"Guess so."
"It seems awful good, Paw, to be back in this old place, don't it?—you and me just settin' here and our boy safe and sound asleep up-stairs."
"That's so. As the fellow says in the circus, here we are again, Maw."
"Here we are again, Paw."
AND THIS IS MARRIAGE
His soul floated upward from the lowermost depths of oblivion, slowly, as a water-plant, broken beneath, drifts to the surface. And then he was awake and unutterably afraid.
His soul opened, as it were, its eyes in terror and his fleshly eyelids went ajar. There was nothing to frighten him except his own thoughts, but they seemed to have waited all ready loaded with despair for the instant of his waking.
The room was black about him. The world was black. He had left the window open, but he could not see outdoors. Only his memory told him where the window was. Never a star pinked the heavens to distinguish it. He could not tell casement from sky, nor window from wall, nor wall from ceiling or floor. He was as one hung in primeval chaos before light had been decreed.
He could not see his own pillow. He knew of it only because he felt it where it was hot under his hot cheek. He could not see the hand he raised to push the hair from his wet brow. He knew that he had a hand and a brow only from their contact, from the sense of himself in them, from the throb of his pulse at the surface of himself.
He felt almost completely disembodied, poised in space, in infinite gloom, alone with complete loneliness. As the old phrase puts it, he was all by himself.
The only sound in his universe, besides the heavy surf of his own blood beating in his ears, was the faint, slow breathing of his wife, asleep in the same bed, yet separated from him by a sword of hostility that kept their souls as far apart as planets are.
He laughed in bitter silence to think how false she was to the devoted love she had promised him, how harsh her last words had been and how strange from the lips that used to murmur every devotion, every love-word, every trust.
He wanted to whirl on her, shake her out of the cowardly refuge of sleep, and resume the wrangle that had ended in exhaustion.
He wanted to gag her so that she would hear him out for once and not break into every phrase. He wanted to tell her for her own good in one clear, cold, logical, unbroken harangue how atrocious she was, how futile, fiendish, heartless. But he knew that she would not listen to him. Even if he gagged her mouth her mind would still dodge and buffet him. How ancient was the experience that warned a man against argument with a woman! And that wise old saw, "Let sleeping dogs lie," referred even better to wives. He would not let her know that he was awake—awake, perhaps, for hours of misery.
This had happened often of late. It had been a hard week, day after day of bitter toil wearing him down in body and fraying his every nerve.
His business was in a bad way, and he alone could save it, and he could save it only by ingenuity and inspiration. But the inspiration, he was sure, would not come to him till he could rest throughout.
Sleep was his hope, his passion, food, drink, medicine. He was heavily pledged at the bank. He could borrow no more. The president had threatened him if he did not pay what was overdue. Bigger businesses than his were being left to crash. A financial earthquake was rocking every tower in the world.
Though he needed cash vitally to further his business, there was a sharper and sharper demand upon him from creditors desperately harried by their own desperate creditors. He must find with his brain some new source of cash. He must fight the world. But how could he fight without rest? Even pugilists rested between rounds.
He had not slept a whole night for a week. To-night he had gone to bed sternly resolved on a while of annihilation. Anything for the brief sweet death with the morning of resurrection.
And then she had quarreled with him. And now he was awake, and he felt that he would not sleep.
He wondered what the hour was. He was tempted to rise and make a light and look at his watch, but he felt that the effort and the blow of the glare on his eyes might confirm his insomnia. He lay and wondered, consumed with curiosity as to the hour—as if that knowledge could be of value.
By and by, out of the stillness and the widespread black came the slumbrous tone of a far-off town clock. Three times it rumored in the air as if distance moaned faintly thrice.
Three o'clock! He had had but two hours' sleep, and would have no more! And he needed ten! To-morrow morning—this morning!—he must join battle for his very existence.
He lay supine, trying not to clench a muscle, seeking to force his surrender to inanition; but he could not get sleep though he implored his soul for it, prayed God for it.
At length he ceased to try to compel slumber. He lay musing. It is a strange thing to lie musing in the dark. His soul seemed to tug and waver outside his body as he had seen an elephant chained by one leg in a circus tent lean far away from its shackles, and sway and put its trunk forth gropingly. His soul seemed to be under his forehead, pushing at it as against a door. He felt that if he had a larger, freer forehead he would have more soul and more room for his mind to work.
Then the great fear came over him again. In these wakeful moods he suffered ecstasies of fright.
He was appalled with life. He felt helpless, bodyless, doomed.
On his office wall hung a calendar with a colored picture showing fishermen in a little boat in a fog looking up to see a great Atlantic liner just about to run them down. So the universe loomed over him now, rushed down to crush him. The other people of the world were asleep in their places; his creditors, his rivals were resting, gaining strength to overwhelm him on the morrow, and he must face them unrefreshed.
He dreamed forward through crisis after crisis, through bankruptcy, disgrace, and mortal illness. He thought of his family, the children asleep in their beds under the roof that he must uphold like an Atlas. Poor little demanding, demanding things! What would become of them when their father broke down and was turned out of his factory and out of his home? How they would hamper him, cling to him, cry out to him not to let them starve, not to let them go cold or barefoot, not to turn them adrift.
Yet they did not understand him. They loved their mother infinitely more. She watched over them, played with them, cuddled and kissed them, while he had to leave the house before they were up, and came home at night too fagged to play their games or endure their noise. And if they were to be punished, she used him as a threat, and saved them up for him to torment and denounce.
They loved her and were afraid of him. Yet what had she done for them? She had conceived them, borne them, nourished them for a year at most. Thereafter their food, their shelter, their clothes, their education, their whole prosperity must come from their father. Yet the very necessities of the struggle for their welfare kept him from giving them the time that would win their favor. They complained because he did not buy them more. They were discontented with what they had, and covetous of what the neighbors' children had, even where it was less than their own.
He busied himself awhile at figuring out how much, all told, his children's upbringing had cost him. The total was astounding. If he had half of that sum now he would not be fretting about his pay-roll or his notes. He would triumph over every obstacle. Next he made estimate of what the children would cost him in the future. As they grew their expenses grew with them. He could not hope for the old comfort of sons, when they made a man strong, for nowadays grown sons must be started in business at huge cost with doubtful results and no intention of repaying the investment. And daughters have to be dressed up like holiday packages, expensive gifts that must be sent prepaid and may be returned, collect.
He could see nothing but vanity back of him and a welter of cost ahead. He could see no hope of ever catching up, of ever resting. His only rest would come when he died.
If he did not sleep soon he would assuredly die or go mad. Perhaps he was going mad already. He had fought too long, too hard. He would begin to babble and giggle soon and be led away to twiddle his fingers and talk with phantoms. He saw himself as he had seen other witless, slavering spectacles that had once been human, and a nausea of fear crushed big sweat out of his wincing skin.
Better to die than to play the living burlesque of himself. Better to die than to face the shame of failure, the shame of reproach and ridicule; the epitaph of his business a few lines in the small type of "Business Troubles." Better to kill himself than risk the danger of going mad and killing perhaps his own children and his wife. He knew a man once, a faithful, devoted, gentle struggler with the world, whom a sudden insanity had led to the butchery of his wife and three little boys. They found him tittering among his mangled dead, and calling them pet names, telling the shattered red things that he had wrought God's will upon them.
What if this should come to him! Better to end all the danger of that by removing himself from the reach of mania or shame. It would be the final proof of his love for his flock. And they would not think bitterly of him. All things are forgiven the dead. They would miss him and remember the best of him.
They would appreciate what they had cost him, too, when they no longer had him to draw on. He felt very sorry for himself. Grown man as he was, he was driven back into infancy by his terrors, and like a pouting, supperless boy, he wanted to die to spite the rest of the family and win their apologies even if he should not hear them.
He wondered if, after all, his wife would not be happier to be rid of him. No, she would regret him for one thing at least, that he left her without means.
Well, she deserved to be penniless. Why should she expect a man to kill himself for her sake and leave her a wealthy widow to buy some other man? Let her practise then some of the economies he had vainly begged of her before. If she had been worthy of his posthumous protection she would not have treated him so outrageously at a time of such stress as this.
She knew he was dog-tired, yet she allowed him to be angered, and she knew just what themes were sure to provoke his wrath. So she had harped on these till she had rendered him to a frenzy.
They had stood about or paced the floor or dropped in chairs and fought as they flung off their clothes piecemeal. She had combed and brushed her hair viciously as she raged, weeping the unbeautiful tears of wrath. But he had not had that comfort of tears; his tears ran down the inside of his soul and burned. She goaded him out of his ordinary self-control—knew just how to do it and reveled in it.
No doubt he had said things to her that a gentleman does not say to a lady, that hardly any man would say to any woman. He was startled to remember what he had said to her. He abhorred the thought of such things coming from his lips—and to the mother of his children. But the blame for these atrocities was also hers. She had driven him frantic; she would have driven a less-dignified man to violence, to blows, perhaps. And she had had the effrontery to blame him for driving her frantic when it was she that drove him.
Finally they had stormed themselves out, squandered their vocabularies of abuse, and taken resort to silence in a pretended dignity. That is, she had done this. He had relapsed into silence because he realized how impervious to truth or justice she was. Facts she would not deal in. Logic she abhorred. Reasoning infuriated her.
And then in grim, mutual contempt they had crept into bed and lain as far apart as they could. He would have gone into another room, but she would have thought he was afraid to hear more of her. Or she would have come knocking at the door and lured him back only to renew the war at some appeal of his to that sense of justice he was forever hoping to find in her soul.
He was aligned now along the very edge of the mattress. It was childish of her to behave so spitefully, but what could he do except repay her in kind? She would not have understood any other behavior. She had turned her back on him, too, and stretched herself as thin as she could as close to the edge as she could lie without falling out.
What a vixen she was! And at this time of all when she should have been gentle, soothing. Even if she had thought him wrong and misinterpreted his natural vehemence as virulence, she should have been patient. What was a wife for but to be a helpmeet? She knew how easily his temper was assuaged, she knew the very words. Why had she avoided them?
And she was to blame for so many of his problems. Her bills and her children's bills were increasing. She took so much of his time. She needed so much entertaining, so much waiting on, so much listening to. Neither she nor the children produced. They simply spent. In a crisis they never gave help, but exacted it.
In business, as in a shipwreck, strong and useful men must step back and sacrifice themselves that the women and children might be saved—for other men to take care of. And what frauds these women were! All allurement and gentleness till they had entrapped their victims, then fiends of exaction, without sympathy for the big work of men, without interest in the world's problems, alert to ridiculous suspicions, reckless with accusations, incapable of equity, and impatient of everything important.
Marriage was a trap, masking its steel jaws and its chain under flowers. What changelings brides were! A man never led away from the altar the woman he led thither. Before marriage, so interested in a man's serious talk and the business of his life! After marriage, unwilling to listen to any news of import, sworn enemies of achievement, putting an ingrowing sentiment above all other nobilities of the race.
And his wife was of all women the most womanish. She had lost what early graces she had. In the earlier days they had never quarreled. That is, of course, they had quarreled, but differently. They had left each other several times, but how rapturously they had returned. And then she had craved his forgiveness and granted hers without asking. She had always forgiven him for what he had not done, said, or thought, or for the things he had done and said most justly. But there had been a charm about her, a sweet foolishness that was irresistible.
In the dark now he smiled to think how dear and fascinating she had been then. Oh, she had loved him then, had loved the very faults she had imagined in him. Perhaps after he was dead she would remember him with her earlier tenderness. She would blame herself for making him the irascible, hot-tempered brute he had been—perhaps—at times.
And now he had slain and buried himself, and his woe could burrow no farther down. His soul was at the bottom of the pit. There was no other way to go but upward, and that, of course, was impossible.
As he wallowed in the lugubrious comfort of his own post-mortem revenge he wished that he had left unsaid some of the things he had said. Quelled by the vision of his wife weeping over him and repenting her cruelties, they began to seem less cruel. She was absolved by remorse.
He heard her sobbing over his coffin and heard her recall her ferocious words with shame. His white, set face seemed to try to console her. He heard what he was trying to tell her in all the gentle understanding of the tomb:
"I said worse things, honey. I don't know how I could have used such words to you, my sweetheart. A longshoreman wouldn't have called a fishwife what I called you, you blessed child. But it was my love that tormented me. If a man had quarreled with me, we'd have had a knock-down and drag-out and nothing more thought of it. If any woman but you had denounced me as you did I'd have shrugged my shoulders and not cared a—at all.
"It was because I loved you, honey, that your least frown hurt me so. But I didn't really mean what I said. It wasn't true. You're the best, the faithfulest, the prettiest, dearest woman in all the world, and you were a precious wife to me—so much more beautiful, more tender, more devoted than the wives of the other men I knew. I will pray God to bring you to me in the place I'm going to. I could not live without you anywhere."
This was what he was trying to tell her, and could not utter a word of it. He seemed to be lying in his coffin, staring up at her through sealed eyelids. He could not purse his cold lips to kiss her warm mouth. He could not lift an icy hand to bless her brow. They would come soon to lay the last board over his face and screw down the lid. She would scream and fight, but they would drag her away. And he could not answer her wild cries. He could not go to her rescue. He would be lifted in the box from the trestles and carried out on the shoulders of other men, and slid into the waiting hearse; and the horses would trot away with him, leaving her to penury, with her children and his at the mercy of the merciless world, while he was lowered into a ditch and hidden under shovelfuls of dirt, to lie there motionless, useless, hideously idle forever.
This vision of himself dead was so vivid that his heart jumped in his breast and raced like a propeller out of water. The very pain and the terror were joyful, for they meant that he still lived.
Whatever other disasters overhung him, he was at least not dead. Better a beggar slinking along the dingiest street than the wealthiest Rothschild under the stateliest tomb. Better the sneers and pity of the world in whispers about his path than all the empty praise of the most resounding obituary.
The main thing was to be alive. Before that great good fortune all misfortunes were minor, unimportant details. And, after all, he was not so pitiable. His name was still respected. His factory was still running. Whatever his liabilities, he still had some assets, not least of them health and experience and courage.
But where had his courage been hiding that it left him whimpering alone? Was he a little girl afraid of the dark, or was he a man?
There were still men who would lend him money or time. What if he was in trouble? Were not the merchant princes of the earth sweating blood? There had been a rich men's panic before the poor were reached. Now everybody was involved.
After all, what if he failed? Who had not failed? What if he fell bankrupt?—that was only a tumble down-stairs. Could he not pick himself up and climb again? Some of the biggest industries in the world had passed through temporary strain. The sun himself went into eclipse.
If his factory had to close, it could be opened again some day. Or even if he could not recover, how many better men than he had failed? To be crushed by the luck of things was no crime. There was a glory of defeat as well as of victory.
The one great gleaming truth was that he was still alive, still in the ring. He was not dead yet. He was not going to die. He was going to get up and win.
There was no shame in the misfortunes he had had. There was no disgrace in the fears he had bowed to. All the nations and all the men in them were in a night of fear. But already there was a change of feeling. The darker the hour, the nearer the dawn. The worse things were, the sooner they must mend.
People had been too prosperous; the world had played the spendthrift and gambled too high. But economy would restore the balance for the toilers. What had been lost would soon be regained.
Fate could not down America yet. And he was an American. What was it "Jim" Hill had said to the scare-mongers: "The man who sells the United States short is a damned fool." And the man who sells himself short is a damneder fool.
Thus he struggled through the bad weather of his soul. The clouds that had gathered and roared and shuttled with lightnings had emptied their wrath, and the earth still rolled. The mystery of terror was subtly altered to a mystery of surety.
Lying in the dark, motionless, he had wrought out the miracle of meditation. Within the senate chamber of his mind he had debated and pondered and voted confidence in himself and in life.
His eyes, still open, still battling for light, had found none yet. The universe was still black. He could not distinguish sky from window, nor casement from ceiling. Yet the gloom was no longer terrible. The universe was still a great ship rushing on, but he was no longer a midget in a little cockleshell about to be crushed. He was a passenger on the ship. The night was benevolent, majestic, sonorous with music. The sea was glorious and the voyage forward.
And now that his heart was full of good news, he had a wild desire to rush home with it to her who was his home. How often he had left her in the morning after a wrangle, and hurried back to her at night bearing glad tidings, the quarrel forgotten beyond the need of any treaty. And she would be there among their children, beaming welcome from her big eyes.
And she was always so glad when he was glad. She took so much blame on herself; though how was she to blame for herself? Yet she took no credit to herself for being all the sweet things she was. She was the flowers and the harvest, and the cool, amorous evening after the hard day was done. And he was the peevish, whining, swearing imbecile that chose a woman for wife because she was a rose and then clenched her thorns and complained because she was not a turnip.
He felt a longing to tell her how false his croakings had been in that old dead time so long ago as last night. But she was asleep. And she needed sleep. She had been greatly troubled by his troubles. She had been anxious for him and the children. She had so many things to worry over that never troubled him. She had wept and been angry because she could not make him understand. Her very wrath was a way of crying: "I love you! You hurt me!"
He must let her sleep. Her beauty and her graces needed sleep. It was his blessed privilege to guard her slumbers, his pride to house her well and to see that she slept in fabrics suited to the delicate fabric of her exquisite body.
But if only she might chance to be awake that he might tell her how sorry he was that he had been weak and wicked enough to torment her with his baseless fears and his unreasonable ire. At least he must touch her with tenderness. Even though she slept, he must give her the benediction of one light caress.
He put his hand out cautiously toward her. He laid his fingers gently on her cheek. How beautiful it was even in the dark! But it was wet! with tears! Suddenly her little invisible fingers closed upon his hand like grape tendrils.
But this did not prove her awake. So habited they were to each other that even in their sleep their bodies gave or answered such endearments.
He waited till his loneliness for her was unendurable, then he breathed, softly:
"Are you asleep, honey?"
For answer she whirled into his bosom and clenched him in her arms and wept—in whispers lest the children hear. He petted her tenderly and kissed her hair and her eyelids and murmured:
"Did I wake you, honey?"
"No, no!" she sobbed. "I've been awake for hours."
"But you didn't move!"
"I was afraid to waken you. You need your rest so much. I've been thinking how hard you work, how good you are. I'm so ashamed of myself for—"
"But it was all my fault, honey."
"Oh no, no, my dear, my dear!"
He let her have the last word; for an enormous contentedness filled his heart. He drew the covers about her shoulder and held her close and breathed deep of the companionship of the soul he had chosen. He breathed so deeply that his head drooped over hers, his cheek upon her hair. The night seemed to bend above them and mother them and say to them, "Hush! hush! and sleep!"
There are many raptures in the world, and countless beautiful moments, and not the least of them is this solemn marriage in sleep of the man and woman whose days are filled with cares, and under whose roof at night children and servants slumber aloof secure.
While these two troubled spirits found repose and renewal, locked each in the other's arms, the blackness was gradually withdrawn from the air. In the sky there came a pallor that grew to a twilight and became a radiance and a splendor. And night was day. It would soon be time for the father to rise and go forth to his work, and for the mother to rise to the offices of the home.
THE MAN THAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN
I
In the tame little town of Hillsdale he seemed the tamest thing of all, Will Rudd—especially appropriate to a kneeling trade, a shoe clerk by election. He bent the pregnant hinges to anybody soever that entered the shop, with its ingenious rebus on the sign-board:
He not only untied the stilted Oxfords or buttoned in the arching insteps of those who sat in the "Ladies' and Misses' Dept.," which was the other side of the double-backed bench whose obverse was the "Gents' Dept.," but also he took upon the glistening surface of his trousers the muddy soles of merchants, the clay-bronzed brogans of hired men, the cowhide toboggans of teamsters, and the brass-toed, red-kneed boots of little boys ecstatic in their first feel of big leather.
Rudd was a shoe clerk to be trusted. He never revealed to a soul that Miss Clara Lommel wore shoes two sizes too small, and when she bit her lip and blenched with agony as he pried her heel into the protesting dongola, he seemed not to notice that she was no Cinderella.
And one day, when it was too late, and Miss Lucy Posnett, whose people lived in the big brick mansard, realized that she had a hole in her stocking, what did Rudd do? Why, he never let on.
Stanch Methodist that he was, William Rudd stifled in petto the fact that the United Presbyterian parson's wife was vain and bought little, soft black kids with the Cuban heel and a patent-leather tip to the opera toe! The United Presbyterian parson himself had salved his own vanity by saying that shoes show so plainly on the pulpit, and it was better to buy them a trifle too small than a trifle too large, but—umm!—er, hadn't you better put in a little more of that powder, Mr. Rudd? I have on—whew!—unusually thick socks to-day.
Clay Kittredge, Rudd's employer, valued him, secretly, as a man who brought in customers and sold them goods. But he never mentioned this to his clerk lest Rudd be tempted to the sin of vanity, and incidentally to demanding an increase in that salary which had remained the same since he had been promoted from delivery-boy.
Kittredge found that Rudd kept his secrets as he kept everybody's else. Professing church member as he was, Rudd earnestly palmed off shopworn stock for fresh invoices, declared that the obsolete Piccadillies which Kittredge had snapped up from a bankrupt sale were worn on all the best feet on Fifth Avenoo, and blandly substituted "just as good" for advertised wares that Kittredge did not carry.
Besides, when no customer was in the shop he spent the time at the back window, doctoring tags—as the King of France negotiated the hill—by marking up prices, then marking them down.
But when he took his hat from the peg and set it on his head, he put on his private conscience. Whatever else he did, he never lied or cheated to his own advantage.
And so everybody in town liked William Rudd, and nobody admired him. He was treated with the affectionate contempt of an old family servant. But he had his ambitions and great ones, ambitions that reached past himself into the future of another generation. He felt the thrill that stirs the acorn, fallen into the ground and hidden there, but destined to father an oak. His was the ambition beyond ambition that glorifies the seed in the loam and ennobles the roots of trees thrusting themselves downward and gripping obscurity in order that trunks and branches, flowers and fruits, pods and cones, may flourish aloft.
Eventually old Clay Kittredge died, and the son chopped the "Jr." curlicue from the end of his name and began a new régime. The old Kittredge had sought only his own aggrandizement, and his son was his son. The new Clay Kittredge had gone to public school with Rudd and they continued to be "Clay" and "Will" to each other; no one would ever have called Rudd by so demonstrative a name as "Bill."
When Clay second stepped into his father's boots—and shoes—he began to enlarge the business, hoping to efface his father's achievements by his own. The shop gradually expanded to a department store for covering all portions of the anatomy and supplying inner wants as well.
Rudd was so overjoyed at not being uprooted and flung aside to die that he never observed the shrewd irony of Kittredge's phrase, "You may remain, Will, with no reduction of salary."
To have lost his humble position would have frustrated his dream, for he was doing his best to build for himself and for Her a home where they could fulfil their destinies. He cherished no hope, hardly even a desire, to be a great or rich man himself. He was one of the nest-weavers, the cave-burrowers, the home-makers, who prepare the way for the greater than themselves who shall spring from themselves.
He was of those who become the unknown fathers of great men. And so, on a salary that would have meant penury to a man of self-seeking tastes, he managed to save always the major part of his earning. At the bank he was a modest but regular visitor to the receiving-teller, and almost a total stranger to the paying-teller.
His wildest dissipation being a second pipeful of tobacco before he went to bed—or "retired," as he would more gently have said it—he eventually heaped up enough money and courage to ask Martha Kellogg to marry him. Martha, who was the plainest woman in plain Hillsdale, accepted William, and they were made one by the parson. The wedding was accounted "plain" even in Hillsdale.
The groomy bridegroom and the unbridy bride spent together all the time that Rudd could spare from the store. He bought for her a little frame house with a porch about as big as an upper berth, a patch of grass with a path through it to the back door, some hollyhocks of startling color, and a highly unimportant woodshed. It spelled HOME to them, and they were as happy as people usually are. He did all he could to please her. At her desire he even gave up his pipe without missing it—much.
Mrs. Martha Rudd was an ambitious woman, or at least restless and discontented. Having escaped her supreme horror, that of being an old maid, she began to grow ambitious for her husband. She nagged him for a while about his plodding ways, the things that satisfied him, the salary he endured. But it did no good. Will Rudd was never meant to put boots and spurs on his own feet and splash around in gore. He was for carpet slippers, round-toed shoes, and on wet days, rubbers; on slushy days he even descended to what he called "ar'tics."
Not understanding the true majesty of her husband's long-distance dreams, and baffled by his unresponse to her ambitions for him, Martha grew ambitious for the child that was coming. She grew frantically, fantastically ambitious. Here was something William Rudd could respond to. He could be ambitious as Cæsar—but not for himself. He was a groundling, but his son should climb.
Husband and wife spent evenings and evenings debating the future of the child. They never agreed on the name—or the alternative names. For it is advisable to have two ready for any emergency. But the future was rosy. They were unanimous on that—President of the United States, mebbe; or at least the President's wife.
Mrs. Rudd, who occasionally read the continued stories in the evening paper, had happened on a hero named "Eric." She favored that name—or Gwendolynne (with a "y"), as the case might be. In any event, the child's future was so glowing that it warmed Mrs. Rudd to asking one evening, forgetful of her earlier edict:
"Why don't you smoke your pipe any more, Will?"
"I'd kind o' got out of the habit, Marthy," he said, and added, hastily, "but I guess I'll git back in."
Thereafter they sat of evenings by the lamp, he smoking, she sewing things—holding them up now and then for him to see. They looked almost too small to be convincing, until he brought home from the store a pair of shoes—"the smallest size made, Marthy, too small for some of the dolls you see over at Bostwick's."
It was the golden period of his life. Rudd never sold shoes so well. People could hardly resist his high spirits. Anticipation is a great thing—it is all that some people get.
To be a successful shoe clerk one must acquire the patience of Job without his gift of complaint, and Rudd was thoroughly schooled. So he waited with a hope-lit serenity the preamble to the arrival of his—her—their child.
And then fate, which had previously been content with denying him comforts and keeping him from luxuries, dealt him a blow in the face, smote him on his patient mouth. The doctor told him that the little body of his son had been born still. After that it was rather a stupor of despair than courage that carried him through the vain struggle for life of the worn-out housewife who became only almost a mother. It seemed merely the logical completion of the world's cruelty when the doctor laid a heavy hand on his shoulder and walked out of the door, without leaving any prescription to fill. Rudd stood like a wooden Indian, too dazed to understand or to feel. He opened the door to the undertaker and waited outside the room, just twiddling his fingers and wondering. His world had come to an end and he did not know what to do.
At the church, the offices of the parson, and the soprano's voice from behind the flowers, singing "Rock of Ages, Cleft for Me"—Marthy's favorite hymn—brought the tears trickling, but he could not believe that what had happened had happened. He got through the melancholy honor of riding in the first hack in the shabby pageant, though the town looked strange from that window. He shivered stupidly at the first sight of the trench in the turf which was to be the new lodging of his family. He kept as quiet as any of the group among the mounds while the bareheaded preacher finished his part.
He was too numb with incredulity to find any expression until he heard that awfulest sound that ever grates the human ear—the first shovelful of clods rattling on a coffin. Then he understood—then he woke. When he saw the muddy spade spill dirt hideously above her lips, her cheeks, her brow, and the little bundle of futile flesh she cuddled with a rigid arm to a breast of ice—then a cry like the shriek of a falling tree split his throat and he dropped into the grave, sprawling across the casket, beating on its denying door, and sobbing:
"You mustn't go alone, Marthy. I won't let you two go all by yourselves. It's so fur and so dark. I can't live without you and the—the baby. Wait! Wait!"
They dragged him out, and the shovels concluded their venerable task. He was sobbing too loudly to hear them, and the parson was holding him in his arms and patting his back and saying "'Shh! 'Shh!" as if he were a child afraid of the dark.
The sparse company that had gathered to pay the last devoir to the unimportant woman in the box in the ditch felt, most of all, amazement at such an unexpected outburst from so expectable a man as William Rudd. There was much talk about it as the horses galloped home, much talk in every carriage except his and the one that had been hers.
Up to this, the neighbors had taken the whole affair with that splendid philosophy neighbors apply to other people's woes. Mrs. Budd Granger had said to Mrs. Ad. Peck when they met in Bostwick's dry-goods store, at the linen counter:
"Too bad about Martha Rudd, isn't it? Plain little body, but nice. Meant well. Went to church regular. Yes, it's too bad. I don't think they ought to put off the strawb'ry fest'val, though, just for that, do you? Never would be any fun if we stopped for every funeral, would there? Besides, the strawb'ry fest'val's for charity, isn't it?"
The strawberry festival was not put off and the town paper said that "a pleasant time was had by all." Most of the talk was about Will Rudd. The quiet shoe clerk had provided the town with an alarm, an astonishment. He was most astounded of all. As he rode back to the frame house in the swaying carriage he absolutely could not believe that such hopes, such plans, could be shattered with such wanton, wasteful cruelty. That he should have loved, married, and begotten, and that the new-made mother and the new-born child should be struck dead, nullified, returned to clay—such things were too foolish, too spendthrift, to believe.
It is strange that people do not get used to death. It has come to nearly every being anybody has ever heard of; and whom it has not yet reached, it will. Every one of the two billions of us on earth to-day expects it to come to him, and (if he have them) to his son, his daughter, his man-servant, his maid-servant, his ox, his ass, the stranger within his gates, the weeds by the road. Kittens and kingdoms, potato-bugs, plants, and planets—all are on the visiting-list.
Death is the one expectation that never fails to arrive. But it comes always as a new thing, an unheard-of thing, a miracle. It is the commonest word in the lexicon, yet it always reads as a hapax legomenon. It is like spring, though so unlike. For who ever believed that May would emerge from March this year? And who ever remembers that violets were suddenly abroad on the hills last April, too?
William Rudd ought to have known better. In a town where funerals were social events dangerously near to diversion, he had been unusually frequent at them. For he belonged to the local chapter of the Knights of Pythias, and when a fellow-member in good standing was forced to resign, William Rudd donned his black suit, his odd-looking cocked hat with the plume, and the anachronous sword, which he carried as one would expect a shoe clerk to carry a sword. The man in the hearse ahead went to no further funerals, stopped paying his dues, made no more noise at the bowling-alley, and ceased to dent his pew cushion. Somebody got his job at once and, after a decent time, somebody else probably got his wife. The man became a remembrance, if that.
Rudd had long realized that people eventually become dead; but he had never realized death. He had been an oblivious child when his mother and father had taken the long trip whose tickets read but one way, and had left him to the grudging care of an uncle with a large enough family.
And now his own family was obliterated. He was again a single man, that familiar thing called a widower. He could not accept it as a fact. He denied his eyes. He was as incredulous as a man who sees a magician play some old vanishing trick. He had seen it, but he could not understand it enough to believe it. When the hack left him at his house he found it emptier than he could have imagined a house could be. Marthy was not on the porch, or in the settin'-room, the dinin'-room, the kitchen, or anywhere up-stairs. The bed was empty, the stove cold. The lamp had not been filled. The cruse of his life was dry, the silver cord loosened, the pitcher broken at the fountain, the wheel broken at the cistern.
As he stumbled about filling the lamp, and covering his hands with kerosene, he wondered what he should do in those long hours between the closing of the shoe-shop of evenings and its opening of mornings. Men behave differently in this recurring situation. Some take to drink, or return to it. Rudd did not like liquor; at least he did not think he would have liked it if he had ever tasted it. Some take to gambling. Rudd did not know big casino from little, though he had once almost acquired a passion for checkers—the give-away game. Some submerge themselves in money-getting. Rudd would not have given up the serene certainty of his little salary for a speculator's chance to clean up a million, or lose his margin.
If only the child had lived, he should have had an industry, an ambition, a use.
Widowers have occasionally hunted consolation with the same sex that sent them grief. Rudd had never known any woman in town as well as he had known Martha, and it had taken him years to find courage to propose to her. The thought of approaching any other woman with intimate intention gave him an ague sweat.
And how was he to think of taking another wife? Even if he had not been so confounded with grief for his helpmeet as to believe her the only woman on earth for him, how could he have accosted another woman when he had only debts for a dowry?
Death is an expensive thing in every phase. The event that robbed Rudd of his wife, his child, his hope, had taken also his companion, his cook, his chambermaid, his washerwoman, the mender of his things; and in their place had left an appalling monument of bills. The only people he had permitted himself to owe money to were the gruesome committee that brought him his grief; the doctor, the druggist, the casket-maker, the sexton, and the dealer in the unreal estate who sold the tiny lots in the sad little town.
His soul was too bruised to grope its way about, but instinct told him that bills must be paid. Instinct automatically set him to work clearing up his accounts. For their sakes he devoted himself to a stricter economy than ever. He engaged meals at Mrs. Judd's boarding-house. He resolved even to rent his home. But, mercifully, there was no one in town to take the place. In economy's name, too, he put away his pipe—for one horrible evening. The next day he remembered how Marthy had sung out, "Why don't you smoke your pipe any more, Will?" and he had answered: "I'd kind o' got out of the habit, Marthy, but I guess I'll git back in." And Lordy, how she laughed! The laughter of the dead—it made a lonely echo in the house.
Gradually he found, as so many dismal castaways have found, that there is a mystic companionship in that weed which has come out of the vegetable world, as the dog from among the animals, to make fellowship with man. Rudd and his pipe were Robinson Crusoe and his man Friday on the desert island of loneliness. They stared out to sea; and imagined.
Remembering how Martha and he used to dream about the child, in the tobacco twilight, and how they planned his future, Rudd's soul learned to follow the pipe smoke out from the porch, over the fence and to disappear beyond the horizons of the town and the sharp definition of the graveyard fence. He became addicted to dreams, habituated to dealing in futurities that could never come to pass.
Being his only luxury on earth, by and by they became his necessities, realities more concrete than the shoes he sold or the board walk he plodded to and from his store.
One Sunday Rudd was present at church when Mr. and Mrs. Budd Granger brought their fourth baby forward to be christened. The infant bawled and choked and kicked its safety-pins loose. Rudd was sure that Eric never would have misbehaved like that. Yet Eric had been denied the sacred rite.
This reminded Rudd how many learned theologians had proved by rigid logic that unbaptized babies are damned forever. He spent days of horror at the frightful possibility, and nights of infernal travel across gridirons where babies flung their blistered hands in vain appeal to far-off mothers. He could not get it from his mind until, one evening, his pipe persuaded him to erect a font in the temple of his imagination.
He mused through all the ritual, and the little frame house seemed to thrill as the vague preacher enounced the sonorous phrase:
"I baptize thee Eric—in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost."
Marthy was there, too, of course, but it was the father that held the baby. And the child did not wince when the pastor's fingers moistened the tiny brow. He just clasped a geranium-petal hand round Rudd's thumb and stared at the sacrament with eyes of more than mortal understanding.
The very next day Mrs. Ad. Peck walked into the store, proud as a peahen. She wanted shoes for her baby. The soles of the old pair were intact, but the stubby toes were protruding.
"He crawls all over the house, Mr. Rudd! And he cut his first tooth to-day, too. Just look at it. Ain't it a beauty?"
In her insensate conceit she pried the child's mouth apart as if he were a pony, to disclose the minute peak of ivory. It was nothing to make such a fuss over, Rudd thought, though he praised it as if it were a snow-capped Fuji-yama.
That night Eric cut two teeth. And Marthy nearly laughed her head off.
Rudd did not talk aloud to the family he had revened from the grave. He had no occult persuasions. He just sat in his rocker and smoked hard and imagined hard. He imagined the lives of his family not only as they might have been, but as they ought to have been. He was like a spectator at a play, mingling belief and make-belief inextricably, knowing it all untrue, yet weeping, laughing, thrilling as if it were the very image of fact.
All mothers and some fathers have a sad little calendar in their hearts' cupboards where they keep track of the things that might have been. "October fifth," they muse. "Why, it's Ned's birthday! He'd have been twenty-one to-day if he'd lived. He'd have voted this year. December twenty-third? Alice would have been coming home from boarding-school to-day if—July fourth? Humph! How Harry loved the fireworks! But he'd be a Senator now and invited to his home town to make a speech in the park to-day if—" If! If!
Everybody must keep some such if-almanac, some such diary of prayers denied. That was all Rudd did; only he wrote it up every evening. He would take from the lavender where he kept them the little things Martha had sewed for the child and the little shoes he had bought. The warm body had never wriggled and laughed in the tiny trousseau, the little shoes had never housed pink toes, but they helped him to pretend until they became to him things outgrown by a living, growing child. He cherished them as all parents cherish the first shoes and the first linens and woolens of their young.
Marthy and Eric Rudd lived just behind the diaphanous curtain of the pipe smoke, or in the nooks of the twilight shadow, or in the heart of the settin'-room stove.
The frame house had no fireplace, and in its lieu he was wont to open the door of the wood-stove, lean forward, elbows on knees, and gaze into the creamy core of the glow where his people moved unharmed and radiant, like the three youths conversing in the fiery furnace.
In the brief period allotted them before bedtime they must needs live fast. The boy grew at an extraordinary rate and in an extraordinary manner, for sometimes Rudd performed for him that feat which God Himself seems not to achieve in His world; he turned back time and brought on yesterday again, or reverted the year before last, as a reaper may pause and return to glean some sheaf overlooked before.
For instance, Eric was already a strapping lad of seven spinning through school at a rate that would have given brain fever to a less-gifted youngster, when, one day, Farmer Stebbins came to the Emporium with a four-year-old chub of a son who ran in ahead of his father, kicked his shoes in opposite directions and yelled, to the great dismay of an old maid in the "Ladies' and Misses' Dept.":
"Hay, mister, gimme pair boots 'ith brass toes!"
The father, after a formulaic pretense of reproving the lad, explained:
"We'll have to excuse him, Rudd; it's his first pair of boots."
Rudd's heart was sore within him, and he was oppressed with guilt. He had never bought Eric his first pair of brass-toed boots! And he a shoe clerk!
So that night Eric had to be reduced several years, brought out of school, and taken to St. Louis. Rudd knew what an epoch-making event this was, and he wanted Eric to select from a larger stock than the meager and out-of-date supply of Kittredge's Emporium—though this admission was only for Rudd's own family. The thumb-screw could not have wrung it from him for the public.
There was a similar mix-up about Eric's first long trousers which Rudd likewise overlooked. He accomplished the Irish miracle of the tight boots. Eric had worn his breeches a long while before he put them on for the first time.
To the outer knowledge of the stranger or the neighbor, William Rudd's employer had all the good luck that was coming to him, and all of Rudd's besides. They were antitheses at every point.
Where Rudd was without ambition, importance, family, or funds, Kittredge was the richest man in town, the man of most impressive family, and easily the leading citizen. People began to talk him up for Congressman, maybe for Senator. He had held all the other conspicuous offices in his church, his bank, his county. You could hardly say that he had ever run for any office; he had just walked up and taken it.
Yet Rudd did not envy him his record or his family. Clay Kittredge had children, real children. The cemetery lodged none of them. Yet one of the girls or boys was always ill or in trouble with somebody; Mrs. Kittredge was forever cautioning her children not to play with Mrs. So-and-so's children and Mrs. So-and-so would return the compliment. The town was fairly torn up with these nursery Guelph and Ghibelline wars.
Rudd compared the wickednesses of other people's children with the perfections of Eric. Sometimes his evil genius whispered a bitter thought that if Eric had lived to enter the world this side of the tobacco smoke, he, too, might have been a complete scoundrel in knee-breeches, instead of the clean-hearted, clear-skinned, studious, truthful little gentleman of light and laughter and love that he was. But Rudd banished the thought.
Eric was never ill, or only ill enough at times to give the parents a little of the rapture of anxiety and of sitting by his bedside holding his hand and brushing his hair back from a hot forehead. Eric never was impolite, or cruel to an animal, or impudent to a teacher, or backward in a class.
And Rudd's wife differed from Kittredge's wife and wives in general—and indeed from the old Martha herself—in staying young and growing more and more beautiful. The old Martha had been too shy and too cognizant of the truth ever to face a camera; and Rudd often regretted that he owned not even a bridal photograph such as the other respectable married folks of Hillsdale had on the wall, or in a crayon enlargement on an uneasy easel. He had no likeness of Martha except that in his heart. But thereby his fancy was unshackled and he was enabled to imagine her sweeter, fairer, every day.
It was the boy alone that grew; the mother, having become perfect, remained stationary in charm like the blessed Greeks in the asphodel-fields of Hades.
About the time Eric Rudd outgrew the public schools of Hillsdale and graduated from the high school with a wonderful oration of his own writing called "Night Brings Out the Stars," Kittredge announced that his eldest son would go to Harvard in the fall. Rudd determined that Eric should go to Yale. He even sent for catalogues. Rudd was appalled to see how much a person had to know before he could even get into college. And then, this nearly omniscient intellect was called a Freshman!
The prices of rooms, of meals, of books, of extra fees, the estimated allowances for clothing and spending-money dazed the poor shoe clerk and nearly sent Eric into business. But, fortunately, the brier pipe came to the rescue with an unexpected legacy from an unsuspected uncle.
The four years of college life were imagined with a good deal of elision and an amount of guesswork that would have amused a janitor. But Rudd and Martha were chiefly interested in the boy's vacations at home, and their own trips to New Haven, and the letters of approval from the professors.
Eric had an athletic career seldom equaled since the days of Hercules. For Eric was a champion tennis-player, hockey-player, baseballist, boxer, swimmer, runner, jumper, shot-putter. And he was the best quoit-thrower in the New Haven town square. Rudd had rather dim notions of some of the games, so that Eric was established both as center rush of the football team and the cockswain in the crew.
He was also a member of all the best fraternities. He was a "Bones" man in his Freshman year, and in his Sophomore year added the other Senior societies. And, of course, he stood at the head of all his classes—though he never condescended to take a single red apple to a professor.
The boy's college life lasted Rudd a thousand and one evenings. It was in beautiful contrast with the career of Kittredge's children, some of whom were forever flunking their examinations, slipping back a year, requiring expensive tutors, acquiring bad habits, and getting into debt. Almost the only joy Kittredge had of them was in telegraphing them money in response to their telegrams for money—they never wrote. Their vacations either sent them scurrying on house parties or other excursions. Or if they came home they were discontented with house and parents. They corrected Kittredge's grammar, though his State accounted him an orator. They corrected Mrs. Kittredge's etiquette, though Hillsdale looked up to her as a social arbitrix.
Kittredge poured a deal of his disappointment into Rudd's ear, because his hard heart was broken and breaking anew every day, and he had to tell somebody. He knew that his old clerk would keep it where he kept all the secrets of his business, but he never knew that Rudd still had a child of his own, forging ahead without failure. Rudd could give comfort, for he had it to spare, and he was empty of envy.
It was a ghastly morning when Kittredge showed Rudd a telegram saying that his eldest son, Thomas, had thrown himself in front of a train because of the discovery that his accounts were wrong. Kittredge had found him a place in a New York bank, but the gambling fever had seized the young fellow. And now he was dead, in his sins, in his shame. Dives cried out to Lazarus:
"It's hell to be a father, Will. It's an awful thing to bring children into the world and try to carry 'em through it. It's not a man's job. It's God's."
At times like these, and when Rudd heard from the tattlers, or read in the printed gossip of the evening paper concerning the multifarious wickednesses of the children of men about the earth, he felt almost glad that his boy had never lived upon so plague-infected a world. But in the soothe of twilight the old pipe persuaded him to a pleasanter view of his boy, alive and always doing the right thing, avoiding the evil.
His motto was, "Eric would have done different." He was sure of that. It was his constant conclusion.
After graduating from an imaginary Yale Eric went to an imaginary law-school in New York City—no less. Then he was admitted to that imaginary bar where a lawyer never defends an unrighteous cause, never loses a case, yet grows rich. And, of course, like every other American boy that dreams or is dreamed of, in good time he had to become President.
Eric lived so exemplary a life, was so busy in virtue, so unblemished of fault, that he could not be overlooked by the managers of the quadrennial national performance, searching with Demosthenes' lantern for a man against whom nothing could be said. They called Eric from private life to be headliner in their vaudeville.
Rudd had watched Kittredge clambering to his success, or rather wallowing to it through a swamp of mud. All the wrong things Kittredge had ever done, and their name was legion, were hurled in his path. His family scandals were dug up by the double handful and splashed in his face. Against his opponent the same methods were used. It was like a race through a marsh; and when Kittredge reached his goal in the Senate he was so muck-bemired, his heart had been so lacerated, the nakedness of his past so exposed, that his laurel seemed more like a wreath of poison ivy. And once mounted on his high post, he was an even better target than when he was on the wing.
Against Eric's blameless life the arrows of slander were like darts shot toward the sun. They fell back upon the archers' heads. That was a lively night in the tobacco lagoon when the election returns came in and State after State swung to Eric's column. Rudd made it as nearly unanimous as he could without making it stupid. The solid South he left unbroken; he just brought it over to Eric en bloc. For Eric, it seems, had devised what everybody else has looked for in vain, a solution of the negro problem to satisfy both North and South—and the negroes. Unfortunately the details have been lost.
Marthy was there, of course; she rode in the same hack with their boy. Some of the politicians and the ex-President wanted to get in, but Eric said:
"My mother and father ride with me or I won't be President."
That settled 'em. Eric even wanted to ride backward, too, but Will, as his father, insisted; and of course Eric obeyed, though he was President. And the weather was more like June than March, no blizzards delaying trains and distributing pneumonia.
Once the administration was begun, the newspapers differed strangely in their treatment of Eric from their attitude toward other Chief Magistrates, from Washington down. Realizing that Eric was an honorable man trying to do the right thing by the people, no editor or cartoonist dreamed of accusing him of an unworthy motive or an unwise act. As for the tariff labyrinth, a matter of some trouble to certain Presidents pulled in all directions at once by warring constituencies, Eric settled that in a jiffy. And the best of it was that everybody was satisfied, importers and exporters; East, West, and Middle; farmers, manufacturers, lumbermen, oilmen, painters—everybody.
And when his first term was ended the Democrats and Republicans, realizing that they had at last found a perfectly wise and honorable ruler, nominated him by acclamation at both conventions. The result was delightful; both parties elected their candidate.
Marthy and Will sat with Eric in the carriage at the second inaugural, too. There was an argument again about who should ride backward. Rudd said:
"Eric, your Excellency, these here crowds came to see you, and you ought to face 'em. As your dad I order you to set there 'side of your mother."
But Eric said, "Dad, your Majesty, the people have seen me often enough, and as the President of these here United States I order you to set there 'side of your wife."
And of course Rudd had to do it. Folks looked very much surprised to see him and there was quite a piece in the papers about it.
To every man his day's work and his night's dream. Will Rudd has poor nourishment of the former, but he is richly fed of the latter. His failures and his poverty and the monotony of his existence are public knowledge; his dream is his own triumph and the greater for being his secret.
The Fates seemed to go out of their way to be cruel to Will Rudd, but he beat them at their own game. Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos kept Jupiter himself in awe of their shears, and the old Norns, Urdur, Verdandi, and Skuld, ruined Wotan's power and his glory. But they could not touch the shoe clerk. They shattered his little scheme of things to bits, but he rebuilt it nearer to his heart's desire. He spread a sky about his private planet and ruled his little universe like a tribal god. He, alone of all men, had won the oldest, vainest prayer that was ever said or sung: "O God, keep the woman I love young and beautiful, and grant our child happiness and success without sin or sorrow."
If, sometimes, the imagination of the matter-of-fact man wavers, and the ugliness of his loneliness overwhelms him, thrusts through his dream like a hideous mountainside when an avalanche strips the barren crags of their fleece; and if he then breaks down and calls aloud for his child and his wife to be given back to him from Out There—these panics are also his secret. Only the homely sitting-room of the lonely frame house knows them. He opens the door of the wood-stove or follows his pipe smoke and rallies his courage, resumes his dream. The next morning sees him emerge from his door and go briskly to the shop as always, whether his path is through rain or sleet, or past the recurrent lilacs that have scattered many a purple snow across his sidewalk since the bankruptcy of his ambitions.
He would have been proud to be the unknown father of a great man. He was not permitted to be the father even of a humble man. Yet being denied the reality, he has taken sustenance in what might have been, and has turned "the saddest words of tongue or pen" into something almost sweet. If his child has missed the glories of what might have been, he has escaped the shames that might have been, and the bruises and heartaches and remorses that must have been, that always have been. That is the increasing consolation a bitter world offers to those who love and have lost. That was Rudd's solace. And he made the most of it; added to it a dream. He was a wise man.
After he paid his sorrowful debts his next slow savings went to the building of a monument for his family. It is one of the handsomest shafts in the cemetery. If Rudd could brag of anything he would brag of that. The inscription took a long time to write. You could tell that by its simplicity. And you might notice the blank space left for his own name when all three shall be together again.
Rudd is now saving a third fund against the encroaching time when he shall be too feeble to get up from his knees after he has dropped upon them to unlace somebody's sandal. Lonely old orphans like Rudd must provide their own pensions. There is a will, however, which bequeaths whatever is left of his funds to an orphan home. Being a sonless father, he thinks of the sons who have no fathers to do for them what he was so fain to do for his. It is not a large fund for these days when rich men toss millions as tips to posterity, but it is pretty good for a shoe clerk. And it will mean everything to some Eric that gets himself really born.
If you drop in at the Emporium and ask for a pair of shoes or boots, or slippers or rubbers, or trees or pumps, and wait for old Rudd to get round to you, you will be served with deference, yet with a pride of occupation that is almost priestly. And you will probably buy something, whether you want it or not.
The old man is slightly shuffly in his gaiters. His own elastics are less resilient than once they were. If you ask for anything on the top shelf he is a trifle slow getting the ladder and rather ratchety in clambering up and down, and his eyes are growing so tired that he may offer you a 6D when you ask for a 3A.
But, above all things, don't hurt his pride by offering to help him to his feet if he shows some difficulty in rising when he has performed his genuflexion before you. Just pretend not to notice, as he would pretend not to notice any infirmity or vanity of yours. It is his vanity to be still the best shoe clerk in town—as he is. There is a gracious satisfiedness about the old man that radiates contentment and makes you comfortable for the time in most uncomfortable shoes. And as old Rudd says:
"You'll find that the best shoe is the one that pinches at first and hurts a little; in time it will grow very comfortable and still be becoming."
That is what Rudd says, and he ought to know.
In these days he is so supremely comfortable in his old shoes that his own fellow-clerks hardly know what to make of him. If they only understood what is going on in his private world they would realize that Eric is about to be married—in the White House. The boy was so busy for the country and loved his mother so that he had no time to go sparkin'.
But Marthy got after him and said: "Eric, they're goin' to make you President for the third term. Oh, what's that old tradition got to do with it? Can't they change it? Well, you mark my words, like as not you'll settle down and live in the White House the rest of your life. You'd ought to have a wife, Eric, and be raisin' some childern to comfort your declining years. What would Will and me have done without you? I'm gettin' old, Eric, and I'd kind o' like to see how it feels to be a grandmother, before they take me out to the—"
But that was a word Rudd could never frame even in his thoughts.
Eric, being a mighty good boy, listened to his mother, as always. And Marthy looked everywhere for an ideal woman, and when she found one, Eric fell in love with her right away. It is not every child that is so dutiful as that.
The marriage is to take place shortly and Rudd is very busy with the details. He will go on to Washington, of course—of evenings. In fact, the wedding is to be in the evening, so that he won't have to miss any time at the shop. There are so many people coming in every day and asking for shoes, that he wouldn't dare be away.
Martha is insisting on Will's buying a dress soot for the festivities, but he is in doubt about that. Martha, though, shall have the finest dress in the land, for she is more beautiful even than Eric's bride, and she doesn't look a day older than she did when she was a bride herself. A body would never guess how many years ago that was.
The White House is going to be all lit up, and a lot of big folks will be there—a couple of kings, like as not. There will be fried chicken for dinner and ice-cream—mixed, maybe, chocolate and vanella, and p'raps a streak of strawb'ry. And there will be enough so's everybody can have two plates. Marthy will prob'ly bake the cake herself, if she can get that old White House stove to working right.
Rudd has a great surprise in store for her. He's going to tell a good one on Marthy. At just the proper moment he's going to lean over—Lord, he hopes he can keep his face straight—and say, kind of offhand:
"Do you remember, Marthy, the time when you was makin' little baby-clothes for the President of the United States here, and you says to me—you see, Eric, she'd made me quit smokin', herself, but she plumb forgot all about that—and she says to me, s'she, 'Why don't you smoke your pipe any more, Will?' she says. And I says, 'I'd kind o' got out of the habit, Marthy,' s'I, 'but I guess I'll git back in,' s'I. I said it right off like that, 'I guess I'll git back in!' s'I. Remember, Marthy?"