CHAPTER III
The Penniman house, white, with green blinds, is set back from the maple-and-elm-shaded street, guarded by a white picket fence. Between the house and gate a green lawn was crossed by a gravelled walk, with borders of phlox; beyond the borders, on either side, were flowering shrubs, and at equal distances from the walk, circular beds of scarlet tulips and yellow daffodils. Detached from the Penniman house, but still in the same yard, was a smaller, one-storied house, also white, with green blinds, tenanted by Dave Cowan and his twins, who—in Newbern vernacular—mealed with Mrs. Penniman. It had been the Cowan home when Dave married the Penniman cousin who had borne the twins. There was a path worn in the grass between the two houses.
On the Penniman front porch the judge was throned in a wicker chair. He was a nobly fronted old gentleman, with imposing head, bald at the top but tastefully hung with pale, fluffy side curls. His face was wide and full, smoothly shaven, his cheeks pink, his eyes a pure, pale blue. He was clad in a rumpled linen suit the trousers of which were drawn well up his plump legs above white socks and low black shoes, broad and loose fitting. As the shadows had lengthened and the day cooled he abandoned a palm-leaf fan he had been languidly waving. His face at the moment glowed with animation, for he played over the deciding game in that day's match at checkers by which, at the harness shop, he had vanquished an acclaimed rival from over Higgston way. The fellow had been skilled beyond the average, but supremacy was still with the Newbern champion. So absorbed was he, achieving again that last bit of strategy by which he had gained the place to capture two men and reach the enemy's king row, that his soft-stepping daughter, who had come from the house, had to address him twice.
"Have you had a good day, father?"
The judge was momentarily confused. He had to recall that his invalidism, not his checker prowess, was in question. He regained his presence of mind; he coughed feebly, reaching a hand tenderly back to a point between his shoulder blades.
"Not one of my real bad days, Winona. I can't really say I've suffered. Stuff that other cushion in back of me, will you? I got a new pain kind of in this left shoulder—neuralgia, mebbe. But my sciatica ain't troubled me—not too much."
Winona adjusted the cushion.
"You're so patient, father!"
"I try to be, Winona," which was simple truth.
A sufferer for years, debarred by obscure ailments from active participation in our industrial strife, the judge, often for days at a time, would not complain unless pressed to—quite as if he had forgotten his pains. The best doctors disagreed about his case, none of them able to say precisely what his maladies were. True, one city doctor, a visiting friend of the Pennimans' family physician, had once gone carefully over him, punching, prodding, listening, to announce that nothing ailed the invalid; which showed, as the judge had said to his face, that he was nothing but an impudent young squirt. He had never revealed this parody of a diagnosis to his anxious family, who always believed the city doctor had found something deadly that might at any time carry off the patient sufferer.
The judge was also bitter about Christian Science, and could easily be led to expose its falsity. He would wittily say it wasn't Christian and wasn't science; merely the chuckleheadedness of a lot of women. This because a local adept of the cult had told him, and—what was worse—told Mrs. Penniman and Winona, that if he didn't quit thinking he was an invalid pretty soon he would really have something the matter with him.
And he had incurred another offensive diagnosis: Old Doc Purdy, the medical examiner, whose sworn testimony had years before procured the judge his pension as a Civil War veteran, became brutal about it. Said Purdy: "I had to think up some things that would get the old cuss his money and dummed if he didn't take it all serious and think he did have 'em!"
The judge had been obliged to abandon all thoughts of a career. Years before he had been Newbern's justice of the peace, until a gang of political tricksters defeated the sovereign will of the people. And perhaps he would again have accepted political honours, but none had been offered him. Still, the family was prosperous. For in addition to the pension, Mrs. Penniman kept a neat card in one of the front windows promising "Plain and Fancy Dressmaking Done Here," and Winona now taught school.
Having adjusted the cushion, Winona paused before the cage of a parrot on a stand at the end of the porch. The bird sidled over to her on stiff legs, cocked upon her a leering, yellow eye and said in wheedling tones, "Pretty girl, pretty girl!" But then it harshly screeched, "Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!" This laughter was discordant, cynical, derisive, as if the bird relished a tasteless jest.
Winona went to the hammock and resumed an open book. Its title was "Matthew Arnold—How to Know Him." She was getting up in Matthew Arnold for a paper. Winona at twenty was old before she should have been. She was small and dark, with a thin nose and pinched features. Her dark hair, wound close to her small head, was pretty enough, and her dark eyes were good, but she seemed to carry almost the years of her mother. She was an earnest girl, severe in thought, concerned about her culture, seeking to subdue a nature which she profoundly distrusted to an ideal she would have described as one of elegance and refinement. The dress she wore was one of her best—for an exemplary young man would call that evening, bringing his choice silver flute upon which he would play justly if not brilliantly to Winona's piano accompaniment—but it was dull of tint, one of her mother's plain, not fancy, creations. Still Winona felt it was daring, because the collar was low and sported a fichu of lace. This troubled her, even as she renewed the earnest effort to know Matthew Arnold. She doubtfully fingered at her throat a tiny chain that supported a tiny pendant. She slipped the thing under the neck of her waist. She feared that with her low neck—she thought of it as low—the bauble would be flashy.
Mrs. Penniman came from the kitchen and sat on the porch steps. She was much like Winona, except that certain professional touches of colour at waist, neck, and wrists made her appear, in spirit at least, the younger woman. There were times when Winona suffered herself to doubt her mother's seriousness; times when the woman appeared a slave to levity. She would laugh at things Winona considered no laughing matters, and her sympathy with her ailing husband had come to be callous and matter of fact, almost perfunctory. She longed, moreover, to do fancy dressmaking for her child; and there was the matter of the silk stockings. The Christmas before the too downright Dave Cowan, in a low spirit of banter, had gifted Winona with these. They were of tan silk, and Dave had challenged her to wear them for the good of her soul.
Winona had been quite unpleasantly shocked at Dave's indelicacy, but her mother had been frivolous throughout the affair. Her mother said, too, that she would like to wear silk stockings at all times. But Winona—she spoke of the gift as hose—put the sinister things away at the bottom of her third bureau drawer. Once, indeed, she had nearly nerved herself to a public appearance in them, knowing that perfectly good women often did this. That had been the day she was to read her paper on Early Greek Sculpture at the Entre Nous Club. She had put them on with her new tan pumps, but the effect had been too daring. She felt the ogling eyes. The stockings had gone back to the third bureau drawer—to the bottom—and never had her ankles flashed a silken challenge to a public that might misunderstand.
Yet—and this it was that was making Winona old before her time—always in her secret heart of hearts she did long abjectly to wear silk stockings—all manner of sinful silken trifles. Evil yearnings like this would sweep her. But she took them to be fruits of a natural depravity that good women must fight. Thus far she had triumphed.
Mrs. Penniman now wielded the palm-leaf fan. She eyed her husband with an almost hardened glance, then ran a professional eye over the lines of Winona. Her head moved with quick little birdlike turnings. Her dark hair was less orderly than Winona's, and—from her kitchen work—two spots of colour burned high on her cheeks.
"Your locket's slipped inside your waist," she said, not dreaming that Winona had in shame brought this about.
Winona, who would have been shamed again to explain this, withdrew the bauble. The fond mother now observed the book above which her daughter bent, twisting her neck to follow the title.
"Is it interesting?" she asked; and then: "The way to know a man—cook for him."
Her daughter winced, suffering a swift picture of her too-light mother, cooking for Mr. Arnold.
"I should think you'd pick out a good novel to read," went on her mother. "That last one I got from the library—it's about a beautiful woman that counted the world well lost for love."
Winona murmured indistinctly.
"She didn't—she didn't stop at anything," added the mother, brightly.
"Oh, Mother!"
"I don't care! The Reverend Mallett himself said that novels should be read for an understanding of life—ever novels with a wholesome sex interest. The very words he said!"
"Mother, Mother!" protested Winona with a quick glance at her father.
She doubted if any sex interest could be wholesome; and surely, with both sexes present, the less said about such things the better. To her relief the perilous topic was abandoned.
"I suppose you both heard the big news today."
Mrs. Penniman spoke ingenuously, but it was downright lying—no less. She supposed they had not heard the big news. She was certain they had not. Winona was attentive. Her mother's business of plain and fancy dressmaking did not a little to make the acoustics of Newbern superior. From her clients she gleaned the freshest chronicles of Newbern's social life, many being such as one might safely repeat; many more, Winona uncomfortably recalled, the sort no good woman would let go any further. She hoped the imminent disclosure would not be of the latter class, yet suddenly she wished to hear it even if it were. She affected to turn with reluctance from her budding acquaintanceship with Matthew Arnold.
"It's the twins," began her mother with a look of pleased horror. "You couldn't guess in all day what they've been up to."
"You may be sure Wilbur was the one to blame," put in Winona, quick to defend the one most responsive to her lessons in faith, morals, etiquette.
"Ought to be soundly trounced," declared the judge. "That's what I always say."
"This is the worst yet," continued Mrs. Penniman.
She liked the suspense she had created. With an unerring gift for oral narrative, she toyed with this. She must first tell how she got it.
"You know that georgette waist Mrs. Ed Seaver is having?"
"Have they done something awful?" Winona demanded. "I perfectly well know it wasn't Merle's fault."
"Well, Mrs. Seaver came in about four o'clock for her final fitting, and what do you think?"
"For mercy's sake!" pleaded Winona.
"And Ed Seaver had been to the barber shop to have his hair cut—he always gets it cut the fifteenth of each month—well, he found out all about it from Don Paley, that they'd had to send for to come to the Whipple New Place to cut it neatly off after the way it had been sawed off rough, and she told me word for word. Well, it's unbelievable, and every one saying something ought to be done about it—you just never would be able to guess!"
Winona snapped shut the volume so rich in promise and leaned forward to face her mother desperately. Mrs. Penniman here coughed in a refined and artificial manner as a final preliminary. The parrot instantly coughed in the same manner, and—seeming to like it—again became Mrs. Penniman in a series of mild, throaty preliminary coughs, as if it would presently begin to tell something almost too good. The real tale had to be suspended again for this.
"Well," resumed Mrs. Penniman, feeling that the last value had been extracted from mere suspense, "anyway, it seems that this morning poor little Patricia Whipple was going by the old graveyard, and the twins jumped out and knocked her down and dragged her in there away from the road and simply tore every stitch of clothes off her back and made her dress up in Wilbur's clothes——"
"There!" gasped the horrified Winona. "Didn't I say it would be Wilbur?"
"And then what did they do but cut off her braid with a knife!"
"Wilbur's knife—Merle hasn't any."
"And the Lord knows what the little fiends would have done next, but Juliana Whipple happened to be passing, and heard the poor child's screams and took her away from them."
"That dreadful, dreadful Wilbur!" cried Winona.
"Reform school," spoke the judge, as if he uttered it from the bench.
"But something queer," went on Mrs. Penniman. "Juliana took the twins home in the pony cart, with Wilbur wearing Patricia's dress—it's a plaid gingham I made myself—and someone gave him a lot of money and let him go, and they didn't give Merle any because Ed Seaver saw them on River Street, and Wilbur had it all. And what did Patricia Whipple say to Don Paley but that she was going to have one of the twins for her brother, because no one else would get her a brother, and so she must. But what would she want one of those little cutthroats for? That's what puzzles me."
"Merle is not a cutthroat," said Winona with tightening lips. "He never will be a cutthroat." She left all manner of permissible suspicions about his brother.
"Well, it just beat me!" confessed her mother. "Maybe they've been reading Wild West stories."
"Wilbur, perhaps," insisted Winona. "Merle is already very choice in his reading."
"A puzzle, anyway—why, there they come!"
And the manner of their coming brought more bewilderment to the house of Penniman. For the criminal Wilbur did not come shamed and slinking, but with rather an uplift. Behind him gloomily trod the Merle twin. Even at a distance he was disapproving, accusatory, put upon. It was to be seen that he washed his hands of the evil.
"Whatever in the world—" began Mrs. Penniman, for Wilbur in the hollow of his arm bore a forked branch upon which seemed to perch in all confidence a free bird of the wilds.
"A stuffed bird!" said the peering Winona, and dispelled this illusion.
The twins entered the gate. Midway up the gravelled walk Wilbur Cowan began a gurgling oration.
"I bet nobody can guess what I brought! Yes, sir—a beautiful present for every one—that will make a new man of poor old Judge Penniman, and this lovely orange—that's for Mrs. Penniman—and I bet Winona can't guess what's wrapped up in this box for her—it's the most beautiful album, and this first-class animal for my father, and it'll last a lifetime if he takes care of it good; and I got me a dog to watch the house." Breathless he paused.
"Spent all his money!" intoned Merle. "And he bought me this knife, too."
He displayed it, but merely as a count in the indictment for criminal extravagance. He had gone to the hammock to sit by Winona. He needed her. He had been too long unconsidered.
The sputtering gift-bringer bestowed the orange upon Mrs. Penniman, the album upon Winona, and the invigorator upon the now embarrassed judge.
"Thank you, Wilbur, dear!" Mrs. Penniman was first to recover her poise.
"Thanks ever so much," echoed Winona, doubtfully.
She must first know that he had come by this money righteously. The judge adjusted spectacles to read the label on his gift.
"Thank you, my boy. The stuff may give me temporary relief."
He had felt affronted that any one could suppose one bottle of anything would make a new man of him; and—inconsistently enough—affronted that any one should suppose he needed to be made a new man of. He had not liked the phrase at all.
"And now perhaps you will tell us——" began Winona, her lips again tightening. But the Wilbur twin could not yet be brought down to mere history.
"This is an awful fighting dog," he was saying. "He's called Frank, and he eats them up. Yes, sir, he nearly et up that old Boodles dog just now. He would of if I hadn't stopped him. He minds awful well."
"Spent all our money!" declaimed Merle in a public-school voice, using "our" for the first time since his defeat of the morning. Certain of Winona's support, it had again become their money. "And cursing, swearing, fighting, smoking!"
"Oh, Wilbur!" exclaimed the shocked Winona; yet there was dismay more than rebuke in her tone, for she had brought the album to view. "If you've been a bad boy perhaps I should not accept this lovely gift from you. Remember—we don't yet know how you obtained all this money."
"Ho! I earned that money good! That old fat Mr. Whipple said I earned it good. He said he wouldn't of done what I done——"
"Did, dear!"
"—wouldn't of did what I did for twice the money."
"And what was it you did?"
Winona spoke gently, as a friend. But Wilbur rubbed one bare foot against and over the other. He was not going to tell that shameful thing, even to these people.
"Oh, I didn't do much of anything," he muttered.
"But what was it?"
The judge interrupted.
"It says half a wineglassful before meals. Daughter, will you bring me the wineglass?"
The Pennimans kept a wineglass. The judge found a corkscrew attached to the bottle, and sipped his draft under the absorbed regard of the group. "It feels like it might give some temporary relief," he admitted, savoring the last drops.
"You go right down to the drug store and look at that picture; you'll see then what it'll do for you," urged the donor.
"What else did the Whipples say to you?" wheedled Winona.
The Wilbur twin again hung embarrassed.
"Well—well, there's a cruel stepmother, but now she wasn't cruel to me. She said I was a nice boy, and gave me back my pants."
"Gave you back—"
Winona enacted surprise.
"I had to have my pants, didn't I? I couldn't go out without any, could I? And she took me to a pantry and give me a big hunk of cake with raisins in it, and a big slice of apple pie, and a big glass of milk."
"I must say! And she never gave me a thing!" Merle's bitterness grew.
"And she kissed me twice, and—and said I was a nice boy."
"You already said that," reminded the injured brother.
"And she didn't act cruel to me once, even if she is a stepmother."
"But how did you come to be without your——"
Wilbur was again reprieved from her grilling. The Penniman cat, Mouser, a tawny, tigerish beast, had leaped to the porch. With set eyes and quivering tail it advanced crouchingly, one slow step at a time, noiseless, sinister. Only when poised for its final spring upon the helpless prey was it seen that Mouser stalked the blue jay on its perch. Wilbur, with a cry of alarm, snatched the treasure from peril. Mouser leaped to the porch railing to lick her lips in an evil manner.
"You will, will you?" Wilbur stormed at her. Yet he was pleased, too, for Mouser's attempt was testimony to the bird's merit. "She thought it was real," he said, proudly.
"But how did you come to have your clothes——" began Winona sweetly once more, and again the twin was saved from shuffling answers.
The dog, Frank, sniffing up timidly at Mouser on the porch rail, displeased her. From her perch she leaned down to curse him hissingly, with arched back and swollen tail, a potent forearm with drawn claws curving forward in menace.
"You will, will you?" demanded Wilbur again, freeing his legs from the leash in which the dismayed dog had entwined them.
Frank now fell on his back with limp paws in air and simpered girlishly up at his envenomed critic on the railing.
"We got to keep that old cat out the way. He eats 'em up—that's all he does, eats 'em! It's a good thing I was here to make him mind me."
"But how did you come to have your clothes——" resumed Winona.
This time it was Dave Cowan who thwarted her with a blithe hail from the gate. Winona gave it up. Merle had been striving to tell her what she wished to know. Later she would let him.
Dave swaggered up the walk, a gay and gallant figure in his blue cutaway coat, his waistcoat of most legible plaid, fit ground for the watch chain of heavy golden links. He wore a derby hat and a fuming calabash pipe, removing both for a courtly bow to the ladies. His yellow hair had been plastered low on his brow, to be swept back each side of the part in a gracious curve; his thick yellow moustache curled jauntily upward, to show white teeth as he smiled. At first glance he was smartly apparelled, but below the waist Dave always diminished rapidly in elegance. His trousers were of another pattern from the coat, not too accurate of fit, and could have been pressed to advantage, while the once superb yellow shoes were tarnished and sadly worn. The man was richly and variously scented. There were the basic and permanent aromas of printer's ink and pipe tobacco; above these like a mist were the rare unguents lately applied by Don Paley, the barber, and a spicy odour of strong drink. As was not unusual on a Saturday night, Dave would have passed some relaxing moments at the liquor saloon of Herman Vielhaber.
"I hope I see you well, duchess!"
This was for Mrs. Penniman, and caused her to bridle as she fancied a saluted duchess might. It was the humour of Dave to suppose this lady a peeress of the old régime, one who had led far too gay a life and, come now to a dishonoured old age, was yet cynical and unrepentant. Winona also he affected to believe an ornament of the old noblesse, a creature of maddening beauty, but without heart, so that despairing suitors slew themselves for her. His debased fancy would at times further have it that Judge Penniman was Louis XVIII, though at this moment, observing that the ladies were preoccupied with one of his sons, he paused by the invalid and expertly from a corner of his mouth whispered the coarse words, "Hello, Old Flapdoodle!" From some remnant of sex loyalty he would not address the sufferer thus when his womenfolk could overhear, but the judge could never be sure of the jester's discretion. Besides, Dave was from day to day earnestly tutoring the parrot to say the base words, and the judge knew that Polly, once master of them, would use no discretion whatever. He glared at Dave Cowan in hearty but silent rage. Dave turned from him to kneel at the feet of Winona.
"'A book of verses underneath the bow—'" he began.
Winona shuddered. She knew what was coming; dreadful, licentious stuff from a so-called poet—far, far different from dear Tennyson, thought Winona—who sang the joys of profligacy. Winona turned from the recitationist.
"What? Repulsed again? Ah, well, there's always the river! Duchess, bear witness, 'twas her coldness drove me to the rash act—she with her beauty that maddens all be-holders!"
Winona was shocked, yet not unpleasantly, at these monstrous implications. She dreaded to have him begin—and yet she would have him. She tried to sign to him now that matters were to the fore too grave for clumsy fooling, but he only took the book from her hand to read its title.
"'Matthew Arnold—How to Know Him,'" he read. "Ah, yes! Ah, yes! But is he worth knowing?"
"Oh!" exclaimed Winona, wincing.
"No respect for God or man," mumbled the judge, meaning that a creature capable of calling him Old Flapdoodle could be expected to ask if Matthew Arnold were worth knowing.
The Wilbur twin here thrust the blue jay upon his father with cordial words. Dave professed to be entranced with the gift. It appeared that he had always longed for a stuffed blue jay. He curled a finger to it and called, "Tweet! Tweet!" a bit of comedy poignantly relished by the donor of the bird.
His father now ceremoniously conducted Mrs. Penniman to what he spoke of as the banqueting hall. He made almost a minuet of their progress. Under one arm he carried his bird to place it on the table, where later during the meal he would convulse the Wilbur twin by affecting to feed it bits of bread. Winona still hungered for details of the day's tragedy, but Dave must talk of other things. He talked far too much, the judge believed. He had just made the invalid uncomfortable by disclosing that the Ajax Invigorator had an alcoholic content of at least fifty-five per cent. He said that for this reason it would afford temporary relief to almost any one. He added that it would be cheap stuff, and harmful, and that if a man wished to drink he ought to go straight to Vielhaber's, where they kept an excellent line of Ajax Invigorators and sold them under their right names. The judge said "Stuff and nonsense" to this, but the ladies believed, for despite his levity Dave Cowan knew things. He read books and saw the world. Only the Wilbur twin still had faith in the invigorator. He had seen the picture. You couldn't get round that picture.
Having made the judge uncomfortable, Dave rendered Winona so by a brief lecture upon organic evolution, with the blue jay as his text. He said it had taken four hundred and fifty million years for man to progress thus far from the blue-jay stage—if you could call it progress, the superiority of man's brain to the jay's being still inconsiderable.
Winona was uncomfortable, because she had never been able to persuade herself that we had come up from the animals, and in any event it was not talk for the ears of innocent children. She was relieved when the speaker strayed into the comparatively blameless field of astronomy, telling of suns so vast that our own sun became to them but a pin point of light, and of other worlds out in space peopled with beings like Mrs. Penniman and Winona and the judge, though even here Winona felt that the lecturer was too daring. The Bible said nothing about these other worlds out in space. But then Dave had once, in the post office, argued against religion itself in the most daring manner, with none other than the Reverend Mallett.
It was not until the meal ended and they were again on the porch in the summer dusk that Winona made any progress in her criminal investigations. There, while Dave Cowan played his guitar and sang sentimental ballads to Mrs. Penniman—these being among the supposed infirmities of the profligate duchess—Winona drew the twins aside and managed to gain a blurred impression of the day's tremendous events. She never did have the thing clearly. The Merle twin was eager to tell too much, the other determined to tell too little. But the affair had plainly been less nefarious than reported by Don Paley to Ed Seaver. The twins persisted in ignoring the social aspects of their adventure. To them it was a thing of pure finance.
Winona had to give it up at last, for Lyman Teaford came with his flute in its black case. Dave Cowan finished "In the Gloaming," brazenly, though it was not thought music by either Lyman or Winona, who would presently dash into the "Poet and Peasant" overture. The twins begged to be let to see Lyman assemble his flute, and Dave overlooked the process with them. Lyman deftly joined the various sections of shining metal.
"He looks like a plumber," said Dave. The twins giggled, but Winona frowned.
"No respect for God or man," mumbled the judge from his wicker chair.
CHAPTER IV
In the Penniman home it was not merely Sunday morning; it was Sabbath morning. Throughout the house a subdued bustling, decorous and solemn; a hushed, religious hurry of preparation for church. In the bathroom Judge Penniman shaved his marbled countenance with tender solicitude, fitting himself to adorn a sanctuary. In other rooms Mrs. Penniman and Winona arrayed themselves in choice raiment for behoof of the godly; in each were hurried steppings, as from closet to mirror; shrill whisperings of silken drapery as it fell into place. In the parlour the Merle twin sat reading an instructive book. With unfailing rectitude he had been the first to don Sabbath garments, and now lacked merely his shoes, which were being burnished by his brother in the more informal atmosphere of the woodshed, to which the Sabbath strain of preparation did not penetrate.
It was the Wilbur twin's weekly task to do the shoes of himself and brother and those of the judge. No one could have told precisely why the task fell to him, and he had never thought to question. The thing simply was. Probably Winona, asked to wrestle with the problem, would have urged that Merle was always the first one dressed, and should not be expected to submit his Sunday suit to the hazards of this toil. She would have added, perhaps, that anyway it was more suitable work for Wilbur, the latter being of a rougher spiritual texture. Also, Merle could be trusted to behave himself in the Penniman parlour, not touching the many bibelots there displayed, or disarranging the furniture, while the Wilbur twin would not only touch and disarrange, but pry into and handle and climb and altogether demoralize. In all the parlour there was but one object for which he had a seemly respect—the vast painting of a recumbent lion behind bars. It was not an ordinary picture, such as may be seen in galleries, for the bars guarding the fierce beast were real bars set into the frame, a splendid conceit that the Wilbur twin never tired of regarding. If you were alone in the sacred room you could go right up to the frame and feel the actual bars and put your hand thrillingly through them to touch the painted king of the jungle. But the Merle twin could sit alone in the presence of this prized art treasure and never think of touching it. He would sit quietly and read his instructive book and not occasion the absent Winona any anxiety. Wherefore the Wilbur twin each Sabbath morning in the woodshed polished three pairs of shoes, and not uncheerfully. He would, in truth, much rather be there at his task than compelled to sit in the parlour with his brother present to tell if he put inquiring fingers into the lion's cage.
He had finished the shoes of his brother and himself, not taking too much pains about the heels, and now laboured at the more considerable footgear of the judge. The judge's shoes were not only broad, but of a surface abounding in hills and valleys. As Dave Cowan said, the judge's feet were lumpy. But the Wilbur twin was conscientious here, and the judge's heels would be as resplendent as the undulating toes. The task had been appreciably delayed by Frank, the dog, who, with a quaint relish for shoe blacking, had licked a superb polish from one shoe while the other was under treatment. His new owner did not rebuke him. He conceived that Frank had intelligently wished to aid in the work, and applauded him even while securing the shined shoes from his further assistance.
But one pagan marred this chastened Sabbath harmony of preparation. In the little house Dave Cowan lolled lordly in a disordered bed, smoked his calabash pipe beside a disordered breakfast tray, fetched him by the Wilbur twin, and luxuriated in the merely Sunday—and not Sabbath—edition of a city paper shrieking with black headlines and spectacular with coloured pictures; a pleasing record of crimes and disasters and secrets of the boudoir, the festal diversions of the opulent, the minor secrets of astronomy, woman's attire, baseball, high art, and facial creams. As a high priest of the most liberal of all arts, Dave scanned the noisy pages with a cynical and professional eye, knowing that none of the stuff had acquired any dignity or power to coerce human belief until mere typesetters like himself had crystallized it. Not for Dave Cowan was the printed word of sacred authority. He had set up too much copy. But he was pleased, nevertheless, thus to while and doze away a beautiful Sabbath morning that other people made rather a trial of.
Having finished the last of the judge's shoes, the Wilbur twin took them and the shoes of Merle to their owners, then hastened with his own to the little house where he must dress in his own Sunday clothes, wash his hands with due care—they would be doubtingly inspected by Winona—and put soap on his hair to make it lie down. Merle's hair would lie politely as combed, but his own hair owned no master but soap. Lacking this, it stood out and up in wicked disorder—like the hair of a rowdy, Winona said.
The rebellious stuff was at last plastered deceitfully to his skull as if a mere brush had smoothed it, and with a final survey, to assure himself that he had forgotten none of those niceties of the toilet that Winona would insist upon, he took his new straw hat and went again to the Penniman house. For the moment he was in flawless order, as neat, as compactly and accurately accoutred as the Merle twin, to whom this effect came without effort. But it would be so only for a few fleeting moments. He mournfully knew this, and so did Winona. Within five blocks from home and still five blocks from the edifice of worship, while Merle appeared as one born to Sunday clothes and shined shoes and a new hat, the Wilbur twin would be one to whom Sabbath finery was exotic and unwelcome. The flawless lustre of his shoes would be dulled, even though he walked sedately the safe sidewalk; his broad collar and blue polka-dotted cravat would be awry, one stocking would be down, his jacket yawning, all his magnificence seeming unconquerably alien. Winona did him the justice to recognize that this disarray was due to no wilfulness of its victim. He was helpless against a malign current of his being.
He held himself stiff in the parlour until the Pennimans came rustling down the stairway. He could exult in a long look at the benignant lion back of real bars, but, of course, he could not now reach up to touch the bars. It would do something to his clothes, even if the watchful and upright Merle had not been there to report a transgression of the rules. Merle also stood waiting, his hat nicely in one hand.
The judge descended the stairs, monumental in black frock coat, gray trousers, and the lately polished shoes that were like shining relief maps of a hill country. He carried a lustrous silk hat, which he now paused to make more lustrous, his fingers clutching a sleeve of his coat and pulling it down to make a brush. The hat was the only item of the judge's regal attire of which the Wilbur twin was honestly envious—it was so beautiful, so splendid, so remote. He had never even dared to touch it. He could have been left alone in the room with it, and still would have surveyed it in all respect from a proper distance.
Mrs. Penniman came next, rustling in black silk and under a flowered hat that Winona secretly felt to be quite too girlish. Then Winona from the door of her room above called to the twins, and they ascended the stairway for a last rite before the start for church, the bestowal of perfume upon each. Winona stood in the door of her room, as each Sunday she stood at this crisis, the cut-glass perfume bottle in hand. The twins solemnly approached her, and upon the white handkerchief of each she briefly inverted the bottle. The scent enveloped them delectably as the handkerchiefs were replaced in the upper left pockets, folded corners protruding correctly. As Wilbur turned away Winona swiftly moistened a finger tip in the precious stuff and drew it across the pale brow of Merle. It was a furtive tribute to his inherent social superiority.
Winona, in her own silk—not black, but hardly less severe—and in a hat less girlish than her mother's, rustled down the stairs after them. Speech was brief and low-toned among the elders, as befitted the high moment. The twins were solemnly silent. Amid the funereal gloom, broken only by a hushed word or two from Winona or her mother, the judge completed his fond stroking of the luminous hat, raised it slowly, and with both hands adjusted it to his pale curls. Then he took up his gold-headed ebony cane and stepped from the dusk of the parlour into the light of day, walking uprightly in the pride of fine raiment and conscious dignity. Mrs. Penniman walked at his side, not unconscious herself of the impressive mien of her consort.
Followed Winona and Merle, the latter bearing her hymn book and at some pains keeping step with his companion. Behind them trailed the Wilbur twin, resolving, as was his weekly rule, to keep himself neat through church and Sunday-school—yet knowing in his heart it could not be done. Already he could feel his hair stiffening as the coating of soap dried upon it. Pretty soon the shining surface would crack and disorder ensue. What was the use? As he walked carefully now he inhaled rich scent from the group—Winona's perfume combining but somehow not blending with a pungent, almost vivid, aroma of moth balls from the judge's frock coat.
They met or passed other family groups, stiffly armoured for the weekly penance to a bewildering puzzle of mortality. Ceremonious greetings were exchanged with these. The day was bright and the world all fair, but there could be no levity, no social small talk, while this grim business was on. They reached the white house of worship, impressive under its heaven-pointing steeple, and passed within its portals, stepping softly to the accompaniment of those silken whisperings, with now and again the high squeak of new boots whose wearers, profaning the stillness, would appear self-conscious and annoyed, though as if silently protesting that they were blameless.
Thus began an hour of acute mental distress for the Wilbur twin. He sat tightly between Mrs. Penniman and the judge. There was no free movement possible. He couldn't even juggle one foot backward and forward without correction. The nervous energy thus suppressed rushed to all the surface of his body and made his skin tingle maddeningly. He felt each hair on his head as it broke away from the confining soap. Something was inside his collar, and he couldn't reach for it; there was a poignant itching between his shoulder blades, and this could receive no proper treatment. He boiled with dumb, helpless rage, having to fight this wicked unrest. He never doubted its wickedness, and considered himself forever shut out from those rewards that would fall to the righteous who loved church and could sit still there without jiggling or writhing or twisting or scratching.
He was a little diverted from his tortures by the arrival of the Whipples. From the Penniman pew he could glance across to a side pew and observe a line of repeated Whipple noses, upon which for some moments he was enabled to speculate forgetfully. Once—years ago, it seemed to him—he had heard talk of the Whipple nose. This one had the Whipple nose, or that one did not have the Whipple nose; and it had then been his understanding that the Whipple family possessed but one nose in common; sometimes one Whipple had it; then another Whipple would have it. At the time this had seemed curious, but in no way anomalous. He had readily pictured a Whipple nose being worn now by one and now by another of this family. He had visualized it as something that could be handed about. Later had come the disappointing realization that each Whipple had a complete nose at all times for his very own; that the phrase by which he had been misled denoted merely the possession of a certain build of nose by Whipples.
But even this simple phenomenon offered some distraction from his present miseries. He could glance along the line of Whipple noses and observe that they were, indeed, of a markedly similar pattern. It was, as one might say, a standardized nose, raised by careful selection through past generations of Whipples to the highest point of efficiency; for ages yet to come the demands of environment, howsoever capricious, would probably dictate no change in its structural details. It sufficed. It was, moreover, a nose of good lines, according to conventional canons. It was shapely, and from its high bridge jutted forward with rather a noble sweep of line to the thin, curved nostrils. The high bridge was perhaps the detail that distinguished it from most good noses. It seemed to begin to be a nose almost from the base of the brow. In a world of all Whipple noses this family would have been remarked for its beauty. In one of less than Whipple noses—with other less claimant designs widely popularized—it might be said that the Whipple face would be noted rather for distinction than beauty.
In oblique profile the Wilbur twin could glance across the fronts in turn of Harvey D. Whipple, of Gideon Whipple, his father; of Sharon Whipple, his uncle; and of Juliana Whipple, sole offspring of Sharon. The noses were alike. One had but to look at Miss Juliana to know that in simple justice this should have been otherwise. She might have kept a Whipple nose—Whipple in all essentials—without too pressing an insistence upon bulk. But it had not been so. Her nose was as utterly Whipple as any. They might have been interchanged without detection.
The Wilbur twin stared and speculated upon and mildly enjoyed this display, until a species of hypnotism overtook him, a mercifully deadening inertia that made him slumberous and almost happy. He could keep still at last, and be free from the correcting hand of Mrs. Penniman or the warning prod of the judge's elbow. He dozed in a smother of applied godliness. He was delighted presently to note with an awakening start that the sermon was well under way. He heard no word of this. He knew only that a frowning old gentleman stood in a high place and scolded about something. The Wilbur twin had no notion what his grievance might be; was sensible only of his heated aspect, his activity in gesture, and the rhythm of his phrases.
This influence again benumbed him to forgetfulness, so that during the final prayer he was dramatizing a scene in which three large and savage dogs leaped upon Frank and Frank destroyed them—ate them up. And when he stood at last for the doxology one of his feet had veritably gone to sleep, the one that had been cramped back under the seat, so that he stumbled and drew unwelcome attention to himself while the foot tingled to wakefulness.
The ever-tractable Merle had been attentive to the sermon, had sung beautifully, and was still immaculate of garb, while the Wilbur twin emerged from the ordeal in rank disorder, seeming to have survived a scuffle in which efforts had been made to wrench away his Sunday clothes and to choke him with his collar and cravat. And the coating of soap had played his hair false. It stood out behind and stood up in front, not with any system, but merely here and there.
"You are a perfect sight," muttered Winona to him. "I don't see how you do it." But neither did the offender.
With a graciously relaxed tension the freed congregation made a leisurely progress to the doors of the church; many lingered here in groups for greetings and light exchanges. It was here that the Penniman group coalesced with the Whipple group, a circumstance that the trailing Wilbur noted with alarm. The families did not commonly affiliate, and the circumstance boded ominously. It could surely not be without purpose. The Wilbur twin's alarm was that the Whipple family had regretted its prodigality of the day before and was about to demand its money back. He lurked in the shadowy doorway.
The Whipples were surrounding Merle with every sign of interest. They shook hands with him. They seemed to appraise him as if he were something choice on exhibition at a fair. Harvey D. was showing the most interest, bending above the exhibit in apparently light converse. But the Wilbur twin knew all about Harvey D. He was the banker and wore a beard. He was to be seen on week days as one passed the First National Bank, looking out through slender bars—exactly as the Penniman lion did—upon a world that wanted money, but couldn't have it without some good reason. He had not been present when the Whipple money was so thoughtlessly loosened, and he would be just the man to make a fuss about it now. He would want to take it back and put it behind those bars in the bank where no one could get it. But he couldn't ever have it back, because it was spent. Still, he might do something with the spender.
The Wilbur twin slunk farther into friendly shadows, and not until the groups separated and the four Whipples were in their waiting carriage did he venture into the revealing sunlight. But no one paid him any attention. The judge and Mrs. Penniman walked up the shaded street, for the Sunday dinner must be prepared. Winona and the Merle twin, both flushed from the recent social episode, turned back to the church to meet and ignore him.
"Fortune knocks once at every one's door," Winona was mysteriously saying.
The Wilbur twin knew this well enough. The day before it had knocked at his door and found him in.
There was still Sunday-school to be endured, but he did not regard this as altogether odious. It was not so smothering. The atmosphere was less strained. One's personality could come a bit to the front without incurring penalties, and one met one's own kind on a social plane—subject to discipline, it was true, but still mildly enjoyable. It was his custom to linger here until the classes gathered, but to-day the Whipple pony cart was driven up by the Whipple stepmother and the girl with her hair cut off. Apparently no one made these two go to church, but they had come to Sunday-school. And the Wilbur twin fled within at sight of them. The pony cart, vehicle in which he had been made a public mock, was now a sickening sight to him.
Sunday-school was even less of a trial to him than usual. The twins were in the class of Winona, and Winona taught her class to-day with unwonted unction; but the Wilbur twin was pestered with few questions about the lesson. She rather singled Merle out and made him an instructive example to the rest of the class, asking Wilbur but twice, and then in sheerly perfunctory routine: "And what great lesson should we learn from this?"
Neither time did he know what great lesson we should learn from this, and stammered his ignorance pitiably, but Winona, in the throes of some mysterious prepossession, forgot to reprove him, and merely allowed the more gifted Merle to purvey the desired information. So the Wilbur twin was practically free to wriggle on his hard chair, to exchange noiseless greetings with acquaintances in other classes, and to watch Lyman Teaford, the superintendent, draw a pleasing cartoon of the lesson with coloured chalk on a black-board, consisting chiefly of a rising yellow sun with red rays, which was the sun of divine forgiveness Once the Wilbur twin caught the eye of the Whipple girl—whose bonnet hid her cropped hair—and she surprisingly winked at him. He did not wink back. Even to his liberal mind, it did not seem right to wink in a Sunday-school.
When at last they all sang "Bringing in the Sheaves," and were ably dismissed by Lyman Teaford, who could be as solemn here as he was gay in a parlour with his flute, Winona took the Merle twin across the room to greet the Whipple stepmother and the Whipple girl. Wilbur regarded the scene from afar. Winona seemed to be showing off the Merle twin, causing him to display all his perfect manners, including a bow lately acquired.
The Wilbur twin felt no slight in this. He was glad enough to be left out of Winona's manoeuvres, for he saw that they were manoeuvres and that Winona was acting from some large purpose. Unless it wanted its money back, the Whipple family had no meaning for him; it was merely people with the Whipple nose, though, of course, the stepmother did not have this. He paused only to wonder if the girl would have it when she grew up—she now boasted but the rudiments of any nose whatsoever—and dismissed the tribe from his mind.
He waited for Winona and Merle a block up the street from the church. Winona was silent with importance, preoccupied, grave, and yet uplifted. Not until they reached the Penniman gate did she issue from this abstraction to ask the Wilbur twin rather severely what lesson he had learned from the morning sermon. The Wilbur twin, with immense difficulty, brought her to believe that he had not heard a word of the sermon. This was especially incredible, because it had dealt with the parable of the prodigal son who spent all his substance in riotous living. One would have thought, said Winona, that this lesson would have come home to one who had so lately followed the same bad course, and she sought now to enlighten the offender.
"And he had to eat with the pigs when his money was all gone," Merle submitted in an effort to aid Winona.
But the Wilbur twin's perverse mind merely ran to the picture of fatted calf, though without relish—he did not like fat meat.
It was good to be back in a human atmosphere once more, where he could hear his father's quips. The Penniman Sunday dinner was based notably on chicken, as were all other Sunday dinners in Newbern, and his father, when he entered the house, was already beginning the gayety by pledging Mrs. Penniman in a wineglass of the Ajax Invigorator. He called it ruby liquor and said that, taken in moderation, it would harm no one, though he estimated that as few as three glasses would cause people to climb trees like a monkey.
The Wilbur twin was puzzled by this and would have preferred that his present be devoted solely to making a new man of Judge Penniman, but he laughed loyally with his father, and rejoiced when Mrs. Penniman, in the character of the abandoned duchess, put her own lips to the glass at his father's urging. The judge did not enter into this spirit of foolery, resenting, indeed, that a sound medicinal compound should be thus impugned. And Winona was even more severe. Not for her to-day were jests about Madame la Marquise and her heart of adamant. Dave Cowan tried a few of these without result.
Winona was still silent with importance, or spoke cryptically, and she lavished upon the Merle twin such attention as she could give from her own mysterious calculations. One might have gathered that she was beholding the Merle twin in some high new light. The Wilbur twin ate silently and as unobtrusively as he could, for table manners were especially watched by Winona on Sunday. Not until the blackberry pie did he break into speech, and even then, it appeared, not with the utmost felicity. His information that these here blackberries had been picked off the grave of some old Jonas Whipple up in the burying ground caused him to be regarded coldly by more than one of those about the table; and Winona wished to be told how many times she had asked him not to say "these here." Of course he couldn't tell her.
Dinner over, it appeared that Winona would take Merle with her to call upon poor old Mrs. Dodwell, who had been bedridden for twenty years, but was so patient with it all. She loved to have Merle sit by her bedside of a Sunday and tell of the morning's sermon. They would also take her a custard. The Wilbur twin was not invited upon this excursion, but his father winked at him when it was mentioned and he was happy. He could in no manner have edified the afflicted Mrs. Dodwell, and the wink meant that he would go with his father for a walk over the hills—perhaps to the gypsy camp. So he winked back at his father, being no longer in Sunday-school, and was impatient to be off.
In the little house he watched from a window until Winona and Merle had gone on their errand of mercy—Merle carrying nicely the bowl of custard swathed in a napkin—and thereupon heartily divested himself of shoes and stockings. Winona, for some reason she could never make apparent to him, believed that boys could not decently go barefoot on the Lord's Day. He did not wish to affront her, but neither would he wear shoes and stockings with no one to make him. His bare feet rejoiced at the cool touch of the grass as he waited in the front yard for his father. He would have liked to change his Sunday clothes for the old ones of a better feel, but this even he felt would be going too far. You had to draw the line somewhere.
His father came out, lighting his calabash pipe. He wore a tweed cap now in place of the formal derby, but he was otherwise attired as on the previous evening, in the blue coal and vivid waistcoat, the inferior trousers, and the undesirable shoes. As they went down the street under shading elms the dog, Frank, capered at the end of his taut leash.
They went up Fair Street to reach the wooded hills beyond the town. The street was still and vacant. The neat white houses with green blinds set back in their flowered yards would be at this hour sheltering people who had eaten heavily of chicken for dinner and now dozed away its benign effects. Even song birds had stilled their pipings, and made but brief flights through the sultry air.
Dave Cowan sauntered through the silence in a glow of genial tolerance for the small town, for Dave knew cities. In Newbern he was but a merry transient; indeed, in all those strange cities he went off to he was but a transient. So frequent his flittings, none could claim him for its own. He had the air of being in the world itself, but a transient, a cheerful and observant explorer finding entertainment in the manners and customs of a curious tribe, its foibles, conceits, and quaint standards of value—since the most of them curiously adhered to one spot even though the round earth invited them to wander.
Sometimes Dave lingered in Newbern—to the benefit of the Weekly Advance—for as long as three months. Sometimes he declared he would stay but a day and stayed long; sometimes he declared he would stay a long time and stayed but a day. He was a creature happily pliant to the rule of all his whims. He never bothered to know why he dropped into Newbern, nor bothered to know why he left. On some morning like other mornings, without plan, he would know he was going and go, stirred by some vagrant longing for a strange city—and it was so easy to go. He was unencumbered with belongings. He had no troublesome packing to do, and took not even the smallest of bags in his farings forth. Unlike the twins, Dave had no Sunday clothes. What clothes he had he wore, very sensibly, it seemed to him. He had but to go on and on, equipped with his union card and his printer's steel rule, the sole machinery of his trade, and where he would linger he was welcome, for as long as he chose and at a wage ample for his few needs, to embalm the doings of a queer world in type. Little wonder he should always obey the wander-bidding.
They passed a place where the head of the clan, having dined, had been overtaken with lethargy and in a hammock on his porch was asleep in a public and noisy manner.
"Small-town stuff!" murmured Dave, amiably contemptuous.
The Wilbur twin could never understand why his father called Newbern a small town. They came to the end of Fair Street, where the white houses dwindled into open country. The road led away from the river and climbed the gentle slope of West Hill. The Wilbur twin had climbed that slope the day before under auspices that he now recalled with disgust. Beyond, at the top of the hill, its chimneys lifted above the trees and its red walls showing warmly through the cool green of its shading foliage, was the Whipple New Place. To the left, across the western end of the little town and capping another hill, was the Whipple Old Place, where dwelt Sharon Whipple and his daughter, Juliana. The walls of the Whipple Old Place were more weathered, of a duller red. The two places looked down upon the town quite as castles of old looked down upon their feudatories.
"I was right inside that house yesterday," said the Wilbur twin, pointing to the Whipple New Place and boasting a little—he would not have to reveal the dreadful details of his entry. "Right inside of it," he added to make sure that his father would get all his importance. But the father seemed not enough impressed.
"You'll probably go into better houses than that some day," he merely said, and added: "You learn a good trade like mine and you can always go anywhere; always make your good money and be more independent than Whipples or even kings in their palaces. Remember that, Sputterboy."
"Yes, sir," said Wilbur.
His father never addressed the Merle twin by any but his rightful name, nor did he ever address the other by the one the dead mother had affixed to him, miscalling him by a number of titles, among which were Sputterboy, Gig, Doctor, and Bill.
Before ascending quite to the Whipple New Place they left the dusty road for a path that led over a lawnlike stretch of upland, starred with buttercups and tiny anemones, and inhabited by a colony of gophers that instantly engaged Frank, the dog, now free of his leash, in futile dashes. They stood erect, with languidly drooped paws, until he was too near; then they were inexplicably not there. Frank at length divined that they unfairly achieved these disappearances by descending into caverns beneath the surface of the earth. At first, with frantic claws and eager squeals, he tore at the entrances to these until the prey appeared at exits farther on, only to repeat the disappearance when dashed at. Frank presently saw the chase to be hopeless. It was no good digging for something that wouldn't be there.
"There's life for you, Doctor," said Dave Cowan. "Life has to live on life, humans same as dogs. Life is something that keeps tearing itself down and building itself up again; everybody killing something else and eating it. Do you understand that?"
"Yes, sir," said Wilbur, believing he did. Dogs killed gophers if they caught them, and human beings killed chickens for Sunday dinners.
"Humans are the best killers of all," said Dave. "That's the reason they came up from monkeys, and got civilized so they wear neckties and have religion and post offices and all such."
"Yes, sir," said Wilbur.
They climbed to a green height and reclined on the cool sward in the shade of a beech tree. Here they could pick out the winding of the quick little river between its green banks far below, and look across the roofs of slumbrous Newbern. The Wilbur twin could almost pick out the Penniman house. Then he looked up, and low in the sky he surprisingly beheld the moon, an orb of pale bronze dulled from its night shine. Never before had he seen the moon by day. He had supposed it was in the sky only at night. So his father lectured now on astronomy and the cosmos. It seemed that the moon was always there, or about there, a lonesome old thing, because there was no life on it. Dave spoke learnedly, for his Sunday paper had devoted a page to something of this sort.
"Everything is electricity or something," said Dave, "and it crackles and works on itself until it makes star dust, and it shakes this together till it makes lumps, and they float round, and pretty soon they're big lumps like the moon and like this little ball of star dust we're riding on—and there are millions of them out there all round and about, some a million times bigger than this little one, and they all whirl and whirl, the little ones whirling round the big ones and the big ones whirling round still bigger ones, dancing and swinging and going off to some place that no one knows anything about; and some are old and have lost their people; and some are too young to have any people yet; but millions like this one have people, and on some they are a million years older than we are, and know everything that it'll take us a million years to find out; but even they haven't begun to really know anything—compared with what they don't know. They'll have to go on forever finding out things about what it all means. Do you understand that, Bill?"
"Yes, sir," said Wilbur.
"Do you understand how people like us get on these whirling lumps?"
"Yes, sir," said Wilbur.
"How do they?"
"No, sir," said Wilbur.
"Well, it's simple enough. This star dust shakes together, and pretty soon some of it gets to be one chemical and some of it gets to be another, like water and salt and lime and phosphorus and stuff like that, and it gets together in little combinations and it makes little animals, so little you couldn't see them, and they get together and make bigger animals, and pretty soon they have brains and stomachs—and there you are. This electricity or something that shook the star dust together and made the chemicals, and shook the chemicals together and made the animals—well, it's fierce stuff. It wants to find out all about itself. It keeps making animals with bigger brains all the time, so it can examine itself and write books about itself—but the animals have to be good killers, or something else kills them. This electricity that makes 'em don't care which kills which. It knows the best killer will have the best brain in the long run; that's all it cares about. It's a good sporty scheme, all right. Do you understand that, Doctor?"
"Yes, sir," said Wilbur.
"Everything's got a fair chance to kill; this power shows no favours to anything. If gophers could kill dogs it would rather have gophers; when microbes kill us it will rather have microbes than people. It just wants a winner and don't care a snap which it is."
"Yes, sir."
"Of course, now, you hear human people swell and brag and strut round about how they are different from the animals and have something they call a soul that the animals haven't got, but that's just the natural conceit of this electricity or something before it has found out much about itself. Not different from the animals, you ain't. This tree I'm leaning against is your second or third cousin. Only difference, you can walk and talk and see. Understand?"
"Yes, sir," said Wilbur. "Couldn't we go up to the gypsy camp now?"
Dave refilled the calabash pipe, lighted it, and held the match while it burned out.
"That fire came from the sun," he said. "We're only burning matches ourselves—burning with a little fire from the sun. Pretty soon it flickers out."
"It's just over this next hill, and they got circus wagons and a fire where they cook their dinners, right outdoors, and fighting roosters, and tell your fortune."
Dave rose.
"Of course I don't say I know it all yet. There's a catch in it I haven't figured out. But I'm right as far as I've gone. You can't go wrong if you take the facts and stay by 'em and don't read books that leave the facts to one side, like most books do."
"Yes, sir," said Wilbur, "and they sleep inside their wagons and I wish we had a wagon like that and drove round the country and lived in it."
"All right," said his father. "Stir your stumps."
They followed the path that led up over another little hill winding through clumps of hazel brush and a sparse growth of oak and beech. From the summit of this they could see the gypsy camp below them, in an open glade by the roadside. It was as the Wilbur twin had said: there were gayly-painted wagons—houses on wheels—and a campfire and tethered horses and the lolling gypsies themselves. About the outskirts loafed a dozen or so of the less socially eligible of Newbern. Above a fire at the camp centre a kettle simmered on its pothook, being stirred at this moment by a brown and aged crone in frivolous-patterned calico, who wore gold hoops in her ears and bangles at her neck and bracelets of silver on her arms—bejewelled, indeed, most unbecomingly for a person of her years.
The Wilbur twin would have lingered on the edge of the glade with other local visitors, a mere silent observer of this delightful life; he had not dreamed of being accepted as a social equal by such exalted beings. But his father stalked boldly through the outer ring of spectators to the camp's centre and genially hailed the aged woman, who, on first looking up from her cookery, held out a withered palm for the silver that should buy him secrets of his future.
But Dave Cowan merely preened his beautiful yellow moustache at her and said, "How's business, Mother?" Whereupon she saw that Dave was not a villager to be wheedled by her patter. She recognized him, indeed, as belonging like herself to the freemasonry of them that know men and cities, and she spoke to him as one human to another.
"Business been pretty rotten here," she said as she stirred the kettle's contents. "Oh, we made two-three pretty good horse trades—nothing much. We go on to a bigger town to-morrow."
A male gypsy in corduroy trousers and scarlet sash and calico shirt open on his brown throat came to the fire now, and the Wilbur twin admiringly noted that his father greeted this rare being, too, as an equal. The gypsy held beneath an arm a trim young gamecock feathered in rich browns and reds, with a hint of black, and armed with needle-pointed spurs. He stroked the neck of the bird and sat on his haunches with Dave before the fire to discuss affairs of the road; for he, too, divined at a glance that Dave was here but a gypsy transient, even though he spoke a different lingo.
The Wilbur twin sat also on his haunches before the fire, and thrilled with pride as his father spoke easily of distant strange cities that the gypsies also knew; cities of the North where summer found them, and cities of the South to which they fared in winter. He had always been proud of his father, but never so proud as now, when he sat there talking to real gypsies as if they were no greater than any one. He was quite ashamed when the gypsies' dog, a gaunt, hungry-looking beast, narrowly escaped being eaten up by his own dog. But Frank, at the sheer verge of a deplorable offense, implicitly obeyed his master's command and forbore to destroy the gypsy mongrel. Again he flopped to his back at the interested approach of the other dog, held four limp paws aloft, and simpered at the stranger.
Other gypsies, male and female, came to the group about the fire, and lively chatter ensued, a continuous flashing of white teeth and shaking of golden ear hoops and rattling of silver bracelets. The Wilbur twin fondly noted that his father knew every city the gypsies knew, and even told them the advantages of some to which they had not penetrated. He gathered this much of the talk, though much was beyond him. He kept close to his father's side when the latter took his leave of these new friends. He wanted these people to realize that he belonged to the important strange gentleman who had for a moment come so knowingly among them.
As they climbed out of the sheltering glade he was alive with a new design. Gypsies notoriously carried off desirable children; this was common knowledge in Newbern Center. So why wouldn't they carry off him, especially if he were right round there where they could find him easily? He saw himself and his dog forcibly conveyed away with the caravan—though he would not really resist—to a strange and charming life beyond the very farthest hills. He did not confide this to his father, but he looked back often. They followed a path and were soon on a bare ridge above the camp.
Dave Cowan was already talking of other things, seeming not to have been ever so little impressed with his reception by these wondrous people, but he had won a new measure of his son's respect. Wilbur would have lingered here where they could still observe through the lower trees the group about the campfire, but Dave Cowan seemed to have had enough of gypsies for the moment, and sauntered on up the ridge, across an alder swale and out on a parklike space to rest against a fence that bounded a pasture belonging to the Whipple New Place. Across this pasture, in which the fat sorrel pony grazed and from which it regarded them from time to time, there was another grove of beech and walnut and hickory, and beyond this dimly loomed the red bulk of the Whipple house and outbuildings. There was a stile through the fence at the point where they reached it, and Dave Cowan idly lolled by this while the Wilbur twin sprawled in the scented grass at his feet. He well knew he should not be on the ground in his Sunday clothes. On the other hand, if the gypsies stole him they would not be so fussy as Winona about his clothes. None of them seemed to have Sunday clothes.
He again broached the suggestion about a gypsy wagon for himself and his father—and Frank, the dog—in which they could go far away, seeing all those strange cities and cooking their dinner over campfires. His father seemed to consider this not wholly impracticable, but there were certain disadvantages of the life, and there were really better ways. It seems you could be a gypsy in all essentials, and still live in houses like less adventurous people.
"Trouble with them, they got no trade," said the wise Dave, "and out in all kinds of weather, and small-town constables telling them to move on, and all such. You learn a good loose trade, then you can go where you want to." A loose trade seemed to be one that you could work at any place; they always wanted you if you knew a loose trade like the printer's—or, "Now you take barbering," said Dave. "There's a good loose trade. A barber never has to look for work; he can go into any new town and always find his job. I don't know but what I'd just as soon be a barber as a printer. Some ways I might like it better. You don't have as much time to yourself, of course, but you meet a lot of men you wouldn't meet otherwise; most of 'em fools to be sure, but some of 'em wise that you can get new thoughts from. It's a cleaner trade than typesetting and fussing round a small-town print shop. Maybe you'll learn to be a good barber; then you can have just as good a time as those gypsies, going about from time to time and seeing the world."