CHAPTER XIII
On a certain morning in early September Wilbur Cowan idled on River Street, awaiting a summons. The day was sunny and spacious, yet hardly, he thought, could it contain his new freedom. Despairing groups of half-grown humans, still in slavery, hastened by him to their hateful tasks. He watched them pityingly, and when the dread bell rang, causing stragglers to bound forward in a saving burst of speed, he halted leisurely in sheer exultation. The ecstasy endured a full five minutes, until a last tap of the bell tolled the knell of the tardy. It had been worth waiting for. This much of his future he had found worth planning. He pictured the unfortunates back in the old room, breathing chalk dust, vexed with foolish problems, tormented by discipline. He was never again to pass a public school save with a sensation of shuddering relief. He had escaped into his future, and felt no concern about what it should offer him. It was enough to have escaped.
Having savoured freedom another ten minutes, he sauntered over to the Advance office as a favour to Sam Pickering. A wastrel printer had the night before been stricken with the wanderlust, deciding at five-thirty to take the six-fifty-eight for other fields of endeavour, and Wilbur Cowan had graciously consented to bridge a possible gap.
He strolled into the dusty, disordered office and eased the worry from Sam Pickering's furrowed brow by attacking the linotype in spirited fashion. That week he ran off the two editions of the paper. A spotted small boy sat across the press bed from him to ink the forms. He confided impressively to this boy that when the last paper was printed the bronze eagle would flap its wings three times and scream as a signal for beer to be brought from Vielhaber's. The boy widened eyes of utter belief upon him, and Wilbur Cowan once more felt all his years. But he was still lamentably indecisive about his future, and when a new printer looked in upon the Advance he stepped aside. Whatever he was going to make of himself it wouldn't be someone who had to sit down indoors. He would be slave to no linotype until they were kept in the open. He told Sam Pickering this in so many words.
The former Mansion's stable at length engaged his wandering fancy. The stable's old swinging sign—a carefully painted fop with flowing side whiskers and yellow topcoat swiftly driving a spirited horse to a neat red-wheeled run-about—had been replaced by First-Class Garage. Of its former activities remained only three or four sedate horses to be driven by conservatives; and Starling Tucker, who lived, but lived in the past, dazed and unbelieving—becoming vivacious only in speech, beginning, "I remember when—"
These memories dealt with a remote time, when a hawse was a hawse, and you couldn't have it put all over you by a lot of slick young smarties that could do a few things with a monkey wrench. Starling, when he thus discoursed, sat chiefly in the little office before the rusty stove, idly flicking his memory with a buggy whip from the rack above his head, where reposed a dozen choice whips soon to become mere museum pieces.
Wilbur's connection with this thriving establishment was both profitable and entertaining. Judge Penniman divined the truth of it.
"He don't work—he just plays!"
He played with disordered motors and unerringly put them right. But he seemed to lack steadiness of purpose. He would leave an ailing car to help out Sam Pickering, or he would leave for a round of golf with Sharon Whipple, Sharon complaining that other people were nothing but doggoned golf lawyers; and he would insist upon time off at three o'clock each afternoon to give Spike Brennon his work-out. Spike had laboured to develop other talent in Newbern, but with ill success. When you got 'em learned a little about the game they acted like a lot of sissies over a broken nose or a couple of front teeth out or something. What he wanted was lads that would get the beak straightened, pretty near as good as new, or proper gold ones put in, and come back looking for more trouble. Wilbur Cowan alone he had found dependable.
Even so, the monotony of mere car repairing began to irk him. It was then he formed a pleasant alliance with old Porter Howgill, whose repair shop was across the street from the First-Class Garage. Porter's swinging sign, weathered and ancient like that of the Mansion's stable, said in bold challenge, "Ask me! I do everything!" And once Porter had done everything. Now there were a number of things he couldn't do, even when asked. He was aging and knotted with rheumatism, and his failing eyes did not now suffice for many of the nicer jobs.
Wilbur Cowan came to him and, even as had Porter in the days when the sign was bright, did everything. It was a distinct relief to puzzle over a sewing machine after labouring with too easily diagnosed motor troubles, or to restore a bit of marquetry in a table, or play at a feat of locksmithing. The First-Class Garage urged him to quit fiddling round and become its foreman, but this glittering offer he refused. It was too much like settling down to your future.
"Got his father's vagabond blood in his veins," declared Judge Penniman. "Crazy, too, like his father. You can't tell me Dave Cowan was in his right mind when the Whipples offered, in so many words, to set him up in any business he wanted to name, and pay all expenses, and he spurned 'em like so much dirt beneath his heel. Acted like a crazy loon is what I say, and this Jack-of-all-trades is showing the strain. Mark my words, they'll both end their days in a madhouse!"
No one did mark his words. Not even Winona, to whom they were uttered with the air of owlish, head-snapping wisdom which marked so many of the invalid's best things. She was concerned only with the failure of Wilbur to select a seemly occupation. His working dress was again careless; he reeked with oil, and his hands—hard, knotty hands—seemed to be permanently grimed. Even Lyman Teaford managed his thriving flour and feed business, with a butter and eggs and farm produce department, in the garments of a gentleman. True, he often worked with his coat off, but he removed his cuffs and carefully protected the sleeves of his white shirt with calico oversleeves held in place by neat elastics. Once away from the store he might have been anybody—even a banker.
Winona sought to enlist Lyman's help in the matter of Wilbur's future. Lyman was flaccid in the matter. The boy had once stolen into the Penniman parlour while Lyman and Winona were out rifling the ice box of delicacies, and enticed by the glitter of Lyman's flute had thrillingly taken it into his hands to see what made it go, dropping it in his panic, from the centre table to the floor, when he heard their returning steps. Lyman had never felt the same toward Wilbur after that. Now, even under the blandishments of Winona, he was none too certain that he would make a capable flour and feed merchant. Wilbur himself, to whom the possibility was broached, proved all too certain that he would engage in no mercantile pursuit whatever; surely none in which he might be associated ever so remotely with Lyman Teaford, whom for no reason he had always viewed with profound dislike. This incident closed almost before it opened.
Winona again approached Sharon Whipple in Wilbur's behalf. But Sharon was not enough depressed by the circumstance that Wilbur's work was hard on clothes, or that tasks were chosen at random and irregularly toiled at.
"Let him alone," advised Sharon. "Pretty soon he'll harden and settle. Besides, he's getting his education. He ain't educated yet."
"Education?" demanded Winona, incredulous. "But he's left school!"
"He'll get it out of school. Only kind ever I got. He's educating himself every day. Never mind his clothes. Right clothes are only right when they fit your job. Give the boy a chance to find himself. He's still young, Buck is—still in the gristle."
Winona winced at "gristle." It seemed so physiological—almost coarse.
A year went by in which Wilbur was perforce left to his self-education, working for Porter Howgill or at the garage or for Sam Pickering as he listed. "I'm making good money," was his steady rejoinder to Winona's hectoring.
"As if money were everything," wrote Winona in her journal, where she put the case against him.
Then when she had ceased to hope better things for him Wilbur Cowan seemed to waken. There were signs and symptoms Winona thus construed. He became careful in his attire, bought splendid new garments. His lean, bold jaw was almost daily smoothed by the razor of Don Paley, and Winona discovered a flask of perfume on his bureau in the little house. The label was Heart of Flowers. It was perhaps a more florid essence than Winona would have chosen, having a downright vigour of assertion that left one in no doubt of its presence; but it was infinitely superior to the scent of machine oil or printer's ink which had far too often betrayed the boy's vicinity.
Now, too, he wore his young years with a new seriousness; was more restrained of speech, with intervals of apparently lofty meditation. Winona rejoiced at these evidences of an awakening soul. The boy might after all some day become one of the better sort. She felt sure of this when he sought her of his own free will and awkwardly invited her to beautify his nails. He who had aforetime submitted to the ordeal under protest; who had sworn she should never again so torture him! Surely he was striving at last to be someone people would care to meet.
Poor Winona did not dream that a great love had come into Wilbur Cowan's life; a deep and abiding love that bathed all his world in colourful radiance and moved him to those surface elegances for which all her own pleading had been in vain. Not even when he asked her one night—while she worked with buffer and orange-wood stick—if she believed in love at first sight did she suspect the underlying dynamics, the true inebriating factor of this reform. He put the query with elaborate and deceiving casualness, having cleared a road to it with remarks upon a circumspect historical romance that Winona had read to him; and she had merely said that she supposed it often did happen that way, though it were far better that true love come gently into one's life, based upon a profound mutual respect and esteem which would endure through long years of wedded life.
Wilbur had questioned this, but so cautiously and quite impersonally that Winona could not suspect his interest in the theme to be more than academic. She believed she had convinced him that love at first sight, so-called, is not the love one reads about in the better sort of literature. She was not alarmed—not even curious. In her very presence the boy had trifled with his great secret and she had not known!
So continuously had Winona dwelt in the loftier realms of social and spiritual endeavour, it is doubtful if she knew that an organization known as the Friday Night Social Club was doing a lot to make life brighter for those of Newbern's citizens who were young and sportive and yet not precisely people of the better sort. In the older days of the town, when Winona was twenty, there was but one social set. Now she was thirty, and there were two sets. She knew the town had grown; one nowadays saw strange people that one did not know, even many one would not care to know. If she had been told that the Friday Night Social Club met weekly in Knights of Pythias Hall to dance those sinister new dances that the city papers were so outspoken about she would have considered it an affair of the underworld, about which the less said the letter. Had it been disclosed to her that Wilbur Cowan, under the chaperonage of Edward—Spike—Brennon, 133 lbs., ringside, had become an addict of these affairs, a determined and efficient exponent of the weird new steps—"a good thing for y'r footwork," Spike had said—she would have considered he had plumbed the profoundest depths of social ignominy. Yet so it was. Each Friday night he danced. He liked it, and while he disported himself from the lightest of social motives love came to him; the world was suddenly a place of fixed rainbows, and dancing —with her—no longer a gladsome capering, but a holy rite.
On a certain Friday evening unstarred by any portent she had burst upon his yielding eyes. Instantly he could have told Winona more than she would ever know about love at first sight. A creature of rounded beauty, peerlessly blonde, her mass of hair elaborately coifed and bound about her pale brow with a fillet of sable velvet. He saw her first in the dance, sumptuously gowned, regal, yet blithe, yielding as might a goddess to the mortal embrace of Bill Bardin as they fox-trotted to the viol's surge. He was stricken dumb until the dance ended. Then he gripped an arm of Spike Brennon, who had stood by him against the wall, "looking 'em over," as Spike had put it.
"Look!" he urged in tones hushed to the wonder of her. Spike had looked.
"Gee!" breathed the stricken one mechanically. He would not have chosen the word, but it formed a vent for his emotion.
"Bleached blonde," said Spike after a sharper scrutiny of the fair one, who now coquetted with a circle of gallants.
"Isn't she?" exclaimed the new lover, admiringly.
With so golden a result to dazzle him, was he to quarrel pettishly with the way it had been wrought?
"Do you suppose I could be introduced to her?" demanded Wilbur, timidly.
This marked the depth of his passion. He was too good a dancer to talk such nonsense ordinarily.
"Surest thing you know," said Spike. "Could you be introduced to her? In a split second! Come on!"
"But you don't know her yourself?" Wilbur hung back.
"Stop your kiddin'!"
Spike half dragged his fearful charge across the floor, not too subtly shouldered a way between Bill Bardin and Terry Stamper, bowed gracefully to the strange beauty, and said, "Hello, sister! Shake hands with my friend, Kid Cowan."
"Pleased to meet you!" She smiled graciously upon Wilbur and extended a richly jewelled hand, which he timidly pressed. Then she turned to Spike Brennon. "I know your name, all right," she declared. "You're that Mister Fresh we hear so much about—giving introductions to parties you ain't met yourself."
Wilbur Cowan blushed for Spike's faux pas, looking to see him slink off abashed, but there were things he had yet to learn about his friend.
"Just for that," said Spike, "I'll take this dance with you." And brazenly he encircled her waist as the music came anew.
"It's hot to-night," said Wilbur very simply to Terry Stamper and Bill Bardin as they moved off the floor to an open window.
His dancing eyes followed Beauty in the dance, and he was at her side when the music ceased. Until it came again he fanned by an open window her flushed and lovely face. Her name was Pearl.
"I wish this night would last forever," he murmured to her.
"Tut, tut!" said Pearl in humorous dismay, "and me having to be at business at seven A.M.!"
Only then did he learn that she was not a mere social butterfly, but one of the proletariat; that, in truth, she waited on table at the Mansion. Instantly he constructed their future together. He would free her from that life of toil.
"You're too beautiful for work like that," he told her.
Pearl eyed him with sudden approval.
"You're all right, kid. I often said the same thing myself, but no one's fell for it up to date."
They danced, and again they danced.
"You're the nicest boy in the bunch," murmured Pearl.
"I never saw any one so beautiful," said Wilbur.
Pearl smiled graciously. "I love the sound of your voice," she said.
She was wrested from him by Bill Bardin. When he would have retrieved her Terry Stamper had secured her notice. So through another dance he stood aloof against the wall, moody now. It might be only social finesse in Pearl but she was showing to others the same pleased vivacity she had shown to him. Could it be she did not yet understand? Had she possibly not divined that they two were now forever apart from the trivial world? They danced again.
"Don't you feel as if we'd always known each other?" he demanded.
"Sure, kid!" breathed Pearl.
It was after still another dance—she had meantime floated in the arms of a mere mill foreman. This time he led her into the dusky hallway, where open windows brought the cool night to other low-voiced couples. He led her to the farthest window, where the shadow was deepest, and they looked out-above the roof of Rapp Brothers, Jewellery-to a sky of pale stars and a blond moon.
"Ain't it great?" said Pearl.
He stood close to her, trembling from the faintest contact with her loveliness. He wished to kiss her-he must kiss her. But he was afraid. Pearl was sympathetic. She divined his trouble, and in the deep shadow she adroitly did it herself. Then she rebuked his boldness.
"Say, but you're the quick little worker, seems to me!"
For a moment he was incapable of speech, standing mute, her warm hand in his.
"It's been a dream," he managed at last. "Just like a dream! Now you belong to me, don't you?"
"Sure, if you want to put it that way," said Pearl "Come on! there's the music again."
At the door she was taken from him by the audacious mill foreman. Wilbur was chilled. Pearl had instantly recovered her public, or ballroom, manner. Could it be that she had not been rightly uplifted by the greatness of their moment? Did she realize all it would mean to them? But she was meltingly tender when at last they swayed in the waltz to "Home, Sweet Home." And it was he who bore her off under the witching moon to the side entrance of the Mansion. They lingered a moment in the protecting shadows. Pearl was chatty—not sufficiently impressed, it seemed to him, with the sweet gravity of this crisis.
"We're engaged now," he reminded her. Pearl laughed lightly.
"Have it your own way, kid! Wha'd you say your name was?"
She kissed him again. Then he wandered off in the mystic night, far over a world reeling through golden moonshine, to reach his dark but glowing little room at an hour that would have disquieted Winona. It was the following day that he cheered her by displaying a new attention to his apparel, and it was before the ensuing Friday night dance that he had submitted his hands to her for embellishment—talking casually of love at first sight.
There followed for him a time of fearful delight, not unmarred by spells of troubled wonder. Pearl was not exclusively enough his. She danced with other men; she chatted with them as with her peers. She seemed even to encourage their advances. He would have preferred that she found these repulsive, but she continued gay, even hard, under his chiding.
"Tut, tut! I been told I got an awfully feminine nature. A girl of my type is bound to have gentleman friends," she protested.
He aged under this strain. He saw now that he must abandon his easy view about his future. He must, indeed, plan his life. He must choose his vocation, follow it grimly, with one end in view. Pearl must become his in the sight abandon his easy view about his future. He must, indeed, plan his life. He must choose his vocation, follow it grimly, with one end in view. Pearl must become his in the sight of God and man—especially man—with the least delay. He delighted Sam Pickering by continuing steadily at the linotype for five consecutive weeks, while business piled up at the First-Class Garage and old Porter Howgill was asked vainly to do everything.
Then on a fateful night Lyman Teaford assumed a new and disquieting value in his life. Lyman Teaford, who for a dozen years had gone with Winona Penniman faithfully if not spectacularly; Lyman Teaford, dignified and genteel, who belonged to Newbern's better set, had one night appeared at an affair of the Friday Night Social Club. Perhaps because he had reached the perilous forties he had suddenly determined to abandon the safe highway and seek adventure in miry bypaths. Perhaps he felt that he had austerely played the flute too long. At any rate, he came and danced with the lower element of Newbern, not oftener with Pearl than with others that first night. But he came again and danced much oftener with Pearl. There was no quick, hot alarm in the breast of Wilbur Cowan. Lyman Teaford was an old man, chiefly notable, in Wilbur's opinion, for the remarkable fluency of his Adam's apple while—with chin aloft—he played high notes on his silver flute.
Yet dimly at last he felt discomfort at Lyman's crude persistence with Pearl. He danced with others now only when Pearl was firm in refusals. Wilbur to her jested with venomous sarcasm at the expense of Lyman. Women were difficult to understand, he thought. What could her motive be?
The drama, Greek in its severity, culminated with a hideous, a sickening velocity. On a Monday morning, in but moderate torment at Pearl's inconsistency, Wilbur Cowan sat at the linotype in the Advance office, swiftly causing type metal to become communicative about the week's doings in Newbern. He hung a finished sheet of Sam Pickering's pencilled copy on a hook, and casually surveyed the sheet beneath. It was a social item, he saw—the notice of a marriage. Then names amazingly leaped from it to sear his defenseless eyes. Lyman Teaford—Miss Pearl King! He gasped and looked about him. The familiar routine of the office was under way. In his little room beyond he could see Sam Pickering scribbling other items. He constrained himself to read the monstrous slander before him.
"Lyman N. Teaford, one of our best-known business men, was last evening united in the bonds of holy wedlock to Miss Pearl King, for some months employed at the Mansion House. The marriage service was performed by the Reverend Mallett at the parsonage, and was attended by only a few chosen friends. The happy pair left on the six-fifty-eight for a brief honeymoon at Niagara Falls, and on their return will occupy the Latimer mansion on North Oak Street, recently purchased by the groom in view of his approaching nuptials. A wide circle of friends wish them all happiness."
Wilbur Cowan again surveyed the office, and again peered sharply in at Sam Pickering. His first wild thought was that Sam had descended to a practical joke. If so it was a tasteless proceeding. But he must be game. It was surely a joke, and Sam and the others in the office would be watching him for signs of anguish. His machine steadily clicked off the item. He struck not one wrong letter. He hung the sheet of copy on its hook and waited for the explosion of crude humour. He felt that his impassive demeanour had foiled the mean intention. But no one regarded him. Sam Pickering wrote on. Terry Stamper stolidly ran off cards on the job press. They were all indifferent. Something told him it was not a joke.
He finished the next sheet of copy. Then, when he was certain he had not been jested with, he rose from the torturing machine, put on his coat, and told Sam Pickering he had an engagement. Sam hoped it wouldn't keep him from work that afternoon.
Wilbur said "Possibly not," though he knew he would now loathe the linotype forever.
"By the way"—he managed it jauntily, as Sam bent again over his pad of yellow copy paper—"I see Lyme Teaford's name is going to be in print this week."
Sam paused in his labour and chuckled.
"Yes, the old hard-shell is landed. That blonde hasn't been bringing him his three meals a day all this time for nothing."
"She must have married him for his money," Wilbur heard himself saying in cold, cynical tones. The illumining thought had just come. That explained it.
"Sure," agreed Sam. "Why wouldn't she?"
Late that afternoon, in the humble gymnasium at the rear of Pegleg McCarron's, Spike Brennon emerged from a rally in which Wilbur Cowan had displayed unaccustomed spirit. Spike tenderly caressed his nose with a glove and tried to look down upon it. The swelling already showed to his oblique gaze.
"Say, kid," he demanded, irritably, "what's the big idea? Is this murder or jest a friendly bout? You better behave or I'll stop pullin' my punches."
It could not be explained to the aggrieved Spike that his opponent had for the moment convinced himself that he faced one of Newbern's best-known business men.
Later he contented himself with observing Lyman Teaford at Niagara Falls. The fatuous groom stood heedlessly at the cataract's verge. There was a simple push, and the world was suddenly a better place to live in. As for his bereaved mate—he meditated her destruction, also, but this was too summary. It came to him that she had been a lovely and helpless victim of circumstances. For he had stayed on with Spike through the evening, and in a dearth of custom Spike, back of the bar, had sung in a whining tenor, "For she's only a bird in a gilded cage——"
That was it. She had discarded him because he was penniless—had sold herself to be a rich man's toy. She would pay for it in bitter anguish.
"Only a bird in a gilded cage," sang Spike again. An encore had been urged.
At noon the following day Winona Penniman, a copy of the Advance before her, sat at the Penniman luncheon table staring dully into a dish of cold rice pudding. She had read again and again the unbelievable item. At length she snapped her head, as Spike Brennon would when now and again a clean blow reached his jaw, pushed the untouched dessert from her with a gesture of repugnance, and went aloft to her own little room. Here she sat at her neat desk of bird's eye maple, opened her journal, and across a blank page wrote in her fine, firm hand, "What Life Means to Me."
It had seemed to her that it meant much. She would fill many pages. The name of Lyman Teaford would not there appear, yet his influence would be continuously present. She was not stricken as had been another reader of that fateful bit of news. But she was startled, feeling herself perilously cast afloat from old moorings. She began bravely and easily, with a choice literary flavour.
"My sensations may be more readily imagined than described."
This she found true. She could imagine them readily, but could not, in truth, describe them. She was shocked to discern that for the first time in her correct life there were distinctly imagined sensations which she could not bring herself to word, even in a volume forever sacred to her own eyes. A long time she sat imagining. At last she wrote, but the words seemed so petty.
All apparently that life meant to her was "How did she do it?"
She stared long at this. Then followed, as if the fruit of her further meditation: "There is a horrid bit of slang I hear from time to time—can it be that I need more pepper?"
After this she took from the bottom drawer of her bureau that long-forgotten gift from the facetious Dave Cowan. She held the stockings of tan silk before her, testing their fineness, their sheerness. She was still meditating. She snapped her dark head, perked it as might a puzzled wren.
"Certainly, more pepper!" she murmured.
CHAPTER XIV
A world once considered of enduring stability had crashed fearsomely about the ears of Winona Penniman and Wilbur Cowan. After this no support was to be trusted, however seemingly stout. Old foundations had crumbled, old institutions perished, the walls of Time itself lay wrecked. They stared across the appalling desolation with frightened eyes. What next? In a world to be ruined at a touch, like a house of cards, what vaster ruin would ensue?
It did not shock Wilbur Cowan that nations should plunge into another madness the very day after a certain fair one, mentioned in his meditations as "My Pearl—My Pearl of great price," and eke—from the perfume label—"My Heart of Flowers," had revealed herself but a mortal woman with an eye for the good provider. It occasioned Winona not even mild surprise that the world should abandon itself to hideous war on the very day after Lyman Teaford had wed beyond the purple. It was awful, yet somehow fitting. Anything less than a World War would have appeared inconsequent, anti-climactic, to these two so closely concerned in the preliminary catastrophe, and yet so reticent that neither ever knew the other's wound. Wilbur Cowan may have supposed that the entire Penniman family, Winona included, would rejoice that no more forever were they to hear the flute of Lyman Teaford. Certainly Winona never suspected that a mere boy had been desolated by woman's perfidy and Lyman's mad abandonment of all that people of the better sort most prize.
Other people, close observers of world events, declared that no real war would ensue; it would be done in a few days—a few weeks at most. But Winona and Wilbur knew better. Now anything could happen—and would. Of all Newbern's wise folk these two alone foresaw the malign dimensions of the inevitably approaching cataclysm. They would fall grimly silent in the presence of conventional optimists. They knew the war was to be unparalleled for blood and tears, but they allowed themselves no more than sinister, vague prophecies, for they could not tell how they knew.
And they saw themselves active in war. They lost no time in doing that. The drama of each drew to a splendid climax with the arrival in Newbern of a French officer—probably a general—bound upon a grave mission. Wilbur's general came to seek out the wife of Lyman Teaford.
To her he said in choice English: "Madame, I bring you sad news. This young man died gallantly on the field of battle—the flag of my country was about to be captured by the enemy when he leaped bravely forward, where no other would dare the storm of shot and shell, and brought the precious emblem safely back to our battle line. But even as the cheers of his comrades rang in his ears an enemy bullet laid him low. I sprang to his side and raised his head. His voice was already weak, for the bullet had found rest in his noble heart.
"'Tell her,' he breathed, 'that she sent me to my death so that she might become only a bird in a gilded cage. But tell her also that I wish her happiness in her new life.' Madame, he died there, while weeping soldiers clustered about with hats off and heads bowed—died with your name on his pale lips---'My Pearl of great price,' he whispered, and all was over. I bring you this photograph, which to the last he wore above his heart. Observe the bullet hole and those dark stains that discolour your proud features."
Whereupon Mrs. Lyman Teaford would fall fainting to the floor and never again be the same woman, bearing to her grave a look of unutterable sadness, even amid the splendours of the newly furnished Latimer residence on North Oak Street.
Winona's drama was less depressing. Possibly Winona at thirty-two had developed a resilience not yet achieved by Wilbur at twenty. She was not going to die upon a field of battle for any Lyman Teaford. She would brave dangers, however. She saw herself in a neat uniform, searching a battlefield strewn with the dead and wounded. To the latter she administered reviving cordial from a minute cask suspended at her trim waist by a cord. Shells burst about her, but to these she paid no heed. It was thus the French officer—a mere lieutenant, later promoted for gallantry under fire—first observed her. He called her an angel of mercy, and his soldiers—rough chaps, but hearty and outspoken—cheered her as La Belle Americaine.
So much for the war. But the French officer—a general now, perhaps with one arm off—came to Newbern to claim his bride. He had been one of the impetuous sort that simply would not take no for an answer. The wedding was in the Methodist church, and was a glittering public function. The groom was not only splendidly handsome in a French way, but wore a shining uniform, and upon his breast sparkled a profusion of medals. A vast crowd outside the church waited to cheer the happy couple, and slinking at the rear of this was a drab Lyman Teaford—without medals, without uniform, dull, prosaic, enduring at this moment pangs of the keenest remorse for his hasty act of a year before. He, too, would never be the same man again.
In truth, the beginning Teaford ménage lay under the most unfavourable portents. Things looked dark for it.
Yet despite the forebodings of Wilbur and Winona, it began to be suspected, even by them, that the war would wear itself out, as old Doctor Purdy said, by first intention. And in spite of affecting individual dramas they began to feel that it must wear itself out with no help from them. It seemed to have settled into a quarrel among foreign nations with which we could rightfully have no concern. Winona learned, too, that her picture of the nurse on a battlefield administering cordial to wounded combatants from the small keg at her waist was based upon an ancient and doubtless always fanciful print.
Wilbur, too, gathered from the newspapers that, though he might die upon a battlefield, there was little chance that a French general would be commissioned to repeat his last words to Mrs. Lyman Teaford of Newbern Center. He almost decided that he would not become a soldier. Some years before, it is true, he had been drawn to the life by a government poster, designed by one who must himself have been a capable dramatist.
"Join the Army and See the World," urged the large-lettered legend above the picture.
The latter revealed an entrancing tropical scene with graceful palms adorning the marge of a pinkly sun-kissed sea. At a table in the background two officers consulted with a private above an important-looking map, while another pleased-looking private stood at attention near by. At the left foreground a rather obsequious-looking old colonel seemed to be entreating a couple of spruce young privates to drop round for tea that afternoon and meet the ladies.
Had Wilbur happened upon this poster in conjunction with the resolve of Miss Pearl King to be sensible, it is possible his history might have been different. But its promise had faded from his memory ere his life was wrecked. He felt now merely that he ought to settle down to something. Even Sharon Whipple plainly told him so. He said it was all right to knock about from one thing to another while you were still in the gristle. Up to twenty a boy's years were kind of yeasty and uncertain, and if he was any way self-headed he ought to be left to run. But after twenty he lost his pinfeathers and should begin to think about things.
So Wilbur began to think about things. He continued to do everything that old Porter Howgill was asked to do, to repair cars for the Mansion garage, and to be a shield and buckler to Sam Pickering in time of need. The Advance office became freshly attractive at this time, because Sam had installed a wonderful new power press to print the paper daily; for the Advance, as Sam put it, could be found ever in the van of progress.
The new press had innermost secrets of structure that were presently best known to Wilbur Cowan. No smeared small boy was required to ink its forms and no surmounting bronze eagle was reported to scream for beer when the last paper was run off. Even Dave Cowan, drifting in from out of the nowhere—in shoes properly describable as only memories of shoes—said she was a snappy little machine, and applauded his son's easy mastery of it.
So the days of Wilbur were busy days, even if he had not settled far enough down to suit either Sam Pickering, Porter Howgill—who did everything, if asked—or the First-Class Garage. And the blight put upon him by a creature as false as she was beautiful proved not to be enduring. He was able, indeed, to behold her without a tremor, save of sympathy for one compelled to endure the daily proximity of Lyman Teaford.
But the war prolonged itself as only he and Winona had felt it would, and presently it began to be hinted that a great nation, apparently unconcerned with its beginning, might eventually be compelled to a livelier interest in it. Herman Vielhaber was a publicly exposed barometer of this sentiment. At the beginning he beamed upon the world and predicted the Fatherland's speedy triumph over all the treacherous foes. When the triumph was unaccountably delayed he appeared mysterious, but not less confident. The Prussian system might involve delay, but Prussian might was none the less invincible. Herman would explain the Prussian system freely to all who cared to listen—and many did attentively—from high diplomacy to actual fighting. He left many of his hearers with a grateful relief that neutrality had been officially enjoined upon them.
Later Herman beamed less brightly as he recounted tales of German prowess. He came to exhibit a sort of indignant pity for the Fatherland, into whose way so many obstacles were being inopportunely thrown. He compared Germany to a wounded deer that ravenous dogs were seeking to bring down, but his predictions of her ultimate victory were not less confident. Minna Vielhaber wept back of the bar at Herman's affecting picture of the stricken deer with the arrow in her flank, and would be comforted only when he brought the war to a proper close.
It was at this time that Winona wrote in her journal: "General Sherman said that war is the bad place. He knew."
It was also at this time that a certain phrase from a high source briefly engaged the notice of Sharon Whipple.
"Guinea pigs," said he, "are also too proud to fight, but they ain't ever won the public respect on that account. They get treated accordingly."
It was after this that Sharon was heard ominously to wish that he were thirty or forty years younger. And it was after this that Winona became active as a promoter of bazaars for ravaged Belgium and a pacifist whose watchword was "Resist not evil!" She wrote again in her journal: "If only someone would reason calmly with them!" She presently became radiant with hope, for a whole boatload of earnest souls went over to reason calmly with the combatants.
But the light she had seen proved deceiving. The earnest souls went forward, but for some cause, never fully revealed to Winona, they had been unable to reason calmly with those whose mad behaviour they had meant to correct. It was said that they had been unable to reason calmly even among themselves. It was merely a mark of Winona's earnestness that she felt things might have gone differently had the personnel of this valiant embassy been enlarged to include herself. Meantime, war was becoming more and more the bad place, just as General Sherman had said. She had little thought now for silk stockings or other abominations of the frivolous, for her own country seemed on the very verge of committing a frightful error.
Some time had elapsed since Wilbur Cowan definitely knew that he would never go to war because of the mother of Lyman Teaford's infant son. He began to believe, however, that he would relish a bit of fighting for its own sake. Winona reasoned with him as she would have reasoned with certain high personages on the other side of the water, and perhaps with as little success. He replied cryptically that he was an out-and-out phagocyte, and getting more so every time he read a newspaper. Winona winced at the term—it seemed to carry sinister implications. Where did the boy hear such words?
This one he had heard on a late Sunday afternoon when he sat, contrary to a municipal ordinance of Newbern, in the back room of Herman Vielhaber, with certain officials sworn to uphold that ordinance, who drank beer and talked largely about what we should do; for it had then become shockingly apparent that the phrase about our being too proud to fight had been, in its essential meaning, misleading. Dave Cowan, citizen of the world and student of its structure, physical and social, had proved that war, however regrettable, was perhaps never to be avoided; that in any event one of the best means to avoid it was to be known for your fighting ways. Anyway, war was but an incident in human progress.
Dave's hair had thinned in the years of his wandering to see a man at Seattle or New Orleans, and he now wore spectacles, without which he could no longer have enlarged his comprehension of cosmic values, for his latest Library of Universal Knowledge was printed in very small type. Dave said that since the chemicals had got together to form life everything had lived on something else, and the best livers had always been the best killers. He did not pretend to justify the plan, but there it was; and it worked the same whether it was one microscopic organism preying on another or a bird devouring a beetle or Germany trying to swallow the world. Rapp, Senior, said that was all very well, but these pacifists would keep us out of war yet. Doctor Purdy, with whom he had finished a game of pinochle—Herman Vielhaber had lately been unable to keep his mind on the game—set down his beer stein in an authoritative manner, having exploded with rage even while he swallowed some of the last decent beer to come to Newbern Center. He wiped froth from his waistcoat.
"Pacifists!" he stormed. "Why don't they ever look into their own bodies? They couldn't live a day on non-resistance to evil. Every one of their bodies is thronged with fighting soldiers. Every pacifist is a living lie. Phagocytes, that's what they are—white corpuscles—and it's all they're there for. They believe in preparedness hard enough. See 'em march up to fight when there's an invasion! And how they do fight! These pacifists belie their own construction. They're built on a fight from the cradle and before that.
"I wish more of their own phagocytes would begin to preach non-resistance and try to teach great moral lessons to invading germs. We wouldn't have to listen to so many of 'em. But phagocytes don't act that way. They keep in training. They don't say, like that poor old maunderer I read this morning, that there's no use preparing—that a million phagocytes will spring to arms overnight if their country's invaded. They keep in trim. They fight quick. If they didn't we wouldn't be here."
"These phagocytes—is infantry, yes?" demanded Herman Vielhaber. "I never hear 'em named before like that."
"Infantry, and all the other branches, in a healthy body—and our own body is healthy. Watch our phagocytes come forward now, just as those tiny white corpuscles rush through the blood to an invaded spot. You'll see 'em come quick. Herman, your country has licked Belgium and Serbia—you can rightly claim that much. But she'll never get another decision. Too many phagocytes."
Dave Cowan, who always listened attentively to Doctor Purdy for new words, was thus enabled to enlighten Winona about her own and other people's phagocytes; and Winona, overwhelmed by his mass of detail—for Dave had supplemented Purdy's lecture with fuller information from his encyclopedia—had sighed and said: "Oh, dear! We seem to be living over a volcano!"
This had caused Dave to become more volubly instructive.
"Of course! Didn't you know that? How thick do you suppose the crust of the earth is, anyway? All we humans are—we're plants that have grown out of the cooled crust of a floating volcano; plants that can walk and talk, but plants just the same. We float round the sun, which is only another big volcano that hasn't cooled yet—good thing for us it hasn't—and the sun and us are floating round some other volcano that no one has discovered yet because the circle is too big, and that one is probably circling round another one—and there you are. That's plain, isn't it?"
"Not very," said Winona.
"Well, I admit there's a catch in it I haven't figured out yet, but the facts are right, as far as I've gone. Anyway, here we are, and we got here by fighting, and we'll have to keep on fighting, one way or another, if we're to get any place else."
"I don't know anything about all that," said Winona; "but sometimes I almost think the Germans deserve a good beating."
This was extreme for Winona, the arch pacifist.
"You almost think so, eh? Well, that's a good specimen of almost thinking. Because the Germans don't deserve any such thing unless someone can give it to them. If the bird can swallow the worm the bird deserves the worm. The most of us merely almost think."
It was much later—an age later, it seemed to Winona—for her country, as she wrote in her journal, had crossed the Rubicon—that she went to attend a meeting of protest in a larger city than Newbern; a meeting of mothers and potential mothers who were persuaded that war was never excusable.
She had listened to much impassioned oratory, with a sickening surprise that it should leave her half-hearted in the cause of peace at any price; and she had gone to take her train for home, troubled with a monstrous indecision. Never before had she suffered an instant's bewilderment in detecting right from wrong.
As she waited she had observed on a siding a long, dingy train, from the windows of which looked the faces of boys. She was smitten with a quick curiosity. There were tall boys and short boys; and a few of them were plump, but mostly they were lean, with thin, browned faces, and they were all ominously uniformed. Their keen young faces crowded the open windows of the cars, and they thronged upon the platforms to make noisy purchases from younger boys who offered them pitiful confections from baskets and trays.
Winona stared at them with a sickened wonder. They were all so alive, so alert, so smiling, so eager to be on with the great adventure. In one of the cars a band of them roared a stirring chorus. It stirred Winona beyond the calm that should mark people of the better sort. She forgot that a gentleman should make no noise and that a lady is serene; forgot utterly. She waved a hand—timidly at first—to a cluster of young heads at a car window, and was a little dismayed when they waved heartily in return. She recovered and waved at another group—less timidly this time. Again the response was instant, and a malign power against which she strove in vain carried Winona to the train's side. Heads were thrust forth and greetings followed, some shy and low-toned, some with feigned man-of-the-world jauntiness.
Winona was no longer Winona. A freckled young vender with a basket halted beside her. Winona searched for her purse and emptied its hoard into one gloved hand. Coins spilled from this and ran about the platform. Hands sprang from the window above her to point out their resting places, and half a dozen of the creatures issued from the car to recover them for her. Flustered, eager, pleasantly shocked at her own daring, Winona distributed gifts from the basket, seeing only the hands that came forth to receive them.
Chewing gum, candy, popcorn, figs—even cigarettes—and Winona the first vice-president and recording secretary of Newbern's anti-tobacco league! War was assuredly what Sherman had so pithily described it, for she now sent the vender back to replenish his stock of cigarettes, and bought and bestowed them upon immature boys so long as her coin lasted. Their laughter was noisy, their banter of one another and of Winona was continuous, and Winona laughed, even bantered. That she should banter strangers in a public place! She felt rowdy, but liked it.
There was a call from the front of the train, and the group about her sprang to the platform as the cars began to move, waving her gracious, almost condescending adieus, as happy people who go upon a wondrous journey will wave to poor stay-at-homes. Winona waved wildly now, being lost to all decorum; waved to the crowded platform and then to the cloud of heads at the window above her.
From this window a hand reached down to her—a lean, hard, brown hand—and the shy, smiling eyes of the boy who reached it sought hers in something like appeal. Winona clutched the hand and gripped it as she had never gripped a human hand before.
"Good-bye, sister!" said the boy, and Winona went a dozen steps with the train, still grasping the hand.
"Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye—all of you!" she called, and was holding the hand with both her own when the train gathered speed and took it from her grasp.
She stood then watching other windows thronged with young heads as the train bore them on; she still waved and was waved at. Faint strains of the resumed chorus drifted back to her. Her face was hurting with a set smile.
She stumbled back across the platform, avoiding other groups who had cheered the passing train, and found sanctuary by a baggage truck loaded with crates of live chickens. Here she wept unnoticed, and wondered why she was weeping. Later, in her own train, she looked down and observed the white-ribboned badge which she had valiantly pinned above her heart that very morning. She had forgotten the badge—and those boys must have seen it. Savagely she tore it from its mooring, to the detriment of a new georgette waist, and dropped it from the open window.
That night she turned back in her journal to an early entry: "If only someone would reason calmly with them. Resist not evil!" She stared at this a long time, then she dipped a new pen in red ink and full across it she wrote "What rotten piffle!" That is, she nearly wrote those words. What she actually put down was "What r-tt-n piffle!"
To Wilbur Cowan, in recounting her fall from the serene heights of pacifism, she brazenly said: "Do you know—when that poor boy reached down to shake hands with me, if I could have got at him I just know I should have kissed him."
"Gee whiz!" said Wilbur in amazed tribute.
"I don't care!" persisted Winona. "That's the way I felt—he was such a nice boy. He looked like you, as if he'd come from a good home and had good habits, and I did want to kiss him, and I would have if I could have reached him—and I'm not going to tell a falsehood about it for any one, and I'm—I'm hostile."
"Well, I guess pretty soon I'll be going," said Wilbur.
Winona gazed at him with strangely shining eyes.
"You wouldn't be any good if you didn't!" she said, suddenly.
It was perhaps the least ornate sentence she had ever spoken.
"Gee whiz!" said Wilbur again. "You've changed!"
"Something came over me," said Winona.