The gra.s.sy bank on which they lay had the rich, burned smell of the hot days. A wind rustled the standing corn that formed a kind of wall behind them. The moon was in the sky and shone down across bank after bank of serried clouds. The grandiloquence went out of the voice of Telfer and his face became serious.
"My foolishness is more than half earnest," he said. "I think that a man or boy who has set for himself a task had better let women and girls alone. If he be a man of genius, he has a purpose independent of all the world, and should cut and slash and pound his way toward his mark, forgetting every one, particularly the woman that would come to grips with him. She also has a mark toward which she goes. She is at war with him and has a purpose that is not his purpose. She believes that the pursuit of women is an end for a life. For all they now condemn Mike McCarthy who went to the asylum because of them and who, while loving life, came near to taking life, the women of Caxton do not condemn his madness for themselves; they do not blame him for loitering away his good years or for making an abortive mess of his good brain. While he made an art of the pursuit of women they applauded secretly. Did not twelve of them accept the challenge thrown out by his eyes as he loitered in the streets?"
The man, who had begun talking quietly and seriously, raised his voice and waved the lighted cigarette in the air and the boy who had begun to think again of the dark-skinned daughter of banker Walker listened attentively. The barking of the dogs grew nearer.
"If you as a boy can get from me, a grown man, an understanding of the purpose of women you will not have lived in this town for nothing. Set your mark at money making if you will, but drive at that. Let yourself but go and a sweet wistful pair of eyes seen in a street crowd or a pair of little feet running over a dance floor will r.e.t.a.r.d your growth for years. No man or boy can grow toward the purpose of a life while he thinks of women. Let him try it and he will be undone. What is to him a pa.s.sing humour is to them an end. They are diabolically clever. They will run and stop and run and stop again, keeping just without his reach. He sees them here and there about him. His mind is filled with vague, delicious thoughts that come out of the very air; before he realises what he has done he has spent his years in vain pursuit and turning finds himself old and undone."
Telfer began jabbing at the ground with his stick.
"I had my chance. In New York I had money to live on and time to have made an artist of myself. I won prize after prize. The master, walking up and down back of us, lingered longest over my easel. There was a fellow sat beside me who had nothing. I made sport of him and called him Sleepy Jock after a dog we used to have about our house here in Caxton.
Now I am here idly waiting for death and that Jock, where is he? Only last week I saw in a paper that he had won a place among the world"s great artists by a picture he has painted. In the school I watched for a look in the eyes of the girl students and went about with them night after night winning, like Mike McCarthy, fruitless victories. Sleepy Jock had the best of it. He did not look about with open eyes but kept peering instead at the face of the master. My days were full of small successes. I could wear clothes. I could make soft-eyed girls turn to look at me in a dance hall. I remember a night. We students gave a dance and Sleepy Jock came. He went about asking for dances and the girls laughed and told him they had none to give, that the dances were taken.
I followed him and had my ears filled with flattery and my card with names. In riding the wave of small success I got the habit of small success. When I could not catch the line I wanted to make a drawing live, I dropped my pencil and, taking a girl upon my arm, went for a day in the country. Once, sitting in a restaurant, I overheard two women talking of the beauty of my eyes and was made happy for a week."
Telfer threw up his hands in disgust.
"My flow of words, my ready trick of talking; to what does it bring me?
Let me tell you. It has brought me to this--that at fifty I, who might have been an artist fixing the minds of thousands upon some thing of beauty or of truth, have become a village cut-up, a pot-house wit, a flinger of idle words into the air of a village intent upon raising corn.
"If you ask me why, I tell you that my mind was paralysed by small success and if you ask me where I got the taste for that, I tell you that I got it when I saw it lurking in a woman"s eyes and heard the pleasant little songs that lull to sleep upon a woman"s lips."
The boy, sitting upon the gra.s.sy bank beside Telfer, began thinking of life in Caxton. The man smoking the cigarette fell into one of his rare silences. The boy thought of girls that had come into his mind at night, of how he had been thrilled by a glance from the eyes of a little blue-eyed school girl who had once visited at Freedom Smith"s home and of how he had gone at night to stand under her window.
In Caxton adolescent love had about it a virility befitting a land that raised so many bushels of yellow corn and drove so many fat steers through the streets to be loaded upon cars. Men and women went their ways believing, with characteristic American what-boots-it att.i.tude toward the needs of childhood, that it was well for growing boys and girls to be much alone together. To leave them alone together was a principle with them. When a young man called upon his sweetheart, her parents sat in the presence of the two with apologetic eyes and presently disappeared leaving them alone together. When boys" and girls"
parties were given in Caxton houses, parents went away leaving the children to shift for themselves.
"Now have a good time and don"t tear the house down," they said, going off upstairs.
Left to themselves the children played kissing games and young men and tall half-formed girls sat on the front porches in the darkness, thrilled and half frightened, getting through their instincts, crudely and without guidance, their first peep at the mystery of life. They kissed pa.s.sionately and the young men, walking home, lay upon their beds fevered and unnaturally aroused, thinking thoughts.
Young men went into the company of girls time and again without knowing aught of them except that they caused a stirring of their whole being, a kind of riot of the senses to which they returned on other evenings as a drunkard to his cups. After such an evening they found themselves, on the next morning, confused and filled with vague longings. They had lost their keenness for fun, they heard without hearing the talk of the men about the station and in the stores, they went slinking through the streets in groups and people seeing them nodded their heads and said, "It is the loutish age."
If Sam did not have a loutish age it was due to his tireless struggle to increase the totals at the foot of the pages in the yellow bankbook, to the growing ill health of his mother that had begun to frighten him, and to the society of Valmore, Wildman, Freedom Smith, and the man who now sat musing beside him. He began to think he would have nothing more to do with the Walker girl. He remembered his sister"s affair with a young farmer and shuddered at the crude vulgarity of it. He looked over the shoulder of the man sitting beside him absorbed in thought, and saw the rolling fields stretched away in the moonlight and into his mind came Telfer"s speech. So vivid, so moving, seemed the picture of the armies of standing corn which men had set up in the fields to protect themselves against the march of pitiless Nature, and Sam, holding the picture in his mind as he followed the sense of Telfer"s talk, thought that all society had resolved itself into a few st.u.r.dy souls who went on and on regardless, and a hunger to make of himself such another arose engulfing him. The desire within him seemed so compelling that he turned and haltingly tried to express what was in his mind.
"I will try," he stammered, "I will try to be a man. I will try to not have anything to do with them--with women. I will work and make money--and--and----"
Speech left him. He rolled over and lying on his stomach looked at the ground.
"To h.e.l.l with women and girls," he burst forth as though throwing something distasteful out of his throat.
In the road a clamour arose. The dogs, giving up the pursuit of rabbits, came barking and growling into sight and scampered up the gra.s.sy bank, covering the man and the boy. Shaking off the reaction upon his sensitive nature of the emotions of the boy Telfer arose. His _sang froid_ had returned to him. Cutting right and left with his stick at the dogs he cried joyfully, "We have had enough of eloquence from man, boy, and dog. We will be on our way. We will get this boy Sam home and tucked into bed."
CHAPTER V
Sam was a half-grown man of fifteen when the call of the city came to him. For six years he had been upon the streets. He had seen the sun come up hot and red over the corn fields, and had stumbled through the streets in the bleak darkness of winter mornings, when the trains from the north came into Caxton covered with ice, and the trainmen stood on the deserted little platform whipping their arms and calling to Jerry Donlin to hurry with his work that they might get back into the warm stale air of the smoking car.
In the six years the boy had grown more and more determined to become a man of money. Fed by banker Walker, the silent mother, and in some subtle way by the very air he breathed, the belief within him that to make money and to have money would in some way make up for the old half-forgotten humiliations in the life of the McPherson family and would set it on a more secure foundation than the wobbly Windy had provided, grew and influenced his thoughts and his acts. Tirelessly he kept at his efforts to get ahead. In his bed at night he dreamed of dollars. Jane McPherson had herself a pa.s.sion for frugality. In spite of Windy"s incompetence and her own growing ill health, she would not permit the family to go into debt, and although, in the long hard winters, Sam sometimes ate cornmeal mush until his mind revolted at the thought of a corn field, yet was the rent of the little house paid on the scratch, and her boy fairly driven to increase the totals in the yellow bankbook. Even Valmore, who since the death of his wife had lived in a loft above his shop and who was a blacksmith of the old days, a workman first and a money maker later, did not despise the thought of gain.
"It is money makes the mare go," he said with a kind of reverence as banker Walker, fat, sleek, and prosperous, walked pompously out of Wildman"s grocery.
Of John Telfer"s att.i.tude toward money-making, the boy was uncertain.
The man followed with joyous abandonment the impulse of the moment.
"That"s right," he cried impatiently when Sam, who had begun to express opinions at the gatherings in the grocery, pointed out hesitatingly that the papers took account of men of wealth no matter what their achievements, "Make money! Cheat! Lie! Be one of the men of the big world! Get your name up for a modern, high-cla.s.s American!"
And in the next breath, turning upon Freedom Smith who had begun to berate the boy for not sticking to the schools and who predicted that the day would come when Sam would regret his lack of book learning, he shouted, "Let the schools go! They are but musty beds in which old clerkliness lies asleep!"
Among the travelling men who came to Caxton to sell goods, the boy, who had continued the paper selling even after attaining the stature of a man, was a favourite. Sitting in chairs before the New Leland House they talked to him of the city and of the money to be made there.
"It is the place for a live young man," they said.
Sam had a talent for drawing people into talk of themselves and of their affairs and began to cultivate travelling men. From them, he got into his nostrils a whiff of the city and, listening to them, he saw the great ways filled with hurrying people, the tall buildings touching the sky, the men running about intent upon money-making, and the clerks going on year after year on small salaries getting nowhere, a part of, and yet not understanding, the impulses and motives of the enterprises that supported them.
In this picture Sam thought he saw a place for himself. He conceived of life in the city as a great game in which he believed he could play a sterling part. Had he not in Caxton brought something out of nothing, had he not systematised and monopolised the selling of papers, had he not introduced the vending of popcorn and peanuts from baskets to the Sat.u.r.day night crowds? Already boys went out in his employ, already the totals in the bank book had crept to more than seven hundred dollars. He felt within him a glow of pride at the thought of what he had done and would do.
"I will be richer than any man in town here," he declared in his pride.
"I will be richer than Ed Walker."
Sat.u.r.day night was the great night in Caxton life. For it the clerks in the stores prepared, for it Sam sent forth his peanut and popcorn venders, for it Art Sherman rolled up his sleeves and put the gla.s.ses close by the beer tap under the bar, and for it the mechanics, the farmers, and the labourers dressed in their Sunday best and came forth to mingle with their fellows. On Main Street crowds packed the stores, the sidewalks, and drinking places, and men stood about in groups talking while young girls with their lovers walked up and down. In the hall over Geiger"s drug store a dance went on and the voice of the caller-off rose above the clatter of voices and the stamping of horses in the street. Now and then a fight broke out among the roisterers in Piety Hollow. Once a young farm hand was killed with a knife.
In and out through the crowd Sam went, pressing his wares.
"Remember the long quiet Sunday afternoon," he said, pushing a paper into the hands of a slow-thinking farmer. "Recipes for cooking new dishes," he urged to the farmer"s wife. "There is a page of new fashions in dress," he told the young girl.
Not until the last light was out in the last saloon in Piety Hollow, and the last roisterer had driven off into the darkness carrying a Sat.u.r.day paper in his pocket, did Sam close the day"s business.
And it was on a Sat.u.r.day night that he decided to drop paper selling.
"I will take you into business with me," announced Freedom Smith, stopping him as he hurried by. "You are getting too old to sell papers and you know too much."
Sam, still intent upon the money to be made on that particular Sat.u.r.day night, did not stop to discuss the matter with Freedom, but for a year he had been looking quietly about for something to go into and now he nodded his head as he hurried away.
"It is the end of romance," shouted Telfer, who stood beside Freedom Smith before Geiger"s drug store and who had heard the offer. "A boy, who has seen the secret workings of my mind, who has heard me spout Poe and Browning, will become a merchant, dealing in stinking hides. I am overcome by the thought."
The next day, sitting in the garden back of his house, Telfer talked to Sam of the matter at length.
"For you, my boy, I put the matter of money in the first place," he declared, leaning back in his chair, smoking a cigarette and from time to time tapping Eleanor on the shoulder with his cane. "For any boy I put money-making in the first place. It is only women and fools who despise money-making. Look at Eleanor here. The time and thought she puts into the selling of hats would be the death of me, but it has been the making of her. See how fine and purposeful she has become. Without the millinery business she would be a purposeless fool intent upon clothes and with it she is all a woman should be. It is like a child to her."
Eleanor, who had turned to laugh at her husband, looked instead at the ground and a shadow crossed her face. Telfer, who had begun talking thoughtlessly, out of his excess of words, glanced from the woman to the boy. He knew that the suggestion regarding a child had touched a secret regret in Eleanor, and began trying to efface the shadow on her face by throwing himself into the subject that chanced to be on his tongue, making the words roll and tumble from his lips.
"No matter what may come in the future, in our day money-making precedes many virtues that are forever on men"s lips," he declared fiercely as though trying to down an opponent. "It is one of the virtues that proves man not a savage. It has lifted him up--not money-making, but the power to make money. Money makes life livable. It gives freedom and destroys fear. Having it means sanitary houses and well-made clothes. It brings into men"s lives beauty and the love of beauty. It enables a man to go adventuring after the stuff of life as I have done.
"Writers are fond of telling stories of the crude excesses of great wealth," he went on hurriedly, glancing again at Eleanor. "No doubt the things they tell of do happen. Money, and not the ability and the instinct to make money, is at fault. And what of the cruder excesses of poverty, the drunken men who beat and starve their families, the grim silences of the crowded, unsanitary houses of the poor, the inefficient, and the defeated? Go sit around the lounging room of the most vapid rich man"s city club as I have done, and then sit among the workers of a factory at the noon hour. Virtue, you will find, is no fonder of poverty than you and I, and the man who has merely learned to be industrious, and who has not acquired that eager hunger and shrewdness that enables him to get on, may build up a strong dexterous body while his mind is diseased and decaying."
Grasping his cane and beginning to be carried away by the wind of his eloquence Telfer forgot Eleanor and talked for his love of talking.