CHAPTER XVI
LOVE AND A LIVING
Marley was not surprised by the result of his visit to Selah Dudley. He made an effort to convince himself that there was truth in what Dudley had said to him, even if he could not remember exactly what it was that Dudley had said. He tried to put down the instinctive feeling of dislike he had for the old banker; he told himself that such a feeling was unworthy of him, if not unworthy of Dudley, and in thinking the matter over he tried to clear himself of all suspicion of envy or jealousy of Dudley’s success. The whole town considered Dudley its leading man, and Marley tried so to consider him; and he tried to consider him in this light because he was a good man and not because he was a rich man, just as the town pretended to do. He wanted to talk about Dudley with some one, but he did not want to talk about him with Lavinia, because he felt a shame in his failure with Dudley that he feared Lavinia might share. He did talk with his father about him, but his father did not seem to be interested; he smiled his tolerant smile, but made no comment. And when Marley pressed him for an opinion of Dudley his father said:
“They make broad their phylacteries.”
And that was all.
However, Marley found Wade Powell willing to talk of Selah Dudley, as he was willing to talk of almost anything. Marley did not tell Powell that he had been to Dudley to ask for a position; he merely let it be understood that he had met the old man in the course of the day and talked with him casually.
“By the way,” he asked, as if the thought had just come to him, “how did Selah Dudley make his money?”
“He didn’t make it,” Powell answered.
“He didn’t? Did he inherit it?”
“No.”
“Then how did he get it?”
“He gathered it.”
“Gathered it? I don’t know what you mean.”
Powell laughed.
“You don’t? Well, there’s a difference.”
“He wasn’t in the army, was he?”
“In the army! Great God!” Powell threw into his voice the contempt he could not find the word to express. “You think he’d risk his hide in the army? Well, I should say not! Though he would have been perfectly safe—” Powell said it as a parenthetical afterthought—“no bullet could ever have pierced his hide, and he had no blood to shed.”
Powell bit the end from his cigar and spat out the damp little pieces of tobacco viciously.
“No, I’ll tell you, Glenn,” he said, “he stayed at home and got his start, as he calls it, by skinning the poor. Widows were his big game and he gathered a little pile that has been growing ever since. To-day he owns Gordon County.”
“He seems to be a prominent man in the church,” ventured Marley.
“He’ll be a prominent man in hell,” said Powell, angrily. And then he added thoughtfully: “My one regret in going there myself is that I’ll have to see him every day.”
The most curious effect of Marley’s visit to Dudley, however, was one he did not observe himself. Having been defeated in his plan to secure a place in the bank, he felt at first, with a certain consolation, that he still had the law to fall back on, and he returned to his studies. But he made little headway; once having decided to give up the law, the decision remained, and his mind was constantly occupied with schemes for securing a foothold in some other occupation. He considered, one after another, every possibility in Macochee, and as fast as he thought of some opening, he went for it, but invariably to find it either no opening at all, or else, if it were an opening, one that closed at his approach. Gradually he gave up his studies altogether, and sat idle, his book before him; but one day Powell said to him:
“Say, Glenn, you’re not getting along very fast, are you?”
Marley started, and flushed with a sense of guilt.
“Well, no,” he admitted.
“What’s the matter, in love?”
Marley blushed, from another cause this time, though the guilt remained in his face. But Powell instantly was gentle.
“I beg your pardon,” he said, “I was just joking, of course; I didn’t mean to be inquisitive. You mustn’t mind my boorishness.”
Marley looked at him gratefully and Powell, to whom any show of affection was confusing, turned away self-consciously. But Marley whirled his chair around toward Powell.
“I am in love,” he said. “I’ve wanted to tell you, but I—you know who she is.”
“Lavinia Blair?”
“Yes. And that’s what’s troubling me,” Marley went on. “I want to get married, and I can’t. I can’t,” he repeated, “the law’s too slow; I’ve realized it for a long while, but I tried to keep the fact away, I tried not to see it. But now I have to face it. Why,” he said, rising to his feet, “it’ll take a thousand years to get a practice in this town, and I’m not even admitted yet.”
He walked to and fro, his brows pinched together, his lower lip thrust out, his teeth nipping his upper one. Powell glanced at him, but said nothing. He knew human nature, this lawyer, and the fact made every one in the county tremble at the thought of his cross-examinations; sometimes he carried too far his love of laying souls bare, and as often hurt as helped his cause. He never had been able to turn his knowledge to much practical account; in a city he would have had numerous retainers as a trial lawyer, though few as a counselor. In Macochee he was out of place, and he chafed under a semi-consciousness of the fact. He waited, knowing that Marley would burst forth again.
“I’ll have to get a job,” Marley said at that moment, bitterly, “and go to work; that’s all.” And then he laughed harshly. “Humph, get a job—that’s the biggest job of all. What can I get here in Macochee, I’d like to know?”
He halted and turned suddenly, fiercely, almost menacingly on Powell, as if he were the cause of his predicament.
“I’ve told you already it’s no place for you,” said Powell, quietly.
“But where’ll I go?” Marley held out his hands with a gesture that was pleading, pathetic. Thus he waited for Powell’s reply.
Powell smoked thoughtfully for a moment and then began:
“When I was going to the law school in Cincinnati, there was a young fellow in my class—a great friend of mine. He was poor, and I was poor—God! how poor we were!” Powell paused in this retrospect of poverty. “That was why we were such friends,—our poverty gave us a common interest. This fellow came from up in Hardin County; he was tall, lean and gawky, the worst jay you ever saw. When we had graduated, I supposed he would go home, maybe to Kenton—that was his county-seat. When we were bidding each other good-by—I’ll never forget the day, it was June, hot as hell; and we had left the old law school in Walnut Street and were standing there by the Tyler-Davidson fountain in Fifth Street. I said, ‘Well, we’ll see each other once in a while; we won’t be far apart.’ He looked at me and said, ‘I don’t know about that.’ ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’m going to Chicago.’ I looked at him in surprise. He was out at the elbows then, and had hardly enough money to get home on. Then the ridiculousness of it struck me, and I laughed. ‘Why, you’ll starve to death there!’ I said. He only smiled.” Powell paused, to whet Marley’s appetite, perhaps, for the foregone dénouement.
“That jay,” Powell said, when he had allowed sufficient time to elapse, “that jay I laughed at is Judge Johnson, of the United States Circuit Court.”
The story saddened Marley. With his faculty of conceiving a whole drama at once, he caught in an instant the trials Judge Johnson had gone through before he won to his station of ease and honor; he saw the privations, the sacrifices, the hardships, the endless strivings, plottings, schemings; it wearied and depressed him; his frightened mind hung back, clung to the real, the present, the known, found a relief in picturing the seeming security of a man like Wade Powell, in a town where he knew everybody and was known by everybody. He shrank from hearing more of the judge; he wished to stay with his thought in Macochee.
“How do young men get a start in places like Macochee?” he asked, and then he added in despairing argument: “They do stay, they do get along somehow, they make livings, and raise families; the town grows and does business, the population increases, it doesn’t die off.”
“Well,” said Wade Powell, approaching the problem with the generalities its mystery demanded, “some of them marry rich women, but that industry is about played out now; the fortunes are divided up; some of them, most of them, are content to eke out small livings, clerking in stores and that kind of thing; about the only ones that get ahead any are traders; they barter around, first in one business, then in another; they run a grocery, then sell it out and buy a livery-stable; then they dabble in real estate a while; finally they skin some one out of a farm and then they go on skinning, a little at a time; by the time they’re old, people forget their beginnings and they become respectable; then they join the church, like Selah Dudley.”
Powell stopped a moment, then he began again.
“The lawyers get along God knows how; the doctors, well, they never starve, for people will get sick, or think they’re sick, which is better yet; then there are a few preachers who are supported in a poor way by their congregations. When a man fails, he goes into the insurance business.”
Powell smoked contemplatively for a few moments.
“Sometimes,” he resumed presently, “I feel as if I were tottering on the verge of the insurance business myself.”
Marley looked at Powell, who had relapsed into silence, his head lowered, his eyes fixed in the distance, and there was something pathetic in the figure, or would have been, but for the humor that saved every situation for Powell. There was, however, something appealing, and something to inspire affection, too. Marley’s gaze recalled Powell, and he glanced up with a smile.
“I reckon you’ve gathered from my remarks,” said Powell, “that I consider success chiefly from a monetary standpoint, but I don’t. The main business of life is living, and the trouble with the world is that it is too busy getting ready to live to find the time for life; it has tied itself up with a thousand chains of its own forging and it has had to postpone living from time to time until most people have put the beginning of life at the gateway of death; meanwhile they’re busy gathering things, like magpies, and those that gather the most are considered the best; they have come to think that people are divided into two classes, good and bad; the good are those who own, the bad those who don’t, and the good think their business is to put down the bad. Now, here in Gordon County, we have about everything a man needs; the spring comes and the summer, and the autumn and the winter; the rain falls and the winds blow and the sun shines, and I’ve noticed that Lighttown gets about as much rain as Main Street, and Gooseville about as much wind as Scioto Street; the sun seems to shine pretty much alike on the niggers loafing in Market Space and on old Selah Dudley and Judge Blair, bowing like Christians to each other in the Square. The trees are the same color wherever they grow, and I don’t see any reason why people shouldn’t be happy if they’d only let one another be happy. Now, I would have lived, but I didn’t have time. I thought when I began that I’d have to do as the rest were doing, get hold of things, and I saw that if I did, I’d have to get my share away from them; well, I made a failure of that, being too soft inside someway; that was all right too, but meanwhile I was wasting time, and putting off living—now it’s too late.”
Marley looked at him in perplexity, not knowing how to take him.
“I know,” he said presently. “But what am I going to do? I can live all right, but I have to do better than that; I want to get married.”
“Married,” mused Powell, “married! Well, I got married.”
Marley was interested. He had never heard Powell speak of his wife, and he feared what he was about to say; for that instant Powell’s standing in his estimation trembled.
“And that was the only sensible thing I ever did.”
Marley felt a great relief.
“But I don’t know that I did right by Mary; I didn’t do her any good, I reckon; still, she’s borne up somehow; I wish I had a sky full of sunlight to pour over her.”
Powell walked to his window, and looked across into the Court-House yard where the leaves were falling slowly from the Maple-trees. Marley hoped that he would go on, and say more of his wife, but he was silent. Presently he turned about.
“Well, Glenn,” he said; “I see you’re stuck on staying in Macochee, and I don’t blame you; and you want to get married, and that’s all right. Maybe I can help you do it.”
“How?” said Marley, eagerly.
“I’ve got a scheme.”
“What is it?”
“Well, maybe it’ll work, maybe it won’t. I’d better wait till I see whether it will or not before I tell you.”
He stood and smiled at Marley a moment, and then said: “You wait here.”
And he turned and left the office. Marley watched Powell’s fine figure as he walked across the street toward the Court House, a great love of the man surging within him. He felt secure and safe; a new warmth spread through him. At the door of the Court House Marley saw him stop and shake hands with Garver, the sheriff. The two talked a moment, then turned and went down toward the big iron gate in Main Street, and disappeared. Marley waited until noon and then he went home to his dinner. He returned, but Powell did not come back to the office all the afternoon.
CHAPTER XVII
THE COUNTY FAIR
Marley did not see Wade Powell again for four days; a Sunday intervened, and Powell did not come back to the office until Monday morning. He came in with a solemn air upon him, and a new dignity that made impressive the seriousness with which he set to work at the pile of papers on his desk, as if he were beginning a new week with new resolutions. He was freshly shaved, and his hair had been cut; it was shorter at the sides and, against his rough sunburnt neck, showed an edge of clean white skin. His newly cropped hair gave him a strange, brisk appearance; his black clothes were brushed, his linen fresh.
He spoke to Marley but a few times and then from the distant altitude of his new dignity. Once he sent Marley on an errand to Snider’s drug store to buy a large blank book; he said he was going to keep an office docket after that. He worked on his new docket half the morning, then he carried the docket and the bundle of papers over to Marley’s table, flung them down and asked Marley if he would not continue the work for him. He explained the system he had devised for keeping a record of his cases; it was intricate and complete, but in many of his cases the numbers and in some instances the names of opposing parties were missing; Powell told Marley to go over to the Court House and get the missing data from the clerk.
“I’ve got to go out for a while,” Powell explained. Then he hurried away; he seemed to be glad to escape from the office and the drudgery of the task he had set for himself.
Powell’s absence weighed on Marley; he was lonesome in the deserted office, and found himself wondering just where Powell was at each moment; he pictured him with his companions, Colonel Devlin, Marshall Scarff, Sheriff Garver, old man Brockton and Doc Hall; lately it had been rumored that George Halliday had been admitted to the merry group, and that they played poker nightly in a room in the Coleman Block. Then Marley would picture to himself Wade Powell’s wife; he had never seen her, but he had an idea of her appearance, formed from no description of her, but created out of his own fancy. He pictured her as a graceful little woman, with a certain droop to her figure; but try as he would, he could not see her face; it was a blur to him, yet it gave somehow a certain expression of sweetness and patience; sometimes, by an effort, he could see her brow, and the hair above it; the hair was dark, and parted in the middle with some gray in its rather heavy mass.
Marley could never discuss Wade Powell with any kind of satisfaction with Lavinia. When he spoke of him, she would smile and affect an interest, but he could detect the affectation, and he could detect, also, a certain distance in her attitude toward Wade Powell or the thought of him, which he ascribed to the influence of Judge Blair’s dislike. Marley saw that Lavinia never would accept Wade Powell, and he had ceased to mention him except in a casual manner. For some like reason he had ceased to mention Wade Powell at home; he found that he had many views which he could not share with those nearest him, and his inner life at that time was somewhat lonely and aloof.
He had not told Lavinia of Wade Powell’s offer of assistance, nor had he spoken of it at home. In those four days he had thought much of it and built countless hopes upon it; he had thought of all the possibilities, and taken a fine delight in examining each one, working it out to its logical end in its effect upon Lavinia and him and upon their fortunes. He was disappointed when Wade Powell failed to refer to the subject again; he would have liked to discuss the disappointment with Lavinia; usually, out of her youthful optimism and faith in the life of which she was so innocent, she could reassure him; but of late he had had so many disappointments and had drawn so heavily on Lavinia’s resources of comfort and hope that he had grown wary, almost superstitiously wary, of making any further drafts.
When Monday came and Powell did not renew the subject, nor even say what his scheme had been, Marley concluded that Powell had forgotten all about it, and so he relinquished the hope with a sigh, and tried to forget it himself. He took up his studies once more; but he made poor headway; he saw with chagrin that he had not read ten pages of law in as many days, and what he had read he could not remember. When he tried to review it, the words had no meaning for him, nor could he wrest any from them, even though he ground his elbows in the table with the book between them and dug his fists into his hair.
That was the week of the Gordon County fair. For a month every fence along the white pikes in the country had borne the bills, flaming from afar in red ink the date, “Oct. 15-31.” There were, too, lithographs everywhere—on boards at the monument, at the Court House, on the town hall, on the covered bridge over Mad River—lithographs picturing the exciting finish of a trotting race, and a sedate concourse of fat cattle. The fair opened Monday, but it was understood that that day would be devoted to preparing and arranging the exhibits; the fair would not begin in earnest until Tuesday; the big day would be Thursday.
Marley was glad that fair week had come, for the chance of novelty which it offered, and, too, for the excuse it gave him; he would not study that week, but in the general festivity try to forget the problem that so oppressed him. He would have liked to go to the fair every day, but he could not, for the expense, insignificant as it seemed to be to every one else in the county, was not insignificant to him. He went, however, on Wednesday with his father, who, with the love of horses he had inherited from the saddle-bag days of Methodism, recklessly attended the races. Marley thought that this visit would be his last, but on Thursday morning he met Lawrence in the Square.
“Just the man I’m looking for!” said Lawrence.
He was brisk, alert, important, and had an official air which was explained when Marley observed, on the lapel of his coat, the badge of blue ribbon that proclaimed an officer of the fair.
“I have charge of the tickets this year,” he said. “Want to go? I’ll pass you in.”
Marley was glad enough to accept.
“I’ll have to go around to the office and tell Powell,” he said. “I was away all day yesterday.”
“Oh, nonsense,” replied Lawrence, “that won’t make any difference; he’s been full for two days. This is his big time.”
Marley had a pang as he saw with what small seriousness Lawrence regarded his relation to the law; it reflected, doubtless, the common attitude of the community toward him and his efforts.
“I’ve got to hurry,” Lawrence went on; “I’ve got a rig waiting here; you can ride out with me.”
It was one of the incomparable afternoons that autumn brings to Ohio; the retreating sun was flashing in the high, blue sky; the air was fresh and Marley felt it full of energy and hope. Lawrence drove rapidly through the throng of hurrying vehicles that crowded the road to the fair-grounds, stirring up a cloud of dust that covered everything with its white powder.
Lawrence left him at the gate, being too full of business to engage in the weary search for pleasure, and Marley set out alone across the scorched and trampled turf for the grand stand, black with people for the races. He could hear the nervous clamor of the bell in the judges’ stand, the notes of the hand-organ at the squeaking merry-go-round, the incessant thumping of the bass drum that made its barbaric music for the side-show, and the cries of venders, dominating all the voices of the thousands bent in their silly way on pleasure. Once, calling him back to the real, to the peace of the commonplace, he heard the distant tones of the town clock in the tower that stood, a mile away, above the autumnal trees.
He pressed into the space between the grand stand and the whitewashed fence that surrounded the track; through the palings he could see the stoop-shouldered drivers, bent over the heavily breathing trotters they jogged to and fro; above him, in the grand stand, he could distinguish cries and laughs, now and then complete excited sentences, sometimes voices he knew. All around him the farmers, clumsy in their ready-made clothes and bearing their buggy whips as some insignia of office, solemnly watched the races and talked of horses.
The sense of kinship with the crowd that had unerringly drawn Marley left him the moment he was in the crowd, and a loneliness replaced the sense of kinship. He looked about for some one he knew. He began, here and there, to recognize faces, just as he had recognized voices in the din above him; he began to analyze and to classify the crowd, and he laughed somewhat cynically when he saw numbers of politicians going about among the farmers, shaking their hands, greeting them effusively, calling them by their Christian names. Then suddenly he saw Wade Powell. The crowd at the point where Powell stood, nucleated with him as its center; by the way the men were laughing, and by the way Powell was trying not to laugh, Marley knew that he had been telling them one of his stories, and from the self-conscious, guilty expressions on certain of the faces, Marley knew that the story was probably one that should not have been told. Several countrymen hung on the edge of the group, not identifying themselves with it, yet anxious to have a look at Wade Powell, who enjoyed the fame of the county’s best criminal lawyer.
When Powell saw Marley he called to him, and when Marley drew near, he introduced him, somehow mysteriously, almost surreptitiously, to the man at his elbow. Powell’s face was very red, and his eyes were brilliant. The mystery he put into his introduction was but a part of his manner.
“This is Mr. Carman, of Pleasant Grove Township, Glenn,” he said, bending over, as if no one should hear the name; and then he added, in a husky whisper: “He’s our candidate for county clerk, you know.”
Marley saw something strange, forbidding, in Carman’s face, but he could not tell what it was. It was a red, sunburnt face, closely shaven, with a short mustache burned by the sun; the smile it wore seemed to be fixed and impersonal. Plainly the man had spent his days out of doors, though, it seemed, not healthfully, for his skin was dry and hardened, and his neck thin and wrinkled; he seemed to have known the hard work and the poor nourishment of a farm. Marley wondered what was the matter with Carman’s face. But Powell was drawing them aside.
“Come over here,” he was saying, “where we can be alone.”
He led them to a corner of the little yard; no one was near; they were quite out of the crowd which was pressing to the whitewashed picket fence, attracted by the excitement of the race for which the horses were just then scoring.
“Now, Jake,” Powell began, speaking to Carman, “this is the young man I was talking to you about.”
Carman, still smiling his dry meaningless smile, turned his face half away.
“I reckon,” Powell went on, “that I might be able to do you some good, if I took off my coat.” Powell spoke with a pride in his own influence; Marley had never known him to come so near to boasting before.
Carman was looking away; and Powell, his own eyes narrowed, was watching him closely. Once he winked at Marley, and Marley was mystified; he did not know what play was going on here; he looked from Carman to Powell, and back to Carman again. There was some strange fascination about Carman; Marley felt a slight relief when he discovered that there was something peculiar about Carman’s eyes.
“I haven’t said anything to Marley about the matter, Jake,” Powell said. “Maybe I’d better tell him. Hell! He might not want it—I don’t know.”
Carman turned suddenly; his face had been in the shadow; now it came into the sunlight, and Marley saw that while the pupil of Carman’s right eye contracted suddenly, the pupil of his left eye remained fixed; it was larger than the pupil of the right eye, which had shrunk to a pin-point in the sharp light of the sun. Marley looked closely, the left eye seemed to be swimming in liquid; it almost hurt Marley’s eyes to look at it.
“I’ve been telling Carman, Glenn,” Powell was explaining, “that if he is elected—and gets into the Court House—”
Marley looked at Powell expectantly.
“I want him,” Powell went on, “to make you his deputy.”
Marley saw it all in a flash; this was what Powell had meant that day a fortnight ago; he felt his great affection for Powell glow and warm; Lavinia would appreciate Powell after this. It meant salary, position, a place in which he might complete his law studies at his leisure; it meant a living, a home, marriage, Lavinia! He looked all his gratitude at Powell, who smiled appreciatively.
Carman had turned his face away again, he was still smiling, and plucking now at his chin; Marley waited, and Powell finally grew impatient.
“Well, Jake, what do you say?”
Carman waited a moment longer, then slowly turned about. Marley watched him narrowly, he saw the pupil of his right eye contract, the pupil of the watery left eye remained fixed; then, for the first time, Carman looked steadily at Marley and for the first time he spoke.
“Well,” he said, and he stopped to spit out his tobacco, “you know I’m always ready to do a friend a good turn.”
Powell looked Carman over carefully a moment, and then he said,
“All right, Jake.”
Just then there was a rush of hoofs, a shock of excitement, and they heard a loud yell:
“Go!”
And they rushed to the fence of the whitewashed palings.