The Happy Average

CHAPTER XXV

LETTERS HOME

“How does she seem since he went away?” asked Judge Blair of his wife two days after Marley had gone. He spoke in his usual habit of deference to his wife’s observation, though his own opportunities for observing Lavinia might have been considered as great as hers.

“I haven’t noticed any difference in her,” said Mrs. Blair, and then she added a qualifying and significant “yet.”

“Well,” observed the judge, “I presume it’s too early. Has she heard from him?”

“She had a letter this morning; that is, I suppose it was from him; she ran to meet the postman, and then went up stairs.”

“You didn’t mention it to her?”

Mrs. Blair looked at her husband in surprise, and he hastened to make amends by acquiescing in the propriety of her conduct, when he said:

“Oh, of course not.”

He seemed to drop the subject then, but that it remained uppermost in his mind was shown later, when he said:

“I think she will be weaned away from him after a while, don’t you? That is—if he stays long enough.”

Mrs. Blair was not so hopeful; perhaps, too, in her romantic ideal of devotion, she did not wish Lavinia to be weaned away. But she avoided a direct answer by the suggestion:

“Perhaps he will be weaned away from her.”

This possibility had not occurred to the judge.

“Why, the idea!” he said resentfully. “Do you think him capable of such baseness?”

Mrs. Blair laughed.

“Would you like to think of your daughter as fickle, and forgetting a young man who was eating his heart out for her far away in a big city?”

A condition of such mild romantic sorrow might have attracted Mrs. Blair in the abstract, but it could not of course appeal to her when it came thus personally. As for the judge, he dismissed the problem, as he had so many times before, with the remark:

“Well, we can only wait and see.”

The letter which Lavinia received from Marley had been written the day he reached Chicago. It was a long letter, conceived largely in a facetious spirit, and he had labored over it far into the night in the little room of the boarding-house he had found in Ohio Street.

“I chose Ohio Street,” he wrote, “because its name reminded me of home. Ohio Street may once have been the street of the well-born, but it has degenerated and it is now the abode of a long row of boarding—places, one of which houses me. My room is a little corner eyrie in the second story, back, and from its one window I get an admirable view of the garbage dump, the atmosphere and certain intensely red bricks which go to make the wall of the house next door. And my landlady, ah, I should have to be a Balzac to describe my landlady! She wears large, vociferous ear-rings, and she says ‘y-e-e-a-a-s’ for yes; just kind o’ rolls it off her tongue as if she didn’t care whether it ever got off or not. She is truly a beauteous lady, given much to a scarlet hue of her nasal appendage; also, her molar system is unduly prominent, too much to the fore, as it were. As for form or figure, I’m afraid I couldn’t say with truth that she goes in for the sinuous, far from it; she leans more to the elephantine style of feminine architecture. And she has a way of reaching out that is very attractive; probably because of the necessity of reaching for room rent. She bears the air of one bent on no earthly thing, of a continual soaring in quest of the unexpected; there is about her the charm of the intangible, the unknowable.

“The boarding-house itself isn’t so bad; I get my room and two meals for three-fifty a week; my noon luncheons I have to take down-town. They have dinner here, you know, in the evening. I haven’t seen much of the people in the boarding-house; the men are mostly clerks, and the women have bleached hair. They all looked at me when I went into the dining-room this evening. There is one young man who sits at my table who is in truth a very unwise and immature youth. He is given greatly to the use of words of awful and bizarre make-up. For instance, he said something about the jokes they get off in the shows here about Irishmen, but instead of saying jokes, he said ‘traversities’! What do you think of that?”

Marley had already described his journey to Chicago in terms similar to those in which he described his boarding-house; of Chicago itself he said:

“It seems that ages ago when the gods, or maybe the demons, were making over plans and specifications of the infernal region, Chicago was mentioned and considered by the committee. When it came to a vote for choice of sites the place that won had only three more votes than Chicago. They didn’t locate the brimstone plant here, and from what I can learn Chicago was a candidate for both the plant and the honor. It was a mistake on somebody’s part, as Chicago is certainly an ideal place for it.”

But the letter discussed mostly the things of Macochee, where Marley’s spirit still dwelt. The passages Lavinia most liked, of course, were those in which he declared his love for her; it was the first love-letter she had ever received, and this tender experience went far to compensate her for the loneliness she felt in his absence.

It grew upon her after she had read her letter many times, that it would be a kindness to take it over and read to Mrs. Marley those parts, at least, that were not personal. It was a hard thing for Lavinia to do; she had a fear of Mrs. Marley; but she felt more and more the kindness of it, and so in the morning she set out. Lavinia was surprised and a little disappointed, when Mrs. Marley told her that she too had received in the same mail a letter from Glenn. It somehow took away from her own act, the more when Mrs. Marley calmly passed her letter over for Lavinia to read.

Lavinia, who had not been able to resist a pang that Marley had written his mother quite as promptly as he had written her, found some consolation in the fact that his letter to his mother was not nearly so long as his letter to her, and it contained, too, the same information; in some instances, identical phrases, as letters do that are written at the same time. She felt that she should be happy in them both, and she wished she could determine which of the letters had been written first. After she had read Mrs. Marley’s letter, she could not speak for a moment; the letter closed with a description of the sensations it gave Marley to open his trunk and come across the Bible his mother had packed in it. But she controlled herself, and when she had finished reading parts of her own letter to Mrs. Marley, she said:

“Well, he seems to be in good spirits, doesn’t he? He writes so amusingly of everything.”

Mrs. Marley looked up at Lavinia with a curious smile.

“Why, don’t you see?” she said.

“What?” asked Lavinia, glancing in alarm at the two letters which she still held in her lap.

“Why, the poor boy is dying of homesickness; that’s what makes him write in that mocking vein.”

“Do you think that is so?” Lavinia leaned forward.

“Why, I know it,” replied Mrs. Marley, with a little laugh. “He’s just like his father.”

For a moment Lavinia felt a satisfaction in Marley’s loneliness, but she denied the satisfaction when she said:

“He’ll get over it, after a while.”

“Not for a long while, I’m afraid,” said Mrs. Marley. “Not until some one can be with him.”

Lavinia blushed, and before she knew it Mrs. Marley had bent over and kissed her cheek.

“He has a long hard battle before him, my dear,” she said, “in a great cruel city. We must help him all we can.”

Lavinia hesitated a moment, then she put her arms about Mrs. Marley and drew her down for the kiss which sealed their friendship.

They sat and talked of Marley for a long time, and at last when Lavinia rose to go, she held out to Mrs. Marley the letter her son had written her. She looked at it a moment before handing it to Mrs. Marley.

“Would you like to keep it?” Mrs. Marley asked.

“May I?”

“If you wish. But you must come often; I shall be lonely now, you know, and you must bring his letters and read parts of them. He’ll be writing so many more to you than he will to me.”

Lavinia received a letter from Marley every day; it was not long before Clemmons, the postman, smiled significantly when, each morning at the sound of his whistle, she ran to meet him at the door. And Lavinia wrote to Marley as regularly herself, sitting at the little desk in her room every night long after the house was dark and still.

The judge could find no hope in the observations Mrs. Blair reported to him.

“She seems to have developed a new idea of constancy,” said Mrs. Blair. “She will not allow herself to do a thing, or go to a single place; she will hardly accept any pleasure because he isn’t here to share it. I believe she tries not to have a thought that is not of him. She is almost fanatical about it.”

“Oh dear!” said the judge. “I thought the nightly calls were a severe strain, but they can not compare to the strain of nightly letters.”

“He writes excellent letters, however,” Mrs. Blair said. “I wish you could read the one he wrote his mother. A boy who writes like that to his mother—”

“How did you get to see a letter he wrote his mother?” interrupted the judge.

“Lavinia showed it to me.”

“Has she been over there?”

“Yes. Why?”

The judge shook his head gravely, as if the situation were now hopeless, indeed.

CHAPTER XXVI

THE ARMY OF THE UNEMPLOYED

“I am very tired to-night,” Marley wrote to Lavinia a day or so later. “I have been making the rounds of the law offices; I have been to all the leading firms, but—here I am, still without a place. I thought I might get a place in one of them where I could finish my law studies, and make enough to live on, meanwhile; I had dreams of working into the firm in time, but they were only dreams, and all my hopes have gone glimmering. The men who are employed in the law offices are already admitted to the bar; most of them are young fellows, but some are old and gray-headed, and the sight of them gave me the blues.

“I did not get to see many of the firm members themselves; their offices are formidable places. There is no office in Macochee like them; they have big outer rooms, full of stenographers and clerks and there is a boy at a desk who makes you tell your business before you can get in to see any of the lawyers themselves. They seem to be mighty big, important fellows. Most of them would not see me at all; several said they had no place for me and dismissed me with a kind of pitying smile; one man, when I asked him if he thought there was an opening, said he supposed there ought to be, as one lawyer in Chicago had died of starvation only the day before. But some were kinder; one, whom I shall never forget, took pains to sit down and talk with me a long time, but he was no more encouraging than the others. He said the profession was terribly overcrowded, ‘that is,’ he corrected himself with a tired smile, ‘if you can call it a profession any longer. It is more of a business nowadays and the only ones who get ahead are those who have big corporations for clients. How they all live is a mystery to me!’ He thought I had better not undertake it and advised me to go into some business. But then most of them did that.

“But I must tell you of my visit to Judge Johnson. You will remember my telling you of him; he was Wade Powell’s chum in the law school in Cincinnati, and Mr. Powell had given me a letter to him. I had a hard time seeing him; the hardest of all. When I went into the big stone government building he was holding court, and a lawyer was making an argument before him. I waited till they were all done, and then when the crier had adjourned court—he said ‘Oyez, Oyez, Oyez,’ instead of the ‘Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye’ we have in Ohio; it sounded so old and quaint, even if he did say ‘Oh yes,’ for ‘Oyez!’ It comes from the old Norman-French, you know; ask your father about it, he’ll explain it—I tried to get in to him. I succeeded at last, but it was hard work. He didn’t seem glad to see me; he looked at me coldly, and made me feel as if I ought to hurry up and state my business promptly and get away. When I gave him Wade Powell’s letter he put on his gold glasses and read it; but—what do you think?—I don’t believe he remembered Wade Powell at all! At least he seemed not to. Of course he may have been putting it on. Wouldn’t it make Wade Powell mad to know that? I’d give a dollar—and I haven’t any to spare either—to see him when he hears that his old friend, Judge Johnson of the United States Circuit Court, couldn’t remember him! Well, the judge didn’t let me detain him long, he looked at his watch a moment, and then he advised me not to try it in Chicago; he said there were too many lawyers here anyhow, and that he thought a young man made a mistake in coming to a city at all.

“‘Why don’t you stay in a small town?’ he asked, looking at me sternly over his glasses. ‘Living is cheaper there, and life is much more simple than it is in the cities. I’ve often wished I had stayed in a little town.’

“I came away, as you can imagine, feeling pretty much cast down and humbled in spirit. There are four thousand lawyers in Chicago; just think of it, almost as many lawyers as there are people in Macochee! As I walked through the crowded streets with men and women rushing along, I wondered how they all lived. What do they do? Where are they all going, and how do they get a place to stand on? As I came across the bridge over to the North Side I felt that there was no place for me here in this great, dirty, ugly city, just as there is no place for me back in peaceful Macochee, where every minute of the day I long to be. Anyway, I am sure that there is no place for me here in the law, and I shall have to look for something else. I see so much wretchedness and poverty and squalor; it is in the street everywhere—pale, gaunt men, who look at you out of sick, appealing eyes.

“This morning I saw a sight down-town that filled me with horror; it was noon, and a great crowd of ragged men were waiting in front of the Daily News office in Fifth Avenue. They were all standing idly and yet expectantly about; I stood and watched them. Presently, as at some signal, they all rushed for the office door, and then all at once they seemed to be enveloped in a white, rustling cloud. Each one had a newspaper, and they all turned to one page and began to read rapidly; sometimes two or three men bent over the same paper; in another moment they had scattered, going in all directions. Then it flashed upon me: they had been waiting for the noon edition of the paper and the page they had all turned to was the page with the ‘want ads’ on it; they were all looking for jobs! It made me inexpressibly sad. I do not wish to inflict my own sorrow upon you, dear heart, but it made me shudder; what if I—but no, the thought is too horrible to mention. And yet I, too, belong to this great army of the unemployed.

“As I write the clock in the steeple of a church a block away chimes the hour of midnight; so you see that I’ve retained my nocturnal habits. When the poets of a coming generation sing of me (as they doubtless will, after my death) their songs will be called Nocturnes.”

That same day Doctor Marley received a letter from his son which Mrs. Marley, though her husband passed it over to her to read, did not show to Lavinia. It ran:

“It’s rather expensive living here, I find; especially for one who belongs to the great army of the unemployed. My contract with my basiliscine landlady calls for two meals a day and a bed at night—also for three-fifty per week in payment of said two meals and bed. My lunches I get down-town; that is, I did get them down-town; for two days I have gone without lunches, and the aforesaid landlady looks reproachfully at me at night when she sees me laying in an extra supply of dinner. I don’t mind the lack of the lunches, even if she does, but I’ll have to pay her in a day or so now. I’m in poor spirits to-night, so can’t write well; cause of said low mental temperature, only eighty cents in the world between me, my landlady and ultimate starvation. It’s funny how much hungrier a fellow gets as the food supply gets low. A word to the wise, etc.

“What do you think? I met Charlie Davis on the street this morning. He is living here now, working in some big department store. My, it was good to see some one from Macochee! How small the world is, after all!

“How are you all? How is Dolly? Does Smith Johnson still clap his hands at his dog every evening as he comes home, and does the dog run out to meet him as joyously as of yore? And does Hank Delphy still go down-town in his shirt-sleeves? And has Charlie Fouly had any fits in the Square lately? And, father, has mother got a girl yet? Give her an ocean of love and tell her not to work too hard, and to let the heathen shift for themselves a while. They haven’t any trusts to monopolize the jobs as yet, and they ought to be able to get along. Oh, how I’d like to see you all! Answer all my questions: I propounded numerous ones to you. I don’t remember now what all of them were, but I know they were all momentous and had much to do with my well-being, spiritual and physical, not to say financial. And see that the moss doesn’t get too thickly overlaid on my memory.”

Marley’s new life in Chicago, as somewhat vaguely reflected in his letters, impressed those who had a sense of having been left behind in Macochee, as but a continuation of the life he had led there, that is, it was presented to them as one long, hopeless search for employment. He told of his daily tramps up and down the city, of his dutiful applications for work in every place where the boon of work might be bestowed, and of the unvarying refusals of those in whose hands had been intrusted, by some inscrutable decree of the providence of economics, the right to control the opportunity of labor. It was as if the primal curse of earning his bread were in a fair way to be taken from man, had not the primal necessity of eating his bread continued unabated.

The routine through which he went each day had begun to weary Marley, and it might have begun to weary his readers in Macochee, had they not all felt their own fortunes somehow bound up with his. He apologized in his nightly letters for the monotony of their recitals, but he hoped it might be condoned as the most realistic portrayal of his life that he could give. He tried at times to give his letters a lighter tone by describing, with a facility that grew with practice, the many incidents that attracted him in a city whose life was all so new and strange to him; he could not help a growing interest in it all, and while Lavinia was probably unconscious of the change, his letters were now less concerned with the things of the life he had left in Macochee, and more and more with the things of the life he had entered upon in Chicago; as on a palimpsest, the old impressions were erased to make way for new ones.

But try as he would to give to his letters a cheer that was far from expressing his own spirit, he could not save them from the despair that was laying hold of him, a despair which finally communicated itself in the declaration that it was now no longer with him a question of selecting employment.

“I must take,” he wrote, “whatever I can get, and that will probably be some kind of manual, if not menial, work. Sometimes,” so he let himself go on, “I feel as if I would give up and go back to Macochee, defeated and done for. But I can not come to that yet, though I would like to; oh, how I would like to! But I don’t dare, my pride won’t let me act the part of a coward, though I know I am one at heart. One thing keeps me up and that is the thought of you; I see your face ever before me, and your sweet eyes ever smiling at me—”

Lavinia’s eyes were not smiling as she read this; and she poured out her own grief and sympathy in a long letter that she promptly tore up, to pen in its stead a calmer, braver one, that should hearten him in the struggle which, as she proudly assured him, he was making for her.

Marley’s description of his straits partly prepared Lavinia for the shock of the letter in which he said he had found a job at last, but she was hardly prepared to learn that it was anything so far from her conception of what was due him as a job trucking freight for a railroad. The mockery he put into the picture of himself in a blue jumper and overalls could not console her, and she kept the truth from every one, except her mother; she preferred rather that they number Marley still with the army of the unemployed than to count him among those who toiled so desperately with the muscles of their arms and backs. She tried to conceal in encouraging congratulations the chagrin of which she felt she should be ashamed, and she tried to show her appreciation of his droll sarcasms about the preparation his four years of college had given him for the task of trundling barrels of sugar and heaving pianos down from box-cars.

“I’m sure it’s honest work,” she wrote, “but do be careful, dear, not to hurt yourself in lifting such heavy loads.” It was a comfort to remind him that he was not intended to do such work.

There was a relief, however, that she did not dare admit, when he told her three days later that he had lost his job.

“I realize for the first time my importance in the great scheme of things,” he wrote. “I was fired because I do not belong to the freight handlers’ union. It took them three days to find this out, and then they threatened to strike if the railroad company did not immediately discharge me. The railroad company, after due consideration, decided to let me out, and—I’m out. It makes me tremble to think of the consequences that would have followed had they decided otherwise. Think of it! The railroad tied up, business at a standstill and the commerce of the nation paralyzed, and all because of Glenn Marley, A. B. It is really encouraging to know that my presence on the earth is actually known to my fellow-mortals; it has at least been discovered that I am alive and in Chicago, even if my diploma is not recognized by Freight Handlers’ Union No. 63. And now,” he concluded, “as Kipling says, it’s ‘back to the army again, Sergeant, back to the army again’—the army of the unemployed.”

Lavinia was shocked again a day or so later when on opening her letter she met the announcement that he had been offered a job with another railroad as a freight handler.

“But you need not be alarmed,” she was reassured to read—though it was not until she thought it all over afterward that she began to wonder how he had divined her dislike of his being in such work—“I haughtily declined, and turned them down. You see this road is just now in the throes of a strike, and all their freight handlers are out. Consequently, they have had to employ scabs to do the work of the strikers. They take anybody—that’s why they were ready to take me. But as I said, I declined. Somehow, I couldn’t bring myself to take a place away from a union man.”

Lavinia mistook her satisfaction in Marley’s declination of the position for a satisfaction in the nobility of his sacrifice, and in her elation she related the circumstance at dinner. Now that Marley had declined such an employment she felt safe in doing this. But her father did not see it in her light, or at least in Marley’s light.

“Humph!” he sneered; “so he sympathizes with unionism, does he? Well, those unions will own the whole earth if they keep on.”

“But he says he thought of the wives and children of the union men—”

“Well, but why doesn’t he think of the wives and children of the scabs, as he calls them? They have as much right to live and work as the union men.”

Lavinia, as an opponent of union labor herself, could not answer this argument, though she felt it her duty to defend Marley. But before she could proceed in his defense, her father, strangely enraged at the mere mention of the policies of the unions, hurried on:

“The union didn’t show any consideration for him when it took his other job away from him.”

Lavinia shot a reproachful glance at her mother, who did not see it because she was shooting a glance more than reproachful at her husband, and it had the effect of silencing and humbling the judge, as all of Lavinia’s arguments, or all of the arguments known to the propaganda of union labor, could not have done.