The Happy Average

CHAPTER XXVII

A FOOTHOLD

The next letter the postman gave Lavinia began ecstatically:

“I’ve got a job at last! I’m now working for the C. C. and P. Railroad, in their local freight office, and I’m not trucking freight either, but I’m a clerk—a bill clerk, to be more exact. My duties consist in sitting at a desk and writing out freight bills, for which by some inscrutable design of Providence my study of common carriers and contracts in the law was doubtless intended to prepare me.

“To-day I wrote out a bill for freight to Cook and Jennings, Macochee, Ohio, and you can imagine my sensations. It made me homesick for a while; I wished that by some necromancy I might conceal myself in the bill and go to Macochee with it; I had a notion to write a little word of greeting on the bill, but I didn’t; it might have worried old man Cook’s brain and he couldn’t stand much of a strain of that kind. But I’m getting nearer Macochee every day now. I guess I’m to be a railroad man after all, and some day you’ll be proud to tell your friends that I started at the bottom. ‘Oh, yes,’ you’ll be boasting, ‘Mr. Marley began as a common freight trucker; and worked his way up to general manager.’ Then we’ll go back to Macochee in my private car. I can see it standing down by the depot, on the side track close to Market Street, baking in the hot sun, and the little boys from across the tracks will be crowding about it, gaping at the white-jacketed darky who’ll be getting the dinner ready. We’ll have Jack and Mayme down to dine with us, and your father and mother and Chad and Connie, and my folks, too, and maybe, if you’ll let me, Wade Powell. Then, of course, the Macochee people will think better of me; they won’t be saying that I’m no good, but instead they’ll stand around, in an easy, careless way, and say, ‘Oh, yes, I knew Glenn when he was a boy. I always said he’d get up in the world.’

“But, ah me, just now I’m a bill clerk at fifty dollars a month, thank you, and glad of the chance to get it; so is my voluptuous landlady glad; she’ll get her board money a little more regularly now.

“I suppose you’ll want to know something about my surroundings. They are not elegant; the office is a big barn of a place, crowded full of desks, where we sit and write from eight in the morning until any hour at night when it occurs to the boss to tell us we can go. Last night it was ten o’clock before the idea struck him. They kindly allow us an hour in which to run out to a restaurant for supper. The windows in the office were washed, so tradition runs, in 1493, the year after Columbus landed. Outside, the freight trains rush by constantly so as to keep the noise going. My boss, whose name is Clark, strikes me as being a sort of fool of an innocuous sort. He is a conscientious ass, but a poor, unfortunate, deluded simpleton. He’s one of those close-fisted reubs whose chief care is the pennies, and whose only interest in life is the C. C. and P. Railroad. He makes his business his own personal affair and the C. C. and P. his god. He lunches down-town and pays twenty cents for his lunch, never more, often fifteen. One of the first things he told me was, now that I had come under his protecting wing, to begin to save money. They have a young man in the office here, whose desk is next to mine, who was born somewhere in Canada, and is always ’a-servin’ of her Majesty the Queen,’ as Kipling says. He told me with much gusto how he had hung out of the office window last New Year’s a Canadian flag. He seemed proud of having done so, and also told me, boasted to me, in fact, that he was going to hang the same flag out of the same window on the Fourth of July. ‘Oh, yes, you are!’ thinks I. So I got the flag and ripped it into shreds and started it through the waste-basket on a hurried trip to oblivion. À bas the Canadian flag! He’ll probably get another one, but if I get hold of it, it’ll meet the same fate as the first one. Then I have something to think of that’ll keep my mind off my horrible fate in being here in Chicago, while I smile in ghoulish glee with a cynical leer overspreading my classic features, at the young man’s disapproval of my actions. The rest of the men in the office aren’t much to boast of. They’re a diluted mixture of Nijni Norgordian and Bill Hoffman the jeweler. I still hate this town; I wish it were buried under seven hundred and thirty feet of Lake Michigan.”

Marley’s next letter to Lavinia opened thus:

“Extract from the diary of J. H. Anderson, Esq., Canadian, clerk in the freight office of the C. C. and P. Ry., at Chicago, Ill., April 20.

“‘New man on desk next to mine; young, about 24. Rather decent fellow, but conceited. Do not think he will last. Took me to lunch with him this evening.’

“Now what do you think of that? The youth I described to you at such length keeps a diary, and the foregoing is culled therefrom. He left it by some mistake on top of his desk, and I picked it up innocently enough to-night, to see what it was, and that was the first thing my eye lit on. He is evidently an adept at coming to conclusions, apparently he can sum one up in two whisks of a porter’s broom. I was much surprised to find myself so well done. Done on every side in those few words. I’ve rather enjoyed it; strikes me as being uproariously funny. Maybe his dictum is correct. You’ll agree with me as to his richness. Tell every one about it and see what they will think. Tell your mother and my mother. Tell Jack and give him a chance to laugh. Tell Mayme Carter, too.”

Lavinia ran at once to her mother.

“Listen,” she said. And she read it.

Mrs. Blair laughed.

“How funny!” she said, “and how well he writes! I should think he’d go into literature.”

Lavinia laid the letter down in her lap and looked at her mother as if she had been startled by a striking coincidence.

“Why, do you know, I’ve thought of that very thing myself.”

“But read on,” urged Mrs. Blair.

Lavinia picked up the letter again and began:

“Well, de—”

“Oh,” she exclaimed, blushing hotly, “I can’t read you that. Let’s see—”

She leafed over the letter, one, two, three, four sheets. Mrs. Blair was smiling.

“Aren’t you leaving out the best parts?” she asked archly.

“Oh, there’s nothing,” Lavinia said, not looking up. “But—oh, well, this is all. He says—

“‘There is a good deal of unrest and uneasiness here just now, because the first of May is coming. The road is anticipating trouble with the freight handlers; they may go out on a strike that day.’

“Oh, dear,” sighed Lavinia, “more strikes, and I suppose that means more trouble for Glenn.”

“Why, the strike of those men can’t affect him,” Mrs. Blair assured her. “He’s a clerk now.”

“Yes, I know, but what if he gets the notion he ought to help them by quitting too?”

CHAPTER XXVIII

THE TALK OF THE TOWN

Macochee’s common interest in Marley was sharpened by his leaving town, and out of the curiosity that raged, Lawrence and Mayme Carter one evening made a call on Lavinia.

“Well, Lavinia,” said Lawrence, almost as soon as they were seated in the parlor, “what’s the news about Glenn? How’s he getting along?”

“Oh, pretty well,” she said, smiling.

“Does he like Chicago?”

“Oh, yes; that is, fairly well.”

“Run get his letters and let us read them.”

“Why, Jack! The idea!” Mayme rebuked him.

But Lavinia instantly got up.

“Well, I’ll read you part of one or two,” she said. “He can tell you much better than I all about himself.”

She was gone from the room a moment and then returned with two thick envelopes.

“My, Lavinia, you don’t intend to read all that, do you?” Lawrence made a burlesque of looking at his watch.

“Oh, you needn’t be afraid,” said Lavinia, smiling. She opened a letter.

“Here’s one that came several days ago. He mentions you both in this one.”

“You don’t mean to say he connects our names?” Lawrence affected consternation.

“Can’t you be serious a moment?” Mayme said, “I want to hear what he says; do go on, Lavinia, and don’t mind Jack.”

Lavinia read the extract from the diary and Marley’s comment.

“Doesn’t he say anything about you?” said Lawrence. “Why don’t you read that? You skip the most interesting parts. You’d better let me read them. Here—” and he held out his hand for the letter.

But Lavinia laid one letter securely in her lap and opened the other.

“Listen to this,” she began, and then she glanced over the first page and half-way down the second.

“Here you’re skipping again,” cried Lawrence. “Why don’t you play fair?”

“‘I have made a friend,’ he says,” she began, “‘and it all came about through the strike. You know the freight handlers went out on the first of May, and since then there has been more excitement than work in the office. The freight house is stacked high with freight, and only a few men are working there and they are afraid of their lives. All around the outside of the big, long shed are policemen and detectives, and the strikers’ pickets. All day they walk up and down, up and down, at a safe distance, just off the company’s ground, and they waylay everybody and try to get them not to go to work here. I happened to see the strike when it began. It was day before yesterday morning. I had gone out in the freight house on some little errand and just at ten o’clock I noticed a man walk down by the platform that runs along outside the shed. I saw him stop by one of the big doors and look in. Suddenly he gave a low whistle, then another. The men in the freight house stopped and looked up. Then the man outside raised his arm, and held up two fingers—’”

“He wanted them to go swimming probably,” interrupted Lawrence.

“Oh, Jack, do stop,” said Mayme, irritably. “Right at the most interesting part, too! Do go on, Lavinia.”

Lavinia read on:

“‘Then the man outside raised his arm, and held up two fingers, and instantly every truck in the shed dropped to the floor, bang, the men all went and put on their coats, marched out of the freight house—and the strike was on. Well, after that came the policemen and the detectives and the pickets, to say nothing of the reporters. It is about these last that I mean to tell you, for among them I have found this new friend. The other day a young man came into the office to see Clark, our boss. I was attracted by him at once. He was tall, and his smooth-shaven face was refined and thoughtful; I call him good-looking; his eyes were dark and his nose straight and full of character; his lips were thin and level; his hair was not quite black and stopped just on the right side of being curly. He was dressed modestly, but stylishly; I remember he wore gloves—he always does—and I thought him somewhat dudish. But what was my pleasure to see on his waistcoat the little white cross of my fraternity! I rushed up to him instantly, and gave him the grip. He was a Sig., from an Indiana college, and he is a reporter on the Courier. His name is James Weston; no, he is no relation to Bob Weston of Macochee at all. I asked him that the first thing; but he is some relation to the Cliffords, distant, I suppose.’”

“I wonder if that isn’t the young man who visited them summer before last?” asked Mayme. “I’ll bet it is!”

“No, it can’t be,” said Lavinia, “I thought of that the very first thing, but you see he says,” and Lavinia read on:

“‘He says he hasn’t been there for years. We chatted together for a few minutes and were friends at once. To-morrow night, if I can get off in time, I’m to dine with him at a café down-town. My, but it was good to see some one wearing that little white cross! You see my college training has done me some good after all.’”

In their conversation afterward, Lavinia and Mayme celebrated Marley’s abilities as a writer, but Lawrence begged Lavinia to read them more, particularly, as he assured her, those parts about herself, saying he could judge better of Marley’s abilities after he heard how he treated romantic subjects.

“I want to know how he handles the love interest,” he said.

“Oh, you got that from George Halliday,” said Mayme. “It sounds just like him when he’s discussing some book none of us has read, doesn’t it, Lavinia?”

Lavinia admitted that it did sound like Halliday, and Mayme returned to her attack on Lawrence by saying:

“What do you know about writing, anyway?”

They might have gone farther along this line had not Mrs. Blair entered with a plate of cake and some ice-cream that had been left over from their dessert at supper. These refreshments instantly seemed to affect Mayme with the idea that the call had assumed the formality of a social function, and as she nibbled at her cake, she asked with a polite interest:

“Just what is Mr. Marley’s position with the railroad, Lavinia?”

“Oh,” Lavinia answered, “he has a place in the office of the freight department; he’s a clerk there.”

“I’m so glad to know,” said Mayme, as if in relief.

“Why?” Lavinia looked up in alarm.

“Oh, well, you know—how people talk.” Mayme raised her pale eyebrows significantly. Lavinia was disturbed, but Lawrence, detecting the danger, instantly turned it off in a joke.

“She heard he was a section hand,” he said.

“The idea!” laughed Lavinia.

“Isn’t this just the worst place for gossip you ever heard of?” said Mayme.

“The worst ever,” said Lawrence. “If I were you I’d quit and start a reform movement.”

When they had gone and were strolling toward the Carters’, Lawrence grumbled at Mayme:

“What did you want to give it all away to Lavinia for?”

“Why, Jack, I didn’t say anything, did I?”

“Oh, no, nothing—only you tipped off the whole thing to her.”

“Why, what did I say that hinted at it, even?”

“‘Oh, you know how people talk!’” Lawrence mimicked her tone as he repeated her words.

“Well, you know they do, Jack, and you know all the mean things they’ve been saying about Glenn. And you remember Charlie Davis’ mother told mama that Charlie ran across him in the street: in Chicago and that—”

“Oh, Charlie Davis!” said Lawrence, as impatiently as he could say anything. “What’s he? Anyway, you didn’t have to tell Lavinia.”

“Well, I’m glad we got the truth anyway.”

“Yes, so am I.”

“We must tell everybody.”

“Sure,” acquiesced Lawrence, “if we can get the gossips started the other way they’ll have him president of the road in a few days.”

CHAPTER XXIX

A MAN OF LETTERS

The Macochee gossips, after they were assured he was engaged in clerical, and not manual work, might have promoted Marley much more rapidly than his railroad would have done, had it not been for the news that he had changed his employment. They had gone far enough to noise it about that Marley was chief clerk in the office, where he was only a bill clerk, when the Republican, with the impartial good nature with which it treated all of Macochee’s folk, so long as they kept out of politics, mentioned him for the first time since his departure, and then, to tell of the advancement he was rapidly making in the metropolis that loomed so large and important in their provincial eyes. Lavinia had the facts in a letter from Marley a day or so before the Republican had them, though she never could imagine, as she told everybody, where the Republican got its information.

“I have a big piece of news to tell you,” he wrote. “Last night I dined with Weston. It was the first really enjoyable evening I have had since I struck the town. Luckily, the strikers had everything tied up so tight that we could do little work, and I had no trouble in getting off in time. I met him about six o’clock, and we went to the swellest restaurant in town. Weston is the finest fellow you ever saw; as it was pay night, he said he would blow me off to a good dinner. And he did, the best dinner I have ever eaten; there were half a dozen courses, and as we ate we talked, talked about everything, college days, the hard days that come after college, and you, and everything. Weston’s experience has been about the same as mine—one long, hopeless search for a job. He, however, did not wait so long as I did; he said that he realized there was no place for him in a small town, and so he set out for the city almost at once. His father wanted him to study medicine, but he said he hadn’t the money or the patience to wait, and he hated medicine anyway, and, as newspaper work offered the quickest channel to making a living he chose that. His secret ambition, he confessed, is literature, and I believe he is writing a book, but he would not, or did not, tell me as much. He says he thinks newspaper work a bad business for any one to get into, but then I have discovered that that is the way every man talks about his own calling.

“After we had finished our dinner, we sat there for a long, long time over our coffee and cigarettes, and we finally got to talking about the strike. Weston, you know, has been working on it, and I was glad to be able to tell him a good many things he said he could use. Finally, I don’t know just how it came about, but I told him how the strike started with us, about the man appearing in the street alongside the freight house, whistling, and then holding up two fingers—I think I described it to you in a letter the other night. Weston was greatly interested; I can see him still, sitting across the table from me, knocking the ashes from his cigarette into his empty coffee-cup and looking so intently at me out of his brown eyes that he almost embarrassed me. And what was my surprise when I finished to have him say:

“‘By Jove, Marley, I’ll have to use that. I’ve been wondering how to lead my story to-night.’

“Now you know the strike at our place occurred several days ago, but since then it has been spreading, and to-day the men on another road walked out. This morning when I picked up the Courier and turned to the strike news, here is what I read, under big head-lines:

“‘A short man with a brown derby hat cocked over his eye walked leisurely down Canal Street at ten o’clock yesterday morning. The short man walked a block and then turned and walked back. At the open door of the C. and A.’s big freight house he stopped. Suddenly he whistled, once, twice, thrice, in low notes. Then he raised his hand with a gesture that was graceful and yet commanding, and held up two fingers. Inside the freight house the men who were heaving away at the big bales and boxes, attracted by the whistle, paused in their labor and looked up; they saw the man raise his two fingers; and, with the discipline of well-trained troops, they dropped their trucks, put on their coats and marched out of the freight house. And the Alton had been added to the list of railroads whose men were on strike.’

“Of course, I was surprised and puzzled, and a little pleased too, that I had had a hand in the article. As I read it, though, I thought of a hundred details I might have told Weston, and I began to wish I had written the account myself. This afternoon he came around to the office again, and the first thing he said was:

“‘Did you see your story this morning?’

“I told him I had, of course. ‘But,’ I added, ‘that was the way it happened on our road; not on the Alton.’

“But he only laughed, and said something about the tricks of the trade.

“And now for the news I was going to tell you. I told Weston, as we talked the story over, of my little wish that I had written the article myself, and he looked at me intently for a moment. Then he said:

“‘How’d you like to break into newspaper business?’

“My heart leaped; it came to me suddenly that it wasn’t the law, nor railroad work, but journalism that I wanted to enter. I told him so frankly and he said:

“‘Well, it’s a dog’s life and I don’t know whether I’m doing you a good turn or not, but I’ll speak to the city editor tonight. He’s a little short of men just now.

“My heart is in my mouth. I can hardly wait till to-morrow, when I’m to see him again. Think of it, dear, and all it means! It means more money, association with men of my own kind, men like Weston, and a fine, interesting life; and it means you; oh, it means you!”

Marley was able in this letter to communicate to Lavinia some of his enthusiasm and some of his suspense, and she found it difficult to await the result of his next interview with Weston. She began to count the hours until Marley and Weston should meet again, and then in a flash it came over her that they had doubtless already met, that the decision was already known, the fate determined, and she was still in ignorance. She had a sense of mystery in it, and she grew impatient, wondering why he did not telegraph. The next day came, and a letter with it; but the letter did not decide anything. Marley wrote that Weston had spoken to the city editor, and that he had told him to bring Marley around that evening. And so, other hours of waiting, and then, at last, another letter. Marley announced the result with what self-repression he could command.

“It’s settled,” he wrote. “I’m to go to work Monday—as a reporter on the staff of the Courier. The salary to begin with is to be fifteen dollars a week. I’m glad to quit railroad work; I’m not built to be a railroad man; I can’t adhere to rules as they want me to, and I can’t bow down as it seems I should. I didn’t tell you that my boss and I had not been getting along very well lately; I thought I wouldn’t worry you. I was glad to be able to tell him to-day that I’d quit Saturday. I did it in a proud and haughty manner; he seemed surprised and shocked—even pained. And when I broke the news gently to the young Canuck he expressed great sorrow and regret, but in his secret heart I knew he was glad, for now as a prophet he can vindicate himself, at least partly, in his diary.”

Lavinia was glad that Marley had gone into newspaper work; much as she had tried she had not been able to conceive of him in exactly the ideal light as a clerk in a railroad office; that position, while it may have had its own promise, nevertheless did not envelope him in the atmosphere she considered native to him. In his new relation to literature, which, in her ignorance, she confounded with journalism, she felt a deep satisfaction, and a new pride, and she was glad when the Republican announced the fact of Marley’s new position; she felt that it was a fitting vindication of her lover in the eyes of the people of Macochee and a rebuke for the distrust they had shown in him.

Thereafter her mail was increased, for in addition to his letter Marley sent her the Courier with his work marked; often he marked Weston’s as well, and early in June he wrote: “I want you to read Weston’s story in Sunday’s paper about the Derby; it’s a peach; it’s the best piece of frill writing that the town has seen in many a day.”

The tone of Marley’s letters now became more cheerful; it was evident to Lavinia that he was finding an interest in life, and in his descriptions of his daily work and the places all over Chicago it took him to and the people of all sorts it brought him in contact with, she found a new interest for her own life. When he wrote that his salary had been increased because of his story about a Sunday evening service in a church of the colored people in Dearborn Street, it seemed to her that happiness at last had come to them, and if, with the passing of June, she felt a pang at Marley’s grieving in one of his letters that this was the month in which they had intended to be married, she was consoled by the rapid progress he was making in his work. His salary had been raised a second time; he was receiving now twenty-five dollars a week; it seemed large to her, and she could not understand why it did not seem large to Marley, even when he wrote that Weston was paid forty dollars a week.

Her chief joy, perhaps, lay in the fact that he seemed to be living more comfortably than he had before. Now that he had left his dismal boarding-house she found a relief from its subtly communicated influence of the stranded wrecks of life, as Marley surely found it in the apartments he was sharing with Weston. She parted as gladly from the knowledge of his landlady as Marley did himself, assuring her that the landlady had “not decreased any in value as a zoo exhibit since first I rhapsodized about her.” Lavinia felt that she could dispense with much of the worry her womanly concern for his comfort had given her, and she turned with a new joy to the books he was constantly recommending.