The Happy Average

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.