XIX. “BRIEFS”
WHEN the Declarator for that week appeared, David found a copy in his box at the post office, for Welsh made it a practice to let his victims see how they were handled. He had given nearly all the space in the “Briefs” column to David. The dominie did not open the paper immediately. He had a couple of letters to read, and one or two denominational papers to glance through, and he was well up the hill before he tore the wrapper from the Declarator, and looked into it. As he read he stopped short, and stood until he had read every word in the column. Then he tore the sheet to bits, and threw it into the gutter. His first thought was that ‘Thusia must not see the paper, or hear how Welsh had attacked him in it. The attack was less harmful than venomous. It was a tirade against “The Spiritual Dead Beat” – for so he chose to dub David – mentioning no name, but pointing clearly enough at the dominie. Choice bits:
“Who is this hypocrite who preaches right living, and owes his butcher, his grocer, his baker, his shoe man, and can’t or won’t pay?”
“I can’t skin my grocer; he knows I’m a dead beat. I’m a fool; I ought to have set up as a parson.”
There was an entire column of it. David’s thought, after ‘Thusia, was thankfulness that he owed not a tradesman in Riverbank.
And this was to be Alice’s father-in-law!
Lanny came to the house that evening; he asked to see David in the study.
“Of course you saw the Declarator, Mr. Dean,” he said when they were alone. “I don’t know what to do about it. I saw father, and if he hadn’t been my father I would have knocked him down with my fist. It’s a dirty piece of business. I know what’s the matter with him: he’s sore because I’m going to marry somebody decent, when no decent person will have anything to do with him. Mother told him I’m engaged to Alice. I talked to him straight; you can believe that! I would have taken it out of his hide if I hadn’t thought how it would look. You wouldn’t want a son-in-law that was in jail for beating up his own father. What can I do about it, Mr. Dean?”
David said nothing could be done about it; he said he was glad Lanny had not attacked his father with physical violence, and he urged him to avoid words with his father.
“He has had a hard life; you and I do not know how hard. It has embittered him; he is not rightly responsible.”
“But why should he attack you, of all men?” Lanny cried. “Or if he don’t like you what kind of a father is it that tries to spoil things for me – that’s what he’s trying to do. It’s meanness.”
“He has had a hard life,” David repeated. “You don’t think I ought to do anything? You can’t suggest anything for me to do?”
“Avoid quarreling with him,” said David. There was no other advice to give; it was unfortunate that Alice should have chosen to love a man with such a father; there was nothing Lanny or any other person could do. Welsh was a town nuisance.
The next week the Declarator retracted, in the manner in which it always retracted when a retraction was necessary. The item in the “Briefs” was headed “An Apology!!!” and ran: “We apologize. The Spiritual Dead Beat has paid his debts. We wonder who lent him the money?” The banker-trustee, Burton, meeting David, spoke to him of this.
“I see our respected fellow townsman, Welsh, is touching you up, dominie,” he said. “It is a pity we can’t run the fellow out of town. Worthless cur! He gave me his attention last year; I put an ad in his paper and he shut up. What do you suppose ever started him against you?”
“He is an embittered man; his hand is against the whole world.”
“That’s probably so,” agreed the banker. “A sort of Donnybrook Fair; if you see a head, hit it. Well, I don’t know what we can do about it. He keeps inside the law.” He hesitated. “Dominie,” he said, “you’ll not feel offended if I say something? I guess you know I’m only thinking of the good of the church and of your own good. You don’t suppose Welsh knows who lent you the money he’s talking about, do you? I’ll tell you – I imagine you make no secret of it – I know who lent it! I couldn’t help knowing – ”
“It was entirely a business transaction; I stipulated that,” said David.
“Certainly. We know that; anyone would know it that knew you, dominie. Well, I’ve no scruples about borrowing and lending; it is my business, I’m a banker. I’ll make a guess that Lucille Hardcome came to you with the loan idea, and that you didn’t go to her; and I’ll make another guess that before you were willing to borrow the money from her you heard her say she was going to increase her subscription, maybe five hundred dollars, and maybe a thousand. Am I right? I thought so! Because it wouldn’t be like you to borrow unless you saw where you could pay it back, and I told you that if Lucille raised her subscription you’d get your share. It’s all right! The only thing – you won’t mind if I say it?”
“I can imagine what it is,” said David.
“Yes. If this man Welsh knows what he is talking about – if he isn’t just guessing – he can be very nasty about it. I can’t imagine why he is picking on you, but if he wants to keep it up, and knows you borrowed money from Lucille Hardcome, he can make it – well, he’ll make it sound as if there was something wrong about it. He’ll twist some false meaning into it – invalid wife and gay widow and money passing. I hate to say this, but people are always looking for a chance to jump on a minister – some people are, that is. I don’t know how we can get at Welsh – he’s so low he’s threat-proof. I was going to suggest that you let me put in an application for a loan at our bank, say for the amount you borrowed from Lucille Hardcome. Borrow the money from us and pay her, and then let us get after Welsh.”
David thought a moment.
“It might offend her,” he said. “She was extremely insistent. I might almost say she predicated her possible increase of subscription on my accepting the loan. I felt so or I would have refused her.”
“Let me handle her,” urged Burton. “I’ll say nothing until the bank agrees to the loan, anyway. You’ll let me make the application for you!”
David agreed. It was, if the bank was willing, the wisest course, or so it seemed at the moment.
David went about his duties as usual, and it was not for several days that he heard from Burton. The bank’s discount committee had declined the loan.
Lucille, in the meantime, had not been idle. She set herself the task of saving Alice from Lanny Welsh, and she went about it in a manner that would have done credit to an experienced diplomat. One of the men she had tried hardest to induce to become a frequenter of the “salon” she had attempted to create was Van Dusen, the owner of the Eagle, and in a certain satirically smiling way he admired Lucille. He had once had literary ambitions and, like most small town editors, he had his share of political hopefulness, especially with reference to a post office; and he recognized in Lucille a power such as Riverbank had not previously possessed. She knew congressmen and senators, and dined them when they came to town; and they seemed to think her worth knowing. A word from her might, at the right moment, throw an office from one applicant to another. Van Dusen cultivated her friendship. He was a good talker and a great reader, and Lucille enjoyed him. He was a busy and a sadly overworked man, hard to draw from his home after his day’s work was done, but he did accept Lucille’s invitations. His presence at her house meant much; the town considered him one of its illustrious men.
Lucille jingled into his office one morning, rustled into a chair and leaned her arms on his desk.
“Are you going to do something for me, like a good man?” she began.
Van Dusen leaned back in his chair and smiled.
“To the half of my kingdom,” he said.
“That’s less than I expected, but I suppose I’ll have to make it do,” she returned playfully. “Isn’t there, Mr. Van Dusen, some newspaper or printing office in Derlingport that pays more than you pay! Some place where a deserving young man could better himself?”
“Some of them pay more than the Eagle,” he admitted.
“And you could get a young man a place there?”
“I might. The Gazette might do it for me; Bender is an old friend of mine.”
“Then I want you to do it,” said Lucille. “You won’t ask why, will you? Just do it for me?”
“What position does your protégé want?” Van Dusen asked, drawing a scratch pad toward him, and poising a pencil.
“Compositor – isn’t that it – when a man sets type? It’s Lanny Welsh; I want him to have a better job than he has – in Derlingport.” She saw Van Dusen frown. “I think I’ll tell you all about it,” she said; “I know I can trust you.”
“With your innermost secrets, on my honor as a bearded old editor,” smiled Van Dusen.
“Then it is this,” said Lucille and she told about Lanny and Alice.
Van Dusen demurred a little. He said Lanny was good enough for any girl, dominie’s daughter or king’s daughter, no matter whose daughter.
“And have you seen the Declarator?” Lucille demanded. “Is the editor of the Declarator good enough to be a dominie’s daughter’s father-in-law?”
Van Dusen admitted that this was another matter, and good-naturedly let Lucille have her way. When she had departed, he wrote to Bender of the Gazette. A few days later Lanny came to the manse, half elated and half displeased.
“Old Van is all right!” he told David. “I can’t blame him for bouncing me when there’s no work for me to do, and there’s not one man in a thousand that would take the trouble to look up another job for me, and hand it to me with my blue envelope. I’m going up to work on the Gazette, at Derlingport, Mr. Dean. It just rips me all up to go that far from Alice, even for a little while, but I’ve got to do it. If we’re going to be married in a year I need every day’s work I can put in, and when you think that the Gazette job will pay more than my Eagle job, I guess you’ll admit I’ve simply got to grab it.”
“When are you going?” asked David. “To-morrow,” said Lanny. “These jobs don’t wait; you’ve got to take them while they’re empty. Between you and me, Mr. Dean, I think I wouldn’t have had a chance in the world if it hadn’t been for Mr. Van Dusen. He’s that sort, though.”
To David, knowing nothing of Lucille’s having a hand in this, it seemed almost providential, this removal of Lanny to another town.
“I’ve got another idea, too,” Lanny said. “I think maybe I can get father to come to Derlingport. He’s dead sore on Riverbank, I know, and mother will be anxious to be where I am. I may be able to make father think there is a better field for the Declarator there than here. I don’t know. After I’ve been there awhile I’ll try it. I wish he would leave this town, and let people forget about him.”
David heartily wished the same thing, and he was soon to wish it still more heartily. At the moment he liked Lanny better than he had ever liked the boy.
“I expect you’ll excuse me, now,” Lanny said. “I expect you know I’m wanting to spend all the time with Alice I can, going in the morning and all that. And, oh, yes! I’m going to look around up there for a job for Old Pop – for Roger. I’m pretty sure to get on the Derlingport nine, and I want Old Pop to be behind the bat when I’m pitching. I think it would be a good thing for him to get up there, if I can land a job for him. There’s no future in that coal office, Mr. Dean, to my mind. They are a live lot of men back of the Derlingport nine, and if I want Old Pop to catch for me, and won’t listen to anything else, some of them will hustle up a job for him. Maybe there is a coal man connected with the nine someway. I don’t know, but in a big place like Derlingport there’s always room for anybody as clean and straight as Roger.”
David was touched. He saw, in imagination, a new Roger winning his own way, spurred on by the brisker business life of the bigger town, bettered by the temporary breaking of home ties, inoculated with Lanny’s enthusiasm.
Roger spoke of the chance Lanny might get him, and spoke of it voluntarily and enthusiastically. It would be a great thing for him, he said. Grandfather Fragg was all right, of course, but there was nothing in the way of a future in his coal business. He said he hated to take money from him when he knew the business was running behind every day.
“Is it as bad as that, Roger!” David asked. “Every bit, father,” Roger replied. “I don’t see how he’s going to pull through the winter and keep the business going.”
“Isn’t there anything you can do!”
“Do! It isn’t a case of do, it’s a case of money. He didn’t have enough capital to start with, and he hasn’t any left. Brown & Son have got all the business. I could get some of it away from them but grandfather can’t supply the coal. He can’t buy it; he hasn’t the money to do a big business on, and a small coal business is a losing proposition. The profit is too small; you’ve got to do big business or you might as well quit.”
The talk left David with a new source of worry. ‘Thusia’s father was showing his infirmities more plainly each day; if he lost his coal business – and David knew the loss of the Fragg home was to be included in that loss – the old man would have but one place to turn to: David’s home. It would mean another mouth to feed, perhaps another invalid to care for and support.
XX. LANNY IS AWAY
TWO weeks in succession, after going to Derlingport, Lanny spent Sunday in River-bank, and Alice enjoyed the visits immensely. Their brief separation gave zest to the mere being together again. The third Sunday Lanny did not come down, but wrote a long letter. The Derlingport nine had jumped at the chance of securing him as a pitcher; they were to give him ten dollars a game. He was mighty sorry, he wrote, that the nine’s schedule included Sunday games, but every ten dollars he could pick up in that way made their wedding day come just so much nearer. He guessed, he said, that it would be all right for him to play the Sunday games in Derlingport, and in other towns than Riverbank; if Derlingport played any Sunday games in Riverbank they could get another pitcher for the games. He mentioned Roger; he had talked to the bosses of the nine, and they were willing to find a job for Old Pop, and would do so if Roger would sign up for the season, or what remained of it, but Lanny wrote that he supposed the Sunday game business would shut Roger out of that.
Alice volunteered to let David and ‘Thusia read the letter – it was the first out-and-out love letter she had ever received – but they declined, feeling that to do so would be to take an unfair advantage of Alice’s dutifulness, and she read them such portions as were not pure love-making. The letter came Saturday. Alice was not greatly disappointed that Lanny was not coming down, for he had suggested that he might not come. She went to church Sunday morning, and Ben Derling walked home with her. The Presbyterian Sabbath school was held in the afternoon, and about the time Lanny was warming up for the first inning of the Derlingport-Marburg ball game Alice was leading her class in singing the closing song. Below the pulpit Lucille Hardcome beat time with her jingling bracelets, and she smiled to see Ben Derling close his hymn book, and edge past his class of boys with a glance in Alice’s direction. He hurried out as soon as the benediction was said, and Lucille rightly guessed that he meant to wait for Alice in the lobby, but Lucille captured Alice before she could escape.
“If you are not needed at home, Alice,” she said, “you must come with me. I have the most interesting photographs! Dozens of them, pictures of Europe. My carriage will be here directly.”
The photographs were not new. Lucille had made a flight through Europe as soon as her husband was dead. It was her first use of the money she inherited, and she had bought the photographs then – it was before the days of picture postcards.
For six months after her return she had inflicted the photographs on all her friends and acquaintances, and had then tired of them. They had reposed peacefully in a box ever since, and might have remained there forever, had she not invited Ben Derling to her house.
Lucille played a harp – a great gilded affair, and she asked Ben, who was a fair violinist, to try a duet, suggesting that they might make part of a program when she gave a concert for the church fund. Ben went willingly enough, and played as well as he could, and enjoyed the evening immensely. He found Lucille but an indifferent harpist, but willing to let him make suggestions. She asked him what he thought of a series of musical evenings, and he took to the idea enthusiastically. This was Wednesday.
Lucille’s real reason for asking Ben to her house had been to study him a little more closely than she had had opportunity to do before. She mentioned Alice, and Ben was enthusiastic enough to satisfy Lucille that he liked Alice well. If Alice would be willing to try out a few things with him, piano-violin duets, it would be a pleasing part of the musical evenings, he said. Lucille thought so, too. They talked music; and Lucille happened to mention that she had first heard the harp in Paris, and Ben said he had not taken time to hear any music when he was in Europe. It was the first Lucille had heard of Ben’s European tour, and she left him in her parlor while she hunted up the photographs.
She was not quite sure where they were. As she rummaged for them she thought Ben over, and almost decided he would not do as a substitute for Lanny Wesh. There was something gayly sparkling about Lanny, and Ben was anything but gay or sparkling. He was short and chunky, serious-minded and sedate. Some ancestor had given him a little greasy knob of a nose, but this was his most unpleasant feature. It is easiest, perhaps, to describe him as a thoroughly bathed young man, smelling of perfumed soap, and with yellowish hair, ever smooth and glistening from recent applications of a well-soaked hair-brush. He had no bad habits unless, in one so young, incessant application to business is a bad habit. He had taken his place in his grandfather’s office the week the old man died. Already, from bending over a desk, he was a little rounded in the shoulders. His violin and his Sunday school class were his only relaxations. He was a good boy, and a good son; but Lucille was afraid he was not likely to appeal to the romantic taste of a girl like Alice. When she discovered the photographs she was inclined to leave them where they were, and tell Ben she could not find them, and let the musical evenings be forgotten. The picture that happened to be on top was one that pictured some city or cathedral of which Van Dusen had spoken when last in her home, and more for Van Dusen than for Ben she gathered the pictures in her arms, and carried them downstairs. Ben seized them eagerly.
His trip abroad had been the one great upflaring of his life. He had gone with a “party,” and had raced from place to place, but he had a memory that was infallible. His eyes brightened as he saw the photographs. He talked. He talked well. He made the pictures live. He was in his element: he would have made an admirable stereopticon lecturer had business not claimed him. He remembered dates, historical associations, little incidents that had occurred and that had the foreign tang. Before he had gone one quarter through the pile of pictures, Lucille gathered them up.
“No more to-night!” she laughed. “We young folks must have our beauty sleep,” and she sent him away. “He must show the pictures to Alice,” she said to herself. “She will be made to visit Europe when she hears him tell of it. He is quite another Ben.”
When, Sunday afternoon, Lucille found that Ben, as she had guessed, was waiting in the lobby she hailed him at once, saying:
“How fortunate! I am taking Alice to look at my European pictures. You ‘ll come, won’t you?” Ben was eager. There was room in the carriage for him, crowding a little, which was not unpleasant when it was Alice who was crowded against him. Lucille left them with the photographs while she went to induce the maid to make a pitcher of lemonade. When she returned Ben was talking. He and Alice were seated on a couch by the window, and Alice was holding a photograph in her hands, studying it. Ben sat turned toward her; he leaned to point out some feature of the picture, and Alice asked a question. Lucille placed the pitcher of lemonade on a stand, and went out; they were doing very well without her. She felt she had made an excellent beginning; Lanny banished, and Alice at least interested in what Ben was interested in. When she interrupted them it was to suggest the musical evenings.
“It will be delightful!” Alice exclaimed. She had, for the moment, quite forgotten Lanny. The moment had, in fact, stretched to something like two hours. Ben walked home with her.
XXI. A FAILURE
AUGUST and September passed, and, in passing, seemed as placid and uneventful as any two months that ever slipped quietly away. To Alice no day and no week held any especial significance; if she had been asked to tell the most important event of the two months, she would probably have said that it was the completion of the set of twelve embroidered doilies, and the centerpiece to match, the first work she had undertaken for her new home – the home to be – since her engagement to Lanny had come about. David Dean could have thought of nothing of particular importance. Old Mrs. Grelling had died, but she had been at death’s door so long her final passing through was hardly an event, and nothing else had occurred. Lanny would have said everything was running smoothly; his pitching arm kept in good condition, his work was steady at the Gazette office, and Alice’s letters to some extent took the place of the visits to Riverbank which the Sunday ball games made impossible. Old P. K. Welsh seemed to have forgotten his anger against the dominie, and used the “Briefs” to lambaste other Riverbankers. Herwig was still in business and Mary Ann, Mr. Fragg’s housekeeper, clung to life. Rose Hinch was still nursing the old housekeeper and getting Fragg’s meals. ‘Thusia was no better and no worse. The two months were uneventful. They were months of which we are accustomed to say: “Everything is going the same as usual.”
We deceive ourselves. The quiet days build the great catastrophies. The greatest builder and demolisher is Time, and he works toward his ends on quiet days as well as on noisy days; works more rapidly and more insidiously, perhaps. If Time does nothing else to us on quiet days, he makes us a day older each day. To-day I am the indestructible granite; to-morrow a speck of dust touches me and is too small to see; the next day it is a smudge of green; the next it is a lichen; it is a patch of moss that can be brushed away with the hand; it is a cushion of wood violets and oxalis; it is a mat in which a seedling tree takes root; the roots pry and the moisture rots and the granite rock falls apart, and I am dead.
The two months that passed so quietly and happily for Alice Dean were equally happy months for Ben Derling. He was never the youth to make of courtship a hurrah and a race; he hardly considered he was courting Alice – he was seeing her oftener than he had seen her, and enjoying it. Alice was but filling in the days and evenings as pleasantly as possible during Lanny’s absence. If Ben had been the eager instigator of their meetings Alice would have drawn back, but Ben instigated nothing; Lucille Hardcome stood between them, and was the reason they met. Alice went to Lucille’s because Lucille wished her musical evenings to be a success; Ben was there because he was a part of the proposed programs. The two young people were musicians, not susceptible male and female, and they met as musicians, interested in a common desire to assist Lucille. By the end of the two months Alice had greater respect and liking for Ben than she had ever imagined possible. She had thought him a dull boy; she found him solid, sincere and more than comfortable. By the end of the two months Ben, not aware that Alice was pledged, had decided that she was the girl he wished – but no hurry! – to have as a wife. Lucille was pleased but impatient. Mary Derling, seeing how things were going, was pleased but not impatient.
Alice was unaware of any change in her feeling for Lanny. She wrote him letters that were as loving as love letters should be, and Lanny wrote with equal regularity. He wrote daily. Toward the end of September Alice was not quite as eager in her reading of his letters, mainly because their mere arrival was satisfactory evidence that Lanny still loved her. She wrote a little less frequently; there was not enough news to make letters necessary, except as expressions of affection. Without knowing it, she was reluctant to express her affection as unrestrainedly as at first. She let one of Lanny’s letters remain unopened a full day. Once she passed old P. K. Welsh on the street: he did not notice her, probably did not know she was Alice Dean, but Alice felt an irritation; it was too bad Lanny had such a father. Without anything having happened, the end of the two months found this difference in Alice: whereas, at the beginning of August she was in love with Lanny, and eager for the wedding, at the end of September she was in love with him, and not eager for the wedding. Probably if Lanny had made a few trips to Riverbank just then it would have made all the difference possible. He was magnetic; he was not a magnetic correspondent.
