Part 24

How did she get wind of it? you’ll ask. But you must remember that, what with being chairman of this, manager of that, and corresponding secretary of the other, the banker’s wife had in her hands the ends of more underground wires than any dozen in Urkey, and under-water wires too, tapping the gossip of all the towns and precincts the length of the Cape. And wise in politics, she knew that two and two, coming at the right time and at all dramatic, are apt to make nearer forty than four. And she knew that there is a tide in the affairs of men. And she knew that it never rains but it pours.

She could hear them at Gillyport: “Well, they say Honest Tansy Snow opened up his mouth at last, and the man’s a spellbinder; vow he is.” And at Barnstable: “They knew him, and they knew he meant it; he ain’t the kind to spout for spoutin’ sake, Banker Snow ain’t. And they do say there was a good many noses blowed there toward the end.”

But Elsie knew more than that. Piecing it together in her astute mind, from a hint here, an allusion there, a slip of somebody’s tongue or pen, she knew a thing that only three men in the Congressional District happened yet to know. And this was that “the party,” what with the chill of old blood and the heat of bad blood, was secretly in a bad way indeed; that it wanted a doctor, and wanted one quickly--with the autumn elections coming forward, and a member of Congress to be sent to Washington. No veteran; no silver-trumpeting old war-horse. No, a new name, a fresh fame, a clean slate.

“And where, oh, where,” thought Elsie, “where will the lightning strike?”

Selectman? Selectman of a village? That was why she smiled. Since Barlow Atkins left Congress in 1884 people in Urkey had almost forgotten that an islander could sit under the dome in Washington. “The biggest man in this town.” She remembered the young Tansy standing up straight in London Lane. Well, she’d see.

One afternoon in mid-July the Knights came over in the steamer _Senator Bates_ for their annual “time,” a clambake at Blue Goat Cove in the evening and the sail back home by moonlight later on. When they had marched the length of the shore street behind their band and got a start for the cove, they took half the population with them, but they left three of their own number behind.

The sail was all right for these three, but they weren’t much on clambakes. They’d rather loaf around the old town, looking at the houses. Perhaps they were interested in architecture. Or perhaps it was lightning-rods. They were Mr. Claude Byram of Gillyport, Captain Charlie Slocum of Barnstable, and ex-Senator Bates himself, and they were the three men in the district who knew what Elsie knew. As they strolled they talked. They talked about Henry Poor, the young lawyer in Provincetown, who, unheard of a year ago, had just won the Province-land suit for the Commonwealth. They talked of the new man who was making such a name for himself as head of the Highmarket Academy--a scholar--no taint of politics there. And once or twice, lingering near the end of the Brick Walk, “Well, here’s where _he_ lives,” they temporized. “What do we say?”

But they couldn’t seem quite to say. They had to talk it all over again. Six o’clock passed. They had a snack at Dow’s place, and then it was seven, and then it was eight. Elsie Snow wasn’t the woman to wait forever. It was in the drug store, where they had stopped for cigars, that she brought them to earth.

“Captain Slocum, as I live! And _Mr._ Byram! And--_not_ Senator _Bates_! Well, I declare, who’d have thought to find _you_ drifting around our little town, and without a soul to manage for you? I give you my word----”

She gave them her word it was an outrage, and that even if there wasn’t a committee of welcome, there was a home that would be honored by their presence, and a fresh lemon layer-cake, and a drop of rhubarb wine, put down the year she and Tansy were married. And Tansy _would_ be tickled.

It seemed providential; seemed to help to clear their minds. When they had arrived, most easily, most pleasantly, at the foot of the Snow steps, they slackened pace and let their hostess go on in ahead.

She made it simple for them. “I’ll run on and see Tansy’s fit to be looked at; he’s that much of a home body, he’s probably in slippers now.”

“I guess, Mrs. Snow,” the Senator called after her, spokesman for the three, “I guess you can tell Snow _we’ll_ be tickled to see _him_.”

All the woman could think, and that over and over, was, “This is the greatest day in Urkey’s history.”

Tansy, hearing voices, was half-way upstairs. She bustled him up the other half, the news on her tongue, but then it was too enormous to tell.

“Get into your blacks, and _hurry_,” she bade him; “there’s company.”

As she turned and swept downstairs again to put the company at its ease with ash-trays and cake and rhubarb wine, the chosen of fortune felt along the wall for the chamber door; with a sigh. Why wouldn’t people let him be?

Once inside, he started toward the window, of habit a quarter-century old. Then he remembered he was to hurry. Company. Who? Why had there been that note in her voice? Perhaps at last it was somebody about the autumn meeting and the Selectmanship. Oh, Tansy knew. He never let on, but he wasn’t a fool And he wanted it--as he’d never wanted anything. Why? For the name? Yes, in a way. More than anything in life, he wanted to be able to go to that window and throw back the taunt of that leering eye of light.

“Yah! Take a look at me--the man that’s trusted above all others! Selectman! The biggest man in this island and this town! You, and your ‘moth-millers,’ your dirty, filthy nobodies, look at me! Yah!”

But he had been told to hurry. In that funny way--hurry! It was the Selectmanship! As good as done already. Because he had been an upright citizen and an honest man. Here he was at the window, after all.

It wasn’t a “Yah!” It wasn’t a sound, nothing formed, just a formless outlashing of a life that was tired in secret; secretly, prematurely old. Then, as he looked again, he lifted a hand and drew it across his eyes.

“Fog coming in. Won’t have much of a moonlight sail, that crowd.”

He removed his hand and stared. There was no fog. The sky was as clear as glass and full of stars. He put his other hand on the bedpost. The bedpost was solid, anyway.

“Good God! What’s--wh-what’s happened? What’s wrong?”

Elsie couldn’t keep them occupied forever, even with cake and rhubarb wine. Minutes are minutes to such men. When fifteen had passed, and Slocum had looked at his watch twice, she went to the stairs and called. Then, laughing, “What would you do with such a man?” she marched up to find him. The bedroom was dark, and he wasn’t there. She went to the spare chamber, to the west chamber, down the back way to the kitchen. She returned to their bedroom; he _must_ be there.

She felt on the bed, the chair; she stood staring out of the window.

She shut her eyes and opened them again. A curious uneasiness, having nothing to do with the company downstairs, seemed to lay hold of her.

“Fog,” she said to herself.

She turned around. What was the matter with this room tonight? Why was everything so--so--so wrong--so lost--so funny? She touched the bedpost. It was solid enough. She glanced toward the window again.

She laughed. She saw what was wrong, and it was ridiculous. For two dozen years, without knowing it, she had depended on seeing a light there when the weather was clear. When it was thick, there was no light; no light, it must be thick. And here it was clear, and no light. Absurd, but it had given her the jumps.

That shows what habit is.

Rid of the spell, she remembered what she was about. Her lips whiter and whiter with anger, running on frantic tip-toe, she searched the house.

Coming through the parlor she was all cheer. “Tansy’ll be down directly,” she promised them, and, slipping out of the door, she was gone.

Time passed. Once or twice they heard a voice calling “Tansy! Tansy!” off in the distance, among the houses and lanes.

They got to talking. “You can’t tell me this fellow Poor hasn’t made a big impression, especially down-Cape.” “Yes, but he’s a lawyer, and that means politician to lots of people. Now this man McDowell over at the Academy----”

When Mrs. Snow reappeared it was awkward. They didn’t want to seem to run, but there was a man Byram ought to see, and there was the boat.

They got out backward, Slocum saying: “We’re right sorry not to have seen Snow,” and the old Senator adding a word of kindness: “The talk’s been up our way that your husband’s slated for the next Selectman over here. I’m glad of that; he ought to make a good one, from all I hear.”

Elsie stood staring at the closed door when they were gone.

“Selectman!” she whispered. “_Selectman!_”

All the poison of all the years came pouring out. “I’ll _see_ him Selectman! I’d kill myself first! He shall stay a stick till the day of his death, he shall. A dumb, stupid stick--stick-in-the-mud! _Ohhhh!_”

In the kitchen of the house on the Stone Fold they were playing pachisi down on the floor. The board was an old one, held together with court-plaster; most of the men were buttons, and there were only two dice left. Despite these defects, however; despite the two youngest, two babies, creeping in continually and grabbing and getting slapped; and despite the paralytic old shepherd in the chair behind the towel rack, who wanted attending to now and then--despite these handicaps they played with a quiet concentration, watching each the moves of all the others, alert for cheating, a gamin shrewdness in the eyes narrowed under the forelocks of tangled hair. It was an old game with them; yet tonight there was something new about it; as new as though it had been another game altogether, or the same game transported to heaven, where all is light.

“Better’n that old lantern!”

“Better’n two lanterns!”

“Better’n _ten_ lanterns!”

So, from time to time, between moves, carried away afresh by realization, they joined and gloated.

“Better’n a _hundred_ lanterns!”

The dogs were barking outside. An old one from under the stove sniffed toward the door, bristling. The players paid no attention, but the grandfather began to screech at the top of his lungs: “Shan’t have it! Shan’t! Ain’t nobody no decency? With _her_ there? Etta, you tell ’em go way. It’s an unholy sin--comin’ round a night like tonight--that’s what it is! Etta!”

“Shut your face!” Etta threw at him as, without haste, she got up from the floor. She was a woman of twenty-odd, the mother of one of the infants underfoot. “Remember, you, it’s my next move!” she threatened the others; then again to the old man: “Won’t you shut up, f’ gracious sake!” and finally to the door: “Well, well, ’tain’t locked, is it? _Come in!_”

The door opened. Those on the floor sat up straight. Etta retreated a step, taken aback to see a stranger.

“What d’y’ want?” she muttered.

The man kept standing there, staring at her; staring at her squat, strong-muscled figure, her lowering face, her hair, thick and matted about her head, the color of unwashed brown sheep. She didn’t like it.

“Who are ye, and what d’y’ want? Y’ dumb?”

But the old shepherd began to screech now: “_I_ know ’im! I seen ’im many’s the time over to the village. I see ye, Mr. Snow. I know ye well, Banker Snow. Well, I vow! Draw out a chair for Mr. Snow, Etta. Florry! Frank! Scabby! What a parcel o’ dummies! Git a chair for Banker Snow.”

“What d’y’ want?” Etta persisted, unmoved.

Snow lifted a hand and passed it down over his face, which looked drawn and moist. Like a man talking in his sleep, he asked: “What’s wrong with Donna?”

That seemed to loosen all tongues at once. The kitchen was as full of voices, of a sudden, as it was of the yellow glare.

“Donna’s dead.”

“Donna’s in there; wanta see ’er?”

“Ma went sick and she got worse and died off.”

“Donna ain’t boss no longer, she ain’t.”

“We got the lamp down.”

“We gone and got the lamp on ’er now, for _all_ ’er.”

“At last we got the lamp.”

Snow seemed to see the lamp for the first time. Like a man walking in his sleep he went to look at it. It was worth looking at. It stood on its own stand, a good four feet high; its finely swelled reservoir had variegated chasings of brass and nickel all over it; it had an extra-size chimney without a nick, and two wicks, one within the other. A lamp for any parlor in the world. All the parts that could be rubbed were as bright as a new one in the store. It had been looked after, like new; the price-tag, even, had never been taken off. It hung from the stem of the regulator, and the mark was still legible on it amongst the spotting of flies. Tansy read it.

“$6.”

Some folks have a God of Mercy. And some have a terrible God.

FOOTNOTES:

[16] Copyright, 1925, by The Pictorial Review Company. Copyright, 1926, by Wilbur Daniel Steele.

THE HOME TOWN[17]

By MILTON WALDMAN

(From _The London Mercury_)

High, high up in the spire of a New York office building (higher than the forty storeys which is the maximum that the foreigner’s imagination, even when abetted by observation, seems able to compass) sat a depressed and lonely little man. He was lonely because he was alone, and unaccustomed to so being; his present occupation was to discover why he was depressed.

The little man was a very important person. On the door by which one entered one might read in reverse, “Powell, Prescot and Shipton, Publicity and Advertising Engineers. Henry J. Powell, Pres.” Though the letters appeared black through the frosted pane, on the other side they were bright gold. If, after entering one looked over Mr. Powell’s head through the window beyond, where the streets and roofs of New York extended to the south, one saw a few of the things for which he was celebrated. Not many hundred yards out of that window is the famous _Lesson in Economy_, the masterpiece commissioned by the Bungalow Savings and Trust Company. It is an animated electric sign, which at night shows the reception of depositors’ money at a window of the bank, its passage to a huge transparent safe wherein the piles of currency and checks undergo a metamorphosis into bricks, lumber, bathtubs, and shrubbery, and fly away to a garden spot in the suburbs to arrange themselves into neat little bungalows of an exact pattern with rows of neighbours of similar origin. At the conclusion of the performance, which requires about three minutes, all lights go out save those in the most recent bungalow, on the steps of which are seen a man, a woman, a small boy and a dog, above the ruby caption “You can Do This Too!”

A quarter of a mile further on is visible the radiantly coloured _tableau vivant_ of the Searchlight Stores, entitled _Nothing Too Good for Milady_, which, around the charming figure of a modish young woman, exhibits, in smaller pictures, the Searchlight’s myrmidons stalking tigers, leopards and cobras’ skins in the jungles of India, ostriches’ feathers in the deserts of Africa, caterpillars’ skeins in a sleepy garden in Japan; one beholds the pearl divers in the shimmering waters of the Orient, and chained gangs of Kaffirs plucking diamonds out of the obdurate rock in Rhodesia. But a few steps further, on the other side of the street, is the striking _Don’t Be Miserable When Enjoying Yourself_, which presents an invalid and her nurse contentedly reading novels while being wafted over the worst of roads in a monotone motor, whilst on a parallel and greatly superior road a competing car and its occupants are being gradually disintegrated. The editor of a magazine for which Mr. Powell had once written an autobiographical article had presented his contributor as “The Monarch of the Upper Reaches of American Cities,” a just, but inadequate tribute to his manifold

## activities.

For Mr. Powell was more than a mere creator of striking advertisement displays. He was, in his way, a philosopher, and in the modern sense a poet as well. In the article referred to he expounds the philosophy of publicity as it has never been done before. He demonstrates clearly and succinctly that publicity, like all the best poetry, is a form of self-expression; only the advertiser, instead of informing the reader of the state of his private feelings, often an awkward affair to the latter, or proclaiming the beauty of Nature’s handiwork, which the public is well able to observe and judge for itself, reveals the merit of the thing which his (the advertiser’s) creative urge, and perhaps Fate, have set him to producing. Publicity thus redounds to the common weal in two ways: by holding the advertiser to a high standard and by elevating the taste of the public to a level which it could never attain without the explanatory counsels of the expert makers of the things the public required. For example, the manufacturer of rubber heels, by illustrating to the pedestrian reader the advantages of his conception, makes a promise, sets for himself an ideal which it is both his duty and pleasure to live up to; while the pedestrian, if not thus made aware of the maker’s ideal, would either be sapping his vitality by continuing to bustle about on leather heels, or his purse, by ignorantly satisfying himself with inferior rubber ones. The article concludes:

The world can’t _guess_ the work you’ve done, ’Tis _you_ must let it know, ’Twill give you then the prize you’ve won, And, giving it, will glow.

The photograph of the author, which accompanied the article was at first sight disappointing. One anticipated that a man who had done big things would keep his appearance in harmony with his achievements; but instead of the burly shoulders, broad face, square jaw, thin lips and aquiline nose which the reader expected to see, he was confronted with the portrait of a round, stoop-shouldered little man, whose black hair was brushed back from his forehead in Beethoven fashion, whose eyes were deep-set and speculative rather than keen, and whose chin violated all the canons by merely rounding off in a perfunctory way the boyish contours of his cheeks. He wore a black coat of ministerial cut and a flowing black tie. Yet, to those who knew him, Powell’s appearance was the best possible index to his character. They were astounded by his miracles, but stood in awe of his dreams.

Now, for the first time in forty years of activity, he felt lonely and depressed. His success, achieved always in the company of men and by dint of untiring effort, had hitherto left no room for either emotion. There was always something to do, somebody to see, at best and worst some pleasant creative vision to think about. But a week since, business being dull, his associates had departed in a body and gone their separate ways to observe the ritual of Old Home Week. This latter, a ceremony springing jointly from native sentimentality and respect for humble beginnings, requires that the men in the cities who have made their way in the big world should retrace their steps to the towns and villages which have given them birth and join in tribute to its virtues. All the absent are welcome, but the occasion is dedicated rather to the successful than to the prodigal sons.

So Prescot and Shipton and the younger partners, Wynn, Jacobson, Bottinelli, Senkowsky, and the rest took leave, and now, five days later, the head of the firm sat in his studio of gleaming mahogany, leather and brass, perusing their exuberant accounts of the various local festivities. Prescot wrote from a little desert village in the Southwest of a Chamber of Commerce dinner in his honour, of a political conference for the selection of a congressional candidate in which his opinion was deferred to, of being asked to lead the subscription towards a War Memorial in the public square. Wynn, in his best “copy” manner, chronicled a round of rustic frolics in Minnesota. Bottinelli sent him a clipping from a newspaper in a Southern California town, which related the installation of a stained glass window in the church where the young Italian had been christened and in which he now made the dedicatory address. And so on, each in his turn contributing to his chief’s forlorn sense of being out of it all. He had few friends besides associates, and they were absent on similar missions, as he knew from a week of solitary luncheons and dinners. It was a dreadful thing, he reflected, for a man to have no interests outside his profession. These others had something to carry them on, to look forward to. It made life more complete, more harmonious, to have the roots of one’s aspirations in one’s beginnings, to wish to honour one’s past by means of one’s future.

He looked back and recalled the early years from which his manhood had so completely divorced itself. Born in a village in southeastern England, he had emigrated with his father, long since dead, to New York. Many other images now intervened between himself and the one he was trying to reconstruct, the dormant blur of red roofs and green fields which was Edginden as he had last seen it. Gradually the focus became clearer and he saw a valley and two intersecting roads which wound their yellow lengths rapidly away over the surrounding hills and disappeared. At their intersection was a gray church steeple, a few shops clustered in two rows on the north-and-south road, some grey, some yellow, some burnt red, a few timbered or brick houses more openly spaced, then the fields beyond, with the white wall or tiled gable of a farmhouse revealed through the trees--old, old trees, sycamores, tall oaks, chestnuts in full white bloom; he wondered what an Old Home Week would be like in Edginden.

He doubted that it would be a success. Very few of Edginden’s sons went away. Those that did seldom came back, never for the purpose of paying a tribute of sentiment to their birthplace. Besides, there was little that Edginden wanted, very little indeed. It grumbled extensively, but seemed only in need of those things which Providence alone could supply. He tried to picture himself returning to join with other absent ones in receiving welcome and admiration, in dispensing bounty of cheer and money. He found that he could not even recall the faces of any absent ones, or in fact of any one likely to be still alive. Of what good----