Part 13

He was too numb with incredulity to find any expression until he heard that awfulest sound that ever grates the human ear--the first shovelful of clods rattling on a coffin. Then he understood--then he woke. When he saw the muddy spade spill dirt hideously above her lips, her cheeks, her brow, and the little bundle of futile flesh she cuddled with a rigid arm to a breast of ice--then a cry like the shriek of a falling tree split his throat and he dropped into the grave, sprawling across the casket, beating on its denying door, and sobbing:

"You mustn't go alone, Marthy. I won't let you two go all by yourselves. It's so fur and so dark. I can't live without you and the--the baby. Wait! Wait!"

They dragged him out, and the shovels concluded their venerable task. He was sobbing too loudly to hear them, and the parson was holding him in his arms and patting his back and saying "'Shh! 'Shh!" as if he were a child afraid of the dark.

The sparse company that had gathered to pay the last devoir to the unimportant woman in the box in the ditch felt, most of all, amazement at such an unexpected outburst from so expectable a man as William Rudd. There was much talk about it as the horses galloped home, much talk in every carriage except his and the one that had been hers.

Up to this, the neighbors had taken the whole affair with that splendid philosophy neighbors apply to other people's woes. Mrs. Budd Granger had said to Mrs. Ad. Peck when they met in Bostwick's dry-goods store, at the linen counter:

"Too bad about Martha Rudd, isn't it? Plain little body, but nice. Meant well. Went to church regular. Yes, it's too bad. I don't think they ought to put off the strawb'ry fest'val, though, just for that, do you? Never would be any fun if we stopped for every funeral, would there? Besides, the strawb'ry fest'val's for charity, isn't it?"

The strawberry festival was not put off and the town paper said that "a pleasant time was had by all." Most of the talk was about Will Rudd. The quiet shoe clerk had provided the town with an alarm, an astonishment. He was most astounded of all. As he rode back to the frame house in the swaying carriage he absolutely could not believe that such hopes, such plans, could be shattered with such wanton, wasteful cruelty. That he should have loved, married, and begotten, and that the new-made mother and the new-born child should be struck dead, nullified, returned to clay--such things were too foolish, too spendthrift, to believe.

It is strange that people do not get used to death. It has come to nearly every being anybody has ever heard of; and whom it has not yet reached, it will. Every one of the two billions of us on earth to-day expects it to come to him, and (if he have them) to his son, his daughter, his man-servant, his maid-servant, his ox, his ass, the stranger within his gates, the weeds by the road. Kittens and kingdoms, potato-bugs, plants, and planets--all are on the visiting-list.

Death is the one expectation that never fails to arrive. But it comes always as a new thing, an unheard-of thing, a miracle. It is the commonest word in the lexicon, yet it always reads as a _hapax legomenon_. It is like spring, though so unlike. For who ever believed that May would emerge from March this year? And who ever remembers that violets were suddenly abroad on the hills last April, too?

William Rudd ought to have known better. In a town where funerals were social events dangerously near to diversion, he had been unusually frequent at them. For he belonged to the local chapter of the Knights of Pythias, and when a fellow-member in good standing was forced to resign, William Rudd donned his black suit, his odd-looking cocked hat with the plume, and the anachronous sword, which he carried as one would expect a shoe clerk to carry a sword. The man in the hearse ahead went to no further funerals, stopped paying his dues, made no more noise at the bowling-alley, and ceased to dent his pew cushion. Somebody got his job at once and, after a decent time, somebody else probably got his wife. The man became a remembrance, if that.

Rudd had long realized that people eventually become dead; but he had never realized death. He had been an oblivious child when his mother and father had taken the long trip whose tickets read but one way, and had left him to the grudging care of an uncle with a large enough family.

And now his own family was obliterated. He was again a single man, that familiar thing called a widower. He could not accept it as a fact. He denied his eyes. He was as incredulous as a man who sees a magician play some old vanishing trick. He had seen it, but he could not understand it enough to believe it. When the hack left him at his house he found it emptier than he could have imagined a house could be. Marthy was not on the porch, or in the settin'-room, the dinin'-room, the kitchen, or anywhere up-stairs. The bed was empty, the stove cold. The lamp had not been filled. The cruse of his life was dry, the silver cord loosened, the pitcher broken at the fountain, the wheel broken at the cistern.

As he stumbled about filling the lamp, and covering his hands with kerosene, he wondered what he should do in those long hours between the closing of the shoe-shop of evenings and its opening of mornings. Men behave differently in this recurring situation. Some take to drink, or return to it. Rudd did not like liquor; at least he did not think he would have liked it if he had ever tasted it. Some take to gambling. Rudd did not know big casino from little, though he had once almost acquired a passion for checkers--the give-away game. Some submerge themselves in money-getting. Rudd would not have given up the serene certainty of his little salary for a speculator's chance to clean up a million, or lose his margin.

If only the child had lived, he should have had an industry, an ambition, a use.

Widowers have occasionally hunted consolation with the same sex that sent them grief. Rudd had never known any woman in town as well as he had known Martha, and it had taken him years to find courage to propose to her. The thought of approaching any other woman with intimate intention gave him an ague sweat.

And how was he to think of taking another wife? Even if he had not been so confounded with grief for his helpmeet as to believe her the only woman on earth for him, how could he have accosted another woman when he had only debts for a dowry?

Death is an expensive thing in every phase. The event that robbed Rudd of his wife, his child, his hope, had taken also his companion, his cook, his chambermaid, his washerwoman, the mender of his things; and in their place had left an appalling monument of bills. The only people he had permitted himself to owe money to were the gruesome committee that brought him his grief; the doctor, the druggist, the casket-maker, the sexton, and the dealer in the unreal estate who sold the tiny lots in the sad little town.

His soul was too bruised to grope its way about, but instinct told him that bills must be paid. Instinct automatically set him to work clearing up his accounts. For their sakes he devoted himself to a stricter economy than ever. He engaged meals at Mrs. Judd's boarding-house. He resolved even to rent his home. But, mercifully, there was no one in town to take the place. In economy's name, too, he put away his pipe--for one horrible evening. The next day he remembered how Marthy had sung out, "Why don't you smoke your pipe any more, Will?" and he had answered: "I'd kind o' got out of the habit, Marthy, but I guess I'll git back in." And Lordy, how she laughed! The laughter of the dead--it made a lonely echo in the house.

Gradually he found, as so many dismal castaways have found, that there is a mystic companionship in that weed which has come out of the vegetable world, as the dog from among the animals, to make fellowship with man. Rudd and his pipe were Robinson Crusoe and his man Friday on the desert island of loneliness. They stared out to sea; and imagined.

Remembering how Martha and he used to dream about the child, in the tobacco twilight, and how they planned his future, Rudd's soul learned to follow the pipe smoke out from the porch, over the fence and to disappear beyond the horizons of the town and the sharp definition of the graveyard fence. He became addicted to dreams, habituated to dealing in futurities that could never come to pass.

Being his only luxury on earth, by and by they became his necessities, realities more concrete than the shoes he sold or the board walk he plodded to and from his store.

One Sunday Rudd was present at church when Mr. and Mrs. Budd Granger brought their fourth baby forward to be christened. The infant bawled and choked and kicked its safety-pins loose. Rudd was sure that Eric never would have misbehaved like that. Yet Eric had been denied the sacred rite.

This reminded Rudd how many learned theologians had proved by rigid logic that unbaptized babies are damned forever. He spent days of horror at the frightful possibility, and nights of infernal travel across gridirons where babies flung their blistered hands in vain appeal to far-off mothers. He could not get it from his mind until, one evening, his pipe persuaded him to erect a font in the temple of his imagination.

He mused through all the ritual, and the little frame house seemed to thrill as the vague preacher enounced the sonorous phrase:

"I baptize thee Eric--in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost."

Marthy was there, too, of course, but it was the father that held the baby. And the child did not wince when the pastor's fingers moistened the tiny brow. He just clasped a geranium-petal hand round Rudd's thumb and stared at the sacrament with eyes of more than mortal understanding.

The very next day Mrs. Ad. Peck walked into the store, proud as a peahen. She wanted shoes for her baby. The soles of the old pair were intact, but the stubby toes were protruding.

"He crawls all over the house, Mr. Rudd! And he cut his first tooth to-day, too. Just look at it. Ain't it a beauty?"

In her insensate conceit she pried the child's mouth apart as if he were a pony, to disclose the minute peak of ivory. It was nothing to make such a fuss over, Rudd thought, though he praised it as if it were a snow-capped Fuji-yama.

That night Eric cut two teeth. And Marthy nearly laughed her head off.

Rudd did not talk aloud to the family he had revened from the grave. He had no occult persuasions. He just sat in his rocker and smoked hard and imagined hard. He imagined the lives of his family not only as they might have been, but as they ought to have been. He was like a spectator at a play, mingling belief and make-belief inextricably, knowing it all untrue, yet weeping, laughing, thrilling as if it were the very image of fact.

All mothers and some fathers have a sad little calendar in their hearts' cupboards where they keep track of the things that might have been. "October fifth," they muse. "Why, it's Ned's birthday! He'd have been twenty-one to-day if he'd lived. He'd have voted this year. December twenty-third? Alice would have been coming home from boarding-school to-day if--July fourth? Humph! How Harry loved the fireworks! But he'd be a Senator now and invited to his home town to make a speech in the park to-day if--" If! If!

Everybody must keep some such if-almanac, some such diary of prayers denied. That was all Rudd did; only he wrote it up every evening. He would take from the lavender where he kept them the little things Martha had sewed for the child and the little shoes he had bought. The warm body had never wriggled and laughed in the tiny trousseau, the little shoes had never housed pink toes, but they helped him to pretend until they became to him things outgrown by a living, growing child. He cherished them as all parents cherish the first shoes and the first linens and woolens of their young.

Marthy and Eric Rudd lived just behind the diaphanous curtain of the pipe smoke, or in the nooks of the twilight shadow, or in the heart of the settin'-room stove.

The frame house had no fireplace, and in its lieu he was wont to open the door of the wood-stove, lean forward, elbows on knees, and gaze into the creamy core of the glow where his people moved unharmed and radiant, like the three youths conversing in the fiery furnace.

In the brief period allotted them before bedtime they must needs live fast. The boy grew at an extraordinary rate and in an extraordinary manner, for sometimes Rudd performed for him that feat which God Himself seems not to achieve in His world; he turned back time and brought on yesterday again, or reverted the year before last, as a reaper may pause and return to glean some sheaf overlooked before.

For instance, Eric was already a strapping lad of seven spinning through school at a rate that would have given brain fever to a less-gifted youngster, when, one day, Farmer Stebbins came to the Emporium with a four-year-old chub of a son who ran in ahead of his father, kicked his shoes in opposite directions and yelled, to the great dismay of an old maid in the "Ladies' and Misses' Dept.":

"Hay, mister, gimme pair boots 'ith brass toes!"

The father, after a formulaic pretense of reproving the lad, explained:

"We'll have to excuse him, Rudd; it's his first pair of boots."

Rudd's heart was sore within him, and he was oppressed with guilt. He had never bought Eric his first pair of brass-toed boots! And he a shoe clerk!

So that night Eric had to be reduced several years, brought out of school, and taken to St. Louis. Rudd knew what an epoch-making event this was, and he wanted Eric to select from a larger stock than the meager and out-of-date supply of Kittredge's Emporium--though this admission was only for Rudd's own family. The thumb-screw could not have wrung it from him for the public.

There was a similar mix-up about Eric's first long trousers which Rudd likewise overlooked. He accomplished the Irish miracle of the tight boots. Eric had worn his breeches a long while before he put them on for the first time.

To the outer knowledge of the stranger or the neighbor, William Rudd's employer had all the good luck that was coming to him, and all of Rudd's besides. They were antitheses at every point.

Where Rudd was without ambition, importance, family, or funds, Kittredge was the richest man in town, the man of most impressive family, and easily the leading citizen. People began to talk him up for Congressman, maybe for Senator. He had held all the other conspicuous offices in his church, his bank, his county. You could hardly say that he had ever run for any office; he had just walked up and taken it.

Yet Rudd did not envy him his record or his family. Clay Kittredge had children, real children. The cemetery lodged none of them. Yet one of the girls or boys was always ill or in trouble with somebody; Mrs. Kittredge was forever cautioning her children not to play with Mrs. So-and-so's children and Mrs. So-and-so would return the compliment. The town was fairly torn up with these nursery Guelph and Ghibelline wars.

Rudd compared the wickednesses of other people's children with the perfections of Eric. Sometimes his evil genius whispered a bitter thought that if Eric had lived to enter the world this side of the tobacco smoke, he, too, might have been a complete scoundrel in knee-breeches, instead of the clean-hearted, clear-skinned, studious, truthful little gentleman of light and laughter and love that he was. But Rudd banished the thought.

Eric was never ill, or only ill enough at times to give the parents a little of the rapture of anxiety and of sitting by his bedside holding his hand and brushing his hair back from a hot forehead. Eric never was impolite, or cruel to an animal, or impudent to a teacher, or backward in a class.

And Rudd's wife differed from Kittredge's wife and wives in general--and indeed from the old Martha herself--in staying young and growing more and more beautiful. The old Martha had been too shy and too cognizant of the truth ever to face a camera; and Rudd often regretted that he owned not even a bridal photograph such as the other respectable married folks of Hillsdale had on the wall, or in a crayon enlargement on an uneasy easel. He had no likeness of Martha except that in his heart. But thereby his fancy was unshackled and he was enabled to imagine her sweeter, fairer, every day.

It was the boy alone that grew; the mother, having become perfect, remained stationary in charm like the blessed Greeks in the asphodel-fields of Hades.

About the time Eric Rudd outgrew the public schools of Hillsdale and graduated from the high school with a wonderful oration of his own writing called "Night Brings Out the Stars," Kittredge announced that his eldest son would go to Harvard in the fall. Rudd determined that Eric should go to Yale. He even sent for catalogues. Rudd was appalled to see how much a person had to know before he could even get into college. And then, this nearly omniscient intellect was called a Freshman!

The prices of rooms, of meals, of books, of extra fees, the estimated allowances for clothing and spending-money dazed the poor shoe clerk and nearly sent Eric into business. But, fortunately, the brier pipe came to the rescue with an unexpected legacy from an unsuspected uncle.

The four years of college life were imagined with a good deal of elision and an amount of guesswork that would have amused a janitor. But Rudd and Martha were chiefly interested in the boy's vacations at home, and their own trips to New Haven, and the letters of approval from the professors.

Eric had an athletic career seldom equaled since the days of Hercules. For Eric was a champion tennis-player, hockey-player, baseballist, boxer, swimmer, runner, jumper, shot-putter. And he was the best quoit-thrower in the New Haven town square. Rudd had rather dim notions of some of the games, so that Eric was established both as center rush of the football team and the cockswain in the crew.

He was also a member of all the best fraternities. He was a "Bones" man in his Freshman year, and in his Sophomore year added the other Senior societies. And, of course, he stood at the head of all his classes--though he never condescended to take a single red apple to a professor.

The boy's college life lasted Rudd a thousand and one evenings. It was in beautiful contrast with the career of Kittredge's children, some of whom were forever flunking their examinations, slipping back a year, requiring expensive tutors, acquiring bad habits, and getting into debt. Almost the only joy Kittredge had of them was in telegraphing them money in response to their telegrams for money--they never wrote. Their vacations either sent them scurrying on house parties or other excursions. Or if they came home they were discontented with house and parents. They corrected Kittredge's grammar, though his State accounted him an orator. They corrected Mrs. Kittredge's etiquette, though Hillsdale looked up to her as a social arbitrix.

Kittredge poured a deal of his disappointment into Rudd's ear, because his hard heart was broken and breaking anew every day, and he had to tell somebody. He knew that his old clerk would keep it where he kept all the secrets of his business, but he never knew that Rudd still had a child of his own, forging ahead without failure. Rudd could give comfort, for he had it to spare, and he was empty of envy.

It was a ghastly morning when Kittredge showed Rudd a telegram saying that his eldest son, Thomas, had thrown himself in front of a train because of the discovery that his accounts were wrong. Kittredge had found him a place in a New York bank, but the gambling fever had seized the young fellow. And now he was dead, in his sins, in his shame. Dives cried out to Lazarus:

"It's hell to be a father, Will. It's an awful thing to bring children into the world and try to carry 'em through it. It's not a man's job. It's God's."

At times like these, and when Rudd heard from the tattlers, or read in the printed gossip of the evening paper concerning the multifarious wickednesses of the children of men about the earth, he felt almost glad that his boy had never lived upon so plague-infected a world. But in the soothe of twilight the old pipe persuaded him to a pleasanter view of his boy, alive and always doing the right thing, avoiding the evil.

His motto was, "Eric would have done different." He was sure of that. It was his constant conclusion.

After graduating from an imaginary Yale Eric went to an imaginary law-school in New York City--no less. Then he was admitted to that imaginary bar where a lawyer never defends an unrighteous cause, never loses a case, yet grows rich. And, of course, like every other American boy that dreams or is dreamed of, in good time he had to become President.

Eric lived so exemplary a life, was so busy in virtue, so unblemished of fault, that he could not be overlooked by the managers of the quadrennial national performance, searching with Demosthenes' lantern for a man against whom nothing could be said. They called Eric from private life to be headliner in their vaudeville.

Rudd had watched Kittredge clambering to his success, or rather wallowing to it through a swamp of mud. All the wrong things Kittredge had ever done, and their name was legion, were hurled in his path. His family scandals were dug up by the double handful and splashed in his face. Against his opponent the same methods were used. It was like a race through a marsh; and when Kittredge reached his goal in the Senate he was so muck-bemired, his heart had been so lacerated, the nakedness of his past so exposed, that his laurel seemed more like a wreath of poison ivy. And once mounted on his high post, he was an even better target than when he was on the wing.