The Happy Average

“Well, little old Macochee’s good enough for us, eh, Wade?” they would say.

Marley would not let them be ahead of him in praise of Macochee, and Powell himself softened enough to admit that old Ohio was a pretty good place to have come from.

When they suddenly encountered Carman in the street, Marley flushed with confusion, first for himself and then vicariously for Powell. But there was no escape from a situation that no doubt exaggerated itself to his sensitiveness, and he was soon allowing Carman to hold his hand in his right palm while with the other Carman solicitously held Marley’s left elbow, and transfixed him with that left eye which still refused to react to light and shade.

“Well, how are you?” asked Carman. “How are you, anyway?”

“Oh, I’m all right.”

“Guess you’re glad now I didn’t give you that job, eh?”

Marley could not look at Powell, but he hastened to say:

“Yes, I’m glad, now.”

“Maybe it was for the best,” said Carman.

When they had left him Marley quickly and crudely tried to change the subject, but Powell insisted on saying:

“I want you to know that I’ve always felt like a dog over that.”

“Oh, don’t mention it,” Marley begged. “I was honest when I told Carman I was glad it turned out as it did.”

“Yes,” said Powell, “I guess it was all for the best.”

To Marley’s relief they dropped the matter then, and went over to Con’s Corner. There Powell lighted a cigar, and Marley could not resist asking for a brand of cigarettes, the kind that Weston smoked, though he knew that Con would not have them. He felt mean about it afterward, but he could not forego some of the petty distinctions of living in a city and he indulged a little revenge toward the people who had deserted him in what had seemed to him his need, and now, in what seemed to them his prosperity, were so ready to rally to him. Marley went home at noon feeling that his triumph had been almost as great as if he had come home in a private car.

His triumph soon was at an end; they came to the afternoon of the day when Marley was to return to Chicago. It was a golden day, with a sun shining out of a sky without clouds, and yet a delicious breeze blew out of the little hills. Marley and Lavinia walked out the white and dusty pike that made the road to Mingo. They walked slowly along the edge of the road, in silence, under the sadness of the parting that was before them. They longed ineffably that the moments might be stayed; somehow they felt they might be stayed by their silence.

But when they had ascended the hill and stood beside the old oak-tree which grew by the road, they looked out across the valley of the Mad River, miles and miles away—across fields now golden with the wheat, or green with the rustling corn that glinted in the sun, off and away to the trees that became vague and dim in the hazy distance. Back whence they had come lay Macochee; they could see the tower of the Court House, the red spire of the Methodist church, the gleam of the sun on some great window in the roof of the car-shops; on the other side of town crawled a train, trailing its smoke behind it. Marley looked at Lavinia—she was leaning against the tree, and as he looked he saw that her blue eyes were filling slowly with tears.

“Isn’t it beautiful!” he said, looking away from her to the simple scenery of Ohio.

“Do you remember that day?”

“When we picked out our farm—where was it?”

“Wasn’t it over there?”

“Yes,” he said. “We could come and live here when we are old.” He knew he was but seeking to console himself for what now could not be. “And there is the old town,” he said. “It looks beautiful from here, nestling among those trees, it seems peaceful, and calm, and simple. But it is different when you are in it; for there are gossip and envy and spite, and I can never quite forgive it because it had no place for me. Well,” he went on defiantly, in the relief he had been able to make for himself out of his immature reading of Macochee’s character; “I don’t need it any more; it is little and narrow and provincial, and the real life is to be lived out in the larger world. It’s a hard fight, but it’s worth it.”

“Don’t you regret leaving it?” asked Lavinia, in a voice that was tenderer than Marley had ever known it. Marley looked at Macochee and then he looked at her.

“I regret leaving it, dear heart, because I must leave you behind in it.”

“Would you never care to come back if it were not for me?” she asked.

“I might,” he admitted, “when we are old. We could come back here then and settle down on our farm over there.” He pointed.

“I’m half-afraid of the city,” Lavinia said.

He turned and took her in his arms.

“Dearest,” he said, “you must not say that; for the next time I come it will be to take you away from Macochee.”

“Will it?” she whispered.

“Yes; and it can’t be long now. How we have had to wait!”

“Yes,” she repeated, “how we have had to wait!”

CHAPTER XXXII

AT LAST

Marley, in that compensatory pleasure we find in difficulties in the retrospect, was afterward fond of saying that if he had waited until he had the money and the position to warrant his marrying, he never would have married at all.

Just what moved him to take the decisive step he did he would have found it hard to tell. He had grown accustomed to the life he was living in Chicago, he had succumbed, as it were, to his environment; he no longer regretted Macochee and he found a satisfaction in declaring, whenever he had the chance, that the kindest thing the town had ever done for him was to refuse him a place within its borders. As he looked back at all the plans he had formed, he marveled at their number, but he marveled more that he should have had such regret in the failure of all of them; he was glad now that they had failed; had any one of them succeeded his life would have been diverted into other channels, and it gave him a kind of fear when he tried to imagine his life in those other channels; he could see himself in those relations only as some other identity, and it gave him a gruesome feeling to do this.

Not that he was satisfied with himself or his surroundings; he did not like newspaper work, and he did not like Chicago very well. He was determined to get out of newspaper work at any rate, and while he could not yet clearly see a way of getting into the law, he had a calm assurance that he would do it, in the end. Weston sustained him in this hope by saying:

“A man can’t control circumstances; they control him; but sometimes he can dodge them, and, after all, every sincere prayer is answered.”

During the winter that followed the summer when he had paid his visit to his home he worked hard at the law, spending in study the hours the other men on his newspaper spent in their dissipations, and in the spring he stole away almost secretly to Springfield, took the examination, and was admitted to the bar.

After it was done, it seemed but a little thing; he wrote Lavinia and he wrote Wade Powell, knowing the interest Powell would have in the fact, that he felt no different now as a lawyer than he had when he was merely a layman. Weston had spent the winter over the book he was writing; in the spring he found a publisher, and The Clutch of Circumstance was given to the world. Marley thought it a wonderful book, and so did Lavinia, and while it made but little noise in the world, Weston said it had done better than he expected—so well, in fact, that he was going to give up newspaper work, and give his attention wholly to writing another book.

It was a shock to Marley when Weston told him they would have to give up their apartment; it was a break in the life to which he had grown accustomed. But it seemed a time of change, and it was then he wrote Lavinia that he thought it useless for them to wait any longer; he thought they might as well be married then as at any time.

Unconsciously, perhaps, he wrote this letter as if he and not she had been waiting, and if he had known the state of the sensitive public opinion in Macochee, he might have felt himself justified in the attitude. Ever since his visit there the summer before his apparent prosperity had given the sentiment of the town an impetus in his favor; the people had turned their criticism toward Lavinia; for months it was a common expression that it was a shame she was keeping Marley waiting so long. They would nod in a sinister way, and insinuate the worldliest of motives; it was generally under stood that she was waiting for Marley to make a fortune, and this, they held, was demanding too much. She had withdrawn utterly from the society of Macochee; and she had not gone to one of the balls Lawrence had arranged that winter at the Odd Fellows’ Hall; her position, outwardly at least, was as isolated as that of the Misses Cramer, the fragile and transparent old maids who lived so many years in their house sheltered by the row of cedars behind the High School grounds.

When Judge Blair received the formal letter in which Marley told him he had asked Lavinia to name the day and requested his approval, the judge gave his consent with a promptness that surprised him almost as much as it did Mrs. Blair and Lavinia. He justified his inconsistency to his wife, in order perhaps, the more thoroughly to justify it to himself, by saying that he had long felt Lavinia’s position keenly.

“If the strain has been to her anything like what it has been to me,” he said to his wife, “they could not have endured it much longer.”

“It will be lonely here without her,” said Mrs. Blair, pensively.

“Yes,” the judge assented, and then after a moment’s thought he added:

“But we can now begin to worry about Connie.”

“Don’t you dare mention that, William!” said Mrs. Blair, almost viciously. “She mustn’t begin to think of such a thing.”

“But she’s in long dresses now, and she seems to walk home more and more slowly every night with those boys from the High School.”

“Well, I don’t propose to go through such an experience as we have had for these last three years, not right away, at any rate.”

The judge tried to laugh, as he said:

“Well, I’ll turn Connie over to you; I’m going to have a little peace now.”

The judge complained that he could find no peace, however, anywhere, so great was the preparation that raged thereafter in the house, driving him with his book and cigar from place to place. Mrs. Blair and Lavinia and Connie were in fine excitement over the gowns that were being fashioned, and Miss Ryan lived at the Blairs’ for weeks, while in every room there were billowy clouds of white garments, and threads and ravelings over all the floors.

Meanwhile it was understood that Marley, too, was making arrangements in Chicago. He had leased a small flat on the South Side, and had arranged with Weston to remove most of the furniture of their apartment into the new home where the lovers were to set up housekeeping. Mrs. Marley was to spare them some of the things from her home, and Mrs. Blair, from time to time, designated certain articles which she was willing to devote to the cause. Chad’s contribution was merely a suggestion; he said they could depend on the wedding presents to fill up the gaps.

They were married in the middle of June. The ceremony was pronounced by Doctor Marley in the parlor of the Blair home; everybody bore up well until, under the stress of his emotion, the doctor’s voice broke, and then Mrs. Blair wept and the judge wiped his eyes and his reddened, anguished face. Mrs. Marley cried too, though every one tried to comfort her with the assurance that she was not losing a son, but gaining a daughter. Connie, in her first long gown, acted as maid for her sister, but it was evident that she was desperately impressed by the young author of The Clutch of Circumstance, who had come on from Chicago to act as groomsman.

The company that had been invited was as much impressed by Weston as Connie was; they had never had an author in Macochee before, and though most of them had such confused notions of Weston’s performances in literature that they grew cold with fear when they talked with him, they nevertheless braved it out for the sake of an experience they could boast of afterward. Most of them took refuge in a discussion of Marley’s achievements with him, and they gave him the unflattering impression that Marley’s work was as important as his own.

Many of them had plots they wished him to use in his stories, others wished to know if he took his characters from real life; and Mrs. Carter was of such an acuteness that she identified Marley as his hero, though Weston had tried to keep his book from having any hero. George Halliday, however, was able to save the day; he could discriminate; he had read The Clutch of Circumstance, having borrowed Lavinia’s autograph copy, and he told Weston that while he did not go in for realism, because it was too photographic, too materialistic and lacked personality, he nevertheless had enjoyed a pleasant half-hour with the volume, and considered it not half-bad.

This conversation was held in plain hearing of all in that difficult moment after the ceremony, when the relatives of the bride had solemnly kissed her, and her most intimate friends, like Mayme Carter, had wept on her neck. The people were standing helplessly about; Marley noticed Wade Powell, as dignified as a clergyman, in his black garments and white tie standing apart with his wife.

Marley had never seen Mrs. Powell before, but he recalled in a flash that she filled his conception of her; and this delicate, sensitive little face completed the picture he remembered long ago to have formed. When he saw Powell standing there, his hands behind him, unequal to the ordeal of being entertained in Judge Blair’s house, bowing stiffly and forcing a smile on the few occasions when he was spoken to or thought he was being spoken to, he had a wish to go to him, but he could not then leave his place by Lavinia’s side. He was glad a moment later when he saw his father and Wade Powell in conversation, and as he and Lavinia passed them on their way out to the dining-room he heard his father say:

“Well, I’ll tell you, Mr. Powell, when I was young my creed was founded on the fact of sin in man; but now that I am old, I find it more and more founded on the fact of the good that is in all of them.”

When the supper was over, Lawrence gave the cheer that every one wished to see come to the wedding by clearing the parlor for a dance, and Marley was glad that his position now permitted him to refrain from dancing with a valid excuse.

Marley thought that Lavinia never looked so pretty as she did when she stood at the head of the stairs after she had donned her blue traveling gown, drawing on her gloves and waiting for the carriage that was to drive them to the station. Her face was rosy in the light that filled the house, and she met his eyes with a fond, contented glance.

“Are you happy?” he asked.

“Don’t you see?” she said, looking up at him.

“And will you be happy in that big city, away from every one you know, as the wife of a newspaper man?”

“I shall be happy anywhere with you.”

“Our dreams are coming true,” Marley said, “after a fashion. And yet not just as we dreamed them, after all.”

“In all the essentials they are, aren’t they?”

“Yes, but you know our dream was that I was to practise law.”

“Well, we still have that dream.”

“Yes, we still have it; maybe it will come true. Weston says that our dreams are as much realities in our lives as anything else.”

THE END