The Happy Average

The judge stirred uneasily in his chair.

“Oh!” she cried, rigidly clenching her little fists. “What have you done! You have sent him away!”

“Come here, my daughter,” he said.

Lavinia moved toward him, halting each moment, then taking a few nervous steps forward. At last she stood before him, challenging, defiant.

“Sit down, Lavinia, and listen,” implored the judge.

“You have sent him away!” she repeated. “You were harsh and cruel and unkind to him!”

“Lavinia!” cried the judge, flushing with the anger parents call by different names. There was now a peremptory quality in his tone. But the girl did not heed him.

“Oh, how could you!” she went on, “how could you! Think how you must have wounded him! You not only reproached him with being poor, but you discouraged him as to his prospects! Do you think I cared for that? Do you think I couldn’t have waited? Do you think I can’t wait anyhow? What had you when you proposed to mama? You were poor—you had no prospects; you had no more right—”

“Lavinia! Lavinia!” the judge commanded, grasping the arms of his chair in an effort to rise. “You are beside yourself! You don’t know what you are saying!”

“And you pretended to be doing it all for my happiness, too! Oh! oh! oh!” Her anger vented itself impotently in these exclamations, and then her mother, white and alarmed, appeared in the doorway behind her.

“Lavinia,” she said quietly.

The girl trembled violently, then whirled about, pressed her hands to her face, and ran in, brushing by her mother in the doorway. Mrs. Blair glanced after her irresolutely. Then she went to her husband.

“Be calm, dear,” she said.

The judge sank back in his chair and looked at her in amazement.

“What has happened?” She drew the empty chair up and sat down in it. She leaned forward and took one of his hands, and pressed it between both of her own. She waited for the judge to speak.

“I hardly know,” he began. “I never heard Lavinia break out so.”

“You must remember how excited and overwrought she is,” Mrs. Blair exclaimed. “You must make allowances.”

“I didn’t know the girl had such spirit,” he continued.

Mrs. Blair smiled rather wanly, and stroked her husband’s hand. It was very cold and moist, and it trembled.

“I had no idea it was so serious,” he went on, as if summing up the catalogue of his surprises.

“Tell me how it all came about,” said Mrs. Blair.

“Marley was here, first,” the judge began. He had to pause, for he seemed to find it difficult to catch his breath. “It was a great surprise to me; it was very painful.”

The judge withdrew his hand and wiped his brow. Then he gazed again as he had done before, across the street. Mrs. Blair, though eying him closely and with concern, waited patiently.

“I didn’t wish to wound him,” the judge resumed, speaking as much to himself as to her. “I hope I said nothing harsh; he really was quite manly about it.”

He paused again.

“I presume I may have seemed cold, unfeeling, unsympathetic,” he went on; and then as if he needed to reassure and justify himself, he added, “but of course it was impossible, utterly impossible.”

After another pause, he drew a deep breath, and as if he had already outlined his whole interview with Marley, continued:

“And then Lavinia appeared; she must have heard it all, standing there in the hall.”

The judge leaned heavily against the back of his big chair; his face was drawn, his wrinkles were deeper than they had been, and he wore an aspect of weariness and pain. His form, too, seemed to have shrunk, and he sat there in an almost helpless mass, limp and inert.

“I am only afraid, dear,” Mrs. Blair said quietly, “that we have taken this thing too seriously.”

“Possibly,” he said. “But it is serious, very serious. I don’t know what is to be done.”

“We must have patience,” Mrs. Blair counseled. “It will require all our delicacy and tact, now.”

“Perhaps you had better go in to her,” the judge said presently. “Poor little girl; she is passing through the deep waters. And I tried to act only for her interest and happiness.”

Mrs. Blair arose.

“She will see that, dear, in time.”

“I hope so,” said the judge. Mrs. Blair went up to Lavinia’s room, and listened for a moment at the closed door. She heard a voice, low and indistinct, but she knew it for the voice of Connie, and she could tell from its tone that the little girl was trying in her way to comfort and console her sister. So she stepped away, silently, almost stealthily, going on tiptoe.

The judge sat on the veranda all the afternoon. He scarcely moved, and never once did he pick up the Sunday paper. Now and then he bowed, in his dignified way, to some acquaintance passing in the street. The Chenowiths came out on to their front porch, evidently hot and stupefied from their Sunday afternoon naps and ready now for the cool refreshment of the evening breeze they could usually rely on in Macochee with the coming of the evening. The judge bowed to them, and he tried to put into his bow an indolent unconcern, lest the Chenowiths should penetrate his manner and discover the trouble that lay on his heart. The Chenowiths had gone to the end of their porch, and the judge could hear their laughter. He thought it strange and unnatural that any one should laugh.

He decided that he would review this whole affair of Lavinia’s love calmly and judicially. He went back to the beginning of Marley’s visit, trying to see wherein he himself had been in the wrong, then he went over the hot scene with Lavinia. He could not recover from his surprise at this; that Lavinia, who was usually so gentle, so mild, so unselfish, should have given way to such anger was incomprehensible. He had always said that she had her mother’s disposition. He could see her, all the time, distinctly, as she had stood there, in a rage he had never known her to indulge before, and yet, as he looked at the image of her that was in his mind, and recalled certain expressions, certain attitudes, certain tones of voice, it came over him all at once that she was exactly as her mother had been at her age, though he could not reconcile Lavinia’s mood with the resemblance. Then he went back to his own days of courtship, with their emotions, their uncertainties, their doubts and illusions. They seemed a long way off.

He was trying to think calmly and logically, but he found that he could not then control his mind, for suddenly he saw Lavinia as a little girl, with her mother kneeling before her, shaking out and straightening her starched frock. And with this thought came the revelation, sudden, irresistible, that Lavinia was no longer a child as, with the habit of the happy years, he had thought of her, up to that very afternoon, in fact, until an hour ago, and he bowed before the changes that hour had wrought. He accepted the conviction now that he himself had grown old. He forgot his purpose to probe to its first cause this unhappiness that had come to him; he saw that what he mourned was the loss of a child, the loss of his own youth.

He glanced across at the Chenowiths again, and they seemed remote from him, of another generation in fact, though but a few moments before he had looked on them as contemporaries. And then suddenly there came to him the fear that Mr. Chenowith might run over to chat with him, as was his habit, and the judge hastily rose, and almost surreptitiously went off the end of the porch and around into the side yard. Under the new impression of age that he had grown into, he walked slowly, with a senile stoop, and dragged his feet as he went. He wandered about in the yard for a long while, looking at the shrubs and bushes and trees he had planted himself so long ago, when he was young. It occurred to him that here in this garden he would potter around, and pass his declining years.

He remained in the yard until his wife came to call him in to the supper she had prepared, in the Sunday evening absence of the hired girl, and with an effort he brought himself back from the future to the present.

“How is she?”

“Oh, she’s all right,” said Mrs. Blair, in her usual cheery tone. “I didn’t go to her, I thought it best to leave her alone.”

The judge looked at his wife, with her rosy face, and her full figure still youthful in the simple summer gown she wore. He looked at her curiously, wondering why it was she seemed so young; a width of years seemed all at once to separate them. Mrs. Blair noted this look of her husband’s. She noted it with pity for him; he looked older to her.

“I think it would be nice for you to take Lavinia with you when you go to Put-in-Bay to the Bar Association meeting,” she said.

It seemed strange and anomalous to Judge Blair that he should still be attending Bar Association meetings.

“I’ll see,” he said; and then he qualified, “if I go.”

“If you go?” his wife exclaimed. “Why, you’re down for a paper!”

“So I am,” said the judge.

They turned toward the house, and the judge took his wife’s arm, leaning rather heavily on it.

“Will!” she said, after they had gone a few steps in this fashion. “What is the matter with you! You walk like an old man!”

She shook his arm off, and said:

“Hurry up now. The coffee will be getting cold.”

Indoors, they passed Connie going through the hall; she had just come down the stairs, and the sight of her girlish figure, and her short skirts just sweeping the tops of her shoes, gladdened the judge’s heart, and he smiled. He could rely on Connie, anyway, for sympathy. But the girl gave him a sharp reproachful stare from her dark eyes, and the judge felt utterly deserted.

Lavinia did not come down to her supper, though her mother, knowing she would want it later, kept the coffee warm on the back of the kitchen stove. Chad had gone away with one of the Weston boys. So the three, the judge, Mrs. Blair and Connie, ate their supper alone.

After supper, Mrs. Blair and Connie went immediately to Lavinia and the judge had a sense of exclusion from the mysteries that were enacting up there, an exclusion that seemed to proceed from his own culpability. He went to his library and tried to read, but he could only sit with his head in his hand, and stare before him. But finally he was aroused from his reveries by a stir in the hall, and glancing up he saw Lavinia in the door. She came straight to him, and said:

“Forgive me, papa, if I was rude and unkind.”

He seized her in his arms, hugging her head against his shoulders, and he said again and again, while stroking her hair clumsily:

“My little girl! My little girl!”

CHAPTER X

PUT-IN-BAY

The little steamer for the islands rolled out of Sandusky Bay with Lavinia sitting by the forward rail. She had yielded to her father’s wishes with an easy complaisance that made him suspicious, and yet, as he stood solicitously by, he was persistent in his determination to realize for her all the delights he had so extravagantly predicted for the journey. He tried to rouse her interest by pointing out Johnson’s Island, but it did not possess for her, as the place where the Confederate prisoners were confined during the war, the interest an old soldier was able to discover in it, and though he tried his best, with an effort at entertainment that was well-nigh pathetic, she only smiled wanly.

He left her, after a while, her chin in her hands, looking over into the light green waters, watching the curve of the waves the steamer tossed away from its sharp prow. The lake was in one of its most smiling and happy moods, though they were then at a point where storms easily lash its shallow depths into billows that might satisfy the rage of the North Atlantic. The lighthouse on the rocks at Marblehead had a fascination for Lavinia; it seemed waiting for her humor, and she watched it until the steamer had gone far on toward Kelly’s Island, and left the lighthouse behind, a white spot gleaming in the sun.

When they entered the little archipelago of the Wine Islands, with their waters a deeper green than those out in the lake and overcast in strange ways by mysterious shadows and cool weird reflections of the green of the islands all about, Judge Blair came back to her and asked if she had been seasick and how she had enjoyed the little journey. As she met him with her strange perplexing smile, he began to doubt her again; something assured him that she still clung to her purpose of love, and he found himself almost wishing that she had kept to her defiant temper of the Sunday afternoon that now seemed so far away.

When they had reached Put-in-Bay and bounded on the trolley across the island to the huge hotel, they had their dinner and Lavinia perplexed the judge further by retiring to her room. She said she would rest, though she had persisted all the morning that she was not tired.

As soon as she had closed the door on her father, leaving him in doubt and confusion, she began a long letter to Marley. She described her trip in detail, jealous of every trifle of experience that had befallen her; she told him of the bridal couple she had seen board the train at Clyde, and of the showers of rice that had been thrown by the laughing bridal party, though she omitted the lone father of the bride standing apart on the platform craning his head anxiously for another sight of his daughter, and trying to smile. But she gave him a sense of the romance that had stirred in her at the sight of the lighthouse on its lonely point of rocks and the stone towers that made the wine-cellars on Kelly’s Island look like castles.

After supper Lavinia left her father to the pleasure of renewing acquaintance with the lawyers who thronged the lobby, and stole down to the rocks that marked the shelving shore of the island. She saw stately schooners, with white sails spread, and she watched, until its black banner of smoke was but a light wraith, a big propeller towing its convoy of grain barges across the far horizon. This calm serene passing of the life of the lakes soothed her, filled her with a thousand fancies, and stirred her emotions with deep, hidden hints of the mystery of all life. As she sat there and gazed, now and then tears came to her eyes. The waters were spread smoothly before her under the last reflection of the sun, the twilight was coming across the lake; and as the light followed the sun and the darkness crept behind, she looked toward the south in the direction, as she felt, of Macochee, and thought of her home and of her mother, of Connie and of Chad, and then she thought of Glenn.

Far out in the lake a cluster of yellow lights moved swiftly along—one of the big passenger steamers that nightly ply between Detroit and Buffalo, and she read in that moving girdle of light new meanings; then suddenly a fear seized her, a fear that was part of the ache in her heart, and she ran into the hotel and up to her room. Then she took up her letter again and poured out all her new sensations, her longings, and her fears in a lengthy postscript. When she had finished, she began to address the envelope; and she wrote on it, with pride:

“Mr. Glenn—”

And then she paused. She did not know whether he spelt his name “Marly,” or “Marley,” or “Marlay.” She tried writing it each way, dozens of times, but the oftener she tested it the less able she was to decide. It was too ridiculous; she became exasperated with herself; then humiliated and ashamed. When she heard her father’s step in the hall, she hastily locked her letter in her little traveling bag. The judge greeted her warmly; he was flushed and happy, and in the highest spirits. During the afternoon he had been meeting lawyers from all over Ohio; the evening boats from Cleveland and Toledo had brought more of them to the island; they were all eminent, respectable, rich, the attorneys of big corporations. The judges of the Supreme Court and of the Circuit Courts were there, and the excitement had reached its height when the boat from Cleveland brought an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court to deliver the chief address of the meeting.

Judge Blair reveled in meeting all these distinguished men; he enjoyed the flattery in their way of addressing and introducing him. But his conscience smote him when he saw Lavinia. He drew up a chair and sat beside her, holding his cigar at arm’s length. It was an excellent cigar, better than he ordinarily smoked, and the thin thread of smoke that wavered up from it filled the room almost instantly with its delicate perfume.

“Did my little girl think her father had deserted her?” he said, speaking of her in the third person, after the affectionate way of parents. “He must pay better attention to her. She must come down and meet the lawyers; they will be delighted; a justice of the Supreme Court has just come on from Washington! She will want to meet him!”

The judge paused and twisted his head about for a puff at his cigar, and then waited for Lavinia to glow at the prospect. But when she looked at him, and tried to smile again, he saw the glint of tears in her eyes.

“Why come, come, dear!” he said. “What’s the matter? Aren’t you having a good time? Never mind, when this meeting’s over we’ll go to Detroit, and maybe up the lakes for a little trip. That’ll bring the roses back!”

He pinched her cheeks playfully, but she did not respond; she looked at him pleadingly.

“Why, Lavinia,” he cried, “you aren’t homesick?”

She winked bravely to stem the flood of tears and then nodded.

“Well!” he said, nonplussed. “You know, dear, we can’t—”

The tears were brimming in her blue eyes, and he left his sentence uncompleted to go on:

“So you’re homesick, eh? For mama, and Connie?”

She nodded, and he studied her closely for a moment, and then he could not resist the question that all along had been torturing him.

“And for—?”

She confirmed his fear, with quick decisive little nods. She got out her handkerchief and hastily brushed her tears away, and then with an effort to control herself, she looked at him and said, as if she were ready to have it all out then:

“Yes, father, I haven’t treated him right. I came away without telling him.”

Judge Blair scowled and turned away, and bit the end of his cigar. Then he sat and studied it. Lavinia waited; she was ready for the final contest. Presently the judge arose.

“Well, dear,” he said. “Well—we’ll see; of course, we can’t go back just yet—I have my address to read to-morrow, and besides, some of the boys are talking of me for president of the Bar Association. And I had thought, I had thought, that a little trip over to Detroit, and maybe up to Mackinac—”

“Father,” said Lavinia, looking at him now calmly, “I don’t want to go to Detroit or up to Mackinac. I’ll do, of course, as you say; I’ll wait until the Bar meeting is over, but I want to go home. You might as well know now, father—we might as well understand each other—it can be no other way.”

Judge Blair looked at his daughter a moment, and she kept her eyes directly and firmly in his.

“Oh well,” he said with a sigh, “of course, dear, if you say. I’d like to stay until after the election though. Will you?”

“Of course,” she consented.

CHAPTER XI

MACOCHEE

Marley had not learned of Lavinia’s departure until Monday afternoon; he had the news from Lawrence, who had it from the hackman who had taken Judge Blair and Lavinia to the train; for whenever any of the quality go away from Macochee they always ride to the station in the hack, though at other times they walk without difficulty all over the town. When Marley reached the office, and found Wade Powell, as he usually found him, sitting with his feet on his table, smoking and reading a Cincinnati paper, the lawyer looked up casually, but when he saw Marley’s expression he suddenly exclaimed:

“Hello! What’s the matter?”

Marley shook his head.

“Something’s troubling you,” said Powell.

Marley shook his head again, and Powell looked at him as at a witness he was cross-examining.

“I know better,” he said.

Marley affected to busy himself at his desk, but after a while, he turned about and said:

“Something is troubling me, Mr. Powell; my—prospects.” He had been on the point of confessing his real trouble, but with the very words on his lips, he could not utter them, and so let the conversation take another turn.

“Oh, prospects!” said Powell. “I can tell you all about prospects; I’ve had more than any man in Gordon County. When I was your age, opinion was unanimous in this community that my prospects were the most numerous and the most brilliant of any one here!”

Powell laughed, a little bitterly.

“If I’d only been prudent enough to die then, Glenn,” he went on, “I’d have been mourned as a potential judge of the Supreme Court, senator and president.”

“It’ll be three years before I can be admitted, won’t it?” asked Marley.

“Yes,” said Powell; “but that isn’t long; and it isn’t anything to be admitted.”

“Well, it takes time, anyway,” said Marley, “and then there’s the practice after that—how long will that take?”

“Well, let’s see,” said Powell, plucking reflectively at the flabby skin that hung between the points of his collar. “Let’s see.” His brows were twitching humorously. “It’s taken me about thirty years—I don’t know how much longer it’ll take.”

Powell smoked on for a few moments, and then added soberly:

“Of course, I had to fool around in politics for about twenty-five years, and save the people.”

“Do you think,” Marley said, after a moment’s silence that paid its own respect to Powell’s regrets, “that there’s an opening for me here in Macochee?”

“No, Glenn, I’ll tell you. There’s no use to think of locating in Macochee or any other small town. The business is dead here. It’s too bad, but it’s so. When I began there was plenty of real estate law to do, and plenty of criminal law, but the land titles are all settled now—”

“That’s what Judge Blair said,” interrupted Marley.

“So you’ve been to him, have you?”

Marley blushed.

“Well, not exactly,” he said. “I heard him say that.”

“Yes,” mused Powell. “Well, he feathered his nest pretty well while they were being settled. But as I was saying—the criminal business has died out, or rather, it has changed. The criminals haven’t any money any more, that is, the old kind of criminals; the corporations have it all now—if you want to make money, you’ll have to have them for clients. Of course, the money still goes to the criminal lawyer just as it used to.”

“I like Macochee,” said Marley, his spirits falling fast.

“Well, it’s a nice old town to live in,” Powell assented. “But the devil of it is how’re you going to live? Of course, you can study here just as well as anywhere; better than anywhere, in fact; you have plenty of time, and plenty of quiet. But as for locating here—why, it’s utterly out of the question for a man who wants to make anything of himself and has to get a living while he’s doing it—and I don’t know any other kind that ever do make anything out of themselves.”

“I had hoped—” persisted Marley, longing for Powell to relent.

“Oh, I know,” the lawyer replied almost impatiently, “but it’s no use, there’s nothing in it. No one with ambition can stay here now. The town, like all these old county-seats, is good for nothing but impecunious old age and cemeteries. It was nothing but a country cross-roads before the railroad came, and since then it’s been nothing but a water-tank; if it keeps on it’ll be nothing but a whistling-post, and the trains won’t be bothered to stop at all. Its people are industrious in nothing but gossip, and genuine in nothing but hypocrisy; they are so mean that they hate themselves, and think all the time they’re hating each other. Just look at our leading citizen, Brother Dudley, over there in his bank; he owns the whole town, and he thinks he’s a bigger man than old Grant. Sundays he sits in his pew with a black coat on, squinting at the preacher out of his sore little eyes, and waiting for him to say something he can get the bishop to fire him for, and he calls that religion. Mondays he goes back to his business of skinning farmers and poor widows out of their miserable little pennies, and he calls that business; Does he ever look at a flower or a tree, or turn round in the street at the laugh of a child? He’s the kind of man that runs this town, and he makes the rest of the people like it. Well, he don’t run me! God! If I’d only had some sense twenty years ago I’d have pulled out and gone to the city and been somebody to-day.”