The Happy Average

It pained Marley to hear Powell berate Macochee; he had never heard him rage so violently at the town, though he was always sneering at it. To Marley the very name of Macochee meant romance; he liked the name the Indian village had left behind when it vanished; he liked the old high-gabled buildings about the Square; he longed to identify himself with Macochee, to think of it as his home.

“But I’ll tell you one thing,” Powell went on, his tone suddenly changing to one of angry resolution as he flung his feet heavily to the bare floor and struck his desk a startling blow with his fist, “I’ll tell you one thing, I’m through working for nothing; they’ve got to pay me! I’m going to squeeze the last cent out of them after this, same as old Dudley does, same as old Bill Blair did before he went on the bench; that’s what I’m going to do. I’m getting old and I’ve got to quit running a legal eleemosynary institution.”

Powell’s eyes flamed, but a shadow fell in the room, and Powell and Marley glanced at the door.

“Well, what do you want?” said Powell.

An old woman, bareheaded in the hurry of a crisis, was on the threshold.

“Oh, Mr. Powell,” she began in a wailing voice, “would you come quick!”

“What for?”

“Charlie’s in ag’in.”

“Got any money?” demanded Powell, in the angry resolution of a moment before. He clenched his fist again on the edge of his table. Marley glanced at him in surprise, and then at the old woman.

The woman hung her head and stammered:

“Well, you know—I hain’t just now, but by the week’s end, when I get the money for my washin’—”

“Oh, that’s all right,” said Powell, getting to his feet, “that’s all right. We won’t talk of that now. I beg your pardon. We’ll walk down to the calaboose and see the boy; we can talk it over with him and see what’s to be done.”

He picked up his slouch hat and clapped it on his head.

“What’s he been doing this time?” he said to the old woman as they went out the door.

Marley watched them as they passed the open window and disappeared. A smile touched his lips an instant, and then he became serious and depressed once more.

He had had no word from Lavinia, and her going away immediately after his scene with Judge Blair confused him. He tried to think it out, but he could reach no conclusion save that it was all at an end. Lavinia’s sudden, unexplained departure proved that. And yet he could not, he would not, think that she had changed; no, her father had borne her away—that was it—forcibly and cruelly borne her away. For a long while he sat there finding a certain satisfaction in the melancholy that came over him, and then suddenly he was aroused by the boom of the town clock. The heavy notes of the bell rolled across to him, and he counted them—five. It was time to go. And Powell had not returned. It was not surprising; Powell often went out that way and did not come back, and, often, somehow to Marley’s chagrin, men and women sat and waited long hours in the dumb patience of the poor and then went away with their woes still burdening them. They must have been used to woes, they carried them so silently.

Marley was walking moodily down Main Street, feeling that he had no part in the bustling happiness of the people going home from their day’s work, when, lifting his head, he saw Mrs. Blair in her surrey. Instantly she jerked the horse in toward the curb and beckoned to him.

“Why, Glenn! I’m so glad I met you!” she said, her face rosy with its smile. “I have something for you.”

She raised her eyebrows in a significant way and began fumbling in her lap. Presently she leaned out of the surrey and pressed something into his hand.

“Just between ourselves, you know!” she said, with the delicious mystery of a secret, and then gathering up her reins, she clucked at her lazy horse.

He looked after her a moment, then at the thick envelope he held in his hand. On it was written in the long Anglican characters of a young girl, these words:

“For Glenn.”

CHAPTER XII

A CONDITIONAL SURRENDER

Judge Blair and Lavinia returned home Saturday.

“I guess it’s no use,” the judge said to Mrs. Blair when she had followed him up stairs, where he had gone to wash off the dust he had accumulated during the six hours the train had consumed in jerking itself from Sandusky to Macochee.

“No, I could see how relieved she was to get home,” replied Mrs. Blair, musing idly out of the window. She was not so sure that she was pleased with the result she had done her part to accomplish.

“I guess you were right,” the judge said.

“I?” asked Mrs. Blair, suddenly turning round.

“Yes—in saying that it would be best not to dignify it by too much notice. That might only add to its seriousness.”

Mrs. Blair looked out of the window again.

“Of course,” the judge went on presently, “I wouldn’t want it considered as an engagement.”

“Of course not,” Mrs. Blair acquiesced.

“You’d better have a talk with her,” he said. She saw that he was seeking his usual retreat in such cases, and she was now determined not to take the responsibility. Spiritually they tossed this responsibility back and forth between them, like a shuttlecock.

“But wouldn’t that make it look as if we were taking too much notice of it?”

“Well,” the judge said, “I don’t know. Do just as you think best.”

“Didn’t you talk to her about it when you were away?” Mrs. Blair asked.

“M-m yes,” the judge said slowly.

“And what did she say?”

“Nothing much, only—”

“Only what?”

“Only that she would not give him up.”

“Oh!”

Mrs. Blair waited, and the judge dawdled at his toilet. Some compulsion she could not resist, though she tried, distrusting her own weakness, drove Mrs. Blair to speak first, and even then she sought to minimize the effect of her surrender.

“Of course, Will,” she said, “I want to be guided by you in this matter. It’s really quite serious.”

“Oh, well,” he said, “you’re capable of managing it.”

“You said you knew his father, didn’t you?” she asked after a while.

“Slightly; why?”

“I was just wishing that we knew more of the family. You know they have not lived in Macochee long.”

“That’s true,” the judge assented, realizing all that the objection meant.

“And yet,” Mrs. Blair reassured him, though she was trying to reassure herself at the same time, “his father is a minister; that ought to count for something.”

“Yes, it ought, and still you know they say that ministers’ sons are always—”

“But,” Mrs. Blair interrupted, as if he were wholly missing the point, “ministers’ families always have a standing, I think.”

They were silent, then, until Mrs. Blair began:

“I suppose I really ought to call on Mrs. Marley.”

“Why?”

“Well, it seems, you know—it seems to me that I ought.”

“But wouldn’t that—?”

“I considered that, and still, it might seem more so if I didn’t, don’t you see?”

The judge tried to grasp the attenuated point, and expressed his failure in the sigh with which he stooped to fasten his shoes. Then he drew on his alpaca coat, and just as he was leaving the room, his wife stopped him with:

“But, Will!”

He halted with his hand on the door-knob. For an instant his wife looked at him in pleasure. He was rather handsome, with his white hair combed gravely, his ruddy face fresh from his shaving, and his stiff, white collar about his neck.

“What did you say?” he asked, recalling her from her reverie of him.

“Oh!” she said; “only this—maybe he won’t feel like coming around here any more. You know you practically sent him away.”

The judge gave a little laugh.

“I guess that will work itself out. Anyway I’ll leave it to you—or to them.”

Still smiling at his own humor, he turned the door-knob, and then hesitated. His smile had vanished.

“She’s so young,” he said with a regret. “She’s so young. How old did you say you were when we were married?”

“Eighteen,” Mrs. Blair replied.

“And Lavinia can’t be more than—”

“Why, she’s twenty,” said Mrs. Blair.

“So she is,” said the judge. “So she is. But then you—”

Mrs. Blair had come close to him, and stood picking a bit of thread from his shoulder.

“It was different with us, wasn’t it, dear?” she said, looking up at him.

He kissed her.

CHAPTER XIII

SUMMER

The dust lay thick in Ward Street, sifting its fine powder on the leaves of the cottonwoods that grew at the weedy gutter. The grass in the yard grew long, and the bushes languished in the heat. Judge Blair’s beans clambered up their poles and turned white; and Connie’s sweet peas grew lush and rank, running, as she complained, mostly to leaves. The house seemed to have withdrawn within itself; its green shutters were closed. In the evening dim figures could be seen on the veranda, and the drone of voices could be heard. At eleven o’clock, the deep siren of the Limited could be heard, as it rounded the curve a mile out of town. After that it was still, and night lay on Macochee, soft, vast, immeasurable. The clock in the Court House tower boomed out the heavy hours. Sometimes the harmonies of the singing negroes were borne over the town.

And to Marley and Lavinia those days, and those evenings of purple shadows and soft brilliant stars, were but the setting of a dream that unfolded new wonders constantly. They were but a part of all life, a part of the glowing summer itself, innocent of the thousand artificial demands man has made on himself. Lavinia went about with a new expression, exalted, expectant; a new dignity had come to her and a new beauty; all at once, suddenly, as it were, character had set its noble mark upon her, and about her slender figure there was the aureola of romance.

“Have you noticed Lavinia?” Mrs. Blair asked her husband.

“No, why?” he said, in the alarm that was ever ready to spring within him.

“She has changed so; she has grown so beautiful!”

One morning the judge saw a spar of light flash from her finger, and he peered anxiously over his glasses.

“What’s that, Lavinia?” he asked, and when she stood at his knee, almost like a little girl again in all but spirit, he took her finger.

“A ring,” she said simply.

“What does it mean?”

“Glenn gave it to me.”

“Glenn?”

“Yes.”

“But I thought there was to be no engagement?” The judge looked up, as if there had been betrayal. But Lavinia only smiled. The judge looked at her a moment, then released her hand.

“I wouldn’t wear it where any one could see it,” he said.

The summer stretched itself long into September; and then came the still days of fall, moving slowly by in majestic procession. With the first cool air, a new restless energy awoke in Marley. All the summer he had neglected his studies; but now a change was working in him as wonderful as that which autumn was working in the world. He looked back at that happy, self-sufficient summer, and, for an instant, he had a wild, impotent desire to detain it, to hold it, to keep things just as they were; but the summer was gone, the winter at hand, and he felt all at once the impact of practical life. He faced the future, and for an instant he recoiled.

Lavinia was standing looking up at him. She laid her hand on his shoulder.

“What is it, Glenn?”

“I was just thinking,” he said, “that I have a great assurance in asking you to marry me.”

“What do you mean?”

“Why, dear, just this: I can’t get a practice in Macochee; I might as well look it in the face now as any time. I have known it all along, but I’ve kept it from you, and I’ve tried to keep it from myself. There’s no place here for me; everybody says so, your father, Wade Powell, everybody. There’s no chance for a young man in the law in these small towns. I’ve tried to make myself think otherwise. I’ve tried to make myself believe that after I’d been admitted I could settle down here and get a practice and we could have a little home of our own—but—”

“Can’t we?” Lavinia whispered the words, as if she were afraid utterance would confirm the fear they imported.

“Well—that’s what they all say,” Marley insisted.

“But papa’s always talking that way,” Lavinia protested. “I suppose all old men do. They forget that they were ever young, and I don’t see what right they have to destroy your faith, your confidence, or the confidence of any young man!” Lavinia blazed out these words indignantly. It was consoling to Marley to hear them, he liked her passionate partizanship in his cause. He longed for her to go on, and he waited, anxious to be reassured in spite of himself. He could see her face dimly in the starlight, and feel her figure rigid with protest beside him.

“It’s simply wicked in them,” she said presently. “I don’t care what they say. We can and we will!”

“I like to have you put it that way, dear,” said Marley. “I like to have you say ‘we’!”

She drew more closely to him.

“And you think we can?” he said presently.

“I know it.”

“And have a little home, here, in one of these quiet streets, with the shade, and the happiness—”

“Yes!”

“And it wouldn’t matter much if we were poor?”

“No!”

“Just at first, you know. I’d work hard, and we could be so happy, so happy, just we two, together!”

“Yes, yes,” she whispered.

“I love Macochee so,” Marley said presently. “I just couldn’t leave it!”

“Don’t! Don’t!” she protested. “Don’t even speak of it!”

CHAPTER XIV

ONE SUNDAY MORNING

It was Sunday morning and Marley sat in church looking at a shaft of soft light that fell through one of the tall windows. From gazing at the shaft of light, he began to study the symbols in the different windows, the cross and crown, the lamb, the triangle that represented the Trinity, all the Roman symbols that Protestantism still retains in its decorations. Then he counted the pipes in the organ, back and forth, never certain that he had counted them correctly. All about him the people were going through the service, but it had lost all meaning for Marley, because he had been accustomed to it from childhood.

Having been reassured by Lavinia, he felt that he should be happy, yet a strong sense of dissatisfaction, of uncertainty, flowed persistently under all his thoughts, belying his heart’s assurance of its happiness. When Doctor Marley, advancing to the pulpit, buttoned his coat down before him, pushed aside the vase of flowers the ladies’ committee always put in his way, and stood with his strong, expressive hand laid on the open Bible, Marley’s thoughts fixed themselves for a moment in the pride and love he had always had for his father. There swept before him hundreds of scenes like this when his father had stood up to preach, and then suddenly he realized that his father had grown old: he was white-haired and in his rugged, smooth-shaven face deep lines were drawn—the lines of a beautiful character.

He remembered something his father had said to the effect that the pulpit was the only place in which inexperienced youth was desired, showing the insincerity of what people call their religion, and then he remembered the ambitions he had dimly felt in his father in his earlier days; it had been predicted that his father would be a bishop. But he was not a bishop, and now in all probability never would be one; he was not politician enough for that. And Marley wondered whether or not his father could be said to have been successful; he had come to know and to do high things, he had lived a life full of noble sacrifice and the finest faith in humanity and in God; but was this success? He heard his father’s voice:

“The text will be found in the third chapter of the Lamentations of Jeremiah.”

But Marley never listened to sermons; now and then he caught a phrase, or a period, especially when his father raised his voice, but his thoughts were elsewhere, anywhere—not on the sermon. The men and women sitting in front of him kept shifting constantly, and he grew tired of slipping this way and that and craning his neck in order to see his father. And then the constant fluttering of fans hurt his eyes, and they wandered here and there, each person they lighted on suggesting some new train of thought.

Presently they fell on a girl in a white dress, and in some way she suggested Lavinia. And instantly he felt that he should be perfectly happy when thinking of Lavinia, but, as suddenly, came that subconscious uncertainty, that deep-flowing discontent. He went over his last conversation with Lavinia, in which he had found such assurance, but now away from her he realized that he had lulled himself into a sense of security that was all false; and the conviction that Macochee had no place for him, at least as a lawyer, came back. He tried to put it away from him, and think of something else.

His eyes fell on old Selah Dudley, sitting like all pillars of the church, at the end of his pew. Dudley’s back was narrow, and rounded out between the shoulders so that Marley wondered how he could sit comfortably at all; his head was flat and sheer behind, and Marley could see with what care the old banker had plastered the scant hair across his bald poll—the only sign of vanity revealed in him, unless it were in the brown kid gloves he wore. Marley looked at Dudley with the feeling that he was looking at the most successful man in Macochee, and yet he had a troubled sense of the phariseeism that is the essential element of such success. He remembered what Wade Powell had said; immediately he saw Dudley in a new light; the old man sat stolid, patient and brutal, waiting for some heterodoxy, or something that could be construed as heterodoxy, theological or economic, like a savage with a spear waiting to pierce his prey, and glad when the moment came.

But Marley, seeing the young girl in the white dress, again thought of Lavinia, who would be sitting at that very moment with her father and mother and Connie and Chad over in the Presbyterian church. How long would it be before he could sit there beside her, as her husband? Then with a flash it came to him that they would, in all likelihood, be married in that very church. Instantly he saw the spectators gathered, he saw the pulpit and the chancel-rail hidden in flowers, he saw his father with his ritual in his hands, waiting; and then while the organ played the wedding march, Lavinia coming down the aisle, her eyes lowered under her veil. His heart beat faster, he felt a wave of emotion, joyous, exciting.

But there was much to do before that moment could come—the long days and nights of study; the examination looming like a mountain of difficulties, then months and years of waiting for a practice. He tried to imagine each detail of the coming of a practice, but he could not; he could not conceive how it was possible for a practice to come to any one, much less to him. There were many lawyers in Macochee now, and all of them were more or less idle. There was certainly no need of more. Judge Blair and Wade Powell and every one had told him that, and suddenly he felt an impatience with them all, as if they were responsible for the conditions they described; they all conspired against him, men and conditions, making up the elements of a harsh, intractable fate.

And Marley grew bitter against every one in Macochee; they all gossiped about him, they were all determined to drive him away; well, let them; he would go; but he would come back again some day as a great, successful lawyer, looking down on them and their little interests, and they would be filled with envy and respect. But what of Lavinia?

What right had he to ask her to marry him? What right had he to place her in the position he had? He realized it now, clearly, he told himself, for the first time. She had given up all for him. She would go out no more, she had foregone her parties, calls, picnics, dances, everything; in her devotion she had estranged her friends. He had given her parents concern, he had placed her in a false, impossible position. He must rescue her from it. But how? By breaking the engagement? He blushed for the thought. By going away quietly, silently, without a word? That would only increase the difficulty of her position. By keeping her waiting, year after year, until he could find a foothold in the world? Even that was unfair.

No, he could not give up Lavinia and he could not go away from Macochee, hence it followed that he must give up the law. He must get some work to do, and at once; something that would pay him enough to support a wife. He began to canvass the possibilities in Macochee. He thought of all the openings; surely there would be something; there were several thousand persons in Macochee, and they lived somehow. He did not wish to give up the law; not that he loved it so, but because he disliked to own himself beaten. But it was necessary; he could suffer this defeat; he could make this sacrifice. There was something almost noble in the attitude, and he derived a kind of morbid consolation from the thought.

His father was closing the Bible—sure sign that the sermon was about to end. There was another prayer, then a hymn, and while the congregation remained standing for the benediction, he heard his father’s voice:

“The peace of God which passeth all understanding—”

The words had always comforted him in the sorrows he was constantly imagining, but now they brought no peace.

In another moment the congregation was stirring joyously, in unconscious relief that the sitting was over. The hum of voices assumed a pleasant social air, as friend and acquaintance turned to greet one another. The people moved slowly down the aisle. He caught a glimpse of his father, smiling and happy—happy that his work was done—passing his handkerchief over his reddened brow and bending to take the hands of those who came to speak to him and to congratulate him. Just then Selah Dudley gave his father his hand; the sight pleased Marley; and suddenly an idea came to him.

CHAPTER XV

A SAINT’S ADVICE

On Monday morning Marley found Dudley at his post in the First National Bank. He halted at the little low gate in the rail that ran round Dudley’s desk until Dudley looked up and saw him, and then Marley smiled. Dudley, conceiving it to be the propitiatory smile of the intending borrower, narrowed his eyes as he regarded him.

“Well?” he said.

Marley went in and sat down on the edge of the hard chair that was placed near Dudley.

“I wish to have a little talk with you, Mr. Dudley,” he said. He waited then for Dudley to reply, thinking perhaps he would be interested in the son of his pastor. Dudley had turned his chair a little, and seemed to have sunk a little lower in its brown leather cushions, worn to a hard shine during the long years he had sat there. The lower part of him was round and full and heavy, while his shoulders were narrow and sloping, and his chest sunken, as if, from sitting there so many years, his vitals had settled, giving him the figure of a half emptied bag of grain. His legs were thin, and his trousers crept constantly up the legs of the boots he wore; the boots were blackened as far as the ankles, above the ankles they were wrinkled and scuffed to a dirty brown.

Marley noted these details hurriedly, for it was the face of the man that held him. A scant beard, made up of a few harsh, wiry hairs, partly covered the banker’s cheeks and chin; his upper lip was clean-shaven, and his hair, scant but still black, was combed forward at the temples, and carefully carried over from one side of his head to the other, ineffectually trying to hide the encroaching baldness. His nose was large; his eyes narrow under his almost barren brows and red at the edges of the lids that lacked lashes.

“What do you want?” said Dudley, never moving, as if to economize his energies, as he economized his words and every other thing of value in his narrow world.

Marley did not know just what reply to make: this was a critical moment to him, and he must make no mistake.

“I came,” he began, “to—to ask you for a little advice.”

Dudley, at this, settled a little more into his chair, possibly a little more comfortably; he seemed to relax somewhat, and his eyes were not quite so narrow as they had been. But he blinked a moment, and then cautiously asked:

“What about?”

“Well, it’s just this,” Marley began, smiling persistently; “you see I’ve begun the study of law; I had intended to be a lawyer.”