Old Judge Priest

“He likely will,” said Judge Priest; “he comes every day – purty near it. Why?”

“Well,” said Mr. Curd, “I don’t know him myself except by sight, and I don’t feel as if I was in a position to be asking him to do anything for me. But I thought, maybe, if you spoke to him yourself when he came, and put it on the grounds of a favour to you, maybe he’d not put any more than just a little short piece in the paper saying suit had been filed – Curd against Curd – for a plain divorce, or maybe he might leave it out of his paper altogether. I’d like to see Luella shielded from any newspaper talk. It’s not as if there was a scandal in it or a fight was going to be made.” He bent forward in his eagerness. “Do you reckon you could do that much for me, Judge Priest – for old times’ sake?”

“Ah-hah,” assented Judge Priest. “I reckin part of it kin be arranged anyway. I kin have Lishy Milam set the case forward on the docket at the head of the list of uncontested actions. And I’ll mention the matter to that there young Rawlings ef you want me to. Speaking personally, I should think jest a line or two ought to satisfy the readers of the Daily Evenin’ News. Of course him bein’ a reporter and all that, he’ll probably want to know whut the facts are ez set forth in your petition – whut allegations are made in – ”

He stopped in mid-speech, seeing how the other had flinched at this last. Mr. Curd parted his lips to interrupt, but the old judge, having no wish to flick wounds already raw, hurried on: “Don’t you worry, Lysandy, I’ll be glad to speak to young Rawlings. I jedge you’ve got no call to feel uneasy about whut’s goin’ to be said in print. You was sayin’ jest now that the papers would be filed sometime to-day?” “They’ll be filed to-day sure.”

“And no defence is to be made?” continued Judge Priest, tallying off the points on his fingers. “And you’ve retained Bigger & Quigley to represent you – that’s right, ain’t it?”

“Hold on a minute, Judge,” Mr. Curd was shaking his whity-grey head in dissent. “I’ve taken up a lot of your valuable time already, and still it would seem like I haven’t succeeded in getting this affair all straight in your mind. Bigger & Quigley are not going to represent me. They’re going to represent Luella.”

He spoke as one stating an accepted and easily understood fact, yet at the words Judge Priest reared back as far as his chair would let him go and his ruddy cheeks swelled out with the breath of amazement.

“Do you mean to tell me,” he demanded, “that you ain’t the plaintiff here?”

“Why, Judge Priest,” answered Mr. Curd, “you didn’t think for a minute, did you, that I’d come into court seeking to blacken my wife’s good name? She’s been thoughtless, maybe, but I know she don’t mean any harm by it, and besides look how young she is. It’s her, of course, that’s asking for this divorce – I thought you understood about that from the beginning.” Still in his posture of astonishment, Judge Priest put another question and put it briskly: “Might it be proper fur me to ask on what grounds this lady is suin’ you fur a divorce?”

A wave of dull red ran up old Mr. Curd’s throat and flooded his shamed face to the hair line.

“On two grounds,” he said – “non-support and drunkenness.”

“Non-support?”

“Yes; I haven’t been able to take care of her lately as I should like to, on account of my business difficulties and all.”

“But look here at me, Lysandy Curd – you ain’t no drunkard. You never was one. Don’t tell me that!”

“Well, now, Judge Priest,” argued Mr. Curd, “you don’t know about my private habits, and even if I haven’t been drinking in public up to now, that’s no sign I’m not fixing to start in doing so. Besides which my keeping silent shows that I admit to everything, don’t it? Well, then?” He stood up. “Well, I reckon that’s all. I won’t be detaining you any longer. I’m much obliged to you, Judge, and I wish you good-day, sir.”

For once Judge Priest forgot his manners. He uttered not a syllable, but only stared through his spectacles in stunned and stricken silence while Mr. Curd passed out into the hallway, gently closing the door behind him. Then Judge Priest vented his emotions in a series of snorts.

In modern drama what is technically known as the stage aside has gone out of vogue; it is called old-fashioned. Had a latter-day playwright been there then, he would have resented the judge’s thoughtlessness in addressing empty space. Nevertheless that was exactly what the judge did.

“Under the strict letter of the law I ought to throw that case out of court, I s’pose. But I’m teetotally dam’ ef I do any sech thing!.. That old man’s heart is broke now, and there ain’t no earthly reason that I kin think of why that she-devil should be allowed to tromp on the pieces. And that’s jest exactly whut she’ll do, shore ez shootin’, unless she’s let free mighty soon to go her own gait… Their feet take hold on hell… I’ll bet in the Kingdom there’ll be many a man that was called a simple-minded fool on this earth that’ll wear the biggest, shiniest halo old Peter kin find in stock.”

He reached for the Trigger Sam book, but put it back again in the drawer. He reached into a gaping side pocket of his coat for his corncob pipe, but forgot to charge the fire-blackened bowl from the tobacco cannister that stood handily upon his desk. Chewing hard upon the discoloured cane stem of his pipe, he projected himself toward the back room and opened the door, to find Mr. Milam, the circuit clerk, and Mr. Birdsong, the sheriff, still engaged together in official duties there.

“Lishy,” he said from the doorway, “young Rawlings generally gits round here about two o’clock in the evenin’, don’t he?”

“Generally about two or two-thirty,” said Mr. Milam.

“I thought so. Well, to-day when he comes tell him, please, I want to see him a minute in my chambers.”

“What if you’re not here? Couldn’t I give him the message?”

“I’ll be here,” promised the judge. “And there’s one thing more: Bigger & Quigley will file a divorce petition to-day – Curd versus Curd is the title of the suit. Put it at the head of the list of undefended actions, please, Lishy, ez near the top of the docket ez you kin.”

“Curd? Is it the Lysander Curds, Judge?”, asked Mr. Milam.

“You guessed right the very first pop – it’s the Lysandy Curds,” said Judge Priest grimly.

“Well, for one I’m not surprised,” said Mr. Milam. “If poor old Lysander hadn’t stayed blind for about two years after the rest of this town got its eyes wide open this suit would have been filed long before now.”

But Judge Priest didn’t hear him. He had closed the door.

Mr. Milam looked meaningly at Mr. Birdsong. Mr. Birdsong felt in his pocket for his plug and helped himself to a copious chew, meanwhile looking meaningly back at Mr. Milam. With the cud properly bestowed in his right jaw Mr. Birdsong gave vent to what for him was a speech of considerable length: ‘“Jedge said Bigger & Quigley, didn’t he? Well, they’re a good smart team of lawyers, but ef I was in Lysander John Curd’s shoes I think I’d intrust my interests in this matter to a different firm than them.”

“Who’s that?” inquired Mr. Milam.

“It’s a Yankee firm up North,” answered Mr. Birdsong, masticating slowly. “One named Smith and the other’n named Wesson.”

It will be noted that our worthy sheriff fell plump into the same error over which Judge Priest’s feet had stumbled a few minutes earlier – he assumed offhand, Sheriff Birdsong did, that in this cause of Curd against Curd the husband was to play the rôle of the party aggrieved. Indeed, we may feel safe in assuming that at first blush almost anybody in our town would have been guilty of that same mistake. The real truth in this regard, coming out, as it very shortly did – before sunset of that day, in fact – gave the community a profound shock. From house to house, from street to street and from civic ward to civic ward the tale travelled, growing as it went. The Daily Evening News carried merely the barest of bare statements, coupled with the style of the action and the names of the attorneys for the plaintiff; but with spicy added details, pieced out from surmise and common rumour, the amazing tidings percolated across narrow roads and through the panels of partition fences with a rapidity which went far toward proving that the tongue is mightier than the printed line, or at least is speedier.

When you see a woman hasten forth from her house with eyes that burn and hear her hail her neighbour next door; when you see their two heads meet above the intervening pickets and observe that one is doing the talking and the other is doing the listening, sucking her breath in, gaspingly, at frequent intervals; and when on top of this you take note that, having presently parted company with the first, the second woman speeds hot-foot to call her neighbour upon the other side, all men may know by these things alone that a really delectable scandal has been loosed upon the air. Not once but many times this scene was enacted in our town that night, between the going-down of the sun and the coming-up of the moon. Also that magnificent adjunct of modern civilisation, the telephone, helped out tremendously in spreading the word.

Hard upon the heels of the first jolting disclosure correlated incidents eventuated, and these, as the saying goes, supplied fuel to the flames. Just before supper-time old Mr. Ly-sander Curd went with dragging feet and downcast head to Mrs. Teenie Morrill’s boarding house, carrying in one hand a rusty valise, and from Mrs. Morrill he straightway engaged board and lodging for an indefinite period. And in the early dusk of the evening Mrs. Lysander Curd drove out in the smart top-phaeton that her husband had given her on her most recent birthday – she sitting very erect and handling the ribbons on her little spirited bay mare very prettily, and seemingly all oblivious to the hostile eyes which stared at her from sidewalks and porch fronts. About dark she halted at the corner of Clay and Contest, where a row of maples, new fledged with young leaves, made a thick shadow across the road.

Exactly there, as it so chanced, State Senator Horace K. Maydew happened to be loitering about, enjoying the cooling breezes of the spring night, and he lifted his somewhat bulky but athletic forty-year-old form into the phaeton alongside of the lady. In close conversation they were seen to drive out Contest and to turn into the Towhead Road; and – if we may believe what that willing witness, old Mrs. Whitridge, who lived at the corner of Clay and Contest, had to say upon the subject – it was ten minutes of eleven o’clock before they got back again to that corner. Mrs. Whitridge knew the exact hour, because she stayed up in her front room to watch, with one eye out of the bay window and the other on the mantel clock. To be sure, this had happened probably a hundred times before – this meeting of the pair in the shadows of the water maples, this riding in company over quiet country roads until all hours – but by reason of the day’s sensational developments it now took on an enhanced significance. Mrs. Whitridge could hardly wait until morning to call up, one by one, the members of her circle of intimate friends. I judge the telephone company never made much money off of Mrs. Whitridge even in ordinary times; she rented her telephone by the month and she used it by the hour.

As we are following the course of things with some regard for their chronological sequence, perhaps I should state here that on the next day but one the Lysander John Curd hay and feed store was closed on executions sworn out by a coterie of panic-stricken creditors. It is a mistake, I think, to assume that rats always leave a sinking ship. It has been my limited observation that, if they are commercial rats, they stay aboard and nibble more holes in the hull. However, that is neither here nor there.

In less than no time at all following this – in less than two weeks thereafter, to be exact – the coils which united Mr. Lysander Curd and Luella his wife in the bonds of matrimony were by due process of the statutory law unloosed and slackened off. Being free, the ex-husband promptly gathered together such meagre belongings as he might call his own and betook himself to that little mortgage-covered farm of his out Lone Elm way. Being free also, the ex-wife with equal celerity became the bride of State Senator Horace K. Maydew, with a handy justice of the peace to officiate at the ceremony. It was characteristic of State Senator Maydew that he should move briskly in consummating this, the paramount romance of his life. For he was certainly an up-and-coming man.

There was no holding him down, it seemed. Undoubtedly he was a rising light, and the lady who now bore his name was bound and determined that she rise with him. She might have made one matrimonial mistake, but this time she had hitched her wagon to a star – a star which soared amain and cast its radiance afar. Soon she was driving her own car – and a seven-passenger car at that. They sent to Chicago for an architect to design their new home on Flournoy Boulevard and to Louisville for a decorator to decorate it. It wasn’t the largest house in town, but it was by long odds the smartest.

The Senator willed that she should have the best of everything, and she had it. For himself he likewise desired much. His was an uneasy ambition, which ate into him like a canker and gave him no peace. Indeed, peace was not of his craving. He watered his desire with the waters of self-appreciation and mulched it with constant energy, and behold it grew like the gourd and bourgeoned like the bay. He had been mayor; at this time he was state senator; presently it was to transpire that he would admire to be more than that.

Always his handclasp had been ardent and clinging. Now the inner flames that burned its owner made it feverish to the touch. His smile was as warming as a grate fire and almost as wide. Shoulders were made for him to slap, and children had been created into the world to the end that he might inquire regarding their general health and well doing. Wherefore parents – and particularly young parents – were greatly drawn to him. If there was a lodge he joined it; if there was a church fair he went to it; if there was an oration to be made he made it. His figure broadened and took on a genial dignity. Likewise in the accumulation of worldly goods he waxed amazingly well. His manner was paternal where it was not fraternal. His eye, though, remained as before – a sharp, greedy, appraising eye. There is no alibi for a bad eye. Still, a lot of people never look as high as the eyes. They stop at the diamond in the scarfpin.

When a vacancy occurred in the district chairmanship it seemed quite in keeping with the trend of the political impulses of the times that Senator Maydew should slip into the hole. Always a clever organiser, he excelled his past record in building up and strengthening the district organisation. It wasn’t long before he had his fences as they should be – hog-tight, horse-high and bull-strong.

Yet in the midst of manifold activities he found time to be an attentive and indulgent husband. If the new Mrs. Maydew did not enjoy the aloof society of those whom we fondly call down our way The Old Families, at least she had her fine new home, and her seven-passenger car, and her generous and loving husband. And she was content; you could tell that by her air and her expression at all times. Some thought there was just a trace of defiance in her bearing.

It was just about a year after her marriage to him that the Senator, in response to the demands of a host of friends and admirers – so ran the language of his column-long paid-for card in the Daily Evening News and other papers – announced himself as a candidate for the Democratic nomination for congressman. Considering conditions and everything, the occasion appeared to be propitious for such action on his part. The incumbent, old Major J. C. C. Guest, had been congressman a long, long time – entirely too long a time, some were beginning to say. He had never been a particularly exciting personage, even back yonder in those remote dim days of his entry into public life. At the beginning his principal asset and his heaviest claim upon the support of his fellow-citizens had been an empty trouser-leg.

In eighty-four, a cross-roads wag had said he didn’t believe Major Guest ever lost that leg in battle – it was his private opinion that the Maje wore it off running for office. At the time this quip was thought almost to border upon the sacrilegious, and nobody had laughed at it except the utterer thereof. But fully sixteen lagging years had dragged by since then; and for the old-soldier element the times were out of joint. Maybe that was because there weren’t so very many of the old soldier element left. A mouse-coloured sleeve without an arm inside of it, no longer had the appeal upon the popular fancy that once it had, and the same was true of the one-time sentimental and vote-catching combination of a pair of hickory crutches and an amputation at the hip joint.

Nevertheless, Major Guest was by no means ready to give up and quit. With those who considered him ripe for retirement he disagreed violently. As between resting on his laurels and dying in the harness he infinitely preferred the chafe of the leather to the questionable softness of the laurel-bed. So the campaign shaped itself to be a regular campaign. Except for these two – Maydew and Guest – there were no openly avowed candidates, though Dabney Prentiss, who dearly loved a flirtation with reluctant Destiny, was known to have his ear to the ground, ready to qualify as the dark horse in the event a deadlock should develop and a cry go forth for a compromise nominee. Possibly it was because Dabney Prentiss generally kept his ear to the ground that he had several times been most painfully trampled upon. From head to foot he was one big mental bruise.

Since he held the levers of the district machinery in the hollows of his two itching hands, Senator Maydew very naturally and very properly elected to direct his own canvass. Judge Priest, quitting the bench temporarily, came forth to act as manager for his friend, Major Guest. At this there was rejoicing in the camp of the clan of Maydew. To Maydew and his lieutenants it appeared that providence had dealt the good cards into their laps. Undeniably the judge was old and, moreover, he was avowedly old-fashioned. It stood to reason he would conduct the affairs of his candidate along old-fashioned lines. To be sure, he had his following; so much was admitted. Nobody could beat Judge Priest for his own job; at least nobody ever had. But controlling his own job and his own county was one thing. Engineering a district-wide canvass in behalf of an aging and uninspiring incumbent was another. And if over the bent shoulders of Major Guest they might strike a blow at Judge Priest, why, so much the better for Maydew now, and so much the worse for Priest hereafter. Thus to their own satisfaction the Maydew men figured it out.

The campaign went forward briskly and not without some passing show of bitterness. In a measure, Judge Priest justified the predictions of the other side by employing certain timehallowed expedients for enlisting the votes of his fellow Democrats for Major Guest. He appealed, as it were, to the musty traditions of a still mustier past. He sent the Major over the district to make speeches. He organised school-house rallies and brush-arbour ratifications. He himself was mighty in argument and opulent in the use of homely oratory.

Very different was the way of State Senator Maydew. The speeches that he made were few as to number and brief as to their length, but they were not bad speeches. He was a ready and a frequent purchaser of newspaper space; and he shook hands and slapped shoulders and inquired after babies without cessation. But most of all he kept both of his eyes and all of his ten nimble fingers upon the machine, triggering it and thimbling it and pulling at secret wires by day and by night. It was, perhaps, a tribute to his talents in this direction that the method that he inaugurated was beginning to be called Maydewism – by the opposition, of course – before the canvass was a month old. In an unusually vociferous outburst of indignation at a meeting in the Independent Order of Odd Fellows’ hall at Settleville, Major Guest referred to it as “the fell blight of Maydewism.” When a physician discovers a new and especially malignant disease his school of practice compliments him by naming the malady after him; when a political leader develops a political system of his own, his opponents, although actuated by different motives, do the same thing, which may be taken as an absolute sign that the person in question has made some sincere enemies at least. But if Maydew made enemies he made friends too; at any rate he made followers. As the campaign drew near to its crackling finish it was plain that he would carry most of the towns; Major Guest’s strength apparently was in the country – among the farmers and the dwellers in small villages.

County conventions to name delegates to the district conventions which, in turn, would name the congressional nominee were held simultaneously in the nine counties composing the district at two P. M. of the first Tuesday after the first Monday in August. A week before, Senator Maydew, having cannily provided that his successor should be a man after his own heart, resigned as district chairman. Although he had thrown overboard most of the party precedents, it seemed to him hardly ethical that he should call to order and conduct the preliminary proceedings of the body that he counted upon to nominate him as its standard bearer – standard bearer being the somewhat ornamental phrase customarily used among us on these occasions. He was entirely confident of the final outcome. The cheering reports of his aides in the field made him feel quite sure that the main convention would take but one ballot. They allowed, one and all, it would be a walk-over.

Howsoever, these optimists, as it developed, had reckoned without one factor: they had reckoned without a certain undercurrent of disfavour for Maydew which, though it remained for the most part inarticulate during the campaign, was to manifest itself in the county conventions. Personalities, strictly speaking, had not been imported into the fight. Neither candidate had seen fit to attack the private life of his opponent, but at the last moment there came to the surface an unexpected and, in the main, a silent antagonism against the Senator which could hardly be accounted for on the ground of any act of his official and public career.

So, late in the afternoon of the first Tuesday after the first Monday, when the smoke cleared away and the shouting and the tumult died, the complete returns showed that of the nine counties, totalling one hundred and twenty delegate votes, Maydew had four counties and fifty-seven votes. Guest had carried four counties also, with fifty-one votes, while Bryce County, the lowermost county of the district, had failed to instruct its twelve delegates for either Maydew or Guest, which, to anybody who knew anything at all about politics, was proof positive that in the main convention Bryce County would hold the balance of power. It wouldn’t be a walkover; that much was certain, anyhow. May-dew’s jaunty smile lost some of its jauntiness, and anxious puckers made little seams at the corners of those greedy eyes of his, when the news from Bryce County came. As for Judge Priest, he displayed every outward sign of being well content as he ran over the completed figures. Bryce was an old-fashioned county, mainly populated by a people who clung to old-fashioned notions. Old soldiers were notably thick in Bryce, too. There was a good chance yet for his man. It all depended on those twelve votes of Bryce County.

To Marshallville, second largest town in the district, befell the honour that year of having the district convention held in its hospitable midst; and, as the Daily Evening News smartly phrased it, to Marshallville on a Thursday All Roads Ran. In accordance with the rote of fifty years it had been ordained that the convention should meet in the Marshallville courthouse, but in the week previous a fire of mysterious origin destroyed a large segment of the shingled roof of that historic structure. A darky was on trial for hog stealing upon the day of the fire, and it may have been that sparks from the fiery oratory of the prosecuting attorney, as he pleaded with the jury for a conviction, went upward and lodged among the rafters. As to that I am not in a position to say. I only know this explanation for the catastrophe was advanced by divers ribald-minded individuals who attended the trial.