In a Little Town Part 15

Shelby paused to watch. The horse drew up at the home of Doctor Stillwell, the dentist. Before the wagon was at rest the delivery-boy was off and half-way around the side of the house. Mrs. Stillwell opened the screen door to take in the carrots and soap and was.h.i.+ng-powder Shelby used to bring her. Shelby remembered that she used was.h.i.+ng-powder then. He wondered if she had heard of the "Paradise."

As he hung poised on a brink of memory the screen door flapped shut, the grocery-boy was hurrying back, the horse was moving away, and the boy leaped to his side-saddle seat on the wagon while it was in motion. The delivery-wagons and their Jehus were the only things that moved fast in Wakefield, now as then.

Shelby drifted back to the main street and found the Bon-Ton Grocery where it had been when he deserted the wagon. The same old vegetables seemed to be sprawling outside. The same flies were avid at the strawberry-boxes, which, he felt sure, the grocer's wife had arranged as always, with the biggest on top. He knew that some Mrs. Spate had so distributed them, if it were not the same who had hectored him, for old Spate had a habit of marrying again. His wives lasted hardly so long as his hard-driven horses.

Shelby paused to price some of the vegetables, just to draw Spate into conversation. The old man was all spectacles and whiskers, as he had always been. Shelby thought he must have been born with spectacles and whiskers.

Joel Spate, never dreaming who Shelby was, was gracious to him for the first time in history. He evidently looked upon Shelby as a new-comer who might be pre-empted for a regular customer before Mrs. L. Bowers, the rival grocer, got him. It somehow hurt Shelby's homesick heart to be unrecognized, more than it pleased him to enjoy time's topsy-turvy. Here he was, returned rich and powerful, to patronize the taskmaster who had worked him hard and paid him harder in the old years. Yet he dared not proclaim himself and take his revenge.

He ended the interview by buying a few of the grocer's horrible cigars, which he gave away to the hotel porter later.

All round the town Shelby wandered, trying to be recognized. But age and prosperity had altered him beyond recall, though he himself knew almost every old negro whitewash man, almost every teamster, he met. He was surer of the first names than of the last, for the first names had been most used in his day, and it surprised him to find how clearly he recalled these names and faces, though late acquaintances escaped his memory with ease.

The women, too, he could generally place, though many who had been short-skirted tomboys were now heavy-footed matrons of embonpoint with children at their skirts, children as old as they themselves had been when he knew them. Some of them, indeed, he recognized only by the children that lagged alongside like early duplicates.

As he sauntered one street of homely homes redeemed by the opulence of their foliage, he saw coming his way a woman whose outlines seemed but the enlargement of some photograph in the gallery of remembrance. Before she reached him he identified Phoebe Carew.

Her mother, he remembered, had been widowed early and had eked out a meager income by making chocolate fudge, which the little girl peddled about town on Sat.u.r.day afternoons. And now the child, though she must be thirty or thereabouts, had kept a certain grace of her youth, a wistful prettiness, a girlish unmarriedness, that marked her as an old maid by accident or choice, not by nature's decree.

He wondered if she, at least, would pay him the compliment of recognition. She made no sign of it as she approached. As she pa.s.sed he lifted his hat.

"Isn't this Miss Phoebe Carew?"

Wakefield women were not in danger from strangers' advances; she paused without alarm and answered with an inquiring smile:

"Yes."

"You don't remember me?"

She studied him. "I seem to, and yet--"

"I'm Luke Shelby."

"Luke Shelby! Oh yes! Why, how do you do?" She gave him her beautiful hand, but she evidently lacked the faintest inkling of his ident.i.ty.

Time had erased from recollection the boy who used to take her sliding on his sled, the boy who used to put on her skates for her, the boy who used to take her home on his grocery-wagon sometimes, pretending that he was going her way, just for the benizon of her radiant companions.h.i.+p, her shy laughter.

"I used to live here," he said, ashamed to be so forgettable. "My mother was--my stepfather was A. J. Stacom, who kept the hardware-store."

"Oh yes," she said; "they moved away some years ago, didn't they?"

"Yes; after mother died my stepfather went back to Council Bluffs, where we came from in the first place. I used to go to school with you, Phoebe--er--Miss Carew. Then I drove Spate's delivery-wagon for a while before I went East."

"Oh yes," she said; "I think I remember you very well. I'm very glad to see you again, Mr.--Mr. Stacom."

"Shelby," he said, and he was so heartsick that he merely lifted his hat and added, "I'm glad to see you looking so well."

"You're looking well, too," she said, and smiled the gracious, empty smile one visits on a polite stranger. Then she went her way. In his lonely eyes she moved with a G.o.ddess-like grace that made clouds of the uneven pavements where he stumbled as he walked with reverted gaze.

He went back to the hotel lonelier than before, in a greater loneliness than Ulysses felt ending his Odyssey in Ithaca. For, at least, Ulysses was remembered by an old dog that licked his hand.

Once in his room, Shelby sank into a patent rocker of most uncomfortable plush. The inhospitable garishness of a small-town hotel's luxury expelled him from the hateful place, and he resumed the streets, taking, as always, determination from rebuff and vowing within himself:

"I'll make 'em remember me. I'll make the name of Shelby the biggest name in town."

On the main street he found one lone, bobtailed street-car waiting at the end of its line, its horse dejected with the ennui of its career, the driver dozing on the step.

Shelby decided to review the town from this seedy chariot; but the driver, surly with sleep, opened one eye and one corner of his mouth just enough to inform him that the next "run" was not due for fifteen minutes.

"I'll change that," said Shelby. "I'll give 'em a trolley, and open cars in summer, too."

He dragged his discouraged feet back to the hotel and asked when dinner would be served.

"Supper's been ready sence six," said the clerk, whose agile toothpick proclaimed that he himself had banqueted.

Shelby went into the dining-room. A haughty head waitress, zealously chewing gum, ignored him for a time, then piloted him to a table where he found a party of doleful drummers sparring in repartee with a damsel of fearful and wonderful coiffure.

She detached herself reluctantly and eventually brought Shelby a supper contained in a myriad of tiny barges with which she surrounded his plate in a far-reaching flotilla.

When he complained that his steak was mostly gristle, and that he did not want his pie yet, Hebe answered:

"Don't get flip! Think you're at the Worldoff?"

Poor Shelby's nerves were so rocked that he condescended to complain to the clerk. For answer he got this:

"Mamie's all right. If you don't like our ways, better build a hotel of your own."

"I guess I will," said Shelby.

He went to his room to read. The gas was no more than darkness made visible. He vowed to change that, too.

He would telephone to the theater. The telephone-girl was forever in answering, and then she was impudent. Besides, the theater was closed.

Shelby learned that there was "a movin'-pitcher show going"! He went, and it moved him to the door.

The sidewalks were full of doleful loafers and loaferesses. Men placed their chairs in the street and smoked heinous tobacco. Girls and women dawdled and jostled to and from the ice-cream-soda fountains.

The streets that night were not lighted at all, for the moon was abroad, and the board of aldermen believed in letting G.o.d do all He could for the town. In fact, He did nearly all that the town could show of charm.

The trees were majestic, the gra.s.s was lavishly spread, the sky was divinely blue by day and angelically bestarred at night.

Shelby compared his boyhood impressions with the feelings governing his mind now that it was adult and traveled. He felt that he had grown, but that the town had stuck in the mire. He felt an ambition to lift it and enlighten it. Like the old builder who found Rome brick and left it marble, Shelby determined that the Wakefield which he found of plank he should leave at least of limestone. Everything he saw displeased him and urged him to reform it altogether, and he said:

"I'll change all this. And they'll love me for it."

And he did. But they--did they?

III

One day a greater than Shelby came to Wakefield, but not to stay. It was no less than the President of these United States swinging around the circle in an inspection of his realm, with possibly an eye to the nearing moment when he should consent to re-election. As his special train approached each new town the President studied up its statistics so that he might make his speech enjoyable by telling the citizens the things they already knew. He had learned that those are the things people most like to hear.