In a Little Town Part 24

While these two troubled spirits found repose and renewal, locked each in the other's arms, the blackness was gradually withdrawn from the air.

In the sky there came a pallor that grew to a twilight and became a radiance and a splendor. And night was day. It would soon be time for the father to rise and go forth to his work, and for the mother to rise to the offices of the home.

THE MAN THAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN

I

In the tame little town of Hillsdale he seemed the tamest thing of all, Will Rudd--especially appropriate to a kneeling trade, a shoe clerk by election. He bent the pregnant hinges to anybody soever that entered the shop, with its ingenious rebus on the sign-board:

[Ill.u.s.tration: CLAY KITTREDGE and Emporium n.o.bby Footwear]

He not only untied the stilted Oxfords or b.u.t.toned in the arching insteps of those who sat in the "Ladies' and Misses' Dept.," which was the other side of the double-backed bench whose obverse was the "Gents'

Dept.," but also he took upon the glistening surface of his trousers the muddy soles of merchants, the clay-bronzed brogans of hired men, the cowhide toboggans of teamsters, and the bra.s.s-toed, red-kneed boots of little boys ecstatic in their first feel of big leather.

Rudd was a shoe clerk to be trusted. He never revealed to a soul that Miss Clara Lommel wore shoes two sizes too small, and when she bit her lip and blenched with agony as he pried her heel into the protesting dongola, he seemed not to notice that she was no Cinderella.

And one day, when it was too late, and Miss Lucy Posnett, whose people lived in the big brick mansard, realized that she had a hole in her stocking, what did Rudd do? Why, he never let on.

Stanch Methodist that he was, William Rudd stifled _in petto_ the fact that the United Presbyterian parson's wife was vain and bought little, soft black kids with the Cuban heel and a patent-leather tip to the opera toe! The United Presbyterian parson himself had salved his own vanity by saying that shoes show so plainly on the pulpit, and it was better to buy them a trifle too small than a trifle too large, but--umm!--er, hadn't you better put in a little more of that powder, Mr. Rudd? I have on--whew!--unusually thick socks to-day.

Clay Kittredge, Rudd's employer, valued him, secretly, as a man who brought in customers and sold them goods. But he never mentioned this to his clerk lest Rudd be tempted to the sin of vanity, and incidentally to demanding an increase in that salary which had remained the same since he had been promoted from delivery-boy.

Kittredge found that Rudd kept his secrets as he kept everybody's else.

Professing church member as he was, Rudd earnestly palmed off shopworn stock for fresh invoices, declared that the obsolete Piccadillies which Kittredge had snapped up from a bankrupt sale were worn on all the best feet on Fifth Avenoo, and blandly subst.i.tuted "just as good" for advertised wares that Kittredge did not carry.

Besides, when no customer was in the shop he spent the time at the back window, doctoring tags--as the King of France negotiated the hill--by marking up prices, then marking them down.

But when he took his hat from the peg and set it on his head, he put on his private conscience. Whatever else he did, he never lied or cheated to his own advantage.

And so everybody in town liked William Rudd, and n.o.body admired him. He was treated with the affectionate contempt of an old family servant. But he had his ambitions and great ones, ambitions that reached past himself into the future of another generation. He felt the thrill that stirs the acorn, fallen into the ground and hidden there, but destined to father an oak. His was the ambition beyond ambition that glorifies the seed in the loam and enn.o.bles the roots of trees thrusting themselves downward and gripping obscurity in order that trunks and branches, flowers and fruits, pods and cones, may flourish aloft.

Eventually old Clay Kittredge died, and the son chopped the "Jr."

curlicue from the end of his name and began a new regime. The old Kittredge had sought only his own aggrandizement, and his son was his son. The new Clay Kittredge had gone to public school with Rudd and they continued to be "Clay" and "Will" to each other; no one would ever have called Rudd by so demonstrative a name as "Bill."

When Clay second stepped into his father's boots--and shoes--he began to enlarge the business, hoping to efface his father's achievements by his own. The shop gradually expanded to a department store for covering all portions of the anatomy and supplying inner wants as well.

Rudd was so overjoyed at not being uprooted and flung aside to die that he never observed the shrewd irony of Kittredge's phrase, "You may remain, Will, with no reduction of salary."

To have lost his humble position would have frustrated his dream, for he was doing his best to build for himself and for Her a home where they could fulfil their destinies. He cherished no hope, hardly even a desire, to be a great or rich man himself. He was one of the nest-weavers, the cave-burrowers, the home-makers, who prepare the way for the greater than themselves who shall spring from themselves.

He was of those who become the unknown fathers of great men. And so, on a salary that would have meant penury to a man of self-seeking tastes, he managed to save always the major part of his earning. At the bank he was a modest but regular visitor to the receiving-teller, and almost a total stranger to the paying-teller.

His wildest dissipation being a second pipeful of tobacco before he went to bed--or "retired," as he would more gently have said it--he eventually heaped up enough money and courage to ask Martha Kellogg to marry him. Martha, who was the plainest woman in plain Hillsdale, accepted William, and they were made one by the parson. The wedding was accounted "plain" even in Hillsdale.

The groomy bridegroom and the unbridy bride spent together all the time that Rudd could spare from the store. He bought for her a little frame house with a porch about as big as an upper berth, a patch of gra.s.s with a path through it to the back door, some hollyhocks of startling color, and a highly unimportant woodshed. It spelled HOME to them, and they were as happy as people usually are. He did all he could to please her.

At her desire he even gave up his pipe without missing it--much.

Mrs. Martha Rudd was an ambitious woman, or at least restless and discontented. Having escaped her supreme horror, that of being an old maid, she began to grow ambitious for her husband. She nagged him for a while about his plodding ways, the things that satisfied him, the salary he endured. But it did no good. Will Rudd was never meant to put boots and spurs on his own feet and splash around in gore. He was for carpet slippers, round-toed shoes, and on wet days, rubbers; on slushy days he even descended to what he called "ar'tics."

Not understanding the true majesty of her husband's long-distance dreams, and baffled by his unresponse to her ambitions for him, Martha grew ambitious for the child that was coming. She grew frantically, fantastically ambitious. Here was something William Rudd could respond to. He could be ambitious as Caesar--but not for himself. He was a groundling, but his son should climb.

Husband and wife spent evenings and evenings debating the future of the child. They never agreed on the name--or the alternative names. For it is advisable to have two ready for any emergency. But the future was rosy. They were unanimous on that--President of the United States, mebbe; or at least the President's wife.

Mrs. Rudd, who occasionally read the continued stories in the evening paper, had happened on a hero named "Eric." She favored that name--or Gwendolynne (with a "y"), as the case might be. In any event, the child's future was so glowing that it warmed Mrs. Rudd to asking one evening, forgetful of her earlier edict:

"Why don't you smoke your pipe any more, Will?"

"I'd kind o' got out of the habit, Marthy," he said, and added, hastily, "but I guess I'll git back in."

Thereafter they sat of evenings by the lamp, he smoking, she sewing things--holding them up now and then for him to see. They looked almost too small to be convincing, until he brought home from the store a pair of shoes--"the smallest size made, Marthy, too small for some of the dolls you see over at Bostwick's."

It was the golden period of his life. Rudd never sold shoes so well.

People could hardly resist his high spirits. Antic.i.p.ation is a great thing--it is all that some people get.

To be a successful shoe clerk one must acquire the patience of Job without his gift of complaint, and Rudd was thoroughly schooled. So he waited with a hope-lit serenity the preamble to the arrival of his--her--their child.

And then fate, which had previously been content with denying him comforts and keeping him from luxuries, dealt him a blow in the face, smote him on his patient mouth. The doctor told him that the little body of his son had been born still. After that it was rather a stupor of despair than courage that carried him through the vain struggle for life of the worn-out housewife who became only almost a mother. It seemed merely the logical completion of the world's cruelty when the doctor laid a heavy hand on his shoulder and walked out of the door, without leaving any prescription to fill. Rudd stood like a wooden Indian, too dazed to understand or to feel. He opened the door to the undertaker and waited outside the room, just twiddling his fingers and wondering. His world had come to an end and he did not know what to do.

At the church, the offices of the parson, and the soprano's voice from behind the flowers, singing "Rock of Ages, Cleft for Me"--Marthy's favorite hymn--brought the tears trickling, but he could not believe that what had happened had happened. He got through the melancholy honor of riding in the first hack in the shabby pageant, though the town looked strange from that window. He s.h.i.+vered stupidly at the first sight of the trench in the turf which was to be the new lodging of his family.

He kept as quiet as any of the group among the mounds while the bareheaded preacher finished his part.

He was too numb with incredulity to find any expression until he heard that awfulest sound that ever grates the human ear--the first shovelful of clods rattling on a coffin. Then he understood--then he woke. When he saw the muddy spade spill dirt hideously above her lips, her cheeks, her brow, and the little bundle of futile flesh she cuddled with a rigid arm to a breast of ice--then a cry like the shriek of a falling tree split his throat and he dropped into the grave, sprawling across the casket, beating on its denying door, and sobbing:

"You mustn't go alone, Marthy. I won't let you two go all by yourselves.

It's so fur and so dark. I can't live without you and the--the baby.

Wait! Wait!"

They dragged him out, and the shovels concluded their venerable task. He was sobbing too loudly to hear them, and the parson was holding him in his arms and patting his back and saying "'Shh! 'Shh!" as if he were a child afraid of the dark.

The spa.r.s.e company that had gathered to pay the last devoir to the unimportant woman in the box in the ditch felt, most of all, amazement at such an unexpected outburst from so expectable a man as William Rudd.

There was much talk about it as the horses galloped home, much talk in every carriage except his and the one that had been hers.

Up to this, the neighbors had taken the whole affair with that splendid philosophy neighbors apply to other people's woes. Mrs. Budd Granger had said to Mrs. Ad. Peck when they met in Bostwick's dry-goods store, at the linen counter:

"Too bad about Martha Rudd, isn't it? Plain little body, but nice. Meant well. Went to church regular. Yes, it's too bad. I don't think they ought to put off the strawb'ry fest'val, though, just for that, do you?

Never would be any fun if we stopped for every funeral, would there?

Besides, the strawb'ry fest'val's for charity, isn't it?"

The strawberry festival was not put off and the town paper said that "a pleasant time was had by all." Most of the talk was about Will Rudd.

The quiet shoe clerk had provided the town with an alarm, an astonishment. He was most astounded of all. As he rode back to the frame house in the swaying carriage he absolutely could not believe that such hopes, such plans, could be shattered with such wanton, wasteful cruelty. That he should have loved, married, and begotten, and that the new-made mother and the new-born child should be struck dead, nullified, returned to clay--such things were too foolish, too spendthrift, to believe.

It is strange that people do not get used to death. It has come to nearly every being anybody has ever heard of; and whom it has not yet reached, it will. Every one of the two billions of us on earth to-day expects it to come to him, and (if he have them) to his son, his daughter, his man-servant, his maid-servant, his ox, his a.s.s, the stranger within his gates, the weeds by the road. Kittens and kingdoms, potato-bugs, plants, and planets--all are on the visiting-list.

Death is the one expectation that never fails to arrive. But it comes always as a new thing, an unheard-of thing, a miracle. It is the commonest word in the lexicon, yet it always reads as a _hapax legomenon_. It is like spring, though so unlike. For who ever believed that May would emerge from March this year? And who ever remembers that violets were suddenly abroad on the hills last April, too?