In a Little Town Part 9

They spoke of how much they missed him, of how perfect a father he had been, competing with one another in regrets and in praise. Back of all this belated tribute there was a silent dismay they did not give voice to--the keen, immediately personal reasons for regret.

"What will become of us?" they were thinking, each in his or her own terrified soul.

"I can't go back to school!"

"This means no college for me!"

"I'll have to stay in this awful town the rest of my life!"

"I can't go to San Francisco! The greatest honor of my life is taken from me just as I grasped it."

"I had a commission to paint the portrait of an amba.s.sador at Was.h.i.+ngton--it would have been the making of me! It meant a lot of money, too. I came home to ask Pop to stake me to money enough to live on until it was finished."

"My business will go to smas.h.!.+ I'll be saddled with debts for the rest of my life. If I could have hung on a little longer I'd have reached the sh.o.r.e; but the bank wouldn't lend me a cent. n.o.body would. I came home to ask Pop to raise me some cash. I counted on him. He never failed me before."

"What will become of us all?"

There was a stir on the pillow. The still head began to rock, the throat to swell, the lips to twitch.

_Mere_ ran to the bedside and knelt by it, laying her hand on the forehead. A miracle had been wrought in the very texture of his brow.

He was whispering something. She put her ear to his lips.

"Yes, honey. What is it? I'm here."

She caught the faint rustling of words. It was as if his hovering soul had been eavesdropping on their thoughts. Perhaps it was merely that he had learned so well in all these years just what each of them would be thinking. For he murmured:

"I've been figuring out--how much the--funeral will cost--you know they're awful expensive--funerals are--of course I wouldn't want anything fancy--but--well--besides--and I've been thinking the children have got to have so many things--I can't afford to--be away from the store any longer. I ain't got time to die! I've had vacation enough!

Where's my clothes at?"

They held him back. But not for long. He was the most irritatingly impatient of convalescents. In due course of time the family was redistributed about the face of the earth. Ethelwolf was at preparatory school; Beatrice and Consuelo were acquiring and lending l.u.s.ter at Wellesley and Va.s.sar; Gerald was painting a portrait at Was.h.i.+ngton; and J. Pennock was like a returned Napoleon in Wall Street.

Pop was at his desk in the store. All his employees had gone home. He was fretfully twiddling a telegram from San Francisco:

Julie's address sublime please telegraph two hundred more love

MERE.

Pop was remembering the words of the address: "Woman has been for ages man's mere beast of burden.... Being a wife has meant being a slave."

Pop could not understand it yet. But he told everybody he met about the first three words of the telegram, and added:

"I got the smartest children that ever was and they owe it all to their mother, every bit."

BABY TALK

I

The wisest thing Prof. Stuart Litton was ever caught at was the thing he was most ashamed of. He had begun to acc.u.mulate knowledge at an age when most boys are learning to fight and to explain at home how they got their clothes torn. He wore out spectacles almost as fast as his brothers wore out copper-toed boots; but he did not begin to acquire wisdom until he was just making forty. Up to that time, if the serpent is the standard, Professor Litton was about as wise as an angleworm.

He submerged himself in books for nearly forty years; and then--in the words of Leonard Teed--then he "came up for air." This man Teed was the complete opposite of Litton. For one thing he was the liveliest young student in the university where Litton was the solemnest old professor.

Teed had scientific ambitions and hated Greek and Latin, which Litton felt almost necessary to salvation. Teed regarded Litton and his Latin as the sole obstacles to his success in college; and, though Litton was too much of a gentle heart to hate anybody, if he could have hated anybody it would have been Teed. A girl was concerned in one of their earliest encounters, though Litton's share in it was as unromantic as possible.

Teed, it seems, had violated one of the rules at Webster University. He had chatted with Miss Fannie Newman--a pretty student in the Woman's College--after nine o'clock; nay, more, he had sat on a campus bench bidding her good night for half an hour, and, with that brilliant mathematical mind of his, had selected the bench at the greatest possible distance from the smallest cl.u.s.ter of lampposts.

On this account he was haled before the disciplinary committee of the faculty. Litton happened to be on that committee. Teed made the best fight he could. He showed himself a Greek--in argument at least--and, like an old sophist, he tried to prove, first, that he was not on the campus with the girl and never had spooned with her; second, that if he had been there and had spooned with her it was too dark for them to be seen; and third, that he was engaged to the girl, anyway, and had a right to spoon with her.

The accusing witness was a janitor whom Teed had played various jokes on and had neglected to appease with tips. Teed submitted him to a fierce cross-examination; forced him to admit that he could not see the loving couple and had identified them solely by their voices. Teed demanded the exact words overheard; and, as often happens to the too-ardent cross-examiner, he got what he asked for and wished he had not. The janitor, blus.h.i.+ng at what he remembered, pleaded:

"You don't vant I should say it exectly vat I heered?"

"Exactly!" Teed answered in his iciest tone.

"Vell," the janitor mumbled, "it vas such a foolish talk as--but--vell, ven I come by I hear voman's voice says, 'Me loafs oo besser as oo loafs me!'"

Teed flushed and the faculty sat forward.

"Den I hear man's voice says,'Oozie-voozie, mezie-vezie--' Must I got to tell it all?"

"Go on!" said Teed, grimly; and the old German mopped his brow with anguish and snorted with rage: "'Mezie-vezie loafs oozie-voozie bestest!'"

The purple-faced members of the faculty were hanging on to their own safety-valves to keep from exploding--all save Professor Litton, who felt that his hearing must be defective. Teed, fighting in the last ditch, said:

"But such language does not prove the ident.i.ty of the--er--partic.i.p.ants.

You said you knew positively."

The janitor, writhing with disgust and indignation, went on:

"Ven I hear such nonsunse I stop and listen if it is two people escapet from de loonatic-houze. And den young voman says, 'It doesn't loaf its Fannie-vannie one teeny-veeny mite!' And young man says, 'So sure my name is Lennie Teedie-veedie, little Fannie Newman iss de onliest gerl I ever loafed!'"

The cross-examiner crumpled up in a chair, while the members of the faculty behaved like children bursting with giggles in church--all save Litton, who had listened with increasing amazement and now leaned forward to demand of the janitor:

"Mr. Kraus, you don't mean to say that two of our students actually disgraced this inst.i.tution with conversation that would be appropriate only to a nursery?"

Mr. Kraus thundered: "De talk of dose stoodents vould disgrace de nursery! It vas so sickenink I can't forget ut. I try to, but I keep rememberink Oozie-voozie! Mezie-vezie!"

Mr. Kraus was excused in a state of hydrophobic rage and Teed withdrew in all meekness.

Litton had fallen into a stupor of despair at the futility of learning.

He remained in a state of coma while the rest of the committee laughed over the familiar idiocies and debated a verdict. Two of the professors, touched by some reminiscence of romance, voted to ignore the incident as a trivial commonplace of youth. Two others, though full of sympathy for Teed--Miss Fannie was very pretty--voted for his suspension as a necessary example, lest the campus be overrun by duets in lovers' Latin.

The result was a tie and Litton was roused from his trance to cast the deciding vote.

Now Professor Litton had read a vast amount about love. The cla.s.sics are full of its every imaginable version or perversion; but Litton had seen it expressed only in the polished phrases of Anacreon, Bion, Propertius, and the others. He had not guessed that, however these men polished their verses, they doubtless addressed their sweethearts with all the imbecility of sincerity.

Litton's own experience gave him little help. In his late youth he had thought himself in love twice and had expressed his fiery emotions in a Latin epistle, an elegy, and a number of very correct Alcaics. They pleased his teacher, but frightened the spectacles off one bookish young woman, and drove the other to the arms of a prescription clerk, who knew no Latin except what was on his drug bottles.