In Our Town Part 11

"Browning has a poem made after visiting a dead house, and in it he describes the corpse of a suicide, and says 'one clear, nice, cool squirt of water o'er the bust,' is the 'right thing to extinguish l.u.s.t.'

And I desire this advertis.e.m.e.nt to be 'one clear, nice, cool squirt of water' over the political remains of Honourable Abner Handy, to extinguish if possible his fatal l.u.s.t for crooked money." After this followed the story of Handy's perfidy in the hitching rack case, a pet.i.tion in disbarment proceedings, and the copy of the warrant for his arrest charged with a felony in the case sworn to by Hedrick himself.

But the effective thing was the pictures, showing both sides of the two checks, each carefully inscribed by the two makers "for legal services in the hitching rack case," and each check indorsed by Handy in his big, brazen signature.

Hedrick saw to it also that, on the day the country papers printed his advertis.e.m.e.nt, the Kansas City and Topeka papers printed the whole story, including the casting out of Handy from Hedrick's office. It did Handy little good to go to Topeka in his flashy clothes and give out a festive interview asking his friends to suspend judgment, and saying that he would try his case in the courts and not in the newspapers. It was contended by the newspapers that if Handy had an honest defence, it would lose no weight in court by being printed in the newspapers; and his enemies in the Congressional fight pushed the charges against Handy so relentlessly that the public faith in him melted like an April snow, and when the delegates to the Congressional convention were named, our own county instructed its delegates against Handy. The farmers opposed him for taking the case against them, and the town scorned him for his perfidy. No one who was not paid for it would peddle his tickets at the primaries, so Handy, with his money all spent, went home on the night of the local primaries a whipped dog. They said around town that all the whipped dog got at home was a tin can; for it is certain that at daylight Handy was down on Main Street viciously drunk, flouris.h.i.+ng a revolver with which he said he was going to kill Charley Hedrick and then himself. They took the pistol from him, and then he wept and said he was going to jump in the river, but no one followed him when he started toward the bridge, and he fell asleep in the shade of the piers, where he was found during the morning, washed up and sent home sober.

One of the curious revelations of society's partners.h.i.+p in crime was the way the grocers and butchers who despised Ab Handy's method, but shared his gains when he succeeded, stopped giving him credit when he failed.

At the end of the first year after the primary wherein he was defeated, the Handys could not get a dime's worth of beefsteak without the dime.

And dimes were scarce. By that time Handy was wearing his flashy New York clothes for every day--frayed and spotted and rusty. His temperament changed with his clothes, from the oily optimism of success to the sodden pessimism of utter failure; which inspired Colonel Morrison, returning after the hitching rack case had been settled in favour of the town, to remark, speaking of Handy, that "an optimist is a man who isn't caught, and is cheering to keep up his courage, and a pessimist is one who has been caught and thinks it will be but a question of time until his neighbours are found out too."

Mrs. Worthington, who was a necessary witness in the disbarment proceedings and the criminal proceedings against Handy, always went to Europe when the cases were called; so rather than put a woman in jail for contempt of court, the court dismissed the proceedings against Handy and he was not allowed to be even a martyr. One morning about a year and a half after Handy's defeat, when Hedrick opened his office door, he found Handy there with his fingers clutching the chair arms and his eyes fixed on the floor. The man was breathing audibly, and seemed to be struggling with a great pa.s.sion. Hedrick and Handy had not spoken since they came through the panels of the door together, but Hedrick went to the miserable creature, touched him gently on the shoulder, and motioned him into the private office. There, with his eyes still on the floor, Handy told Hedrick that the end of the rope had been reached.

"I had to come down without any breakfast this morning--because--they--they ain't anything in the house for her to fix.

And there ain't any show for dinner. Next week, Red Martin has promised me some money he's goin' to get from Jim Huddleson; but they ain't a soul in town but you I can come to now"; and Handy raised his eyes from the floor in canine self-pity as he whined--"and she's making life a h.e.l.l for me!" When Hedrick opened his desk and got out his check-book, he smiled as he fancied he could detect about Handy's body the faint resemblance of a wagging tail. He made the check for fifty dollars and gave it to Handy saying, "Oh, well, Ab--we'll let bygones be bygones."

Handy snapped at it and in an instant was gone.

That afternoon Hedrick met Handy sailing down Main Street in his old manner. His head was erect, his eyes were sparkling, his big, rough, statesman's voice was bellowing abroad, and his thumbs were in the armholes of his vest. He walked straight to Hedrick and led him by the coat lapel into a dark stairway. There was an air of deep mystery about Handy and when he put his arm on Hedrick to whisper in his ear, Hedrick, smelling the statesman's breath heavy with whiskey and onions and cloves and cardamon seeds and pungent gum, heard this:

"Say, Charley, I'm fooling 'em--I've got 'em all fooled. They think I'm poor. They think I ain't got any money. But old Ab's too smart for them.

I've got lots of money--all I want--all anyone could want--wealth beyond the dreams of avar--of av--avar--avar'ce, as John Ingalls used to say.

Just look at this!" And with that Handy pulled from his inside coat pocket a roll of one and two-dollar bills, that seemed to Hedrick to represent fifty dollars less the price of about ten drinks. "Look a-here," continued Handy, "ol' Ab's got 'em all fooled. Don't you say anything about it; but ol' Ab's goin' to make his mark." And he shook Hedrick's hand and took him down to the street, and shook it again and again before prancing grandly down the sidewalk.

For three years Mrs. Handy's boarding-house has been one of the most exclusive in our town. They say that she pays Mr. Handy for mowing the lawn and helping about the rough work in the kitchen, and that he sleeps in the barn and pays her for such meals as he eats. Sometimes a new boarder makes the mistake of paying the board money to Handy, and he appears on Main Street ostentatiously jingling his silver and toward evening has ideas about the railroad situation. On election days and when there is a primary Handy drives a carriage and gathers up his cronies in the fifth ward, who, like him, are not so much in evidence as they were ten years ago.

It was only last week that Hedrick was in our office telling us of Handy's "wealth beyond the dreams of avarice." He paused when he had finished the story, c.o.c.ked his head on one side, and squinted at the ceiling as he said:

"For three long, weary, fruitless years I've searched the drug-stores of this town for the brand of liquor Ab had that day. I believe if I had two drinks of that I could write better poetry than old Browning himself."

Whereupon Hedrick shook himself out of the office in a gentle wheesy laugh.

XVII

The Tremolo Stop

Our business has changed greatly since Horace Greeley's day. And, although machines have come into little offices like ours, the greatest changes have come in the men who do the work in these offices. In the old days--the days before the great war and after it--printers and editors were rarely leading citizens in the community. The editor and the printer were just coming out of the wandering minstrel stage of social development, and the journeyman who went from town to town seeking work, and increasing his skill, was an important factor in the craft. One might always depend upon a tramp printer's coming in when there was a rush of work in the office, and also figure on one of the tourists in the office leaving when he was needed most.

From the ranks of this wayward cla.s.s came the old editors and reporters; they were postgraduates from the back room of newspaper offices and they brought to the front room their easy view of life. Some of these itinerant writing craftsmen had professional fame. There was Peter B.

Lee, who had tramped the country over, who knew Greeley and Dana and Prentice and Bob Burdett and Henry Watterson, and to whom the cub in country offices looked with wors.h.i.+pful eyes. There was "Old Slugs"--the printer who carried his moulds for making lead slugs, and who, under the influence of improper stimulants, could recite stirring scenes from the tragedies of Shakespeare. There was Buzby--old Buzby, who went about from office to office leaving his obituary set up by his own hand, conveying the impression that at last the end had come to a misspent life. Then there was J. N. Free--the "Immortal J. N.," as he called himself, a gaunt, cadaverous figure in broad hat and linen duster, with hair flowing over his shoulders, who stalked into the offices at unseemly hours to "raise the veil" of ignorance and error, and "relieve the pressure" of psychic congestion in a town by turning upon it the batteries of his mind.

They were a dear lot of old souls out of accord with the world about them, ever seeking the place where they would harmonise. They might have stepped out of d.i.c.kens's books or Cruikshank's pictures, and, when one recalls them now, their lineaments seem out of drawing and impossible in the modern world. And yet they did live and move in the world that was, and the other day when we were looking over the files we came across the work of Simon Mehronay,--the name which he said was spelled Dutch and sounded Irish,--and it does not seem fair to set down the stories of the others who have made our office traditions without giving some account of him.

For to us he was the most precious of all the old tribe of journalistic aborigines. He came to the office one bright April day with red mud on his shoes that was not the mud of our river bottoms, and we knew that he had ridden to town "blind baggage"--as they say of men who steal their way--from the South. The season was ripe for the birds to come North and it was the mud of Texas that clung to him. His greeting as he strode through the front room not waiting for a reply was "How's work?" And when the foreman told him to hang up his coat, he found a stick, got a "chunk of copy," and was clicking away at his case three minutes from the time he darkened the threshold of the office.

There he sat for two weeks--the first man down in the morning and the last to quit at night--before anyone knew whence he came or whither he was bound. He had a little "false motion," the foreman said, and clattered his types too audibly in the steel stick, but as he got up a good string of type at the end of the day and furnished his own chewing tobacco, he created no unfavourable comment in the office. He was a bald little man, with a fringe of hair above the greasy velvet collar of his coat, with beady, dancing black eyes, and black chin whiskers and a moustache that often needed dyeing. It was the opinion of the foreman and the printers that Mehronay's weakness was liquor, though that opinion did not arise from anything that he said. For during the first two weeks we did not hear him say much, but in the years that followed, his mild little voice that ever seemed to be teetering on the edge of the laugh into which he fell a score of times during an hour, became a familiar sound about the office, and the soft, flabby little hand which the other printers laughed about, during the first week of his employment with us, has rested on most of the shoulders in the shop guiding us through many sad ways.

In those days there were only three of us in the front room. All the bookkeeping and collecting and reporting and editorial writing were done by the three, and it happened that one morning near the first of the month, when the books needed attention, no one had heard the performance of "Hamlet" given by Thomas Keene at the opera house the night before, and no one about the paper could write it up. Wherefore there was perturbation; but in an hour this came from the back room set up in type and proved in the galley:

"There were more clean shaves in town last night than have been seen here for a long time. Everyone who wears cuffs and a necktie got a 'twice-over' and was 'out amongst 'em.' In the gallery of the opera house roosted the college faculty and the Potter boy who holds the Cottonwood Valley belt as the champion lay-down collar swell, and near him was Everett Fowler, who was making his first public appearance in his new parted spring whiskers, and was the observed of all observers.

Colonel Alphabetical Morrison, with his famous U-shaped hair-cut, lent the grace of his presence to the dress circle. The first Methodist Church was represented by Brother-in-law John Markley, who is wearing a new flowered necktie, sent by his daughter in California (if you must know), and General Durham of the _Statesman_ says that when the orchestra played 'Turkey in the Straw,' and Bill Master began to shake the sand-box--which is a new wrinkle in musical circles in our town--John Markley's feet began to wiggle until people thought this was his 'chill day.' After 'Turkey in the Straw,' the orchestra struck up something quick and devilish, which Charley Hedrick, who played the snare drum at Gettysburg, and is therefore ent.i.tled to speak on musical subjects, says was 'The Irish Washerwoman.' After this appropriate overture the curtain rose and the real show began.

"Mr. Keene's Hamlet is not so familiar to our people as his Richard III., but it gave great satisfaction; for it is certainly a Methodist Hamlet from the clang of the gong to the home-stretch. The town never has stood for Mr. Lawrence Barrett's Unitarian Hamlet, and the high church Episcopal Hamlet put on the boards last winter by Mr. Frederick Paulding was distinctly disappointing. One of the most searching scenes in the play was enacted when Ophelia got the power and had to be carried out to the pump. The Chicago brother who plays the ghost has a great voice for his work. He brought many souls to a realizing sense that they are sin-stricken and hair-hung over the fiery pit. The groans and amens from the sanctified in the audience were a delicate compliment to his histrionic ability. The queen seems to have been a Presbyterian, and the king a Second Day Adventist of an argumentative type. And they were not popular with the audience, but the boy preacher who did Laertes was exceedingly blessed with the gift of tongues. Brother Polonius seems to have been a sort of presiding elder, and, when his exhortation rose, the chickens in Mike Wessner's coop, in the meat-market downstairs, gave up hope of life and lay down to be cut up and fried for breakfast. The performance was a great treat and, barring the fact that some switchmen, thinking Ophelia was full, giggled during the mad scene, and the further fact that someone yelled, 'Go for his wind, Ham!' during the fencing scene, the evening with Shakespeare's weirdest hero was a distinct credit to Mr. Keene, his company and our people."

We wrote a conventional report of the performance, and printed Mehronay's account below it, under the caption FROM ANOTHER REPORTER, and it made the paper talked about for a week. Now in our town Keene was a histrionic G.o.d of the first order, and so many church people came to the office to "stop the paper" that circulation had a real impetus. We have never had a boom in subscription that did not begin with a lot of angry citizens coming in to stop the paper. It became known about town who wrote the Keene article, and Mehronay became in a small way a public character. We encouraged him to write more, so every morning the first proof slips that came in began to have on them ten or a dozen short items of Mehronay's writing. There was a smile in every one of them, and if he wrote more than ten lines there was a laugh. It was Mehronay who referred to Huddleson's livery-stable joint--where the old soaks got their beer in a stall and salted it from the feed-box--as "a gilded palace of sin." It was Mehronay who wrote the advertis.e.m.e.nt of the Chinese laundryman and signed his name "Fat Sam Child of the Sun, Brother of the Moon and Second Cousin by marriage to all the Stars." It was Mehronay who took a galley of pi which the office devil had set up from a wrecked form, and interspersed up and down the column of meaningless letters "Great applause"--"Tremendous cheering"--Cries of "Good, good!--that's the way to hit 'em!"--"Hurrah for Hanc.o.c.k"--and ran it in the paper as a report of Carl Schurz's speech to the German-American League at the court-house. It was Mehronay who put the advertis.e.m.e.nt in the paper proclaiming the fact that General Durham of the _Statesman_ office desired to purchase a good second-hand fiddle, and explaining that the owner must play five tunes on it in front of the _Statesman_ office door before bringing it in. Mehronay originated the fiction that there was an a.s.sociation in town formed to insure its members against wedding invitations which, in case of loss, paid the afflicted member a pickle dish or a napkin ring, to present as his offering to the bride.

Mehronay started a mythical Widowers' Protective Foot-racing Society, and the town had great sport with the old boys whose names he used so wittily that it transcended impudence. Mehronay got up a long list of husbands who wiped dishes when the family was "out of a girl," as our people say, and organised them into a union to strike for their altars and their kitchen fires. When we sent him out to write up a fire, however, he generally forgot the amount of insurance and the extent of the loss, but he told all about the way the crowd tried to boss the fire department; and if we sent him out to gather the local markets, he made such a mess of it that we were a week straightening matters up. Figures didn't mean anything to Mehronay. When the bank failed, he tried to write something about it, but mixed the a.s.sets and the liabilities so hopelessly that we had to keep him busy with other things, so that he would have no time to touch the bank story. They used to say around town that when he laid down a piece of money, however large, on a store counter he never waited for his change, but be it said to the credit of most of the merchants that they would save it for Mehronay and give it to him on his next visit to the store, when he would be as joyful as a child.

Gradually he left the back room and became a fixture in the front office. He wrote locals and editorials and helped with the advertising, drawing for this the munificent salary of fifteen dollars a week, which should have kept him like a prince; but it did not--though what he did with his money no one knew. He bought no new clothes, and never b.u.t.toned those he had. Before sending him out on the street in the morning, someone in the office had to b.u.t.ton him up, and if it was a gala day--say circus day, or the day of a big political pow-wow--we had to put a clean paper collar on Mehronay above his brown wool s.h.i.+rt and shove out the dents in his derby hat--a procedure which he called "making a b.u.t.terfly of fas.h.i.+on out of an honest workin' man." He slept in the press-room, on a bed which he rolled up and stowed behind the press by day, and in the evening he consorted with the G.o.ddess of nicotine--as he called his plug tobacco--and put in his time at his desk with a lead pencil and a pad of white paper writing copy for the next day's issue. Nothing delighted him so much as a fict.i.tious personage or situation which held real relations with local events or home people.

One of the best of his many inventions was a new reporter who, according to Mehronay's legend, had just quit work for a circus where he had been employed writing the posters. Mehronay's joy was to write up a local occurrence and pretend that the circus poster-writer had written it and that we had been greatly bothered to restrain his adjectives. A few days after the Sinclair-Handy wedding--a particularly gorgeous affair in one of the stone churches, which had been written up by the bride's mother, as the whole town knew, in a most disgusting manner--Mehronay sat chuckling in his corner, writing something which he put on the copy-hook before going out on his beat. It was headed A DAZZLING AFFAIR and it ran thus:

"For some time we have realised that we have not been doing full justice to the weddings that occur in this town; we have been using a repressed and obsolete style which is painful to those who enter into the joyous spirit of such occasions, and last night's wedding in the family of the patrician Skinners we a.s.signed to our gentlemanly and urbane Mr. J.

Mortimer Montague, late of the publicity department of the world-famed Robinson Circus and Menagerie. The following graceful account from Mr.

Montague's facile pen is the most accurate and satisfactory report of a nuptial event we have ever recorded in these columns."

And thereafter followed this:

"Last evening, just as the clock in the steeple struck nine, a vast concourse of the beauty and the chivalry of our splendid city, composing wealth beyond the dreams of the kings of India and forming a galaxy only excelled in splendour by the knightly company at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, a.s.sembled to witness the marriage of Miss May Skinner and Mr.

John Fortesque. The great auditorium was a bower of smilax and chrysanthemums, bewildering, amazing, superb in its verdant labyrinth.

As the clock was striking the hour, the ten-thousand-dollar pipe-organ filled the edifice with strains of most seductive, entrancing music, played by Miss Jane Brown, the only real left-handed organist in the civilised world. Then came the wedding party, magnificent, radiant, resplendent with the glittering jewels of the Orient, dazzling with gorgeousness, stupefying and miraculous in its revelation of beauty.

There were six handsome ushers--count them--six, ten bridesmaids--ten--a bevy of real, live, flower-bearing fairies, captured at an immense outlay of time and money in far Caucasia. The bride's resplendent costume and surpa.s.sing beauty put the blush upon the Queen of Sheba, made Hebe's effulgence fade as the moon before the sun; and as the long courtly train of knights errant and ladies-in-waiting pa.s.sed the populace, they presented a regal spectacle, never equalled since the proud Cleopatra sailed down the perfumed lotus-bearing Nile in her gilded pageant to meet Marc Antony, while all the world stood agape at the unheard-of triumph.

"To describe the bride's costume beggars the English language; and human imagination falls faint and feeble before the Herculean task. From the everlasting stars she stole the glittering diamonds that decked her alabaster brow and hid them in the Stygian umbrage of her hair. From the fleecy, graceful cloud she snared the marvellous drapery that floated like a dream about her queenly figure, and from the Peri at Heaven's gate she captured the matchless grace that bore her like an enchanted wraith through the hymeneal scene.

"The array of presents spread in the throne-room of the Skinner palace has been unexcelled in lavish expenditure of fabulous and reckless prodigal wealth anywhere in the world. Golden tokens literally strewed the apartment, merely as effulgent settings for the mammoth, appalling, maddening array of jewels and precious stones, sunbursts and pearls without price, that gleamed like a transcendent electrical display in the hypnotising picture."

There was more of the same kind, but it need not be set down here.

However, it should be said that nothing we ever printed in the paper before or since set the town to laughing as did that piece. We have calls to-day for papers containing the circus-poster wedding, and it was printed over two decades ago.

It was Mehronay's first great triumph in town; then the expected happened. For three days he did not appear at the office and we suspected the truth--that by day he slept the sleep of the unjust in the loft of Huddleson's stable and by night he vibrated between the Elite oyster parlour, where he absorbed fabulous quant.i.ties of soup, and Red Martin's gambling-room, where he disported himself most festively before the gang a.s.sembled there. The morning of the fourth day Mehronay appeared--but not at his desk. We found him sitting glumly on his stool at the case in the back room, clicking the types, with his hat over his eyes and the smile rubbed off his face.

We were a month coaxing Mehronay back in to the front room. His self-respect grew slowly, but finally it returned, and he sat at his desk turning off reams of copy so good that the people read the paper up one side and down the other hunting for his items. He is the only man we have ever had around the paper who could write. Everyone else we have employed has been a news-gatherer. But Mehronay cared little for what we call news. He went about the town asking for news, and getting more or less of it, but the way he put it was much more important than the thing itself. He had imagination. He created his own world in the town, and put it in the paper so vividly that before we realised it the whole town was living in Mehronay's world, seeing the people and events about them through his merry countenance. No one ever referred to him as Mr.

Mehronay, and before he had been on the street six months he was calling people by their first names, or by nicknames, which he tagged onto them.

He was so fatherly to the young people that the girls in the Bee Hive, or the White Front, or the Racket Store used to brush his clothes when they needed it, if we in the office neglected him, and smooth his back hair with their pocket combs, and he--never remembering the name of the particular ministering angel who fixed him up--called one and all of them "darter," smiled a grateful smile like an old dog that is petted, and then went his way. The girls in the White Front Drygoods Store gave him a cravat, and though it was made up, he brought it every morning in his pocket for them to pin on. He was as simple as a child, and, like a child, lived in a world of unrealities. He swore like a mule driver, and yet he told the men in the back room that he could never go to sleep without getting down and saying his prayers, and the only men with whom he ever quarrelled were a teacher of zoology at the College, who is an evolutionist, and Dan Gregg, the town infidel.

One morning when we were sitting in the office before going out to the street for the morning's grist, Mehronay dog-eared a fat piece of copy and jabbed it on the hook as he started for the door.

"My boy was drunk last night," he said. "Me and his mother felt so bad over it that I gave him a pretty straight talk this morning. There it is."

The office dropped its jaw and bugged its eyes.

"Oh, yes," he continued. "Didn't you know I had a boy? He's been the best kind of a boy till here lately. I can see his mother don't like it and his sister's worried too." His face for a second wore an expression of infinite sadness, and he sighed even while the smile came back on the face he turned to us from the door as he said: "Sometimes I think he is studying law with old Charley Hedrick and sometimes I think he is in the bank with John Markley; but he is always with me, and was such a decent boy when I had him out to the College. But I saw him with Joe Nevison last night, and I knew he'd been drinking."

With that he closed the door behind him and was gone. This was the article that Mehronay left on the hook:

"Your pa was downtown this morning, complaining about his 'old trouble,'