To Look and Pass Page 5

  Bee shrugged, not with anything so robust as contempt for her mother’s anxious words, but with indifference. Even at sixteen she felt the measure of her own intelligence; she felt that it was like steel with which she would like to slash. But Sarah presented no firm flesh for slashing; she had only cloudlike softnesses and little laughters. If she had been a strong antagonist, Bee might have spent much of her venom on her and would have had less left with which to poison other lives.

  However, she was in good temper today and announced that she would accompany us a ways, as she wished to see Livy. Livy had finished school last June, and had not yet decided whether she would go to Ripley to the high school or stay at home with her mother for a year. Mrs. Bingham had had a miscarriage, which was bad at her time of life, since she was about forty-five. We younger people were believed to be utterly ignorant of Mrs. Bingham’s illness, but like all children we knew more than we were suspected of knowing. Mrs. Bingham was never quite the same after her “inward complaint,” as the ladies called it, and Livy stayed with her mother, not out of an excess of affection, but because she felt that it was the decent and indicated thing to do. The two older girls were at the Ripley High School, Marjorie in her last year and looking towards college (an outlandish and exciting subject of conversation in our town), and Lucille in her third year.

  Beatrice had finished school when Livy had finished. There was no question of her going to Ripley High School. Mrs. Faire was always artlessly surprised when higher education for women was mentioned. Once she asked simply: “What for?” Of course, the answer then was no more convincing than it is today. If I had had daughters, I suppose I would have sent them to college, but that does not alter my belief that education for men is a necessity, but not for women. Men have the originality, the power and the fortitude, and education increases them, enriches their lives, hurls back horizons. But women have no originality, no power, and little fortitude in other than physical matters, and so education is an affectation in women, adding nothing to them except stupidity and arrogance. Women have always had great faith in words and formulae and the sound of their own voices; giving them an education only gives them access to more words and formulae and adds a shrillness and clamor beyond endurance to them.

  I don’t suppose Beatrice Faire ever argued with her mother about education, though I have reason to know that she desired to go to school in Ripley. It was part of her curious character that she rarely entered into an argument when her opponent had inferior equipment. That was because she would not waste her time. She was greedy for time; she snatched at it. Time to her was infinitely valuable. She seemed to think that it was something to mold, to bend to service, to use for personal aggrandisement. She was feverish about it, as though she must always be alert or something crafty would rob her of a moment or an hour. In this she was violently different from Dan, who did not believe in time, who really did not believe in anything or find anything valuable. He was convinced that all one could do was “look—and pass.” Beatrice believed that one could, and should “look—and seize!”

  As she walked between Dan and myself that brilliant October afternoon, we were both taken aback by the new side which she was showing us. We had always been somewhat afraid of her, and resentful, but today she laughed and chattered with only slight glimpses of dark waters under the foam of her gaiety. She seemed in exceptionally high spirits, and was affable even to Dan, whom she despised. Dan was sensitive about the fact that he was almost seventeen and still at the local school. He mentioned that Mortimer Rugby wanted him to go to school in Ripley after January, when he would be finished with our school. But he could not do that, he said. His pa was getting old and tired out. He could get a job in January with Mr. Riggs, working in the general store. Mr. Riggs had promised him two dollars and a half a week. Mr. Riggs’s brother had sold out to him, the brother buying a large and prosperous farm near Ripley. The succeeding Mr. Riggs was a bachelor with long walrus whiskers perpetually stained with tobacco, and had the reputation of being an atheist, if not actually a heathen. Dan liked him. The work would not be too bad, he said, mostly evenings and Saturday afternoons, because Mr. Riggs liked to visit Ed Ford’s bar and chatter in the park with his friends, and play chess with the undertaker, and argue horses with Crawford and Mundell.

  “I should think you’d hate to waste your time there,” said Beatrice scornfully.

  “Why?” asked Dan with indifference, as though her opinion did not matter at all.

  “I should think you’d want to go to school, to amount to something.”

  “Why?” he repeated equably.

  “Well, don’t you want to amount to something?” she cried. “Don’t you want to get anywheres?”

  “Why should I? Getting somewheres keeps you from thinking. That’s about all you can really get out of living, seems to me. Just thinking. Getting somewheres means, I expect, eating better vittles, and having more suits to wear, and maybe a horse and carriage of your own, and traveling ’round on trains and boats looking at folks who’d like to travel around and see the places you’ve come from. All that don’t seem important enough to me to sweat for it, and give up thinking-time for it.”

  “I think you’re just lazy!” exclaimed Beatrice.

  “Maybe,” he replied mildly. “Maybe. What if I am?”

  “Mama says you’ve got what she calls a ‘touch’ on the violin she gave you. You could perhaps amount to something if you wanted to.”

  They had ignored me during this conversation. I was more than a year younger than Dan, and besides, I thought the argument so dull, when the sky was so bright and blue, that I could contribute nothing intelligent to it. But, as I glanced at Dan I was arrested by the sudden tightening of his face as though he had been greatly hurt.

  “No,” he said slowly. “I’ll never amount to anything—playing a violin. I know it. I feel as though I—try to push too hard on it, try to make it say things it hasn’t got all the strings for. I try to make it sound like all the drums and flutes and horns and things I hear, inside, and when it can’t sound like all that, I sort of bear down on it, and it just sounds dull. It’s no good.”

  A lady was coming through the opened gate of a pleasant house, her arms full of late flowers. It was Mrs. Burnett, leaving a friend after a visit. Her carriage stood at the curb, the old darky drowsing on his seat. She stopped when she saw us young folk approaching. She smiled at me with her cold mouth and eyes, and beamed at Beatrice. Dan, she entirely ignored.

  “Oh, there you are again, you children!” she said. “Seems we are always running into each other! Bee, I forgot to ask you this afternoon, but Amelia wants you to come to her birthday party next week, Tuesday, and you, too, Jimmy. I do hope your mama finishes Amelia’s blue challis by that time, Bee.”

  “I’ll help her with it, Mrs. Burnett,” said Beatrice sweetly. She put her head gently to one side, and her eyes swam in softness.

  Mrs. Burnett was moved, and patted the girl’s cheek. “Your mama is very fortunate in you, dear,” she said. She entered her carriage, and waved her gloved hand at us, and drove away. Beatrice snorted as we went on.

  “Horrible old woman,” she said. “Horrible little Amelia. Toad! What I’d like to do—”

  “If you think that about folks, why’re you so nice to ’em?” I demanded.

  She laughed. “Because if you know what they are, and are nice to ’em, and flatter ’em, and make ’em feel good, they can do a lot for you,” she answered derisively.

  We left her at Livy’s. Livy came to the door, her plump little face somewhat pale, but still wearing her air of pert awareness and good sense. She did not seem overjoyed to see Beatrice, but greeted her pleasantly enough.

  Dan and I walked on together. Suddenly he looked at me with amusement.

  “I suppose you want to amount to something, Jim,” he said. “What’ve you got in mind?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t mind being President,” I said, half afraid of his ridicule. “Wouldn�
�t you?”

  “Yes, I would.”

  Chapter Five

  Dan went to work in Billy Riggs’s general store. Business there had been conducted with more or less laissez-faire and lofty nonchalance. It had nothing of the heat of commerce, the bustle of achievement; Mr. Riggs’s favorite platitude had nothing to do with a daily “something accomplished, something done.” He showed no impatience towards congenital philosophers who slumped in stupefied positions on his cracker barrels, contemplating what, had it not been for overalls, would have been their navels. No, Mr. Riggs was all for a gentle flow of spirit and peace in his store; in the winter he kept his iron potbellied stove in a genial fume and red glow, and showed no decent shrewdness in the prodigal way in which he handed out free mugs of cider on frequent occasions, and tossed in crackers, apples, and chewing tobacco to boot. The result was that though he had the greatest good will of South Kenton, his books, if he had kept them, would have shown a steadily increasing decline in more practical assets. But so long as he was able to meet most of his bills, and Mrs. Knowles did not press him too regularly on his mortgage, and there was a good thick slice of salt pork in his beans each day, he did not worry a particle.

  Then Dan came to work for him, and to share with him the three warm but musty rooms behind the store. Dan’s father had injured his thumb one day some two months before Dan had taken the job; it had rapidly become infected, and within a week he was dead. The general disfavor in which Dan was held was not lightened by the fact that he showed “no decent feelin’s.” South Kenton failed to notice that Dan got the best possible price for the smithy and the half-acre of land about it, and so was able to keep his father’s funeral “off the town.” I think South Kenton would not have disliked paying for the funeral had an indigent son edified it by dramatic demonstrations of grief over the grave of a pauper father. Folks will always like their little Roman holiday of morbid emotion, I guess, and will even be pleased to pay for it.

  Billy Riggs liked Dan immensely. He, himself, was profoundly and hypnotizingly lazy. He frankly asserted that only chickens and other brainless creatures really liked to get up at dawn, and that folks who followed suit, and liked it, didn’t “have no more sense than a settin’ hen.” As far as Billy Riggs was concerned, you could have your nonsense about industry and dew-washed worlds and getting early starts, and early birds getting the worms. He preferred his good narrow bed and a long hour of drowsing before rising to confront the day. “Folks’ll rush and rush,” he would say, “and by and by, come the years, they’ll rush around until there ain’t anythin’ more to do, and then they’ll sit on their backsides and starve to death, seein’ that everythin’s all done and washed up and built up and made, and needin’ about fifty million more folks than there is to eat up and use up what the hard-workin’ folks piled up in their factories and silos.” I have heard more learned discourse, and read more rhetorical and scholarly essays on the subject of depressions and boom periods and economic ebbs and flows, but I doubt that any of them had the uncomplicated pungency and clarity of Billy Riggs’s elucidation of overproduction and unrestricted work.

  He liked Dan because of the boy’s easy-goin’ ways, and lack of what he called “agog-ness.” Billy had physical inertia, but Dan had an inertia of the spirit. He cleaned up the most flagrant dirt in the store, tidied shelves, kept accounts, and made indignant customers pay on the nail. He was leading a far more comfortable life than he had ever experienced before. Billy Riggs was a bachelor, but more than that, he was chaste. He never “sashayed after wimminfolks.” It was not that he had a contempt for women; it was just that he had never needed a woman, and therefore found the exigency of them incomprehensible. A neighbor woman came in every day to clean up the three rooms behind the store, and prepare the meals and wash the few clothes, but Billy would never sit down to eat until the last flutter of her skirt had disappeared. He said his vittles didn’t set right with a female “a-swishin’” around the premises.

  Dan had worked for him about a year when Billy Riggs informed all and sundry that he was leaving his store and his possessions to Dan. “I ain’t got no one but my brother’s pesky younguns that I’d just as lief pizen as look at,” he said frankly. “Dan, here, is like a son to me. He can have every blame thing I got.”

  The ladies of South Kenton were fond of speaking of Billy as “being quite a character.” They found nothing outrageous in many of the outrageous things he did and said. That was because, I believe, he had a shrewd and dangerously candid tongue and a certain brutality of expression that was justly feared. But they did resent his wholehearted and well-published admiration for Dan and the fact that he had made the boy his heir. Mr. Ezra Hughes, president, vice-president, secretary, and manager of the First National Bank, knew that Billy had something like two thousand dollars in the bank, and he righteously resented the idea of shiftless Dan Hendricks inheriting that sum.

  South Kenton’s regard for Dan did not increase because of this, not even in the face of the obvious fact that the store was better kept than it had been, that all bills were paid promptly, books balanced, and larger varieties of stock kept on hand. Dislike is always increased, if anything, when unexpected virtues in the disliked appear; society must have its scapegoat and always resents its devil suddenly appearing in newly washed robe and fresh wings. I notice that preachers do not unduly emphasize the Lord’s nostalgic grief for his “Lucifer, Star of the Morning,” but prefer to keep up the stench of brimstone and refer to Satan’s alleged ugliness.

  It would be nice to write something romantic about Dan Hendricks’ business career, something epically American. Think what rhetoric, what admiration and reverence, could be utilized to show how he built up a lowly little village store into the nucleus of what would some day be giant chain stores in giant cities. A charming story could be written about startling innovations he had thought up, built on the good old hypocritical foundations of Service, Value, and Courtesy. Perhaps, in such a story, I could tell how he invented some simple little sales trick which made him a millionaire with two yachts, a palace on the Riviera, dyspepsia, a swimming pool, and a bodyguard. But, unfortunately for the edification of youth and the support of educators and preachers, such was not the case. Beyond the simple and well-worn mechanics of making the store pay a little profit and keeping down the majority of cockroaches, mice, and rats, and using a broom with casual regularity, Dan accomplished nothing much.

  He kept up his lessons with Sarah Faire. He knew by now that he would never be even a fair musician. But it gave Sarah pleasure to teach him. And only God knows what pleasure she gave Dan by her very being, by the sight of her, by the touch of her hands, and by the kindness of her sweet voice. I am sure that all the heaven he ever knew was in that little white house under its gnarled old trees. He would take her a slab of bacon, or a ham occasionally, insisting that it was payment for his lessons; or maybe he’d carry over a sack of potatoes or flour, or a bushel of apples. These are not romantic things like orchids and books and bits of gold nothings and furs. But no jewel was ever given with deeper passion and more atavistic love than that which accompanied Dan’s prosaic offerings.

  The last time I ever saw Dan taking a lesson from Sarah Faire was when he was nineteen years old, and she, past forty. It was during my summer vacation, and my last year at Ripley High School, and I walked over to Sarah’s house one hot July evening. I watched Dan take his lesson; his fingers seemed to hold well enough, with gentleness and strength and power, but the sounds that he brought forth were confused, muffled, yet terribly strong. Sarah was distressed; she stood beside him, wrinkling her clear brows in the funny way she had, and automatically waving a finger. She could not understand it. At length she sighed in despair, laughed a little, and shook her head. Dan removed the violin from under his chin, and looked at her as she sat in her chair, smiling in bewilderment and affection. Sarah did not appear forty, though she was somewhat plumper. The bright patina which she wore was not of the flesh, but of th
e brightness within her. I thought she was prettier than ever, in spite of the silvery gleam of a few gray hairs in the mass of red-gold curls on her head, and the fine web of wrinkles about her apple-brown eyes.

  “I expect it’s no use,” said Dan slowly. He still looked at Sarah. He had grown very tall during these past years, and though still shabby he was very clean. In recent years I saw a rare portrait of Abraham Lincoln when he had been a young man, and there was something about that portrait which reminded me of Dan Hendricks at eighteen. There was the same ugly and melancholy face, the mild yet somber eyes, the serene and tender mouth, the indefinable aura of crude beauty and strength. There is nothing paradoxical in saying that Dan had both ugliness and beauty, and that the ugliness increased the beauty, made it alive and full of splendor.

  I had grown used to Dan’s face, yet youthfully careless and unobservant as I was I was struck tonight by its expression. There was always something guarded about his expression, something held back and reticent. But tonight his guard was down, and his love for Sarah Faire was blazing so simply in his eyes that only one as innocent as Sarah could have failed to see it. Fortunately Bee was not there. But I saw, and I became hot-cheeked and frightened and embarrassed. I felt that I had come upon Dan when he was naked, and that I ought to retreat a distance and shout, thus giving him time to resume his clothing, and I, to pretend that I had not seen. But I really did not understand completely, and forgot it entirely within a year.