Chapter XI: Introduction (10)

The light in his father’s office was, as usual, turned up, a thin haze of tobacco smoke perceptible. Without the desire to go up to his room Epes sat in a lower chamber. Snatches of the conversation--the quarrel, really--between Sumatra and Annice returned to him. How essentially different they were. Annice was far, far the lovelier. She made a business of being beautiful. But at least that, in a wife, was something; the majority of wives had far less. What a curious double life it would be--two separate people with one name, in one house. She could never, he was sure, mean more to him than she did now. And it was clear that for her part her demand was no greater.

Sumatra would be the opposite--there was no end to what she expected, fought for, insisted upon. Strangely enough, he couldn’t see her as a wife--even for that coast-wise figure he had so often pictured--at all. He was unable to discover what sort of man would suit her, but certainly one armed with a belaying pin. He became conscious of a clamor faintly heard from another part of Salem; it grew more distinct, and he recognized that it was the confused alarms and uproar of a fire. The fire evidently lay in the direction of Marlboro Street; the noise increased rather than subsided; but even this didn’t stir him until his father appeared.

“I shall have to neglect my duty this evening,” he explained; “there are some questions of foreign exchange. But perhaps you will take my place.”

Epes went silently out to the hall, where two leather buckets, painted with the name Active Fire Club, were hanging. He secured them, and a wool scarf, and went unexcitedly in search of the fire. It was, as he had thought, in the vicinity of Marlboro Street, the Baptist Church. The Fire Engine Exchange, he saw, to which generally the men of the Calef family belonged, had secured the place of honor, directly at the conflagration. Its reservoir was connected by hose to another engine, and that latter to a third, which drew from the source of their water. A pandemonium rose about Epes--the hoarse, jeering shouts of the competing companies, authoritative voices magnified by trumpets, the clatter of the hand pump, and the dull roar of the unconquerable flames. A curtain of black smoke, ruddy at its base and, above, poured with live cinders, rolled up across the immaculate green sky and frosty stars.

The members of the Active Fire Club had formed their line for the rapid orderly passing of buckets, and Epes had taken his place at the end, when he saw a short, familiar feminine shape standing alone. It was Sumatra, and it was extremely wrong of her to be there, like that, so late.

He left his position hurriedly and laid a hand on her arm. How, he demanded, had she got there, and why was she by herself?

“Oh, Epes!” she exclaimed with pleasure. “The cotillon nearly killed me, it was so stupid; and then I heard the alarms, and James Saltonstall wanted to come; and so, you see, here we--here I am.”

“Where is he? Why did he leave you?”

Before she could answer there was a louder opposed shouting of voices:

“Suck him dry, Exchange!”

“Overwash them, Adams. Drown the damned silk stockings!”

Sumatra clutched his hand excitedly. “Don’t you see--they are trying to burst the Exchange engine; we haven’t enough men to pump, because some didn’t leave Hamilton Hall, and James is at the sweep. You must go, too, Epes. Quick, quick, or it will be too late!”

His negative attitude settled into an active perversity; Epes Calef made up his mind that he wouldn’t pump; they could knock the silly engines into painted fragments for all him. Sumatra gave him a strong impatient shove forward, but he resisted her.

“The fire will be over in a few more minutes,” he observed.

She damned the fire excitedly; it was the engine she cared about. “I’ll pump, myself!” Sumatra cried.

He turned to her with a smile, but that was immediately lost as he saw that she had every intention of fulfilling her threat. Sumatra had started toward the profane companies of men when he caught her by the shoulder.

He said coldly, “You’re crazy. Nobody ever heard of such a thing--a girl pumping at a fire! You’d be talked about, insulted in songs all over the country. Come home at once.”

She wrenched herself from his hold, and Epes was obliged to stand in front of her with his arms outspread. Sumatra’s face grew crimson with rage.

“Get out of my way!” she commanded him. “Do you think everyone is a coward and a ninny like you? I’ll pump if I want to, and it doesn’t matter who sings about it. I don’t care what the other fools of women do.”

“No, you won’t,” he told her grimly.

She gave him a shove, and she was so strong that, unprepared, he staggered. She nearly succeeded in evading him, but he caught her with an arm around her vigorous waist. In an instant they were fighting. Braced, with her hand crushing into his face, she tried to break his hold; then Sumatra struck him in the eye. Infuriated, he wanted to knock her head off, but he had to restrain himself to a negative attack.

“I’ll throw you down and sit on you,” he gasped; “here, on the street.”

By way of reply she kicked his shins until, through the hurt, he could feel the blood sliding into his shoes. Shouts, which now, in his rage, he heard but dimly, derisive and encouraging calls, surrounded him. The girl, the little Amazon, was implored to crack his coco; there were protesting cries of shame, but these were lost in the larger approval and entertainment. By Jupiter, but she was finishing him! This, Epes desperately told himself, was horrible beyond words.

“Stop it!” he said savagely, again and again.

But through set teeth Sumatra replied that she’d pump if she chose, and no--no l-l-land shark could stop her. At this there was a hurrah. Her strength was amazing, and entirely wrong; she was like a maniac. Then with a free arm he punched her directly and rudely in the stomach. Sumatra settled against him limply; and holding her up, dragging her with him past threatening faces wavering in the dark, he succeeded in getting her around a corner to a deserted street.

She was still limp, struggling for breath; her face was pale and her hair in torn disorder. Sumatra slowly recovered, and--amazingly--she smiled. Epes’ anger, too, fled; he gazed at her, examining in dismay her clothes with a feeling which might almost have been called admiration. Yet he spoke severely.

“You ought to be in a cage,” he told her; “you’re just wild.”

However was she to fix her clothes, she replied; where could she go? “I ought to go back to Hamilton Hall.”

To this he agreed, the Balavan house was far, inconveniently situated; and they decided, since the Calefs and Balavans were now practically one family, to stop at his dwelling for the repairing of her clothes and spirit. He secured his buckets and they hurried back, through a serene air like liquid ice, over Summer Street to Chestnut. The light was still burning in Ira Calef’s office, and noiselessly they turned into an opposite room.

Epes went on into the dining room, opening darkly beyond, leaving Sumatra with candles on the floor before a tall mirror. There, bearing a high silver candlestick and a following indeterminate illumination, he discovered a bottle of champagne, tagged the ship _Nautilus_ and the year, and gathered two high glasses and some ice. He was tingling with excitement, a disturbance deeper than physical. He felt oddly detached from his late life, the commonplace and irresponsible; his mind was without images, thought--it was like a whirling of crackling colored lights. He found his situation--the uncorked champagne, the two glasses, the unsuspecting near presence of his father, Sumatra, rearranged, entering the dining room--extraordinary and invigorating. The wine foamed whitely through the ice, turning into a silky clear amber that stung his lips. Sumatra observed, sitting down, that she ought to go on to the cotillon at once.

“What,” she demanded, “will James Saltonstall think?”

That, Epes replied, was of singularly small importance.

The rose flush had returned to her cheeks, her eyes were shining; she was decidedly more attractive than he had admitted. But that, he made up his mind, he’d never tell her. She sipped and sipped from her glass; that in itself was unusual, startling. No, he corrected his impression, it would have been in any other girl of Sumatra’s age, but not in her. The most unexpected, inappropriate things seemed to become her perfectly.

“I don’t want to go,” she added, so long after her other phrase that he almost lost the connection. “We are so different,” Sumatra pointed out; “I hardly ever do what I don’t want to. It’s a good thing for your father I’m not you.”

“It wouldn’t make any difference,” he said, listlessness again falling over him; “in the end it would be the same; you’d stay or go as he said.”

“I would not.”

“Oh, yes, but you would.”

“He couldn’t make me,” she insisted; “not about that. It’s too terribly important.”

Epes became annoyed. “Can’t you understand that, to my father, nothing is important except what he wants?”

“Why argue?” she decided. “After all, I am not you. And yet, even as it is, I believe if I were concerned, which I’m not, I could do what I decided with him.”

He laughed. “Try, and if you are successful, why--why, I’d marry you instead of Annice.”

The flush deepened painfully in her countenance; she regarded him with startled eyes. For a moment there was a ridiculously tense silence; and then, relaxing, she shook her head negatively.

“It wouldn’t be any good; you’d have no regard for me.”

“Regard for you!” he exclaimed. “If you did that I’d think more of you than anything else on earth; more than I did of--of the _Triton_.” His voice, his manner darkened. “But you mustn’t; there’s a lot you don’t understand--my father, first of all. He can be very nasty.”

“I’ve told you before, he’s only a man,” she reminded him. “I shouldn’t be afraid.” Her direct gaze again challenged him, but Epes shook his head dejectedly. Suddenly she laid a hand over his. “I didn’t tear that picture up,” she whispered. Then with a sweep of her arm she finished what had been in her glass, and rose. “Come on, he’s still in the office.”

Epes Calef urged her in careful tones not to be a donkey; he tried, here discreetly, to restrain her; but she went resolutely on, through the front room into the hall. There would be a frightful row, but he couldn’t desert Sumatra. However, in the passage she paused, with her lips against his ear.

“Remember, better than the _Triton_, or it would kill me.”

Ira Calef looked up from his table, frowning slightly as she entered the office, followed by Epes. The elder’s face was as white as marble under the artificial light.

“Why, Sumatra,” he greeted her easily.

Epes tried to step between her and his father--disaster--but she held him back, speaking immediately in a voice as level as, but a little faster than, Ira Calef’s.

“I suppose you think it’s strange to see me here, so late, with Epes; but it is stranger even than you imagine.” She put a hand over Epes Calef’s mouth. “No,” she protested, “you promised to let me speak. Mr. Calef,” said the incredible Sumatra, “perhaps I ought to apologize to Mrs. Calef and you--Epes and I are married.”

Epes’ amazement, which he barely restrained, was no greater than his father’s, but the latter’s was given, for him, full expression.

“Married!” he repeated in a voice slightly and significantly louder than usual. “Why, that is outrageous! Nothing, nothing at all was said to me. My plan was wholly different.”

He rose, beyond the table, with one hand resting beside a paper weight of greenish glass. Epes’ eyes fastened upon this.

“It was, as you might guess, in a hurry,” Sumatra went on; “we decided only today. You must remember that I am as much a Balavan as Annice, and I suit Epes far better; I understand and agree with his ambition.”

The man’s manner was colder than the night.

“What ambition?” he demanded.

“To go to sea, of course.”

“Epes isn’t going to sea,” he instructed her.

“He wasn’t, as your son,” she corrected him; “but married to me, yes.”

“No,” Ira Calef answered in a restrained, bitter temper that yet had the effect of a shout.

“But he is,” Sumatra Balavan retorted. “He is, and now you can’t stop him. It doesn’t matter what you want, I won’t have a husband fastened like a sponge to the earth, and as soft as a sponge.” Her anger, equal with Ira Calef’s, rose.

The room grew quiet. Epes’ attention was still concentrated on the heavy rectangle of glass close by his father’s hand. With a sensation like an enveloping breath of winter air he saw the other’s fingers reach out and close about the paper weight. He hadn’t a second to spare; but Sumatra, too, had seen the instinctive movement on the table.

“I wish you would,” she told the man facing her with a set, icy glare. “I’d have you dropped off the end of Derby Wharf. I’m not your wife or son; there would be no reason for my protecting you, hiding your beastliness from the world. Nothing could be better than having you throw a paper weight at me.”

The shadows under Ira Calef’s eyes, on the deathly pallor of his face, were like black smudges; a shiver passed over his rigidity. His hand drooped; both hands held the edge of the table before him. Epes, in a swift insight brushed with compassion, saw what was in his father’s mind--the huddled light figure crushing the geranium border.

“Get out of here,” the elder said to Sumatra in strained, dry tones. “Go, and take him with you.”

“To sea?” she insisted.

“If there is any salt water in hell.”

But, once more in the hall, she was pitiably shaken.

“What can we do?” she implored Epes, against him.

He reassured her that that was easy enough; a far different, apparently trivial and ill-timed question occupied him.

“Sumatra,” he proceeded, “tonight Annice told me that she had lost the obang, the Calef token. Did you find it?”

“No, Epes,” she replied, “I didn’t find it.” Her voice sank, died. “I didn’t find it, Epes,” she repeated with difficulty. “I couldn’t, very well, could I, when I had stolen it?”

[15] Copyright, 1921, by The Curtis Publishing Company.
Copyright, 1923, by Joseph Hergesheimer.

THE RESURRECTION AND
THE LIFE[16]

By WILLIAM C. G. JITRO

(From _The Little Review_)

The low country of the lakes with its flowing blue waters, its sunken gray and yellow earth and low skies, is beautiful; yet there have been thrown down in it cities so mean, so cold, so dingy, and so ugly that in them any beautiful thing is marvelous. The eyes strain away out of the cities over the waters and the still, sandy marshes, or turn up into the fathomless heights of the sky; and again and again in springtime, when small clusters of fruit trees and rose vines bloom here and there in the smoke with robins singing in the new sticky foliage, one seeks such spectacles out to walk near them. As for the cities’ polyglot people, they are so harsh, so cold and silent, and so monotonous both in appearance and in their fierce activity, that among them any one only beautiful or charming becomes precious; a thrilling deed, a noble character, a great love, a deathless faith, or even a passionate hatred, or profound despair is something to set apart, to cherish in the mind, to hoard and love.

For they dream, the people of those gray and far-off cities by the azure floods, as all must do or die; but their dreams are not good or sweet or high or noble.

Once it was evening in winter in a city and the great blue darkness had fallen upon the low plains, the waters, and the frozen marshes; the darkness had grown gray and misty; and after that, as usual within the city, it had become dead, cold, and dingy black. The long misty streets with their feeble pale-blue lamps were dingy; and though many hurrying people, rattling black gasoline motor vehicles, and broken dirty tram-cars passed in them, yet they remained dreary. One of the half dozen very long streets, which lie across the others and meet in the lower center of the city like the spokes of a half-wheel, was dark when I walked into it. It had large furniture shops full of colored lamps; tobacco and shoe shops well lighted up; and Jews’ shops with every sort of cheap glittering merchandise to catch the eyes of the crowd of stupid whites and negroes who occupied this quarter; yet it seemed bleak and dark. The people hurried along silently in the shadows; old snow lay frozen in the dim dirty corners; and the dust was thick. Over the roofs the sky seemed particularly black, foggy and cold.

It was night.

For a time there was no sound except those of the vehicles flying over the rough pavement, the pounding tram-cars that passed, and the shoes of the hurrying people; but at last, at intervals above the other sounds there became audible what seemed to be a voice raised in shouting or speaking; and on coming to a place where two mean dark side streets met I found on the pavement of one of them a short, plump, gentle but very earnest and prepossessing negro of forty who was urging upon passers the principles of Jesus’ teaching. He used the inflection and diction of most negroes in this part of the world, but he was neatly dressed and wore a greatcoat, though his head was bare, for he had placed his round black hat against an iron hydrant for the reception of coins. Four or five men who had turned aside from the main street were listening to him; more, however, were going into the half-screened drinking places all about. Besides, the farther side of the street in which he stood contained a row of little dark wooden buildings that held negro brothels.

It was a dusty winter night.

“You men, naow,” the negro was crying in a ringing, pleasing voice, “you got to be good! You got to do as God says! It ain’t gwine do you no good to pray to God if you don’t do as He says! Don’t you go to fightin’ and killin’ and gamblin’ and then pray to God. It ain’t gwine do you no good! First you got to quit yo’ fightin’, quit yo’ killin’, quit yo’ drinkin’, quit yo’ gamblin’, quit yo’ swarin’, quit yo’ whore-mongerin’: God does not wish you to do these things! Then you go to Him and pray! And he’s gwine hear what you say!”

The utterance of these words with such singular force in that stirring melodious voice, and the face and form of this sturdy little man made lovely by joy, faith, and good will, shone in that bleak cold street, it seemed to me, like a work of glittering gold and jewels amid gutter dust.

I drew nearer and listened to him say that he had come there because he had been bidden by God to go among men and preach the Word, not as preached in worldy churches but as the prophets of Israel and the Apostles preached it long ago. Men must be truthful, kindly, abstemious; then all would be well with them. They must understand one another, sympathize with one another, love one another. That was the Word. When all did so, then God’s kingdom would have come on earth. Meantime the few who knew the truth and strove to live by it would, even though they were lonely and cast out, become happy, strong and courageous. Theirs would be a life unattainable by the gross and careless, a life inconceivable by such, yet the life that all men really desired, the life that was man’s heritage.

Aside, as it were, for the assurance of timid children, he illustrated some of the workings of God’s plan. Once a man received God into his heart and was trying earnestly to live according to His will, God would not desert or neglect him either in this world or any other. He himself was but a humble servant bidden to teach and expound the Word. And since he strove to do this, even though he never succeeded as he wished to, yet God had blessed him forty years with health and strength and the means to live. “The servant am worthy of his hire,” God had said, yet so merciful and kind was God that, “Jes’ so long as you try the best you can, He’ll stand by you. Money an’ things is the least, but He’ll see to them too. Ah don’t have to worry. When Ah get out of money He send me means to get some. Ah don’t owe nobody a cent tonight ’cept seventy-five cents fo’ coal, and the man said the’ wasn’t no hurry fo’ that; but Ah’m goin’ to pay him tomorrow night. And this week Ah was down to the Boahd of Public Works and they said they’d put me to work next Wednesday mornin’ shovelin’ up ashes in the alleys. Ah’m gwine be there. So I get on. Kase Ah’m tryin’ to do as God said. He’ll do jes’ the same by you. If you wonder who I am to stand out here and tell you this, Ah’m Brothah Frank Burns, Servant of the Lord, come to preach the Word like ole Isaiah and Jeremiah and ole Jonah--an’ like ole Peter an’ Paul an’ Silas. They said what Ah’m tellin’ you naow! Kase that’s God’s Word that’ll make you happy an’ strong an’ glad!”

Bright earnestness! Steadfast belief! But two grim city policemen, coming through the dark street where the brothels are, making their way swiftly in the gloom, hear the preacher’s voice and raise their heads. They are not patrolling and have not their bludgeons, but one immediately gives the other a package he has been carrying and hurries across the street behind the speaker: a short, burly man, pink-faced and contemptuous, active and strong, with the bold insolence and cruelty of the police. The buttons and silver shield glitter on the breast of his clean blue greatcoat; the forepiece and shield shine on his heavy cap. Without a word he takes the speaker from behind by arm and neck, jerks him violently backward, choking him, and all but throws him to the pavement. “_Here! Here! Here!_” he cries. “What are _you_ doing?”

Startled, the negro tries to keep his feet and twist his head so as to see his assailant. He strives manfully to explain.

“Where’s your _per_mit?” asks the policeman.

“Judge tole me Ah didn’t need to have no _per_mit--”

“Git to hell out of here!”

The negro is thrown forward almost to his knees and flung about. Very firmly he declares: “Ah’ve come here to speak the Word of the Lord like the old prophets in de Bahble. Folks must know this. Judge he tole me--”

At that the policeman fiercely tightens his hold, strikes him on the head with his fist, and hurls him to his knees. The second officer, a taller man, runs in. And the eager crowd that has gathered in the dark during these few minutes of parley closes about to see. Again and again the negro is thrown down, struck, and dragged in the dust. He continues to gasp out his purpose. The dark cold street resounds with the noise of the blows, the scuffle, the negro’s voice, and the feet of newcomers running up to see. At length, tossing along in the dark amid the crowd, the preacher is swept round a corner and pushed roughly past a dark little medical school, a cross street, and a long hospital with a dimly lighted colored statue of the Virgin in a front gable. Over the way are a dark cold little park with bare trees and a waterless basin, and beyond this some old public buildings. The negro’s once neat clothes are twisted, half pulled from him, and covered with dust and mud, the hand of the policeman chokes him, but he continues to declare his purpose. The policeman, gripping him behind, rushes him along; the other follows carrying the round black hat and half entreating, half commanding the curious crowd to keep off and go away. The captive is taken round another corner and in through the dark basement door of a public building. The second policeman follows and closes the door. Then all go away except me.

I wait for a time, and the tallest policeman comes out and goes off. Soon after the burly attacker comes with his parcel and hurries up the street as if to make up lost time. After an interval the little preacher comes himself, alone and somewhat put to rights; goes quietly back around the corner, past the hospital and medical school and the park and on toward the corner where he was taken. But he seems to consider his work for the night done, and does not stop. He picks his way across the street of business and starts off northward as if beginning a long journey. I follow him curiously for two kilometers or more, but at last, concluding from the way in which he looks about when he passes under the street lights that he suspects that he is being followed, I turn off and go my way.

Next night, however, he is at his corner again, with a large crowd about him this time, for it is the gay free night before the Sabbath when the people have their wages for the week. Crowds are entering and leaving the brothels; loud cheery talk sounds everywhere, in the dark and in the cold blue light of the street lamps; and coins fall steadily into the hat by the hydrant. A tall spectacled friend, well dressed in fur cap and greatcoat with fur collar, accompanies the preacher tonight and treats him disdainfully; but just as before, with the same bright earnestness, the little man tells simply of his “mission,” of God’s laws and God’s promises, and urges obedience to God. Without dismay, even with some zest, he speaks of last night: “Let ’em come an’ git me again;” he says, “Ah’ll be right back. They’ll have to carry me though,” he adds quickly. “I ain’t gwine to fight ’em. That’s what makes all the trouble, men, folks always a-fightin’. You boys,” he cries earnestly, “don’t you ever go to fightin’; don’t you ever go off to no war and kill folks. If they try to make you, don’t you care. Let ’em do what they can, but don’t you care. The Lord said, ‘Don’t do it!’ He does not wish you to do it! An’ God’ll look after you. Jes’ you obey Him an’ don’t you worry!”

Introducing his companion, he assures his audience that this is “a splendid speaker,” and listens eagerly to the other’s halting, practiced: “Ah didn’t expect to be called on to speak yeah this evenin’”; and interpolates quick, bright “Amen”s, “Yes, He will”s, and “Bless his Name”s into the exhortation that follows.

That night they were not attacked or molested.

But at a gathering of negroes on a later night I see the same bright strange little man standing unnoticed by himself at one side of the hall, and I go to him and assure him of my sympathy and tell him that I was present the night he was attacked. He passes over that hastily; it was nothing; he has had many such experiences; but when I ask him about himself he answers my questions obligingly, though with some diffidence. He knows nothing of his parents except that before the emancipation one or both were slaves; he has been taught scarcely anything; and has done hard work all his life. In his youth he joined a church and began to preach, but having come soon afterward to see the quality of churches and to be aware of his “mission,” he traveled “north” and began to go about working and preaching. He belongs to no church and disapproves of all alike. He has no property, permitting himself nothing but poverty and labor. Already he is looked down upon as improvident by those who know him. His wife has left him, not relishing her lot with him, for they were forced always to lodge in the poorest parts of the towns they visited. The intolerance and hate of white Americans for negro people made their lives harder than they would otherwise have been. Single rooms near small independent “mission houses,” when there was one that suited, were their temporary homes; and from one such the wife went at last to visit at the town of Nashville in the distant State of Tennessee, and she has not come back. Her intention to do so was vague at her departure. Her husband has suffered a great deal through her desertion and has humbly and pitifully begged her by letter to return, but he has borne her failure to do so and goes on with his work. He is not loved, nor even much liked by anyone, I find later; he and his preaching, his high standards, his belief, his self-reliance and fearlessness, even his good temper, seem disquieting to others, irritating, a bore, something to escape.

During that year he remained in the city by the floods preaching and working at hard manual labor.

But the next winter, well toward the end, there was an epidemic of pneumonia and my little apostle was stricken suddenly and removed to a cheerless public hospital. There, gasping and choking so horribly that it was almost impossible to watch him, he died the night of his arrival. Nothing but a rickety screen of wood and cloth separated him from a score of other sick men when he died. Next night, washed and dressed in his usual neat clothes, with white linen and a gay colored cravat, the beautiful plump little figure lay in a hideous black coffin with tawdry white lining in the little gloomy mission house that he had found somewhere off on the northern edge of the town. Two or three people watched perfunctorily by the body; but though it was almost spring and the day had been wet, the place grew cold as the night waned, and became almost intolerably dismal and horrible.

The next day, when he was buried, was just such another old winter day, really a wet spring day. The low dirty white sky was heavy with the breath of the lakes; the air was thick with rain; and the filthy snow melted in corners and mingled its muddy dirty water with that which dripped in showers from the soaked and swollen black roofs. The motor vehicles, tramcars and the thousands of feet splashed the water onto the morose people, the buildings, and the shop windows. The negro’s wife, not much affected, arrived from Nashville in time to attend the service at the mission house and to go in the cortege to the cemetery.

I left the service early, and riding on various trams and walking part of the time, crossed the low flat scattered city to the great out-of-the-way cemetery off on the western edge where he was to be buried. This tract lay beyond a vast expanse of the dirty little wooden houses of the city, which stand wall to wall along endless monotonous streets; but it lies on the bank of a little winding stream that is tributary to the great one by which the city stands. High stone supports and black iron palings fence the burial place, which stretches away out of sight among poor streets, low flat fields, and woods. Large parts of its surface have been covered with turf or diversified by small artificial mounds and slopes; but it is flat still, and the turf is now gray and dead. The yellow sand of the lake country shows through in places; and the square stones, urns, painted iron benches, and unsubstantial looking tombs that stand in clusters, are tiny. In making the mounds the trunks of many of the trees were buried almost to the branches, and these trees look fat, stubby, and short-legged in the gray mist. A heavy odor of warm, salty grease hangs in the lower air, a suggestive stench from a factory for reducing fats somewhere in the neighborhood. There are winding macadam roads through the cemetery.

When I have waited a little while at a place which has recently been added for the graves of poor people, the great black motor coach, splashed with mud, appears suddenly out of the city and enters one of the small stone gateways at the southeastern corner. There is a stone lodge there, and a bell over the gates tolls briefly as the coach comes in. Then the vehicle follows a road parallel to a lonely bare wet red-paved street outside, in which long dingy trolley cars pass at intervals; and comes quickly to where I am. The sand here is entirely bare; the few old forest trees are neglected; and the graves lie in long close rows. They have no stones, but there are dead rotten flowers on some of the newest, fluttering forlornly from cardboard frames wound with lead foil and adorned with letters of crinkly purple paper. Some graves have been covered with white cotton cloth fastened to the ground by pegs; but that is all. Ragged rotten brown leaves lie in the hollows of the sand, where brown weeds stand; and wet newspapers are blown about by the cold wind.

In this shabby somber place on the dun earth of the boundless lake country, beside the harsh ugly city in which he has been an unwelcome stranger, but under the great white sky, too, the body of the servant of God is to be laid.

The coach stops in the muddy road, and the escort, all negroes except the undertaker and his agile assistant, descend in the mist. Those who are to carry the coffin gather uncertainly, and with the assistance of the undertaker and his man take it down. Then an irregular procession is formed, the bearers take off their hats, and slowly and stumblingly all move off up the slope on a mat of tan jute with two red stripes, that has been laid on the mud, and make their way among the graves. Shabby, ordinary people in their greatcoats and hats of different dull colors, with their umbrellas and rubber storm shoes, no one of them is much moved as they creep with their dead man like tiny worms on the yellow sand beneath the sky. When the poor black coffin has been put down on the canvas bands of the wooden frame around the grave, all stand back quietly while something that I cannot hear at my distance is read or said. Some of the women sob out then. The coffin descends slowly from sight into the damp yellow sand.

Out at a distance over the swampy fields beyond the stream, large black crows flap noisily around a lone tree; from a tiny locomotive on railway trackage far away white steam rises with a faint roar. The mist in the air is rapidly turning to falling rain.

After a short pause the party straggles back to the coach, some who have started first pausing to look at the other graves and the dead flowers. A few remain for a moment by the open grave looking down. But very soon all are again in their places and the coach is rolling away among the slopes. It passes out at the stone gate and back into the city. And then old German laborers, who have been waiting not far off, approach the grave rheumatically and set aside the few flowers that have been left on the pile of fresh sand, which is partly covered by a green waxed cloth and evergreen branches. They put on and screw down the lid of the new wooden overbox; earth is thrown in; and before the early gloomy rainy nightfall the grave of Brother Frank Burns, Servant of the Lord, is almost filled.

But I go from the place almost unmindful of the irony of what has happened, almost unmindful of the night and the mist and the vastness of the wet sky; so touching and agitating have been this fair bright vain dream which I have glimpsed, and this pure and simple heart which, dreaming, has been able to meet its destiny so calmly and so bravely, has been able so undeniably and so thoroughly to conquer life and to conquer death.

[16] Copyright, 1922, by Margaret C. Anderson.
Copyright, 1923, by William C. G. Jitro.

THE GOLDEN HONEYMOON[17]

By RING W. LARDNER

(From _The Cosmopolitan_)

Mother says that when I start talking I never know when to stop. But I tell her the only time I get a chance is when she ain’t around, so I have to make the most of it. I guess the fact is neither one of us would be welcome in a Quaker meeting, but as I tell Mother, what did God give us tongues for if He didn’t want we should use them? Only she says He didn’t give them to us to say the same thing over and over again, like I do, and repeat myself. But I say:

“Well, Mother,” I say, “when people is like you and I and been married fifty years, do you expect everything I say will be something you ain’t heard me say before? But it may be new to others, as they ain’t nobody else lived with me as long as you have.”

So she says:

“You can bet they ain’t, as they couldn’t nobody else stand you that long.”

“Well,” I tell her, “you look pretty healthy.”

“Maybe I do,” she will say, “but I looked even healthier before I married you.”

You can’t get ahead of Mother.

Yes, sir, we was married just fifty years ago the seventeenth day of last December and my daughter and son-in-law was over from Trenton to help us celebrate the Golden Wedding. My son-in-law is John H. Kramer, the real estate man. He made $12,000 one year and is pretty well thought of around Trenton; a good, steady, hard worker. The Rotarians was after him a long time to join, but he kept telling them his home was his club. But Edie finally made him join. That’s my daughter.

Well, anyway, they come over to help us celebrate the Golden Wedding and it was pretty crimpy weather and the furnace don’t seem to heat up no more like it used to and Mother made the remark that she hoped this winter wouldn’t be as cold as the last, referring to the winter previous. So Edie said if she was us, and nothing to keep us home, she certainly wouldn’t spend no more winters up here and why didn’t we just shut off the water and close up the house and go down to Tampa, Florida? You know we was there four winters ago and staid five weeks, but it cost us over three hundred and fifty dollars for hotel bill alone. So Mother said we wasn’t going no place to be robbed. So my son-in-law spoke up and said that Tampa wasn’t the only place in the South, and besides we didn’t have to stop at no high price hotel but could rent us a couple rooms and board out somewheres, and he had heard that St. Petersburg, Florida, was _the_ spot and if we said the word he would write down there and make inquiries.

Well, to make a long story short, we decided to do it and Edie said it would be our Golden Honeymoon and for a present my son-in-law paid the difference between a section and a compartment so as we could have a compartment and have more privatecy. In a compartment you have an upper and lower berth just like the regular sleeper, but it is a shut in room by itself and got a wash bowl. The car we went in was all compartments and no regular berths at all. It was all compartments.

We went to Trenton the night before and staid at my daughter and son-in-law and we left Trenton the next afternoon at 3.23 P. M.

This was the twelfth day of January. Mother set facing the front of the train, as it makes her giddy to ride backwards. I set facing her, which does not affect me. We reached North Philadelphia at 4.03 P. M. and we reached West Philadelphia at 4.14, but did not go into Broad Street. We reached Baltimore at 6.30 and Washington, D.C., at 7.25. Our train laid over in Washington two hours till another train come along to pick us up and I got out and strolled up the platform and into the Union Station. When I come back, our car had been switched on to another track, but I remembered the name of it, the La Belle, as I had once visited my aunt out in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, where there was a lake of that name, so I had no difficulty in getting located. But Mother had nearly fretted herself sick for fear I would be left.

“Well,” I said, “I would of followed you on the next train.”

“You couldn’t of,” said Mother, and she pointed out that she had the money.

“Well,” I said, “we are in Washington and I could of borrowed from the United States Treasury. I would of pretended I was an Englishman.”

Mother caught the point and laughed heartily.

Our train pulled out of Washington at 9.40 P. M. and Mother and I turned in early, I taking the upper. During the night we passed through the green fields of old Virginia, though it was too dark to tell if they was green or what color. When we got up in the morning, we was at Fayetteville, North Carolina. We had breakfast in the dining car and after breakfast I got in conversation with the man in the next compartment to ours. He was from Lebanon, New Hampshire, and a man about eighty years of age. His wife was with him and two unmarried daughters and I made the remark that I should think the four of them would be crowded in one compartment, but he said they had made the trip every winter for fifteen years and knowed how to keep out of each other’s way. He said they was bound for Tarpon Springs.

We reached Charleston, South Carolina, at 12.50 P. M. and arrived at Savannah, Georgia, at 4.20. We reached Jacksonville, Florida, at 8.45 P. M. and had an hour and a quarter to lay over there, but Mother made a fuss about me getting off the train, so we had the darkey make up our berths and retired before we left Jacksonville. I didn’t sleep good as the train done a lot of hemming and hawing, and Mother never sleeps good on a train as she says she is always worrying that I will fall out. She says she would rather have the upper herself, as then she would not have to worry about me, but I tell her I can’t take the risk of having it get out that I allowed my wife to sleep in an upper berth. It would make talk.

We was up in the morning in time to see our friends from New Hampshire get off at Tarpon Springs, which we reached at 6.53 A. M.

Several of our fellow passengers got off at Clearwater and some at Belleair, where the train backs right up to the door of the mammoth hotel. Belleair is the winter headquarters for the golf dudes and everybody that got off there had their bag of sticks, as many as ten and twelve in a bag. Women and all. When I was a young man we called it shinny and only needed one club to play with and about one game of it would of been a-plenty for some of these dudes, the way we played it.

The train pulled into St. Petersburg at 8.20 and when we got off the train you would think they was a riot, what with all the darkeys barking for the different hotels.

I said to Mother, I said:

“It is a good thing we have got a place picked out to go to and don’t have to choose a hotel, as it would be hard to choose amongst them if every one of them is the best.”

She laughed.

We found a jitney and I give him the address of the room my son-in-law had got for us and soon we was there and introduced ourselves to the lady that owns the house, a young widow about forty-eight years of age. She showed us our room, which was light and airy with a comfortable bed and bureau and washstand. It was twelve dollars a week, but the location was good, only three blocks from Williams Park.

St. Pete is what folks calls the town, though they also call it the Sunshine City, as they claim they’s no other place in the country where they’s fewer days when Old Sol don’t smile down on Mother Earth, and one of the newspapers gives away all their copies free every day when the sun don’t shine. They claim to of only give them away some sixty-odd times in the last eleven years. Another nickname they have got for the town is “the Poor Man’s Palm Beach,” but I guess they’s men that comes there that could borrow as much from the bank as some of the Willie boys over to the other Palm Beach.

During our stay we paid a visit to the Lewis Tent City, which is the headquarters for the Tin Can Tourists. But maybe you ain’t heard about them. Well, they are an organization that takes their vacation trips by auto and carries everything with them. That is, they bring along their tents to sleep in and cook in and they don’t patronize no hotels or cafeterias, but they have got to be bona fide auto campers or they can’t belong to the organization.

They tell me they’s over 200,000 members to it and they call themselves the Tin Canners on account of most of their food being put up in tin cans. One couple we seen in the Tent City was a couple from Brady, Texas, named Mr. and Mrs. Pence, which the old man is over eighty years of age and they had came in their auto all the way from home, a distance of 1,641 miles. They took five weeks for the trip, Mr. Pence driving the entire distance.

The Tin Canners hails from every State in the Union and in the summer time they visit places like New England and the Great Lakes region, but in the winter the most of them comes to Florida and scatters all over the State. While we was down there, they was a national convention of them at Gainesville, Florida, and they elected a Fredonia, New York man as their president. His title is Royal Tin Can Opener of the World. They have got a song wrote up which everybody has got to learn it before they are a member:

The tin can forever! Hurrah, boys! Hurrah!
Up with the tin can! Down with the foe!
We will rally round the campfire, we’ll rally once again,
Shouting, “We auto camp forever!”

That is something like it. And the members has also got to have a tin can fastened on to the front of their machine.

I asked Mother how she would like to travel around that way and she said:

“Fine, but not with an old rattle brain like you driving.”

“Well,” I said, “I am eight years younger than this Mr. Pence who drove here from Texas.”

“Yes,” she said, “but he is old enough to not be skittish.”

You can’t get ahead of Mother.

Well, one of the first things we done in St. Petersburg was to go to the Chamber of Commerce and register our names and where we was from as they’s great rivalry amongst the different States in regards to the number of their citizens visiting in town and of course our little State don’t stand much of a show, but still every little bit helps, as the fella says. All and all, the man told us, they was eleven thousand names registered, Ohio leading with some fifteen hundred-odd and New York State next with twelve hundred. Then come Michigan, Pennsylvania and so on down, with one man each from Cuba and Nevada.

The first night we was there, they was a meeting of the New York-New Jersey Society at the Congregational Church and a man from Ogdensburg, New York State, made the talk. His subject was Rainbow Chasing. He is a Rotarian and a very convicting speaker, though I forget his name.

Our first business, of course, was to find a place to eat and after trying several places we run on to a cafeteria on Central Avenue that suited us up and down. We eat pretty near all our meals there and it averaged about two dollars per day for the two of us, but the food was well cooked and everything nice and clean. A man don’t mind paying the price if things is clean and well cooked.

On the third day of February, which is Mother’s birthday, we spread ourselves and eat supper at the Poinsettia Hotel and they charged us seventy-five cents for a sirloin steak that wasn’t hardly big enough for one.

I said to Mother: “Well,” I said, “I guess it’s a good thing every day ain’t your birthday or we would be in the poorhouse.”

“No,” says Mother, “because if every day was my birthday, I would be old enough by this time to of been in my grave long ago.”

You can’t get ahead of Mother.

In the hotel they had a cardroom where they was several men and ladies playing five hundred and this new tangled whist bridge. We also seen a place where they was dancing, so I asked Mother would she like to trip the light fantastic toe and she said no, she was too old to squirm like you have got to do now days. We watched some of the young folks at it awhile till Mother got disgusted and said we would have to see a good movie to take the taste out of our mouth. Mother is a great movie heroyne and we go twice a week here at home.

But I want to tell you about the Park. The second day we was there we visited the Park, which is a good deal like the one in Tampa, only bigger, and they’s more fun goes on here every day than you could shake a stick at. In the middle they’s a big bandstand and chairs for the folks to set and listen to the concerts, which they give you music for all tastes, from Dixie up to classical pieces like Hearts and Flowers.

Then all around they’s places marked off for different sports and games--chess and checkers and dominoes for folks that enjoys those kind of games, and roque and horseshoes for the nimbler ones. I used to pitch a pretty fair shoe myself, but ain’t done much of it in the last twenty years.

Well, anyway, we bought a membership ticket in the club which costs one dollar for the season, and they tell me that up to a couple years ago it was fifty cents, but they had to raise it to keep out the riffraff.

Well, Mother and I put in a great day watching the pitchers and she wanted I should get in the game, but I told her I was all out of practice and would make a fool of myself, though I seen several men pitching who I guess I could take their measure without no practice. However, they was some good pitchers, too, and one boy from Akron, Ohio, who could certainly throw a pretty shoe. They told me it looked like he would win the championship of the United States in the February tournament. We come away a few days before they held that and I never did hear if he win. I forget his name, but he was a clean cut young fella and he has got a brother in Cleveland that’s a Rotarian.