Hempfield

Well, Nort had a breathless audience! This time he was in deadly earnest. His sketch was not long, but it was as vivid a picture of the torment of domestic unhappiness as ever I have seen in such brief compass. Moreover, it had the very passion, the cut and thrust of the truth of things.

No sooner had he finished reading than Harriet leaned forward and asked in a half whisper, all ablaze with shocked interest.

"Who is it? Is it the Newtons?"

It was Nort's turn to look surprised.

"Why, no," said he. "I don't know the Newtons at all."

"But you must have had some one in mind."

"No," said Nort; "it's just a description of how married people quarrel."

"But it's exactly what the Newtons do," said Harriet.

Here the old Captain broke in.

"Why," said he, "if we printed a thing like that we'd lose all the advertising of Newton's store. We'd lose the whole Newton family, and their cousins, the Maxwells, and their connections, the Mecklins. Why – "

"But it's true, it's true!" Nort burst in. "And every one of you was more interested in it, I could see that, than in anything we ever put in the Star– since I've been here."

With that Nort suddenly jumped up, as though some important thought had just occurred to him, and rushed out of the room.

"Well, I never!" exclaimed Harriet.

I succeeded in catching him in the hallway.

"Hempfield would not see these things as Miss Grayson does," he said.

"Nort," said I, "Harriet is Hempfield."

He paused just a moment.

"I think Anthy – Miss Doane – will understand," he said.

With that he rushed out in the dark. He made the distance to town, I think, in record time. It was well past nine o'clock when he arrived at the common, and the town was silent with a silence that broods over it only on Sunday nights. He went past the printing-office without looking around. It was in the neighbourhood of a quarter to ten when he arrived at Anthy's gate. An odd time for a call at Hempfield, you say! It was, indeed.

But there was a light in the window. Nort went up the steps and rang the bell. He had never before felt quite as he did at that moment.

Anthy herself opened the door. Nort stepped in quickly and, for a moment, was unable to say a word. Anthy retreated a step or two.

"I tell you, Miss Doane," said Nort explosively, "the only way to make a success of the Star is to publish the truth about Hempfield – "

At that moment Nort happened to glance through the wide door of the library. It was a comfortable, old-fashioned room, and the evening being a little cool a cheerful fire was blazing on the hearth. In a low chair under the light, seeming perfectly at home, sat Ed Smith.

The words died on Nort's lips. He stood for a moment rigid and silent, facing Anthy. Ed had turned his head and was looking at them. No one uttered a sound.

Nort was never able afterward to account for what he did at that moment. He turned quickly, still without saying a word, rushed out of the house, ran down the steps, fell over a honeysuckle bush, picked himself up again, bumped into the gate – and found himself in the middle of the road, in the dark, bare-headed.

CHAPTER XII

THE EXPLOSION

When I was younger than I am now – not so very long ago, either! – I thought I should like to make over some of my neighbours. I thought I could improve on the processes of the Creator, who was apparently wobbly in his moral standards and weak in his discipline, for he allowed several people I knew to flourish and be joyful who by good rights ought to be smacked on their refractory pates; but now, it seems to me, I love most of all to see my friends coming every day true to themselves: Harriet illustrating herself, Horace himself. As for the old Captain, I never wanted a hair of him changed. When men act in character, though they be beggars or burglars, and do not pose or imitate, we have a kind of fondness for them.

As I look back on it now I would not even make over Ed Smith. I did not understand him as well then as I do now, but he was playing his part in the world as well as ever he knew how to play it.

Sometimes I like to think of human beings as cells in the various parts of the huge anatomy of society. In any such consideration Ed Smith would be a stomach cell, and a pretty good one. Whenever the rest of us were soaring too far aloft it was Ed's function to come stealing in upon us like the honest odour of corned beef and cabbage. It was Ed's function to see that we earned every week at least as much as we spent, a tremendous undertaking when you come to think of it.

The fact is, whether we like it or not, we are all mixed up together in this world – poets and plumbers, critics and cooks – and the more clearly we recognize it, the firmer, sounder, truer, will be our grip upon the significance of human life. Why, many a time, when I've been sitting here reading in my study, living for the moment in the rarer atmosphere of the poets, the philosophers, the prophets, I have had to get up and go out and feed the pigs. I have always thought it, somehow, good for me.

When Ed Smith arrived at the printing-office early on the following morning, the fat, round stove, with legs broadly planted in a box of sand, into which Fergus had poked accumulated scraps and cuttings of the shop, had just broken into a jolly smile. Fergus himself, his early morning temper scarcely less rumpled than his hair, was standing near it, shoulders humped up, like a cold crow. He did not know that Ed Smith had returned to Hempfield, but his face, when he saw him, betrayed not the slightest sign of surprise.

Ed was evidently labouring under a considerable pressure of excitement.

"What's all this tomfoolery about printing the truth in the Star?" he burst out.

Fergus began to rumble.

"Tired o' printin' lies, I s'pose," he observed.

Ed always wore his hat a little cocked back, and when he was excited he put both hands in his pockets and began thrusting out his chest until you were relieved to discover that he was held together by a chain which ran across him from the vest pocket that contained his watch to the pocket where he carried his comb and his toothbrush.

Ed had been working himself up into a fine passion. Only ten days away and everything gone to the bow-wows. The Poems of Hempfield! He held up the first page of our precious issue, slapped it smooth with his hand, and glared at it fiercely.

"The Poems of Hempfield!" he remarked with concentrated irony. "What this broken-down newspaper has got to learn is that it isn't in business for the fun of it. Poetry! Truth! What we want is cash, hard, cold cash!"

At this moment Ed began to glare at the paper still more fiercely.

"Where's that reading notice about the electric light company?" he demanded.

By an imperceptible motion of a hostile shoulder Fergus indicated the hold-over stone. Ed rushed over and found the precious item, with leads askew and one corner pied down. He also found the notice of the candidacy of D. J. McCullum, Democrat, which the old Captain had so lightly ordered excluded from our issue of the Star.

If Anthy herself had appeared at that moment I don't know what might not have happened. Poor Ed! He had painfully, by hustle and bustle, pieced together a business which was about to yield a profit, and had scarcely turned his back when a lot of blunderers (and worse) had begun to mix everything up. There wasn't enough business sense in the whole crowd of them —

Ed had still another cause for irritation. He was miserably jealous, and for the first time in his life. The incident of the previous night, when Nort had burst in so unceremoniously upon Anthy, and at sight of him had fled so precipitately, was wholly beyond his comprehension. A tramp printer, at next to nothing a week! What could he mean by calling on Anthy, the proprietor, in such a way, and bursting out with a suggestion about the paper, as though he owned it.

Poor Ed! I shall never forget the picture I have of him – I learned about it long afterward – standing rather stiffly at the doorway, awkwardly handling his hat, about to say good-night, and yet not going.

"Anthy," he began, "I came back on purpose to – to make a proposition to you to-night – "

He published his intention by the very sound of his voice, which trembled a little in spite of the confidence he had felt beforehand.

I fancy I can see Anthy, too, as she stood facing him there at the foot of the stairs in the old hallway, with the flower-filled urns on the wall paper. So much of the thing in her eyes as she looked at him whimsically, it must have been, and yet kindly, Ed could never have understood. He could never have understood the other Anthy, the Anthy whose letters to Mr. Lincoln lie here in my desk.

I am not clear as to exactly what happened next, and no more, I think, was Ed; but he went out and down the steps without having told Anthy what his "proposition" was, and firmly believing that she did not know how dangerously near he had come to committing himself. Women know how to do these things. Ed did not rush away as Nort had done, nor fall over the honeysuckle bush, nor lose his hat – nor his head. Not Ed! But as he walked back home a faint suspicion began to rankle in his soul that his course might not be as clear as he had supposed.

The most irresistible man to women is the one who seems to know least that they are women at all. But Ed Smith was not of this sort. Ed's practical thoughts were ever hanging about the idea of marriage. He fell more or less deeply in love with every pretty girl he met, made elaborately gallant speeches, brought her flowers, pop corn, and chewing gum, tried to hold her hand, and began, warily, to consider her as a prospective Mrs. Smith, weighing her qualifications, quite sensibly, for that responsible position. Oh, Ed had been a good deal of a "lady's man" in his time: knew well his many qualifications, and often congratulated himself that he would never be "caught" until he was "good and ready." There was more than one girl – he had only to "crook his finger."