Julie Cane

Front matter

HARVEY O'HIGGINS

ADVANCE COPY FOR PRIVATE DISTRIBUTION NOT FOR SALE — HARPER 8b BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, NEW YORK AND LONDON

Copyright, 1924, by Harper 8s Brothers

II

That was on a bright October morning in the early eighteen-eighties. He had been summoned excitedly from his shop downstairs, and he had come running in his white apron to the doorway of his wife's IxMlroom. He had (!aught at^tlie door jam})s witli both hands when he saw what the doctor was doing, and he hung there, staring. The doctor, in his knitted waistcoat, with his shirtsleeves rolled to bis bare elbows, was holding up like a butcher, by the hind legs, a little animal the size of a sucking pig, watching it as if, having stuck it with a knife, he were waiting for it to die. Suddenly, he smacked it. It writhed with a choked and gurgling wail. And at the sound of that wail Cane felt a terrifying emotion.

A sublime emotion! It was as if the earth had dropped from under him and left him suspended by the door posts in the midst of the bottomless mystery of the world's existence which the everyday sights and ordinary aspects of the world commonly concealed from him. It was an emotion that he had once doted on — and dreaded. As a boy, he had often induced it at night — instead of saying his prayers — lying on his back in bed, staring at the darkness. He had not, for years, remembered the imagined scenes by means of which he used to produce it in himself; yet, when it flashed upon him now, it brought with it, instantaneously, the whole elaborate vision with which, in his adolescence, he had so often awed and frightened himself.

He would imagine himself floating through the great void of the heavens, beyond the farthest limits of the known universe; and, drifting there, as a disembodied intelligence — all alone in that empty blackness, in that absolute nothingness and cold vacancy — he would say to himself: '* There's nothing here. There never has been anything here. There never can be anything here. Scientif^ically speaking, out o' nothing, nothing can never come."

Then, in the vast and blind distance, he would see a vague glow, a sort of dim yellow mist of light; and, in it, little definite centers of light would gradually grow and strengthen. "Ah!" he would say to himself, *'this's impossible. Scientifically speaking, this's impossible. Out o' empty darkness, how can light come?"

Slowly he would realize that he was looking, from the desert wastes of space, at the impossible and incredible solar system. There, in its center, swung the small globe of the sun. The stars came rushing toward him, like a blast of sparks, blown across the immensity above him and below him, at great distances from one another, in a confusion of orderly motion. Unexpectedly from the sun, he felt the miracle of heat. Air began to rush past him. And then, through clouds, he saw the earth, the green earth, full of that final impossibility, life, animal life, human life, and most unexplainable of all, human intelligence. And lying on his back in bed, afloat in that terrific mystery, he would feel a sinking in his insides and be horrified with awe."

Now he seemed to see it all again, in the flash of a second, at the sound of the thin wail from his newborn child. Out of nothingness, a human voice. And the old emotion struck him in the legs like a fright and made his knees shake and his white apron quiver.

To the doctor, smiling at him, he looked merely scared and stupid.

"You have a daughter, Mr. Cane."

He did not answer. He stared through his glasses — a young grocer with small, weak, whitish eyes — a young grocer in a soiled apron, his shirtsleeves gartered at the elbows and protected at the wrists by woven straw cuffs. Cane, the grocer. He had callow side-whiskers in the style of the day, and he wore a paper collar with a neck scarf that was held at its knot by a gold ring.

His wife was looking at him with a peculiar air of peevish and malevolent triumph, as if to say: "There now! Were you wrong or weren't you?" He did not notice her. He turned away, stupidly dumb, with the feeling that his feet were not yet sure of the earth under them. He walked with a sort of fumbling-footed dignity — very important and very old — a father, a person of an earlier generation. His knees were jerky as he went downstairs into the back storeroom of his shop.

Ill

He could see customers waiting for him, three of them, sitting on stools before the counter in silence. He drew some cider into a pint measure from the spigot of a barrel behind the back partition, drank a mouthful, replaced the measure, and went into the shop briskly — Cane, the grocer — in the changed manner of an actor assuming a role.

It was a role for which he was hopelessly miscast, and the fact that he was playing it I offer as another proof that anything is possible. The part had been so slowly and so slyly imposed on him that he had never questioned it. And, in fact, the imposition had begun before he was born. His father, a Connecticut school teacher, had taken the first false step by migrating to New York to make a fortune. His commercial ambition had propelled him into the position of bookkeeper in a Broadway grocery, and left him stranded there for life. Having transshipped his cargo of hopes to his son, he forced the boy to give up his school studies and become a clerk in the same shop; and after the mother's death, when the natural conflict between father and son became continuous, John escaped the paternal tyranny by taking to the road as a commercial traveler for a wholesale house. He had some vague idea that such travel would be educational. He was given a suburban territory, and on his rounds he came to Findellen and to Sowers' grocery, where Annie Sowers was trying to run the business while her father lay ill upstairs.

Cane did not recognize her as the next false agent of fate. She was an incompetent, distracted woman of thirty, struggling against sharp customers, bad debts, and a delivery boy who was irresponsible. Cane sold her several bills of goods, between customers, patiently, touched by her expression of pale and worried inadequacy. She seemed to him to be chiefly engaged in a bewildered pursuit of a lead pencil which she always thrust into the back-knot of her red hair and always forgot to seek there. His mother had had red hair. He felt sorry for her. He was not himself very eflScient commercially, and it flattered him to find some one whom he could pity as worse than he.

To her of course, he was a successful New York business man, young and rather handsome.

Then, one Saturday afternoon, swinging back in his suburban circle to Broadway, he dropped off at Findellen to pick up an order from her, and he found her in a madly distracted state, trying to get a doctor for her father — who seemed on the point of death — unable to wait on her customers — farmers and their wives, in town to buy their week's supplies — deserted by her delivery boy with whom she had quarreled, and so unpopular with her neighbors that she would not even ask any of them to help her. Cane hung up his hat and coat in the back storeroom, put on her father's apron, took charge behind the counter, and sent her upstairs.

Old Sowers died that night, and it was Cane who closed the shop and notified the undertaker. She had apparently no relatives and certainly no friends. Some church acquaintances came to her and Cane left them in control of the tragedy and went for the night to the Union Hotel, instead of returning at once to New York. The delay probably indicated an inclination in him of which he was unaware.

The next day was Sunday. He woke to a fine, brightly-painted, newly sunvarnished autumn morning; and after breakfast — having sauntered down the empty Center Street and looked at the black streamer on the grocery door — he turned toward the wooded hills behind Findellen, in need of a solitary walk.

He liked the little town as he passed through it; and he liked the view of the Jersey flats that opened as he ascended the hill-road above them. Findellen had as yet few shade trees; to the pioneer farmers who had built it trees were an enemy tliat had to be cleared away. But on the steep and rocky hillside where farming was impossible the woods had been allowed to live in an Indian reservation of their own, and Cane enjoyed them with city eyes. In their barbaric autumn foliage, they were as picturesque as blanketed and painted savages, impassive, indifl'erent, meditative, sunning themselves. He sat among them, in their own mood, on the top of the ridge, and looked down on Findellen. He saw it as a little friendly gathering of white houses that appeared idle and contented. A man might be very happy there, with a small shop to support him. He would have time to read and to think.

He went on over the ridge into the next valley; and he liked the cedar trees that volunteered along the partylines, where the farmers let them live till they were large enough to be killed for fence posts. And he liked the Dutch colonial farmhouses which had not yet rotted away, and the yellowing scruboak and the crimson sumach. It w^ould be pleasant to walk these roads on Sunday, after a week's work. If he could take over old Sowers' shop — But how? Well, if he could, for instance, get the wholesale people to advance the needed capital on condition that he should always buy his groceries from them. . . .

When he returned to Findellen in the late afternoon, tired and sunburned but full of country air and the country food of a crossroads hotel, he almost had his mind made up to buy the grocery if Miss Sowers would sell it, and if he could get the money to buy it. But he could not decide whether he ought to speak to her about it, or wait and come back in a few days, after the funeral.

And he might never have brought himself to any real decision if he had not seen Annie Sowers coming out of the cemetery as he returned down Mountain Avenue. She was alone. She had evidently been looking at the burial plot. Tall and thin, in a tight black dolman

THE VERANDAH OF THE UNION HOTEL WAS THE CENTER OF FINDELLEN's LIFE and a skirt that had once been worn with a narrow hoop, she bore her tragedy stiffly, in a repressed rigidity.

"Miss Sowers?" he said, coming up beside her as she approached a street corner.

She did not turn to look at him, and he kept his eyes on the distance, as if it would have been an indelicacy to glance at her. She had her head dropped a little, her gaze fixed on her clasped hands, in the pose of a mourner coming down a church aisle.

"I oughtn't to speak of it, I guess," he mumbled, walking beside her. "I just wanted to say — I was afraid you'd sell the business before I got back, an' I—"

They were at the street corner. "I'll not," she said, without moving her lips; and she turned at right angles from him into the cross street, continuing on her way with all the conventions of grief perfectly preserved, as if she had not spoken.

His hand moved to raise his hat, but stopped and rubbed his nose instead. He coughed — to show the world that he was innocent of any impropriety — and then went on in the general direction of the Union Hotel, with his future unalterably set.

IV

His wholesale firm was far from being sufficiently convinced of his business ability to be willing to lend him money. " We think, however," they assured him, "that you'd be wise to return to retail trade. In fact, we've practically decided to give your territory to Mr. Greening, and if you can swing this proposition at Findellen. . . ."

His idea of swinging it was to propose to Miss Sowers that he should take over the shop from her and gradually pay for it out of his profits. And her idea was that he should come and work for her as a clerk, and gradually purchase the business out of his wages. They compromised by agreeing to go into a sort of partnership: he was to give her his experience and his services, and she was to give him his board and fifty per cent of the net profits. The profits, net or gross, were blissfully unknown, because her father had never kept any books except a day-book of customers' accounts.

Three days later. Cane's trunk was in the back storeroom, and he was at work behind the counter. The public accepted him as a hired clerk; neither he nor Annie Sowers explained the situation to anyone; and at first no one asked about it. They were left, undisturbed, to those instinctive explorations of each other's likes and dislikes that are the beginnings of better acquaintance — or the end of it.

He found that she was cut off from her neighbors, the other shopkeepers, by her openly expressed conviction that they were all dishonest, all liars, all petty thieves. She told him anecdotes of them, reported to her by her father, and she told them with an indignation which Cane accepted as natural in a woman. To him, their practices were among the usual tricks of the trade. He understood them all, though he did not imitate them. He was too impractical for that. He could not have given a customer short weight without reddening criminally.

"Anyway," he justified himself, "it's bad business. You've got to keep your customer's confidence. That's what's the matter with a lot o' these small-town stores."

She accepted this as satisfactory.

He found that she was cut off from her church acquaintances by an independence in religious thought which she had acquired from her father. She went to church in order to pray, but she did not join in any of the church activities. "Well," he said, "I guess it's good for business to go to church. I don't go myself, but still — "

His mother had been religious, and he was used to having his own opinion in such matters, without offending anyone by expressing it. And this, too, was satisfactory to Miss Sowers.

He knew how to keep books. As a boy he had helped his father. And, for the first month, he was busy at all hours of the night, taking stock, appraising goods, closing old accounts, entering up his ledger, and trying hopefully to figure out an overhead of rent, taxes, repairs, and living expenses — for it appeared that her living, as well as his board, was to come out of the gross. He slept on a cot in the back storeroom, beside an old Franklin stove, with his little library of second-hand volumes arranged in a bookcase made of empty lemon-boxes; and he was as happy as a rabbit that had been chased by all the dogs in the world and now found itself safe and quiet in a deep burrow. She did the cooking and the housework. They ate breakfast together before he opened the shop. The rest of the day he spent behind the counter, she relieving him to let him eat the meals that she prepared for him upstairs, and joining him in waiting on the customers when business was brisk. On Sundays he walked over the hills with a book in his pocket.

Meantime, he was momentarily distracted by the conception of a new scientific theory that had come upon him, from nowhere, with a promise of explaining everything in the world. And he felt that if he could first work it out, in all its details, he might even be able to apply it to the solution of his grocery problems.

It was this — and I give it at length because it is a fair sample of the sort of thinking that went on endlessly behind Cane's dumb preoccupation:

It had occurred to him that the vital principle in all things, probably, was heat. Life was warm; death was cold. The moment of dissolution was the triumph of cold over heat. Moreover, all love and sympathy and kindliness were warm. They were moral manifestations, so to speak, of the vital principle. But all hate and indifference and ill-will were cold. And, by and large, the struggle between these two antagonistic principles, heat and cold, was at the bottom of the whole battle of life, the succession of the seasons, the moral conflict in the human heart, and the fight between God and Satan.

Applying this to the grocery business, a wise man would always take his stand on the side of warmth. How? Well, to be practical, he would have the outside of his shop painted a warm color — say, red. And the truth of the whole theory was at once strongly supported for Cane

HE SAW IT AS A LITTLE GATHERING OF WHITE HOUSES IDLE AND CONTENTED by the fact that people naturally liked warm colors, especially red. Then, the inside of the shop should be warm, perhaps a sunny yellow; and it should be well lighted at night. For the same reason, his manner to his customers ought to be warm, kindly, sympathetic. The sawdust on the floor — this being in the days when grocers sprinkled sawdust— should be fresh every morning. He even thought of coloring it in some way, and he decided to get always cedar sawdust, which is ruddy, or, failing that, tanbark. He cleaned up his showcases.

rearranged his windows, and put the brightest labels in the front rows of his canned goods. He improved his manner to his customers, but he was rather blushing and awkward about it — with the result that some of the women thought he was trying guiltily to flirt with them. A growing suspicion of him was increased when he undertook to dress more vitally, and made himself look rather fast. Most disastrous of all, he began to be more sunny and beaming with Annie Sowers, and more appreciative of the cooking and washing and ironing and sewing that she did for him. He even noticed, with a httle thrill that her red hair was on the side of virtue and all things good. He felt that he liked her hair.

He liked, too, the way in which she trusted his business ability and agreed to everything he proposed, without questioning it. She was almost meek in her deference to his superior wisdom. " I never had much to do with the store," she explained, **till father was took sick"; and she had obviously elected him to her father's place in her life, although she was older than he. Even in the matter of his books, she was touchingly deferential. She never read, herself. It had never occurred to her to read scientific books, any more than to read law; and it overcame her like a revelation of new truth that there could be useful knowledge in books and that Cane was wise to read them. "Helps you to know the ropes," he said cryptically, and she agreed.

And then, one Monday morning in November, he wakened early to hear her rattling the kitchen stove-lids overhead. Since it was his accepted duty to be up first, to tend to the fires, he thought that he had overslept, and he jumped out of his camp cot and dressed hastily in the shivering darkness of the storeroom, without looking at his watch. When he struck a light and found his glasses it turned out to be not yet six o'clock; and he smiled to himself, in the forgiving superiority of that masculine efficiency with which she had endowed him. Her watch, of course, was wrong. He went upstairs to tell her so — and to wash in the kitchen sink.

He found her fully dressed, her hair smoothed for the day, very wide awake and palely thoughtful. "I know," she said when he told her what time it was. "I couldn't sleep."

She had always managed not to intrude on his toilet in the kitchen, })ut now she proceeded to put the coffee on the stove and to boil the water for the porritlge while he shaved and washed.

"Don't mind m<?," she said. "Fatlier ust to wash out here while I was gettin' breakfast." And she said it softly, with a smile at once shy and intimate.

He found that he liked having her there. He grinned at her in the glass when he saw her looking, amused, at the spectacle he made with his chin lathered. "Father didn't ust to shave," she explained.

"Mebbe let it grow, myself," he muttered, poising the razor.

She shook her head. "No, don't." "No? Why.?"

She looked down at the porridge. "I like ... It looks better."

He understood that she had almost said she liked him as he was, and he felt the vital principle of warmth slowly rising in a flush under his lather. They were silent, but there was something going on in their silence. He found himself very pleasantly aware of her, even when he could not see her. He liked the subdued clatter of dishes and the scrape of the spoon as she stirred oatmeal into the boiling water. He liked the sound of her skirt as she moved about. And when he turned, wiping his face, he liked the simple gingham work dress that she wore; it had been molded by use to follow the curves of her slight figure.

" I think I'll make pancakes," she said.

If he had been romantic and she had put on an evening gown in order to play Chopin nocturnes while he sat and watched her, it could not have been more effective than the music and the deftness of her batter-mixing at that moment. The aroma of the coffee began to be a boudoir perfume that was seductive. He said huskily, "Lemme help set the table."

She continued absorbed in her cooking while he walked solemnly in and out, from the kitchen cupboard to the dining-room table, handling the dishes almost reverently and certainly with tenderness. He thought them pretty dishes. She had flushed with the heat of the stove; her long pale features seemed less plain and colorless; and the bend of her head was gravely maternal as she turned the pancakes. She looked up at him once and smiled with a peculiar wistful and apprehensive expression of the eyes.

To Cane all women were divided into two classes. In one class was his mother, who had died young; she was a wholly spiritual being of heavenly benevolence whom you adored and desired to protect. In the other class were all other women. They were either vaguely absurd creatures — all sex and its satisfaction — of whom commercial travelers told smoking-room stories; or they were cunning parasites who lived to exploit man either by marrying him or not. Cane was quite unconscious of this classification in his mind, and he did not realize that Annie Sowers had taken on some of the .qualities of his mother's class.

When breakfast was ready she sat down opposite him at the table, poured coffee for him, and helped him to bacon and pancakes. He watched her hands. They were working hands, bony and big-knuckled, but they were offering him the food which they had cooked for him, and the sight of them gave him a grateful emotion. They were motherly hands. He wanted to make, some return to them, to protect her, to work for her, to make her happy. He smiled across the table at her. She looked down at her plate and blushed. And then she said hastily, as if it had been on her mind all morning, "They won't let us go on this way."

Her tone conveyed bad news, though he did not understand what she meant. "What way?"

"They say it's a scandal."

"What is? Who?"

"Yesterday, at church — He came up an' spoke to me — the minister. He says we can't go on like this. I told 'm it was a — a partnership. He says they're talkin' about us."

Cane was uncomfortably red. "None o' their business," he muttered, jabbing at the tablecloth with a fork.

"That's what I told 'm." She gave him a swift glance. He was glowering down at the table cover.

She waited.

Seeing that he had nothing to suggest, she went on shakily, "I told 'm how it was. I told 'm it was a partnership. And he said we couldn't do it — we couldn't have a partnership, this way — unless we got "

She swallowed the word, frightened, and when he looked up, her mouth was twisted into a sort of apologetic grimace that tried to pretend it was a smile, but the expression of her eyes betrayed her. In spite of a shameful apprehension, there was a wistful half-hope.

"All right," he said. "Let's."

Her look held for a penetrating moment and then broke and quavered into tears. She gulped, shaking her head. "Oh, no," she breathed out on a sob And covering her face with her hands, she began to weep.

"That's all right," he said. "I'd— I'd like to."

"Oh, no! No," she wailed.

He went around the table and stood beside her. "Don't feel that way about it. It's all right." He made as if to stroke her hair but ended by patting her shoulder. "It needn't make any difference. We can just do it, so as to stop their talk — you know."

"Oh, don't," she cried. "Don't."

And there was such a shamed pain in her tone that he could not endure it. He bent down and put an arm round her. " Don't feel that way about it. I'm such a — I never thought about it. I've just been thinking how comfor'ble I was here, an' how good you were to me. It's — it's been great. An' I was thinking only this morning how pretty your hair was, an' how I liked to see you cooking an' everything — with the way the coffee smelled an' everything. I don't see why we couldn't be just as happy. I've been awful happy. Unless you don't want to?"

"Oh, I shouldn't 've said it," she sobbed.

"You didn't say it," he consoled her.

"It was the minister. You were just telling me what the minister said, an* I said, * All right, then, let's get married/ I'd've asked you any way. I've been going to."

"You wouldn't! You haven't! Oh, go away," she cried. " Go away. Don't speak to me."

He went away. He went downstairs to the shop. But he knew that it was only a temporary withdrawal. He knew that he had committed himself. He realized that his apparently fluid and unsettled life had suddenly "jelled"; and he felt a natural depression that was partly the mood of indigestion and partly the cramped prospect of his future as a retail grocer.

He began mechanically to shake down the base-burner that warmed the shop, to fill it with coal, to sweep up the sawdust, and sprinkle the floor afresh. It was a dark November morning with a cold rain, and he lighted all his lights. The effect was cheering. He was warm and dry, protected, comfortable, while the whole hurried, driven, weather-beaten world of anxious men and women scurried past his door to catch an early train. He stood looking out at them from his snug shelter, and he began to brighten. As the fire burned up, a pleasant odor of scorched stove-polish joined the distillation of sweet, stuffy smells that make the aromatic essence of a little grocery store. He drew a long, contented breath.

He said to himself, "First thing, I guess, I've got to get a license or something."

V

Looking at it from the outside, it must have seemed an impossible marriage. She was five years older than he, a confirmed spinster, without any physical charms whatever, and apparently as cold as a neuter bee. He was a shy, timid, impracti(;a1 failure, of a monastic; disposition, unromantic, simple-looking, and dumb. If you had seen them standing up together before the minister.

you could only have asked in amazement, "What in the world do they see in each other?"

You ask that, of course, of half the marriages which you observe in your lifetime. And the answer in the Cane- Sowers case is the answer in every case. Anything is possible, in the way of marriage, with the human mind as that mind is.

It is true that — although she had practically asked him to marry her — she began, in the first week, to behave as if he had betrayed her into marriage and disgraced her. She refused to receive any congratulatory visits from her church acquaintances — refused with resentment— and made him tell them that she was ill, and secluded herself like an invalid. She would not go behind the counter to wait on customers while he ate his meals; she left his food in the back storeroom, and he got it when he could. That amused him; he mistook it for the delicate bashfulness of a bride — which perhaps, in part, it was.