SEVEN
The Extraordinary Entanglement of Mr. Pupkin
Judge Pepperleigh lived in a big house with hardwood floors and a
wide piazza that looked over the lake from the top of Oneida Street.
Every day about half-past five he used to come home from his office
in the Mariposa Court House. On some days as he got near the house he
would call out to his wife:
"Almighty Moses, Martha! who left the sprinkler on the grass?"
On other days he would call to her from quite a little distance off:
"Hullo, mother! Got any supper for a hungry man?"
And Mrs. Pepperleigh never knew which it would be. On the days when
he swore at the sprinkler you could see his spectacles flash like
dynamite. But on the days when he called: "Hullo, mother," they were
simply irradiated with kindliness.
Some days, I say, he would cry out with a perfect whine of
indignation: "Suffering Caesar! has that infernal dog torn up those
geraniums again?" And other days you would hear him singing out:
"Hullo, Rover! Well, doggie, well, old fellow!"
In the same way at breakfast, the judge, as he looked over the
morning paper, would sometimes leap to his feet with a perfect howl
of suffering, and cry: "Everlasting Moses! the Liberals have carried
East Elgin." Or else he would lean back from the breakfast table with
the most good-humoured laugh you ever heard and say: "Ha! ha! the
Conservatives have carried South Norfolk."
And yet he was perfectly logical, when you come to think of it. After
all, what is more annoying to a sensitive, highly-strung man than an
infernal sprinkler playing all over the place, and what more
agreeable to a good-natured, even-tempered fellow than a
well-prepared supper? Or, what is more likeable than one's good, old,
affectionate dog bounding down the path from sheer delight at seeing
you,--or more execrable than an infernal whelp that has torn up the
geraniums and is too old to keep, anyway?
As for politics, well, it all seemed reasonable enough. When the
Conservatives got in anywhere, Pepperleigh laughed and enjoyed it,
simply because it does one good to see a straight, fine, honest fight
where the best man wins. When a Liberal got in, it made him mad, and
he said so,--not, mind you; from any political bias, for his office
forbid it,--but simply because one can't bear to see the country go
absolutely to the devil.
I suppose, too, it was partly the effect of sitting in court all day
listening to cases. One gets what you might call the judicial temper
of mind. Pepperleigh had it so strongly developed that I've seen him
kick a hydrangea pot to pieces with his foot because the accursed
thing wouldn't flower. He once threw the canary cage clear into the
lilac bushes because the "blasted bird wouldn't stop singing." It was
a straight case of judicial temper. Lots of judges have it, developed
in just the same broad, all-round way as with Judge Pepperleigh.
I think it must be passing sentences that does it. Anyway,
Pepperleigh had the aptitude for passing sentences so highly
perfected that he spent his whole time at it inside of court and out.
I've heard him hand out sentences for the Sultan of Turkey and Mrs.
Pankhurst and the Emperor of Germany that made one's blood run cold.
He would sit there on the piazza of a summer evening reading the
paper, with dynamite sparks flying from his spectacles as he
sentenced the Czar of Russia to ten years in the salt mines--and made
it fifteen a few minutes afterwards. Pepperleigh always read the
foreign news--the news of things that he couldn't alter--as a form of
wild and stimulating torment.
So you can imagine that in some ways the judge's house was a pretty
difficult house to go to. I mean you can see how awfully hard it must
have been for Mr. Pupkin. I tell you it took some nerve to step up
on that piazza and say, in a perfectly natural, off-hand way: "Oh,
how do you do, judge? Is Miss Zena in? No, I won't stay, thanks; I
think I ought to be going. I simply called." A man who can do that
has got to have a pretty fair amount of savoir what do you call it,
and he's got to be mighty well shaved and have his cameo pin put in
his tie at a pretty undeniable angle before he can tackle it. Yes,
and even then he may need to hang round behind the lilac bushes for
half an hour first, and cool off. And he's apt to make pretty good
time down Oneida Street on the way back.
Still, that's what you call love, and if you've got it, and are well
shaved, and your boots well blacked, you can do things that seem
almost impossible. Yes, you can do anything, even if you do trip over
the dog in getting off the piazza.
Don't suppose for a moment that Judge Pepperleigh was an
unapproachable or a harsh man always and to everybody. Even Mr.
Pupkin had to admit that that couldn't be so. To know that, you had
only to see Zena Pepperleigh put her arm round his neck and call him
Daddy. She would do that even when there were two or three young men
sitting on the edge of the piazza. You know, I think, the way they
sit on the edge in Mariposa. It is meant to indicate what part of the
family they have come to see. Thus when George Duff, the bank
manager, came up to the Pepperleigh house, he always sat in a chair
on the verandah and talked to the judge. But when Pupkin or Mallory
Tompkins or any fellow like that came, he sat down in a sidelong
fashion on the edge of the boards and then they knew exactly what he
was there for. If he knew the house well, he leaned his back against
the verandah post and smoked a cigarette. But that took nerve.
But I am afraid that this is a digression, and, of course, you know
all about it just as well as I do. All that I was trying to say was
that I don't suppose that the judge had ever spoken a cross word to
Zena in his life.--Oh, he threw her novel over the grape-vine, I
don't deny that, but then why on earth should a girl read trash like
the Errant Quest of the Palladin Pilgrim, and the Life of Sir
Galahad, when the house was full of good reading like The Life of Sir
John A. Macdonald, and Pioneer Days in Tecumseh Township?
Still, what I mean is that the judge never spoke harshly to Zena,
except perhaps under extreme provocation; and I am quite sure that he
never, never had to Neil. But then what father ever would want to
speak angrily to such a boy as Neil Pepperleigh? The judge took no
credit himself for that; the finest grown boy in the whole county and
so broad and big that they took him into the Missinaba Horse when he
was only seventeen. And clever,--so clever that he didn't need to
study; so clever that he used to come out at the foot of the class in
mathematics at the Mariposa high school through sheer surplus of
brain power. I've heard the judge explain it a dozen times. Why,
Neil was so clever that he used to be able to play billiards at the
Mariposa House all evening when the other boys had to stay at home
and study.
Such a powerful looking fellow, too! Everybody in Mariposa remembers
how Neil Pepperleigh smashed in the face of Peter McGinnis, the
Liberal organizer, at the big election--you recall it--when the old
Macdonald Government went out. Judge Pepperleigh had to try him for
it the next morning--his own son. They say there never was such a
scene even in the Mariposa court. There was, I believe, something
like it on a smaller scale in Roman history, but it wasn't half as
dramatic. I remember Judge Pepperleigh leaning forward to pass the
sentence,--for a judge is bound, you know, by his oath,--and how
grave he looked and yet so proud and happy, like a man doing his duty
and sustained by it, and he said:
"My boy, you are innocent. You smashed in Peter McGinnis's face, but
you did it without criminal intent. You put a face on him, by
Jehoshaphat! that he won't lose for six months, but you did it
without evil purpose or malign design. My boy, look up! Give me your
hand! You leave this court without a stain upon your name."
They said it was one of the most moving scenes ever enacted in the
Mariposa Court.
But the strangest thing is that if the judge had known what every one
else in Mariposa knew, it would have broken his heart. If he could
have seen Neil with the drunken flush on his face in the billiard
room of the Mariposa House,--if he had known, as every one else did,
that Neil was crazed with drink the night he struck the Liberal
organizer when the old Macdonald Government went out,--if he could
have known that even on that last day Neil was drunk when he rode
with the Missinaba Horse to the station to join the Third Contingent
for the war, and all the street of the little town was one great roar
of people--
But the judge never knew, and now he never will. For if you could
find it in the meanness of your soul to tell him, it would serve no
purpose now except to break his heart, and there would rise up to
rebuke you the pictured vision of an untended grave somewhere in the
great silences of South Africa.
Did I say above, or seem to imply, that the judge sometimes spoke
harshly to his wife? Or did you gather for a minute that her lot was
one to lament over or feel sorry for? If so, it just shows that you
know nothing about such things, and that marriage, at least as it
exists in Mariposa, is a sealed book to you. You are as ignorant as
Miss Spiffkins, the biology teacher at the high school, who always
says how sorry she is for Mrs. Pepperleigh. You get that impression
simply because the judge howled like an Algonquin Indian when he saw
the sprinkler running on the lawn. But are you sure you know the
other side of it? Are you quite sure when you talk like Miss
Spiffkins does about the rights of it, that you are taking all things
into account? You might have thought differently perhaps of the
Pepperleighs, anyway, if you had been there that evening when the
judge came home to his wife with one hand pressed to his temple and
in the other the cablegram that said that Neil had been killed in
action in South Africa. That night they sat together with her hand in
his, just as they had sat together thirty years ago when he was a law
student in the city.
Go and tell Miss Spiffkins that! Hydrangeas,--canaries,--
temper,--blazes! What does Miss Spiffkins know about it all?
But in any case, if you tried to tell Judge Pepperleigh about Neil
now he wouldn't believe it. He'd laugh it to scorn. That is Neil's
picture, in uniform, hanging in the dining-room beside the Fathers of
Confederation. That military-looking man in the picture beside him is
General Kitchener, whom you may perhaps have heard of, for he was
very highly spoken of in Neil's letters. All round the room, in fact,
and still more in the judge's library upstairs, you will see pictures
of South Africa and the departure of the Canadians (there are none of
the return), and of Mounted Infantry and of Unmounted Cavalry and a
lot of things that only soldiers and the fathers of soldiers know
about.
So you can realize that for a fellow who isn't military, and who
wears nothing nearer to a uniform than a daffodil tennis blazer, the
judge's house is a devil of a house to come to.
I think you remember young Mr. Pupkin, do you not? I have referred to
him several times already as the junior teller in the Exchange Bank.
But if you know Mariposa at all you have often seen him. You have
noticed him, I am sure, going for the bank mail in the morning in an
office suit effect of clinging grey with a gold necktie pin shaped
like a riding whip. You have seen him often enough going down to the
lake front after supper, in tennis things, smoking a cigarette and
with a paddle and a crimson canoe cushion under his arm. You have
seen him entering Dean Drone's church in a top hat and a long frock
coat nearly to his feet. You have seen him, perhaps, playing poker in
Peter Glover's room over the hardware store and trying to look as if
he didn't hold three aces,--in fact, giving absolutely no sign of it
beyond the wild flush in his face and the fact that his hair stands
on end.
That kind of reticence is a thing you simply have to learn in
banking. I mean, if you've got to be in a position where you know for
a fact that the Mariposa Packing Company's account is overdrawn by
sixty-four dollars, and yet daren't say anything about it, not even
to the girls that you play tennis with,--I don't say, not a casual
hint as a reference, but not really tell them, not, for instance,
bring down the bank ledger to the tennis court and show them,--you
learn a sort of reticence and self-control that people outside of
banking circles never can attain.
Why, I've known Pupkin at the Fireman's Ball lean against the wall in
his dress suit and talk away to Jim Eliot, the druggist, without
giving the faintest hint or indication that Eliot's note for
twenty-seven dollars had been protested that very morning. Not a hint
of it. I don't say he didn't mention it, in a sort of way, in the
supper room, just to one or two, but I mean there was nothing in the
way he leant up against the wall to suggest it.
But, however, I don't mention that as either for or against Mr.
Pupkin. That sort of thing is merely the A B C of banking, as he
himself told me when explaining why it was that he hesitated to
divulge the exact standing of the Mariposa Carriage Company. Of
course, once you get past the A B C you can learn a lot that is
mighty interesting.
So I think that if you know Mariposa and understand even the
rudiments of banking, you are perfectly acquainted with Mr. Pupkin.
What? You remember him as being in love with Miss Lawson, the high
school teacher? In love with HER? What a ridiculous idea. You mean
merely because on the night when the Mariposa Belle sank with every
soul on board, Pupkin put off from the town in a skiff to rescue Miss
Lawson. Oh, but you're quite wrong. That wasn't LOVE. I've heard
Pupkin explain it himself a dozen times. That sort of
thing,--paddling out to a sinking steamer at night in a crazy
skiff,--may indicate a sort of attraction, but not real love, not
what Pupkin came to feel afterwards. Indeed, when he began to think
of it, it wasn't even attraction, it was merely respect,--that's all
it was. And anyway, that was long before, six or seven months back,
and Pupkin admitted that at the time he was a mere boy.
Mr. Pupkin, I must explain, lived with Mallory Tompkins in rooms over
the Exchange Bank, on the very top floor, the third, with Mullins's
own rooms below them. Extremely comfortable quarters they were, with
two bedrooms and a sitting-room that was all fixed up with snowshoes
and tennis rackets on the walls and dance programmes and canoe club
badges and all that sort of thing.
Mallory Tompkins was a young man with long legs and check trousers
who worked on the Mariposa Times-Herald. That was what gave him his
literary taste. He used to read Ibsen and that other Dutch
author--Bumstone Bumstone, isn't it?--and you can judge that he was a
mighty intellectual fellow. He was so intellectual that he was, as he
himself admitted, a complete eggnostic. He and Pupkin used to have
the most tremendous arguments about creation and evolution, and how
if you study at a school of applied science you learn that there's no
hell beyond the present life.
Mallory Tompkins used to prove absolutely that the miracles were only
electricity, and Pupkin used to admit that it was an awfully good
argument, but claimed that he had heard it awfully well answered in a
sermon, though unfortunately he had forgotten how.
Tompkins used to show that the flood was contrary to geology, and
Pupkin would acknowledge that the point was an excellent one, but
that he had read a book,--the title of which he ought to have written
down,--which explained geology away altogether.
Mallory Tompkins generally got the best of the merely logical side of
the arguments, but Pupkin--who was a tremendous Christian--was much
stronger in the things he had forgotten. So the discussions often
lasted till far into the night, and Mr. Pupkin would fall asleep and
dream of a splendid argument, which would have settled the whole
controversy, only unfortunately he couldn't recall it in the morning.
Of course, Pupkin would never have thought of considering himself on
an intellectual par with Mallory Tompkins. That would have been
ridiculous. Mallory Tompkins had read all sorts of things and had
half a mind to write a novel himself--either that or a play. All he
needed, he said, was to have a chance to get away somewhere by
himself and think. Every time he went away to the city Pupkin
expected that he might return with the novel all finished; but though
he often came back with his eyes red from thinking, the novel as yet
remained incomplete.
Meantime, Mallory Tompkins, as I say, was a mighty intellectual
fellow. You could see that from the books on the bamboo bookshelves
in the sitting-room. There was, for instance, the "Encyclopaedia
Metropolitana" in forty volumes, that he bought on the instalment
plan for two dollars a month. Then when they took that away, there
was the "History of Civilization," in fifty volumes at fifty cents a
week for fifty years. Tompkins had read in it half-way through the
Stone Age before they took it from him. After that there was the
"Lives of the Painters," one volume at a time--a splendid thing in
which you could read all about Aahrens, and Aachenthal, and Aax and
men of that class.
After all, there's nothing like educating oneself. Mallory Tompkins
knew about the opening period of all sorts of things, and in regard
to people whose names began with "A" you couldn't stick him.
I don't mean that he and Mr. Pupkin lived a mere routine of studious
evenings. That would be untrue. Quite often their time was spent in
much less commendable ways than that, and there were poker parties in
their sitting-room that didn't break up till nearly midnight.
Card-playing, after all, is a slow business, unless you put money on
it, and, besides, if you are in a bank and are handling money all
day, gambling has a fascination.
I've seen Pupkin and Mallory Tompkins and Joe Milligan, the dentist,
and Mitchell the ticket agent, and the other "boys" sitting round the
table with matches enough piled up in front of them to stock a
factory. Ten matches counted for one chip and ten chips made a
cent--so you see they weren't merely playing for the fun of the
thing. Of course it's a hollow pleasure. You realize that when you
wake up at night parched with thirst, ten thousand matches to the
bad. But banking is a wild life and everybody knows it.
Sometimes Pupkin would swear off and keep away from the cursed thing
for weeks, and then perhaps he'd see by sheer accident a pile of
matches on the table, or a match lying on the floor and it would
start the craze in him. I am using his own words--a "craze"--that's
what he called it when he told Miss Lawson all about it, and she
promised to cure him of it. She would have, too. Only, as I say,
Pupkin found that what he had mistaken for attraction was only
respect. And there's no use worrying a woman that you respect about
your crazes.
It was from Mallory Tompkins that Pupkin learned all about the
Mariposa people, because Pupkin came from away off--somewhere down in
the Maritime Provinces--and didn't know a soul. Mallory Tompkins used
to tell him about Judge Pepperleigh, and what a wonderfully clever
man he was and how he would have been in the Supreme Court for
certain if the Conservative Government had stayed in another fifteen
or twenty years instead of coming to a premature end. He used to talk
so much about the Pepperleighs, that Pupkin was sick of the very
name. But just as soon as he had seen Zena Pepperleigh he couldn't
hear enough of them. He would have talked with Tompkins for hours
about the judge's dog Rover. And as for Zena, if he could have
brought her name over his lips, he would have talked of her forever.
He first saw her--by one of the strangest coincidences in the
world--on the Main Street of Mariposa. If he hadn't happened to be
going up the street and she to be coming down it, the thing wouldn't
have happened. Afterwards they both admitted that it was one of the
most peculiar coincidences they ever heard of. Pupkin owned that he
had had the strangest feeling that morning as if something were going
to happen--a feeling not at all to be classed with the one of which
he had once spoken to Miss Lawson, and which was, at the most, a mere
anticipation of respect.
But, as I say, Pupkin met Zena Pepperleigh on the 26th of June, at
twenty-five minutes to eleven. And at once the whole world changed.
The past was all blotted out. Even in the new forty volume edition
of the "Instalment Record of Humanity" that Mallory Tompkins had just
received Pupkin wouldn't have bothered with it.
She--that word henceforth meant Zena--had just come back from her
boarding-school, and of all times of year coming back from a
boarding-school and for wearing a white shirt waist and a crimson tie
and for carrying a tennis racket on the stricken street of a
town--commend me to the month of June in Mariposa.
And, for Pupkin, straight away the whole town was irradiated with
sunshine, and there was such a singing of the birds, and such a
dancing of the rippled waters of the lake, and such a kindliness in
the faces of all the people, that only those who have lived in
Mariposa, and been young there, can know at all what he felt.
The simple fact is that just the moment he saw Zena Pepperleigh,
Mr. Pupkin was clean, plumb, straight, flat, absolutely in love with
her.
Which fact is so important that it would be folly not to close the
chapter and think about it.
