EIGHT
The Fore-ordained Attachment of Zena Pepperleigh and Peter Pupkin
Zena Pepperleigh used to sit reading novels on the piazza of the
judge's house, half hidden by the Virginia creepers. At times the
book would fall upon her lap and there was such a look of unstilled
yearning in her violet eyes that it did not entirely disappear even
when she picked up the apple that lay beside her and took another
bite out of it.
With hands clasped she would sit there dreaming all the beautiful
day-dreams of girlhood. When you saw that faraway look in her eyes,
it meant that she was dreaming that a plumed and armoured knight was
rescuing her from the embattled keep of a castle beside the Danube.
At other times she was being borne away by an Algerian corsair over
the blue waters of the Mediterranean and was reaching out her arms
towards France to say farewell to it.
Sometimes when you noticed a sweet look of resignation that seemed to
rest upon her features, it meant that Lord Ronald de Chevereux was
kneeling at her feet, and that she was telling him to rise, that her
humbler birth must ever be a bar to their happiness, and Lord Ronald
was getting into an awful state about it, as English peers do at the
least suggestion of anything of the sort.
Or, if it wasn't that, then her lover had just returned to her side,
tall and soldierly and sunburned, after fighting for ten years in the
Soudan for her sake, and had come back to ask her for her answer and
to tell her that for ten years her face had been with him even in the
watches of the night. He was asking her for a sign, any kind of
sign,--ten years in the Soudan entitles them to a sign,--and Zena was
plucking a white rose, just one, from her hair, when she would hear
her father's step on the piazza and make a grab for the Pioneers of
Tecumseh Township, and start reading it like mad.
She was always, as I say, being rescued and being borne away, and
being parted, and reaching out her arms to France and to Spain, and
saying good-bye forever to Valladolid or the old grey towers of
Hohenbranntwein.
And I don't mean that she was in the least exceptional or romantic,
because all the girls in Mariposa were just like that. An Algerian
corsair could have come into the town and had a dozen of them for the
asking, and as for a wounded English officer,--well, perhaps it's
better not to talk about it outside or the little town would become a
regular military hospital.
Because, mind you, the Mariposa girls are all right. You've only to
look at them to realize that. You see, you can get in Mariposa a
print dress of pale blue or pale pink for a dollar twenty that looks
infinitely better than anything you ever see in the city,--especially
if you can wear with it a broad straw hat and a background of maple
trees and the green grass of a tennis court. And if you remember,
too, that these are cultivated girls who have all been to the
Mariposa high school and can do decimal fractions, you will
understand that an Algerian corsair would sharpen his scimitar at the
very sight of them.
Don't think either that they are all dying to get married; because
they are not. I don't say they wouldn't take an errant knight, or a
buccaneer or a Hungarian refugee, but for the ordinary marriages of
ordinary people they feel nothing but a pitying disdain. So it is
that each one of them in due time marries an enchanted prince and
goes to live in one of the little enchanted houses in the lower part
of the town.
I don't know whether you know it, but you can rent an enchanted house
in Mariposa for eight dollars a month, and some of the most
completely enchanted are the cheapest. As for the enchanted princes,
they find them in the strangest places, where you never expected to
see them, working--under a spell, you understand,--in drug-stores and
printing offices, and even selling things in shops. But to be able to
find them you have first to read ever so many novels about Sir
Galahad and the Errant Quest and that sort of thing.
Naturally then Zena Pepperleigh, as she sat on the piazza, dreamed of
bandits and of wounded officers and of Lord Ronalds riding on
foam-flecked chargers. But that she ever dreamed of a junior bank
teller in a daffodil blazer riding past on a bicycle, is pretty hard
to imagine. So, when Mr. Pupkin came tearing past up the slope of
Oneida Street at a speed that proved that he wasn't riding there
merely to pass the house, I don't suppose that Zena Pepperleigh was
aware of his existence.
That may be a slight exaggeration. She knew, perhaps, that he was the
new junior teller in the Exchange Bank and that he came from the
Maritime Provinces, and that nobody knew who his people were, and
that he had never been in a canoe in his life till he came to
Mariposa, and that he sat four pews back in Dean Drone's church, and
that his salary was eight hundred dollars. Beyond that, she didn't
know a thing about him. She presumed, however, that the reason why he
went past so fast was because he didn't dare to go slow.
This, of course, was perfectly correct. Ever since the day when Mr.
Pupkin met Zena in the Main Street he used to come past the house on
his bicycle just after bank hours. He would have gone past twenty
times a day but he was afraid to. As he came up Oneida Street, he
used to pedal faster and faster,--he never meant to, but he couldn't
help it,--till he went past the piazza where Zena was sitting at an
awful speed with his little yellow blazer flying in the wind. In a
second he had disappeared in a buzz and a cloud of dust, and the
momentum of it carried him clear out into the country for miles and
miles before he ever dared to pause or look back.
Then Mr. Pupkin would ride in a huge circuit about the country,
trying to think he was looking at the crops, and sooner or later his
bicycle would be turned towards the town again and headed for Oneida
Street, and would get going quicker and quicker and quicker, till the
pedals whirled round with a buzz and he came past the judge's house
again, like a bullet out of a gun. He rode fifteen miles to pass the
house twice, and even then it took all the nerve that he had.
The people on Oneida Street thought that Mr. Pupkin was crazy, but
Zena Pepperleigh knew that he was not. Already, you see, there was a
sort of dim parallel between the passing of the bicycle and the last
ride of Tancred the Inconsolable along the banks of the Danube.
I have already mentioned, I think, how Mr. Pupkin and Zena
Pepperleigh first came to know one another. Like everything else
about them, it was a sheer matter of coincidence, quite inexplicable
unless you understand that these things are fore-ordained.
That, of course, is the way with fore-ordained affairs and that's
where they differ from ordinary love.
I won't even try to describe how Mr. Pupkin felt when he first spoke
with Zena and sat beside her as they copied out the "endless chain"
letter asking for ten cents. They wrote out, as I said, no less than
eight of the letters between them, and they found out that their
handwritings were so alike that you could hardly tell them apart,
except that Pupkin's letters were round and Zena's letters were
pointed and Pupkin wrote straight up and down and Zena wrote on a
slant. Beyond that the writing was so alike that it was the strangest
coincidence in the world. Of course when they made figures it was
different and Pupkin explained to Zena that in the bank you have to
be able to make a seven so that it doesn't look like a nine.
So, as I say, they wrote the letters all afternoon and when it was
over they walked up Oneida Street together, ever so slowly. When they
got near the house, Zena asked Pupkin to come in to tea, with such an
easy off-hand way that you couldn't have told that she was half an
hour late and was taking awful chances on the judge. Pupkin hadn't
had time to say yes before the judge appeared at the door, just as
they were stepping up on to the piazza, and he had a table napkin in
his hand and the dynamite sparks were flying from his spectacles as
he called out:
"Great heaven! Zena, why in everlasting blazes can't you get in to
tea at a Christian hour?"
Zena gave one look of appeal to Pupkin, and Pupkin looked one glance
of comprehension, and turned and fled down Oneida Street. And if the
scene wasn't quite as dramatic as the renunciation of Tancred the
Troubadour, it at least had something of the same elements in it.
Pupkin walked home to his supper at the Mariposa House on air, and
that evening there was a gentle distance in his manner towards Sadie,
the dining-room girl, that I suppose no bank clerk in Mariposa ever
showed before. It was like Sir Galahad talking with the tire-women of
Queen Guinevere and receiving huckleberry pie at their hands.
After that Mr. Pupkin and Zena Pepperleigh constantly met together.
They played tennis as partners on the grass court behind Dr.
Gallagher's house,--the Mariposa Tennis Club rent it, you remember,
for fifty cents a month,--and Pupkin used to perform perfect
prodigies of valour, leaping in the air to serve with his little body
hooked like a letter S. Sometimes, too, they went out on Lake
Wissanotti in the evening in Pupkin's canoe, with Zena sitting in the
bow and Pupkin paddling in the stern and they went out ever so far
and it was after dark and the stars were shining before they came
home. Zena would look at the stars and say how infinitely far away
they seemed, and Pupkin would realize that a girl with a mind like
that couldn't have any use for a fool such as him. Zena used to ask
him to point out the Pleiades and Jupiter and Ursa minor, and Pupkin
showed her exactly where they were. That impressed them both
tremendously, because Pupkin didn't know that Zena remembered the
names out of the astronomy book at her boarding-school, and Zena
didn't know that Pupkin simply took a chance on where the stars were.
And ever so many times they talked so intimately that Pupkin came
mighty near telling her about his home in the Maritime Provinces and
about his father and mother, and then kicked himself that he hadn't
the manliness to speak straight out about it and take the
consequences.
Please don't imagine from any of this that the course of Mr. Pupkin's
love ran smooth. On the contrary, Pupkin himself felt that it was
absolutely hopeless from the start.
There were, it might be admitted, certain things that seemed to
indicate progress.
In the course of the months of June and July and August, he had taken
Zena out in his canoe thirty-one times. Allowing an average of two
miles for each evening, Pupkin had paddled Zena sixty-two miles, or
more than a hundred thousand yards. That surely was something.
He had played tennis with her on sixteen afternoons. Three times he
had left his tennis racket up at the judge's house in Zena's charge,
and once he had, with her full consent, left his bicycle there all
night. This must count for something. No girl could trifle with a man
to the extent of having his bicycle leaning against the verandah post
all night and mean nothing by it.
More than that--he had been to tea at the judge's house fourteen
times, and seven times he had been asked by Lilian Drone to the
rectory when Zena was coming, and five times by Nora Gallagher to tea
at the doctor's house because Zena was there.
Altogether he had eaten so many meals where Zena was that his meal
ticket at the Mariposa lasted nearly double its proper time, and the
face of Sadie, the dining-room girl, had grown to wear a look of
melancholy resignation; sadder than romance.
Still more than that, Pupkin had bought for Zena, reckoning it
altogether, about two buckets of ice cream and perhaps half a bushel
of chocolate. Not that Pupkin grudged the expense of it. On the
contrary, over and above the ice cream and the chocolate he had
bought her a white waistcoat and a walking stick with a gold top, a
lot of new neckties and a pair of patent leather boots--that is,
they were all bought on account of her, which is the same thing.
Add to all this that Pupkin and Zena had been to the Church of
England Church nearly every Sunday evening for two months, and one
evening they had even gone to the Presbyterian Church "for fun,"
which, if you know Mariposa, you will realize to be a wild sort of
escapade that ought to speak volumes.
Yet in spite of this, Pupkin felt that the thing was hopeless: which
only illustrates the dreadful ups and downs, the wild alternations of
hope and despair that characterise an exceptional affair of this
sort.
Yes, it was hopeless.
Every time that Pupkin watched Zena praying in church, he knew that
she was too good for him. Every time that he came to call for her and
found her reading Browning and Omar Khayyam he knew that she was too
clever for him. And every time that he saw her at all he realized
that she was too beautiful for him.
You see, Pupkin knew that he wasn't a hero. When Zena would clasp her
hands and talk rapturously about crusaders and soldiers and firemen
and heroes generally, Pupkin knew just where he came in. Not in it,
that was all. If a war could have broken out in Mariposa, or the
judge's house been invaded by the Germans, he might have had a
chance, but as it was--hopeless.
Then there was Zena's father. Heaven knows Pupkin tried hard to
please the judge. He agreed with every theory that Judge Pepperleigh
advanced, and that took a pretty pliable intellect in itself. They
denounced female suffrage one day and they favoured it the next. One
day the judge would claim that the labour movement was eating out the
heart of the country, and the next day he would hold that the hope of
the world lay in the organization of the toiling masses. Pupkin
shifted his opinions like the glass in a kaleidoscope. Indeed, the
only things on which he was allowed to maintain a steadfast
conviction were the purity of the Conservative party of Canada and
the awful wickedness of the recall of judges.
But with all that the judge was hardly civil to Pupkin. He hadn't
asked him to the house till Zena brought him there, though, as a
rule, all the bank clerks in Mariposa treated Judge Pepperleigh's
premises as their own. He used to sit and sneer at Pupkin after he
had gone till Zena would throw down the Pioneers of Tecumseh Township
in a temper and flounce off the piazza to her room. After which the
judge's manner would change instantly and he would relight his corn
cob pipe and sit and positively beam with contentment. In all of
which there was something so mysterious as to prove that Mr. Pupkin's
chances were hopeless.
Nor was that all of it. Pupkin's salary was eight hundred dollars a
year and the Exchange Bank limit for marriage was a thousand.
I suppose you are aware of the grinding capitalistic tyranny of the
banks in Mariposa whereby marriage is put beyond the reach of ever so
many mature and experienced men of nineteen and twenty and
twenty-one, who are compelled to go on eating on a meal ticket at the
Mariposa House and living over the bank to suit the whim of a group
of capitalists.
Whenever Pupkin thought of this two hundred dollars he understood all
that it meant by social unrest. In fact, he interpreted all forms of
social discontent in terms of it. Russian Anarchism, German
Socialism, the Labour Movement, Henry George, Lloyd George,--he
understood the whole lot of them by thinking of his two hundred
dollars.
When I tell you that at this period Mr. Pupkin read Memoirs of the
Great Revolutionists and even thought of blowing up Henry Mullins
with dynamite, you can appreciate his state of mind.
But not even by all these hindrances and obstacles to his love for
Zena Pepperleigh would Peter Pupkin have been driven to commit
suicide (oh, yes; he committed it three times, as I'm going to tell
you), had it not been for another thing that he knew stood once and
for all and in cold reality between him and Zena.
He felt it in a sort of way, as soon as he knew her. Each time that
he tried to talk to her about his home and his father and mother and
found that something held him back, he realized more and more the
kind of thing that stood between them. Most of all did he realize it,
with a sudden sickness of heart, when he got word that his father and
mother wanted to come to Mariposa to see him and he had all he could
do to head them off from it.
Why? Why stop them? The reason was, simple enough, that Pupkin was
ashamed of them, bitterly ashamed. The picture of his mother and
father turning up in Mariposa and being seen by his friends there and
going up to the Pepperleigh's house made him feel faint with shame.
No, I don't say it wasn't wrong. It only shows what difference of
fortune, the difference of being rich and being poor, means in this
world. You perhaps have been so lucky that you cannot appreciate what
it means to feel shame at the station of your own father and mother.
You think it doesn't matter, that honesty and kindliness of heart are
all that counts. That only shows that you have never known some of
the bitterest feelings of people less fortunate than yourself.
So it was with Mr. Pupkin. When he thought of his father and mother
turning up in Mariposa, his face reddened with unworthy shame.
He could just picture the scene! He could see them getting out of
their Limousine touring car, with the chauffeur holding open the door
for them, and his father asking for a suite of rooms,--just think of
it, a suite of rooms!--at the Mariposa House.
The very thought of it turned him ill.
What! You have mistaken my meaning? Ashamed of them because they were
poor? Good heavens, no, but because they were rich! And not rich in
the sense in which they use the term in Mariposa, where a rich person
merely means a man who has money enough to build a house with a
piazza and to have everything he wants; but rich in the other
sense,--motor cars, Ritz hotels, steam yachts, summer islands and all
that sort of thing.
Why, Pupkin's father,--what's the use of trying to conceal it any
longer?--was the senior partner in the law firm of Pupkin, Pupkin and
Pupkin. If you know the Maritime Provinces at all, you've heard of
the Pupkins. The name is a household word from Chedabucto to
Chidabecto. And, for the matter of that, the law firm and the fact
that Pupkin senior had been an Attorney General was the least part of
it. Attorney General! Why, there's no money in that! It's no better
than the Senate. No, no, Pupkin senior, like so many lawyers, was
practically a promoter, and he blew companies like bubbles, and when
he wasn't in the Maritime Provinces he was in Boston and New York
raising money and floating loans, and when they had no money left in
New York he floated it in London: and when he had it, he floated on
top of it big rafts of lumber on the Miramichi and codfish on the
Grand Banks and lesser fish in the Fundy Bay. You've heard perhaps of
the Tidal Transportation Company, and Fundy Fisheries Corporation,
and the Paspebiac Pulp and Paper Unlimited? Well; all of those were
Pupkin senior under other names. So just imagine him in Mariposa!
Wouldn't he be utterly foolish there? Just imagine him meeting Jim
Eliot and treating him like a druggist merely because he ran a drug
store! or speaking to Jefferson Thorpe as if he were a barber simply
because he shaved for money! Why, a man like that could ruin young
Pupkin in Mariposa in half a day, and Pupkin knew it.
That wouldn't matter so much, but think of the Pepperleighs and
Zena! Everything. would be over with them at once. Pupkin knew just
what the judge thought of riches and luxuries. How often had he heard
the judge pass sentences of life imprisonment on Pierpont Morgan and
Mr. Rockefeller. How often had Pupkin heard him say that any man who
received more than three thousand dollars a year (that was the
judicial salary in the Missinaba district) was a mere robber, unfit
to shake the hand of an honest man. Bitter! I should think he was!
He was not so bitter, perhaps, as Mr. Muddleson, the principal of the
Mariposa high school, who said that any man who received more than
fifteen hundred dollars was a public enemy. He was certainly not so
bitter as Trelawney, the post-master, who said that any man who got
from society more than thirteen hundred dollars (apart from a
legitimate increase in recognition of a successful election) was a
danger to society. Still, he was bitter. They all were in Mariposa.
Pupkin could just imagine how they would despise his father!
And Zena! That was the worst of all. How often had, Pupkin heard her
say that she simply hated diamonds wouldn't wear them, despised them,
wouldn't give a thank you for a whole tiara of them! As for motor
cars and steam yachts,--well, it was pretty plain that that sort of
thing had no chance with Zena Pepperleigh. Why, she had told Pupkin
one night in the canoe that she would only marry a man who was poor
and had his way to make and would hew down difficulties for her sake.
And when Pupkin couldn't answer the argument she was quite cross and
silent all the way home.
What was Peter Pupkin doing, then, at eight hundred dollars in a bank
in Mariposa? If you ask that, it means that you know nothing of the
life of the Maritime Provinces and the sturdy temper of the people. I
suppose there are no people in the world who hate luxury and
extravagance and that sort of thing quite as much as the Maritime
Province people, and, of them, no one hated luxury more than Pupkin
senior.
Don't mistake the man. He wore a long sealskin coat in winter, yes;
but mark you, not as a matter of luxury, but merely as a question of
his lungs. He smoked, I admit it, a thirty-five cent cigar, not
because he preferred it, but merely through a delicacy of the thorax
that made it imperative. He drank champagne at lunch, I concede the
point, not in the least from the enjoyment of it, but simply on
account of a peculiar affection of the tongue and lips that
positively dictated it. His own longing--and his wife shared it--was
for the simple, simple life--an island somewhere, with birds and
trees. They had bought three or four islands--one in the St.
Lawrence, and two in the Gulf, and one off the coast of
Maine--looking for this sort of thing. Pupkin senior often said that
he wanted to have some place that would remind him of the little old
farm up the Aroostook where he was brought up. He often bought little
old farms, just to try them, but they always turned out to be so near
a city that he cut them into real estate lots, without even having
had time to look at them.
But--and this is where the emphasis lay--in the matter of luxury for
his only son, Peter, Pupkin senior was a Maritime Province man right
to the core, with all the hardihood of the United Empire Loyalists
ingrained in him. No luxury for that boy! No, sir! From his
childhood, Pupkin senior had undertaken, at the least sign of luxury,
to "tan it out of him," after the fashion still in vogue in the
provinces. Then he sent him to an old-fashioned school to get it
"thumped out of him," and after that he had put him for a year on a
Nova Scotia schooner to get it "knocked out of him." If, after all
that, young Pupkin, even when he came to Mariposa, wore cameo pins
and daffodil blazers, and broke out into ribbed silk saffron ties on
pay day, it only shows that the old Adam still needs further tanning
even in the Maritime Provinces.
Young Pupkin, of course, was to have gone into law. That was his
father's cherished dream and would have made the firm Pupkin, Pupkin,
Pupkin, and Pupkin, as it ought to have been. But young Peter was
kept out of the law by the fool system of examinations devised since
his father's time. Hence there was nothing for it but to sling him
into a bank; "sling him" was, I think, the expression. So his father
decided that if Pupkin was to be slung, he should be slung good and
far--clean into Canada (you know the way they use that word in the
Maritime Provinces). And to sling Pupkin he called in the services of
an old friend, a man after his own heart, just as violent as himself,
who used to be at the law school in the city with Pupkin senior
thirty years ago. So this friend, who happened to live in Mariposa,
and who was a violent man, said at once: "Edward, by Jehoshaphat!
send the boy up here."
So that is how Pupkin came to Mariposa. And if, when he got there,
his father's friend gave no sign, and treated the boy with roughness
and incivility, that may have been, for all I know, a continuation of
the "tanning" process of the Maritime people.
Did I mention that the Pepperleigh family, generations ago, had taken
up land near the Aroostook, and that it was from there the judge's
father came to Tecumseh township? Perhaps not, but it doesn't matter.
But surely after such reminiscences as these the awful things that
are impending over Mr. Pupkin must be kept for another chapter.
