# The Second Name for Vreedersburgh

Extracted from Everybody's magazine, Aug 1916, pp. 144–160. Accompanying illustrations may be omitted.
THE SECOND NAME FOR VREEDERSBURGH
By Booth Tarkington
AUTHOR OF “THE TURMOIL,” “PENROD,” “SEVENTEEN.” ETC.
ILLUSTRATIONS AND DECORATIONS BY F. B. MASTERS
THE wide midland landscape, wooded with walnut and beech and elm and hickory, and intertraced with silver where sycamores followed the creek, was so kindly that the Indians gave it a musical name, meaning “Pleasant Murmurs,” though there was no waterfall near, and the creek was slow and still. The murmurs were only the little sounds that a forest makes in summer.
The settlers changed the name to “Fair Lands” after they plowed their clearings and had corn growing and cattle in the meadows. The fair lands were fertile; a nucleus of tavern and farmers' warehouse developed among the scattered cabins; the cabins became farmhouses, and, in place of the rough nucleus, a little market-town with a church, a doctor, and four saloons appeared. They called it Fairlands City.
In 1867 Fairlands City had two banks, a weekly paper, a “hotel,” a livery-stable, a lumber-yard, a brick-yard, a tannery, five churches, eight doctors, nine saloons, eleven lawyers, and a tintype studio. The tintype man was elected to Congress, and in his honor they changed the name to Vreedersburgh.
Surviving not only this but the collapse of '73—for from the first the place had abnormal vitality—the market-town grew ever the more ambitious: it offered “locations” to factories, and got them; it got farm-houses and breweries, and another railroad. It became a “railroad center” and a manufacturing town, and, assuming the ways of a city, had noisy corners, footpads, orphan asylums, both white and colored, genuine red light, and exorbitant prosperity.
Burning soft coal, it smeared itself over the landscape as a soot-spot smears itself over a clean face. The forest was gone; and the sky was gone; the creek was gone; sliming through tunnels and under culverts, it had become a sewer. And where the pleasant murmurs had stirred the under side of leaves, steam-whistles screamed, drays thundered, and draymen cursed. Still the big soot-spot spread, its rough circumference inexorably creeping upon the farms; and if you looked down upon it from an aeroplane, you saw a horrible thing.
You saw hundreds and hundreds of mouths projected into the air at you, vomiting black destruction. You saw the soot falling back upon the people who made it, fouling and suffocating them, making them cough; making more hideous the great nondescript buildings where they did their business, streaking and smudging the wide confusion of shoddy houses where they ate and slept and kept the begrimed women and children. Through the dim and dirty air you made out the fringes of the town, the shacks standing in little yards, or mudholes, where chickens and pigs groped in the factory smoke. And if you flew low enough over the streets, you saw the people, all of them dirty, most of them in a hurry, and all wearing dark clothes made into the ugliest and most serviceable shapes.
These hustling souls were boisterously content with their own way of life, and they loved their money-making city. When Harley Otis was elected mayor the name Vreedersburgh meant more than a hundred thousand people, their ideals, and all their works.
Harley Otis was young, but he had already proved himself to be a devoted Vreedersburgher, and it was to his reputation as a patriot that he owed his election. Two breweries always fought each other for the “mayorality.” When the Göritz brewery won, the saloon-keepers were not allowed to sell Hanlon beer; if any of them persisted, the mayor would make his chief of police compel those saloon-keepers to obey the law, and thus be devastated by privileged competition. Contrariwise, when the Hanlon brewery elected a mayor, all the saloon-keepers who sold Göritz beer had to close at eleven o'clock and on Sunday. And in the red light, also, there was harrying and raiding until the people who sold beer in that quarter had learned which brewery owned the mayor. But Harley Otis was made mayor by neither of the breweries: he was nominated and elected by the banks.
The bankers were tired of the kind of men the breweries elected, so they made the breweries and the politicians understand that it was about time for a business administration, and they forced the nomination and election of Harley Otis. The breweries and their dependents acquiesced without bitterness. Of course there would have to be a little persecution here and there to satisfy the better element and boost the prosecutor's fees; but everybody knew that Harley Otis was no crazy reformer, mad upon indiscriminate raiding and badgering. He was a patriot, and would not do anything to hurt the town.
He was an enthusiast. He could not speak the name “Vreedersburgh” without emotion, and his ambition for the city became a passion in him from the day of his inauguration. Consulting with the Chamber of Commerce, he organized a club to boom Vreedersburgh. This club sent postals to factory-owners everywhere:
    Are you thinking of changing your location? If so, have you investigated Vreedersburgh? Shall we send one of our members to you to explain what Vreedersburgh will be glad to do for you? You need not meet us halfway: we will do it all.
They took a special train, with Harley for orator, and went up and down the land, carrying with them a plaster relief-map, almost white, of Vreedersburgh, to use for a table decoration at the banquets which were given in their honor.
They did all the convincing and flamboyant things their energy could devise; but at their joint banquet with the Chamber of Commerce, on a March evening in the first year of Harley's administration, it was discovered that there was one important thing which they had not done—had not even thought of, until the president of the club suggested it in his speech. This was to find a second name for Vreedersburgh.
“Gentlemen,” he said—and his manner was profoundly earnest—“gentlemen, we must have it! As San Francisco is known as the Golden Gate, as New Orleans is known as the Crescent City, as Philadelphia is known as the City of Brotherly Love, as Chicago is known by her stern but uplifting motto, 'I Will,' as Minneapolis and St. Paul are known far and wide as the Twin Metropoli of the North, and as Boston is known as the Hub of the Universe, gentlemen, so must Vreedersburgh be known by a second name which shall be at once a sobriquet and a motto. Our city is not yet so large, perhaps, as some of those I have mentioned, but if we can discover a synonym expressing what we know her to be, then, gentlemen, the noise of our adoption of that synonym as Vreedersburgh's second name will go over this broad land, from the dreamy Atlantic island of Porto Rico to where the blue Philippines swim in the long Pacific roll; from the frozen marches of the boisterous Yukon to the torrid cliff-dwellings of Arizona! Nothing, gentlemen, nothing on this earth so advertises and makes known the character and virtues of a town as a second name, such as I have indicated! Gentlemen, such a name must be found, to couple with the name of Vreedersburgh. Gentlemen, the thing must be done! I leave the thought in your minds. My wish is that it will sink deep. I thank you!”
The applause came sharply upon the instant; it was convincing and serious—the solid and prolonged sound made by patriots enthusing in a new resolve. It left room for no doubt that the orator had his wish: his thought was already deep in every mind; deepest of all in the mind of Harley Otis.
HE WALKED home alone, rejecting offers of company upon the way, because he wished to concentrate his mind. Enthusiast that he was, he had determined to be the discoverer of the immortal word or phrase—that perfect second name for Vreedersburgh, which would indeed, as another orator had prophesied, “send the grand old city of Vreedersburgh crashing down the ages with her head up and her tail over the dashboard!”
Harley Otis believed that the right word, if discovered, might easily double the population within ten years. Glory would rest forever upon the man who discovered it, and thus glorified his city. Harley was the mayor, and the city was peculiarly his to glorify; none else should be its second godfather.
He lay awake that night, while symbolic words and groups of words paraded before his mind's eye. He pictured them upon letter-heads, upon sign-posts, upon transparencies and banners in procession and pageant; and he saw them in stone above the great doorway of the prospective new City Hall; but they were all wrong, and he found no second name for Vreedersburgh that night. In the morning he woke to a jumbled mind, his dis cards of the night tumbling pell-mell through his head in company with many new ones, all preposterous.
But he was the persistent enthusiast, not the flare-up; and he went for his morning ride in a profound preoccupation, resolved to let no thought distract him from his high pursuit. This morning ride was one of the things which he considered part of his duty to himself and Vreedersburgh. The mayor must be kept in condition or the business administration would suffer. However, he did not rise to the trot, and his selection of a riding costume permitted his long trousers to ruck up over his shoe-tops, so that his riding was inoffensive to the voters.
With eyes fixed upon the black mane of his bay mare, he rode slowly, this morning, the full length of Vreedersburgh's “best residence street.” Now and then a sharp little March gust would whirl up a dust cloud from the asphalt and decorate the unheeding horseman with flinty particles, bacilli, hairs from dead cats and rats and dogs, shreds of feather and bits of dead birds, and remnants of all else that had lain upon the street since September, when the last street-cleaner had been officially conducted to his annual hibernation. It was no part of a business administration to waste money trying to keep streets clean from September until May;—however, the bodies of dead animals, if of noticeable size, were usually removed when their special department was summoned by a citizen.
TO THE eye of a stranger the houses upon this best street of Vreedersburgh were all of a dreadful appearance, though among them were several gloomily exhibiting symptoms of architecture. There were others that should have shown a cheerful countenance, being newly built or freshly painted during the past year; but they were as stricken as the rest. Each succeeding snow had turned black with the soot that became a great part of its body; and this soot-snow, melting to a thinnish ink, had flowed and trickled, and congealed again, and melted again, upon these houses; and soot-laden rain had frozen upon their faces, until those bedraggled faces now were like the faces of negro minstrels in a half stage of make-up. But they lacked all gaiety of the minstrel; rather, these houses were like haggard patients, not yet convalescent after racking illness. And they stood in leprous enclosures of besooted bare earth where lingered a few patches of sparse grass not yet slain by the acids in the smoke.
A girl came out of one of the houses as the mayor rode by, and in her hand she held a new, white tennis-ball, just from the box. She rolled it across the “lawn” for a pointer to retrieve. He brought it to her, gray.
The mayor reached a dead little park at the upper end of this street and for an instant he glanced up appreciatively at the statue there: “Peter J. Vreeder” was the name carved on the colossal granite pedestal, shaped like a mountain. The statue was faithfully the size of tintyping, bald, chin-bearded Peter in life; and it looked lonely, so high in the air and upon such a deserted vastness of granite. It looked cold, too, though Peter was solidly dressed in a deformed frock coat and cylindrical trousers. This dumfounding thing was of native stone, and had been carved by a native sculptor or stonecutter, maker of most of the monuments in the cemetery beyond the little dead park. Vreedersburgh was proud of him, for his design, now everlastingly realized, had won the decision in a competition wherein Macmonnies and O'Connor had taken part.
Moreover, the successful monument man's brother-in-law's brother (who was chairman of the Commission of Award) shared the family talent; and it was he who had designed the granite mountain or pedestal. At first, the color of the stone figure was thought not to harmonize prettily with the color of the granite; but the kindly universal soot had soothed this disturbance, for both Peter and his pedestal were now so blotched and smeared and murked and blackened that few could detect a difference in their texture. And Harley Otis, like the rest of Vreedersburgh, was proud of Vreedersburgh's one work of plastic art.
PERHAPS SOME DAY HE MIGHT STAND, IN A STONE FROCK COAT, AT THE OTHER ENTRANCE OF THE PARK
As he rode by, he knew a moment of excitement in the thought that perhaps some day he might stand, likewise grand and lonely in a stone frock coat, at the other entrance of that dead little park. Such a thing was far from unlikely—especially if he found the second name for Vreedersburgh.
Still concentrating fiercely upon his problem, he came to the fringe of the town; and here he rode between slattern tenements where children coughed in the smoke-fog, and murky women, waving gray dish-towels, urged them schoolward. Farther on, the mare was fetlock deep in mud; pavements of pitted asphalt and worn brick gave way to sloughs, houses and tenements to rough shacks and to shelters built of tin and stolen canvas, where apathetic faces stared from windows never glazed.
Then came the city dump-heaps, a range of low hills of refuse: necropolis of a million cold and collapsed tin cans; and here a few dark, human figures groped, shawl over head, hoping to find among the million one can not emptied of all its fruit or corn or fish.
Beyond this was a railroad, with its freight-yards, not grimier than other places; but, after that, the mare came to a thinner, purer air, and the road, not so heavily rutted by the teams, began to grow firmer under foot. little farther, and she was bearing her rider through the open country.
He still rode preoccupied. For a time he failed even to notice that he had left the town behind. Usually he did not come this far; he preferred to ride within his city's purlieus. Unlike Douglas, he loved better to hear the mouse squeak than the lark sing; the city was his country. But this morning the mare had her way of it, and she had carried the rapt Harley three miles beyond the city boundary before he was roused to take other than the dreamiest cognizance of his surroundings.
What roused him was the sound of a fiddle. He straightened himself, pushed up the brim of his soft hat, and looked about him. The mare had left the road for the open gate of a ten-acre pasture, had crossed the pasture, and now, with lowered head, as the absently slacked rein permitted, was nuzzling the short grass bordering a path through a thicket.
Forty feet to his right, Harley caught the gleam of a creek, glimpsed through the leafless bushes and saplings of its hither bank, and upon the still water was winter's last touch—just the barest skim of ice, thin as thin paper. But there were suspicions of green among the gray blades the mare was nuzzling; across the creek, uproarious robins made public announcement that a willow-tree had come to life; overhead was a blue bowl of sky, brighter blue than midsummer; and among the frosted reeds at the creek's edge stood a little naked boy playing a fiddle.
This pagan figurine, sketched in ivory against a tapestry of underbrush and brown water, was no wood-creature nor little Pan, but a true boy as he proceeded to demonstrate.
His back was toward the mayor, and, just as the latter looked up to discover the source of the disturbing music, the boy set his fiddle upon the ground, lifted his thin arms above his head, palm to palm, and dived into the creek through the scum of ice. He repented this, as he made evident when his head emerged. After giving the briefest possible imitation of a spouting gargoyle, he howled bloody murder.
Harley dropped from his saddle and ran to the water's edge; but the boy could swim well enough—he struck out for shore with agonized vigor.
“Oh, gosh!” he said, as in shallow water he rose and pranced to the land.
“What's the matter with you?” the mayor demanded angrily.
“That water's cold!” the boy announced.
“You ought to be whipped!” Harley exclaimed. “You ought to know better! What were you doing with that fiddle?”
“PLAYIN' it,” the boy replied, hopping and shivering. “I thought I'd see if I dairst go in swimmin' through the i-hi-ice, an' I took my clo'es off, an' I felt so cold I just played one tut-tune to kind o' warm me up be-fore I went in—an', ooh! I'm froze!”
“You're a truant,” the mayor said sternly. “Aren't you a truant?”
The boy hung his shaking head; he stood shuddering, huddling his pipe-stem arms, and rubbing what should have been the calves of his legs together; he shook so hard that he was like a figure on a joggled film.
“Aren't you a truant?”
“S-s-sir?”
“You ought to be arrested by the truant officer,” Harley began. “You have no business to be out of——”
But he was interrupted by a voice that called to him peremptorily from a distance.
“Rub him!” it called. “Don't stand there talkin' to him! Rub him!”
Harley looked over his shoulder and beheld the figure of a girl. She had just emerged from an empty corn-crib at the edge of the pasture, and stood with her back properly toward the mayor and the glistening truant, but she was one of those remarkable people who can gesticulate with their backs turned. In fact, she was waving both arms, and it was obvious to Harley Otis that she was waving them angrily at himself.
To emphasize this effect, “Rub him, you dummy!” she shouted. “Haven't you got sense enough to rub him!”
Much offended, and yet cowed, as all men are when women become decisive, Harley ridiculously took his handkerchief from his pocket and turned to the boy. But the latter was no longer within reach; he had fled to the bush, already his boudoir for the disrobing; and, wet as he was, his too visible ribs became invisible in the shroudings of a man's old shirt, and in the twinkling of an eye he had capered into his knickerbockers. Forthwith, he seated himself upon the ground for purposes connected with stockings and shoes.
“Are you rubbin' him?” shouted the distant girl. “Haven't you got sense enough to rub him?”
“How can I?” the mayor called testily. “I'd like to know how anybody's going to rub him when he's already got three-fourths of his clothes on!”
At that she turned and came running. “What'd you let him put 'em on for, before he'd had a rubbin'?” she demanded. “Do you want him to get pneumonia?” And as Harley uttered the first sound of an attempted reply, she cut him off instanter. “Don't stand around! Listen to his teeth! Don't you know enough to build a fire?“.
Harley bestirred himself resentfully, but none the less with energy. He tied his mare to a sapling, and brought sticks and dead wood, while the girl heaped dry leaves and twigs into a little pile; so that the fire was burning by the time the boy had tied the makeshift strings with which his shoes were laced.
“Here, you!” The peremptory damsel thus hailed the swimmer. “You get as close to this fire as you can without burnin' your clothes off o' you. You want to die?” And, as he obeyed, she held his jacket close to the in creasing flames until it was warm, then put it upon him. “You want to die?” she repeated crossly. “Here! What's the matter with you, anyway? You crazy?”
The question seemed fairly reasonable, for the boy, after standing a moment by the fire, darted without explanation into the underbrush. He had only gone for his fiddle, however, and he returned with the instrument in a covering of old green cloth.
“You sit down,” said the girl. “Not on the ground! What you doin'? Sit down on them sticks and put your feet to the fire. If your feet get right hot the rest of you's pretty sure to be warm. But you keep the rest of you as close to the fire as you can, anyhow.”
Harley Otis, considerably outraged in spirit, began to recover his poise; and the more of it he recovered, the more magisterially he regarded his chance companions. The boy was about eleven; and his hat, like his shirt, had been a man's. His shoes continued this harmony: they also were adult. The shoes wept with the wetness within them; the hat was a terrible relic, based upon that design sometimes malignantly attributed to an Earl of Derby.
This was a town boy; both his attire and his pallor denied that he was of the country.
Neither was the young woman a thing of buttermilk and apples. Sallowness and a murky suffering beneath the eyes claimed her for Vreedersburgh, though she was broad-shouldered, vigorous, and not uncomely. She was less shabby than the boy, yet her shabbiness was sufficient. Her hat, her cloak, and her dress were all old, of no discernible mode, and had been cheap when they were new. Just now they looked as if she had slept in them. She had.
The mayor addressed her severely. “You seem to understand that going in swimming at this time of year is dangerous,” he said. “What did you let him do it for?”
“What did I let—” she repeated, and stopped, astonished.
“Did he run away from you?” Harley inquired.
“Good gracious!” she cried. “I never saw this boy before in my life. I thought he was your boy—until he put his clothes on. I heard a fiddle and then a hollerin' and a splashin'; and I saw you just standin' around talkin' to him, instead o' havin' enough sense to r——”
“”At this point Harley decided that he owed it to himself to turn his back upK)n her. “What's your name?” he asked the boy.
“My name's Ben.”
“What's your last name?”
“I guess it's Pritchard.”
“What do you mean by 'guessing' it's Pritchard?”
“Well,”said Ben,“it's like this, first I was in the orphan asylum, an' my name was Ben Pritchard. Then a woman took me, an' I had her name; it was Kyle. But she sent me back to the asylum again, 'cause she got run over by a nottamabeel speeder, an' when she got well she hadn't only one leg, an' couldn't run after me. So then a man an' his wife took me, an' I was named same as them; I was named Ben Gower. Well, an' then Mr. Gower he had a little groc'ry', but the trouble was, he owned the propaty; an' they put a asphelt street in front of it an' a brick street to the side of it; an' they made him pay fer all that asphelt an' brick; an' taxed him an' taxed him; an' he had to give up the groc'ry; an' his wife died, an' he drank a while an' c'mitted suacide last year. So I guessed my first name maybe was the right one after all: Pritchard. But I ain't sure.”
“Why aren't you in school?”
“I don't b'long to no school.”
“Why not?”
Ben removed his cavernous hat and passed his hand over his wet head reflectively. “Well,” he said, “when Mr. Gower went an' hung himself I didn't have no place to go. I expected I was too old to go back to the orphan asylum; so Mr. Gower he'd taught me to fiddle some, an' I just went around the saloons fiddlin'. People in saloons are apt to be mighty good-hearted. I expeck I made as much as sellin' papers. Anyways, I shore seen some good fights!”
The mayor flushed slightly. “You may need a month or two at the reform school,” he said.
A PAGAN FIGURINE, SKETCHED IN IVORY AGAINST A TAPESTRY OF UNDERBRUSH.
“Yes, sir,” Ben returned meekly. “I thought they might git me; they already got four o' the crowd I run with. That's why I quit the ole smoke-stack.”
“What are you talking about?” Harley asked impatiently.
“Vreedersburgh,” said Ben. “I says to myself, 'What's the use stayin' here?' I says. 'I don't see nothin' to stay fer,' I says. So I left, this morning.
“Do you know who I am?”
“Yes, sir. I had a friend o' mine hauled up in police court oncet this year, an' I seen you settin' there givin' 'em what's what, right an' left! Yes, sir; you're the mayor.”
“All right,” said the mayor. “You'll march straight back!”
But at this the girl burst into sudden loud laughter. “You can't make him go back!” she said harshly, as the mayor turned to her in frowning surprise. “It's outside the city limits, and you got no more authority over him than one o' them robins across the crick has! Besides, when you look what you're doin' to me, I should think you'd see it's kind o' ridiculous for you to talk about makin' anybody go back to Vreedersburgh!”
“What do you mean by what I'm doing to you?” Harley demanded.
“Why, don't you know?” she cried. “My name's Milly Cross.”
“I never saw you before,” said Harley. “I don't remember ever hearing your name.”
The mouth of Milly Cross opened; the eyes of Milly Cross became large and staring. “That's the awfullest thing I ever heard!” she said. “Can you do a thing like that to a person and then not even know her the very next day?”
Ben Pritchard at once looked upon her with the brightest interest. “What you done?” he inquired eagerly.
“Nothin'!” cried Milly.
“'Course!” said Ben, prompt to be a gentleman. “I mean, what was you up for?”
“He knows!” she answered with a quick nod of her head at the mayor.
“No, I don't,” he responded, still puzzled, his official mood somewhat relaxed. “We've had more than a hundred cases in police court this week.”
“Mine took all of three minutes,” said Milly.
“What was the charge against you?”
“I was hauled up with another girl,” Milly told him darkly. “Her name was Dessing. Mabel Dessing.”
“Look here!” urged little Ben Pritchard. “What was you up for?”
Milly stared fiercely at the eyes of the mayor. “For bein' a 'bad character'!” she said.
“Mabel Dessing,” Harley repeated. “Yes, I rememberer. So you were the woman with her, were you?” He became more magisterial as he spoke; his glance was ominous. “I thought I told you to leave Vreedersburgh.”
“I have left!”
“You understood me well enough,” he said. “I meant on a train, and you know it. You'd better not be caught inside the city limits.”
“Don't be afraid; I won't be!” she returned with her bitter stare still sharp upon his eyes. “I don't know just how you expected me to take a train, though. I didn't have a cent on earth. Not after I got out o' your court-room, I didn't!”
“That's not my affair.”
“When I walked out o' your court,” said Milly, “I walked on straight up the street and out o' your blame town. I walked till I got to this pasture here, and it was comin' on dark. I slept in that corn-crib yonder. Pretty soon I'm goin' on again; but I'll go where I want to. You can't order me! Not a step! You did all you're ever goin' to, to me, Mr. Otis, yesterday when you ruined my character in that court-room o' yours!”
He laughed a short, bored laugh. “Your 'character'?” he said tolerantly.
“You look here!” she cried. “You just be careful! I don't want to hit you, but I will, if you say anything like that again! You listen to me!”
“Oh, I'll 'listen'!” he said.
“All right, then,” said Milly Cross. “I guess I'll just make you know what you did, now I got the chance.”
“Go on,” the mayor returned. “Do!”
His tone and manner were of a skepticism still official, yet not altogether unkindly; and she took him at his word.
“Well, I come to Vreedersburgh from Boonville,” Milly began. “It was about three years ago. I had to leave Boonville——”
“Ah!” said the mayor. “So you had to leave Boonville, too, did you?”
She took a furious step toward him.
“Say!” little Ben warned her. “Look out! You don't want to muss it up with no mayor!”
Milly choked. “I never laid a hand on nobody in my life,” she said huskily. “But I been feelin' for a couple days like it was time to begin, and I guess if I do begin he's the right one to begin on!” She choked again, then shouted in Harley's face: “I got folks down in Boonville good as what you got in your town!”
“1 don't doubt it,” he said. “What about yourself?”
“I left there because I had trouble with my fella!” she cried, her fury not abating. “Is that any of your business?”
“Not at all,” Harley returned promptly. “My business is only to see that you keep out of Vree——”
“Then I'll just tell you what it was!” Milly cut him off. “He took a job as a bartender down at the Boonville Hotel, and I says if I didn't have no more influence with him than that, I'd quit him; and I hoped that'd make him give up the job—but instead he got mad and took to goin' with another girl that I hated and hated me. I couldn't stand seein' 'em around together; I saw I was goin' to be sick if I stayed there much longer. That's why I had to leave Boonville, you mayor, you!”
“All right,” he said. “That all you wanted to tell me?”
“You know better,” she contented herself with retorting quietly; and went on: “I come up to Vreedersburgh, and got a job in Baker's canning factory, six dollars and a half a week. Well, this Mabel Dessing was the girl that worked next to me, and her and I got on right good; so after while we hired a room together. We put our wages together, too, and that made thirteen a week; it goes farther that way than what six and a half does for one. We got along first-rate.”
Harley showed some interest. “Certainly you could,” he said. “I've always claimed that six dollars and a half a week——”
“Wait!” she interrupted, “I'm tellin' you! Here, along about last January we heard there was goin' to be trouble in the factory for us hands.”
“Oh, no,” said Harley. “There's been no strike or trouble of any kind at the Baker cannery. I own stock there, and I ought to know.”
“I reckon you ought to,” she agreed, “but you don't. It was this way. Seems the church people, or somebody like that, had went and got up a big investigation about bad girls that work in stores and factories, and they were givin' a hard name to any place that paid girls less than eight dollars a week. Well, our factory didn't want to get a hard name, so the bosses worked things out like this: they says, 'When them committees come around here investigatin' we want to show 'em that the girls that work for us don't haf to do nothin' bad to make a livin' outside of the six and a half they get from the cannery. We'll show 'em that all our girls got homes they live in, and live with their own families, and only work in the cannery to make something on the side, kind of—to help out at home, or maybe just to have their own pocket money, for pitcher shows and so on.' That's the way they figured it out when they saw the investigation was goin' to get around to them. About half the girls did live at home with their families anyway, so the factory just discharged the rest of us—the ones that didn't have no homes—and filled up our places with new hands that did.”
“YOU WANT TO DIE?” SHE REPEATED CROSSLY. “YOU CRAZY?”
“THEY KEP' US THERE IN THE RAIN, WITH PEOPLE STARIN' AT US, TILL THE PATROL. WAGON COME.”
“I see.” Harley said, nodding. “They couldn't do much else, under the circumstances. They're bound to the stockholders to be economical, of course.”
“Oh, I'm not blamin' anybody for that,” said Milly Cross. “Everybody's got to lose their job now and then. I and Mabel had some money to go on; we'd saved twenty-six dollars, and there was even five of it left when we got arrested, night before last. By that time I knew about Mabel as well as you seemed to when you had us up before you. I found out two, three months before we got discharged from the cannery. Fellas spoke to her kind o' funny sometimes when we'd be on the way to the room after work; and there was a couple o' girls come to see her; she couldn't fool me about them.
“Well, and so I told her I suspicioned her; and she got to cryin', and told me all about it. She'd lived down in the Red Light from the time she was sixteen till she was twenty, and then she got converted or something; anyway she reformed and got a job at the cannery a little before I come there.
“Well, I felt kind o' like not havin' anything more to do with her after that, and there was a week or so when I couldn't make up my mind what to do. She kep' beggin' me every night when we got home to say I wasn't goin' to quit her; and I wouldn't answer yes or no. I suspicioned she kind of had a touch o' T. B., too; and that made me want to get rid of her; but she told me if I broke up the room she'd feel so bad she couldn't help goin' to the dogs again. So at last I said I'd stay; and we quit talkin' about it.”
Little Ben Pritchard, who listened with entire comprehension, nodded approvingly. “You're all right!” he said. “I know that Mabel Dessing.
I was a messenger a while, when Mr. Gower had me; an' I used to carry notes to Mabel Dessing. She give me a quarter, mostly.”
“She didn't give no quarters away for notes while we were at the cannery,” said Milly Cross grimly. “She took it awful hard when we lost our jobs. The whole first week she just laid around the room and cried and took on. I didn't see then why she made such a fuss, but now I reckon it was because she kind o' suspicioned that the discouragement was liable to drive her back to the life she used to lead. I couldn't drag her out with me lookin' for a job, but I got some sewin' to bring home. We weren't neither of us much good for sewin'—our work at the cannery had kind o' spoiled our hands for it—and we only made two dollars and forty-five cents between us the whole time we were at it. So about the end of last month she took to goin' out alone; said she was willin' to go job-huntin', after all. Then one night when she come back to the room I noticed whisky on her. We had a lot o' trouble over it, and after we'd been talkin' and cryin' a.good while, she got up all of a sudden and went out. I never saw her again till night before last.”
“I did,” said little Ben. “I seen her last week. She had a room at the Buffet Hotel.”
“She come to the room about seven o'clock, night before last,” Milly went on. “She was all wet with the rain, and coughin', and scared to death. She told me how it was: the prosecutor gets fees for all the prosecutions by him and his deputies, she says; but if the cops don't raid around some and arrest a lot o' people the prosecutor don't make much, so of course the prosecutor has to do the right thing by the cops. Well, the people that don't want to get arrested, they do the right thing by the cops, too; and sometimes the cops do one way a while, and then they turn round and do the other. Well, Mabel was in bad trouble, because, she says, the cops and the prosecutor had got friendly again; and the cops were bound to do a lot of arrestin' to make fees for the prosecutor. I reckon you know all about that, Mr. Otis.”
“Go on,” said the mayor.
“Well, she was awful scared. She says the cops would do all the arrestin' at first just around among girls like her that was all alone, because the other people had more influence and paid regular. And she says she was liable to get in pretty bad with the cops, because she'd been havin' some beer with a fella, a couple days before, at Wechsel's and he got pretty drunk and went home, and she found a ten-dollar bill on the chair where he'd been sittin', an' kep' it.”
“Yes,” said Harley, smiling faintly. “That sounds familiar!”
“It was new to me!” Milly returned sharply. “I believed her, and it was true. It doesn't matter much whether it was or not, the way I see it: you'd 'a' given her what you did, either way, wouldn't you?”
“I suppose so.”
“I guess you do! Well, she was awful scared, because she'd heard afterwards that this fella was in politics, and she knew if he made a holler about his ten-dollar bill she'd be in big trouble. So she went back to Wechsel's and left the money for the fella, if he asked about it; but Wechsel told her that wouldn't probably help her none, because the cops were goin' to pull all her kind anyhow*. She told me she was afraid she'd kill herself if she got arrested—but she didn't! I still had a five-dollar bill that was half of it hers, from when we saved money out of our wages, and, after she quieted down, and her clothes got dry, I told her to come along; we'd go get some supper, and I'd let her have her part of the five.
“We didn't get any supper. Just as we opened the cafeteria door somebody jerked us both back out on to the sidewalk. It was two men in rubber coats had hold of us. They kep' us there in the rain, with people stoppin' and havin' a fine time starin' at us under their umbrellas till the patrol-wagon come. And a fine night we had of it in your jail, Mr. Otis! Just before we were shoved into your court in the morning a man that said he was a lawyer took our five-dollar bill and kind o' mumbled something when we were called up. That's all he did for the five dollars; I couldn't even tell what he said. Then this politician swore Mabel had stole the ten from him, because Wechsel had never give it to him. Mabel told you that, but you wouldn't pay no attention; you were too busy hurryin' folks off to the workhouse and back to jail, or to the reform school——”
“Tut, tut!” said Harley. “The Dessing girl got what she deserved. Why didn't you speak up then, and tell me a little of what you're telling me now about yourself?”
{{fqm|“}WHY didn't I tell you?” she cried incredulously. “You wouldn't listen; you wouldn't hear a word from me! I started to say something, and that big cop stopped me; he swore I was Mabel's 'running-mate,' he says; and how Mabel had been a 'police character' for six years. He says they couldn't prove I was with her at the time she stole the ten dollars, and was willin' not to push the larceny part o' the charges against me, though they would against Mabel. Then I tried to speak again, but you says you'd heard enough; you understood the case. You sent Mabel to the workhouse for six months, and the number six seemed to be kind of a favorite with you just then, because you told me I better leave Vreedersburgh inside o' six hours. I tried to say something. I tried to——”
“Yes, I remember,” said the mayor. “I'm sorry I didn't let you speak.”
“I guess nobody speaks when you don't 'let' 'em!” said Milly Cross. “When you said you'd heard enough, the big cop give me a twist of the wrist that fixed my tryin' to say anything! It give me something else to think about for quite a few minutes!”
And with this recollection the muscles about her mouth underwent a spasmodic change, but there was no sign of tears in her eyes. Throughout her story she had spoken with sharpness, and at times with fire; but not once with pathos; not once with a quaver of self-pity.
“THE BIG COP GIVE ME A TWIST OF THE WRIST THAT FIXED MY TRYIN' TO SAY ANYTHING!”
The man who had banished her was obviously somewhat disturbed. “I'm sorry I didn't let you speak,” he said again. “We have so many that we'd never get through if we let all of them talk as much as they want to. I'll see that the charges against you are erased.”
Then Milly's loud laughter rang out once more. “A lot of good that'll do me!” she cried. “The fella I left Boonville on account of, he was in the drunks waitin' behind I and Mabel when we were called up. He'd come up to Vreedersburgh on a bat, and got run in. And the girl he quit me for, she'd come up from Boonville to get him out. She was sittin' right there in your court-room, and him and her both liked to fell over when they heard my name and looked—and saw me! Then the girl she begun to laugh and wink at Charlie, and he kind of laughed too; and I guess it was funny, lookin' back at the way I used to tell him he'd end up if he kep' on bein' a bartender, and the things I used to say about that girl! They heard what I was charged with, and they saw me stand there and get convicted with Mabel Dessing, and they heard what you said to me. That about fixes me plenty with Boonville, I guess!”
“No, it doesn't,” said Harley impulsively. “I'll give you a letter stating that the charge against you was a mistake and that it has been erased.”
“THAT GIRL'LL TAKE YESTERDAY'S PAPER TO BOONVILLE, YOU BET.”
Milly looked at him queerly; then she shook her head, marveling. “You don't know enough to rub a wet boy,” she said; “but I should think you would know enough to understand that when everybody in a little town gets all excited, goin' around gabbin' the news how somebody's turned out to be a scandal, nobody can get up much interest in a letter sayin' that the excitement's all been a mistake.”
For a moment Harley was nonplused. “Well—” he began lamely, and paused.
“No,” she said. “That's the finish o' Milly Cross with all the uncles and aunts and cousins in Boonville. After that girl gets through with her story down there you could give me a hundred letters and they'd think I probably forged 'em. She'll have yesterday's paper from Vreedersburgh, too; you bet your sweet life! It told about I and Mabel, and what we got arrested for. If I went back there I'd have to spend the rest o' my life stoppin' people on the Square, and gettin' 'em to read your letter about it all bein' a mistake. But I wasn't thinkin' o' goin' back there. I'm goin' on out into the country.”
“What you goin' to do?” little Ben asked quickly.
“I'll find something,” she answered. “I'm strong as a steer, and I can do farm cookin', or anything else they'd be a mind to put me at, I guess. I'll find some place that'll take me in; and if they once take me in I'll bet it won't be long before they find they can't afford to let me go! I'm not worried!”
“Let me go with you,” the boy cried, jumping up eagerly. “I got to be a farm boy! We'll say we're brother an' sister, an' we'll work all day, an' in the evenings I'll fiddle in the kitchen. Will you, Milly?”
She looked at him thoughtfully and then smiled. “Why, yes, I guess so,” she said. “I don't see why not.”
But the Mayor of Vreedersburgh interposed. “Nonsense!” he exclaimed. “You'll have a harder time finding work in the country than you did in town. This boy wouldn't be the worse for a few months in the reform school; they're very conscientious people in charge there; and as for you, Miss Cross, I've been very glad of the chance to hear what you had to say, and I tell you freely I rescind my order to you. You can come back to Vreedersburgh at once.”
“I can?” she asked, and once more she stared at him incredulously.
“Certainly,” he answered, inclining his head. “You can come back and live there as long as you choose.”
Then she shocked him. “Not in a thousand years!” she cried. “I wouldn't go back to that place if you give it to me with every last cent there is in its banks. It ain't only the way I was treated there that makes me feel like this; and it ain't just the things I saw happening; nor the way I feel about girls like Mabel, and about her bein' out in the workhouse with her T. B., nor it ain't the way your police and your prosecutor act; nor all the other things like that; it's none o' them things so much. It's something funny and kind o' queer in me, I guess! All the time I been livin' in Vreedersburgh, ever since I first come from Boonville, I been feelin' like something was kind o' poisonin' me! Yes, sir; that's just it—like I was gettin' poisoned slow, but every day a little more. All the time, week in and week 'out, month after month, it kep' gettin' worse and worse, and I couldn't tell what it was. Seemed to me sometimes like I must be kind o' crazy! Well, sir, that night I spent in your jail—all at once it come to me: all bright and clear I saw in my mind what this poisoned feelin' was. It was because in all that time I'd been livin' in Vreedersburgh I'd never had one pretty thing to look at, and never once been clean!”
“What!” cried the astounded and indignant mayor. “What do you mean?”
“Why, you know it yourself, Mr. Otis,” said Milly, “if you stop to think. Just the minute a person's washed in that town he's dirty again! That was what had been poisonin' me—never seein' a thing that wasn't ugly and never bein' clean! If a person could be clean for a little while maybe they could stand it, and if they could see something pretty maybe they could; but there ain't anything pretty in Vreedersburgh, and if there was it'd be dirty, and then it couldn't be pretty. And so when you said for me to get out of Vreedersburgh in six hours and never come back, why, Mr. Otis, in all my misery, when I got outside your court-room I felt a kind o' something happy inside o' me, like I wanted to sing! You treated me like I wouldn't treat a dog, but if it hadn't been for you I mightn't of had any more sense than to hang around that town because I didn't know what else to do; and I want to tell you, Mr. Otis, I haven't got a bit of hard feelings toward you. Indeed, I haven't! Why, instead o' that, when you told me I had to leave Vreedersburgh forever,” cried Milly, “the way I felt to you was thankful!”
And then, stretching out her capable hand to the boy: “You and I don't ever have to go back to Vreedersburgh!” she said; and there were tears in her eyes at last, but they were dancing tears, tears of joy. “Come on, Benny Pritchard!” she cried.
He seized her hand, and they ran lightly across the pasture, toward the road.
Harley Otis repressed an impulse to pursue them. He felt that insult had been offered to his town and to himself, and that something ought to be done about it; but he could not think just what to do. Finally, as he rested an arm on the neck of his mare, debating the matter rather sorely, he considered the source of the insult—a cannery girl just out of police court, and abetted by a runaway guttersnipe—and he cheered up.
“GIRLS LIKE MABEL BEIN' OUT IN THE WORKHOUSE, WITH HER T. B—VREEDERSBURGH!”
By the time he had mounted and ridden slowly to the pasture gate, the two renegades had reached the road by a short cut, and were trudging manfully eastward, their backs toward Harley and his town. He looked after them thoughtfully as they went steadily onward; the girl's figure stalwart and competent; the boy's confidently dependent.
They looked back never once, but, just before they passed round a bend in the road Harley saw that the boy had taken his fiddle out of the green cloth, and had begun to play, and that the girl was waving her arms peculiarly. Both Milly and Ben were also doing something peculiar with their feet.
They were dancing!
The sky was blue over them, and they passed round the bend in the road, dancing to the boy's fiddle. Sunshine was upon them: they danced every step the more gaily. Dancing, they passed out of sight.
... Harley stared a moment longer; then he spoke to his mare and turned her head toward where a great dinginess overspread the lower heavens. The mare broke into a canter, and within five minutes her master had drawn rein upon a little eminence, pride and happiness tingling upon his very skin. Gone utterly from his mind were the renegades; forgotten was everything but what lay before him. For there, a swarming, steaming, vast black blotch of buildings—great buildings and squalid buildings, jagged and craggy, or squat and sprawling, but all dim, fuming in the smoke—there before him in the middle distance, there lay Vreedersburgh, his city!
He had forgotten Milly Cross, and was not reminded of her even when his eye dwelt on the vague oblong profiles of the great Baker canneries, at the north end of the town; but they did remind him of something: that the dividends on his stock in the canneries had paid him twelve per cent. in the past year. And, as he remembered that, his joy and pride increased. From one end of the great town to the other his eye dwelt upon chimneys that meant dividends. There, as in a coal-mine, men lived and created dividends all their lives: Vreedersburgh was the very home and sanctuary of money-making. It was beautiful!
And then—oh, then! all alone on the little hillcrest as he was, save for his startled mare, Harley Otis lifted his voice and shouted aloud. In that moment of rapture he had found his inspiration. Like a flash from the heavens he saw the words in letters of fire before him; and the glory of it would ever be his—he had found the second name for Vreedersburgh!
He had found it!
ALOUD, he repeated to himself, marveling, and yet with humility, those words which all Vreedersburgh was to receive with unanimous enthusiasm before that night should fall; those words destined to ring from one end of the country to the other; destined to be printed or en graved on ail the official writing-paper of the city from that day onward; destined to be the perpetual newspaper rubric of Vreedersburgh; destined to be solemnly coupled with Vreedersburgh in the mouth of every orator who ever spoke the name thenceforth for evermore; and, finally, destined to be carved—to be carved sincerely, in the highest good faith, with loftiest enthusiasm, and with no faintest farthest shadow' of mockery—to be carved imperishably, in majestic letters of stone, over the great doorways of Vreedersburgh's new million-dollar City Hall:
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1946, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 77 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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