Judge Banks's Mary

JUDGE BANKS was talking of his daughter Mary as he and Ralston, who was burdened with a heavy “grip ” and a sample ease, made their way through the reclining-chair car to the vacant seats in the rear. He was still talking of Mary when the local pulled out for its day’s run between Kansas City and St. Louis. When the train stopped unexpectedly at Bunkerton flag station, his voice, pitched high against the anticipated roar and rumble, made the people in the car turn toward him. They saw an elderly man, whose fine face, underneath a wide soft hat, announced gently but distinctly,“gentleman of the old school.” The man beside him was another sort of man, a much younger man, whose face and equipment bespoke modernity, save that the look in his eyes was more indicative of the eternal dream and hope of young manhood than of times or customs. He seemed at this moment the victim of a carefully suppressed excitement. And the Judge was saying to him, —

“Ah, my boy, the young women of today are not like the young women of my time, except my Mary, thank God. They have not the — ah—the fine femininity of their mothers. But, there, wait until we reach Arcana,” — the Judge laughed fondly, — “and I’ll show you one who saves the day.”

“Or say the yesterday,” suggested Ralston, and the Judge bowed to the suggestion, and waved his hand with the grace of the Virginia cavaliers who had been his ancestors.

“It was worth saving. I think that you will see that when you see her.” The train moved on again, the other people in the car began to attend to their own business again, and Ralston, his sad eyes shining, — Ralston’s eyes were sad, although (perhaps because) he was a humorist,— leaned back and, listening to the Judge, followed the Judge’s Mary, as he had often followed her before, into a charming place, haunted by the scent of lavender.

It was not in the least Ralston’s eligibility that was making the Judge talk about Mary. He would have talked just as impressively if Ralston had been twelve years old, and a hod-carrier, instead of thirty, and heir-apparent to his uncle’s rubber goods, the commodity that engaged the talents of both men in different capacities. The Judge liked to talk, and he especially liked to talk about Mary. At Penangton he was saying, with radiant satisfaction in his theme, that all his life his daughter had been his lode-star.

“Why, Mary herself does n’t begin to know how many good things she has made me do, and how many bad things she has made me hate to do. I don’t believe a fine, sweet woman ever fully appreciates herself as an influence upon a man. I sometimes feel that I should be almost willing to be a woman myself, just to have some man think about me the way I think about Mary.” The Judge meant what he said so much that he spat out of the car window by way of emphasis. Then he began to remember the days when there was a fence around Kansas City, and you stood up on the fence and selected the hogs that you wanted. “’T was n’t much except a stock yard then,” mused the Judge. “It’s different now, but is it any better ? Railroad tracks and trolley tracks get us to it quicker now, but the country roads that used to lead into it were mighty sweet in the summer time. The whole place is a glare of electricity now, but I don’t believe people see any prettier things than they used to see by candle-light.”

Ralston always tried to be patient with this sort of talk, recognizing in it the swan song of one of the pioneer state-makers, who had spent himself formulating ideals for his own generation, and now found it desperately hard to accommodate himself to the ideals that a new generation was formulating. But to-day it was not easy to be patient. To-day Ralston was so nervous that he was irritable. He could quiet his excitement only by not heeding the Judge, and considering instead what the Judge’s acquaintance had meant to him. That acquaintance dated from a trip that had called both men to Kansas in the interests of the house, some six months before, Ralston as the house’s star traveling man, the Judge as the house’s legal adviser. All during the Kansas sojourn Ralston had exercised a protectorate over the Judge, softening the asperities of the shyster lawyers with whom they had to deal, translating the irreverent ways of the “drummers” into terms of deference, and spiritualizing the frank liveliness of the girls who came out to meet the trains at the depots of the little towns along their route. For that espionage that a younger man may extend to an older man out of careless good nature Ralston had reaped a fine reward. The reward had been the Judge’s Mary. On the very first day that the Judge had spoken of her the young man had lifted his head alertly, his fancy aroused and pleased. He had thought that he knew all the lands of women that there are to know, but here was a different woman, new in her oldness. He got the Judge to talk of her often, humoring and petting him for that purpose. And the Judge, Old-World and sweet, knowing adequately what he admired in womanhood, gradually brought into Ralston’s life, with broad and sure strokes, a woman who, by her ancestral completeness, made the other women whom Ralston had known seem inchoate. For Ralston she came at the exact psychological moment, just as he was becoming exasperated by his own incompleteness and willing to have the vague tantalizations of romance take on concrete form. To be sure, the form that Mary took seemed astrally sheer and fugitive, but Ralston liked that impression. He had a misty recollection of his young mother, dead ever so many years ago, that affected him as Judge Banks’s Mary affected him. Finally he passed completely under the spell of Mary’s idyllic charm, heightened as it was in a subtle blend of mother memories.

“Why, I’ll be dogged if I don’t think of myself as Mary’s lover,” he told himself now, while inclining his head courteously to the Judge’s artless talk of yesterday. Then he smiled at the conceit, remembering how little the girl in the flesh had to do with his self-appraisement. For Ralston had never seen Mary in the flesh. The essential girl to him so far had been the astral girl who came at her father’s call and decoyed both men into the lavender-haunted place far away. Her satisfactoriness several times surprised him into a glow of pride that he was fine enough to get his satisfaction out of high places in the presence of the ideal. And in one of these very glows, only the day before, he had suddenly yielded like water to the Judge’s oft-repeated invitation, and was even now on his way to Arcana to meet the real.

“Judge,” he asked suddenly, “do you really think that your daughter looks like you?” This was his surest way of making the Judge produce the photograph of Mary which he carried in a little morocco case in a breast pocket. In another moment the two men were bending over the photograph in close scrutiny, as they had bent over it many times before during the last six months. Happily, it showed to the inquiring eye no trait that the Judge’s Mary should not have had. The pictured face was girlishly sweet, lovely in contour, and lighted by eyes that seemed to see far.

“What do you think, Rawly, does she or does n’t she ? ” The Judge dearly liked to have any one corroborate his strong conviction that his daughter got her beauty from him. However, before Ralston could gratify him, the train began to slow down and the Judge hastily put the photograph away. “Rawly,” he said, “just you come along with me, and I’ll show you something a good deal better than a picture. I’ll show you the real girl.”

And Ralston, with an abrupt,odd sense of impending loss, answered like an idiot, “I’ve a good mind to give up and keep what I have.”

“How’s that ? How’s that ? But here, don’t waste any time. This is Arcana. Come a-running.”

Ralston came, but not running. On the car steps he turned back, but the Judge seized his arm and pulled him from the steps, laughing at him, but not in the least comprehending him. The train moved off, and Ralston gazed after it sorrowfully. Then the Judge engaged his attention again. He was arranging with the man who drove the ’bus to take Ralston’s baggage to town, and, having accomplished that, he drew Ralston away with him.

“We’ll walk down, if you don’t mind. I want to show you the town. Made after my own recipe. I like to see a town come up just so.” He had piloted Ralston into a long, wide, dusty street, and he gazed about with paternalistic pride. “ Do you realize that this state is getting old?” he asked next. “I have helped start several towns in this commonwealth upon paths of prosperity; this is the youngest of my family, and I set out her trees twenty years ago.”

It occurred to Ralston that the trees had been a wise precautionary measure for Arcana. They relieved her by hiding some of her. She was in the stage of architectural development that inevitably finds expression in straight up-and-down houses painted lavender, with red or green trimmings. However, the town itself caught but little of Ralston’s attention. He could think of nothing now but of his coming meeting with the real Mary.

At the foot of a street that showed a slight grade Judge Banks pointed toward a house at the top of the incline. “That’s mine,” he said. Ralston’s heart quickened with satisfaction as he looked at the house. It was white, for one thing, and it had green shutters, and there were vines about the porch, and it seemed as if the life which the house sheltered must be less experimental, maturer, and finer than that in the lavender cottages. Ralston, lighthearted and hopeful, quickened his pace.

“I suppose Miss Mary selected the plans for your house, Judge?” he remarked, whth very little question in his tone.

“Oh, no, she did n’t. That’s the old Larney farmhouse. Arcana is built on the old Larney farm. Phil Larney, my mother’s father, came out here from Virginia in the forties and brought with him Virginia notions of house-building. To-day my house is not only the oldest house in Arcana, it’s the newest. The old style has come back, you see. Mary says the house would be all right if it were only lavender-colored, — why don’t you come on? — As for myself, I don’t mind its being white.”

Meantime in the parlor of the house at the head of the street a girl, sitting at a piano,played some chords in a jerky fashion, and then leaned her head forward on the music rest and said, “Oh, how I wish father would n’t! ”

“Wouldn’t what, Mary, honey?” That was Miss Sue Banks. From the chair, where she sat rocking, she turned a gay face toward her niece.

“Would n’t bring those two people here together,” answered the girl, and, as if the words increased her nervousness, she arose and walked up and down the room, with her hands locked behind her.

“ What two people ? — Saints and masters, my chicken is not going to be enough — What two? Mr. Ralston, and who else ?”

“And father’s Mary.” The girl bit her lip, and her aunt laughed out loud.

“Oh, Mr. Ralston’s a man; he will like her, don’t you fret,” said Miss Sue, and went out of the room with her shoulders shaking.

“Yes, that’s just it,” said Mary Banks, as though she still had an audience, “he’ll like her,” and then stopped abruptly, and stood in the middle of the floor, fluttering like a bird, as she heard the men coming in through the front doorway.

She was still standing there when the Judge entered the room. “Here! Here! Where’s my girl ? I am mighty glad to see you, pet.” Was there a restraint in the Judge’s tone, or did Ralston, at a polite distance behind, only imagine it ? He was ushered forward at once, and as he came, he could not tell whether he was disappointed or not. He had seen the girl, pretty as a vision, take her father’s caress smilingly, and he saw her now, still smiling, with her arm slipped filially through her father’s, yet he got no more sense of her actuality than if she had been miles away. He heard her tell him, in the right sort of voice for the Judge’s Mary, that she was glad to meet him because she had heard so much about him from her father, — and from some other friends. And he heard himself tell her that he had heard a good deal of her, too, from her father. And to that he heard her reply, “Yes, I don’t doubt that you have.” And it was just then, for the first time, that he got any sense of her actuality. For one fleeting moment somebody, with some definiteness, seemed to stand before him. Unfortunately she was gone before he had any chance to apprehend her significance. Mary Banks, smiling again, turned her face up to her father and asked him if he were well, and if he had had a pleasant trip. Was there a shadowy stress on the upturned face, or did Ralston only imagine it? Before he could answer his own question, Miss Sue Banks came in and took his hand in hers, and made him feel so much at ease with her and so much at home in the parlor that he forgot to worry himself with questions.

From the moment of Miss Sue’s appearance, Mary seemed to slip into the background. The older woman’s touch was surer, in some indefinable way. It was she who rallied the Judge gayly on having made his guest walk from the station, “ just to show off the Banks model for a railroad town.” It was she who suggested that they all sit down, and it was she who suggested that they all get up, and that the Judge take Ralston upstairs if perchance he wanted to “freshen” for breakfast, which was going to be ready in a minute. As Ralston climbed the stairs behind the Judge, he found himself flinging back something mirthful at Miss Sue, and it was upon her that his eyes rested with vivid pleasure. Mary had moved over to the window out of his range of vision.

The two men had reached the top of the stairs when Mary came to the parlor door and called to her father: “ Don’t expect to find your old slippers in the case this time, father. I just had to throw them aside. But the new ones are almost exactly the same, — only a little difference in the flowers.” Her voice had in it a curious pleading quality that warred with humorous appreciation, according to the way that Ralston heard it. He was so sure of the humor that he laughed. But the Judge did n’t laugh.

“Oh, Mary,” he said, as fretfully as a good-tempered man can say anything, “the old ones would have held out,— I was so used to them.”

Still fretting, he led Ralston into the guest room. From the guest room he passed into his own room, and through the open door Ralston could see him holding up the new carpet slippers, his face twitching in contemptuous disapproval. Presently he put the slippers down and began to tumble things about in his shoebox. Then he got down on his hands and knees, and looked under the bed, puffing irascibly. Then he took a chair and climbed upon it, and felt painstakingly along the top shelf of his closet. After quite a while he came back to Ralston, his equanimity wholly restored.

Almost immediately he began to talk of his daughter in his accustomed way. That suggestion of restraint that had mystified Ralston down in the parlor was not in evidence at all. By and by, he took out the morocco case and looked at the photograph. Ralston, from force of habit, ranged up beside him. Bending over the photograph, both men seemed to find themselves. The Judge emitted a jealous “Ah!” and brushed a speck from the face. Then he put the photograph on the bureau, and stood back a pace or two in admiring regard, his head on one side, his chin in the air. Ralston also took up a position in front of the photograph, and gave a murmur of satisfaction as he again faced that exquisite womanly sweetness on the flat. Both men forgot all about the girl downstairs. When finally they left the guest room, both showed the highheadedness of men who have had an inspirational séance with their ideals. From the stairs they got a glimpse of Mary, standing with her arms over the back of a chair in the parlor, waiting for them. The Judge remembered that he wanted to take a look at his buff cochons, — “raising ’em on a plan of my own, Rawly, my boy,” and, starting Ralston toward the parlor, went out through the rear doorway of the hall.

Ralston stopped at the open front door to gain time. The absurd fact that both he and the Judge were able to get more out of Mary’s photograph than out of Mary herself was not lost upon him. While he was admitting it, with a furtive smile, two ladies in two yards across the street came out to their partition fence and swapped a dressed rabbit for a beefsteak. The neighborly commerce in breakfasts pleased Ralston so much that his smile became a laugh. He thought that he heard the laugh echoed, but, turning quickly, he found Mary standing beside him with grave eyes.

“Town has some pleasant ways, has n’t it ?” He looked down upon her, suspecting that his persiflage would bring a smile to her lips. But it did not. Traveling-man fashion, Ralston had once told Judge’Banks’the story of the heavy drinker who would n’t go skiff-riding on the Missouri River until assured that there was a bar every half mile; and the Judge had asked amiably, “Well, and did the boat ground first thing, and was the man drowned ? ” So Ralston sighed now, with an educated comprehension of Mary’s mental attitude, and changed the subject.

“I’m so glad to meet you,” he said. “I have been wanting to meet you, the real girl, for a long while.”

“ Have you, — the real girl ? ” Again he got a sense of a potential personality. Her tone was lively.

“Yes. I have known you perhaps better than you think, — from your father’s portrayal of you, and from the little photograph of you, and from my own fancies of you.”

“Your own fancies ? What were they ?”

“ What are always a man’s fancies of a woman ? ”

“Mistakes, are n’t they ?” He had not paused for any reply, and her interruption did not make much impression upon him. He was lifting the delicate mindstuff that he had been spinning for months, and was draping it about Mary with engrossing satisfaction.

“I confess that my fancies of you were so pleasant that I hesitated to meet you for fear that I might lose them. I am not going to, am I ? ” He had gone farther than he had intended to at first, but it seemed inevitable. He had so often talked to her in his imagination, just as he was talking now, really imploring her not to let him lose her. As he spoke, her appearance calmed him. She looked her very picture, and when she answered him he did not miss the previous vivacity of her tone because of his pleasure in its gentle shyness.

“Why, if the fancies pleased you, I’ll let you keep them, — if I can.”

Miss Sue called them to breakfast just then, and Ralston followed Mary into the dining-room with his chest lifting. That shyness of hers, peeping out opportunely, had been reassuring to him. He talked to her at the breakfast table very easily. And Mary said, “How comical!” to the jokes that he could not help telling, and did her part by the conversation with little feminine flourishes of like sort, that were sufficient as long as the joke-supply lasted. A little later, when she was making shift to talk on her own account, Ralston noticed that she stole occasional looks at her father, and occasionally seemed to hesitate and give the Judge a chance to shape her remarks for her, as if that were the habit between them.

“ Oh, Mary,” said the Judge, as breakfast drew to a close, “I was looking at the old slippers. They’ll do very well for a while yet. Don’t throw them away, honey; I like them. They suit me. I am so used to them.”

“All right, father.”

After breakfast the Judge went off to town alone, Ralston electing, as a matter of course, to stay at the house with Mary. His desire to push on in pursuit of the real was becoming keen.

But when the Judge came back at noon Ralston responded without delay to an invitation to come upstairs, and when he got upstairs he stretched. Mary, who upon closer acquaintance had developed the glibness of a mouthpiece, had made a nice effort to entertain him, however. “You want to remember that,” he reminded himself, and sternly insisted upon a feeling of gratitude to the girl.

The midday dinner was a rather spiritless affair, and, dinner over, Ralston accepted the Judge’s invitation to go to town with him. On the way, Ralston, his eyes idly fixed upon Arcana’s unfolding glories, skillfully guided the conversation toward Mary.

“I think,”said the Judge,in the course of one of his panegyrics, “that she is what she is to-day because I took so much pains with her as she grew up. I was careful to keep the ideal woman always before her. I believe that I know the ideal as well as any man, Rawly, my boy.” The Judge put his hand to his breast pocket where the photograph again lay, and gave the picture a fond pressure. “You would n’t think, to see Mary now, that she promised to be a little difficult to manage when she was a child. However, she quieted down very prettily as soon as she was old enough to understand what I wanted.”

“Difficult to manage ?” And after the Judge reassured the young man that such had been the case, the latter turned the thought in his mind with increasing interest. Finally he said that he did n’t believe that he wanted to go “down town” after all, and, excusing himself to the Judge, retraced his steps. He felt drawn back to the Banks house. He saw that he would have to come to an understanding of Mary before he could expect peace of mind. The thought that she might have an esoteric temper troubled him. He walked toward the Banks house with his head down, lost in analysis, and he had reached the gate when he noticed that a light phaeton stood before it. Mary was coming through the front doorway. He waited for her at the gate with a purpose that he characterized to himself as little short of fell. “Young woman,” so his thoughts ran, “this is where you — whoever you are — and I meet.”

“You are just in time to go driving with me,” she said, by way of welcome. As he helped her into the phaeton he noticed that her eyes were shining brilliantly. He had not observed before that her eyes could be brilliant. She lowered her lashes quickly, however, and her face assumed at once the expression identified with Ralston’s acquaintance with her. She made a very pleasing appearance, in a white duck suit and hat, and they were hardly established in the phaeton before he made it his business to tell her so. She answered him, in her subdued way, —

“Do you like me in this suit? Father does, too. I wear it a good deal when he is about, so that I can be his Mary.” The words were childishly filial, but the tone was as disconcerting as the brilliancy of her eyes. Ralston simply did n’t know what either meant. He set himself to find out.

“You like to please your father, don’t you ?”

“Yes. You see, I am sorry for him.” Ralston observed her more closely. Again he seemed face to face with a personality. But his attention disconcerted her, and she flushed bewilderingly and looked out upon sunlit Arcana. “Have you been on the road long?” she asked.

“ Why, about six months, — ever since I met your father out in Kansas last fall,” he answered, with purposeful misunderstanding, “but I’ve just made a turn and lost myself.”

“I am talking about your business.”

“Are you sure that I am not?”

She took a deep breath and said, “This is the prettiest street in Arcana.” And for five minutes she discoursed about Arcana in surprisingly fluent platitudes. As they passed the high school, memories of his college days stirred within Ralston. It was memory, too, that made her say softly, “You are an S. U. man, are n’t you ? ”

“Yes, I am, but how did you know ?”

“An honor man of ’93” —

“Where did you learn it?”

“On the campus.”

“Oh! So you arc an S. U. girl ?”

“Yes, but my diploma is only a year old. Still, even when I got there, your fame still echoed on the gridiron, and in the halls of learning. Dr. Carneen everlastingly bragged about you. And Mrs. Henner had your picture.” She did not see fit to tell him what part the photograph— which exploited a big fellow boyishly pleased with his football clothes and hair — had played upon her silly schoolgirl heart, but even what she did tell him made Ralston redden with pleasure.

“I believe I was sorrier to disappoint Carny,” he said, “than to disappoint myself, when I had to give up law, and go in for rubber. But the law did n’t seem to need me, and my uncle did.”

“Such a change ought to have made you elastic.”

He laughed. “I think it has.”

“I hope it has.”

“Why?”

She did not answer, and thereupon Ralston roused to the fact that the girl to whom he had been talking for the last five minutes was not Judge Banks’s Mary. But even as he realized it, she came back.

“Where have you been?” he asked wonderingly. And as she stayed silent and began to breathe quickly, he persisted the more. “Don’t you think you might tell me your riddle? Don’t you think you ought to ? Is it fair to be a riddle to a man who has told you frankly that he wants to know you?”

“Ah, but that’s just what you did n’t tell me. What you asked of me was that I should be still and let you hang your fancies on me. Don’t you suppose that I could see that that was what you really wanted ? Why, that’s what I have been doing for father all these years. But now that I have had a little while to think about it, I have decided that my obligation to you is a different thing, and the sphinx is going to speak.” She spoke with the terrific earnestness of youth, and Ralston saw all at once that she was honest and that a sense of justice to him and to herself was back of her speech. He saw, too, that she was very young and wholly potential, and that it would be pleasant to help her realize her potentialities. She looked up at him, half smiling, half sighing. From the animation of her face it was evident that she was finding compensation in the duty that drove her up a path starred with romantic possibilities as sweet as wild flowers. Then she resumed her argument with naïve seriousness. “You see, what I have tried to do for father is this, — I have tried to recognize that it would be pretty hard on a man as old as he to ask him to readjust his ideals. He has lived a long and useful life with them, warmed and comforted by them. And he is not adaptable. And so I have just tried to let him see in me what he wanted to see in me. It seemed only fair after he had given me my education, even though the education itself set me away from his ideal toward a new ideal.” She glanced up at Ralston again, and by so doing made him lose the thread of her thought. When he got hold of it, she was saying, “Father’s ideal of a woman has the strength of ages. Why, I can remember when I first took it in. just as I realized that I was a woman. Everything was confused and roseate, and I had no great desire for individuality, so I was pleased,and took all sorts of poses up on the pedestal where father had put me. But that didn’t last. By and by, I learned to slip down from the pedestal and leave father’s Mary alone in her glory. By and by, too, I learned to look upon that pedestal girl as a robber. Often I go up to her and shake my fist at her. She has my father’s affection, don’t you see. Still, I try not to smash her, for father’s sake. I don’t pretend to know as yet what I should be in her place. I just know that she keeps me from having any place. I don’t make a nice woman of yesterday. You have already seen it. Father himself has a subconsciousness of it that makes him ill at ease with me.” Suddenly she began to laugh, a gay, sparkling laugh, like Miss Sue’s. “Then, you see, in our family it’s the women who have the sense of humor, perhaps because the men have had to work so hard that they have worked all the humor out of their systems. At any rate, father has n’t a bit. For instance, he admires Arcana, because he made it, and when I tell him that our house ought to be lavender in the interests of harmony, he tells me seriously that he likes a white house pretty well.” That justification of her taste and that revelation of her sense of humor came in just right for Ralston, He smiled down at her, with world-old satisfaction in her.

“Do you know what I am going to do?” he said gravely, though his eves danced. “I am going to smash your father’s Mary.”

“Oh, if you only would!” she cried, with girlish gayetv.

“ Well, I’m going to. I need the pedestal for another Mary;” — and then, seeing that she had become a little frightened, and for fear that he might say more than he ought to say all at once, he began to talk hopefully of the loneliness of traveling men’s lives. Talking in that wise, they drove back home.

Judge Banks was waiting for them at the gate, and when Ralston had helped Mary from the phaeton, she ran to her father and kissed him with a pretty impulsiveness, and then hurried into the house as if afraid of herself. The Judge looked after her uneasily, but he turned to Ralston with a loyal assumption of satisfaction in her. “Isn’t my Mary fine, Rawly?” he asked sturdily.

“She is that, Judge,” answered Ralston;— then he added, too low for the Judge to be grieved by it, — “but not so fine as my Mary ’s going to be.”