Chapter 2

Of course, the son John, if he had had the energy, might have followed old Adams's example and worked the Field for a time, until the gas and sewer mains had corrupted the soil and spoiled it for market gardening. But he preferred to rely upon his record as an old soldier and secured a small clerkship in the Alton Gas Company, and some years later obtained a pension. Of course, all this trouble with the Field supplied both him and his father with ample cause for grumbling. Samuel had never liked his brother Edward, who seemed almost spitefully to be turning this trick against him in his old age, and he handed on his grievance to John and his wife. The small, wooden house in Church Street contained a narrow, ungracious family life, it can be seen, of petty economies and few interests. No wonder that the Field--the one important family possession remaining--became the favorite topic of discussion and speculation. The city was growing fast, and Alton was already its most considerable suburb. The lines of modern life had crept up to within call of the old Field before the death of Samuel. So the old fellow was not indulging in much exaggeration when he bragged towards the end that he wouldn't take twenty-five thousand dollars for his property, although ten years earlier he had been eager to sell for five thousand dollars!

That twenty-five thousand dollars, however, was as far away as the five thousand, and the life in the Church Street house was more penurious and uncomfortable than it had ever been on the old farm, which had provided a coarse plenty for many generations. The Clarks were obviously running out, and when the old man died in 1882 he must have had the bitter consciousness that the family destiny had dwindled in his hands. From being prosperous and respected farmers, living on their own land in their ancestral square wooden house with its one enormous chimney, they were living in real poverty in a small house on a dusty side street off the noisy Square, which was not what it had once been as a place of residence. And they did not even own this Church Street house--merely clung to it from inertia and bad habit. The only thing they did own was Clark's Field, and Mrs. John sometimes thought it would be better if that had gone the way of the rest of the Clark farm, so insidious was its moral influence upon the men as well as costly in the way of outgo....

If a man's accomplishment in this life is to be reckoned by the substantial gains he has made on his father's estate and condition, old Samuel Clark had nothing to be proud of when he was borne to his grave in the new cemetery a mile south of Clark's Field. He had left nothing to his children but the Field, encumbered with the undivided and indivisible half interest belonging to his brother Edward Stanley, were he alive at this date, and to his heirs if he had any.

II

The possession of property of any kind gives a curious consciousness of dignity to the human being who is its owner, due very likely to the traditional estimate of the importance of all possessions, and to the mystical but generally erroneous belief that property is in some way an outward and visible proof of the worth or the ability of its possessor--or his forbears. Even the possession of a possibility such as Clark's Field--which was of no positive value to the Clarks, and indeed an increasing source of expense and anxiety to the impoverished family, as taxes rose in company with the rise of all values--conferred upon the Clarks some small consideration in Alton and made them feel the dignity and the tragedy of property ownership. John, who was nothing but a seedy, middle-aged clerk, none too careful of his appearance and uneasily aware of his failure, had ample excuse to himself for his shortcomings and willingness to live on a kind Government, because he had been hardly used by fate in the matter of his inheritance. As the property that might have been his was just beyond his reach, he had a small swagger of superiority in the gas office, and the tradition was well established there that he belonged to a family "land poor,"--the most genteel form of poverty if any form of poverty can be genteel. Even old farmer Samuel had tottered about the Square on his malacca stick and exchanged the time of day with the small merchants there, with a sense of his own importance as the owner of "a valuable piece of property" temporarily under legal disability.

As for the women of the family this sense of unrealized importance grew tenfold in their consciousness, because they had few opportunities of encountering reality in their narrow lives and because as women they were apt to dream of wealth, even of visionary wealth. It cannot be said that Clark's Field had much to do with John's marriage which had taken place in 'sixty-seven, because at that early date it was not considered a large expectation even by the Clarks. But John had a younger sister, Ada or "Addie" Clark as she was always known, and over Addie's destiny Clark's Field had a large and sinister influence as I shall presently show. At the time when her father finally abandoned his farm in favor of town life, Addie was a mere child, so young that she could forget the wholesome pictures of domestic farm industry that she must have shared. Or, if there lingered in the background of her memory a consciousness of her mother's butter-making, feeding the pigs, cooking for the occasional farm hands, washing and mending, and all the other common tasks of this laborious condition, she conveniently ignored it as women easily contrive to do. Her life was centered in the Church Street house where the Clarks had at first indulged in certain pretensions. Addie had gone to the Alton schools and there associated with the better class of children,--a doctor's daughter and a retired bank clerk's family being the more intimate of these. As a young girl she had a transparent complexion and a thin sort of American prettiness that unfortunately quickly faded, under the influences of the Church Street house, into a sallow commonplaceness. But Addie unlike the men of the family never wholly abandoned her aspirations and ambitions. She was very careful about the young men whom she "encouraged," and the families into whose houses she would enter. Thus she sacrificed her slim chances of matrimony on the altar of a visionary family pride. One of her high-school mates, the son of the prosperous liveryman in Alton, might have married her had he been more warmly met, and taken her with him to Detroit, where in time he became the well-to-do head of a large automobile manufactory. This was not the single instance of her family pride.

It is a fascinating subject to speculate what would have happened to Ada if she had had the moral vigor to shake herself loose from the hampering family traditions of riches to be, and struck out for an independent, wholesome life as women have been known to do under similar circumstances. But Alton, like most old towns, had strong class traditions that exercised an iron influence upon feminine destinies. It was, of course, hopeless for Ada, the daughter of a retired farmer who could not sell his farm, to come into close social contact with the local aristocracy, which consisted at this time of the Stearns and Frost relationship together with a few well-to-do merchants from B---- who had always lived in Alton and owned those large semi-suburban estates in its environs. But at least she could jealously guard herself from falling into the mire of the commoner sort of small shopkeepers who were pressing into the Square. The end was that Addie fast became what was then called, without any circumlocution, an "old maid," and an uninteresting one, whose days were occupied by church and gossip, and who went over and over the threadbare family tradition. Old Mrs. Clark, her mother, was a realist and never forgot the farm days. She was enough of a woman to regret sincerely the fatal mistake that the family had made in trying to become something other than their destiny had fitted them to be. She was a thorn in the sentimental flesh of Addie, whose thoughts preferred to play with the dignities and ease that would be hers when the Field had been sold. Addie dressed herself as finely as she could on Sundays and in the afternoons would walk down the South Road past the abandoned Field and remark to a friend upon the family property and the misfortune that kept them all down in the depths of poverty. As the years went on and the price of real estate advanced, her tale sounded less ridiculous than it might. But it was a bloodless sort of consolation even for Addie, and all her friends knew the story by heart and listened to it merely with kind indulgence. "A bird in the hand," etc., is a proverb peculiarly to the liking of Yankees. They do not take much interest in Peruvian mines or other forms of non-negotiable wealth unless they see a chance to work them off on a more credulous public. As for old Mrs. Clark, when she became tied to her chair, she was bitter on the topic. "That dratted old Field!" she would say with the brutal directness of the realist; "your father would have sold the whole of it for five thousand dollars and been thankful!"--a fact that seemed to her children of no importance.

When the old woman was laid away in Woodlawn beside her husband, Addie could give free rein to her fancies, untroubled by the darts of the realist. But the family fortunes soon became most desperate. Fortunately John had no children, his one small son having died as a baby. His wife, who had perhaps become tired of the family fortune as it never quite realized itself, tried to prod her shiftless husband into a greater activity. But except for the getting of the pension, which was put through in 1885, John added little to the family purse, and before his mother's death lost his position in the gas office, a new administration of the company holding that a municipal utility was not an asylum for old soldiers. The trouble was, as Mrs. John knew, and as Ada always refused to recognize, John drank. At first it was a convivial weakness indulged in only at the reunions of old veterans,--John was a most ardent "Vet,"--but it became a habit that took away his little usefulness for anything. So now the family for steady income was reduced to the pension, which was only twenty-two dollars a month. Clearly something had to be done. Mrs. John took in lodgers in the Church Street house, a clerk or two from the neighboring shops. And Addie finally brought herself to learn the manipulation of the typewriter, which was fast becoming a woman's profession, and found a position in a large store in the city.

It would seem that the Clark fortunes had reached their lowest ebb: family extinction was all that now remained for them. The Church Street house rested solely, save for the small pension, on the exertions of two ineffective women. It could just get on as it was, and if the family life had never been a bright and cheerful one, it was now drearier than ever. Then Addie married. She was nearly if not quite forty years old, and neither her brother nor sister-in-law expected such an event. She was sallow, thin, and rather querulous in temperament. Very likely Addie felt that marriage could not make her lot worse, and as middle-age threatened, she accepted the defeat of her ambitions and in the spirit of better-late-than-never struck out for herself in the race for personal happiness, throwing over the burden of Clark's Field.

At any rate, she was married to William Scarp, a fellow-clerk in Minot Brothers--wholesale wool. Addie represented that Mr. Scarp was of excellent Southern blood from somewhere in North Carolina. It is needless to enter into that nebulous question. He was earning thirty dollars a week with Minot Brothers when they became engaged and was a few years younger than his bride. The firm gave him a five-dollar increase of salary on his marriage, old Savage remarking facetiously that he believed in rewarding courage. The couple went to live in the city, and for a year or two they moved nomadically from one boarding-house or cheap hotel to another. It may be presumed that Addie, without any clear idea of deceiving, had misled William Scarp in the matter of Clark's Field--her fixed delusion. The Field made this marriage, and it was not a happy one. The John Clarks, who still hung on in the Church Street house with an additional roomer, soon began to suspect that Addie was not wholly happy in her married life. William had a quick temper and was very plain-spoken about the "job" that Addie had "put over him" in the matter of the Clark property, though in fact she had exercised no more mendacity than women of forty in her position are wont to do. At one time shortly after the marriage Scarp had an "understanding" with John Clark about the family estate. When he learned that the Field could not be sold in the present state of its title and that such leases as had been made of it to meet taxes and other obligations tied it up until the opening of the next century, he expressed himself abusively. Later he suggested that a "syndicate" should be formed to employ lawyers to straighten out the title and dispose of the property piecemeal as the leases fell in. It seemed a brilliant plan, quite modern in its sound, but alas! William, no more than John, could finance the "syndicate." So the suggestion lapsed, and the Scarps worried along on William's salary for a time, and then moved to Philadelphia. What Addie's experiences were there, or in Cincinnati and Indianapolis, to which cities they also wandered, I have no means of knowing, nor did the John Clarks hear from her, except for a rare penciled postcard. The Clarks, as may be observed, were no great letter-writers.

All is that one day in November of 1889, Addie arrived at the Church Street house with a forlorn parcel of a little girl and a bedraggled bag that contained her entire worldly possessions. She was ill and old. She would say little about her husband, but later it came out in the newspapers that William Scarp had been convicted of forgery and sent to prison in Indiana (where he died soon after of consumption contracted in prison). Addie had come back to the only human refuge she knew. She was too ill and too beaten by life to work. She sat around in the Church Street house dumbly for nearly a year, then died, leaving the forlorn, pale little girl to her brother and sister-in-law as a legacy. This child she had named Adelle, thus proving the persistence of her fancy even in her forlornest hours. Ada or Addie was too common for the last of the Clarks. She should at least have something poetic for name. For who could say? She might some day become an heiress and shine in that social firmament so much desired by her mother. In that event she should not be handicapped by a vulgar name. As Addie had resumed her maiden name after Scarp had been sent to prison, the little girl was destined to grow up as Adelle Clark,--the last member of the Alton branch of the Clarks, ultimate heiress to Clark's Field, should there be anything of it left to inherit when the law let go.

The silent little girl, who played about the lodgers' rooms in the dingy Church Street house, was of course unaware of the weight of expectation hanging to her. She was almost abnormally silent, perhaps because of her depressing prenatal experiences as well as the forlorn environment of the rooming-house,--perhaps because of physical and spiritual anæmia. "She's a puny mite of a child," Mrs. John Clark said complainingly, unpromising like everything Clark; nevertheless, the last of the sturdy yeoman stock of Clarks.

III

That "weight of expectation" hanging to the little girl was not quite as fantastic as might seem. It must be remembered that old Samuel before his death, in pressing need of ready money to finance some foolish venture of his son, had leased a good part of Clark's Field to some speculative builders, who had covered that portion of the old pasture that bordered the South Road with a leprous growth of cheap stores, which brought in a fair return. The leases ran up to the new century. Just why this precise term for the gambling venture had been chosen probably only the lawyers who made the arrangement could say. Possibly old Samuel had superstitious reasons for not pledging the family expectation beyond the present century. He may have thought that the turn of the century would bring about some profound change in the customs and habits of society that the family could take advantage of. At any rate, so it was. And it was not many years now to the close of the century when Clark's Field would be released to its original owners with all its shabby encumbrances.

The field had gained enormously in value and importance in men's eyes these last years. The city of B---- had eaten far into the country, creating prosperous appendages in the way of modern suburbs for twenty miles and more from Alton, and there was much talk of its annexing the old town to itself, which it accomplished not long after. Those were the days of the "greater" everything, the worship of size. Alton in fact was now a city itself of no mean size, and the shallow stream of water that nominally divided it from B---- was a mere boundary line. As men had multiplied upon this spot of earth, needing land for dwelling and business, envious eyes had been cast upon the Field, the last large "undeveloped" tract anywhere near the great city. Men who were skillful in such real estate "deals," greedy and ingenious in the various ways of turning civic growth to private profit, were figuring upon the possibility of getting hold of Clark's Field, when the short leases expired, and after making the necessary "improvements" cutting it up for sale. They saw fat profits in the transaction. Men needed it for their lives; the community needed it for its growing corporate life. And yet it was "tied up" with a legal disability--left largely useless and waste. It looked as if when the legal spell was finally broken, as it must be, and the land so long unprofitable and idle should be apportioned to these human needs, it would be neither the Clarks nor the community that would derive benefit from it,--certainly not the people who would live upon it,--but some gang of skillful speculators, who knew the precise moment to take advantage of the mechanism of the law and the more uncertain mechanism of human nature so as to obtain for a small amount what they could sell to others for much. The crisis in the history of Clark's Field seemed approaching.

It was time. The fence of high white palings that Samuel had jealously maintained about his old field had long since completely disappeared. Latterly the neighbors crisscrossed the vacant portions of the Field with short cuts and contractors either dumped refuse upon it or burrowed into it for gravel. The sod had long since been stripped from every foot of its surface. In a word, it was treated as no man's land, so low had the Clark family sunk in the world. And it was covered with a cloud of invisible disabilities, further than the original difficulty created by Edward S. in not leaving an address behind him. There were liens against it by the city for improvements in the way of gas and sewer and water pipes, and for taxes, as well as first, second, and third mortgages of a dubious character that John in extremity had been forced to put upon the Field in order to "carry" his expectation. Under this burden of invisible lien as well as outward degradation Clark's Field had struggled until 1898, and the ultimate doom was not far off. John thought so and struggled less to preserve his inheritance. What he owned of the Field was a diminishing fraction, long since negligible, were it not for the marvelous increase in all real-estate values, due to the growth of population in these parts and the activity of the country. It was rumored about the Square that Clark's Field would shortly be sold for taxes, and a tax title, poor as that is, would probably be the best title that could ever be got for the Field. Capitalists and their lawyers were already figuring on that basis for the distribution of the property....

But before we concern ourselves in the plot of these greedy exploiters, it would be well to go back for a time to the dingy Church Street house and the pale little Adelle, who was now in her twelfth year. Her ancestors, certainly, had done little for her physical being. She was a plain, small child, with not enough active blood in her apparently to make a vivid life under any circumstances. She was meek and self-effacing,--two excellent virtues for certain spheres, but not for a poor child in America at the opening of the new century! Her earliest impressions of life must have been the dusty stairs and torn stair carpet of her aunt's house, defaced under the dirty feet of many transient "roomers," and next her aunt herself, a silent, morose woman over fifty, who accepted life as nearly in the stoic spirit as her education permitted. Mrs. John Clark had none of Addie's cheap pretentions, fortunately: she was obviously the poor woman with a worthless husband, who kept cheap lodgings for a livelihood. She was kind enough to the little girl as such people have the time and the energy to be kind. She could not give her much thought, and as soon as Adelle was old enough to handle a broom or make beds she had to help in the endless housework. At eight she was sent to school, however, to the public school close by in the rear of the livery-stable, where she learned what American children are supposed to learn in the grade schools. At twelve she was a small, undersized, poorly dressed, white-faced little girl, so little distinctive in any way that probably hundreds exactly like her could be picked from the public schools of any American city. If this story were a mere matter of fiction, we should be obliged to endow Adelle with some marks of exceptionality of person, or mind, or soul,--evident to the discerning reader even in her childhood. She would already possess the rudiments of an individuality under her Cinderella outside,--some poetic quality of day-dreaming or laughing or sketching. But this is a plain chronicle of very plain people as they actually found themselves in life, and it is not necessary to embellish the truth so that it may please any reader's sensibilities or ideals. Adelle Clark was a wholly ordinary, dumb little creature, neither passionate nor spiritual. She laughed less than children of her age because there was not much in her experience to laugh about. She talked less--much less--than other little girls, because the Church Street house was not a place to encourage conversation. She liked her aunt rather better than her uncle, who was an untidy, not to say smelly, person, who sat dozing in the kitchen much of the time, a few strands of long gray hair vainly trying to cover the baldness of a blotchy head. His principal occupation these latter years was being a "Vet." He was a faithful attendant at all "post nights," "camp-fires," and veteran "reunions," and when in funds visited neighboring posts where he had friends. On his return from these festivities he was smellier and stupider than ever,--that was all his small niece realized. He never did any work, so far as she was aware, but as his wife had accepted the fact and no longer discussed it in public, the little girl did not think much about his idleness. That might be the man-habit generally.