Part 4

Millersville, Missouri, was the usual small town. It boasted, according to the Millersville _Eagle_ and the annual leaflet of the Chamber of Commerce, a population of twenty thousand souls. There were, perhaps, ten thousand actual human beings in Millersville, including the farmers within a radius of five miles, the few Italians and Slavs down near the railroad tracks, and the negroes.

Millersville’s main street extended nearly the full length of the town, footed by the Sulpulpa River and the Union Depot, and headed by the Brick Church. On Hill Street were the Grand Hotel—five stories high; the Bon Marché and the New York Store, whose buyers went to New York—or anyhow Chicago—twice each year; the Busy Bee, candy fresh every day, always two kinds of ice cream, with marble topped tables in the back half of it for sodas and ice creams; an assortment of drug stores and cigar stores; garages, still carrying the outward semblance of the stables from which they had sprung; “gents’ furnishings,” with clerks who copied, in their fashion, the styles in the men’s clothing advertisements, always standing near the doors where they could most easily ogle the feminine passerby; groceries displaying the season’s best potatoes and onions, with sawdust floors and clerks in white aprons and pencils behind their ears; and two furniture stores with windows brimming with golden oak rockers.

On either side of Hill Street, the streets stretched out in a regular checkerboard, the first blocks of them devoted to the lesser business establishments that had overflowed Hill Street, and the remaining blocks given over to residences. The majority of these streets, a few blocks out, were full of neat houses—old houses with mansard roofs and cupolas; new houses in atrocious, too-low bungalow effects, with awful, protruding roofs; simple white cottages, each with its green lawn and over half with a red swing in front and a small, one-car garage in back. Then came a turning into tumbledown negro quarters or the homes of the neighbourhood “white trash.”

There was a difference in streets, too. Up near the Brick Church the streets were respectable for all their length, the houses were bigger, and the lawns were better cared for. Maple Street, the last to enter Hill, was the best of all, turning into Maple Road, later on, when it became even more select until, when it reached Burton Addition—the old Burton farm—it burst forth into a spasm of country homes, a dozen of them, with pretentiously landscaped “grounds.”

Each house showed an attempt at grandeur in architecture. Some aped Southern Colonial, with white clapboards or brick; others aimed at English styles, with stucco or half-timber. Each house, too, had a peculiar, inappropriate and ineffectual name: “The Elms,” “The Lonesome Pine,” “Pleasure,” “Crestwood,” “Hilltop.” Miss Drewsy, of the Millersville _Eagle_, whose rich cousins, the Horns, lived in Maple Street, which gave her social standing, mentioned the names of these houses in her society column, whenever possible.

On the other side of town, toward Union Station and the river, the streets became gradually less pleasing and less important, until, when one reached Gillen Row, the neat houses had given way to grey ramshackle affairs, a bit tipsy as to roof or wall or chimney, with a porch awry, a baluster missing and an occasional broken window patched with papers or rags. These houses were surrounded by grey lawns tufted with weeds, and around them were unpainted picket fences with half the pickets missing.

Mamie Carpenter lived in Gillen Row, in the least pleasing block of it. Her home was a one-story cottage which had, in its adolescence, showed the spruce yellow and white of a poached egg, but in its senility one could barely see the remains of this glory. The porch which ran across the front sagged. One of the posts was missing. The bottom of the three steps leading up to the porch was loose, the wood breaking into long brown slivers under one’s foot. One went directly from the unevenly floored porch, which held two once-green rockers and a bench of slatted wood, into the living room, papered in what had formerly been gold and green but was now a more fortunate, though dirty, tan.

The living room held a figured red rug, a table and half a dozen unmatched chairs, mostly rockers, of uncertain wood and construction. Back of this was the dining-room, with a table and four chairs and a huge, golden oak, mirrored sideboard. Next came a narrow hallway, leading on one side to a dark green kitchen, and on the other to the small and incomplete bath. Beyond were the two bedrooms, one occupied by Mr. and Mrs. Carpenter, who slept in a large bed of yellow wood, with high head and foot board, new when they were married, twenty-two years before, and the other, with its iron and brass bed and rickety dresser of imitation mahogany, occupied by their daughter Mamie.

II

Mamie Carpenter was twenty-one. She could have passed for eighteen; she knew it and, when meeting new acquaintances, she often did. She was small and had blonde hair, not white and faded-looking, but real blonde, which needed only an occasional touching up with peroxide to be a lovely, gleaming mass of gold. Her hair was not especially thick nor long, but it waved naturally and Mamie had acquired the knack of doing it high on her head so that it looked pleasantly mussed and fresh.

Her nose was short and well chiselled. Her eyes were round and blue and she pencilled them just a little, which gave the necessary accent. Her mouth was perhaps a bit too full, but her complexion was creamy and her cheeks pleasantly pink and plump. She had learned that if you can’t afford many things, it’s better to stick to plain things—if your figure is good enough. Mamie’s figure was trim and softly curved, with a roundness that hinted of fat at thirty.

Mamie clerked at the Busy Bee candy store. She had left school in her second year of High School when, after a series of small accidents at the yards, her father, a “railroad man,” found himself more frequently out of work than usual.

She had become tired of school, anyhow, but had kept on going until then, partly out of habit and partly because she felt superior to her parents and her neighbours and wanted the further superiority of a higher education. Her mother could do nothing but housework, and that but poorly, and would not consider the indignity of doing menial labour for others, so Mamie, not knowing where to turn at first, and being untrained, went into the overall factory, one of Millersville’s few industries. She found the work monotonous and disagreeable. A doctor’s reception room and a cashier’s cage next claimed her in turn. Both bored her.

Then she heard that the Busy Bee was enlarging the store and wanted pretty saleswomen. Mamie knew she was pretty. She applied for and got the job and had been there ever since. Mamie daily disproved the theories that, if you give a girl enough candy to eat she soon tires of it, that candy-shop girls do not care for sweets, and that sugar ruins the complexion. She nibbled at chocolates at intervals all day long, and, except that perhaps her cheeks were a bit pinker, her hair a trifle more blonde, she remained just the same.

To the mere buyer of candy, Mamie was one of the pretty, polite little girls in big white aprons who waited on you at the Busy Bee. To her acquaintances and the dwellers in Gillen Row she was old Joe Carpenter’s girl, a reproach in itself—rather a wild piece. To Millersville, socially, she was, of course, nothing at all. She did not exist to Millersville’s smartest circle except as a purveyor of sweets. She was below even the least important members of the church societies, who occasionally got into the end paragraphs in Miss Drewsy’s society column.

Mamie knew how Millersville felt about her, and her liking for Millersville was shaped accordingly. She especially disliked the “society girls,” the ones who lived in Maple Road, because they had good times and did the sort of things she would like to have done. They could flirt and not get talked about. The girls in the Busy Bee looked up to them, whispered about them when they came in.

The rest of Millersville Mamie didn’t mind, but she despised those girls with a keen, sharp, unbelievable hate. She was better looking than any of them. She knew that. Society? Good blood? Family? What did they mean, in Millersville?

Mamie scorned Millersville’s social pretensions. She knew that in some cities, London and New York, maybe, there was society, real people with generations of good blood back of them, and money and breeding. People like that Mamie could look up to. But she knew Millersville. In Millersville, what did society amount to? A joke; that’s what it was. No one really came to anything, did anything.

The Elwood Simpsons, the leaders of Millersville society—look at them! There was a little grave in Oakdale Cemetery that Mamie knew all about—and it was closely connected with the girlhood of Mrs. Elwood Simpson—and there were other babies who did not die but who arrived at equally inopportune times. The Coakleys were one of Millersville’s oldest and best families—and Frank Coakley’s half-brother spent most of his time in jail, and his other half-brother, Bill, was half-witted, went around with his tongue hanging out and saying silly things. The Binghams—ugh—they had to get their servants out of town, and sometimes at the last minute had to break engagements because some one in their third floor would cry and scream—their oldest daughter, some said it was.

Mamie knew other things about Millersville society. The rich Ruckers made their money getting land away from ignorant farmers. The Bilcamps made theirs selling fake oil stocks in Oklahoma. There was some sort of a misrun bank in the Grantly family. It wouldn’t do to look too closely into the histories of any of them. Yet they were “society” and had a Country Club—and lots of good times.

Mamie knew she was as good as any of them—better than most. Her family had moved to Millersville from Lexington when she was thirteen. Her father had got into some sort of a scrape over a woman—or a girl—she had never known much about it, but anyhow, it was enough to make them move. Of course the news of it had seeped to Millersville, made the Carpenters a bit more outcast than they would have been, though they wouldn’t have been anything, in any case, without money or connections.

Coming to Millersville hadn’t made any difference to Mamie. The new house was just as unpleasant as the old. She had had just as good a time playing with the boys of the neighbourhood, catching on wagons for rides, in Millersville as in Lexington. She had liked Millersville all right. She had gone to school rather unevenly, staying at home for frequent imaginary ills. But a sense of herself had kept her in school beyond the age of most of her friends.

It was in High School that she had first felt the social barriers of Millersville—and she had sneered at them even as they hurt her. The teachers had all been partial to the two stupid Redding girls, pale-haired, fat and awkward, because Samuel Redding was president of the school board. Their essays had been praised and read aloud in the class. Mamie had known that hers were quite as good and that she was just as clever—and much prettier. But nobody had ever praised or noticed her.

On Friday nights there had been parties, which “the crowd” attended. During the week, eating her lunches in the school lunch-room, echoes of the glories of the parties had reached her—how Marion Smith had let Harold Frederickson put his arm around her, how much salad Louis Bingham had eaten. There had been clubs at school, intimate things with secrets and pins and bows of coloured ribbon; there had been cryptic jokes handed from one member of the selected set to another, to be referred to, giggled over. But Mamie had been out of it all.

There had been other sets, less desirable, the church societies, smaller, less exclusive organizations. Mamie had not been welcomed to these, either, though by a great effort the daughter of old Joe Carpenter might have attained the least of them. She had not wanted to belong. She had not wanted to go with the “society set” of her age, either. It had been more than that. She had wanted them to want _her_. But her father, a ne’er-do-well, had been run out of Lexington, her mother was a slovenly woman with wispy hair, and her home was a grey shamble in Gillen Row.

So Mamie, as she grew up, did not improve her social position. She remained old Joe Carpenter’s girl, from Gillen Row.

III

But, if society did not recognize Mamie, the masculine element of it did, in a hidden, stealthy way.

Even when she had gone to High School the most desirable boys had offered her—secretly—invitations, moonlight drives—the best people of Millersville did not allow their daughters to drive after sundown with masculine escorts—and other forbidden pleasures. When she was younger Mamie accepted these invitations, but when she grew older and came to the Busy Bee to work, she learned how unpleasant they could be. Gradually, the men had ceased bothering about her. After all, she was only old Carpenter’s daughter and not a good sport—no pep to her.

In the Busy Bee, too, had come invitations from the commercial travellers who hung around the Grand Hotel. Mamie accepted them for a while. She wanted a good time. She flirted and laughed, went for walks and drives. But finally she stopped going with the travelling men—refused their invitations altogether. She didn’t know why—just no fun any more, nothing to it.

Not that these refusals helped her reputation in Millersville. A girl as pretty as Mamie and coming from such a neighbourhood as Gillen Row and with Joe Carpenter as a father had no reputation to lose.

But when she quit “running around” it left her pretty much alone. She even refused the invitations of the girls who worked with her at the Busy Bee. Their homes were neater than hers. She couldn’t return their invitations. Anyhow, she didn’t care anything about them. Their beaux, decent clerks, annoyed her. Occasionally, lately, she had allowed Will Remmers, of the New York Store, to take her to some of Millersville’s infrequent theatrical performances. She didn’t care for Will Remmers, a stupid fellow who thought he was doing her a favour, but, at least, he was decent—some one to go with. She didn’t care for any one especially. She had learned a lot about men, being pretty and meeting them since she was sixteen.

Mamie had tried to think of some way to get out of Millersville, but she never went far enough to plan anything definitely. The home in Gillen Row took all of her money; she could barely keep out enough to dress decently. She saw no future by the route of the drummers of the Grand Hotel. She had no profession or training. Really, she didn’t dislike being in Millersville. If she could have been one of the society set she felt she would have liked it very well indeed. It was just her position that annoyed her—having nothing, no pretty things, being nothing—when girls like the Reddings had so much.

The Reddings especially annoyed Mamie.

There were two Redding girls: Sophie, the older, rather fat and white with colourless hair, and Esther, a bit more presentable, but a trifle more stupid, if anything. The Redding girls giggled, holding their heads on one side. They tossed their light curls. They snuggled up to their young men. They were always coming into the Busy Bee, the head of a little group, laughing and chatting, selecting tables with great care, ordering elaborate sundaes or sodas. They always had new little tricks, new clothes. If they recognized Mamie as one of their old schoolmates, they gave no sign. They had each had a year at the Craig School, a second-rate boarding school that New York maintained for rich Westerners, and liked to forget that they had ever attended any other institution.

When Marlin Embury came into the Busy Bee to make a purchase, Mamie might have paid no attention to him at all if Rose Martin hadn’t nudged her.

“That’s William E. Embury’s son,” she said. “He’s back in town. Do you know him? I read in the _Eagle_ he’s gone in with his father in business. He goes with Sophie Redding. They say he is going to marry her, though they haven’t announced the engagement.”

Mamie looked at Embury and liked him. That nice-looking fellow—for Sophie Redding! Not nearly as handsome as the man who had played in the stock company in Millersville the month before, but not bad-looking—didn’t compare with Wallace Reid or John Barrymore, but then they were only on the screen—pictures as far as she was concerned, and married—she’d read that in a magazine—and Embury was right here.

She knew who Embury was, had seen him, years ago, before he went away to college, had sort of kept track of him through the papers. She had read, several months before, that he was back in Millersville, after two years as manager of some of his father’s oil wells in Oklahoma.

And now he was going with Sophie Redding! Good-looking and rich—the only son of rich parents—and Sophie Redding would get him! He had a good face, was young, couldn’t be more than twenty-four. That young kind is easy—falls for anything. Mamie knew that. He had gone to a boys’ preparatory school, then to a college that was not co-educational, then two years in a little town. Why he didn’t know anything about girls. He’d be easy even for Sophie Redding to capture—Sophie, with her home, “Crestwood,” out in Maple Road, her father, grey-haired and pompous, and her mother, fat and smiling—always giving parties—good times.

No wonder Sophie could get him, even if she was fat and white and silly! Sophie had everything. What chance had she against Sophie?

Until then it hadn’t occurred to Mamie that she was entitled to a chance—that there was even the possibility of her and Sophie having aims in the same direction. And yet—

She looked at Embury.

He had bought a huge box of candy. It was being wrapped up for him. He was a nice boy with sleek black hair, not especially tall, but then she herself was small and didn’t like tall men. He had nice shoulders, a slim figure, a good head, just a boy. Fat Sophie Redding, with her pale eyes and giggles—why, she _knew_ she was prettier—smarter than Sophie! And yet—Sophie—!

Why not do something about it? _Do_ something? Get Embury? Why not? Wasn’t his father about the richest man in Millersville? Wasn’t he the most eligible man in town, now that Bliss Bingham had gone to Chicago and Harold Richardson was married?

There were other men, of course, but either they were old bachelors who knew too much about her, old and snobbish, or poor or too young. Embury had already made good in Oklahoma. Now his father had taken him into business, wouldn’t disinherit him—if he married her. Wasn’t it rumoured that Mrs. Embury—stately and dignified enough now—had before her marriage “worked out”? She wouldn’t dare object too strenuously to Joe Carpenter’s daughter as her daughter-in-law.

After all, Mamie had always wondered if she could do something clever if she had a chance. Here was her chance—she’d never have a better one, she knew that. After all, no one would help her—all she had was herself. Maybe, if she tried hard enough....

Embury took his package and went out of the store. He had not noticed Mamie Carpenter.

IV

Embury was glad to get home again. He thought Millersville a jolly place to live in after Sorgo, Oklahoma, with its constant smell and feel of oil. He enjoyed his old room again and the new car and being with the crowd.

He was not an especially brilliant fellow, nor a rapid thinker, nor much of a reader. He liked a good time, in a quiet way. He wore good clothes and liked to be with others who did. He thought girls were awfully jolly, but hard to get acquainted with. He found the girls in Millersville unusually pleasant. But, of course, that was as it should be; they were home-town girls.

Sophie Redding—she was jolly and cute and had a way of making him feel awfully at home. It was pleasant at the Reddings, sitting out on the big porch and drinking lemonade, with Sophie ready to laugh at his jokes and some of the others of the crowd likely to drop in at any time. Yes, Sophie was a pretty fine girl. His folks liked her, too, always awfully glad when he called on her, kept telling him what a fine girl she was and how much they liked the family. Now, if he showed her a good time all summer and autumn, did all he could for her, maybe Sophie would care for him.

Embury was driving down Hill Street four or five days later when a pretty girl nodded to him, just a formal, pleasant little nod.

Embury couldn’t place her, exactly, but he spoke, of course. He even took his eyes off the road ahead long enough to glance back at her. She was pretty, and he liked little girls who wore plain blue dresses in summer. Some one, probably, he’d met out at the Country Club and didn’t remember. Still, she seemed prettier than most of the girls he had met there. Maybe some one he used to know. He tried to conjure up a childhood acquaintance who might have blossomed into this little blonde girl, but he couldn’t. Anyhow, she was pretty.

Two weeks later, walking up Elm Street after leaving the office—he frequently walked home and always went that way when he did—the same little figure overtook him, passed ahead. His heart palpitated quite pleasantly. But this time the nod was even cooler, more formal. He returned it as cordially as he could. That night there was a dance at the club and Embury watched each new arrival, but there was no pretty little blonde with big eyes and radiant hair. Sophie found him preoccupied and told him so. He tried his best to be more courteous to her. After all, why worry about a strange girl? You couldn’t tell who she might turn out to be.

He saw her again, a week later, when he was driving. Again he received a cool little nod. He’d ask some of the boys about her—she might be good fun—evidently wasn’t one of the crowd. Millersville was a slow place, not much to do, a little affair on the side—by another year he might be married and settled down—might as well have a good time while he could.

He didn’t have to ask any of the boys, for the very next day, on Elm Street, the little figure in blue held out her hand as he overtook her.

“I don’t believe you know me,” she laughed prettily, shyly. “You’ve looked—so amazed, when I’ve spoken. Don’t tell me your years out of town have made you forget old acquaintances altogether. I’m Mamie Carpenter.”

“Why, of course, Miss Carpenter, I’m delighted,” he stammered.

“Oh, I’m so ashamed,” she said, then hurriedly, with embarrassed little pauses between the words: “Here, I’ve stopped you to tell you how—how glad Millersville is to have you back—and—I’m afraid you don’t remember me, after all. I don’t blame you—I was such a little girl when you left—and I’m not—important. But I remember when I went to Grant School, and you were in High, I used to stop every day and watch you practise football. You wore a red sweater, I remember. You—you were one of my youthful heroes, you see.”