I
Regardless of the chagrin the reminder often cost its womenfolk, the foundation for the Ruggles family “Money” had been laid in the junk business. Junk. Exactly. Junk!
Jasper Ruggles, the grandfather, had started life as one of those peddlers who drove about New England in a cart resembling a small-sized circus wagon of flaming scarlet. He swapped tinware with farmers’ wives for rags and old metal and never got cheated. From gathering old metal was but a step to melting it. From melting was but another step to finding a manufactured product. So an iron works had flourished following the Civil War and canny investments had done the rest.
Amos Ruggles, Gordon’s father, called himself a barrister,—not a lawyer, but a barrister! He maintained an expensive suite of offices in one of the most prominent Springfield buildings, but no one had ever heard of his trying a case and among his fellow attorneys he was considered more or less of a joke. He looked after the family “investments” and dabbled in politics. Six months of the year he spent traveling, principally in Europe, where he demonstrated what Americans are not like at home, even at their worst.
In appearance, Amos Ruggles was a tall, ample-girthed immaculately clad man with a certain over-clean whiteness about him, a whiteness that looked unhealthy. He suggested he had been kept away from sunlight until his flesh had become bleached. His thin, silky-fine white hair was combed from the back of his head forward, and he had a perpetually surprised look in his eye as though forever startled at finding himself alive and asking, “Bless my stars! Where am I, anyhow?” He had another look on his face, a look of always being on the point of saying something tremendously important but never quite bringing himself to do it.
His political experience to date had been but a single term in the legislature. Certain questionable “interests” who wanted a “perfect dummy” in the place had been responsible, not Amos’s solicitude for the welfare of the laboring classes and his brilliant defense of the Constitution, as he had always assumed. During this single term, his Bills were versatile if not always feasible. Among those especially demonstrating the man’s brilliance may be cited (1) A Bill—to mitigate social conditions by making it a penal offense for laborers earning less than a thousand a year to have more than two children; (2) A Bill—making it a criminal violation to alight from moving street cars while facing in the wrong direction. His bills were quietly killed in committee. Still, they were good bills and if they had gone through, Amos felt that he would not have lived wholly in vain. His intentions were good, at any rate, even if the execution of his legislation may have presented difficulties insurmountable.
Margaret Ruggles, his wife, was a Theddon and even as a girl had been so wealthy she could afford to be homely. She came from “Boston and Rhode Island,” as the local society reporters quoted it, making it sound like a railroad.
In later life Margaret Ruggles’s nerve was iron and her savoir faire flawless. Rumor had it that she instructed Amos how and when to do everything, from selling United Fruit Common to changing his waistcoat. And a local grocer had a yarn about having sent a special team out to the Ruggleses residence to deliver three lemons, and Margaret had ordered the man to wait and take back two of them because cook had discovered there were already two lemons in the house. She was a close buyer and a difficult customer and yet young Gordon—only child of these two—was allowed, from earliest boyhood, to spend money like a Monte Cristo in knickers. At three he cried for the moon but was given the earth instead, and found it so absorbing that he never gave it back. Not even when other people wanted it.
Gordon had never gone to school three consecutive years in his life. He had never shown interest in anything for two consecutive days, in his life,—except fighting. Yet he even refused to make fighting a business, or he might have turned out a notable pugilist or worked his bellicosities off to some good purpose in the Army.
Amos and Margaret absolutely refused to credit their son with faults. They looked at him and beheld that he had a body, a brain, a temperament and an appetite. But faults? Not a one! He committed indiscretions, irresponsibilities, sowed a few wild oats, perhaps! But that was to be expected. Why should he work when the Ruggleses already had more money than they could ever spend? Besides, why should he work when he wouldn’t work and they couldn’t make him work, even if they wanted? That he would ultimately “go in for something” as his father had “gone in” for law—and foreign travel—was vaguely understood. But the insinuation that Gordon was one whit worse than a million other boys they would not tolerate an instant. The Ruggleses—second generation—had a queer outlook on life, one which it is perhaps difficult for hoi polloi to understand: The world was their personal bootjack and any one who essayed to question that fact was a “disturbing element” and “a menace against established institutions.”
Nevertheless, Gordon at twenty-six was giving Amos not a little anxiety. While a few wild oats were expected of a boy to show that he was a boy and virile—in fact, Amos had rolled in a wild oat or two himself when a boy or when his wife was occasionally elsewhere—it didn’t necessarily follow that the son should turn wholesale agriculturist and rear elevators with the family money in which to house his disturbing grain crops. Not that it offended Amos’s sense of decency—the things he had to pay for, from broken china to broken women—so much as it affected the family prestige. It was time the boy calmed down, and the boy gave no symptoms whatever of calming down. He had, in fact, calmed upward considerably of late and grown a little out of hand,—if indeed he ever was in hand. Thereat Amos, like most of his type, looking into his own experience for solution, hit upon the brilliant idea that what Gordon needed most of all to straighten him out was a brainy, strong-minded wife. The very thing. Gordon must have a wife. Then a baby or two. If a baby or two couldn’t tone Gordon down then nothing could tone Gordon down. Amos would speak to his son about it.
Which, on a winter’s evening in March, 1915, he did. Gordon was talking about going to France and “guttin’ Fritzies” for the fun of it, and that must be nipped at any cost. Why, the boy might get shot. Amos was especially peeved at the Germans and the war, anyhow—it was making a continental colander out of all his favorite watering places and spoiling his annual trips abroad by filling the seas with submarines that actually blew people up. Not that Gordon cared anything about the moral aspects of the war. Such a venture merely promised a new thrill.
Amos called his boy into the big Ruggles library, had a Scotch and soda with him, lighted a big cigar and assumed a place on the hearth rug with one hand behind his coat tails. There he rocked on his toes and heels and became the Declaiming Parent.