CHAPTER VI—ALCOTT AIDEE
THE Sexton Avenue Assembly hall was a large building of red brick, with wide windows and a tower full of bells, and Aidee lived across the Avenue in a block of bay-windowed houses painted grey, the third house from the corner. Aidee rented rooms on the floor above the drawing-room, but his study was in the Assembly building. The house belonged to one Mrs. Tillotson, sometime wife of one Colonel Tillotson. She wrote articles for The Chronicle, and verses which were military at one time, nay, even ferocious, which afterward reflected her pensioned widowhood, and now reflected Aidee. She hoped her drawing-room might be the intellectual nucleus of the Assembly. She was tall, thin, grey-haired, and impressive.
The people who gathered in Mrs. Tillotson's drawing-room were mainly a kind of mental driftwood, caught in the Aideean swirl and backwater, but some of them were more salient. There was Emil Ralbeck, the Assembly organist, a small blond and smoothly bearded man with a pudgy nose, who delivered harsh language melodiously, denounced classes and aggregations of capital, and while not advocating slaughter, yet prophesied it. There was Thomas Berry, whose theme was brotherly love and the Golden Rule. Crime, he said, was mainly the creation of Law. He lay on the sofa, and rumpled his hair, and wished all human beings to call him “Tom.” He had fleshy flowing outlines, a heavy shaven face, and a leaden grey eye. There was Alberta Keys, a small, trim, blue-eyed damsel, who thirsted for excitement of the soul and resembled a Maltese kitten; and a large, good-looking, surprised, hesitating young man, who followed in her trail, Ted Secor, son of T. M. Secor, the owner of mines and rolling mills.
T. M. S. had financed the Assembly in the beginning, either because he liked Aidee, or liked sport, or both. The bloom of untroubled health was on Ted Secor's cheek. Hard drinks and ballet girls had suddenly faded from his mind of late, and he followed Alberta Keys in dazed submission into Mrs. Tillotson's drawing-room, and believed his mind now set forever on higher things. These, and others less salient, met in Mrs. Tillotson's drawing-room, and held conversation.
Her furnishings hinted at luxury by means of sofa cushions, at art by means of pictures resting unconventionally on easels, and at literature by the skilfully careless distribution of books. A fireplace with natural gas and asbestos seemed to say, “With all this we are modern, intensely modern.”
Aidee's father had been a circuit preacher of New England birth, a man of radical statements, who declared that the subsidence of Puritanism there had left it spiritually dead. Being a man of radical action, he came to the Middle West in the early forties, and spent the rest of his life in the wake of the frontier. He died at about the end of the war, leaving two sons aged twelve and eight, Alcott and Allen Aidee, “Al” and “Lolly,” on a small farm in the prairie. The mother died soon after, on the same small farm.
The story of the two brothers ran on for some twenty years together, and then split apart. It involved school, school-teaching by the elder, in that straggling but populous prairie town, and the pursuit of trouble by the younger. Alcott developed political and religious opinions objected to by school commissioners, and a barn belonging to a school commissioner was fired in consequence by Allen. It was enough. They left it all suddenly, their native town and the stumpy fields of their farm, the corn lot, the muddy creek, the brick schoolhouse that was so proud of its two stories and three grades of scholars. A newspaper period followed in a disorderly city on the Mississippi, where Allen enjoyed himself prodigally, and the finances of the brothers went to pieces. Allen's endeavour to improve their finances led him to a barred and solitary cell. Alcott was at the door of the prison when he came out.
“Let me go! Oh, Al!” pleaded the younger, “Kick me out!”