“Well, he was sorry for the kid, and tried to let him down easy. He went on talking, to give the boy time to catch his breath. ‘You understand, I’d like, maybe more than you, to reorganize the whole ball o’ wax, on any lines that would work better. And there are lots of good points in your plan that we can use, plenty of ’em. This invention of yours about cross-indexing orders now, that is a splendid idea. I believe we could install that ... it looks almost fool proof! And maybe we might run a special mailing-list along the lines you’ve worked out. Lemme look at it again. Well, I guess the mistakes the stenogs would make might be more than offset by the extra publicity ... maybe!
“But the lad was feeling too cut up to pay any attention to these little poultices. He stood there, and almost fell in pieces, he was thinking so hard. Not very cheerful thoughts, at that. When he could get his breath he leaned over the table and said in a solemn, horrified voice, ‘Good God, Mr. Burton, why then ... why then....’ He was all but plumb annihilated by the hardness of the fact that had just hit him on the head. He broke out, ‘What’s the use of inventing a better system as long as ... as long as ...?’ he got it out finally. ‘Why, Mr. Burton, there just aren’t enough folks with sense to go around!’”
My cousin stood up, moved to the hall, secured his hat and looked in at me through the door-way. “Poor kid!” he commented pityingly. “Just think of his never having thought of that before!”
UNCLE ELLIS
I never saw my Uncle Ellis because he died before I was born, but I heard a great deal about him when I was a child. His stepdaughter married one of our fellow-townsmen, and lived next door to us when I was a little girl, and her mother, my great-aunt, Uncle Ellis’ third wife, lived with her. Whatever Cousin Ruth did not say about her stepfather, Aunt Molly supplied. The two women spent the rest of their lives hating him, and for his sake hated, distrusted and despised all men.
The gruesome impressions of married life which float through the air to most little girls, came to me from their half-heard and half-understood stories of Uncle Ellis. He had killed his first two wives, they said, just as much as though he had taken an ax to them, and only his opportune death had saved Aunt Molly from the same fate. His innumerable children—I would never venture to set down how many he had, all in legal marriage—feared and detested him and ran away from home as soon as they could walk. He was meanness itself, secret, sneaking meanness, the sort of man who would refuse his wife money for a wringer to do the family wash, and spend five dollars on a box of cigars; he would fly into a black rage over a misplaced towel, and persecute the child who had misplaced it, till she was ready to commit suicide; and then open his arms with a spectacular smile to the new baby of a parishioner. After mistreating his wife till she could hardly stand, she used to hear him holding forth in a boys’ meeting, exhorting them to a chivalric attitude towards women.
Aunt Molly died long ago, firing up to the last in vindictive reminiscences of her husband. Ruth is dead now, too, in the fullness of time. I am a middle-aged woman, and probably the only one now alive who ever heard those two talk about Uncle Ellis; and I had forgotten him. If he stayed at all in my memory it was with the vague, disembodied presence of a character in a book.
About a month ago, I accepted an invitation to speak at a convention in a town in the middle-west which I had never seen, but the name of which seemed slightly familiar; perhaps, I thought, because I had learned it in a geography lesson long ago. But when I arrived I understood the reason. It was the town where for many years Uncle Ellis had been pastor of the church. At the railway station, as I stepped down on the platform, one of the older women in the group who met me, startled me by saying, “We have been especially anxious to see you because of your connection with our wonderful Dr. Ellis Randolph. I was a young girl when he died, but I can truly say that my whole life has been influenced for good by the words and example of that saintly man.”