The Seeker

by Harry Leon Wilson

It should, perhaps, be said that dissolution by slow poison is not infrequently the fate of an idol.

Doubtless there was never a certain day of which the little boy could have said "that was the first time Cousin Bill J. began to seem different." Yet there came a moment when all was changed—a time of question, doubt, conviction; a terrible hour, in short, when, face to face with his hero, he suffered the deep hurt of knowing that mentally, morally, and even esthetically, he himself was the superior of Cousin Bill J.

He could remember that first he had heard a caller say to Clytie of Miss Alvira, "Why, they do say the poor thing has to go down those back stairs and actually split her own kindlings—with that healthy loafer setting around in the good clothes she buys him, in the back room of that drug-store from morning till night. And what's worse, he's been seen with that eldest——"

Here the caller's eyes had briefly shifted sidewise at the small listener, whereupon Clytie had urged him to run along and play like a good boy. He pondered at length that which he had overheard and then he went to Miss Alvira's wood-pile at the foot of her back stairs, reached by turning up the alley from Main Street. He split a large pile of kindling for her. He would have been glad to do this each day, had not Miss Alvira proved to be lacking in delicacy. Instead of ignoring him, when she saw him from her back window, where she was second-fitting Samantha Rexford's pink waist, she came out with her mouth full of pins and gave him five cents and tried to kiss him. Of course, he never went back again. If that was the kind she was she could go on doing the work herself. He was no Ralph Overton or Ben Holt, to be shamed that way and made to feel that he had been Doing Good, and be spoken of all the time as "our Hero."

As for Cousin Bill J., of course he was a loafer! Who wouldn't be if he had the chance? But it was false and cruel to say that he was a healthy loafer. When Cousin Bill J. was healthy he had been able to fell an ox with one blow of his fist.

Nor was he disturbed seriously by rumours that his hero was a "come-outer"; that instead of attending church with Miss Alvira he could be heard at the barber-shop of a Sabbath morning, agreeing with Milo Barrus that God might have made the world in six days and rested on the seventh; but he couldn't have made the whale swallow Jonah, because it was against reason and nature; and, if you found one part of the Bible wasn't so, how could you tell the rest of it wasn't a lot of grandmother's tales?

Nor did he feel anything but sympathy for a helpless man imposed upon when he heard Mrs. Squire Cumpston say to Clytie, "Do you know that lazy brute has her worked to a mere shadow; she just sits in that shop all day long and lets tears fall every minute or so on her work. She spoiled five-eighths of a yard of three-inch lavender satin ribbon that way, that was going on to Mrs. Beasley's second-mourning bonnet. And she's had to cut him down to twenty-five cents a day for spending-money, and order the stores not to trust him one cent on her account."

He was sorry to have Miss Alvira crying so much. It must be a sloppy business, making her hats and things. But what did the woman expect of a man like Cousin Bill J., anyway?

Yet somehow it came after a few years—the new light upon his old idol. One day he found that he neither resented nor questioned a thing he heard Clytie herself say about Cousin Bill J.: "Why, he don't know as much as a goat." Here she reconsidered, with an air of wanting to be entirely fair:—"Well, not as much as a goat really ought to know!" And when he overheard old Squire Cumpston saying on the street, a few days later, "Of all God's mean creatures, the meanest is a male human that can keep his health on the money a woman earns!" it was no shock, though he knew that Cousin Bill J. was meant.

Departed then was the glory of his hero, his splendid dimensions shrunk, his effective lustre dulled, his perfect moustache rusted and scraggly, his chin weakened, his pale blue eyes seen to be in force like those of a china doll.