But this generous plan had been balked by Johnnie and his kind. They said it had been all right enough to get the loan of the family cars when they were freshmen in high school, and to go driving about distributing peonies. But they drew the line at manure. Mrs. Benton said to Emily that she had told Johnnie he was a selfish boy, and that he had said: "Well, maybe I'm selfish. But I'm certainly fragrant." Emily had never believed Johnnie capable of that retort. She thought his mother had made it up for the story. But now—well—she was beginning to think maybe he had made it.
Johnnie had arrived home from college two days after the headline appeared, and his mother had been ready to receive him. She said he had to apologize to the whole club publicly. He refused. And Emily was trying to arbitrate between them. "Honestly, Mrs. Kenworthy," he said, "it never entered my mind that you'd ever hear of it in this town. Mother ought to believe me when I say I wouldn't have done it for anything if I'd known that man French was ever going to get hold of it. I was in bad with the dean, sitting there in his office waiting to get hauled over the coals about my work, as usual, and I couldn't help hearing what he was saying. He was raving. He told the class committee that if they couldn't get something better than the drivel they had submitted, the annual play was off. I was feeling low when he got through with me, believe me. And I knew what I'd get at this end if I came home flunking again. And that night when I was lying in bed it all came to me at once, and I got right up and wrote it down." Johnnie spoke now without awe of his inspiration. "There was the chorus of high-brow old maids singing about the need of the poor for garden manure. It isn't my fault they rhyme, is it, now? I might have said that, Mrs. Kenworthy, but you know I never would have poked fun publicly at old Miss Sisson. I'd never have put in about land dressing. Would I, now?" And Emily, considering the shyness of the poor elegant old thing, believed that Johnnie would have had more mercy. "And then," he went on, "I had that chorus of farmers, regular stage hayseeds, with long gray beards and pitchforks, resisting them. And the Bolshevists singing." Johnnie hummed:
"'Tis the lack of horse litter
Makes poverty bitter.
"It just all does rhyme. And I had a hero like me, refusing to drive a truck, and eloping with a farmer's daughter in a manure spreader. And every farmer in the chorus was leading a calf or a pig with him as he danced. I told them not to have those kids as animals. And when the audience began to applaud, one of the little fiends rose up on his hind legs and began to dance. And then they all did, of course. The people nearly went into spasms, they laughed so. Oh, boy! It was a hot show! I was popular for a while. The skirts just clung to me at the dance afterwards. And everybody was wondering what else might be in me. And I was going to strike mother for a new car the minute I got home. Now, oh, Lordie, what a life I lead!"
And Emily, standing as usual, between mother and son, had maintained to Mrs. Benton that Johnnie might have been deplorably thoughtless, but he certainly hadn't been deliberately malicious. How could he suppose that that man French could get hold of it? It was simply brutal, as Emily realized, for that horrid person to entitle his derision "Scholastic Honors." It was rubbing salt into the deep wound of Cora Benton's soul. For Johnnie most conspicuously lacked not only scholastic honors, but even mediocre class attainments of common town children. He had been pulled and shoved along from one grade to another by the skin of his teeth. He had always been the most careless boy in every class. Mrs. Benton was right when she said it was because of his health. When he was nine he had had infantile paralysis, and, recovering, had been sent South. Mrs. Benton, a passionate mother, had thrown down her Red Cross work and taken him to a Southern town in which a cousin of hers was living. And that choice had changed, she averred, the course of the boy's life.
For the White Sox had been wintering there. And the weary little boy, too uninterested in life to turn his thin hand over, was carried out into the sun and coaxed into watching them. Some of them noticed the pale child and spoke to him. Presently Johnnie was no longer a pitiful invalid; he had become an active humble little mortal peeping up at the great gods who strode about this Parnassus upon which he had been thrown. Like an eager disciple he watched their ways. He knew what blessed street cars they took and at what hours. He knew the hallowed spot they had their hair cut. Lying in his bed at night, he could identify their manager's car by the sound. In his dreams he was steadying his arm to send a terrible curve. His nightmares were missed bases. Books and reading were forbidden him. But at the end of that year he knew the names and the positions of practically all the players in the League.
It took a woman like his mother to get him into the schoolhouse the next year. But even she could not induce his mind to consider text-books. By the time he was sixteen he was in a class with thirteen-year-old boys, and he looked small and delicate among them. And then he began growing. His heart was weak. He got pneumonia. The doctor said he would never be well unless he was taken out of school again and let "run wild." The year Bronson came to his Aunt Emily, Mrs. Benton spent part of the winter in New Mexico and moved from there because she couldn't endure the sight of her son playing ball with lazy Mexicans whom he had inspired to the game. She went to a vineyard in California, and there she had to see him rally enough young Japs for his nine. She left him that summer on a ranch in Arizona, safe from a baseball atmosphere, she supposed. He found a camp of Boy Scouts by riding not too many score of miles, and played with them till he came back in the autumn, less inclined to sit at a desk than ever before, and much stronger physically. And if people said truly that only Mrs. Benton's incorrigible determination had kept that boy alive to grow into a strong man, they might also have said the same force finally got him into college. And all he had ever done there, as she remarked bitterly to Emily, who condoned his accidental operatic career, was to short-stop for the second nine, and make his mother ridiculous in that disgusting "opera."
And now, Johnnie, having put in a good word for himself, having diplomatically repeated every complimentary remark he had heard all the evening about the extraordinary superiority of the floor, intended going back to his play. Mrs. Benton kept him standing there, however. Emily wondered if she had determined to have the whole town see mother and son chatting pleasantly together. For the whole town, like Emily Kenworthy, often wondered, too curiously, exactly what the relationship between the two was. Mrs. Benton kept her own counsel like the proverbially close-lipped male. People could only imagine what she thought of Johnnie's dancing every evening at the country club from which she had withdrawn in rage. The elders were known to have welcomed her withdrawal like a gift from heaven. The young fry, it was commonly said, couldn't have a single dance without Johnnie, who danced "divinely." (Martha Kenworthy had said once, holding a long-legged columbine swaying in her hand, that it looked exactly like Johnnie Benton.) He was hail-fellow-well-met to most of his mother's sworn enemies. Emily sometimes thought I that must require determination almost equal to his mother's. He just simply was a "nice boy," the town said. He had a good disposition, and Bob Kenworthy was not the only one who, saying that, added, "And the Lord knows he needed it!"
"Whoever could have believed it?" Emily was saying. "Where have they all come from?" they were thinking together. You could count the faces you knew. The youth of the town had been pushed aside by the youth of the whole state, apparently. In a way, the very success was failure, for the committee had enlarged their plans time after time to provide against this indecent modern crowding. And now people were simply wriggling about like fishing worms thick in a can. Suddenly:
"EMILY!" exclaimed Cora Benton. "WHAT'S MARTHA DOING?" Sharply she had spoken, commandingly.