Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man

by Marie Conway Oemler

Laurence nodded. "Yes, Padre, I know all that. But it can't teach away what's always happening here and now. At least not to the Butterfly Man and me, ... nor yet the mother-birds, Padre. No. We want to be shown how to head off the bluejays."

We walked along in silence, his hand upon my arm. His eyes were clouded with the vision that beckoned him. As for me, I was wondering just where, and how far, that bluejay was going to lead John Flint.

It led him presently to my mother. All men learn their great lessons from women and in stress the race instinctively goes back to be taught by the mothers of it. There were long intimate talks between herself and the Butterfly Man, to which Laurence was also called. In her quiet way Madame knew by heart the whole mill district, good, bad and indifferent, for she was a woman among the women. She had supported wives parting from dying husbands; she had hushed the cries of frightened children, while I gave the last blessings to mothers whose feet were already on the confines of another world; she had taken dead children from frenzied women's arms. Just as the Butterfly Man had shown the country folks to Laurence, so now Madame showed them both the mill folks, the poor folks, the foreigners in a small town disdainful of them; and she did it with the added keenness of her woman's eyes and the diviner kindness of her woman's heart.

The little lady had enormous influence in the parish. And as Laurence's plans and hopes and ambitions unfolded before her, she threw this potent influence, with all it implied, in the scale of the young lawyer's favor. They began their work at the bottom, as all great movements should begin. What struck me with astonishment was that so many quiet women seemed to be ready and waiting, as for a hoped for message, a bugle-call in the dawn, for just that which Laurence had to tell them.

"A fellow with pull behind him," said John Flint, "is what you might call a pretty fair probability. But a fellow with the women behind him is a steam-roller. There's nothing to do but clear the road and keep from under." And when he went on his rounds among the farm houses now it wasn't only the men and children he talked to. There was a message for the overworked women, the wives and daughters who had all the pains and none of the profits. Westmoreland, who had been a rather lonesome evangelist for many years, of a sudden found himself backed and supported by younger and stronger forces.

The work was done very noiselessly; there was no outward disturbances, yet; but the women were in deadly earnest; there were far, far too many small graves in our cemetery, and they were being taught to ask why the children who filled them hadn't had a fair chance? The men might smile at many things, but fathers couldn't smile when mothers of lost children wanted to know why Appleboro hadn't better milk and sanitation. And there, under their eyes bulked the huge red mills, and every day from the bosom of this Moloch went up the smoke of sacrifice.

Behind all this gathering of forces stood an almost unguessed figure. Not the lovely white-haired lady of the Parish House; not big Westmoreland; not handsome Laurence, nor outspoken Miss Sally Ruth with a suffrage button on her black basque; but a limping man in gray tweeds with a soft felt hat pulled down over his eyes and a butterfly net in his hand. That net was symbolic. With trained eye and sure hand the naturalist caught and classified us, put each one in his proper place.

Keener, shrewder far than any of us, no one, save I alone, guessed the part it pleased him to play. Laurence was hailed as the Joshua who was to lead all Appleboro into the promised land of better paving, better lighting, better schools, better living conditions, better city government—a better Appleboro. Behind Laurence stood the Butterfly Man.

He seldom interfered with Laurence's plans; but every now and then he laid a finger unerringly upon some weak point which, unnoticed and uncorrected, would have made those plans barren of result. He amended and suggested. I have seen him breathe upon the dry bones of a project and make it live. It satisfied that odd sardonic twist in him to stand thus obscurely in the background and pull the strings. I think, too, that there must have been in his mind, since that morning he had watched the bluejay destroy his nest, some obscure sense of restitution. Once, in the dark, he had worked for evil. Still keeping himself hidden, it pleased him now to work for good. So there he sat in his workroom, and cast filaments here and there, and spun a web which gradually netted all Appleboro.

There was, for instance, the Clarion. We had had but that one newspaper in our town from time immemorial. I suppose it might have been a fairly good county paper once,—but for some years it had spluttered so feebly that one wondered how it survived at all. In spite of this, nobody in our county could get himself decently born or married, or buried, without a due and proper notice in the Clarion. To the country folks an obituary notice in its columns was as much a matter of form as a clergyman at one's obsequies. It simply wasn't respectable to be buried without proper comment in the Clarion. Wherefore the paper always held open half a column for obituary notices and poetry.