Uncle Loren had been a miser and so close that his nickname had implied the ability to skin a flint. People hated him and raged against him; but it suddenly became evident that they had worked hard to meet their bills payable to him. They had sat up nights devising schemes to gain cash for him. He was a cause of industry and thrift and self-denial. He paid poor wages, but he kept the factory going. He squeezed a penny until the eagle screamed, but he made dusters out of the tail feathers, and he was planning to branch out into whisk brooms and pillows when, in the words of the pastor, he was "called home." The pastor liked the phrase, as it did not commit him to any definite habitat.
Eddie, however, though he worked hard and used thrift, and, with Ellaphine's help, practised self-denial, found that he was not so big a man as the small man he succeeded. He increased the wages and cut down the hours, and found that he had diminished the output of everything except complaints. The men loafed shamelessly, cheated him of the energy and the material that belonged to him, and whined all the time. His debtors grew shiftless and contemptuous.
It is the irony, the meanness, of the trade of life that virtue may prove vicious in effect; and viciousness may produce good fruit. Figs do grow from thistles.
For a time the Pouch couple attracted a great deal of attention from the people of Carthage—the sort of attention that people on shore devote to a pair of capsized canoeists for whom nobody cares to risk his life.
Luella Thickins had forced the note of gaiety at the wedding, but she soon grew genuinely glad that Eddie had got away. She began to believe that she had jilted him.
VI
People who wondered what Mr. and Mrs. Pouch saw in each other could not realize that he saw in her a fellow-sufferer who upheld him with her love in all his terrors. She was everything that his office was not—peace without demand for money; glowing admiration and raptures of passion.
What she saw in him was what a mother sees in a crippled child that runs home to her when the play of the other boys is too swift or too rough. She saw a good man, who could not fight because he could not slash and trample and loot. She saw what the Belgian peasant women saw—a little cottage holder staring in dismay at the hostile armies crashing about his homestead.
The only comfort Eddie found in the situation was the growing realization that it was hopeless. The drowsy opiate of surrender began to spread its peace through his soul. His torment was the remorse of proving a traitor to his dead uncle's glory. The feather-dustery that had been a monument was about to topple into the weeds. Eddie writhed at that and at his feeling of disloyalty to the employees, who would be turned out wageless in a small town that was staggering under the burden of hard times.
He made a frantic effort to keep going on these accounts, but the battle was too much for him. He could not imagine ways and means—he knew nothing of the ropes of finance. He was like a farmer with a scythe against sharpshooters. Ellaphine began to fear that the struggle would break him down. One night she persuaded him to give up.