In Our Town

by William Allen White

The conversation went no further. Neither could have said what he saw. But there is something in every human creature—a survival of our jungle days, which lets our eyes see more than our consciousness records in language. And these men, who saw Markley and the woman, could not have defined the canine impression which he gave them. Yet it was there. The volcano was beginning to smoke.

It was a month later before the town saw the flames. During that time John Markley had been walking to and from his midday dinner with Isabel Hobart, had been helping her on and off with her wraps in the office, and had been all but kicking up the dirt behind him and barking around her, as the clerks there told us, without causing comment. An honest man always has such a long start when he runs away from himself that no one misses him until he is beyond extradition. Matters went along thus for nearly a year before the woman in the cottage on Exchange Street knew how they stood. And that speaks well of our town; for we are not a mean town, and if anyone ever had our sympathy it was Mrs. Markley, as she went about her quiet ways, giving her missionary teas, looking after the poor of her church, making her famous doughnuts for the socials, doing her part at the Relief Corps chicken-pie suppers, digging her club paper out of the encyclopædia, and making over her black silk the third time for every day. If John Markley was cross with her in that time—and the neighbours say that he was; if he sat for hours in the house without saying a word, and grumbled and flew into a rage at the least ruffling of the domestic waters—his wife kept her grief to herself, and even when she left town to visit her daughter in California no one knew what she knew.

A month passed, two months passed, and John Markley's name had become a by-word and a hissing. Three months passed, a year went by, and still the wife did not return. And then one day Ab Handy, who sometimes prepared John Markley's abstracts, came into our office and whispered to the man at the desk that there was a little paper filed in the court which, under the circumstances, Mr. Markley would rather we would say as little about as is consistent with our policy in such cases. Handy didn't say what it was, and backed out bowing and eating dirt, and we sent a boy hot-foot to the court-house to find out what had been filed. The boy came back with a copy of a petition for divorce that had been entered by John Markley, alleging desertion. John Markley did not face the town when he brought his suit, but left for Chicago on the afternoon train, and was gone nearly a month. The broken little woman did not come back to contest the case, and the divorce was granted.

The day before his marriage to Isabel Hobart, John Markley shaved off his grizzled brown beard, and showed the town a face so strong and cunning and brutal that men were shocked; they said that she wished to make him appear young, and the shave did drop ten years from his countenance; but it uncovered his soul so shamelessly that it seemed immodest to look at his face. Upon the return from the wedding trip, the employees of the Markley Mortgage Company, at John Markley's suggestion, gave a reception for the bride and groom, and the Lord laid the first visible stripe on John Markley while he stood with his bride for three hours, waiting for the thousand invited guests who never came. "Alphabetical" Morrison, who owed John Markley money, and had to go, told us in the office the next day that John Markley in evening clothes, with his great paunch swathed in a white silk vest, smirking like a gorged jackal, showing his fellow-townsmen for the first time his coarse, yellow teeth and his thin, cruel lips, looked like some horrible cartoon of his former self. Colonel Morrison did not describe the bride, but she passed our office that day, going the rounds of the dry-goods stores, giggling with the men clerks—a picture of sin that made men wet their lips. She was big, oversexed, and feline; rattling in silks, with an aura of sensuousness around her which seemed to glow like a coal, without a flicker of kindness or shame or sweetness, and which all the town knew instinctively must clinker into something black and ugly as the years went by.

So the threshold of the cottage on Exchange Street was not darkened by our people. And when the big house went up—a palace for a country town, though it only cost John Markley $25,000—he, who had been so reticent about his affairs in other years, tried to talk to his old friends of the house, telling them expansively that he was putting it up so that the town would have something in the way of a house for public gatherings; but he aroused no responsive enthusiasm, and long before the big opening reception his fervour had been quenched. Though we are a curious people, and though we all were anxious to know how the inside of the new house looked, we did not go to the reception; only the socially impossible, and the travelling men's wives at the Metropole, whom Mrs. Markley had met when she was boarding during the week they moved, gathered to hear the orchestra from Kansas City, to eat the Topeka caterer's food, and to fall down on the newly-waxed floors of the Markley mansion. But our professional instinct at the office told us that the town was eager for news of that house, and we took three columns to write up the reception. Our description of the place began with the swimming pool in the cellar and ended with the ballroom in the third story.

It took John Markley a long time to realise that the town was done with him, for there was no uprising, no demonstration, just a gradual loosening of his hold upon the community. In other years his neighbours had urged him and expected him to serve on the school-board, of which he had been chairman for a dozen years, but the spring that the big house was opened Mrs. Julia Worthington was elected in his place. At the June meeting of the Methodist Conference a new director was chosen to fill John Markley's place on the college board, and when he cancelled his annual subscription no one came to ask him to renew it. In the fall his party selected a new ward committeeman, and though Markley had been treasurer of the committee for a dozen years, his successor was named from the Worthington bank, and they had the grace not to come to Markley with the subscription-paper asking for money. It took some time for the sense of the situation to penetrate John Markley's thick skin; whereupon the fight began in earnest, and men around town said that John Markley had knocked the lid off his barrel. He doubled his donation to the county campaign fund; he crowded himself at the head of every subscription-paper; and frequently he brought us communications to print, offering to give as much money himself for the library, or the Provident Association, or the Y. M. C. A., as the rest of the town would subscribe combined. He mended church roofs under which he never had sat; he bought church bells whose calls he never heeded; and paid the greater part of the pipe-organ debts in two stone churches. Colonel Morrison remarked in the office one day that John Markley was raising the price of popular esteem so high that none but the rich could afford it. "But," chuckled the Colonel, "I notice old John hasn't got a corner on it yet, and he doesn't seem to have all he needs for his own use." The wrench that had torn open his treasure chest, had also loosened John Markley's hard face, and he had begun to smile. He became as affable as a man may who has lived for fifty years silent and self-contained. He beamed upon his old friends, and once or twice a week he went the rounds of the stores making small purchases, to let the clerks bask in his sunlight.

If a new preacher came to town the Markleys went to his church, and Mrs. Markley tried to be the first woman to call on his wife.

All the noted campaign speakers assigned to our town were invited to be the Markleys' guests, and Mrs. Markley sent her husband, red necktied, high-hatted and tailor-made, to the train to meet the distinguished guest. If the man was as much as a United States Senator, Markley hired the band, and in an open hack rode in solemn state with his prize through the town behind the tinkling cymbals, and then, with much punctility, took the statesman up and down Main Street afoot, into all the stores and offices, introducing him to the common people. At such times John Markley was the soul of cordiality; he seemed hungry for a kind look and a pleasant word with his old friends. About this time his defiant eyes began to lose their boring points, and to wander and hunt for something they had lost. When we had a State convention of the dominant party, the Markleys saw to it that the Governor and all the important people attending, with their wives, stopped in the big house. The Markleys gave receptions to them, which the men in our town dared not ignore, but sent their wives away visiting and went alone. This familiarity with politicians probably gave the Markleys the idea that they might help their status in the community if John Markley ran for Governor. He announced his candidacy, and the Kansas City papers, which did not appreciate the local situation, spoke well of him; but his boom died in the first month, when some of his old friends called at the back room of the bank to tell him that the Democrats would air his family affairs if he made another move. He looked up pitiably into Ab Handy's face when the men were done talking and said: "Don't you suppose they'll ever quit? Ain't they no statute of limitation?" And then he arose and stood by his desk with one arm akimbo and his other hand at his temple as he sighed: "Oh hell, Ab—what's the use? Tell 'em I'm out of it!"

Mrs. Markley seems to have shut him out of the G. A. R., thinking maybe that the old boys and their wives were not of her social level, or perhaps she had some idea of playing even with them, because their wives had not recognised her; but she shut away much of her husband's social comfort when she barred his comrades, and they in turn grew harder toward him than they were at first. As the Markleys entered their second year, Mrs. Markley alone in the big house, with only the new people from the hotel to eat her dinners, and with only the beer-drinking crowd from the West Side to dance in the attic ballroom, had much time to think, and she bethought her of the lecturers who were upon the college lecture course, whereupon John Markley had to carve for authors and explorers, and an occasional Senator or Congressman, who, after a hard evening's work on the platform, paid for his dinner and lodging by sitting up on a gilded high-backed and uncomfortable chair in the stately reception-room of the Markley home, talking John Markley into a snore, before Isabel let them go to bed. Isabel sent the accounts of these affairs to the office for us to print, with the lists of invited guests, who never accepted. And the town grinned.

At the end of two years John Markley's fat wit told him that it was a losing fight. He had been dropped from the head of the Merchants' Association; he was cut off from the executive committee of the Fair; he was not asked to serve on the railroad committee. His old friends, whom he asked over to spend the evening at his house, always had good excuses, which they gave him later over the telephone, and their wives, who used to call him by his first name, scarcely recognised him on the street. He quit coming to our office with pieces for the paper telling the town his views on this or that local matter; and gradually gave up the fight for his old place on the school board.