In Our Town

by William Allen White

Her influence on Abner Handy and his life was such that it is necessary to record something of the kind of a woman she was before he met her. A woman of the right sort might have made a man of Handy, even that late in life. Strong, good women have made weak men fairly strong, but such women were never girls like Nora. She was a nice enough little girl until she became boy-struck—as our vernacular puts it. Her mother thought this development of the child was "so cute," and told callers about the boys who came to see Nora—before she was twelve. In those days, and in some old-fashioned families in our town, little girls were asked to run out to play when the neighbours had to be discussed. But Mrs. Sinclair claimed Nora was "neither sugar nor salt nor anybody's honey," and everything was talked over before the child. We knew at the office from Colonel Morrison that his little girls did not play at the Sinclairs'. Her mother put long dresses and picture hats upon her and pushed her out into society, and the whole town knew that Nora was a mature woman, in all her instincts, by the time she was sixteen. Her mother, moreover, was manifestly proud that the child wasn't "one of those long-legged, gangling tom-boy girls, who seem so backward" and wear pigtails and chew slate pencils and dream.

The gilded youths who boarded at the Hotel Metropole began to notice her. That pleased her mother also, and she said to the mothers of other little girls of Nora's age who were climbing fences and wiping dishes: "You know Nora is so popular with the gentlemen." When the girl was seventeen she was engaged. She kept a town fellow and had a college fellow. She acquired a "gentleman friend" in Kansas City who gave her expensive presents. These her mother took great joy in displaying, and never objected when he stayed after eleven o'clock; for she thought he was "such a good catch" and such a "swell young man." But Nora shooed him off the front porch in the summer following, because he objected to her having two or three other eleven o'clock fellows. She said he was "selfish, and would not let her have a good time." At nineteen she knew more about matters that were none of her business than most women know on their wedding day, and the boys said that she was soft. Every time that Nora left town she came back with two or three correspondents. She perfumed her stationery, used a seal, adopted all the latest frills, and learned to write an angular hand. At twenty she was going with the young married set, and was invited out to the afternoon card clubs. She was known as a dashing girl at this time, and travelling men in three States knew about her. Her mother used to send personal items to our office telling of their exalted business positions and announcing their visits to the Sinclair home. There was more or less talk about Nora in a quiet way, but her mother said that "it is because the other girls don't know how to wear their clothes as well as Nora does," and that "when a girl has a fine figure—which few enough girls in this town have, Heaven knows—why, she is a fool if she doesn't make the most of herself."

Then, gradually, Nora went to seed. She became a faded, hard-faced woman, and all the sisters in town warned their brothers against her. She was invited out only when there was a crowd. She took up with the boys of the younger set, and the married women of her own age called her the kidnapper. She was a social joke. About once a year a strange man would show up in her parlour, and she kept up the illusion about being engaged. But in the office we shared the town's knowledge that her harp was on the willows. She was massaging her face at twenty-six and her mother was sniffing at the town and saying that there were no social advantages to be had here. She and the girl went to the Lakes every summer, and Nora always came home declaring that she had had the time of her life, and that she met so many lovely gentlemen. But that was all there was to it, and in the end it was Abner Handy or no one.

After their wedding, Nora and Abner Handy set about the business of making politics pay. That is a difficult thing to do in a country town, where every voter is a watchdog of the county and city treasuries. Abner gave up his gambling, he and his wife joined all the lodges in town, and she dragged him into that coterie of people known as Society. She joined a woman's club, and was always anxious to be appointed on the soliciting committee when the women had any public work to do; so when the library needed books, or the trash cans at the street corners needed paint, or the park trees needed trimming, or the new hospital needed an additional bed, or the band needed new uniforms, Mrs. Handy might be seen on the streets with two or three women of a much better social status than she had, making it clear that she was a public-spirited woman and that she moved in the best circles. Whereupon Abner Handy got work in the court-house—as a deputy, or as a clerk, or as an under-sheriff, or as a juror—and when the legislature met he went to Topeka as a clerk.

No one knew how they lived, but they did live. Every two years they gave a series of parties, and the splendour of these festivals made the town exclaim in one voice: "Well, how do they do it?" But Mrs. Handy, who was steaming the wrinkles out of her face, and assuming more or less kittenish airs in her late thirties, never offered the town an explanation. "Hers not to answer why, hers not to make reply, hers but to do and dye" was the way Colonel Morrison put it the day after Mrs. Handy swooped down into Main Street with a golden yellow finish on her hair. She walked serenely between Mrs. Frelinghuysen and Mrs. Priscilla Winthrop Conklin. They were begging for funds with which to furnish a rest room for farmers' wives. And when they bore down on our office, Colonel Morrison folded his papers in his bosom and passed them on the threshold as one hurrying to a fire in the roof of his own house. It was interesting to observe, when the Federation Committee called on us that day, that Mrs. Handy did all the talking. She was as full of airs and graces as an actress, and ogled with her glassy eyes, and put on a sweet babyish innocence of the ways of business and of men—as though men were a race apart, greatly to be feared because they ate up little girls. But she got her dollar before she left the office, and George Kirwin, who happened to be in the front room at the time waiting for a proof, said he thought that the performance and the new hair were worth the price.

Five years passed and in each year Mrs. Handy had found some artificial way of deluding herself that she was cheating time. Then Charley Hedrick, who needed a vote in the legislature, and was too busy to go there himself, nominated Abner Handy and elected him to a seat in the lower house. The thing that Hedrick needed was not important—merely the creation of a new judicial district which would remove an obnoxious district judge in an adjoining county from our district, and leave our county in a district by itself. Hedrick hated the judge, and Hedrick used Handy's vote for trading purposes with other statesmen desiring similar small matters and got the district remade as he desired it.

When the Handys started to Topeka for the opening of the session, they began to inflame with importance as the train whistled for the junction east of town, and by the time they actually arrived at Topeka they were so highly swollen that they could not get into a boarding-house door, but went to the best hotel, and engaged rooms at seven dollars a day. The town gasped for two days and then began to laugh and wink. Two weeks after their arrival at the State capital, Abner Handy had been made chairman of the joint committee on the calendar, second member of the judiciary committee and member of the railroad committee, and Mrs. Handy had established credit at a Topeka dry-goods store and was going it blind. She gave her hair an extra dip, and used to come sailing down the corridors of the hotel in gorgeous silk house-gowns with ridiculous trains, and never appeared at breakfast without her diamonds. Before the session was well under way she had been to Kansas City to have her face enameled and had told the other "ladies of the hotel," as the wives of members of the legislature stopping at the hotel were called, that Topeka stores offered such a poor selection; she confided to them that Mr. Handy always wore silk nightshirts, and that she was unable to find anything in town that he would put on. She regarded herself as a charmer, and made great eyes at all the important lobbyists, to whom she put on her baby voice and manner and said that she thought politics were just simply awful, and added that if she were a man she would show them how honest a politician could be, but she wasn't, and when Abner tried to explain it to her it made her head ache, and all she wanted him to do was to help his friends, and she would add coyly: "I'm going to see that he helps you—whatever he does."

Every bill that had a dollar in it was held at the bottom of the calendar until satisfactory arrangements were made with Abner Handy and his friends. When the legislative buccaneers under the black flag, sailed after an insurance company, their bill remained at the bottom of the calendar in one house or the other until Ab Handy had been seen, and no one could find out why. And so, in spite of our dislike of the man, our paper was forced to acknowledge that Handy was a house leader. Although he had never had a dozen cases above the police court, he came back at the end of the session with the local attorneyship of two railroads, and was chairman of a house committee to investigate the taxes paid by the railroads in the various counties. This gave him a year's work, so he rented an office in the Worthington block and hired a stenographer. Of course, we knew in town how Ab Handy had made his money. But he paid so many of his old debts, and dispensed so many favours with such a lordly hand, that it was hard to stir local sentiment against him. He donned the clothes of a "prominent citizen," and in discussing public affairs assumed an owlish manner that impressed his former associates, and fooled stupid people, who began to believe that they had been harbouring a statesman unawares. But Charley Hedrick only grinned when men talked to him of the rise of Handy, and replied to the complaints of the scrupulous that Ab was no worse than he had always been, and if he was making it pay better, no one was poorer for his prosperity but Ab himself, and added: "Certainly he is a sincere spender." One day when Handy appeared on the street in a particularly fiery red necktie, Hedrick got him in a crowd, and began: "Just for a handful of silver he left us—just for a riband to stick in his coat." And when the crowd laughed with the joker, Hedrick continued in his thick, gravy-coated voice: "Old Browning's the boy. You fellows that want Shakespeare can have him; but Ab here knows that I take a little dash of Browning in mine. Since Ab's got to be a statesman, he's bought all of Webster's works and is learning 'em by heart. But"—and here Hedrick chuckled and shook his fat sides before letting out the joke which he enjoyed so much—"I says to Ab: as old Browning says, what does 'the fine felicity and flower of wickedness' like you need with Webster; what you want to commit to memory is the penal statutes." And he threw back his head and gurgled down in his abdomen, while the crowd roared and Handy showed the wool in his teeth with a dog-like grin.

No other man in town would have dared that with Handy after he became a statesman; but we figured it out in the office that old Charley Hedrick was merely exhibiting his brand on Ab Handy to show the town that his title to Handy was still good. For though there was considerable of the King Cole about Hedrick—in that he was a merry old soul—he was always king, and he insisted on having his divine right to rule the politics of the county unquestioned. That was his vanity and he knew it, and was not ashamed of it.

He was the best lawyer in the State in those days, and one of the best in the West. Ten months in the year he paid no attention to politics, pendulating daily between his house and his office. Often, being preoccupied with his work, he would go the whole length of Main Street speaking to no one. When a tangled case was in his mind he would enter his office in the morning, roll up his desk top, and dig into his work without speaking to a soul until, about the middle of the morning, he would look up from his desk to say as though he had just left off speaking: "Jim, hand me that 32 Kansas report over there on the table." When he worked, law books sprang up around him and sprawled over his desk and lay half open on chairs and tables near him until he had found his point; then he would get up and begin rollicking, slamming books together, cleaning up his debris and playing like a great porpoise with the litter he had made. At such times—and, indeed, all the time unless he was in what he called a "legal trance"—Hedrick was bubbling with good spirits, and when he left his office for politics he could get out in his shirt-sleeves at a primary and peddle tickets, or nose up and down the street like a fat ferret looking for votes. So when Abner Handy announced that he desired to go to the State Senate, to fill an unexpired term for two years, he had Hedrick behind him to give strength and respectability to his candidacy. Between the two Handy won. That was before the days of reform, when it was supposed to be considerable of a virtue for a man to stand by his friend; and, being a lawyer, Hedrick naturally had the lawyer's view that no man is guilty until the jury is in, and its findings have been reviewed by the supreme court.