It was spoken in a joke. The two young men were grinning, but Mehronay looked at the floor in a study as he said:
"Well, to be honest—damfino if I ever did—just exactly." He smiled reflectively in a pause and continued: "Nearest I remember was one night we was sitting with our feet on the base-burner and I looked up and says, 'Hell's afire, Commie'—I called her that for short—'why in the devil don't a fine woman like you get married? She got up and come over to where I was a-sitting and before I could say Lordamighty, she put her hand on my shoulder and says real soft and solemn: 'I'll just be damned if I don't believe I will.'"
He did not smile when he looked up, but sighed contentedly as he added reverently: "And so, by hell, she did!" If Columbia Merley Mehronay had known this language which her husband's innocent inadvertence put into her mouth she would have strangled him—even then.
We did not have Mehronay with us more than a year after his wedding. Mrs. Mehronay knew what he was worth. She asked for twenty-five dollars a week for him, and when we told her the office could not afford it she took him away. They went to New York City, where she peddled his pieces about town until she got him a regular place. There they have lived happily ever after. Mehronay brings his envelope home every Saturday night, and she gives him his carfare and his shaving-money and puts the rest where it will do the most good. When the men from our office go to New York—which they sometimes do—they visit with Mehronay at his office, and sometimes—if there is time for due and proper notice of the function in writing—there is an invitation to dinner. Mehronay fondles his old friends as a child fondles its playmates and he takes eager pleasure in them, but she that was Columbia Merley all but searches their pockets for the tempter.
Mehronay has never broken his word. He knows if he does break it she will tear him limb from limb and eat him raw. So he goes to his work, writes his pieces, hums his gentle bee-song—so that men do not like to room with him at the office—and has learned to keep himself fairly well buttoned up in the great city. But Miss Larrabee that was—who used to edit the society page for our paper, but who now lives in New York—told us when she was home that as she was walking down Fourth Avenue one winter day when the street was empty, she saw Mehronay standing before the window of a liquor store looking intently at the display of bottled goods before him. When he saw her half a block away he turned from her and shuffled rapidly down the street, clicking his cane nervously.
It was not for him!
XVIII
Sown in Our Weakness
When one comes to know an animal well—say a horse or a cow or a dog—and sees how sensibly it acts, following the rules of conduct laid down by the wisdom of its kind, one cannot help wondering how much happier, and healthier, and better, human beings would be if they used the discretion of the animals. For ages men have been taught what is good for their bodies and their minds and their souls. There has been no question about the wisdom of being temperate and industrious and honest and kind; and the folly of immoderation and laziness and chicanery and meanness is so well known that a geometrical proposition has not been more definitely proved. Yet only a few people in any community observe the rules of life, and of these few no one observes them all; and so misery and pain and poverty and anguish are as a pestilence among men, and they wonder why they are living in such a cruel world. It was Eli Martin who, back in the seventies, won the prize in the Bethel neighbourhood for reciting more chapters of the Old Testament than any other child in Sunday-school; and the old McGuffey's Reader that he used on week-days was filled with moral tales; but someway when it came to applying the rules he had learned, and the moral that the stories pointed, Eli Martin lacked the sense of a dog or a horse. Once, when the paper contained an account of one of Red Martin's police court escapades, George Kirwin recalled that, when we offered a prize during the Christmas season of 1880, for the best essay by a child under twelve, it was Ethelwylde Swaney who won the prize with an essay on the Weakness of Vanity; and she married Eli Martin when she and the whole town knew what he was.