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With the Procession

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HENRY B. FULLER

With

the

Procession


Introduction by Mark Harris




I


When old Mr. Marshall finally took to his bed, the household viewed this
action with more surprise than sympathy, and with more impatience than
surprise. It seemed like the breaking down of a machine whose
trustworthiness had been hitherto infallible; his family were almost
forced to the acknowledgement that he was but a mere human being after
all. They had enjoyed a certain intimacy with him, in lengths varying
with their respective ages, but they had never made a full avowal that
his being rested on any tangible physical basis. Rather had they fallen
into the way of considering him as a disembodied intelligence, whose sole
function was to direct the transmutation of values and credits and
resources and opportunities into the creature comforts demanded by the
state of life unto which it had please Providence to call them; and their
dismay was now such as might occur at the Mint if the great stamp were
suddenly and of its own accord to cease its coinage of double-eagles and
to sink into a silence of supine idleness. His wife and children
acknowledged, indeed, his head and his hands--those it were impossible to
overlook; but his head stopped with the rim of his collar, while his
hands--those long, lean hands, freckled, tufted goldishly between joints
and knuckles--they never followed beyond the plain gilt sleeve-buttons
(marked with a Roman M) which secured the overlapping of his cuffs. No,
poor old David Marshall was like one of the early Tuscan archangels,
whose scattered members are connected by draperies merely, with no
acknowledged organism within; nor were his shining qualities fully
recognized until the resolutions passed by the Association of Wholesale
Grocers reached the hands of his bereaved---

But this is no way to begin.

* * * * *

The grimy lattice-work of the drawbridge swung to slowly, the steam-tug
blackened the dull air and roiled the turbid water as it dragged its
schooner on towards the lumber-yards of the South Branch, and a long line
of waiting vehicles took up their interrupted course through the smoke
and the stench as they filed across the stream into the thick of business
beyond: first a yellow street-car; then a robust truck laden with
rattling sheet-iron, or piled high with fresh wooden pails and willow
baskets; then a junk-cart bearing a pair of dwarfed and bearded Poles,
who bumped in unison with the jars of its clattering springs; then,
perhaps, a bespattered buggy, with reins jerked by a pair of sinewy and
impatient hands. Then more street-cars; then a butcher's cart loaded with
the carcasses of calves--red, black, piebald--or an express wagon with a
yellow cur yelping from its rear; then, it may be, an insolently
venturesome landau, with crested panel and top-booted coachman. Then
drays and omnibuses and more street-cars; then, presently, somewhere in
the line, between the tail end of one truck and the menacing tongue of
another, a family carry-all--a carry-all loaded with its family, driven
by a man of all work, drawn by a slight and amiable old mare, and
encumbered with luggage which shows the labels of half the hotels of
Europe.

It is a very capable and comprehensive vehicle, as conveyances of that
kind go. It is not new, it is not precisely in the mode; but it shows
material and workmanship of the best grade, and it is washed, oiled,
polished with scrupulous care. It advances with some deliberation, and
one might fancy hearing in the rattle of its tires, or in the suppressed
flapping of its rear curtain, a word of plaintive protest. "I am not of
the great world," it seems to say; "I make no pretence to fashion. We
are steady and solid, but we are not precisely in society, and we are
far, very far indeed, from any attempt to cut a great figure. However, do
not misunderstand our position; it is not that we are under, nor that we
are exactly aside; perhaps we have been left just a little behind. Yes,
that might express it--just a little behind."

How are they to catch up again--how rejoin the great caravan whose fast
and furious pace never ceases, never slackens? Not, assuredly, by the
help of the little sorrel mare, whose white mane swings so mildly, and
whose pale eyelashes droop so diffidently when some official hand at a
crowded crossing brings her to a temporary stand-still. Not by the help
of the coachman, who wears a sack-coat and a derby hat, and whose frank,
good-natured face turns about occasionally for a friendly participation
in the talk that is going on behind. Can it be, then, that any hopes for
an accelerated movement are packed away in the bulging portmanteau which
rests squeezed in between the coachman's legs? Two stout straps keep it
from bursting, and the crinkled brown leather of its sides is completely
pasted over with the mementoes used by the hosts of the Old World to
speed the parting guest. "London" and "Paris" shine in the lustre of the
last fortnight; "Tangier" is distinctly visible; "Buda-Pest" may be
readily inferred despite the overlapping labels of "Wien" and "Bâle";
while away off to one corner a crumpled and lingering shred points back,
though uncertainly, to the Parthenon and the Acropolis. And in the midst
of this flowery field is planted a large M after the best style of the
White Star Line.

Who has come home bearing all these sheaves?

Is it, to begin with, the young girl who shares the front seat with the
driver, and who faces with an innocent unconcern all the clamor and evil
of a great city? There is a half-smile on her red lips, and her black
eyes sparkle with a girlish gayety--for she does not know how bad the
world is. At the same time her chin advances confidently, and her dark
eyebrows contract with a certain soft imperiousness--for she does not
know how hard the world is nor how unyielding. Sometimes she withdraws
her glance from the jostling throng to study the untidy and overlapping
labels on the big portmanteau; she betrays a certain curiosity, but she
shows at the same time a full determination not to seem over-impressed.
No, the returned traveller is not Rosy Marshall; all that _she_ knows of
life she has learned from the broadcast cheapness of English
story-tellers and from a short year's schooling in New York.

Is it, then, the older girl who fills half of the rear seat and who, as
the cruel phrase goes, will never see thirty again? She seems to be tall
and lean, and one divines, somehow, that her back is narrow and of a
slab-like flatness. Her forehead is high and full, and its bulging
outlines are but slightly softened by a thin and dishevelled bang. Her
eyes are of a light and faded blue, and have the peculiar stare which
results from over-full eyeballs when completely bordered by white. Her
long fingers show knotted joints and nails that seem hopelessly plebeian;
sometimes she draws on open-work lace mitts, and then her hands appear to
be embroiling each other in a mutual tragedy. No, poor Jane is
thoroughly, incorruptibly indigenous; she is the best and dearest girl in
half the world, as you shall see; but all her experiences have lain
between Sandusky and Omaha.

Perhaps, then, the returned traveller is the elderly woman seated by her
side. Perhaps--and perhaps not. For she seems a bit too dry and sapless
and self-contained--as little susceptible, in fact, to the gentle dews of
travel as an umbrella in a waterproof case. Moreover, it is doubtful if
her bonnet would pass current beyond the national confines. One surmises
that she became years ago the victim of arrested development; that she
is a kind of antiquated villager--a geologic survival from an earlier
age; that she is a house-keeper cumbered and encompassed by minute cares
largely of her own making. It is an easy guess that, for Eliza Marshall,
London is in another world, that Tangier is but a remote and
impracticable abstraction, and that all her strength and fortitude might
be necessary merely to make the trip to Peoria.

There is but one other occupant of the carriage remaining--the only one,
after all, who can or could be the owner of the baggage. He is a young
man of twenty-three, and he sits with his back to the horse on a little
seat which has been let down for the occasion between the usual two; his
knees crowd one of the girls and his elbows the other. He seems
uncommonly alert and genial; he focusses brilliantly the entire attention
of the party. His little black mustache flaunts with a picturesque
upward flourish, and it is supplemented by a small tuft at the edge of
his underlip--an embellishment which overlays any slight trace of
lingering juvenility with an effect which is most knowing, experienced,
caprine, if you like, and which makes fair amends for the blanched
cheeks, wrinkled brows and haggard eyes that the years have yet to
accomplish for him. A navy-blue tie sprinkled with white interlacing
circles spreads loosely and carelessly over the lapels of his coat; and
while his clever eyes dart intelligently from one side to the other of
the crowded thoroughfare, his admiring family make their own shy
observations upon his altered physiognomy and his novel apparel--upon
his shoes and his hat particularly; they become acquainted thus with the
Florentine ideal of foot-wear, and the latest thing evolved by Paris in
the way of head-gear.

This young man has passed back through London quite unscathed. Deduce
from his costume the independence of his character and the precise slant
of his propensities.

The carriage moves on, with a halt here, a spurt there, and many a jar
and jolt between; and Truesdale Marshall throws over the shifting and
resounding panorama an eye freshened by a four years' absence and
informed by the contemplation of many strange and diverse spectacles.
Presently a hundred yards of unimpeded travel ends in a blockade of
trucks and street-cars and a smart fusillade of invective. During this
enforced stoppage the young man becomes conscious of a vast unfinished
structure that towers gauntly overhead through the darkening and
thickening air, and for which a litter of iron beams in the roadway
itself seems to promise an indefinite continuation skyward.

"Two, three, four--six, seven--nine," he says, craning his neck and
casting up his eye. Then, turning with a jocular air to the elder lady
opposite, "I don't suppose that Marshall & Belden, for instance, have got
up to nine stories yet!"

"Marshall & Belden!" she repeated. Her enunciation was strikingly
ejaculatory, and she laid an impatient and unforgiving emphasis upon the
latter name. "I don't know what will happen if your father doesn't assert
himself pretty soon."

"I should think as much!" observed the elder girl, explosively; "or they
will never get up even to seven. The idea of Mr. Belden's proposing to
enlarge by taking that ground adjoining! But of course poor pa didn't put
up the building himself, nor anything; oh no! So _he_ doesn't know
whether the walls will stand a couple of extra stories or not. Upon my
word," she went on with increased warmth, "I don't feel quite sure
whether pa was the one to start the business in the first place and to
keep it going along ever since, or whether he's just a new errand-boy,
who began there a week ago! August, are we stuck here to stay forever?"

The little sorrel mare started up again and entered upon another stage of
her journey. The first lights began to appear in the store-fronts; the
newsboys were shrieking the last editions of the evening papers; the
frenzied comedy of belated shopping commenced to manifest itself upon the
pavements.

The throng of jostling women was especially thick and eager before a vast
and vulgar front whose base was heaped with cheap truck cheaply ticketed,
and whose long row of third-story windows was obscured by a great reach
of cotton cloth tacked to a flimsy wooden frame. Unprecedented bargains
were offered in gigantic letters by the new proprietors, "Eisendrath &
Heide..."--the rest of the name flapped loosely in the wind.

"Alas, poor Wethersby, I knew him well," observed Marshall, absently. He
cast a pensive eye upon the still-remaining name of the former
proprietor, and took off his hat to weigh it in his hands with a pretence
of deep speculation. "Well, the Philistines haven't got hold of _us_ yet,
have they?" he remarked, genially; he had not spent six months in Vienna
for nothing. "I suppose we are still worth twenty sous in the franc, eh?"

"I suppose," replied his mother, with a grim brevity. She rather groped
for his meaning, but she was perfectly certain of her own.

"I guess pa's all right," declared his sister, "as long as he is left
alone and not interfered with."

The evening lights doubled and trebled--long rows of them appeared
overhead at incalculable altitudes. The gongs of the cable cars clanged
more and more imperiously as the crowds surged in great numbers round
grip and trailer. The night life of the town began to bestir itself, and
little Rosy, from her conspicuous place, beamed with a bright intentness
upon its motley spectacle, careless of where her smiles might fall. For
her the immodest theatrical poster drooped in the windows of saloons, or
caught a transient hold upon the hoardings of uncompleted buildings;
brazen blare and gaudy placards (disgusting rather than indecent) invited
the passer-by into cheap museums and music-halls; all the unclassifiable
riff-raff that is spawned by a great city leered from corners, or
slouched along the edge of the gutters, or stood in dark doorways, or
sold impossible rubbish in impossible dialects wherever the public
indulgence permitted a foothold.

To Rosy's mother all this involved no impropriety. Eliza Marshall's
Chicago was the Chicago of 1860, an Arcadia which, in some dim and
inexplicable way, had remained for her an Arcadia still--bigger, noisier,
richer, yet different only in degree, and not essentially in kind. She
herself had traversed these same streets in the days when they were the
streets of a mere town, Fane, accompanying her mother's courses as a
child, had seen the town develop into a city. And now Rosy followed in
her turn, though the _urbs in horto_ of the earlier time existed only
in the memory of "old settlers" and in the device of the municipal
seal, while the great Black City stood out as a threatening and evil
actuality. Mild old Mabel had drawn them all in turn or together, and had
philosophized upon the facts as little as any of them; but Rosy's brother
(who had been about, and who knew more than he was ever likely to tell)
looked round at her now and then with a vague discomfort.

"There!" called their mother, suddenly; "did you see that?" A big lumpish
figure on the crossing had loomed up at the mare's head, a rough hand had
seized her bridle, and a raw voice with a rawer brogue had vented a piece
of impassioned profanity on both beast and driver. "Well, I don't thank
that policeman for hitting Mabel on the nose, I can tell him. August,
did you get his number?"

"No'm," answered the coachman. He turned round familiarly. "I got his
breath."

"I should think so," said Truesdale. "And such shoes as they have, and
such hands, and such linen! Didn't that fellow see what we were? Couldn't
he realize that we pay for the buttons on his coat? Mightn't he have
tried to apprehend that we were people of position here long before he
had scraped his wretched steerage-money together? And what was it he had
working in his cheek?"

"I think I know," responded August mumbling.

"Like enough," rejoined Truesdale, with his eye upon the coachman's own
jaw.

His mother's sputter of indignation died rapidly away. It was, indeed,
her notion that the guardians of the public peace should show some degree
of sobriety, respect, neatness, and self-control, as well as a reasonable
familiarity with the accents of the country; but her Arcadia was full of
painful discrepancies, and she did not add to her own pain by too serious
an attempt to reconcile them. Besides, what is a policeman compared with
a detective?

Mabel, released from the arm of the law, jarred over another line of car
tracks, whereon a long row of monsters glared at one another's slow
advances with a single great red eye, and then she struck a freer gait on
the succeeding stretch of Belgian blocks. Presently she passed a lofty
building which rose in colonnades one above another, but whose walls were
stained with smoke, whose windows were half full of shattered panes,
and whose fraudulent metallic cornice curled over limply and jarred and
jangled in the evening breeze--one more of the vicissitudes of mercantile
life.

"Well, I'm glad the fire-fiend hasn't got Marshall & Co. yet," said the
young man, restored to good-humor by the sight of another's misfortune.
He used unconsciously the old firm name.

"But he'd get us fast enough if the insurance was taken off," declared
Jane. "Do you know, Dicky," she went on, "how much that item costs us a
year? Or have you any idea how much it has amounted to in the last
twenty, without our ever getting one cent back? Well, there's ten
thousand in the Hartford and eight in the Monongahela and eleven in--"

"Dear me, Jane!" exclaimed her brother, in some surprise; "where do you
pick up all this?"

Rosy turned her head half round. "Mr. Brower tells her," she said, with a
disdainful brevity.

Her face was indistinct in the twilight, but if its expression
corresponded with the inflection of her voice, her nostrils were inflated
and her lips were curled in disparagement. To Jane, in her dark corner of
the carriage, this was patent enough. Indeed, it was sufficiently obvious
to all that Jane's years availed little to save her from the searching
criticism of her younger sister, and that Miss Rosamund Marshall bestowed
but slight esteem--or, at least, but slight approval--upon Mr. Theodore
Brower.

"Supposing he _does_ tell me!" called Jane, absurdly allowing herself to
be put on the defensive. "It's a mighty good thing, I take it. If there's
anybody else in the family but me who knows or cares anything about poor
pa's business, I should like to be told who it is!"

"That will do, Jane," sounded her mother's voice in cold correction.
"There's no need for you to talk so. Your father has run his own business
now for thirty-five years, with every year better than the year before,
and I imagine he knows how to look out for himself. Thank goodness, we
are on a respectable pavement once more."

Mabel, turning a sudden corner, had given them a quick transition from
the rattle and jar of granite to the gentle palpitation that is possible
on well-packed macadam. The carriage passed in review a series of
towering and glittering hotels, told off a score or more of residences of
the elder day, and presently drew up before the gate of an antiquated
homestead in the neighborhood of the Panoramas.

"Just the same old place," murmured Truesdale, as he writhed out of his
cramped quarters and stood on the carriage-block in the dusk to stretch
his legs. "Wonderful how we contrive to stand stock-still in the midst of
all this stir and change!"




II


It was at Vevey, one morning late in August, that Truesdale Marshall
received the letter which turned his face homeward--the summons which
made it seem obligatory for him to report at headquarters, as he phrased
it, without too great a delay. He was pacing along the terrace which
bounded the pension garden lakeward, and his eye wandered back and forth
between the superscription of the envelope and the distant mountain-shore
of Savoy, as it appeared through the tantalizing line of clipped acacias
which bordered the roadway that ran below him.

"'Richard T. Marshall, Esq.,'" he read, slowly, with his eye on the
accumulation of post-marks and renewed addresses. "They keep it up right
along, don't they? I can't make them feel that initials on an envelope
are not the best form. I can't bring them to see that 'Esq.' on foreign
letters is worse than a superfluity." He referred once more to the
mountains of Savoy; they seemed to offer no loophole of escape. "Well,
I've got to do it, I suppose."

He made some brief calculations, and found that he could put himself in
marching order within a month or so. There was the trunk stored at
Geneva; there was that roomful of furniture at Freiburg--Freiburg-im-
Breisgau; there was that brace of paintings boxed up in Florence; and
there were the frayed and loosely flying ends of many miscellaneous
friendships.

"I should think the end of October might do for them," he droned,
reflectively. "They can't mean to cut me off any shorter than that."

He saw the steamer taking on passengers between the two rotund
chestnut-trees that adorned the end of the stubby little stone pier.
Voices of shrieking gladness came across from the coffee-tables on the
terrace of the Three Crowns, his nearest neighbor to the right.

"Well, America is meeting me half way," he said; "I don't want to seem
reluctant myself. Suppose we make it Southampton, about October 15th?"

Truesdale Marshall had been away from home and friends for about the
length of time ordinarily required by a course through college, but it
was not at college that most of this period had been passed. He had left
Yale at the end of his sophomore year, and had taken passage, not for
Chicago, but for Liverpool, compromising thus his full claims on nurture
from an alma mater for the more alluring prospect of culture and
adventure on the Continent. This supplementary course of self-improvement
and self-entertainment had now continued for three years.

He had written back to his family at discreet intervals, his
communications not being altogether untinctured, it is true, by
considerations of a financial nature; and his sister Jane, who charged
herself with the preservation of this correspondence, would have
undertaken to reconstruct his route and to make a full report of his
movements up to date on ten minutes' notice. She kept his letters in a
large box-file that she had teased from her father at the store; and two
or three times a year she overhauled her previous entries, so to speak,
and added whatever new ones were necessary to bring her books down to the
present day.

She pleased herself, on the occasion of such reviews, with the thought
that her brother's long absence was so largely and so laboriously
educational. There, for example, was his winter and spring at Heidelberg,
which she figured as given over to Kant and Hegel. This sojourn was
attested by a photograph which showed her brother in a preposterous
little round cap, as well as with a bar of sticking-plaster (not markedly
philosophical, it must be confessed) upon one cheek.

Again, there was his six months' stay in Paris, during which time he had
dabbled in pigments at one of the studios affected by Americans. Her
vouchers for this period consisted of several water-colors; they were
done in a violent and slap-dash fashion, and had been inspired,
apparently, by scenes in the environs of the capital. They were marked
"Meudon" and "St. Cloud" and "Suresnes," with the dates; both names and
dates were put where they showed up very prominently. Jane was rather
overcome by these sketches on a first view, and after she had pinned them
up on the walls of her bedroom (she had made no scruple over an immediate
individual appropriation) she was obliged to acknowledge that you had to
step back some little distance in order to "get them."

Then there was his year at Milan, during which he was engaged in the
cultivation of his voice at the Conservatory. "A whole year," said
innocent Jane to herself; "think of Dick's staying in one place as long
as that!" She made no account of the easily accessible joys of Monte
Carlo, but figured him, instead, as running interminable scales at all
hours of day and night, and as participating, now and then, in the chorus
at the Scala, for which purpose, as he wrote her, he had had a pair
of tights made to order. In another letter he sent her a pen-and-ink
sketch of himself as he appeared while studying the last act of
"Favorita." He explained that the large looking-glasses surrounding him
were designed to give the disillusioned Fernando opportunity to see
whether his facial expression was corresponding to the nature of the
music he was interpreting.

All this completely overpowered poor Jane; it enveloped her brother's
head in a roseate halo; it wrapped him in the sweet and voluminous folds
of a never-failing incense; it imparted a warm glow to his coolish summer
in the Engadine, and it illumined his archaeological prowlings through
the Peloponnesus; it opened up a dozen diverging vistas to the
enthusiastic girl herself, and advanced her rapidly in long courses of
expansion and improvement. Above all, it filled her with a raging
impatience for his return. "Between him and me," she would say to
herself, "something _may_ be done. Pa'll never do anything to get us out
of this rut; nor ma. Neither will Roger nor Alice. And Rosy--well, Rosy's
too young to count on, yet. But Richard Truesdale Marshall, the younger
son of the well-known David Marshall, of Lake Street, recently returned
from a long course of travel and study abroad"--she seemed to be quoting
from the printed column--"_can_. Especially when assisted by his sister,
the clever and intellectual Miss Jane Marshall, who--"

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