The Gay Cockade
"Ahead of what?" asked O-liver.
Atwood was vague. He felt himself a rising citizen. Some day he expected
to marry and set his wife up in a mansion in San Francisco, with
seasons of rest and recreation at Del Monte and Coronado and the East.
If the shoe business kept to the present rate of prosperity he would
probably have millions to squander in his old age.
He tried to say something of this to O-liver.
"Well, will you be any happier?" asked the young man with the bare head.
"I'll wager my horse against your car that when you're drunk with
dollars you'll look back to a day like this and envy yourself. It's
happiness I'm talking about."
"Well, are you happy?" Atwood challenged.
"Why not?" asked the young man lightly. "I have enough to eat, money for
tobacco, a book or two--an audience." He waved his hand to include the
listening group and smiled.
It was O-liver's lightness which gave him the whip hand in an argument.
They were most of them serious men; not serious in a Puritan sense of
taking thought of their souls' salvation and the world's redemption, but
serious in their pursuit of wealth. They had to be rich. If they weren't
they couldn't marry, or if they were married they had to be rich so that
their wives could keep up with the wives of the other fellows who were
getting rich. They had to have cars and money to spend at big hotels and
for travel, money for diamonds and furs, money for everything.
But here was O-liver Lee, who said lightly that money weighed upon him.
He didn't want it. He'd be darned if he wanted it. Money brought
burdens. As for himself, he'd read and ride Mary Pick.
"Anyhow," said Henry, with his hands folded across his stomach--Henry
had grown fat riding in his car--"anyhow, when you get old you'll be
sorry."
"I shall never grow old," said O-liver, and stood up. "I shall be
young--till I--die."
They laughed at him outwardly, but in their hearts they did not laugh.
They could not think of him as old. They felt that in a hundred years he
would still be strong and sure, his blond mane untouched by gray, his
clear blue eyes unblurred.
Atwood rounding them all up for a drink found that O-liver wouldn't
drink.
"Drank too much, once upon a time," he confessed frankly. "But I'll give
you a toast."
He gave it, poised on his box like a young god on the edge of the world.
"Here's to poverty! May we learn to love her for the favors she denies!"
"Queer chap," said Atwood to Henry later.
Henry nodded. "He's queer, but he's great company. Always has a crowd
round him. But no ambition."
"Pity," said Atwood. "How'd he get that name--O-liver?"
"One of the fellows got gay and called him 'Ollie.' Lee stopped him. 'My
name is Oliver Lee. If you want a nickname you can say "O-liver." But
I'm not "Ollie" from this time on, understand?' And I'm darned if the
fellow didn't back down. There was something about O-liver that would
have made anybody back down. He didn't have a gun; it was just something
in his voice."
"Say, he's wasted," said Atwood. "A man with his line of talk might be
President of the United States."
"Sure he might," Henry agreed. "I've told him a lot of times he's
throwing away his chance."
II
The office of the incipient oil king was on the main street of the
straggling town. At the back there was a window which gave a view of a
hill or two and a mountain beyond. The mountain stuck its nose into the
clouds and was whitecapped.
It was this view at the back which O-liver faced when he sat at his
machine. When he rested he liked to fix his eyes on that white mountain.
O-liver had acquired of late a fashion of looking up. There had been a
time when he had kept his eyes on the ground. He did not care to
remember that time. The work that he did was intermittent, and between
his industrious spasms he read a book. He had a shelf at hand where he
kept certain volumes--Walt Whitman, Vanity Fair, Austin Dobson, Landor's
Imaginary Conversations, and a rather choice collection of Old Mission
literature. He had had it in mind that he might some day write a play
with Santa Barbara as a background, but he had stopped after the first
act. He had ridden down one night and had reached the mission at dawn.
The gold cross had flamed as the sun rose over the mountain. After that
it had seemed somehow a desecration to put it in a painted scene.
O-liver had rather queer ideas as to the sacredness of certain things.
Tommy Drew, who had a desk in the same office, read Vanity Fair and
wanted to talk about it. "Say, I don't like that girl, O-liver."
"What girl?"
"Becky."
"Why not?"
"Well, she's a grafter. And her husband was a poor nut."
"I'm afraid he was," said O-liver.
"He oughta of dragged her round by the hair of her head."
"They don't do it, Tommy," O-liver was thoughtful. "After all a woman's
a woman. It's easier to let her go."
An astute observer might have found O-liver cynical about women. If he
said nothing against them he certainly never said anything for them. And
he kept strictly away from everything feminine in Tinkersfield, in spite
of the fact that his good looks won him more than one glance from
sparkling eyes.
"He acts afraid of skirts," Henry had said to Tommy on one occasion.
"He?" Tommy was scornful. "He ain't afraid of anything!"
Henry knew it. "Maybe it's because you can't do much with women on
fifteen a week."
"Well, I guess that's so," said Tommy, who made twenty and who had a
hopeless passion.
His hopeless passion was Jane. Jane lived with her mother in a small
rose-bowered bungalow at the edge of the town. She and her mother owned
the bungalow, which was fortunate; they hadn't a penny for rent. Jane's
father had died of a weak lung and the failure of his oil well. He had
left the two women without an income. Jane's mother was delicate and
Jane couldn't leave her to go out to work. So Jane dug in the little
garden, and they lived largely on vegetables. She sewed for the
neighbors, and bought medicine and now and then a bit of meat. She was
young and strong and she had wonderful red hair. Tommy thought it was
the most beautiful hair in the world. Jane was for him a sort of goddess
woman. She was, he felt, infinitely above him. She knew a great deal
that he didn't, about books and things--like O-liver. She sewed for his
mother, and that was the way he had met her. He would go over and sit on
her front steps and talk. He felt that she treated him like a little dog
that she wouldn't harm, but wouldn't miss if it went away. He told her
of Vanity Fair and of how he felt about Becky.
"If she had been content to earn an honest living," Jane stated
severely, "the story would have had a different ending."
"Well, she wanted things," Tommy said.
"Most women do." Jane jabbed her needle into a length of pink gingham
which, when finished, would be rompers for a youngster across the
street. "I do; and I intend to have them."
"How?" asked the interested Tommy.
"Work for them."
"O-liver says that fifteen dollars a week is enough for anybody to
earn."
Jane had heard of O-liver. Tommy sang his constant praises.
"Why fifteen?"
"After that you get soft."
Jane laid down the length of pink gingham and looked at him. She hated
to sew on pink; it clashed dreadfully with her hair.
"I should say," she stated with scorn, "that your O-liver's lazy."
"No, he isn't. He only wants enough to eat and enough to smoke and
enough to read."
"That sounds all right, but it isn't. What's he going to do when he's
old?"
"He ain't ever going to grow old. He said so, and if you'd see him you'd
know."
Jane felt within her the stirring of curiosity. But she put it down
sternly. She had no time for it.
"Tommy," she said, "I've been thinking. I've got to earn more money, and
I want your help."
Tommy's faithful eyes held a look of doglike affection.
"Oh, if I can--" he quavered.
"I've got to get ahead." Jane was breathless. Her eyes shone.
"I've got to get ahead, Tommy. I can't live all my life like this." She
held up the pink strip. "Even if I am a woman, there ought to be
something more than making rompers for the rest of my days."
"You might," said the infatuated Tommy, "marry."
"Marry? Marry whom?"
Tommy wished that he might shout "Me!" from the housetops. But he knew
the futility of it.
"I shall never marry," she said, "until I find somebody different from
anything I've ever seen."
Jane's ideas of men were bounded largely by the weakness of her father
and the crudeness of men like Henry Bittinger, Atwood Jones and others
of their kind. She didn't consider Tommy at all. He was a nice boy and a
faithful friend. His mother, too, was a faithful friend. She classed
them together.
Her plan, told with much coming and going of lovely color, was this: She
had read that the way to make money was to find the thing that a
community lacked and supply it. Considering it seriously she had decided
that in Tinkersfield there was need of good food.
"There's just one horrid little eating house," she told Tommy, "when the
men come in from out of town."
"Nothing fit to eat either," Tommy agreed; "and they make up on booze."
She nodded. "Tommy," she said, and leaned toward him, "I had thought of
sandwiches--home-made bread and slices of ham--wrapped in waxed paper;
and of taking them down and selling them in front of the post-office on
Saturday nights."
Tommy's eyes bulged. "You take them down?"
"Why not? Any work is honorable, Tommy."
Tommy felt that it wouldn't be a goddess role.
"I can't see it." The red crept up into his honest freckled face. "You
know the kind of women that's round on Saturday nights."
"I am not that kind of woman." She was suddenly austere.
He found himself stammering. "I didn't mean--"
"Of course you didn't. But it's a good plan, Tommy. Say you think it's a
good plan."
He would have said anything to please her. "Well, you might try."
The next day he found himself talking it over with O-liver. "She wants
to sell them on Saturday nights."
"Tell her," said O-liver, "to stay at home."
"But she's got to have some money."
"Money," said O-liver, "is the root of evil. You say she has a garden.
Let her live on leeks and lettuce."
"Leeks and lettuce?" said poor Tommy, who had never heard of leeks.
"Her complexion will be better," said O-liver, "and her peace of mind
great."
"Her complexion is perfect," Tommy told him, "and she isn't the peaceful
kind. Her hair is red."
"Red-haired women"--O-liver had his eye on Vanity Fair--"red-haired
women always flaunt themselves."
Tommy, softening O-liver's words a bit, gave them in the form of advice
to Jane: "He thinks you'd better live on leeks and lettuce than go
down-town like that."
Jane gasped. "Leeks and lettuce? Me? He doesn't know what he's talking
about! And anyhow, what can you expect of a man like that?"
III
A week later Jane in a white shirt-waist and white apron came down with
her white-covered basket into the glare of the town's white lights. The
night was warm and she wore no hat. Her red hair was swept back from her
forehead with a droop over the ears. She had white skin and strong white
teeth. Her eyes were as gray as the sea on stormy days. Tommy came after
her with a wooden box, which he set on end, and she placed her basket on
it. The principal stores of the small town, the one hotel and the
post-office were connected by a covered walk which formed a sort of
arcade, so that the men lounging against doorways or tip-tilted in
chairs seemed in a sort of gallery from which they surveyed the
Saturday-night crowd which paraded the street.
Jane folded up the cloth which covered her basket and displayed her