Teeftallow/Chapter 14

AT EXACTLY four-thirty-six of the same afternoon—precision in matter of time being almost forced upon one in the jeweller's repair business—A. M. Belshue, watch tinker and village infidel, sat at his desk with the light from his dingy window filtering down over him and with his magnifying glass screwed monstrously into his left eye. He was soldering together the broken hand of a tiny Swiss watch and was getting along badly with his work. He interrupted himself every few minutes by leaning forward and peering at an acute angle through his window down the street. The reason for this was that at some uncertain moment at about this time of the afternoon Nessie Sutton would walk out of the Grand, where she worked, on her way home. And if he could hit the exact moment of her departure, he could, by leaning forward and peering at an angle, get a ten- or twelve-second view of the milliner's assistant as she walked away.

Belshue's nervous straining after a glimpse of the girl told several things about the jeweller. One was that he did not feel at all sure of Miss Sutton; another, that he had never put his arms about her and kissed her, for just as marriage loses for the husband all those little eagernesses and ardours which go to make up the lover, so the ripening familiarities of courtship destroy those first gazings and wistfulness of the eye which serve as airy kisses and caresses until some soldier demonstration takes their place.

As the time drew near when Nessie either must go, or else already had gone without having been seen—this last a painful possibility—Mr. Belshue abandoned his task altogether, got up, walked around the little railing which kept ​the curious from meddling with his tools, went to the door and looked out. He leaned against his dirty casement and watched the village street as it lay in the afternoon light. He looked and looked, apparently at nothing. Every person who passed out of the door of the Grand delivered a little shock, and, an instant later, a little disappointment to the graying stoop-shouldered man who stood motionless in the door of the jeweller's shop. He waited but for Nessie's pleasant figure to fall upon his eyes. He knew she would not so much as glance around at him as she went; she never did. But there was something warming to the jeweller in the mere view of Nessie, as if the sun shone upon him. The fact that within three hours he would call on her, talk to her, gaze on her to his fill, all that had no reference to this immediate craving. He must see her at this very moment. So he stood looking and looking with the demented patience of a lover, afraid to remove his eyes for a moment from the stodgy entrance of the Grand lest he miss her altogether.

Presently it became apparent even to Belshue that he must have come to the door too late. He glanced into his shop to verify this. Beside his desk stood a large board on which were hung more than a score of watches which he was regulating. The hands of all these watches, with a unanimity uncommon among timepieces, stood at precisely twelve minutes after five. So he had missed her. Nessie always left the Grand before five. That was the hour set for her departure, and like all girl employees in all businesses, she watched the clock and left the Grand on the dot.

Mr. Belshue turned back into his shop and stood by the rail looking at the brace which held the tiny gold hand of the Swiss watch ready for soldering. He had no heart to return to his work. He looked again at the boardful of watches as if somehow they had tricked him. The round-faced chronometers returned his stare impassively. In the silence of the shop their many tickings filled his ears as with the flight of numberless tiny feet. As he listened to it with fancies tuned to disappointment, it sounded as if Time might ​be a Lilliputian army double-quicking (to what purpose?) down the endless slope of eternity.

Belshue gave up the shank of the afternoon altogether; he brushed briefly at any dust of glint of gold filings which might have clung to his clothes; then, glancing at his watches again, this time to calculate how long it would be before he really called on Nessie Sutton, he turned out into the village street.

Now, as a matter of fact, Mr. Belshue had nowhere at all to go. There were four or five places in the village where men congregated for whatever social life was possible in Irontown. "Loafing places," the villagers called them, and all the communal life they enjoyed was given this ungracious and derogatory name of "loafing."

There was rather an unexpected range to the village "loafing places" from the thoroughgoing obscenity of the garage up through Bell's Grocery, Bingham's Butcher Shop, to the religio-philosophical gatherings in Fuller's Drug Store. But in few of these places and only on rare occasions would any one debate with Mr. belshue the existence of God, so the jeweller came and went, filled with a rancorous and unused dialectic.

On this particular evening Belshue did not stop or want to stop at any of these places. He walked along the tranquil street wishing that Nessie were with him, but she never would walk with him in the village. It was one of her notions which pained the jeweller at times, but she would get over that; at least, he hoped she would.

As Belshue passed Fuller's Drug Store he heard an aggressive voice inside demanding, "Gentlemen, see if you can get this 'un: If the half of nine is three what would the third of twenty be?"

Came a chorus of "But, perfesser, the half of nine ain't three. . . ."

At that moment, Mr. Ditmas, the engineer, came out of the door of the drug store lighting a cigar with a twinkle ​of amusement in his eyes. Belshue was moved out of his taciturnity to ask who was the man inside.

"That's Professor Lemuel Overall," smiled Ditmas. "I understand he is to teach the Irontown school."

The rather genial satire in the remark and the friendly way Ditmas dropped in at his side inclined the jeweller toward the Northerner. All the other villagers were rather stiff around Belshue—in fact, were a little afraid of him. The engineer, however, paid no regard to the cloven hoof of the village infidel but moved along smiling at the village professor. Presently he said quite gaily, "I really ought to have it in for you, Belshue. You are the one who broke up my ball game last Sunday." He offered the jeweller a cigar.

"I!" exclaimed Belshue in surprise. He took the cigar awkwardly, for such an amenity had been offered him hardly twice in his life.

"Yes, your espousal killed it. It was an instance of 'God deliver me from my friends.'" Mr. Ditmas laughed heartily. "How long have you been living here?"

"All my life," answered the jeweller, puzzled.

"That's odd. With your anti-religious views, somehow I felt you might be a Northern man."

"Are there lots of infidels up there?" asked Belshue naïvely.

"We don't exactly use that term," said Ditmas, his eyes resuming their faintly amused expression. "If we speak of the matter we say a man has liberal ideas. Life in the North doesn't seem to revolve around religious creeds as it does down here. One believes what he likes and nothing is thought about the matter."

"Queer state of affairs," mused Belshue. He could hardly conceive a state of society where religion was not the paramount topic. "What do you Northern folks discuss, what do you think about?"

Ditmas puffed thoughtfully. "Well, when you leave out ​business, we are occupied with sports, fiction, drama, pictures, dancing, science, philosophy, and such things."

It was noteworthy that every single item in Mr. Ditmas's list was reckoned sinful by the hill folk. This religious preoccupation had so seeped in around Belshue that the jeweller himself accounted such things, if not immoral, at least a wilful waste of time.

"Don't you Northern people believe something about eternity and a future life?" probed the jeweller out of this mental background.

The engineer glanced at him. "It is hardly ever discussed."

"What do you think about it individually?" persisted the jeweller curiously.

"I—" The engineer paused to consider what he did think about it—"Well, I think we persist after death through our children."

The jeweller stared at him. "That isn't us."

"In a way it is. Our children were once part of us. Then the Old Testament suggests it. It says no man who is emasculated shall enter the Kingdom of Heaven."

Belshue was surprised. "I didn't know that."

"It does. You see, the Jews had an idea there was a close connection between reproduction and salvation. Of course, our modern life has broken up that feeling of solidarity in a family which permitted a man genuinely to feel that he was living on in his descendants. The American family is a far more casual assembly of individuals than was the old Hebrew family."

"But the Bible speaks of Heaven and eternal life," persisted the jeweller.

"That's true, but have you never observed that every religious injunction points directly toward the welfare of the young? Take the basic ten commandments. 'Thou shalt not commit adultery.' Why did Moses pick out the specific sin, adultery, whereas fornication is treated as a much lesser evil? There is no spiritual difference between the two. ​It is simply because adultery corrupts the home and strikes at the welfare of the children; while fornication is very likely to found a home and protect the resulting children. You see the details of our religious thought are aimed at the preservation of the young. Our present moral code tends to the same direction. All of our novels and plays which exhibit life beyond kindergarten experience fall under the censorship of the Cornstock society. The novelist who presents life as pap for babes is praised for his loftiness of purpose and purity of ideas. In fact, there has always been an effort in America to cut its artistic output to fit the nursery.

"Now, is it at all probable, if men possess an eternal soul, that its advancement in a future life would depend on exactly those acts and sentiments which assist in making the world safe for children? Would it not be quite the reverse? It would be a grasping of the actual complexities of life in order thoroughly to master it if we really had an infinitude of life bearing down upon us. No, the general tendency of human culture shows that our personalities cease at the grave." Mr. Ditmas thumped his cigar stump away.

"So you really are an atheist, after all," said Belshue.

"Not at all," denied Ditmas sharply, "if the whirl of nebulous gas can develop worlds which produce creatures of such profound sacrificial instincts that they refuse to look truth in the eye for the benefit of the unborn, creation cannot be dubbed Godless. Consider the pains and the trouble the human race goes to never to think coherently on any question; it is as beautifully pathetic as the stork which feathers its nest from the down plucked from its own bleeding bosom. All other animals see things simply as they are, but man has reached a point where he sees nothing as it is. Only a God could accomplish that."

The two men walked on through the evening with scarcely another word. The jeweller was offended. It seemed to him somehow sinful to speak ironically of nothingness. Belshue's feeling were probably the result of the hill life, ​where men are solitary with practically no object of thought save themselves. Hence their religious notions magnify the importance of each individual man. Mr. Ditmas, on the other hand, was a child of the Northern cities with their teeming impersonal millions.