The Genius of Retta Romany Tompkins

IF Penangton had been in England instead of in Missouri, the relative superiority of the Tompkins family would have come to stunted blossom in the title of squire; but the advantage of living in Missouri over living in England is suggested by the aphorism that to title superiority is to limit it. To be heralded a squire is to be heralded as better than a yeoman, but it is also to be heralded as not so good as a lord. Nobody in Missouri could stand that. Instead of being squires, the Tompkins family for three generations had been prosperous citizens; and for three generations they had been the kind of citizens to whom a Western town can most safely allow success. Whatever the degree of success attained by a Tompkins, the stress of it had never yet carried him beyond the claim of Penangton; there had been no lifting him out of the Missouri soil; he had been warm and rich with Missouri, and he had lived and died in Missouri.

Going back three generations, the first Tompkins out from Kentucky was Thousand-acre. He came with the rush in 1816, and on the banks of Big Snibble Creek he took up so much government land and “pitched ” his crops so successfully that being a Tompkins came easier ever after. The son of Thousand-acre was State Rights Tompkins, one of the elect few called down to St. Louis in 1861 to help determine which way Missouri should go. It was Frank Blair, with that great mailed hand of his immediately on the throat of the caucus, who jumped to his feet on the side of the Union in the very fever of the St. Louis discussion, and shouted: “Gentlemen, we waste time! Let us have a country first, and talk politics later! ” And it was old State Rights Tompkins who jumped to his feet next, and caught Blair on the rebound, as though Blair had been a rubber ball. “In God’s name, sir, ” State Rights bellowed, “what better country do you want than Missourah ? ”

And then, continuing in the inevitable Missouri sequence of those days, with gouge of spur and hemp-tied, rotting boots, there dashed to the front State Rights’ son Elmer, Colonel Barehead Tompkins, who rode into Penangton one September evening, hatless, blood-dabbled, and laughing like a lunatic. “The Lyon’s whelps ’most got me, boys! ” he called to the gray-faced men who came hobbling from the Court House steps. “But I said I ’d bring those dispatches through from Jackson, didn’t I?” Elmer was not the sort of man to have thrown away his hat for the sake of riding into Penangton with his yellow hair streaking out behind, but it would have been plain to a baby, if there had been any babies that September, that since the hat was gone the gentleman knew how to make the most of himself without a hat. He made his mare leap forward, he rose in his stirrups, and he yelled over his shoulder: “Well, I guess I got ’em! They got my hat, but I got the dockyments. Erraw for Pap Price ’n’ the State Guard! ” Bareheaded, with the hair blowing back from his gay, thin face, he thundered on toward Academy Hill where Price lay encamped.

State Rights’ daughter, Miss Muriel “Murmur,” was a Tompkins whose talents were essentially and delicately preservative. In the first blush of those talents she compiled a volume of poems from the works of Missouri’s best poets, and styling the compilation Missouri’s Murmurings, the title’s gentle meanderings through happy hearts, winter winds, soft sighs, and rippling rivers finally brought it to rest upon the gifted lady’s own head in an encircling climax not unlike laurel. It also fell to Miss Muriel’s lot, after the finish of Elmer in the wild hours at Bloody Hill and the death of Elmer’s heart-broken father and wife, to supervise his orphan children, and prod them up to what was expected of them as Tompkinses.

During the childhood of Elmer’s son and daughter it was Miss Muriel’s habit, as it was all Penangton’s Habit, to dwell with a certain high-headedness upon the characteristics of the Tompkins girl. “ Her father’s own child, you may say, ” was Miss Muriel’s and Penangton’s way of labeling the girl’s energy, vitality, and tricks of face and gesture, until the child herself took lip the song, and got around in front of her brother with it. “ I’m a Tompkins all over, ain’t I, Marmaduke ? And you are like mother, ain’t you, Marmaduke? ” she would say. And the boy would say yes, with a strange, old feeling of locking arms with his mother, and so standing, white and ineffectual, before a capable world of Tompkinses. Then he would probably lift the girl from some fence to a lower and safer place, or pull herl back from the brink of Little Snibble, or in some other way look out for her and take care of her.

It was not until the girl was fifteen, and had twice run away from the Central Missouri Female Boarding School in St. Louis, that Miss Muriel and Penangton began to see that the Tompkins energy and vitality might prove disturbing elements in a woman, and to set about doing their best by the Tompkins boy, and showing him that since his father had been cut down in the very heat and sweat of accomplishment, and since his sister wasn’t a man, he was expected to finish that father’s record. Having set about this, Penangton and Miss Muriel did it so well that all through his youth Marmaduke had to carry about with him a digging sensation that he ought to do something or other, or be something or other; and all through his youth life presented dark, unsatisfactory spots where the Penangtonians buttonholed him and tried to help him toward a big career.

Perhaps it was General Tom Whittington, his father’s one-time crony, and now deputy United States marshal: “Marmaduke, see here a minute. Would you care for that West Point place ? Seems like a pity to put you in the off-color clothes ; but what ’s past help’s past grief, Marmaduke, and if you can be half as good a fighter as your daddy, seems like a pity not to put you where you can fight.”

Perhaps it was his aunt Muriel herself, with her transparent hand on his shoulder, prodding him poetically: “Whither now, young aspirant? Under which queen ? Scientia ? Justitia ? Martia?”

Meantime Marmaduke was growing up the more helpless to do because the more appreciative of what ought to be done. The boy realized, if the town didn’t, that it was not to be allowed to him, as it had been allowed to his ancestors, to be a pillar of state without ever leaving the porch of Thousandacre. Missouri was too big for that now, and his father had already brought the family name too close to the outer boundaries of Missouri. If the Tompkins record was to be continued, the banner must next, and inevitably, be carried on beyond Missouri. Marmaduke did not want to get beyond Missouri, under no matter how good a banner. It was not only that he hadn’t the capacity for that sort of progression; he didn’t want it. He had accepted the family feeling for Missouri just as it had been handed to him; then, as his town was a good place, something Southern and something Western, and as he was susceptible to the influence of old landmarks, well-known faces, the fair, wide roll of the land, the crunching bite of the river, and the sweep of the wind in the wheat, the feeling had grown as lie grew into an immeasurable devotion to his state and to his town. He saw things as his town saw them; he was accustomed to what his town was accustomed to, and he was convinced, as his town was convinced, that everybody ought to be a Presbyterian, a Methodist, a Baptist, or a Campbellite, and eat supper at night instead of dinner.

It was on a fine June day, close to his twenty-second birthday, that he came home from Chicago, after one last effort at the university somehow to get himself ready to do what was expected of him. When he left the train at the Penangton depot, he doubled straight back into the Thousand-acre land, jumped Little Snibble Creek, climbed a fence into the Red Haw Pasture, fared across that, struck the Fair Ground Road at Big Snibble Bridge, and so up to the great Thousand-acre gate. There he stooped down and patted the earth. “Good old ground,” he said. Once in his old room, he lost no time in getting out of his pepper-andsalt suit, got his stiff shirt up over his head, and flapped his arms vigorously. “Because,” he crowed, “I’m done. Before I ’d squeeze up my soul in kid, before I ’d forget the smell of the ground where the reaper ’s run over, I ’d — well, I don’t squeeze and I don’t forget. That ’s all. As I am, after this, not as I ought by family rights to be. Cau’t be a lawyer, can’t be a soldier; going to be a farmer — and a damn good one almost surely, ” he said, while his eyes rioted outside in the young glory of his fields.

For a few months he lay back easy and fanned himself in the relief his decision had brought him. Miss Muriel had closed Thousand-acre that last winter, because the Fair Ground Road got so bad, and had moved in to the Tompkins town house to live; but it didn’t take Marmaduke very long to marshal the old force of Tompkins darkies back into the kitchen, to the tubs, and into the fields; and he was so well satisfied to be about it, and got so busy selling his wheat and keeping his fences up, that cold weather had fairly come before he saw that the tragedy which his decision had entailed upon the town had worked to the surface and had frozen over Penangton like a great tear. By Christmas time he was having to stand the knowledge that Penangton was saying soberly, “Oh, ’t is n’t as though Marmaduke had taken after his father’s side.”

Two years is a good while to work against the disappointment of your town, against its patiently silent reproach, but it was all of two years — years of close-mouthed effort on Marmaduke’s part to lift some of the results of the war from Thousand-acre — before General Tom Whittington found occasion to say: “Talk to Marmaduke about the farmers’ body militant or the mistakes of the Grangers,and you won’t get him to do nothing but bat his eyes; but harkee, ” — the general cleared a permanent way for the revised opinion by spitting far up the cottonwood tree in front of the Commercial Hotel: “Marmaduke can pitch the southwest quarter of the northwest quarter of section seben in township leben of range thirteeun in chicory beans and reap a mighty good article of wheat off the forty.”

That ought to have meant a good deal to Marmaduke, and undoubtedly would have, had it not been that just at this time he was too absorbed in his sister Retta’s future to care much about his own present, or what Penangton thought or said about it. Retta had gone from the school in St. Louis to a school in New York, and she had now written from the New York school that, please God, she was done with schools, and was going to visit a friend in the city. She said she would stay at the friend’s house until she could think up another place. “And the place won’t be Penangton,” she said.

As the girl had moved restlessly farther and farther from Marmaduke and Thousand-acre, it had followed, as one of the results of his nature, that Marmaduke had all the more braced himself, ready and waiting, for whatever she might by and by require of him. Almost unconsciously, the religious feeling that was his by inheritance came to be doubly his by necessity, in the matter of Retta’s future. He had grown to feel that the only thing to do was to turn the matter over to God; that it was too much for him. But long after Penangton had given Retta up, and long after Miss Muriel had ceased to speak of her except with a frightened sigh, Marmaduke kept hoping that all that fanfare of childish ability in Retta might yet mean something, that she might some day do something that would pull both her and him to a fair level with the dead-and-gone Tompkinses, even while he kept fearing that she might some day do something so terrible that she would pull both her and him down too low for the shadow Tompkinses on the heights ever to recognize them. There was a cheerfulness in his conviction that he would go up or down with Retta that gave it the free dignity of a determination, and there was enough of a haunting prescience that the journey would be down to give the conviction the set face of courage.

It was out in the wheat at Thousandacre, one day, that he lifted up his eyes and saw a boy coming toward him, waving something that was flat and white; and though the boy was little he was accurate, and he landed fair at Marmaduke’s feet. In another flash the special letter was open and Marmaduke was reading: —

“MARMADUKE, DEAR, — You see I haven’t been telling you all I’ve been up to these last few weeks. I’ve been meeting some people and pulling some strings, and now such a splendid thing has happened. I ’m going on the stage. And right in the beginning, don’t you get the idea that you or anybody can stop me. It means too much to me. It’s a great thing for me, even if I do have to begin at the bottom. I don’t care where I begin. I don’t care how I begin. The thing is to begin — begin — begin ” —

The letter blurred under Marmaduke’s eyes, and he stared about him. The post-office boy was cutting along the fence path, slashing at the fluffyheaded wheat as he went. The darky on the reaper had turned on the upsweep, and only his back was visible, a round, sweat-stained back, which soon disappeared through the barn gate. Down on Snibble a bird crinkled her timid toes in the shallows, gave a cheep of terror, and careened into the air toward some distant nest. Every man and bird and beast on Thousand-acre, just at that hour, was bound for home, where the niche of shelter was. Would all of them find the way ? The man would: he rooted close to earth, where there is room. The boy would: a boy can always squeeze in. But the bird yonder, already far up in the tremulous air, — would it find the way ? It was flying to the north now, where the town stretched out as calm and cocksure as though no baneful news ever seeped into it. In a little while the town must know. Then the talk.

“ Ah, God! ” cried Marmaduke, “ the talk! ” He turned to the letter again.

“ Oh, Marmaduke, I know I’m a silly to believe them, but they say it isn’t just talent: they say it’s genius; they say I owe it to the world as well as to myself to go on the stage ” —

“They! ” snarled Marmaduke, — “ they! And who may they be ? Some yellow-skinned, thick-lipped son of a pawnbroker; some lying, hump-nosed scoundrel who knows of the girl’s money ; some — Ah, God! ” cried Marmaduke again, dropping crazily down into the wheat. “Why do you let it happen? Why did n’t you protect her? I trusted you, I trusted.” The letter rustled waitingly on the wheat heads while he dug at his eyes.

“ They say there is no question about my career, that I ’m sure of a great future ” —

“Oh yes, great — of sin and suffering, ” choked Marmaduke.

“Of course I’ve got to start almost at the bottom. At first I thought I should have to start at the very bottom, and when the extras were called for the Far From Home Company I went down to the theatre to take my medicine with the rest; but Goldberg happened to be there, and seemed to notice me, for I saw him go over to Silbermann, who is staging the play, and say something, and directly I was singled out for a little business part. Oh, Marmaduke, ever since then the world’s been turned upside down, and I’ve been walking with my feet inside heaven. Be glad. I don’t stop now till I get to the top. I want you to come a little later to see my success. It’s not to be a little success, not just a Penangton, Tompkinsy success. The whole wide world is to ring with it. Poor old Marmaduke, are you very afraid for me ? Of course you are. You were always afraid for me ; afraid I ’d fall off things or get too close to things, — scare-for-nothings all, Marmaduke. I ’m all right. I ’m not so awful just because I ’m going to be an actress. But I tell you what, if it was the most awful thing on earth, I’d still be one; I’ve got to. Only I wish one thing, —I wish you didn’t have to hear Penangton talk about me. I know it ’ll hurt. Take my side, Marmaduke, take my side. Also send me a lot of money.”

She wrote just enough more to remind him that she was of age; that he could come after her now if he wanted to, but that he wouldn’t get her; that she had found a good place to board; and that New York was not as dark a place to get around in at night as Penangton. Then she closed in order to add a postscript: “My! oh, won’t they talk! ”

Ay, wouldn’t they? Penangtonians are as kind as the exigencies of conversation permit anybody to be, but when a girl reared in the first Presbyterian Church of Penangton goes on the stage, there is a great deal to be said. It began to be plain to Marmaduke that the town’s very kindness, the close intimacy, the interest, must pour out in a tide of talk that would menace the Tompkins family root and branch. All about him, across miles of pasture land, timber, and cereal, spread the honor and the glory of his family. He looked, as his ancestors had looked, at the stretch of it, and off across Snibble Bridge he saw, as his ancestors had seen, the town that was at once his vassal and his mistress.

That bird had closed in again, and straight up over his head was circling dizzily. Off to the left was the Fair Ground Road, crawling like a strip of gold back into his childhood, where a little hot hand had often lain in his, throbbing, twitching, burning.

Take my side, Marmaduke.

In front of him lay the big house, bare, lonely, stripped down to a ridiculous bachelor stiffness inside, yet as full to-day as it had been all these sixty years of his sagacious great-grandfather, of his assertive grandfather, of his gay, daring father, — all of them forceful still, even as ghosts, and all of them demanding their dues from their posterity.

Take my side Marmaduke.

He lay flat down in the wheat, dryeyed again, and stared at the sky. The bird in the high, white air was going rickety; she teetered; and little by little she descended, batting the air with a helpless flutter, until she settled plaintively back into the shallows of Little Snibble. Marmaduke wondered what she had hoped to find up there that she had not found.

Take my side, Marmaduke.

He got up then, and went around the wheat to the house. A half hour later he came down from his room, and passed through the dining - room without so much as a glance at the portraits on the wall. He had taken off his corduroys for a blue serge suit, and he looked trim and strong and young in spite of the blue, beaten places under his eyes.

“Shan’t want any supper, Dilse, ” he said to the negress in the kitchen. “I’m going in to the town house. I’ 11 take supper with aunt Muriel.”

Dilsey shuffled lazily on her flat feet; then cried out in half fright: “Namergawd, Mist’ Mommyduke, what matter yell face ? Look like yeh been stompin on yehse’f. ”

He remembered afterward that he laughed at Dilsey, and that he whistled as he went out the kitchen door to take the reins from the stable hand who had just brought his buggy up. He remembered because that was where the laugh and the whistle first came to his aid, and because he used both afterward till the laugh sounded like the Penangton firebell and the whistle seemed to take the asthma. Ten minutes later he drove around the corner below the town house, and saw Miss Muriel in the grape arbor at the rear of the house. By the time he had let the mare’s head down and had drawn her rein through the hitching ring Miss Muriel was on her way to him across the short, tough Missouri grass, and the very air had curled on itself and was bugling the command: Place for the granddaughter of Thousand-acre Tompkins! Place for the daughter of State Rights Tompkins! Place for the sister of Barehead Tompkins ! And also, place for the Preserver of Poetry!

“Good-evening, Marmaduke,” she said cordially. “Hess was just this minute wishing you would drive in. There ’s to be flour cakes for supper. Come right in.”

He came in, with a terrible distaste for flour cakes, supper, everything that a man has to swallow when his throat is dry, springing up within him. Ever since his return from Chicago the town house had seemed to Marmaduke like a great frame for the Tompkinses’ past. Miss Muriel had gathered between its four walls all the horsehair sofas, all the dragon-legged tables, all the silver soup ladles, and all the chandeliers with dangling prisms that had checked off the prosperity of the family from generation to generation. If the difference between Retta and Retta’s forbears was pronounced at Thousand-acre, it was appalling here in the town house. Marmaduke put his hat on the antlered rack, — his great-grandfather had killed the deer which furnished the antlers, — sat down in an armchair which had been his grandfather’s special delight, and stared at his father’s old rattletrap gun which hung above the rack.

“Well, what news from Retta?” Miss Muriel was getting a glass of crabapple jelly from the closet under the stairway, and she put her question with some physical difficulty because of the strained position of her body, and some hesitation because of the strained position her mind was always in about Retta.

With his eyes on the gun barrel, Marmaduke replied quite steadily: “The best of news. Retta — Retta, aunt Murey, is going to be a great success. What would you think, now, if you were some day to be pointed out as the aunt of a great — well, say of a great actress ? ”

Miss Muriel backed out of the closet, and unscrewed the top from the jellyglass. “Why,” she said, trying to support, herself on a laugh that trembled, “why don’t you ask me how I should like to be a great actress myself ? ” She fished off the cap of white paper from the top of the jelly and said sombrely: “I shouldn’t like it. I guess you know that, Marmaduke.”

Marmaduke got up from his chair, and began again, straight and even as the gun barrel above him: “I mean a great one, aunt Murey. I mean one of the actresses who sink all questions of family position and convention by the very weight of their genius. I mean one who will make the whole wide world ring with her success. I don’t mean a Penangton success, I don’t mean a Missouri success. I mean world-wide ” —

“Wait, Marmaduke, — wait, child.” As they stood there, the flower-like delicacy of Miss Muriel’s own achievement drifted between them like the fragrance of a past day. “I know what ’s coming. I’ve always known it would come, or that something like it would come. It ’s that Retta ’s going on the stage.”

“It’s that she’s gone on the stage! And why not ? ” cried Marmaduke. “Why not the stage? ’T is as good a way as any. For genius, mind you. If ’t were talent, now, there might be a question; but there’s no question for genius, is there? That ’s what it is in Retta, — genius! Let her go. ’T would be a shame to keep her back. ’T would be wrong to her, wrong to the world.” He had the matter well in hand now. He had already carefully figured out just what he had to do. Back of his aunt Muriel stretched the phalanxes of tradition, religion, and unworldliness, stern and jealous. He dared not take Retta into their midst; he felt that he must somehow project her over them, he must give her wings. “You want to get you some smoked glasses and watch the flight of that girl, aunt Murey. Ho! there ’s a Tompkins that ’ll count. You’ve always been nagging at me to take up the Tompkins banner where my father dropped it. Watch that girl. There’s a Tompkins that ’ll do it for you. She ’ll have it waving high and steady soon ” —

“Yes,” cried Miss Muriel at last, bringing up her words with a cog-wheel catch, “yes, the Tompkins banner — from the stage — with a device of the devil on it — in letters of red ” —

Then Marmaduke; “ From the stage ! With Genius on it in letters that you ’ll never wash out with your tears, aunt Murey ” — He came over and faced his aunt, and there was suddenly something overpowering in the great hulking reach of his young body. “See here, aunt Murey, you got to quit taking this thing this way before you begin it. You shan’t do it. You can ruin Retta by it. You can make the town take her as a runaway girl, set over against her family; you can make her cheap. But if you ’re going to do it, ” — he leveled his long brown hand at her with loose, supple force, — “ if you ’re going to do it, I ’m a pretty good person not to have around when you do it.” It was the sort of voice that wipes away tears as with a scrubbing brush, and he began to ring in that short, sharp laugh he had just picked up. “The plain truth, ” he said, “the plain truth is that just because it ’s your own niece you are n’t getting it into your head how big a matter this is. This is no ordinary question of a young girl going on the stage, no question of morals and paint and disgrace. Those things fall away, they flatten out, under the feet of Genius. You know that, and you’d better take my word for it that Retta ’s a genius.” His lips stayed parted even when he stopped for breath, and his eyes had a peculiar hard brightness.

“ When did you hear ? ” asked the poor, unconvinced, but overwhelmed lady in front of him, driven like a hapless leaf in the swirl of his zeal.

“Just got the letter. It’s like this : she ’s already attracted the attention of the New York managers, and I’m to go on to New York myself pretty soon to help arrange with ’em about her — her career, you know.” He came up close to his aunt, the wistful sadness of an honest nature betrayed by itself in his eyes. “’T is n’t all thought out yet,” he said meaningly. “What I ’m going to try to do is to let her know that we are with her, — that I am, at least; to let her know that she can’t get so far away but what I ’ll be with her; to let this town know it; to let everybody know that she doesn’t have to stand alone nor to fight alone. D’ you see what I mean ? ”

There was a long pause in the hall. Through the open door came the soft, mystifying rays of the evening sun, and the intermittent murmur of the town’s life as it went, quiet and satisfied, up and down the street in front of the house. Miss Muriel, with her thin knuckles against her mouth, seemed to be pushing herself through some substratum of thought. “I guess I do see what you mean, Marmaduke, ” she said by and by. Her mouth was still rigid, but her eyes rippled in light. “That isn’t all: whatever you mean, I ’m with you, Marmaduke. We ’ll stand shoulder to shoulder with Retta, Tompkins with Tompkins. That ’s it, isn’t it? Now see here; now don’t, Marmaduke, — now don’t give way.” Defrauded of anything further on the outside to fight down and trample under, his emotion had turned inward and undone him, and he sobbed miserably before her. “ Marmaduke, ” she said, with a fitting and beautiful assumption of the role of comforter, “you are right about it. It ’s getting plainer to me. It’s getting as plain as day. And it’s a good way, Marmaduke, and we ’ll work it out just that way. What a girl she is, Marmaduke, so fearless and so ready-witted ! And, Marmaduke, I certainly do wish you would come on in and try the cakes.”

He laughed full and clear now, because he could never help laughing at the Tompkins women for expecting a man to eat his way through trouble. “No, I think not, aunt Murey. I could n’t get the cakes down, this trip. I want to cut back to Thousand-acre and think it out, but I ’ll survive overnight on the comfort you ’ve been to me.”

She watched him go over the grass a moment later, and unhitch the mare, and she saw how for one second man’s head and mare’s head rested together in his dumb cry for further comfort, and how with a leap he was in his buggy and off again to Thousand-acre.

For the next three months, while he waited, full of anxious foreboding, for Retta to summon him to New York, it was Marmaduke’s self-imposed task to trumpet his sister’s genius to Penangton. In his way of putting the matter before his aunt he had shown that he knew the town’s point of view; that he realized that the only way to save Retta in the town’s eyes would be to get her before it in such a white electrification of genius that the town could think of her only as a sort of diaphanous, depersonalized glory, too big and remote to bother about, as it thought of the United States Senator who got his first growth in Penangton, or as it thought of Mark Twain, who once went to school at Penangton Academy. In his effort to establish Retta in this goodly company he soon threw Penangton into a peculiarly disagreeable state of perplexity. If there is one thing a Missourian likes better than another, it is to be forehanded in belief in the right thing; and if there is one thing he hates worse than another, it is to be gulled into belief in the wrong thing. Perhaps, if Marmaduke had gone a little slower in his argument, Penangton would have joined him a little earlier in his conclusion; but Marmaduke was far from being able to go slow; he was enfevered with anxiety, and because he had to argue not only against the town, but against his own fear, he became over-vehement, and soon irritated the town into jeering opposition.

. “ Marmaduke, ” General Whittington would say, “you ought to stop this goldarned ballooning of your sister, and get on a train and go bring her home. What that girl needs is an apron round her waist and a tea-towel in her hands. I guess that’s about what she needs.”

“ General, ” Marmaduke would reply, with bitter politeness, “you used to be a good guess with a gun, but nowadays your guesses don’t come knee-high to a puddle duck.”

“And another thing, Marmaduke,” the general would continue irascibly, “you forget that Retta is a professor. You can’t build a theatre big enough for a stage and a pulpit. They won’t house together and they can’t house together.”

“Then I ’ll tell you what,” Marmaduke would cry, goaded to fury and laughing that harsh, snorting laugh of his, — “I ’ll tell you what: if it comes to a choice, genius will have to have the stage! It’s got to act, it’s got to sing, it ’s got to paint, it ’s got to discover, it’s got to get itself expressed. That’s the great thing with genius, religion or no religion.”

Sometimes he sat on his back porch out at Thousand-acre, his face pulled and thoughtful, and read over the last letter from Retta, trying to find in it something like willingness to give up the struggle, something like the first stirring of a desire to get out of the glare and the scorch, something like homesickness for the sweet, cool life at Thousand-acre; but he always put the letter back in his pocket with a deep and burdened sigh. For the letter only said: —

“MARMADUKE, Dear,—Well, I didn’t pass up on a line last night. Didn’t have but one to pass up on! I ’m to get something better next time. Trouble is I’m so everlastingly young. They ’re afraid of me. They say it is n’t often that a girl gets even as much of a start as I’ve had. Try to believe in me. Mr. Goldberg stands right up for me; he says I’m to have a chance in centre before the season is over, whether I get any older or not. Marmaduke, I’ll tell you a secret: it’s slow work and hard as nails. I ’ll tell you another: I would n’t give it up if it were ten times harder and I knew that I was never to succeed in it. Are they still talking? Course they are. Better send me some money pretty generally when you write.”

After such a letter he was always more taciturn out at Thousand-acre and more vehement in town, bringing into his arguments with Penangton an added fire and discursiveness, an uncompromising assurance, that were as disconcerting to the town as they were exhausting to Marmaduke.

“What’s your feeling in regard to Retta’s course, Miss Murmur?” Penangton would ask, in despair over Marmaduke.

“ Oh, I agree with Marmaduke, ” Miss Muriel would answer, as true as steel.

It was well that this sort of thing did not have to go on forever. When Marmaduke had had three months of it he was limp. He drove down to one of his farms near Weaver for a few days, to get away from it; but as he turned into the Fair Ground Road, coming home, one crisp fall morning, he found that he had not gotten away from it at all. It made him irritable to see Thousand-acre piling off before him in a great spreading protection that had yet fallen lamentably short of protecting the girl who had the best claim on it. It exasperated him, as he came on around the house, to see Miss Muriel with her nose deep in some newspapers before the sitting-room fire, safe, comfortable. She so emphasized to him the difference between the woman who stays at home and gets old without ever running any danger from anything and the woman who fares forth and runs the gamut of every danger in the world, that he made a point of staying at the barn as long as he could find any excuse for doing so. When he did at last turn toward the house, it was because Miss Muriel had come to the cistern platform outside the kitchen and was shaking a paper at him.

“You, Marmaduke ! I’ve been waiting for you! Come to the house this minute! ”

He had put himself between the shafts, and was backing his buggy into the buggy-house as the long shake in her voice smote him. With a sick feeling of crisis he stopped, his hands still on the shafts, and tried to steady himself.

“Marmaduke, why don’t you come on? Or if you won’t come, listen. This’ll bring you”—and she raised the paper and shrieked across the yard to him: “‘ Missouri has reason to be proud of the success achieved in New York a few nights ago by the actress Retta Romany, a Missouri girl. ’ ” She flapped the paper with her hand. “St. Louis Republic ! ” she screamed. “And there ’s a telegram come for you two days ago, and New York papers. Why, Marmaduke, what in the name of craziness are you bringing that buggy for ? ”

With his hands still on the buggy shafts he had started on a leaping run to the cistern platform. “Well, I guess I won’t take it any further,” he said, abashed. “’T won’t go through the kitchen door, will it ? Quit your laughing at me, aunt Murey, and give me that telegram.” He bounded on into the sitting-room, snatched a yellow envelope from the table, tore it open, and read: —

“I send papers to-day now will you believe in me come as soon as you can.”

His aunt was beaming at him from across a table piled with newspapers. “You went to Weaver the wrong time, ” she said gayly ; “these came yesterday. Did you ever hear of a young lady named Retta Romany ? I’m told her last name is Tompkins. Listen.” She picked out one of the papers and began to read: “‘The success of the evening was made by Miss Retta Romany, a young actress of little or no experience, but who last night gave evidence of the higher dramatic ability which we are wont to name, not talent, but genius. ’ And here ’s another of the best: ‘ Retta Romany is the name of the young person of whom Mr. Goldberg has been predicting glory all season, once he could get her before the public in a suited part. The astuteness of Mr. Goldberg’s judgment was made manifest last night when a large audience of accustomed first-nighters clapped its hands and stamped its feet for Miss Romany. She is one of the notable comediennes of the future. ’ ” Under Miss Muriel’s guidance, Marmaduke cut his way, like a pair of clipping scissors, through one marked place after another; then took all the papers, rolled them into a neat bundle, slipped a rubber band around them, and started for the front door. “I’ve got to go to the office of the Progress,” he said. “The town must have the facts.”

At the Thousand-acre gate he stood a moment to let the enlightening sun blaze away at him from the eastern sky.

“So that’s Retta,” he said, “and it’s all true, all my lies. And I have n’t even done her justice. I bet the next time I lie I do it a-plenty.”

A little later he had left the papers at the office of the Penangton Progress; a little later still he was sauntering into the post office. The post office was full of men and women; at the pen-and-ink desk stood General Tom Whittington.

“Yes, ” the general was saying, “she ’s a genius. Oh, well, she always showed it as a child. I always said — Hi ! that you, Marmaduke ? ” The general, a trifle uneasily, held out his hand. “You’ve heard from Retta? ”

“Yes, I’ve heard from Retta,” said Marmaduke carelessly, though his heart was trailing blood-red wattles and strutting like a turkey gobbler. “Heard’ same thing I’ve always heard, — heard she ’s a genius. You all are pretty deaf around Penangton, general, but I reckon you are beginning to hear it too about now, aren’t you? ”

“Well, to tell the truth, Marmaduke,” said the general, drowning the words as much as he could in a stream of tobacco juice, “we will have to admit that you know what’s what in theatricals better ’n we do.”

“I should think it,” said Marmaduke, with that damnable assurance that had made him so distasteful to Penangton for the past three months. “If,” continued the young man mercilessly, “I couldn’t tell genius any better’n you all, I’d never go out by daylight.”

R. E. Young .