The Vanity of Foley

by Anne O'Hagan

The Vanity of Foley

By Anne O’Hagan

THE clear September afternoon had begun to decline toward evening when Foley emerged from the station which had engulf him more than twenty years before. With the relieved sense of the man whose destiny is at last decided he stood in the once familiar place. When, on the Western coast, he had received his discharge from the army, the back pay which the Government had paternally laid away for him, and his railroad fare to the place of his enlistment, the future had been bewilderingly full of possibilities. He might “go in” with Jenkins on a small ranch in southern California; he might, with Otherwite, open on the edge of the reservation one of the saloons which had replaced the canteen; he might take a brief vacation and reenlist with all the benefits accruing from his former terms of service—added pay, good conduct marks, and all. Now his money was ignobly and riotously gone from him, and all business ventures were barred. The period of grace for reenlistment had passed. If he reentered the service now, it would be on the footing of the raw recruit So it happened that after the lapse of nearly a quarter of a century, Foley was coming home.

The domed and bridged gorgeousness of the new station which had replaced the brown bird-house of his recollection rather dampened his joy, but once beyond it he breathed a sigh of contentment The low buildings of Bailey's Block, turning the corner in a bulging obtuse angle, had grown grimier with the coal smoke of two decades, but that was all. The colors on the barber's pole before Frederick's were tending but little more toward the dun unity of old age; the “Attorney and Counselor at Law” of D. Webster Simmons still creaked as it swung below the second-story windows of that legal luminary's office. Frank Malizia's fruit stall was still prodigal of exotic color and grace. It faced with as bright a defiance as old the triple grayness in which Puritanism, mill smoke, and sea fog had enveloped the town. It had grown, though—it now included the store behind it and the store next door; and surely that was Malizia himself, bustling out with a customer, Malizia with thick white locks instead of thick black ones, but otherwise unchanged, as vivid, as eloquent a personality as when Foley and his peers had been wont to levy tribute from the single stall. So he had prospered—the dago! Yet Foley could forgive him his good fortune for the sake of his likeness to the Malizia of old days.

“I wonder would he know me,” the home-comer debated. His loose, indeterminate mouth quivered beneath the long, fierce mustache which sun and wind had bleached to straw. He took a step forward. Then he paused. After all, he had been only one of Malizia's many tormentors—why should Malizia remember him?

He turned the corner. His blue eyes, eager for landmarks, looked out of the brown wrinkles the sun and the alkaline winds of the plains had graved. Suddenly they narrowed with resentment There, pasted upon the red bricks below the recruiting agency, was the old, familiar figure that had been his lure so long before.

“'Twas the bad day's work for me when first I saw you,” he apostrophized the gallant blue simulacrum of military glory. “You an' your promises!” His eyes climbed upward, over the ledge of the square little windows where the gilt “U. S. Recruiting Agency” was tarnishing day by day. He wondered what deep-chested agent sat there now, scanning the candidates for soldierhood who shambled before him. How bold he himself, Foley, had been when he marched up the dusty, narrow stairs to that room, and how his boldness had oozed away before the keen scrutiny of the man behind the rail. He saw himself again in the full-lipped, evanescent rosiness of youth, vain of his inches, vain of the set of his dark head upon his neck, vain—vain. To-day, coming home from nearly a quarter of a century of inglorious unsuccess, he was willing to acknowledge how puffed up with arrogance the boy had been.

He passed beyond Bailey's Block and toward the center of the town. His eyes, bent backward upon himself, took little note of the tangle of trolley tracks where, of old, the patient horses had waited on a single riding; of the new, big, stone bank building; of the shops with almost metropolitan bedazzlements spread behind their great plate-glass windows. Mechanically, he faced in the direction in which his old home lay, and his thoughts were not with the man who had come back, but with the boy whom the blue-paper doll of a soldier had recalled, the boy, half-braggart, half-idealist, who had signed away his future one rainy day as a revenge upon an unappreciative world.

Even Nora, his generally adoring little sister, had been unappreciative that day. Usually she had been his ardent champion against family criticism. Did he lie late abed on Sunday mornings? Not only did Nora, in the bare, scoured little kitchen, make his fresh coffee, reheat his beans, set forth butter for his brown bread, but she also violently declared that his week-day labors were the cause of his Sabbath weariness! His week-day labors, indeed! His work in the shoe shops had been brief. He had abandoned it to become the clerk in Popham's emporium. But though all the girls in Fairhaven had fluttered dove-like before his counter and had divided their admiration between his curly hair, his bold glances, and the printed lawns he showed them, he had not cared for the position in Popham's. It had been no job for a man of his parts—of his shoulders, of his chest. Besides, Popham had expected him to attend to the furnace, to open the store before the day was well awake, and to keep it open until the last light in the village was quenched in darkness. So he had left Popham's, and for a while every morning had been as Sunday to Nora, and to him every evening one of sauntering along the main street, of loitering, in congenial society, at the corners, of smoking countless cheap cigarettes, of being a “sport” according to his lights and those of his tribe in the little town.

How his father had stormed at his idleness, how his brother Pat had glowered, how the ugly word “loafer” had been dinned in his ears! And how Nora had defended him in public and upbraided him in private! Ah, it would be very good to see Nora again!

He was glad, on the whole, that it was only Nora whom he should see. He was glad that Pat had gone away to exercise his acquisitive and retentive gifts in another part of the world—Pat and the false Mary Ann Kehoe. In bibulous moments Foley always told his companions that it was woman's perfidy which had driven him into the army. Certainly Mary Ann had discarded him, despite his height and breadth and prettiness, for Pat, short and stolid and square-jawed. She had told him, to be sure, that it was his indolence drove her to make the exchange. And his blue eyes had burned darkly upon her as he had replied that the time would come when she would wish, with bitter heartache, that she had not made it. Then he had gone to the recruiting agency. Well, it did not matter much now whether he had been driven by woman's treachery or by his own conceit and idleness, his dislike of family faultfinding, his emulation of that blue-paper vision which had confronted him whenever he had lounged over to Malizia's to snatch a plum or a handful of chestnuts. He had taken leave of all his critics rather grandly, he remembered, prophesying a return which should humble and dazzle them. Truly, it was better that only Nora remained to witness that home-coming!

He left the bustling little main street and passed the old Common. Its elms threw feathery, late-afternoon shadows upon its close-clipped grass. The revolutionary cannon still marked its entrance. About it the great houses of Fairhaven stood, unchanged in twenty years—in a hundred and twenty years, for that matter. How could wood, how could brick and mortar, pillar, fanlight, violet-tinted glass—how could these convey such an impression of worth, of dignity, beyond the chance of mortal change? Once he had boasted to Nora that she should live in one of those houses, that her carriage should wait before one of those brass-knockered doors to take her for her daily airing. And now he was coming home to ask for a place in Nora's poor chimney-corner.

“She'll not deny it me,” he told himself. “I'd never have asked it while Durgan was alive—queer that she married Durgan! But now—though it's no carriages I'm bringing her an' no deeds to houses, sure she'll give me the warm welcome.”

He reproached himself a little that he had written so seldom to Nora. Scarcely ten letters had passed between them in all the time of his wanderings. They were “poor hands at writin',” both of them, and he had been the more derelict of the two. It had been five or six years now since her letter had come telling him of Durgan's death. He had delayed to answer till he should be able to send some substantial token of brotherly sympathy—“somethin' to help with the funeral,” he had said to himself, “for Nora'd never be one to have a mean wake or to skimp with the carriages.” But the time had never arrived, and now he was coming to her empty-handed.

“I'll help her with the bit of a place,” he argued down his self-reproach. “I can be a good bit of use to her. I'll teach her some of them Chinese tricks of gardenin' I learned in the West. An' there'll not be so many to cheat her when it's known she has a man around to look out for her. As for goin' back to the army an' not burdenin' her—I'll not burden her, an' I'm too old for the army, anyway. That fever in China—I've never been the same man since.”

He was out on the long road now that led to the open country. It was less changed than the center of the town. No trolley-line had spoiled its elms or lined it with “easily accessible” workmen's cottages. The old houses stood, each in its own acre or two, as they had done in his boyhood. Foley's heart beat a little faster as he glanced ahead. Nora and Durgan had taken the old place when Pat and Mary Ann Kehoe had gone away. He wondered if it was changed at all or if it still stood, its roof pitching over its single story, its shingles silver in the massed green of its lilac bushes.

A road wandered up a slope at his right. The tinkle of cow-bells sounded along it, and Foley looked to see two barelegged girls behind a half-dozen ambling, leisurely cows. Now that he was so near his journey's end, a sort of choking diffidence seized him. He dallied with the notion of his welcome, he delayed, he fell in behind the oblivious children, who pursued some argument shrilly.

“My mother,” declared one breathlessly, “has a black silk for best an' a cashmere shawl an' a gold watch an' chain——”

“Pooh!” cried the other scornfully. “My mother's got a pink satin an' a diamond ring, an' when my Uncle Tim comes home we're goin' to live on the Common in Judge Cabot's place. My uncle is a general in the army.”

“A general?” The questioner's voice wavered between awe and unbelief. Unbelief triumphed. “I don't believe a word you say, Nonie Durgan. You're the poorest people on the Lane—my mother says you are. A general! An' your mother goes out by the day.”

“A general,” repeated the other firmly. “He rides a white horse—snow white—with a bridle all set with precious stones. He's always sendin' my mother things—dresses an' rings——”

“Then why don't she wear none of them?” cried triumphant Skepticism. “My mother says she'd be ashamed to go out lookin' like your mother does.”

“She's savin' her good things to wear when my uncle comes home an' we go to live with him in Judge Cabot's house,” declared the other dauntlessly. “She says she wouldn't shame the neighbors by her fine things so long's we live in the Lane. He's goin' to send little Tim to college to be a priest, my uncle is, an' I'm goin' to have music lessons an'——”

They trailed on to the accompaniment of the cow-bells' slow, single note. Foley stood by a corner of the fence. His blue eyes gazed unseeingly at the vegetable garden stretching in loamy richness back to the little house, silver among its dark-leaved lilac bushes.

By and by he turned, sighing, and retraced his steps. When he came again to the place opposite the recruiting agency he paused irresolute. The early lights were shining palely in the street lamps.

“I can't. I'm tired of soldierin',” he said fretfully to himself.

The erect blue figure on which the street lights played, the promises beneath it—he knew them for what they were worth. Then he heard “a snow-white horse, a bridle all set with precious stones.” He sighed and crossed the street.

Again Foley's vanity carried him up the dusty, narrow stairway and into the presence of the keen-eyed recruiting officer.