Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town Read online

  Everybody knew Jeff and liked him, but the odd thing was that till he made money nobody took any stock in his ideas at all. It was only after he made the “clean up” that they came to see what a splendid fellow he was. “Levelheaded” I think was the term; indeed in the speech of Mariposa, the highest form of endowment was to have the head set on horizontally as with a theodolite.

  As I say, it was when Jeff made money that they saw how gifted he was, and when he lost it,—but still, there’s no need to go into that. I believe it’s something the same in other places too.

  The barber shop, you will remember, stands across the street from Smith’s Hotel, and stares at it face to face.

  It is one of those wooden structures—I don’t know whether you know them—with a false front that sticks up above its real height and gives it an air at once rectangular and imposing. It is a form of architecture much used in Mariposa and understood to be in keeping with the pretentious and artificial character of modern business. There is a red, white and blue post in front of the shop and the shop itself has a large square window out of proportion to its little flat face.

  Painted on the panes of the window is the remains of a legend that once spelt BARBER SHOP, executed with the flourishes that prevailed in the golden age of sign painting in Mariposa. Through the window you can see the geraniums in the window shelf and behind them Jeff Thorpe with his little black scull cap on and his spectacles drooped upon his nose as he bends forward in the absorption of shaving.

  As you open the door, it sets in violent agitation a coiled spring up above and a bell that almost rings. Inside, there are two shaving chairs of the heavier, or electrocution pattern, with mirrors in front of them and pigeon holes with individual shaving mugs. There must be ever so many of them, fifteen or sixteen. It is the current supposition of each of Jeff’s customers that everyone else but himself uses a separate mug. One corner of the shop is partitioned off and bears the sign: HOT AND COLD BATHS, 50 cents. There has been no bath inside the partition for twenty years—only old newspapers and a mop. Still, it lends distinction somehow, just as do the faded cardboard signs that hang against the mirror with the legends: TURKISH SHAMPOO, 75 cents, and ROMAN MASSAGE, $1.00.

  They said commonly in Mariposa that Jeff made money out of the barber shop. He may have, and it may have been that that turned his mind to investment. But it’s hard to see how he could. A shave cost five cents, and a hair-cut fifteen (or the two, if you liked, for a quarter), and at that it is hard to see how he could make money, even when he had both chairs going and shaved first in one and then in the other.

  You see, in Mariposa, shaving isn’t the hurried, perfunctory thing that it is in the city. A shave is looked upon as a form of physical pleasure and lasts anywhere from twenty-five minutes to three-quarters of an hour.

  In the morning hours, perhaps, there was a semblance of haste about it, but in the long quiet of the afternoon, as Jeff leaned forward towards the customer and talked to him in a soft confidential monotone, like a portrait painter, the razor would go slower and slower, and pause and stop, move and pause again, till the shave died away into the mere drowse of conversation.

  At such hours, the Mariposa barber shop would become a very Palace of Slumber, and as you waited your turn in one of the wooden arm-chairs beside the wall, what with the quiet of the hour, and the low drone of Jeff’s conversation, the buzzing of the flies against the window pane and the measured tick of the clock above the mirror, your head sank dreaming on your breast, and the Mariposa Newspacket rustled unheeded on the floor. It makes one drowsy just to think of it!

  The conversation, of course, was the real charm of the place. You see, Jefferson’s forte, or specialty, was information. He could tell you more things within the compass of a half-hour’s shave than you get in days of laborious research in an encyclopaedia. Where he got it all, I don’t know, but I am inclined to think it came more or less out of the newspapers.

  In the city, people never read the newspapers, not really, only little bits and scraps of them. But in Mariposa it’s different. There they read the whole thing from cover to cover, and they build up on it, in the course of years, a range of acquirement that would put a college president to the blush. Anybody who has ever heard Henry Mullins and Peter Glover talk about the future of China will know just what I mean.

  And, of course, the peculiarity of Jeff’s conversation was that he could suit it to his man every time. He had a kind of divination about it. There was a certain kind of man that Jeff would size up sideways as he stropped the razor, and in whose ear he would whisper: “I see where Saint Louis has took four straight games off Chicago,”—and so hold him fascinated to the end.

  In the same way he would say to Mr. Smith: “I see where it says that this ‘Flying Squirl’ run a dead heat for the King’s Plate.”

  To a humble intellect like mine he would explain in full the relations of the Keesar to the German Rich Dog.

  But first and foremost, Jeff’s specialty in the way of conversation was finance and the money market, the huge fortunes that a man with the right kind of head could make.

  I’ve known Jefferson to pause in his shaving with the razor suspended in the air as long as five minutes while he described, with his eye half closed, exactly the kind of a head a man needed in order to make a “haul” or a “clean up.” It was evidently simply a matter of the head, and as far as one could judge, Jeff’s own was the very type required.

  I don’t know just at what time or how Jefferson first began his speculative enterprises. It was probably in him from the start. There is no doubt that the very idea of such things as Traction Stock and Amalgamated Asbestos went to his head: and whenever he spoke of Mr. Carnegie and Mr. Rockefeller, the yearning tone of his voice made it as soft as lathered soap.

  I suppose the most rudimentary form of his speculation was the hens. That was years ago. He kept them out at the back of his house,—which itself stood up a grass plot behind and beyond the barber shop,—and in the old days Jeff would say, with a certain note of pride in his voice, that The Woman had sold as many as two dozen eggs in a day to the summer visitors.

  But what with reading about Amalgamated Asbestos and Consolidated Copper and all that, the hens began to seem pretty small business, and, in any case, the idea of two dozen eggs at a cent apiece almost makes one blush. I suppose a good many of us have felt just as Jeff did about our poor little earnings. Anyway, I remember Jeff telling me one day that he could take the whole lot of the hens and sell them off and crack the money into Chicago wheat on margin and turn it over in twenty-four hours. He did it too. Only somehow when it was turned over it came upside down on top of the hens.

  After that the hen house stood empty and The Woman had to throw away chicken feed every day, at a dead loss of perhaps a shave and a half. But it made no difference to Jeff, for his mind had floated away already on the possibilities of what he called “displacement” mining on the Yukon.

  So you can understand that when the mining boom struck Mariposa, Jefferson Thorpe was in it right from the very start. Why, no wonder; it seemed like the finger of Providence. Here was this great silver country spread out to north of us, where people had thought there was only a wilderness. And right at our very doors! You could see, as I saw, the night express going north every evening; for all one knew Rockefeller or Carnegie or anyone might be on it! Here was the wealth of Calcutta, as the Mariposa Newspacket put it, poured out at our very feet.

  So no wonder the town went wild! All day in the street you could hear men talking of veins, and smelters and dips and deposits and faults,—the town hummed with it like a geology class on examination day. And there were men about the hotels with mining outfits and theodolites and dunnage bags, and at Smith’s bar they would hand chunks of rock up and down, some of which would run as high as ten drinks to the pound.

  The fever just caught the town and ran through it! Within a fortnight they put a partition down Robertson’s Coal and Wood Office
and opened the Mariposa Mining Exchange, and just about every man on the Main Street started buying scrip. Then presently young Fizzlechip, who had been teller in Mullins’s Bank and that everybody had thought a worthless jackass before, came back from the Cobalt country with a fortune, and loafed round in the Mariposa House in English khaki and a horizontal hat, drunk all the time, and everybody holding him up as an example of what it was possible to do if you tried.

  They all went in. Jim Eliot mortgaged the inside of the drug store and jammed it into Twin Tamagami. Pete Glover at the hardware store bought Nippewa stock at thirteen cents and sold it to his brother at seventeen and bought it back in less than a week at nineteen. They didn’t care! They took a chance. Judge Pepperleigh put the rest of his wife’s money into Temiskaming Common, and Lawyer Macartney got the fever, too, and put every cent that his sister possessed into Tulip Preferred.

  And even when young Fizzlechip shot himself in the back room of the Mariposa House, Mr. Gingham buried him in a casket with silver handles and it was felt that there was a Monte Carlo touch about the whole thing.

  They all went in—or all except Mr. Smith. You see, Mr. Smith had come down from there, and he knew all about rocks and mining and canoes and the north country. He knew what it was to eat flour-baked dampers under the lee side of a canoe propped among the underbrush, and to drink the last drop of whiskey within fifty miles. Mr. Smith had mighty little use for the north. But what he did do, was to buy up enough early potatoes to send fifteen carload lots into Cobalt at a profit of five dollars a bag.

  Mr. Smith, I say, hung back. But Jeff Thorpe was in the mining boom right from the start. He bought in on the Nippewa mine even before the interim prospectus was out. He took a “block” of 100 shares of Abbitibbi Development at fourteen cents, and he and Johnson, the livery stable-keeper next door, formed a syndicate and got a thousand shares of Metagami Lake at 31/4 cents and then “unloaded” them on one of the sausage men at Netley’s butcher shop at a clear cent per cent advance.

  Jeff would open the little drawer below the mirror in the barber shop and show you all kinds and sorts of Cobalt country mining certificates,—blue ones, pink ones, green ones, with outlandish and fascinating names on them that ran clear from the Mattawa to the Hudson Bay.

  And right from the start he was confident of winning.

  “There ain’t no difficulty to it,” he said, “there’s lots of silver up there in that country and if you buy some here and some there you can’t fail to come out somewhere. I don’t say,” he used to continue, with the scissors open and ready to cut, “that some of the greenhorns won’t get bit. But if a feller knows the country and keeps his head level, he can’t lose.”

  Jefferson had looked at so many prospectuses and so many pictures of mines and pine trees and smelters, that I think he’d forgotten that he’d never been in the country. Anyway, what’s two hundred miles!

  To an onlooker it certainly didn’t seem so simple. I never knew the meanness, the trickery, of the mining business, the sheer obstinate determination of the bigger capitalists not to make money when they might, till I heard the accounts of Jeff’s different mines. Take the case of Corona Jewel. There was a good mine, simply going to ruin for lack of common sense.

  “She ain’t been developed,” Jeff would say. “There’s silver enough in her so you could dig it out with a shovel. She’s full of it. But they won’t get at her and work her.”

  Then he’d take a look at the pink and blue certificates of the Corona Jewel and slam the drawer on them in disgust.

  Worse than that was the Silent Pine,—a clear case of stupid incompetence! Utter lack of engineering skill was all that was keeping the Silent Pine from making a fortune for its holders.

  “The only trouble with that mine,” said Jeff, “is they won’t go deep enough. They followed the vein down to where it kind o’ thinned out and then they quit. If they’d just go right into her good, they’d get it again. She’s down there all right.”

  But perhaps the meanest case of all was the Northern Star. That always seemed to me, every time I heard of it, a straight case for the criminal law. The thing was so evidently a conspiracy.

  “I bought her,” said Jeff, “at thirty-two, and she stayed right there tight, like she was stuck. Then a bunch of these fellers in the city started to drive her down and they got her pushed down to twenty-four, and I held on to her and they shoved her down to twenty-one. This morning they’ve got her down to sixteen, but I don’t mean to let go. No, sir.”

  In another fortnight they shoved her, the same unscrupulous crowd, down to nine cents, and Jefferson still held on.

  “They’re working her down,” he admitted, “but I’m holding her.”

  No conflict between vice and virtue was ever grimmer.

  “She’s at six,” said Jeff, “but I’ve got her. They can’t squeeze me.”

  A few days after that, the same criminal gang had her down further than ever.

  “They’ve got her down to three cents,” said Jeff, “but I’m with her. Yes, sir, they think they can shove her clean off the market, but they can’t do it. I’ve boughten in Johnson’s shares, and the whole of Netley’s, and I’ll stay with her till she breaks.”

  So they shoved and pushed and clawed her down—that unseen nefarious crowd in the city—and Jeff held on to her and they writhed and twisted at his grip, and then—

  And then—well, that’s just the queer thing about the mining business. Why, sudden as a flash of lightning, it seemed, the news came over the wire to the Mariposa Newspacket, that they had struck a vein of silver in the Northern Star as thick as a sidewalk, and that the stock had jumped to seventeen dollars a share, and even at that you couldn’t get it! And Jeff stood there flushed and half-staggered against the mirror of the little shop, with a bunch of mining scrip in his hand that was worth forty thousand dollars!

  Excitement! It was all over the town in minutes. They ran off a news extra at the Mariposa Newspacket, and in less than no time there wasn’t standing room in the barber shop, and over in Smith’s Hotel they had three extra barkeepers working on the lager beer pumps.

  They were selling mining shares on the Main Street in Mariposa that afternoon and people were just clutching for them. Then at night there was a big oyster supper in Smith’s caff, with speeches, and the Mariposa band outside.

  And the queer thing was that the very next afternoon was the funeral of young Fizzlechip, and Dean Drone had to change the whole text of his Sunday sermon at two days’ notice for fear of offending public sentiment.

  But I think what Jeff liked best of it all was the sort of public recognition that it meant. He’d stand there in the shop, hardly bothering to shave, and explain to the men in the arm-chairs how he held her, and they shoved her, and he clung to her, and what he’d said to himself—a perfect Iliad—while he was clinging to her.

  The whole thing was in the city papers a few days after with a photograph of Jeff, taken specially at Ed Moore’s studio (upstairs over Netley’s). It showed Jeff sitting among palm trees, as all mining men do, with one hand on his knee, and a dog, one of those regular mining dogs, at his feet, and a look of piercing intelligence in his face that would easily account for forty thousand dollars.

  I say that the recognition meant a lot to Jeff for its own sake. But no doubt the fortune meant quite a bit to him too on account of Myra.

  Did I mention Myra, Jeff’s daughter? Perhaps not. That’s the trouble with the people in Mariposa; they’re all so separate and so different—not a bit like the people in the cities—that unless you hear about them separately and one by one you can’t for a moment understand what they’re like.

  Myra had golden hair and a Greek face and would come bursting through the barber shop in a hat at least six inches wider than what they wear in Paris. As you saw her swinging up the street to the Telephone Exchange in a suit that was straight out of the Delineator and brown American boots, there was style written all over her,—the kind of t
hing that Mariposa recognised and did homage to. And to see her in the Exchange,—she was one of the four girls that I spoke of,—on her high stool with a steel cap on,—jabbing the connecting plugs in and out as if electricity cost nothing—well, all I mean is that you could understand why it was that the commercial travellers would stand round in the Exchange calling up all sorts of impossible villages, and waiting about so pleasant and genial!—it made one realize how naturally good-tempered men are. And then when Myra would go off duty and Miss Cleghorn, who was sallow, would come on, the commercial men would be off again like autumn leaves.

  It just shows the difference between people. There was Myra who treated lovers like dogs and would slap them across the face with a banana skin to show her utter independence. And there was Miss Cleghorn, who was sallow, and who bought a forty cent Ancient History to improve herself: and yet if she’d hit any man in Mariposa with a banana skin, he’d have had her arrested for assault.

  Mind you, I don’t mean that Myra was merely flippant and worthless. Not at all. She was a girl with any amount of talent. You should have heard her recite “The Raven,” at the Methodist Social! Simply genius! And when she acted Portia in the Trial Scene of the Merchant of Venice at the High School concert, everybody in Mariposa admitted that you couldn’t have told it from the original.

  So, of course, as soon as Jeff made the fortune, Myra had her resignation in next morning and everybody knew that she was to go to a dramatic school for three months in the fall and become a leading actress.

  But, as I said, the public recognition counted a lot for Jeff. The moment you begin to get that sort of thing it comes in quickly enough. Brains, you know, are recognized right away. That was why, of course, within a week from this Jeff received the first big packet of stuff from the Cuban Land Development Company, with coloured pictures of Cuba, and fields of bananas, and haciendas and insurrectos with machetes and Heaven knows what. They heard of him, somehow,—it wasn’t for a modest man like Jefferson to say how. After all, the capitalists of the world are just one and the same crowd. If you’re in it, you’re in it, that’s all! Jeff realized why it is that of course men like Carnegie or Rockefeller and Morgan all know one another. They have to.