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"THE LIMIT OF THE LINE”
HE last suburban train pulled out
from under the marble corridors of
the great Terminal station, and flashed
away through the red glare of the win
ter sunset; past the outlying city dis
tricts, into expansive stretches of
fields, whose gray billows seemed to
melt into the dim azure and green of
the horizon; through forests whose limbs
w
were startlingly etched against the blue of the sky,
or clothed with a mantle of dead leaves, the brown
and russet shroud with which the sad year hides its
face at this season.
Inside the last coach, the usual melodrama, vivid,
with human interest, was being presented; if there
had been any psychological student aboard, who
believed with the poet, “that crowds are good foi
meditation.” There were bright groups of well
dressed people, chatting amiably about current
events; and others whose faces but poorly masked
the inner conflict. Midway the car, a young girl
dressed inconspicuously in dark blue, leaned lmr
bright head against the window frame, apparently
unconscious of her fellow passengers. The face be
neath the crown of burnished hair was rather pale,
but there was nothing of marked distinction about
the features, except the appealing brilliance of the
eyes. They suggested “that hungering outward
from the barren earth for something like a joy,” as
she gazed steadily through the glass.
Shirley Bryan was a stenographer for a wholesale
Iron Corporation, which furnished steel, in all its
manifold ramifications, on demand, from an iron
bolt to the thousands of rails necessary to equip a
railroad. Her work was heavy and exacting. For
while there were numerous typewriters employed
by the firm, she served the Brain of the Corpora
tion, and he was absolutely relentless in his de
mands.
The hard truth was that Barry Moore was a
modern pagan, and Mammon-mad, although he was
comparatively young in years. He offered up the
incense of his own life, and that of others, to the
God of Gold, without a thought or care as to the
consequences. The expenditure of nerve force re
quired simply to write his personal letters was enor
mous, because he was full of schemes, for the ex
ploiting of his own plans, outside of the legitimate
business represented by his firm.
There was but one cleft in the hard rock of Barry
Moore’s nature, and in that niche grew the white
flower of his love for his invalid mother; other
wise he would have been as entirely despicable as
his attitude on other lines warranted.
The train slackened its onward rush, the wester
ing sun swung low over a dark green belt of pines;
a trestle rose in the shining steel track, underflowed
by a broad, slumberous river; next a flock of blue
birds winging southward swept into view, and
seemed to pause over a group of cattle congregated
on a gray hillside; after this a farm house en
swathed in stiff lines of evergreen hedges, with a
mammoth red barn in the background closed the
kaleidoscope of vision. The river left its psychurgic
impression of old gold, waves that glinted like the
bright work of a Cruiser, yellow, dreamy circles of
spray, with here and there a flake of nun white
foam.
Shirley was recalled from her study of the win
dow panorama by the sob of a child on the velvet
seat in front of her. She was scarcely three years
of age, her little head was running o’er with curls,
and her eyes, when the tears were not blurring them,
were blue and angelic. The sobbing said to Shirley
that she was tired, in a temper, and inconsolable.
Her mother, in deep mourning, was handicapped
in her ministry by a baby in her arms; and some
how the pitifulness of the small tragedy touched the
young typewriter.
A countryman wearing a suit of gray jeans and
a slouched hat, sat just across the aisle from the
X.
The Golden Age for December 24, 1908.
3y Odessa Strickland Payne and Lamar Strickland Payne
little party, to whom the casual interest of the
coach had been attracted by the fretting of the
child. He held a large cluster of green cotton
stalks in his hand, in full, white flower. Shirley
divined that it was some unusual variety of the
Queen of Plants in the South, which he had carried
to some expert for a critical examination, that
might react to his own advantage. She leaned over
the arm of her seat, with gracious intent, smiling as
she made a slight gesture with her ungloved hand.
“Your specimen stalks are very fine,” she said, in
a clear, musical voice, slightly raised, “I wonder,”
with a skilled accent upon the verb, “if you would
be so kind . . as to . . as to spare one to a fellow
passenger ? ’ ’
The countryman lifted his hat.
“Why shore, Miss,” he returned, a little flushed
and humanly flattered by the girl’s tact, and her
frank request, “but, Miss, yer put me entirely up
a stump. Beg your pardon, but what kin yer want
with it?” selecting the best stalk. He had heard of
“Lady Farmers. ’’
iShirley smiled. The man extended one of the
overflowing bolls, in his brown, toil-hardened hand.
“Thank you,” said Shirley, “so much.”
She took the proffered stalk, and dropping the
snow white cotton flower down in front of the un
happy child, she caught its attention, then, she
swayed the green branch upward, just out of reach
of the pink, chubby fingers.
The man in jeans comprehended; and leaning
back in his seat, he took off his soft, wool hat, wip
ing his brow with a red bandanna handkerchief,
reflectively.
“Sea Island Cotton!” he ejaculated. “It is all
in the know how. As the colored brother said to the
Judge, when he split the stove wood so that it ac
tually fitted the stove, ‘ Jedge, I charge you 50 cents
for the work, and a SI.OO for the “know how.” ’ I
•have been told that to roll off a log is easy. The
only log I ever rolled off landed me in a sucker hole
ten feet deep. But, layin’ aside my personal expe
rience with the proverb,” glancing at. Shirley, “to
amuse that kid was as easy to the lady .
as rolling off a log.”
He addressed the girl who he had thought must
be a “Lady Farmer,” because she was interested
in cotton stalks.
“Miss,” he said, getting red to the roots of his
hair, “er . . er . . Miss! When that un
wears out, you can have anuther, with my best
Sunday-go-to-meetin ’ compliments. ’ ’
His voice had the compass of a megaphone on elec
tion night. The strength of the hills was in it. A
cascade of good humored laughter came from the
back of the car.
But the child had ceased its cries, after the first
glimpse of the magic wand, and the tired mother
had settled back in her seat to watch the play.
The ability to do the right thing at the right mo
ment is a gift, as exceptional as fine. Very few
people are unconventional enough to observe the
Golden Rule. It is so much easier and more com
fortable to look on. But Miss Bryan, by her pretty
experiment, had struck the note of harmony for the
car, soothed the unhappy child, relieved the em
barrassed mother, besides a score or more of pas
sengers.
Shirley gathered her packages together. The en
gineer’s sudden stop jostled the merry passengers
a little, but no one threatened to sue the road, and
they filed leisurely out of the car.
Shirley dropped her cotton stalk, glanced at the
blue-eyed child, nodded to the bowing and thankful
mother, and followed her fellow townsmen. The
man in jeans had kept his seat. At Shirley’s de
parture, he leaned forward, got down on his knees,
elongated like a piece of India rubber on a boy’s
sling, contracted, rose to his feet, half sheer.js* half
triumphant. He had the prize cotton str wer
less, but famous. He might enter it at State
Fair as Exhibit A, with the modest suggestion, ‘that
cotton stalks were understudies for baby rattles.”
Unconscious of this byplay, Shirley picked her
way down the cinder track, past the red glow of the
engine’s furnace, past the white beam from the
night operator’s lamp. The moon swung like a sil
ver censer among a drift of gray-blue clouds, it was
night and she had a lonely half-mile walk before
her.
■Standing in the gravel walk, under a lamp post,
in the small ornamental railroad park, just beyond a
rectangular bed of red and white chrysanthemums,
was a rather distinguished looking middle-aged wo
man. She wore rimless glasses, and was dressed
very simply in black. But her iron-gray hair, worn
in pompadour under an inconspicuous toque, was
indeed a crown of glory; and her complexion was
soft and clear as a girl’s. The lines of her figure
were fine, and her pose in the landscape garden, at
the moment, unconsciously graceful.
As the blue clad figure of Shirley Bryan was
evolved from the crowd, the woman hurried for
ward, and joined her at one of the doors of the
depot.
1 ‘ Mater, what made you! ’ ’ 'Shirley exclaimed, re
provingly, but with a look of keen delight in her
dark eyes.
Mrs. Bryan laughed lightly, the musical laugh of
a well-bred woman.
“Manifestly, Shirley,” she answered, in a voice
of magnetic quality, “because I was anxious and
the train was late. Besides, so much has happened
today,” she continued, as she linked her arm in that
of her daughter, and caught the swing of her
step, as they turned down a side street.
“I confess I wanted to talk it over with you,
as soon as possible. Think of events coming with
a rush in this Rip Van Winkle town! I declare,”
she went on, with a pressure of the blue clad arm
against her heart, “I feel absolutely metropolitan
and alive. I have been waiting so long, and, de
spairingly, Micawber-like for something to turn up.
And now that the answer to my petitions lias been
deposited within my very doors, I remind myself,
startlingly, of the tale of the drum. I am so amaz
ing glad, Shirley, that I could almost repeat the
hero’s words—as a quotation.”
“Mater, you are giving wings to your imagina
tion,” the girl replied, as they paused for a mo
ment, in a bright drift of moonlight, under the
naked boughs of a. sycamore tree on the sandy side
walk. “Don’t I know you of old, dear heart? You
think I need a mental cheery bounce, after a hard
day of toil; and this is your artistic way of ad
ministering it. Isn’t it true?”
“Well, let’s go on,” the older woman said, quiet
ly, and then you can determine whether you have
misinterpreted me. Since you were not at church
last Sunday, and, in consequence failed to hear the
tale of the drum, I am going to tell it to you, caris
sima, honestly, and without any variations.”
“It seems,” she continued, in the colorless tone
of a trained narrator, “that once upon a time, there
was a little boy who prayed for a drum. But the
drum was so long in putting in an appearance that
his faith died a natural, or, should I say, a super
natural death, since I am speaking of a spiritual
element ? At any rate, it died! And one evening,
when he was praying as usual for the drum, bis
father, who had previously overheard his prayers,
slipped np behind him, and dropped a brand-new,
shining drum over his head. The boy recoiled with
an exclamation, which revealed that his prayer was
a formula and not a fact
“‘ Where in the dick. did you come from,
now?’ he said, in a most surprised voice.”
Shiiley laughed; the story was such a piquant
betrayal of human nature and its weakness.
“Then I am to believe,” Shirley said, with scin
tillating eyes, “that all this extravagant preamble
was simply to introduce me to the tale of the
drum?”
(Continued on Page 9.)
