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Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man by Marie Conway Oemler

M >> Marie Conway Oemler >> Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man



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SLIPPY McGEE

SOMETIMES KNOWN AS
THE BUTTERFLY MAN

BY
MARIE CONWAY OEMLER


NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
1920


1917, by
THE CENTURY CO.


Published, April, 1917.
Reprinted, August, 1917; February, 1918;
August, 1918; March, 1919; August, 1919;
November, 1919; February, 1920.


TO
ELIZABETH AND ALAN OEMLER




FOREWORD


I have known life and love, I have known death and disaster;
Foregathered with fools, succumbed to sin, been not unacquainted
with shame;
Doubted, and yet held fast to a faith no doubt could o'ermaster.
Won and lost:--and I know it was all a part of the Game.

Youth and the dreams of youth, hope, and the triumph of sorrow:
I took as they came, I played them all; and I trumped the trick
when I could.
And now, O Mover of Men, let the end be to-day or to-morrow--
I have staked and played for Myself, and You and the Game were good!




CONTENTS


CHAPTER PAGE

I APPLEBORO 3
II THE COMING OF SLIPPY McGEE 19
III NEIGHBORS 37
IV UNDERWINGS 48
V ENTER KERRY 65
VI "THY SERVANT WILL GO AND FIGHT WITH THIS PHILISTINE."
1 SAM. 17-32 94
VII THE GOING OF SLIPPY McGEE 111
VIII THE BUTTERFLY MAN 131
IX NESTS 145
X THE BLUEJAY 172
XI A LITTLE GIRL GROWN UP 189
XII JOHN FLINT, GENTLEMAN 203
XIII "EACH IN HIS OWN COIN" 226
XIV THE WISHING CURL 258
XV IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT 283
XVI "WILL YOU WALK INTO MY PARLOR" 302
XVII "--SAID THE SPIDER TO THE FLY--" 319
XVIII ST. STANISLAUS CROOKS HIS ELBOW 343
XIX THE I O U OF SLIPPY McGEE 364
XX BETWEEN A BUTTERFLY'S WINGS 382




SLIPPY McGEE




CHARACTERS


FATHER ARMAND JEAN DE RANCE, Catholic Priest of Appleboro, South Carolina
MADAME DE RANCE, his Mother
CLELIE, their Servant
LAURENCE MAYNE, the Boy
MARY VIRGINIA EUSTIS, the Girl
JAMES EUSTIS, Man of the New South
MRS. EUSTIS, a Lady
DOCTOR WALTER WESTMORELAND, the Beloved Physician
JIM DABNEY, Editor of the Appleboro "Clarion"
MAJOR APPLEBY CARTWRIGHT }
MISS SALLY RUTH DEXTER } Neighbors
JUDGE HAMMOND MAYNE }
GEORGE INGLESBY, the Boss of Appleboro
J. HOWARD HUNTER, his Private Secretary
KERRY, an Irish Setter
PITACHE, the Parish House Dog
THE MOTHS AND BUTTERFLIES OF SOUTH CAROLINA
THE CHILDREN, THE MILL-HANDS, THE FACTORY FOLKS, and
SLIPPY MCGEE, sometimes known as the Butterfly Man




SLIPPY McGEE


CHAPTER I

APPLEBORO


"Now there was my cousin Eliza," Miss Sally Ruth Dexter once said to
me, "who was forced to make her home for thirty years in Vienna! She
married an attache of the Austrian legation, you know; met him while
she was visiting in Washington, and she was such a pretty girl and he
was such a charming man that they fell in love with each other and got
married. Afterward his family procured him a very influential post at
court, and of course poor Cousin Eliza had to stay there with him.
Dear mama often said she considered it a most touching proof of
woman's willingness to sacrifice herself--for there's no doubt it must
have been very hard on poor Cousin Eliza. She was born and raised
right here in Appleboro, you see."

Do not think that Miss Sally Ruth was anything but most transparently
sincere in thus sympathizing with the sad fate of poor Cousin Eliza,
who was born and raised in Appleboro, South Carolina, and yet
sacrificed herself by dragging out thirty years of exile in the court
circles of Vienna! Any trueborn Appleboron would be equally sorry for
Cousin Eliza for the same reason that Miss Sally Ruth was. Get
yourself born in South Carolina and you will comprehend.

"What did you see in your travels that you liked most?" I was curious
to discover from an estimable citizen who had spent a summer abroad.

"Why, General Lee's standin' statue in the Capitol an' his recumbent
figure in Washington an' Lee chapel, of co'se!" said the colonel
promptly. "An' listen hyuh, Father De Rance, I certainly needed him to
take the bad taste out of my mouth an' the red out of my eye after
viewin' Bill Sherman on a brass hawse in New York, with an angel
that'd lost the grace of God prancin' on ahead of him!" He added
reflectively: "I had my own ideah as to where any angel leadin' _him_
was most likely headed for!"

"Oh, I meant in Europe!" hastily.

"Well, father, I saw pretty near everything in Europe, I reckon;
likewise New York. But comin' home I ran up to Washington an' Lee to
visit the general lyin' there asleep, an' it just needed one glance to
assure me that the greatest an' grandest work of art in this round
world was right there before me! What do folks want to rush off to
foreign parts for, where they can't talk plain English an' a man can't
get a satisfyin' meal of home cookin', when we've got the greatest
work of art an' the best hams ever cured, right in Virginia? See
America first, I say. Why, suh, I was so glad to get back to good old
Appleboro that I let everybody else wait until I'd gone around to the
monument an' looked up at our man standin' there on top of it, an' I
found myself sayin' over the names he's guardin' as if I was sayin' my
prayers: _our names_.

"Uh huh, Europe's good enough for Europeans an' the Nawth's a God's
plenty good enough for Yankees, but Appleboro for me. Why, father,
they haven't got anything like our monument to their names!"

They haven't. And I should hate to think that any Confederate living
or dead ever even remotely resembled the gray granite one on our
monument. He is a brigandish and bearded person in a foraging cap,
leaning forward to rest himself on his gun. His long skirted coat is
buckled tightly about his waist to form a neat bustle effect in the
back, and the solidity of his granite shoes and the fell rigidity of
his granite breeches are such as make the esthetic shudder; one has to
admit that as a work of art he is almost as bad as the statues
cluttering New York City. But in Appleboro folks are not critical;
they see him not with the eyes of art but with the deeper vision of
the heart. He stands for something that is gone on the wind and the
names he guards are our names.

This is not irrelevant. It is merely to explain something that is
inherent in the living spirit of all South Carolina; wherefore it
explains my Appleboro, the real inside-Appleboro.

Outwardly Appleboro is just one of those quiet, conservative, old
Carolina towns where, loyal to the customs and traditions of their
fathers, they would as lief white-wash what they firmly believe to be
the true and natural character of General William Tecumseh Sherman as
they would their own front fences. Occasionally somebody will give a
backyard henhouse a needed coat or two; but a front fence? Never! It
isn't the thing. Nobody does it. All normal South Carolinians come
into the world with a native horror of paint and whitewash and they
depart hence even as they were born. In consequence, towns like
Appleboro take on the venerable aspect of antiquity, peacefully
drowsing among immemorial oaks draped with long, gray, melancholy
moss.

Not that we are cut off from the world, or that we have escaped the
clutch of commerce. We have the usual shops and stores, even an
emporium or two, and street lights until twelve, and the mills and
factory. We have the river trade, and two railroads tap our rich
territory to fetch and carry what we take and give. And, except in the
poor parish of which I, Armand De Rance, am pastor, and some few
wealthy families like the Eustises, Agur's wise and noble prayer has
been in part granted to us; for if it has not been possible to remove
far from us all vanity and lies, yet we have been given neither
poverty nor riches, and we are fed with food convenient for us.

In Appleboro the pleasant and prejudiced Old looks askance at the
noisy and intruding New, before which, it is forced to retreat--always
without undue or undignified haste, however, and always unpainted and
unreconstructed. It is a town where families live in houses that have
sheltered generations of the same name, using furniture that was not
new when Marion's men hid in the swamps and the redcoats overran the
country-side. Almost everybody has a garden, full of old-fashioned
shrubs and flowers, and fine trees. In such a place men and women grow
old serenely and delightfully, and youth flourishes all the fairer for
the rich soil which has brought it forth.

One has twenty-four hours to the day in a South Carolina town--plenty
of time to live in, so that one can afford to do things unhurriedly
and has leisure to be neighborly. For you do have neighbors here. It
is true that they know all your business and who and what your
grandfather was and wasn't, and they are prone to discuss it with a
frankness to make the scalp prickle. But then, you know theirs, too,
and you are at liberty to employ the same fearsome frankness, provided
you do it politely and are not speaking to an outsider. It is
perfectly permissible for _you_ to say exactly what you please about
your own people to your own people, but should an outsider and an
alien presume to do likewise, the Carolina code admits of but one
course of conduct; borrowing the tactics of the goats against the
wolf, they close in shoulder to shoulder and present to the audacious
intruder an unbroken and formidable front of horns.

And it is the last place left in all America where decent poverty is
in nowise penalized. You can be poor pleasantly--a much rarer and far
finer art than being old gracefully. Because of this, life in South
Carolina sometimes retains a simplicity as fine and sincere as it is
charming.

I deplore the necessity, but I will be pardoned if I pause here to
become somewhat personal, to explain who and what I am and how I came
to be a pastor in Appleboro. To explain myself, then, I shall have to
go back to a spring morning long ago, when I was not a poor parish
priest, no, nor ever dreamed of becoming one, but was young Armand De
Rance, a flower-crowned and singing pagan, holding up to the morning
sun the chalice of spring; joyous because I was of a perishable
beauty, dazzled because life gave me so much, proud of an old and
honored name, secure in ancestral wealth, loving laughter so much that
I looked with the raised eyebrow and the twisted lip at austerities
and prayers.

If ever I reflected at all, it was to consider that I had nothing to
pray for, save that things might ever remain as they were: that I
should remain me, myself, young Armand De Rance, loving and above all
beloved of that one sweet girl whom I loved with all my heart. Young,
wealthy, strong, beautiful, loving, and beloved! To hold all that,
crowded into the hollow of one boyish hand! Oh, it was too much!

I do not think I had ever felt my own happiness so exquisitely as I
did upon that day which was to see the last of it. I was to go
a-Maying with her who had ever been as my own soul, since we were
children playing together. So I rode off to her home, an old house set
in its walled inclosure by the river. At the door somebody met me,
calling me by my name. I thought at first it had been a stranger. It
was her mother. And while I stood staring at her changed face she took
me by the hand and began to whisper in my ear ... what I had to know.
Blindly, like one bludgeoned on the head, I followed her into a
darkened room, and saw what lay there with closed eyes and hair still
wet from the river into which my girl had cast herself.

No, I cannot put into words just what had happened; indeed, I never
really knew all. There was no public scandal, only great sorrow. But I
died that morning. The young and happy part of me died, and, only
half-alive I walked about among the living, dragging about with me the
corpse of what had been myself. Crushed by this horrible burden which
none saw but I, I was blind to the beauties of earth and deaf to the
mercies of heaven, until a great Voice called me to come out of the
sepulcher of myself; and I came--alive again, and free, of a strong
spirit, but with youth gone from it. Out of the void of an
irremediable disaster God had called me to His service, chastened and
humbled.

"_Who is weak and I am not weak? who is offended and I burn not?_"

And yet, although I knew my decision was irrevocable, I did not find
it easy to tell my mother. Then:

"Little mother of my heart," I blurted, "my career is decided. I have
been called. I am for the Church."

We were in her pleasant morning room, a beautiful room, and the lace
curtains were pushed aside to allow free ingress of air and sunlight.
Between the windows hung two objects my mother most greatly
cherished--one an enameled Petitot miniature, gold-framed, of a man in
the flower of his youth. His hair, beautiful as the hair of Absalom,
falls about his haughty, high-bred face, and so magnificently is he
clothed that when I was a child I used to associate him in my mind
with those "_captains and rulers, clothed most gorgeously, all of them
desirable young men, ... girdled with a girdle upon their loins,
exceeding in dyed attire upon their heads, all of them princes to look
to" ... whom Aholibah "doted upon when her eyes saw them portrayed
upon the walls in vermilion_."

The other is an Audran engraving of that same man grown old and
stripped of beauty and of glory, as the leaf that falls and the flower
that fades. The somber habit of an order has replaced scarlet and
gold; and sackcloth, satin. Between the two pictures hangs an old
crucifix. For that is Armand De Rance, glorious sinner, handsomest,
wealthiest, most gifted man of his day--and his a day of glorious men;
and this is Armand De Rance, become the sad austere reformer of La
Trappe.

My mother rose, walked over to the Abbe's pictures, and looked long
and with rather frightened eyes at him. Perhaps there was something in
the similarity to his of the fate which had come upon me who bore his
name, which caused her to turn so pale. I also am an Armand De Rance,
of a cadet branch of that great house, which emigrated to the New
World when we French were founding colonies on the banks of the
Mississippi.

Her hand went to her heart. Turning, she regarded me pitifully.

"Oh, no, not that!" I reassured her. "I am at once too strong and not
strong enough for solitude and silence. Surely there is room and work
for one who would serve God through serving his fellow men, in the
open, is there not?"

At that she kissed me. Not a whimper, although I am an only son and
the name dies with me, the old name of which she was so beautifully
proud! She had hoped to see my son wear my father's name and face and
thus bring back the lost husband she had so greatly loved; she had
prayed to see my children about her knees, and it must have cost her a
frightful anguish to renounce these sweet and consoling dreams, these
tender and human ambitions. Yet she did so, smiling, and kissed me on
the brow.

Three months later I entered the Church; and because I was the last
De Rance, and twenty four, and the day was to have been my
wedding-day, there fell upon me, sorely against my will, the halo of
sad romance.

Endeared thus to the young, I suppose I grew into what I might call a
very popular preacher. Though I myself cannot see that I ever did much
actual good, since my friends praised my sermons for their "fine
Gallic flavor," and I made no enemies.

But there was no rest for my spirit, until the Call came again, the
Call that may not be slighted, and bade me leave my sheltered place,
my pleasant lines, and go among the poor, to save my own soul alive.

That is why and how the Bishop, my old and dear friend, after long
argument and many protests, at length yielded and had me transferred
from fashionable St. Jean Baptiste's to the poverty-stricken
missionary parish of sodden laboring folk in a South Carolina
coast-town: he meant to cure me, the good man! I should have the worst
at the outset.

"And I hope you understand," said he, sorrowfully, "that this step
practically closes your career. Such a pity, for you could have gone
so far! You might even have worn the red hat. It is not hoping too
much that the last De Rance, the namesake of the great Abbe, might
have finished as an American cardinal! But God's will be done. If you
must go, you must go."

I said, respectfully, that I had to go.

"Well, then, go and try it out to the uttermost," said the Bishop.
"And it may be that, if you do not kill yourself with overwork, you
may return to me cured, when you see the futility of the task you
wish to undertake." But I was never again to see his kind face in this
world.

And then, as if to cut me off yet more completely from all ties, as if
to render my decision irrevocable, it was permitted of Providence that
the wheel of my fortune should take one last revolution. Henri Dupuis
of the banking house which bore his name shot himself through the head
one fine morning, and as he had been my guardian and was still the
executor of my father's estate, the whole De Rance fortune went down
with him. All of it. Even the old house went, the old house which had
sheltered so many of the name these two hundred years. If I could have
grieved for anything it would have been that. Nothing was left except
the modest private fortune long since secured to my mother by my
father's affection. It had been a bridal gift, intended to cover her
personal expenses, her charities, and her pretty whims. Now it was to
stand between her and want.

Stripped all but bare, and with one servant left of all our staff, we
turned our backs upon our old life, our old home, and faced the world
anew, in a strange place where nothing was familiar, and where I who
had begun so differently was destined to grow into what I have since
become--just an old priest, with but small reputation outside of his
few friends and poor working-folks. There! That is quite enough of
_me_!

There was one pleasant feature of our new home that rejoiced me for my
mother's sake. From the very first she found neighbors who were
friendly and charming. Now my mother, when we came to Appleboro, was
still a beautiful woman, fair and rosy, with a profusion of _blonde
cendre_ curls just beginning to whiten, a sweet and arch face, and
eyes of clearest hazel, valanced with jet. She had been perhaps the
loveliest and most beloved woman of that proud and select circle which
is composed of families descended from the old noblesse, the most
exclusive circle of New Orleans society. And, as she said, nothing
could change nor alter the fact that no matter _what_ happened to us,
we were still De Rances!

"Ah! And was it, then, a De Rance who had the holy Mother of God
painted in a family picture, with a scroll issuing from her lips
addressing him as 'My Cousin'?" I asked, slyly.

"If it was, nobody in the world had a better right!" said she stoutly.

Thus the serene and unquestioning faith of their estimate of
themselves in the scheme of things, as evidenced by these Carolina
folk around her, caused Madame De Rance neither surprise nor
amusement. She understood. She shared many of their prejudices, and
she of all women could appreciate a pride that was almost equal to her
own. When they initiated her into the inevitable and inescapable
Carolina game of Matching Grandfathers, she always had a Roland for
their Oliver; and as they generally came back with an Oliver to match
her Roland, all the players retired with equal honors and mutual
respect. Every door in Appleboro at once opened wide to Madame De
Rance. The difference in religion was obviated by the similarity of
Family.

Fortunately, too, the Church and Parish House were not in the mill
district itself, a place shoved aside, full of sordid hideousness,
ribboned with railroad tracks, squalid with boarding-houses never free
from the smell of bad cooking, sinister with pawnshops, miserable with
depressingly ugly rows of small houses where the hands herded, and all
of it darkened by the grim shadow of the great red brick mills
themselves. Instead, our Church sits on a tree-shaded corner in the
old town, and the roomy white-piazza'd Parish House is next door,
embowered in the pleasantest of all gardens.

That garden reconciled my mother to her exile, for I am afraid she had
regarded Appleboro with somewhat of the attitude of the castaway
sailor toward a desert island--a refuge after shipwreck, but a desert
island nevertheless, a place which cuts off one from one's world. And
when at first the poor, uncouth, sullen creatures who were a part of
my new charge, frightened and dismayed her, there was always the
garden to fly to for consolation. If she couldn't plant seeds of order
and cleanliness and morality and thrift in the sterile soil of poor
folks' minds, she could always plant seeds of color and beauty and
fragrance in her garden and be surer of the result. That garden was my
delight, too. I am sure no other equal space ever harbored so many
birds and bees and butterflies; and its scented dusks was the paradise
of moths. Great wonderful fellows clothed in kings' raiment, little
chaps colored like flowers and seashells and rainbows, there the airy
cohorts of the People of the Sky wheeled and danced and fluttered. Now
my grandfather and my father had been the friends of Audubon and of
Agassiz, and I myself had been the correspondent of Riley and Scudder
and Henry Edwards, for I love the People of the Sky more than all
created things. And when I watched them in my garden, I am sure it was
they who lent my heart their wings to lift it above the misery and
overwork and grief which surrounded me; I am sure I should have sunk
at times, if God had not sent me my little friends, the moths and
butterflies.

Our grounds join Miss Sally Ruth Dexter's on one side and Judge
Hammond Mayne's are just behind us; so that the Judge's black Daddy
January can court our yellow Clelie over one fence, with coy and
delicate love-gifts of sugar-cane and sweet-potato pone in season; and
Miss Sally Ruth's roosters and ours can wholeheartedly pick each
other's eyes out through the other all the year round. These are fowls
with so firm a faith in the Mosaic code of an eye for an eye that when
Miss Sally Ruth has six blind of the right eye we have five blind of
the left. We are at times stung by the Mayne bees, but freely and
bountifully supplied with the Mayne honey, a product of fine flavor.
And our little dog Pitache made it the serious business of his life to
keep the Mayne cats in what he considered their proper bounds.

Major Appleby Cartwright, our neighbor to the other side of Miss Sally
Ruth, has a theory that not alone by our fruits, but by our animals,
shall we be known for what we are. He insists that Pitache wags his
tail and barks in French and considers all cats Protestants, and that
Miss Sally Ruth's hens are all Presbyterians at heart, in spite of the
fact that her roosters are Mormons. The Major likewise insists that
you couldn't possibly hope to know the real Judge Hammond Mayne unless
you knew his pet cats. You admire that calm and imperturbable
dignity, that sphinxlike and yet vigilant poise of bearing which has
made Judge Mayne so notable an ornament of the bench? It is purely
feline: "He caught it from his cats, suh: he caught every God-blessed
bit of it from his cats!"

As one may perceive, we have delicious neighbors!

When we had been settled in Appleboro a little more than a year, and I
had gotten the parish wheels running fairly smooth, we discovered that
by my mother's French house-keeping, that exquisitely careful
house-keeping which uses everything and wastes nothing, my salary was
going to be quite sufficient to cover our modest menage, thus leaving
my mother's own income practically intact. We could use it in the
parish; but there was so much to be done for that parish that we were
rather at a loss where to begin, or what one thing to accomplish among
so many things crying aloud. But finally, tackling what seemed to us
the worst of these crying evils, we were able to turn the two empty
rooms upstairs into what Madame pleasantly called Guest Rooms, thus
remedying, to the best of our ability, the absolute lack of any
accommodation for the sick and injured poor. And as time passed, these
Guest Rooms, so greatly needed, proved not how much but how little we
could do. We could only afford to maintain two beds on our small
allowance, for they had to be absolutely free, to help those for whom
they were intended--poor folks in immediate and dire need, for whom
the town had no other place except an insanitary room in the jail. You
could be born and baptized in the Guest Rooms, or shriven and sent
thence in hope. More often you were coaxed back to health under my
mother's nursing and Clelie's cooking and the skill of Doctor Walter
Westmoreland.

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