With the Procession | Page 9

and business in all
manner of guise ran up towering walls behind them that shut off the
summer sun hours before it was due to sink; and traffic rang incessant
gongs at their back door, and drew lengthening lines of freight-cars
across the lake view from their front one; and Sunday crowds strolled
and sprawled over the wide green between the roadway and the
waterway, and tramps and beggars and peddlers advanced daily in a
steady and disconcerting phalanx, and bolts and bars and chains and
gratings and eternal vigilance were all required to keep mine from
becoming thine; until, in the year of grace 1893, the Marshalls had
almost come to realize that they were living solitary and in a state of
siege. But they had never yet thought of capitulation nor of retreat; they
were the Old Guard; they were not going to surrender, nor to die either.
As the advance guard of all, old David Marshall frequently occupied
the most advanced bastion of all, the parlor bay-window. Here, in the
half-dark, he was accustomed to sit and think; and his family let him sit
and think, unconscious that it would sometimes be a kindness to break
in upon the habit. He pondered on the markets and on the movements
of trade; he kept one eye for the shabby wayfarers who threw a longing
look upon his basement gratings, and another for the showers of sparks
and black plumes of smoke which came to remind him of corporate
encroachments upon municipal rights. And here one evening he sat,
some few days after his son's return, while a hubbub of female voices
came to him from the next room. His sister-in-law from three miles
down the street, and his married daughter from ten miles out in the
suburbs, had come to show some civility to the returned traveller, and
the conjunction of two such stars was not to be effected in silence. Nor
was silence to be secured even by a retreat from one room to another.

"Well, pa, you are here, sure enough." A hand pulled aside the curtain
and made the bay-window a part of the parlor again. "Poking off by
yourself, and thinking--I know. When I've told you so many times not
to."
It was Jane. It was her office to keep the family from disintegration.
None of them realized it--hardly she herself.
She perched on the arm of his big chair, placed her hand on his
forehead, and looked in his face with a quizzical pretence of impatience.
These little passages sometimes occurred in the bay-window--hardly
anywhere else.
"Well, what is it this time?" she asked. Her intention was tender, but
her voice issued with a kind of explosive grate--the natural product of
vocal cords racked by the lake winds of thirty springs and wrecked by a
thousand sudden and violent transitions from heat to cold and back
again. "Not Mr. Belden, I hope?"
"No, Jennie. That will come out all right, I expect. We had a talk with
the builder about it today."
He looked at her with a kind of wan and patient smile. His own voice
was dry, husky, sibilant--sixty years of Lake Michigan.
She smiled back at his "Jennie"; that was always her name on such
occasions. "It isn't about Oolong?" she asked, in burlesque anxiety.
"No."
"Well, then, is it the--Sisters?"
"Not the Sisters. They were in last week."
"Guess again, then," said Jane, perseveringly. "Is it--is it the
Benevolent Policemen?"
"No, not the Policemen. They won't be around for a month yet."

Her hand dropped to his shoulder and her eyes searched his. To another
they might have seemed staring; to him they were only intent. "Poor pa;
he's like a ten-pin standing at the end of the alley, isn't he? They all take
a turn at him, don't they?"
"I'm afraid that's about it, Jennie." He smiled rather wanly again and
smoothed her hand with his own.
"Well, what else is there?" pondered Jane. "Is it the Afro-American
bishop raising the mortgage on their chapel?"
"No. I guess the Afro-Americans have about paid things off by this
time."
"How lonesome they must leave you? H'm! is it the Michigan Avenue
Property Owners assessing you again to fight the choo-choo cars?"
Her father shook his head and almost laughed.
"Is it The Wives of the Presidents'? Is it 'The Mothers of Great Men'?"
"What a girl!" he said, and laughed aloud. It seemed as if he wanted to
laugh.
She eyed him narrowly. "There's only one thing more I can think of,"
she declared, screwing up her mouth and her eyes. "But I sha'n't ask
you that--it's too silly. If I imagined for a moment that you could be
thinking about old Mother Van Horn--"
She paused. Her father cast down