Cordelia Underwood, or the Marvelous Beginnings of the Moosepath League

by Van Reid

  “Well, Mrs. Morningside,” replied the man, “a row of itself might be a proper subject, but I understand that this one was between two politicians.”

  James chuckled from behind his paper, though if his humor was the result of the written account of the epic battle, or Mr. Benning’s reply, there was no telling. Mr. Benning, for his part, gave no indication that he had been signally responsible for the great Blithewaite-Van Smooten bout.

  “Don’t worry, Grace,” said James. “It says here that ‘the combatants maintained a dangerous distance from one another; dangerous, that is, to the crowd at least, for they were never closer than ten feet till the parachute caused them to disappear from sight altogether.’ ”

  “I wish we had been closer to it,” said Cordelia. Quite innocently she turned to John Benning and asked him: “Did you see the fight?”

  “Well, yes,” he said, carefully. “I did happen to be there.”

  “I would have paid good money to see two politicians in the ring,” came a familiar, though unexpected, voice. A balding head and a white beard emerged from behind the back of a seat several rows down from the Under-woods’ party.

  “Mr. Tolly!” said Cordelia, and indeed it was the same fellow who had beguiled their trip to Rockland with his story of the Christmas bear.

  “At your service, ma’am,” said Isherwood Tolly.

  Grace peered at the man to see if they should be talking to him.

  “What a pleasant surprise!” said Mercia. “Are you going to Bangor?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Visiting my sister. I lived there once.”

  “I don’t suppose politicians have fistfights in Bangor, Mr. Tolly,” said James.

  “Not the politicians, no; but I’ve seen some terrific jams in my time.” James winked at his daughter, for like an expert angler he knew that he had used the right bait. “I saw, in my youth,” reminisced Mr. Tolly, “the awfulest, sockingest, most thunderous, hair-singeing, eye-popping fight since Hercules tackled Atlas. I don’t know but what it was the most extreme sort of powder-up since the history of man first said: ‘What day is it?’! And there was I, barely big enough to straddle a cat and ringside for the whole event.”

  The clackety-clack of the rails sounded loud in the silence that waited for Mr. Tolly’s story. Grace looked as if he had offered to personally explain to her the fine art of mule skinning—which, perhaps, he could have done. She was quite dumbstruck, and Cordelia wondered briefly if she had been frightened more by the subject of his discourse or by the grammatical genius with which he presented it.

  “What happened?” asked Aunt Delia. Mr. Tolly swung himself around so that his feet were in the aisle. He hung on the back of his seat with one arm and fished in his pocket for a pipe. “Well,” he said. “It came about like this. . . .

  “I was eight years old and my father ran a supply store by the waterfront. We weren’t in the Half-Acre, but we were close enough so that you could smell a blast of rum every time someone opened a tavern door, and hear the revels at night like a great engine of destruction. We went to church twice a week, and I credit my survival to it.” Mr. Tolly was searching for a light, and James obliged him with a pocket-box of lucifers.

  “There was a timber man in those days,” continued Mr. Tolly, once he had fired up his pipe and drawn several satisfying puffs from it, “Daniel Hector Oakenspill was his name, and he wasn’t the tallest jack and he wasn’t the broadest, but somehow he was the biggest man I had ever seen, except for one. He rode those logs like his hair was on fire, and blasted into town like a spring flood whenever a drive came through.

  “He patronized my father’s supply store, however, and he always doffed his cap and spoke like a deacon to my mother. He knew my name and once gave me a baby crow called Applewood. But there was a wild look in his eye, and when he walked the floorboards cracked and the candy jars rattled. My mother assured me that I wasn’t to speak to him outside the store.

  “There were many establishments on the hard side of town, you see, courting many purposes, and his exploits in them all were legend. At eight years old I couldn’t be expected to understand everything I heard about Dan Oak, as he was known, but it was clear just to hear his voice—like a tree falling—that he was the most drastic sort of man that ever set foot on shore—except for one.”

  Mr. Tolly’s pipe fumed like a steam engine as he drew on it, the smoke catching in the breeze of an open window. He savored the pipe stem for a moment; then he said: “Now, as you have probably guessed, there was another man in those days—a seaman, Henry Goliath Stormthrew, and he was no taller than Daniel and no broader, but he was the other biggest man I had ever seen. He sailed the Thinks-I-to-Myself, which had been built at Bangor, taken by the British in 1813, and salvaged off the coast of Africa by a merchant-adventurer by the name of Earnest Polyscope. But that’s another story.

  “That ship ran the lumber line for more years than anyone could remember, and Hank Storm, as he was known, would come in on her like he was singlehandedly filling the sails, and once she dropped anchor, he’d tear through town like an unexpected northeaster!

  “He plied his custom at my father’s store as well, and held his hat in his hand and spoke as softly as he could to the ladies. He had a voice like the crash of the surf, but he always called me Ish, and gave me a macaw once, named Mr. Feldspar, that he had bought in South America. He had the look of a barely controlled tornado, and if he moved too quickly the windows shivered and the pages of my father’s ledger book fluttered out of place. He was not to be spoken to outside the store as well.

  “For, you see, he cut a swath through the dark end of town like an act of violent weather and they said that the fallen sort of women (pardon me for mentioning them) flocked to him with as much sense as moths to a flame. I couldn’t be expected to know what that meant, all those years ago, but there was no mistaking him for anything but the other most drastic sort of man that ever put one foot ahead of the first.”

  Mr. Tolly couldn’t have set up an entire war with more promise. The range of his voice went beyond the Underwoods’ party and the entire car fairly rang with keening ears. True to his craft, he found it expedient just then to pause in his story. His mouth was dry, it seemed, and a young man who hadn’t even been introduced to the speaker ran off in search of the lemonade cart.

  Mr. Tolly was much obliged when the reviving draft arrived, and he smacked his lips with such vigor that a general thirst was realized throughout the car. The man with the lemonade cart, sensing a windfall business, appeared, and a picniclike atmosphere ensued that was very agreeable.

  “So, Mr. Tolly,” said James, “When did these two upheavals meet one another? I am supposing that they did.”

  “Yes, sir; but it wasn’t at my father’s store, and it wasn’t in the Devil’s Half-Acre. Strange as it sounds, in all the years they frequented those places, they had never so much as laid eyes on one another. More than once they had torn through town at the same time, but like similar magnets they kept apart. Some believed that they hadn’t the slightest notion of one another’s existence, and no one was very anxious to introduce them.

  “They were like two natural forces, you understand, and the thought of them simply shaking hands caused otherwise stout men to shiver. It was pretty well agreed upon in the town of Bangor, when I was young, that putting Dan and Hank within reach of one other would more than double the danger. One might just as well introduce fire to oil, or water to electricity.

  “Now, it is a verifiable actuality that any two men can talk politely and even become friends, given the chance; but put them in different uniforms, or train them in the use of different tools or philosophies or shaving soap, and you will have two men who are sure that the other lives primarily to contradict him. I did know a fellow once who insisted that reasonable men can disagree, but somebody knocked him cold with a cast-iron frying pan, just then, and I never did hear the remainder of his hypothesis.

  “Differences ought to complemen
t one another, of course, there being no better example than those lumberjacks and sailors who regularly dismantled each other whenever their paths crossed in the streets and taverns of the Half-Acre. It never occurred to them, I suppose, that the seaman needed the woods-man to bring the forest to them, and that the woodsman needed the seaman to take their forest all over the world. They had the most fantastic dust-ups whenever they met in the dim quarter of town, and the newspapers tallied the ongoing toll like baseball scores.

  “But Henry Goliath Stormthrew and Daniel Hector Oakenspill never came face to face till one sunny afternoon on State Street—and I was there, almost responsible for it.”

  Mr. Tolly looked hungry at this point: an inward sort of expression apprehended him, as if he were taking a mental inventory of his physical condition, and the resulting information told upon his face with great eloquence. (It was either that or his stomach grumbling.) Clearly it required a certain amount of energy to recall these memories and he was in need of sustenance if he were to continue. Several hampers were cracked toward this end, and Mr. Tolly found himself regaled with any number of sandwiches and cold chickens and large helpings of sweet pastry. Everyone else followed his example, though it was early for the midday meal, and the sense of a picnic outing increased.

  “Is there a woman involved in your story?” wondered John Benning. He, like everyone else, did not want to encourage Mr. Tolly to speak with his mouth full, but neither did he want the man to reach his destination before he finished.

  “There is,” said Mr. Tolly in reply, “though wholly innocent in the matter.”

  “You surprise me, sir,” said James, who felt safe saying this while out of reach of his wife’s foot.

  “She was my cousin,” said Mr. Tolly.

  “Ah, well then. One’s cousins are often wholly innocent—especially the female ones.”

  “Ursula Dupré was her name. She was the daughter of my mother’s sister and had come to stay with us during the summer months. A flaxen-haired beauty, my friends! Yet her eyes were brown! I quite loved her from the start. She was tall and lithe, and my father called her Sunflower. I cannot describe her further,” said Mr. Tolly, almost with tears in his eyes. “She was too beautiful to me. She was eighteen that summer and absolutely bursting, though equally unaware of it in a dignified sort of way.”

  “Good heavens!” said Grace. “Whatever can he mean?”

  Cordelia and Priscilla wondered if they were ever bursting in such a consummate manner. Cordelia had often thought that she would burst.

  “It was the second day of July, and I was eight years old, when my mother sent me with Ursula to buy me some Sunday best, as I had outgrown my nicest shirt and trousers. Bangor hadn’t reached its bustling height in that day but the dirt streets and wooden sidewalks were charged with business, and dust was in the air from the traffic.

  “We didn’t do up the Fourth like they do these days, but we knew what it was about, and flags were flying from the storefronts and from the top of the courthouse. There was something of a festive air wherever we went, but I’m not so sure that Ursula didn’t bring it with her, she was that charming, and everyone—man, woman, and child—smiled at us, and nodded, or doffed their hats, and every man took a sidelong glance as we passed them.

  “We were on our way home, after a successful foray, with my new toggery wrapped in paper bundles and tucked up under my arm. With my other hand I held Ursula’s, and I was not a little proud of the fact, basking in a sort of reflected glory, I suppose.”

  The train came to a whistling stop during this portion of the story and several listeners looked about apprehensively, for fear that this might represent their destination—a terrible fate in the middle of Mr. Tolly’s tale. If anyone of them had planned to debark, however, no one did so, though several people joined them in the car and had to be shushed to silence.

  “A solitary gust of wind,” said Mr. Tolly as the train recommenced its journey, “can be a charmed thing, or a cursed one, or simply mischievous—but knowing where the wind blows is not a little talent, and had we a single inkling of an impish sprite of a breeze suddenly bold with the chance of chasing a hat from off a pretty head, we might have taken another way home.”

  “The wind blew her hat from her head, Mr. Tolly?” asked Cordelia.

  “Yes, indeed. Without warning and without hesitation that breeze saw its opportunity and lifted her hat—a pretty little straw topper with a blue ribbon—off her head and into the street.

  “I was on my way to retrieve it before it ever hit the ground; but Ursula was not the sort to stand on gallantry and held me back so that she could fetch it herself. She needn’t have bothered, however, for I froze in my steps at the sight before me. The two biggest men I had ever known were closing in on that hat with identical purpose.

  “It was ironic, really—Hank Storm, the sailor, striding from the shore side of town, and Dan Oak, the lumberjack, tramping from the river. They arrived at the hat like mirror images of one another, bending to pick it up and just checking themselves short of bumping heads. They straightened to their full heights then, and except for the color of their hair and the cast of their features and the cut of their clothes they were almost twins. It was an awful thing to see. Ursula stopped in the middle of the street, as struck by the sight of those two as I was—as anyone would be.

  “ ‘Pardon me,’ they said in unison—the words polite, but the tone in their voices like dire warning.

  “ ‘Please, don’t bother yourselves,’ said Ursula, the way someone might speak at a church social. It was then, unfortunately, that those two men took a glance at the owner of the hat, and the fate of that day was sealed as tight as an acorn.

  “ ‘You will forgive me, I am sure,’ said Daniel Hector Oakenspill to Henry Goliath Stormthrew. ‘I was just preparing to retrieve this hat for the young lady.’ He spoke as quietly as he was able, and still you could feel the words vibrating beneath your feet.

  “ ‘You will excuse me, I have no doubt,’ returned Henry Goliath Stormthrew to Daniel Hector Oakenspill. ‘But I myself was on the verge of fulfilling the very same duty.’ He spoke in as soft a voice as he could, but the air hummed with his speech. A man observing the scene from the other side of the street groaned; it was such a horrible thing to watch.

  “ ‘When I restore the hat to her,’ said Dan Oak, ‘I will certainly express your worthy intentions.’

  “ ‘That is quite unnecessary,’ returned Hank Storm. ‘But I will assuredly explain to her, once I have given back her hat, how commendable were your designs.’

  “With each new courtesy, onlookers grew more terrified. Dan and Hank stood stock-still, leaning toward one another like two trees, or two masts, in a self-contradicting breeze.

  “ ‘I fear you misunderstand me,’ said Dan, ‘though I am sure it is due to my own poor elocution.’ Someone standing beside me fainted dead away at this.

  “ ‘I am almost certain,’ answered Hank, ‘that my poor rendition of the language has caused a misapprehension on your part.’ The sound of someone running in pure terror caught my ear from behind. I myself was rooted to the spot and had not even the sense to pull Ursula from harm’s way.

  Ursula alone was unshaken; she stepped between the two men and fetched her hat for herself. ‘Gentlemen,’ she said, and unhurriedly returned to the sidewalk. ‘Isherwood,’ she said, and tugged at my elbow as she passed by.

  Now I would have been relieved to think that was that,” said Mr. Tolly. “But before I had taken two steps I was unnerved by some of the most frightening words I have ever laid an ear to.

  “ ‘I am powerfully sorry to inform you,’ said Hank to Dan, ‘that this conversation, however pleasant it may have been, has impeded the realization of my purpose.’

  “ ‘I can hardly explain the pain it gives me,’ said Dan, ‘to apprise you that our discourse, which otherwise has been thoroughly diverting, has managed to obstruct the furtherance of my objective.’

 
“Their foreheads nearly touched, they were leaning toward each other and their smiles were so absolutely congenial that my face hurt to watch them. No one who was there that day could ever say who moved first—we were all so mightily transfixed by those handsome smiles. Ursula was just telling me to come along when it happened—a thunderclap, an explosion, a rush of displaced air—and when the dust cleared Dan Oak and Hank Storm were twenty yards apart, each at the end of his own skid marks, which had deepened at their extremities into three-foot trenches.

  “Every other citizen within a hundred yards was on his or her back, except for Ursula, who looked as if a month of rain couldn’t have made her angrier. I straightened myself onto my seat (pardon my mentioning it) in time to see what looked like two locomotives charging one another in the middle of the street.

  “ ‘I am so sorry!’ shouted Hank and he caught Dan on the chin with such a whack that the lumberman pirouetted on his toes and swung back around.

  “Hardly fazed, Dan bellowed: ‘I am sure you’ll forgive me!’ and took Hank such a slam to the chest that the sailor somersaulted in the air and landed on his feet.

  “Then, expressing further niceties, Hank picked Dan off the ground and drove him head first a good eight or nine inches into the street. (We measured the holes later.) Not one to be outdone when it came to common courtesy, Dan righted himself and, with a very polite turn of phrase that I can’t recall just now, rendered the same treatment onto Hank.

  “They continued to speak very highly of one another as they stood toe to toe and traded such blows that people in three counties thought a thunderstorm was on its way. Twice they found themselves worked into self-manufactured pits and were considerate in helping each other out so that they could begin again. They scratched so much dust in the air in one spot that they uncovered bedrock, and for three-quarters of an hour or so found this a congenial place upon which to throw one another.