The Conquest of Canaan

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THE CONQUEST OF CANAAN
BY BOOTH TARKINGTON

To
L.F.T.

CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. ENTER CHORUS
II. A RESCUE
III. OLD HOPES
IV. THE DISASTER
V. BEAVER BEACH
VI. "YE'LL TAK' THE HIGH ROAD AND I'LL TAK' THE LOW ROAD"
VII. GIVE A DOG A BAD NAME
VIII. A BAD PENNY TURNS UP
IX. OUTER DARKNESS
X. THE TRYST
XI. WHEN HALF-GODS GO
XII. TO REMAIN ON THE FIELD OF BATTLE IS NOT ALWAYS A VICTORY
XIII. THE WATCHER AND THE WARDEN
XIV. WHITE ROSES IN A LAW-OFFICE
XV. HAPPY FEAR GIVES HIMSELF UP
XVI. THE TWO CANAANS
XVII. MR. SHEEHAN'S HINTS
XVIII. IN THE HEAT OF THE DAY
XIX. ESKEW ARP
XX. THREE ARE ENLISTED
XXI. NORBERT WAITS FOR JOE
XXII. MR. SHEEHAN SPEAKS
XXIII. JOE WALKS ACROSS THE COURT-HOUSE YARD
XXIV. MARTIN PIKE KEEPS AN ENGAGEMENT
XXV. THE JURY COMES IN
XXVI. "ANCIENT OF DAYS"

THE CONQUEST OF CANAAN

ENTER CHORUS

I

A dry snow had fallen steadily
throughout the still night, so that
when a cold, upper wind cleared the
sky gloriously in the morning the
incongruous Indiana town shone in a
white harmony--roof, ledge, and earth as evenly
covered as by moonlight. There was no thaw;
only where the line of factories followed the big
bend of the frozen river, their distant chimneys like
exclamation points on a blank page, was there a
first threat against the supreme whiteness. The
wind passed quickly and on high; the shouting of
the school-children had ceased at nine o'clock with
pitiful suddenness; no sleigh-bells laughed out on
the air; and the muffling of the thoroughfares
wrought an unaccustomed peace like that of Sunday.
This was the phenomenon which afforded the
opening of the morning debate of the sages in the
wide windows of the "National House."

Only such unfortunates as have so far failed
to visit Canaan do not know that the "National
House" is on the Main Street side of the Courthouse
Square, and has the advantage of being
within two minutes' walk of the railroad station,
which is in plain sight of the windows--an
inestimable benefit to the conversation of the aged
men who occupied these windows on this white
morning, even as they were wont in summer to hold
against all comers the cane-seated chairs on the
pavement outside. Thence, as trains came and
went, they commanded the city gates, and, seeking
motives and adding to the stock of history, narrowly
observed and examined into all who entered or
departed. Their habit was not singular. He who
would foolishly tax the sages of Canaan with a
bucolic light-mindedness must first walk in Piccadilly
in early June, stroll down the Corso in Rome
before Ash Wednesday, or regard those windows of
Fifth Avenue whose curtains are withdrawn of a
winter Sunday; for in each of these great streets,
wherever the windows, not of trade, are widest, his
eyes must behold wise men, like to those of Canaan,
executing always their same purpose.

The difference is in favor of Canaan; the "National
House" was the club, but the perusal of
traveller or passer by was here only the spume
blown before a stately ship of thought; and you
might hear the sages comparing the Koran with the
speeches of Robert J. Ingersoll.

In the days of board sidewalks, "mail-time" had
meant a precise moment for Canaan, and even now,
many years after the first postman, it remained
somewhat definite to the aged men; for, out of
deference to a pleasant, olden custom, and perhaps
partly for an excuse to "get down to the hotel"
(which was not altogether in favor with the elderly
ladies), most of them retained their antique boxes
in the post-office, happily in the next building.

In this connection it may be written that a
subscription clerk in the office of the Chicago
Daily Standard, having noted a single subscriber
from Canaan, was, a fortnight later, pleased to
receive, by one mail, nine subscriptions from that
promising town. If one brought nine others in a
fortnight, thought he, what would nine bring in a
month? Amazingly, they brought nothing, and
the rest was silence. Here was a matter of intricate
diplomacy never to come within that youth his
ken. The morning voyage to the post-office,
long mocked as a fable and screen by the families
of the sages, had grown so difficult to accomplish
for one of them, Colonel Flitcroft (Colonel in the
war with Mexico), that he had been put to it,
indeed, to foot the firing-line against his wife (a lady
of celebrated determination and hale-voiced at
seventy), and to defend the rental of a box which
had sheltered but three missives in four years.
Desperation is often inspiration; the Colonel
brilliantly subscribed for the Standard, forgetting to
give his house address, and it took the others just
thirteen days to wring his secret from him. Then
the Standard served for all.

Mail-time had come to mean that bright hour
when they all got their feet on the brass rod which
protected the sills of the two big windows, with the
steam-radiators sizzling like kettles against the
side wall. Mr. Jonas Tabor, who had sold his
hardware business magnificently (not magnificently
for his nephew, the purchaser) some ten years
before, was usually, in spite of the fact that he
remained a bachelor at seventy-nine, the last to settle
down with the others, though often the first to reach
the hotel, which he always entered by a side door,
because he did not believe in the treating system.
And it was Mr. Eskew Arp, only seventy-five, but
already a thoroughly capable cynic, who, almost
invariably "opened the argument," and it was he
who discovered the sinister intention behind the
weather of this particular morning. Mr. Arp had
not begun life so sourly: as a youth he had been
proud of his given name, which had come to him
through his mother's family, who had made it
honorable, but many years of explanations that
Eskew did not indicate his initials had lowered his
opinion of the intelligence and morality of the race.

The malevolence of his voice and manner this
morning, therefore, when he shook his finger at
the town beyond the windows, and exclaimed,
with a bitter laugh, "Look at it!" was no surprise
to his companions. "Jest look at it! I tell you
the devil is mighty smart. Ha, ha! Mighty
smart!"

Through custom it was the duty of Squire
Buckalew (Justice of the Peace in '59) to be the
first to take up Mr. Arp. The others looked to
him for it. Therefore, he asked, sharply:

"What's the devil got to do with snow?"

"Everything to do with it, sir," Mr. Arp
retorted. "It's plain as day to anybody with eyes
and sense."

"Then I wish you'd p'int it out," said Buckalew,
"if you've got either."

"By the Almighty, Squire"--Mr. Arp turned in
his chair with sudden heat--"if I'd lived as long
as you--"

"You have," interrupted the other, stung.
"Twelve years ago!"

"If I'd lived as long as you," Mr. Arp repeated,
unwincingly, in a louder voice, "and had follered
Satan's trail as long as you have, and yet couldn't
recognize it when I see it, I'd git converted and
vote Prohibitionist."

"_I_ don't see it," interjected Uncle Joe Davey,
in his querulous voice. (He was the patriarch of
them all.) "_I_ can't find no cloven-hoof-prints in
the snow."

"All over it, sir!" cried the cynic. "All over it!
Old Satan loves tricks like this. Here's a town
that's jest one squirmin' mass of lies and envy and
vice and wickedness and corruption--"

"Hold on!" exclaimed Colonel Flitcroft. "That's
a slander upon our hearths and our government.
Why, when I was in the Council--"

"It wasn't a bit worse then," Mr. Arp returned,
unreasonably. "Jest you look how the devil fools us.
He drops down this here virgin mantle on Canaan
and makes it look as good as you pretend you
think it is: as good as the Sunday-school room of a
country church--though THAT"--he went off on a
tangent, venomously--"is generally only another
whited sepulchre, and the superintendent's mighty
apt to have a bottle of whiskey hid behind the
organ, and--"

"Look here, Eskew," said Jonas Tabor, "that's
got nothin' to do with--"

"Why ain't it? Answer me!" cried Mr. Arp,
continuing, without pause: "Why ain't it? Can't
you wait till I git through? You listen to me, and
when I'm ready I'll listen to--"

"See here," began the Colonel, making himself
heard over three others, "I want to ask you--"

"No, sir!" Mr. Arp pounded the floor irascibly
with his hickory stick. "Don't you ask me anything!
How can you tell that I'm not going to
answer your question without your asking it, till
I've got through? You listen first. I say, here's
a town of nearly thirty thousand inhabitants,
every last one of 'em--men, women, and children--
selfish and cowardly and sinful, if you could see
their innermost natures; a town of the ugliest and
worst built houses in the world, and governed by a
lot of saloon-keepers--though I hope it 'll never
git down to where the ministers can run it. And
the devil comes along, and in one night--why, all
you got to do is LOOK at it! You'd think we needn't
ever trouble to make it better. That's what the
devil wants us to do--wants us to rest easy about
it, and paints it up to look like a heaven of peace
and purity and sanctified spirits. Snowfall like
this would of made Lot turn the angel out-of-doors
and say that the old home was good enough for
him. Gomorrah would of looked like a Puritan
village--though I'll bet my last dollar that there
was a lot, and a WHOLE lot, that's never been told
about Puritan villages. A lot that--"

"WHAT never was?" interrupted Mr. Peter
Bradbury, whose granddaughter had lately announced
her discovery that the Bradburys were descended
from Miles Standish. "What wasn't told about
Puritan villages?"

"Can't you wait?" Mr. Arp's accents were those
of pain. "Haven't I got ANY right to present my
side of the case? Ain't we restrained enough to
allow of free speech here? How can we ever git
anywhere in an argument like this, unless we let
one man talk at a time? How--"

"Go on with your statement," said Uncle Joe
Davey, impatiently.

Mr. Arp's grievance was increased. "Now listen
to YOU! How many more interruptions are comin'?
I'll listen to the other side, but I've got to state
mine first, haven't I? If I don't make my point
clear, what's the use of the argument?
Argumentation is only the comparison of two sides of a
question, and you have to see what the first side
IS before you can compare it with the other one,
don't you? Are you all agreed to that?"

"Yes, yes," said the Colonel. "Go ahead. We
won't interrupt until you're through."

"Very well," resumed Mr. Arp, with a fleeting
expression of satisfaction, "as I said before, I
wish to--as I said--" He paused, in some
confusion. "As I said, argumentation is--that is, I
say--" He stopped again, utterly at sea, having
talked himself so far out of his course that he was
unable to recall either his sailing port or his
destination. Finally he said, feebly, to save the
confession, "Well, go on with your side of it."

This generosity was for a moment disconcerting;
however, the quietest of the party took up the
opposition--Roger Tabor, a very thin, old man
with a clean-shaven face, almost as white as his
hair, and melancholy, gentle, gray eyes, very unlike
those of his brother Jonas, which were dark
and sharp and button-bright. (It was to Roger's
son that Jonas had so magnificently sold the hardware
business.) Roger was known in Canaan as
"the artist"; there had never been another of his
profession in the place, and the town knew not the
word "painter," except in application to the useful
artisan who is subject to lead-poisoning. There
was no indication of his profession in the attire of
Mr. Tabor, unless the too apparent age of his
black felt hat and a neat patch at the elbow of his
shiny, old brown overcoat might have been taken
as symbols of the sacrifice to his muse which his
life had been. He was not a constant attendant
of the conclave, and when he came it was usually
to listen; indeed, he spoke so seldom that at the
sound of his voice they all turned to him with
some surprise.

"I suppose," he began, "that Eskew means the
devil is behind all beautiful things."

"Ugly ones, too," said Mr. Arp, with a start of
recollection. "And I wish to state--"

"Not now!" Colonel Flitcroft turned upon him
violently. "You've already stated it."

"Then, if he is behind the ugly things, too," said
Roger, "we must take him either way, so let us be
glad of the beauty for its own sake. Eskew says
this is a wicked town. It may be--I don't know.
He says it's badly built; perhaps it is; but it doesn't
seem to me that it's ugly in itself. I don't know
what its real self is, because it wears so many
aspects. God keeps painting it all the time, and
never shows me twice the same picture; not even
two snowfalls are just alike, nor the days that
follow them; no more than two misty sunsets are
alike--for the color and even the form of the
town you call ugly are a matter of the season of
the year and of the time of day and of the light
and air. The ugly town is like an endless gallery
which you can walk through, from year-end to
year-end, never seeing the same canvas twice, no
matter how much you may want to--and there's
the pathos of it. Isn't it the same with people
with the characters of all of us, just as it is with
our faces? No face remains the same for two
successive days--"

"It don't?" Colonel Flitcroft interrupted, with
an explosive and rueful incredulity. "Well, I'd
like to--" Second thoughts came to him almost
immediately, and, as much out of gallantry as
through discretion, fearing that he might be taken
as thinking of one at home, he relapsed into
silence.

Not so with the others. It was as if a
firecracker had been dropped into a sleeping poultry-
yard. Least of all could Mr. Arp contain himself.
At the top of his voice, necessarily, he agreed
with Roger that faces changed, not only from day
to day, and not only because of light and air and
such things, but from hour to hour, and from
minute to minute, through the hideous stimulus
of hypocrisy.

The "argument" grew heated; half a dozen tidy
quarrels arose; all the sages went at it fiercely,
except Roger Tabor, who stole quietly away.
The aged men were enjoying themselves thoroughly,
especially those who quarrelled. Naturally, the
frail bark of the topic which had been launched
was whirled about by too many side-currents to
remain long in sight, and soon became derelict,
while the intellectual dolphins dove and tumbled
in the depths. At the end of twenty minutes
Mr. Arp emerged upon the surface, and in his
mouth was this:

"Tell me, why ain't the Church--why ain't the
Church and the rest of the believers in a future life
lookin' for immortality at the other end of life,
too? If we're immortal, we always have been;
then why don't they ever speculate on what we
were before we were born? It's because they're
too blame selfish--don't care a flapdoodle about
what WAS, all they want is to go on livin' forever."

Mr. Arp's voice had risen to an acrid triumphancy,
when it suddenly faltered, relapsed to a
murmur, and then to a stricken silence, as a tall, fat
man of overpowering aspect threw open the outer
door near by and crossed the lobby to the clerk's
desk. An awe fell upon the sages with this advent.
They were hushed, and after a movement in their
chairs, with a strange effect of huddling, sat
disconcerted and attentive, like school-boys at the
entrance of the master.

The personage had a big, fat, pink face and a
heavily undershot jaw, what whitish beard he wore
following his double chin somewhat after the manner
displayed in the portraits of Henry the Eighth.
His eyes, very bright under puffed upper lids, were
intolerant and insultingly penetrating despite
their small size. Their irritability held a kind of
hotness, and yet the personage exuded frost, not
of the weather, all about him. You could not
imagine man or angel daring to greet this being
genially--sooner throw a kiss to Mount Pilatus!

"Mr. Brown," he said, with ponderous hostility,
in a bull bass, to the clerk--the kind of voice
which would have made an express train leave the
track and go round the other way--"do you hear
me?"

"Oh yes, Judge," the clerk replied, swiftly, in
tones as unlike those which he used for strange
transients as a collector's voice in his ladylove's
ear is unlike that which he propels at delinquents.

"Do you see that snow?" asked the personage,
threateningly.

"Yes, Judge." Mr. Brown essayed a placating
smile. "Yes, indeed, Judge Pike."

"Has your employer, the manager of this hotel,
seen that snow?" pursued the personage, with a
gesture of unspeakable solemn menace.

"Yes, sir. I think so. Yes, sir."

"Do you think he fully understands that I am
the proprietor of this building?"

"Certainly, Judge, cer--"

"You will inform him that I do not intend to
be discommoded by his negligence as I pass to
my offices. Tell him from me that unless he keeps
the sidewalks in front of this hotel clear of snow I
will cancel his lease. Their present condition is
outrageous. Do you understand me? Outrageous!
Do you hear?"

"Yes, Judge, I do so," answered the clerk,
hoarse with respect. "I'll see to it this minute,
Judge Pike."

"You had better." The personage turned
himself about and began a grim progress towards the
door by which he had entered, his eyes fixing
themselves angrily upon the conclave at the windows.

Colonel Flitcroft essayed a smile, a faltering one.

"Fine weather, Judge Pike," he said, hopefully.

There was no response of any kind; the undershot
jaw became more intolerant. The personage
made his opinion of the group disconcertingly
plain, and the old boys understood that he knew
them for a worthless lot of senile loafers, as great a
nuisance in his building as was the snow without;
and much too evident was his unspoken threat
to see that the manager cleared them out of there
before long.

He nodded curtly to the only man of substance
among them, Jonas Tabor, and shut the door
behind him with majestic insult. He was Canaan's
millionaire.

He was one of those dynamic creatures who
leave the haunting impression of their wills
behind them, like the tails of Bo-Peep's sheep, like
the evil dead men have done; he left his intolerant
image in the ether for a long time after he had
gone, to confront and confound the aged men and
hold them in deferential and humiliated silence.
Each of them was mysteriously lowered in his own
estimation, and knew that he had been made to
seem futile and foolish in the eyes of his fellows.
They were all conscious, too, that the clerk had
been acutely receptive of Judge Pike's reading of
them; that he was reviving from his own squelchedness
through the later snubbing of the colonel;
also that he might further seek to recover his
poise by an attack on them for cluttering up the
office.

Naturally, Jonas Tabor was the first to speak.
"Judge Pike's lookin' mighty well," he said, admiringly.

"Yes, he is," ventured Squire Buckalew, with
deference; "mighty well."

"Yes, sir," echoed Peter Bradbury; "mighty
well."

"He's a great man," wheezed Uncle Joe Davey;
"a great man, Judge Martin Pike; a great man!"

"I expect he has considerable on his mind,"
said the Colonel, who had grown very red. "I
noticed that he hardly seemed to see us."

"Yes, sir," Mr. Bradbury corroborated, with an
attempt at an amused laugh. "I noticed it, too.
Of course a man with all his cares and interests
must git absent-minded now and then."

"Of course he does," said the colonel. "A
man with all his responsibilities--"

"Yes, that's so," came a chorus of the brethren,
finding comfort and reassurance as their voices and
spirits began to recover from the blight.

"There's a party at the Judge's to-night," said
Mr. Bradbury--"kind of a ball Mamie Pike's givin'
for the young folks. Quite a doin's, I hear."

"That's another thing that's ruining Canaan,"
Mr. Arp declared, morosely. "These entertainments
they have nowadays. Spend all the money
out of town--band from Indianapolis, chicken
salad and darkey waiters from Chicago! And
what I want to know is, What's this town goin' to
do about the nigger question?"

"What about it?" asked Mr. Davey, belligerently.

"What about it?" Mr. Arp mocked, fiercely.
"You better say, `What about it?' "

"Well, what?" maintained Mr. Davey, steadfastly.

"I'll bet there ain't any less than four thousand
niggers in Canaan to-day!" Mr. Arp hammered
the floor with his stick. "Every last one of 'em
criminals, and more comin' on every train."

"No such a thing," said Squire Buckalew, living
up to his bounden duty. "You look down the
street. There's the ten-forty-five comin' in now.
I'll bet you a straight five-cent Peek-a-Boo cigar
there ain't ary nigger on the whole train, except
the sleepin'-car porters."

"What kind of a way to argue is that?"
demanded Mr. Arp, hotly. "Bettin' ain't proof, is
it? Besides, that's the through express from the
East. I meant trains from the South."

"You didn't say so," retorted Buckalew,
triumphantly. "Stick to your bet, Eskew, stick to
your bet."

"My bet!" cried the outraged Eskew. "Who
offered to bet?"

"You did," replied the Squire, with perfect
assurance and sincerity. The others supported
him in the heartiest spirit of on-with-the-dance,
and war and joy were unconfined.

A decrepit hack or two, a couple of old-fashioned
surreys, and a few "cut-unders" drove by, bearing
the newly arrived and their valises, the hotel
omnibus depositing several commercial travellers
at the door. A solitary figure came from the
station on foot, and when it appeared within fair
range of the window, Uncle Joe Davey, who had
but hovered on the flanks of the combat, first
removed his spectacles and wiped them, as though
distrusting the vision they offered him, then,
replacing them, scanned anew the approaching figure
and uttered a smothered cry.

"My Lord A'mighty!" he gasped. "What's
this? Look there!"

They looked. A truce came involuntarily, and
they sat in paralytic silence as the figure made its
stately and sensational progress along Main Street.

Not only the aged men were smitten. Men
shovelling snow from the pavements stopped suddenly
in their labors; two women, talking busily
on a doorstep, were stilled and remained in frozen
attitudes as it passed; a grocer's clerk, crossing
the pavement, carrying a heavily laden basket to
his delivery wagon, halted half-way as the figure
came near, and then, making a pivot of his heels
as it went by, behaved towards it as does the
magnetic needle to the pole.

It was that of a tall gentleman, cheerfully, though
somewhat with ennui, enduring his nineteenth
winter. His long and slender face he wore smiling,
beneath an accurately cut plaster of dark hair
cornicing his forehead, a fashion followed by many
youths of that year. This perfect bang was shown
under a round black hat whose rim was so small as
almost not to be there at all; and the head was
supported by a waxy-white sea-wall of collar,
rising three inches above the blue billows of a puffed
cravat, upon which floated a large, hollow pearl.
His ulster, sporting a big cape at the shoulders,
and a tasselled hood over the cape, was of a rough
Scotch cloth, patterned in faint, gray-and-white
squares the size of baggage-checks, and it was so
long that the skirts trailed in the snow. His legs
were lost in the accurately creased, voluminous
garments that were the tailors' canny reaction
from the tight trousers with which the 'Eighties had
begun: they were, in color, a palish russet, broadly
striped with gray, and, in size, surpassed the milder
spirit of fashion so far as they permitted a liberal
knee action to take place almost without superficial
effect. Upon his feet glistened long shoes,
shaped, save for the heels, like sharp racing-shells;
these were partially protected by tan-colored low
gaiters with flat, shiny, brown buttons. In one
hand the youth swung a bone-handled walking-
stick, perhaps an inch and a half in diameter, the
other carried a yellow leather banjo-case, upon the
outer side of which glittered the embossed-silver
initials, "E. B." He was smoking, but walked
with his head up, making use, however, of a gait at
that time new to Canaan, a seeming superbly
irresponsible lounge, engendering much motion
of the shoulders, producing an effect of carelessness
combined with independence--an effect which the
innocent have been known to hail as an unconscious one.

He looked about him as he came, smilingly, with
an expression of princely amusement--as an elderly
cabinet minister, say, strolling about a village
where he had spent some months in his youth, a
hamlet which he had then thought large and imposing,
but which, being revisited after years of
cosmopolitan glory, appeals to his whimsy and his
pity. The youth's glance at the court-house
unmistakably said: "Ah, I recall that odd little box.
I thought it quite large in the days before I
became what I am now, and I dare say the good
townsfolk still think it an imposing structure!"
With everything in sight he deigned to be amused,
especially with the old faces in the "National
House" windows. To these he waved his stick
with airy graciousness.

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