When, in 1885, Ashley first saw the house his eyes opened wide. As he mounted the steps and entered the hall his lips parted, his breathing was arrested, as it is when we try to hear a distant music. He seemed to have seen it before or to have dreamt it. A large verandah surrounded the ground floor on three sides; another verandah overhung the front door; above it rose a cupola in which a telescope had been installed. Within, a wide staircase ascended from the front hall; the newel post supported an iridescent crystal globe. At the right a large living room extended the length of the house. Newspapers, already ten years old, had been spread over the tables and chairs, over the well-worn sofas, over the old square piano. Behind the house stretched an untended lawn; rains and snows had discolored the croquet balls half-hidden in the weeds. At the bottom of the lawn was a pond with a summerhouse beside it. In the grove of elms at the right stood a large shed which the children were to call the “Rainy Day House” and which was to serve also as workshop for their father’s “inventions” and “experiments.” He knew before he saw them that there were some chicken-houses, now collapsed on one side and open to the rain, a small orchard, blackberry bushes, and some chestnut trees. A sort of awe filled him. Who could be richer?
But it was Airlie MacGregor’s dream into which he had entered. MacGregor had built it in expectation of a large family. There were to have been croquet parties on the lawn until the fading light drove the young people into the summerhouse, where there would be singing to the accompaniment of a banjo. There would be fireflies. In bad weather there would be taffy pulls in the kitchen, and clamorous games of slapjack and who’s-got-the-thimble in the living room. The rugs would be rolled back against the walls and there would be dancing—Virginia reels and “Melissa, make your bow.” On clear nights the children would be taken up to the cupola; each in turn would be lifted up to look through the telescope. Nothing dull would ever be reflected on that lens, but red Mars and the hoops of Saturn and the solemnizing craters on the moon.
All came true, but not for Airlie MacGregor. On Sunday nights, when the hired girl had gone to visit her sister, Beata Ashley and Eustacia Lansing would prepare the supper. “Come in, children. Come to supper.” Hector Gillies, the doctor’s son, taught Roger Ashley to play the banjo. All of them could sing, but none like Lily Ashley. She sang so beautifully that at fifteen she was invited to sing in church before all the people. At sixteen she sang “Home, Sweet Home,” at the volunteer fire department’s picnic; strong men sobbed. Mrs. Lansing forbade the children to play slapjack and muggins because her two younger children, George and Anne (it was their Creole blood), became overexcited and boisterous. After supper Ashley and Lansing went off to the “Rainy Day House” to work on their inventions of locks and firearms. At the end of the evening there was reading aloud—Ulysses and the Cyclops, Robinson Crusoe and his man Friday, Gulliver’s shipwrecks, and the Arabian Nights. On other Sunday afternoons, the same children and the same elders gathered at “St. Kitts.” Targets were set up for rifle practice—Breckenridge Lansing was a great huntsman—and the men and boys fired away and set the town’s dogs barking. After supper Eustacia Lansing would tell some of her native Caribbean stories. Her children and the Ashley children spoke French, but she deftly inserted a translation for the visitors. She was a vivid narrator and the company listened spellbound to the adventures of Père-Père Tortue and Dédenni Iguanou.
At “The Elms” it all came true, but not for Airlee MacGregor. If he had planned the staircase to exhibit the grace and distinction of his wife’s carriage, it had failed of its purpose. The unhappy Mrs. MacGregor soon developed the obesity which so often accompanies a life of enforced leisure and unremitting anxiety. She was incapable of descending a staircase without clutching its railing. No brides hurled their bouquets to the uplifted hands below. It admirably facilitated the descent of a succession of coffins. But Beata Ashley came down these stairs like that Queen of Prussia who had been the lifelong admiration of her mother, geborene Clotilde von Diehlen of Hamburg and Hoboken, New Jersey. There were to be no Ashley weddings at “The Elms,” but Lily, Sophia, and Constance were taught to go up and down the stairs balancing an atlas on their heads. The iridescent crystal ball reflected the fulfillment of another’s dream.
Both Breckenridge Lansing and John Ashley found their way to Coaltown because they had failed in their previous situations. They did not know this, though their wives had an inkling of it. Lansing thought he had been promoted to a better position; Ashley knew he had been transferred to a happier one. John Ashley had become increasingly discontented in an office in Toledo, Ohio, where he had been set to designing machine tools for nine hours a day, and felt that the invitation to Coaltown was a stroke of good fortune—poor though the pay was. As the most brilliant student in his class at the engineering school, he had been free to choose among the opportunities offered to him. He chose that from Toledo because both he and his bride were eager to leave the East behind them and because the position seemed to afford outlet to his inventive gift. Great was his disappointment when he discovered that he was expected to sit the entire day on one stool before one drawing board, designing bits of machinery that he described derisively as “cookie molds.” We shall see later how the supposedly dynamic young Lansing was gently shunted out of the important offices in Pittsburgh and sent—in 1880, at the age of twenty-six—to the Kangaheela Valley. He was not a mining engineer; his work was to be administrative. He was the resident manager.
In the board’s offices at Pittsburgh the mines at Coaltown were referred to as “Poor John” mines. The phrase in the Middle West denoted a catchall for the superannuated and the incompetent. A prosperous farmer, owning several farms, set aside one to which he sent aging hands, aging horses, and aging machinery. Every four or five years the board took up the question of closing them down altogether. They still showed a small profit, however; they bore famous names; and they were convenient as a “Poor John” enterprise. They were kept running on the condition that no improvements were made, no wages raised, and few operatives replaced. Lansing’s predecessor, Cayley Debevoise—brother of a director’s wife—had been a discard also. Like Lansing, he had been enthusiastically engaged in the Pittsburgh area—“Best young man we’ve seen in a long time,” “bright as a penny,” “full of ideas,” “charming wife.” The board could have terminated their contracts at any moment, but—perhaps reluctant to acknowledge their bad judgment—they sent the no longer promising young men to Coaltown instead.
Who did run the mines? The office on the hill was staffed with presumably competent mining engineers, but these, too, were “Poor John” rejects, aging and subject to the inertia inherent in such institutions. The mines were running down like a tired clock, but somehow they managed to stumble and jerk along by themselves. Miss Thoms, assistant to the successive resident managers, met the foremen of the various departments at seven o’clock in the morning before they descended into the earth; together they arrived at various decisions in an improvisatory way. The measures they adopted were presented to the resident manager—at nine o’clock or at ten—in such a way that they appeared to him as brilliant ideas that had just occurred to him. For years Miss Thoms received sixteen dollars a week. If she had fallen ill, the mines would have been thrown into a chaos, and she would have found her way, early or late, to the poorhouse in Goshen.
When Breckenridge Lansing succeeded Cayley Debevoise, Miss Thoms picked up hope; it appeared that the burden was to be lifted from her shoulders. Breckenridge Lansing never failed to make a good impression at the start of everything he started. He examined the books dynamically; dynamically he descended, once, into the bowels of the earth. He teemed with ideas. He managed simultaneously to be shocked at what he saw and to commend everyone for the splendid work that was being carried on. But presently the truth came to light: Lansing could not remember a fact from one day to the next. Memory is the servant of our interests and Lansing’s primary interest was the impression he made on othe
rs. Numerals, charts, carloads do not applaud. Miss Thoms was soon back in harness.
“Mr. Lansing, the Forbush gallery has run into pan cobble.”
“Is that so!”
“You remember that you thought pretty well of Number Seven-B. Don’t you think it would be a good idea to direct Jeremiah to put all their effort over there?”
“Very good idea, Wilhelmina! Let’s do that!”
“Mr. Lansing, Conrad has been having the tumbles.”
Men who have worked ten hours a day for years at the lower levels are subject to falling asleep suddenly; they tumble to the ground in a stupor. They are more terrified of these manifestations than they are of accidents or of tuberculosis itself. When a man starts to tumble four times a day he is on his way to Goshen.
“Hmm,” said Lansing, narrowing his eyes judiciously.
“Now I remember your saying you thought the second Bragg boy looked like a good worker. We’ll need a new rolling jacker in ‘Bluebell.’”
“Just the ticket, Wilhelmina! We’ll put it on the bulletin board. You draw it up and I’ll sign it.”
The bulletin boards were Lansing’s signal contribution to the mines. He was soon signing his name to them fifteen times a day. When there were no more bulletins to sign he took a little nap on the horsehair sofa or went hunting in the hills.
Ashley was called to the mines, for a short term, to patch and bolster this vast collapsing skeleton. For two months he held his tongue; he observed and listened. He spent half his time underground, a lamp on his forehead. The flying cages descended and rose by old-fashioned rope, drum, and pulley. The foremen were not unintelligent, but living so long like moles they had lost the faculty of making a choice between evils. As they laid their problems before Ashley this faculty revived; they saw which seams were running into pan cobble or noggers; they were ready to risk new probes. Everywhere Ashley saw danger. The men, stupefied by the conditions under which they lived, had come to assume that the hazards of mining were an expression of God’s will. When Ashley finally began to speak—in an “Eastern” accent all but unintelligible to them—his first suggestions were in the direction of ventilation. He “wasted” hands and hours in opening “gangs”; he devised a crude clattering system of fans and the rate of tumbling decreased. There was some shifting about of operatives, though that was not in his province; the almost blind, the tubercular, the unredeemable tumblers were sent to a “Poor John” shaft. He reconditioned the forge; cars, cages, frames, rackets, tracks, stomps were rendered more serviceable. The skeleton began to twitch and right itself. It was a deplorable mine, but it was no longer a moribund one. Ashley’s salary was never increased, though he saw to it that Miss Thoms, in return for her instructions, received an additional five dollars a week. Lansing was delighted with all the brilliant ideas that sprang to his mind daily; they were posted on the bulletin board. He felt free to go hunting oftener. As he was frequently out late at night in the taverns on the River Road there was a good deal of napping on the horsehair sofa. Ashley had no idea that work could be so varied and that it could call so constantly on improvisation and invention. He rose each day with zest. To the ends of their lives his children could remember him singing before his shaving mirror, “’Nita, Juanita,” and “No gottee tickee, No gettee shirtee, At the Chinee laundryman’s.”
So it was that John Ashley ran the mine in everything but title. He learned the processes of mining coal from admirable instructors—the foremen below ground and the “Poor John” engineers emeriti who were as eager to share their knowledge as they were to avoid responsibility and work. This situation continued for almost seventeen years, during which the annual reports began, from the fifth year, to show small but increased profits. It continued by virtue of a conspiracy, primarily on the part of John Ashley and Miss Thoms, but involving also the men’s wives. Only a John Ashley could have lent himself for so long to so difficult and even humiliating a role. Devoid of ambition or envy, indifferent to the admiration or contempt of others, completely happy in his family life at “The Elms,” he “saved” Breckenridge Lansing. He not only did all he was able to conceal his superior’s ineptitude from the company and the community, he played the older brother to this older man. He tried to mitigate his harshness toward his family at “St. Kitts” and to divert him from his squalid dissipations in the taverns up the River Road and on Old Quarry Pond. He involved him in his “experiments” and praised his imagined contributions to them. The beautiful mechanical drawings were signed with their combined names: The “Lansing-Ashley Spiral Shift Lock,” the “Ashley-Lansing St. Kitts Primer.” It was an elaborate and generous fiction; sooner or later, such fictions are exposed.
Breckenridge Lansing was murdered on the late afternoon of May 4, 1902, and John Ashley was sentenced to death for having shot him. Murders are not uncommon, but some arouse more interest than others. The escape of a convict on the way to his execution is all but unheard of. An intense search was made for the missing man. First a description, then a dim photograph, was displayed in post offices all over the country and a large sum of money was offered for information leading to his recapture and to the arrest of his six mysterious rescuers. The region’s interest in these rescuers exceeded even that extended to Ashley. A man who rescues a convicted murderer brings on himself the death sentence. These six men must have been well paid. Where’d Ashley get the money? But the circumstances were otherwise amazing. One could understand six well-paid bandits bursting into a locked railway car with blazing revolvers—but these six men, masquerading as Negro porters, had accomplished the rescue in silence and without weapons! This event had taken place at one in the morning at a point a quarter of a mile south of the Fort Barry depot, where all trains stop for ten minutes beside the water tank. Ashley’s guard consisted of five men—three sent down from the prison at Joliet and two, including the leader Captain Mayhew, appointed by the State’s Attorney’s office at Springfield. After the official inquiry all the men were removed from the police force in disgrace. Four of them never mentioned the humiliating occasion, but one of them could be heard telling the story far and wide. “Blister” Hughes had come down in the world and was selling poultry feed in the northwestern counties. He gained a certain celebrity and increased his sales by recounting in saloons the events of that historic night.
“This porter came in the door and said the stationmaster had a telegram for Captain Mayhew and Captain Mayhew said, ‘Bring it here!’ But the porter said, ‘It’s confidential’ and ‘It’s from Springfield and Captain Mayhew had to go and get it personally himself.’ Well, we thought it was a pardon from the Governor—see what I mean? Captain Mayhew had orders not to leave the car and he didn’t know what to do. We all tried to think what he should do and it was that moment of thinking that made us stupid. Before we knew it the car was full of porters. They smashed the lamps and from then on we were crawling in broken glass. A man got hold of my feet and started tying them together. I leaned forward to punch him, but he was so strong that he could lift my feet up in the air and tie them together at the same time. There were my legs pointing to the ceiling and me lying on my shoulderblades, floundering around like a crayfish. When he got my feet tied he flipped me over and tied my hands behind me. We were all yelling and Captain Mayhew was yelling the loudest: ‘Shoot Ashley! Shoot Ashley!’ But how would we know which was Ashley, tell me that? And then they gagged up our mouths and dragged us along the aisle and laid us out like sacks of potatoes. Believe me, they weren’t from around Coaltown. They were from Chicago or New York. They’d done it before. They’d practiced it. You could tell that. I’ll never forget it. The blinds were down, but there was a faint light coming from somewhere and they was hopping over the backs of them seats like monkeys.”
The mystery of the performance baffled the finest intelligences—from Colonel Stotz in Springfield, the newspapermen from the cities, the Sheriff playing cards with his deputies, the ladies sewing garments for the heathen in Africa, the
nightly circle of great thinkers in the Illinois Tavern’s saloon, down to the loungers chewing their tobacco in Mr. Kinch’s livery stable and blacksmith shop. Not the least amazed by it was Beata Ashley.
There was much thereafter to stimulate the most sluggish imagination. How does an escaped convict, with four thousand dollars on his shaven head, find his way out of the country? How would such a man send messages and finally money to his penniless wife and children when every message sent to the house was intercepted by the police and every visitor closely questioned? What was he thinking? What was she thinking? What was Eustacia Lansing thinking? Questions of money played a large part in the citizens’ speculations. Everyone knew how small Ashley’s salary was. They had known his butcher’s bills for years. The banker’s wife had confided to her best friends the meager amount of his savings. The prudent and self-righteous were in ecstasy: John Ashley, for seventeen years, had been breaking one of the most implacable laws of civilization. He had saved no money. The trial had been unduly prolonged. Soon after it began Ashley courteously dismissed his lawyer and threw himself upon the defense provided by the court. The town had seen a “second-hand man” arrive from Summerville. His van had carted away furniture, crockery, window curtains and linen, the grandfather’s clock from the hall, the square piano that had accompanied so many Virginia reels—even Roger’s banjo. They were still eating at “The Elms”; they had their henhouse, their cow, and their garden, but there were no butcher’s bills. On the last night before Ashley was put on the train for Joliet he sent his son his gold watch—the family’s last convertible asset.
During the trial and the weeks following Ashley’s disappearance the town watched “The Elms” with covert but breathless interest. There were few callers: Dr. Gillies; Miss Thoms, who was now temporarily carrying the whole administration on her shoulders; Miss Doubkov (Olga Sergeievna), the dressmaker; some representatives of Colonel Stotz’s office who arrived from time to time to torment Mrs. Ashley. Dr. Benson, the family’s minister, did not call. He had visited the prisoner in jail, but Ashley had not shown a penitent spirit. Dr. Benson was relieved of all obligation to call again. A group of ladies from the church, after long consultation and with no encouragement from their pastor, set out to call on their friend Mrs. Ashley. They lost heart, however, twenty yards from the house. She had sewn with them in the Missionary Society; she had decorated the church with them at Easter and Christmas; she had invited their children to croquet and supper at “The Elms.” But over all these years she had not addressed one of them by her Christian name. She called Miss Thoms “Wilhelmina” and Mrs. Lansing “Eustacia,” but that was all. She even called her hired girl “Mrs. Swenson.”