This is part 13 in a series of Old News columns.
Old News is paraphrasing "Billy of Arkansas," a novel by Bernie Babcock that was serialized by the Arkansas Democrat in 1922. To catch up on the plot, follow the links beginning with: arkansasonline.com/213start.
The impetuous heroine of Bernie Babcock's "Billy of Arkansas" has discovered to her sincere dismay that the women's workhouse in New York is as dangerous as the night court judge warned her it would be. She regrets not trusting him.
She writes to her schoolmate, Jane Bierce, begging for help from Jane's big brother, a lawyer. Billy has never met John Bierce — to her knowledge— but she likes what Jane says about him; they once exchanged teasing notes, through Jane; and he sent Billy a little scarab ring as a debut gift, with a note that the beetle symbolized the immortality of love.
But they have met, which John realizes as soon as Jane begins reading aloud Billy's long letter from jail.
"Billy Camelton inciting to riot? Where is a judge so idiotic as to believe such nonsense?" Jane asks, rhetorically.
But John knows he was that judge, and he sentenced Billy to six months. He also fined her $25 for contempt. He hesitates to admit this. First, he calls Blackwell's Island and arranges for Jane to visit Billy.
And then John Bierce tells his sister he will not have Billy freed. Jane is stupefied. How could he refuse to help her beautiful classmate, and how could he treat her as "one of the common herd, the street rabble — or even a real agitator."
"Real agitator," John Bierce repeats, "well she is the real thing in the line of agitators. ... Agitators stir passion into flames that cannot be controlled. Then comes the destruction of property. Property rights must be protected or —"
"Pardon me, dear brother," Jane breaks in, with an annoyed little lecture against capitalism. Then she reminds him they have dinner guests coming who expect to meet Billy Camelton.
After a few lame jokes about the various guests he thinks they've prevailed upon to endure dining with an Arkansas rube, John assures Jane that Billy will be freed -- he won't do it, but Jane can with his advice. "A good stiff fine with a little on the side will be all that is necessary," he says.
"But Jane, do me a favor. Get your friend to promise she will not refer to the fact that she has just come from jail on a sentence from my court. She has a peculiar way of making a fellow feel like 15 cents. She presented my court with a bar of soap in a way leaving the impression the court had need to use it. And when I fined her for contempt, what she said nearly took my breath. She might refer to some of these things in a most embarrassing way."
Jane tells him he's only worth 3 cents.
DINNER DETENTE
When Jane collects Billy at the workhouse, she admits that John was her judge and that he has refused to free her himself. Exhausted, Billy laughs: "Hats off to honesty, even the honesty of stupidity!"
But she's in fine form for the dinner party, dressed to the nines and vivacious. She honors John's request that she hold her tongue about their encounter in court. The guests are enchanted by her lively banter; her ripostes slay all the men — except John.
The next morning, while Billy sleeps in, Jane and John chat over breakfast.
"Well, John, you have now seen my friend Billy of Arkansas. Do you think she is beautiful? Do you think she is interesting? Do you think she is attractive? Do you like Billy of Arkansas?"
"Is she beautiful?" John answers. "By the measurements of art, yes. But my standard of the beautiful is that of your grandmother, Jane. She said, 'Handsome is that handsome does.'"
"And you don't think Billy has beautiful ways?"
"No."
"You don't?"
He agrees she's interesting, beautiful, "a magnet." But Billy is a scalp hunter, he says — she enjoys cutting men down. "And then Billy's cynicism — Jane, it is really too bad to see so young a girl holding such views as she expressed when the subject of love came up. The woman that appeals to me is not the scalp hunter, the agitator, the cynic. It is the other kind."
Jane says John would be cynical, too, if he had been as earnestly in love as Billy was with a cad like Larvante. She says Billy has wounds that will take time to heal.
"Perhaps, but even excusing her cynicism, she is a born agitator, and in friendship, an agitator is as unsatisfactory as in the social order."
"I am disappointed," Jane says. "I wanted you to like Billy."
"And I am disappointed," he says. "I wanted to like Billy."
THE RING
A few nights after the dinner party, the Bierces and their guest spend a quiet night home, just conversing. But Billy begins sparring with John, antagonizing him at every turn, and he does not enjoy it.
Later, up in their room, she confesses to Jane that she doesn't like who she's become. She seems "unreal" to herself. The ugliness of the workhouse left her ashamed of her easy ignorance and indifference to poor people. "For me now, life can never again be aimless, purposeless, and I shall find my niche and do my duty," she says.
But more painfully, she has become someone who assumes the worst of others. "I do not like myself and never expect to again."
Jane assures Billy that she will in time.
"Perhaps," Billy says. But she had a dream the night before in which she was filled with joy. "And laughing I awoke, fingering the little ring. And then, Jane, alone in the dark, I cried, knowing the ring can no more be the emblem of that which I thought but instead a reminder always of the false and the untrue."
She can't just throw the ring away, though. She wants to give it back to John Bierce -- tonight. Back downstairs she goes.
Billy sees him half reclining in a deep leather chair, smoking. Something in his attitude under the dim circles of smoke causes a momentary pause in her purpose. But she walks in, bows and says, "Your Honor."
He stands to offer her a chair, which she declines. "I will bother you but a moment," she says.
After a self-involved, dramatic speech about her former naive self and her ugly new self, she asks him to take the ring: "Perhaps you can give it to some other girl and make her happy as you once did me."
He's insulted. "What kind of a man do you think I am? That ring was made for you."
"I suppose you are like all the rest of them."
"Did you ever know a man to do so small a thing as you ask me to do?" By "small" he means petty.
"Mr. Bean did."
"And who, if I may ask, is this Bean you would measure me by?"
"Henry O. Bean — Bean by name and bean by nature. He was one of my ardent lovers. He gave me a little ring. When he found I had decided never to get into the Bean family he took it back, gave it to another girl, and in a letter today from Aunt Nan, she says they are married."
"And you propose to think I am such a type?"
"How am I to know you are not?"
"Because I say so."
"You taught me in court, Your Honor, that it is evidence that counts and not statements."
After a moment of silence he says, "So I am on trial. Is that it?"
"We are all and always on trial, " Billy says. "Please take this ring. I have loved it too much, and its message is too beautiful to be turned now into an emblem of the false and untrue. It wouldn't be fair to the ring."
He holds out his hand; she drops it on his palm. "Thank you," she says and leaves the room. But being Billy, she pops right back in, with a proposal.
"Your Honor," she says, "as I started upstairs, I thought of Jane. She is disappointed because I do not like you."
"Because you did not like me — don't you like me?"
"I cannot say that I do. I was wondering if we couldn't do something to take some of the stiffness out of this affair and I have thought of a way. There is one thing I like about you. You make me think of my grandfather. ... You make me think of Granddad, and since you do, I suggest you call me Billy. I think Jane will like it, and I don't care. Will you do this?"
He agrees, on the condition that after she wises up and realizes all men are not liars she will take it back.
"Good night, Billy of Arkansas," he says, "and pleasant dreams."
After she departs, he looks at the ring before dropping it into his vest pocket. "Her grandfather?"
I know this sounds like the opening notes in a romantic denouement, but first — #ButFirst — Billy Camelton goes sledding and steals a baby.
[To read Part 14, see arkansasonline.com/515feet]
Email: [email protected]