Kitabı oku: «Fairfax and His Pride: A Novel», sayfa 10

CHAPTER XV

He did not go South. There was nothing for him to go for. The idea of his home uninhabited by her made him a coward. Emmeline sent him her thimble, her lace collar, her wedding ring and a lock of her hair, shining still and without a touch of grey. The packet, wrapped up in soft paper and folded by jasmine leaves and buds, whose withered petals were like a faded dress, Fairfax put away in his trunk and did not untie; he did not wish to open his wound. And his face, thinner from his illness and his loss, looked ten years older. The early happy ecstasy of youth was gone, and a bitter, mature recklessness took its place, and there was no hand to soothe him but Molly's, and she had gone back to Troy. He tried what ways were open to a man of his age and the class he had adopted, and he turned for distraction and relief and consolation to their doors. But at those portals, at the threshold of the houses where other men went in, he stopped. If his angel had deserted him, at any rate the beast had not taken its place. The vast solitude and the cruel loneliness, the isolation from his kind, made him an outcast too wretched not to cry for help and too clean to wallow in order to forget his state. His work saved his health and his brain. He made a model of an engine in plaster and went mad over it; he set it on a shelf in his room and when in June he drove his own engine and was an engineer on the New York Central, he knew his locomotive, body and soul and parts, as no other mechanic in the Company knew it. His chiefs were conscious of his skill and intelligence. There were jealousies and enmities, and instead of driving the express as he had hoped, he was delegated to a local on a branch line, with an Italian for fireman who could not speak a word of any but his own language.

"You speak Italian, don't you, Fairfax?" his boss at the office asked him.

("Cielo azuro … Giornata splendida…!") and he smelt the wet clay.

"I can point," laughed the engineer, "in any language! and I reckon I'll get on with Falutini."

CHAPTER XVI

The boss was a Massachusetts man and new to Nut Street, and Fairfax, when he took the paper with his orders from Rainsford's hand, saw for the first time in months a man of his own class, sitting in the revolving chair before the desk where his papers and schedules and ledgers were filed. The man's clothes were too thin for the season, his linen was old and his appearance meagre, and in his face with its sunken cheeks, the drooping of the eyes and the thinness of the brow, were the marks of the sea of life and its waste, and the scars of the storm. A year ago Fairfax would have passed Rainsford by as a rather pitiful-looking man of middle age.

The boss, his thin hand opening and shutting over a small book which looked like a daily ledger, regarded the engineer in his red shirt as Fairfax paused.

"Irish, I expect? Your name, Fairfax, is Irish. I understand you've had a hard blow this year, been sick and lost your mother."

At the quiet statement of this sacred fact Fairfax started painfully, his face flushed.

"He would not have spoken to me like that," he thought, "if he had not imagined me a working man."

"Work is the best friend a young man can have," Rainsford went on; "it is a great safeguard. I take it that you are about thirty?"

"Twenty-three," said Fairfax, shortly.

His report was brief. Just then his fireman came in, a black-haired, tall young fellow with whom Fairfax knew he should never sing "Mia Maddelena."

CHAPTER XVII

He avoided Rainsford, gave himself up to his engine and his train, and took a dislike to his black-headed fireman, who dared to be Italian and to recall the aurora of days he had buried fathoms deep. The heat pouring on him in summer time made him suffer physically. He rather welcomed the discomfort; his skin grew hardened and tanned and oiled and grimed, and his whole body strong and supple; and his devotion to his work, the air that filled him as he flew, made him the perfect, splendid animal that he was.

At night, when the darkness blotted out the steel rails, and the breeze blowing through the car-window fluttered his sleeve till it bellied, and the cinders, red and biting, whirled by, and on either side the country lay dark and fragrant with its summery wealth – at night his eyes, fixed on the track under the searchlight, showed him more than once a way to end his unhappy life, but his confused reveries and his battle, spiritual and physical, helped him, and he came out of it with a love for life and a stronger hold upon it each time than the last. He gave up wearing his Sunday clothes, he went as the others did; he had not been for months to Albany or to Troy.

One Sunday in midsummer his local did not run on the seventh day. He considered his own image in the glass over his bureau and communed with his reflection. The result of his musings was that he opened his trunk and took out the precious packet; started to unfold it, turned it over in his uncertain hands, thrust it back, set his teeth and went out to the junction and took the train for Troy.

He found her in the boarding-house where she was passing her Sunday, rocking the landlady's teething baby. He bade her to come as she was, not to fix up. The idea of a toilet which would end in a horrible frock rasped his nerves. She detected a great change in him, simple-minded though she was, and she tried to get him to talk and failed. Down at the Erie Canal, by the moored boats and the motionless water, he seized her arm and facing her, said, his lips working —

"I have come to ask you to marry me, Molly."

She grew as white as the drying linen on the windless air, as the family wash hung on the canal boat lines behind her. Her grey eyes opened wide on Antony.

"I'm making a good living: too much for me alone."

He saw her try to find her voice and her senses, and with something of his old radiance, he said —

"I'm a brute. I reckon I don't know how to make love. I've startled you."

"Ah, shure, ye don't know what ye're saying," she whispered; "the likes o' me ain't good enough."

"Hush, hush," he answered, "don't say foolish things."

She gasped and shook her head. "Ye shouldn't tempt me so. It's crool. Ye shouldn't tempt me so."

With a self-abandonment and a humility which he never afterward forgot, as her life and colour came back Molly said under her breath —

"Take me as I am, shure, if I'm the least bit of good to ye. I love ye enough for both."

He exclaimed and kissed her.

Dreams of women! Visions of the ecstasy of first love, ideals and aspirations, palpitating, holy, the young man's impassioned dream of The Woman, the Only Woman, the notion and conception that the man of nature and of talent and of keen imagination sleeps upon and follows and seeks and seeks and follows all his life, from boyhood to the grave – where were they then?

He had brushed his aunt's cheek, he had touched her hand and trembled; now he kissed fresh young lips that had yearned for his, and he gave his first embrace to woman, put his arms round Molly Shannon and her young body filled them. As she had said, she had love enough for both. He felt a great gratitude to her, a relaxation of his tense senses, a melting of his heart, and his tenderness was deep for her when his next kiss met her tears.

CHAPTER XVIII

He returned to Nut Street dazed, excited but less sentimentally miserable and more profoundly touched. He had made himself a mechanical career; he had assumed the responsibilities of a man. He might have been a miserable failure as a sculptor, perhaps he would be a good mechanic. Who knows where any flight will carry a man? Making his life, married and founding a home, he would be a factor in the world's progress, and a self-supporting citizen. He tried to fire himself with this sacrifice. At any rate, in order to save his body he had lost his soul – that is, his spiritual soul. "Is not the life more than the meat?" In the recesses of his artist's mind a voice which he had strangled tried to tell him that he had done his soul a great, great wrong. Nevertheless, a solemn feeling of responsibility and of manhood came upon him, a grave quiet strength was his, and as he journeyed back to his lodgings, he did not then regret.

Mrs. Kenny and her husband and the children were in the kitchen as he passed and the landlady called out something, but he did not hear for he was half-way upstairs. As he opened the door and went into his room he saw some one was standing by the window – no, leaning far out of the window, very far; a small figure in a black dress.

"Bella!" he cried.

She flashed about, rushed at him, and for the first time since "Going to Siberia" he felt the entwining arms. He suffered the dashing embrace, then, freeing himself, saw her hair dark under her black hat, and that she had grown in eighteen months, and he heard —

"Oh, Cousin Antony, how long you have been coming home! I have been waiting for your engine to come under the window, but I didn't see you. How did you get here without my seeing you?"

If the sky had opened and shown him the vision of his own mother he could not have been more overwhelmed with surprise.

"Where did you come from, Bella? Who is with you?"

She took her hat off, dropped it easily on the floor, and he saw that her hair was braided in a great braid. She sat on the ledge of the open window and swung her feet. Her skirts had been lengthened, but she was still a little girl. The charming affectionate eyes beamed on him.

"But you are like anybody else, Cousin Antony, to-day. When I saw you in your flannel shirt I thought you were a fireman."

At the remembrance of when she had seen him, a look of distress crossed her mobile face. She burst out crying, sprang up and ran to him.

"Oh, Cousin Antony, I want him so, my little brother, my little playmate."

He soothed her, made her sit on his bed and dried her tears, as he had dried them when she had cried over the blackbird.

"Who is with you, honey? Who brought you here?"

As though she had stored up all her sorrow, as though she had waited with a child's loyal tenderness for this moment, she wound her arms around Fairfax's neck and brought her face close to his cheek.

"I miss him perfectly dreadfully, Cousin Antony. Nobody took care of him much but me. Now father is broken-hearted. You loved him, didn't you? He perfectly worshipped you."

"There, Bella, you choke me, honey. I can't breathe. Now tell me who let you come. Is Aunt Caroline here?"

She had no intention of answering him, and wiped her eyes briskly on the handkerchief that he gave her.

"Tobacco," she sniffed, "your handkerchief has got little wisps of tobacco on it. I think it is perfectly splendid to be an engineer! I wouldn't have thought so though, if I hadn't seen you in the flannel shirt. Wouldn't you rather be a genius as you used to think? Don't you make casts any more? Isn't it sweet in your little room, and aren't the tracks mixing? How do you ever know which ones to go on, Cousin Antony? And which is your engine? Take me down to see it. How Gardiner would have loved to ride!"

She was a startling combination of child and woman. Her slenderness, her grace, her tender words, the easy flow of speech, the choice of words caught and remembered from the varied books she devoured, her ardour and her rare brilliant little face, all made her an unusual companion.

"Now answer me," he ordered, "who came with you to Albany?"

"No one, Cousin Antony."

"What do you mean?"

"I came alone."

"From New York? You're crazy, Bella!"

She sat up with spirit, brought her heavy braid around over her shoulder and fastened the black ribbon securely.

"I lose my hair ribbons like anything," she said. "Why, I've done things alone for years, Cousin Antony. I've been all over New York matching things. I used to buy all Gardiner's things alone and have them charged. I know my way. I'm going on fourteen. You dropped your telegram, the one Miss Mitty sent you, when you rushed out that night. I found it on the stairs." She fished it out of her pocket. "Mr. Antony Fairfax, 42, Nut Street, West Albany. I had to watch for a good chance to come, and when I got to Forty-second Street I just took a ticket for West Albany, and no one ever asked me my name or address, and the people in the cars gave me candy and oranges. At the station down here I asked the ticket man where Nut Street was, and he said: 'Right over those tracks, young lady,' and laughed at me. Downstairs the woman gave me a glass of milk – and aren't the children too sweet, Cousin Antony, with so many freckles? And doesn't she speak with a brogue just like old Ann's?"

"This is the wildest thing I ever heard of," said her cousin. "I must telegraph your mother and take you home at once."

She gasped. "Oh, you wouldn't do that? I'm not going home. I have run away for good."

"Don't be a goose, little cousin."

"I hate home," she said hotly, "it's lonely, and I miss my little brother. They won't let me go to school, and mother takes lessons from an opera singer, and there is no quiet place to read. I never go to the Top Floor where we used to play." She clung to his hand. "Let me stay, Cousin Antony," she pleaded, "I want to live with you."

She coloured furiously and stopped. And Fairfax saw that she was like his mother, and that the promises were fulfilled. Her low collar, edged with fine lace, fell away from the pure young throat. Her mouth, piquant and soft, half-coaxing and half-humorous, and her glorious eyes fast losing the look of childhood, were becoming mysterious.

"You are too big a girl," he said sternly, "to talk such nonsense. You are too old to be so silly, Bella. Why, your people must be insane with anxiety."

But her people, as it turned out, were at Long Branch for the summer, and Bella, presumably to go to the dentist, had come up to stay for a day or two with the little Whitcomb ladies. She had chosen her time well.

"No one knows where I am. The Whitcombs don't know I am coming to New York, and the family think I am with Miss Eulalie and Miss Mitty."

"There is a train to New York," he said, "in half an hour."

"Oh," she cried, "Cousin Antony, how horrid! You've changed perfectly dreadfully. I see it now. You used to be fond of me. I thought you were fond of me. I don't want to force myself on you, Cousin Antony."

Fairfax was amazed, charmed and bewildered by her. What did Mrs. Kenny think? He opened the door and called her, and said over his shoulder to Bella —

"What did you tell the woman downstairs?"

Bella picked her hat up from the floor and wound the elastic around her fingers. Her face clouded.

"Tell me," Antony urged, "what did you say to Mrs. Kenny?" He saw her embarrassment, and repeated seriously: "For heaven's sake, Bella, tell me."

"No," she whispered, "I can't."

He shrugged in despair. "Come, it can't be anything very dreadful. I've got to know, you see."

The bell of the Catholic Church tolled out eight o'clock.

"Come, little cousin."

Half-defiantly and half-shamefacedly, she raised her eyes.

"It's rather hard to tell you," she stammered, "you seem to be so mad at me." She put a brave face on it. "I just told them that I was engaged to you and that I had come to marry you." And she stood her ground, her little head held up.

Fairfax stifled a shout, but was obliged to laugh gently.

"Why, Bella, you are the most ridiculous little cousin in the world. You have read too much. Now, please don't cry, Bella."

He flung the door open and called: "Mrs. Kenny, Mrs. Kenny! Will you come up-stairs?"

CHAPTER XIX

Those five hours were short to him travelling back to New York. Bella talked to Fairfax until she was completely talked out. Leaning on him, pouring out her childish confidences, telling him things, asking him things, until his heart yearned over her, and he stored away the tones of her sweet gay voice, exquisite with pathos when she spoke of Gardiner, and naïvely tender when she said —

"Cousin Antony, I love you better than any one else. Why can't I stay with you and be happy? I want to work for my living too. I could be a factory girl."

A factory girl!

Then she fell asleep, her head on his shoulder, and was hardly awake when they reached Miss Mitty's house and the cab stopped.

He said, "Bella, we are home."

She did not answer, and, big girl as she was, he carried her in asleep.

"I wish you could make her believe it's all a dream," he said to the Whitcombs. "I don't want the Carews to know about it. It would be far better if she could be induced to keep the secret."

"I am afraid you can't make Bella believe anything unless she likes, Mr. Antony."

No one had missed her. From the Long Branch boat she had gone directly to the Forty-second Street station, and started bravely away on her sentimental journey.

The little ladies induced him to eat what they could prepare for him, and he hurried away. He was obliged to take his train out at nine Monday morning.

He bade them look after bold Bella and teach her reason, and before he left he went in and looked at the little girl lying with her face on her hand, the stains of tears and travel on her face.

"I told her that I had come to marry you, Cousin Antony…"

"Little cousin! Honey child!"

His heart was tender to his discarded little love.

CHAPTER XX

Bella Carew's visit did disastrous work for Fairfax. The day following he was like a dead man at his engine, mechanically fulfilling his duties, his eyes blood-shot, his face worn and desperate. The fireman Falutini bore Fairfax's rudeness with astonishing patience. Their run was from nine until four, with a couple of hours lying off at Fonda, and back again to Albany along in the night.

The fatality of what he had been doing appeared to Antony Fairfax in its full magnitude. He had cut himself off from his class, from his kind for ever. Bella Carew, baby though she was, exquisite, refined, brilliant, what a woman she would be! At sixteen she would be a woman, at eighteen any chap, who had the luck and the fortune, could marry her. She would be the kind of woman that a man would climb for, achieve for, go mad for. As far as he was concerned, he had made his choice. He was engaged to be married to an Irish factory girl, and her words came back to him —

"If I'm any good, take me as I am. You couldn't marry the likes o' me."

Why had he ever been such a short-sighted Puritan, so little of a worldling as to entangle himself in marriage? More terribly the sense of his lost art had come in with the little figure he had admitted.

When he flung himself into his room Monday morning his brain was beyond his usual control, it worked like magic, and one by one they passed before him, the tauntingly beautiful aerial figures of his visions, the angelic forms of his ideals, and if under his hands there had been any tools he would have fallen upon them and upon the clay like a famished man on bread. He threw himself down on his lonely bed in his room through which magic had passed, and slept heavily until Mrs. Kenny pounded on the door and roused him an hour before his train.

At Fonda, in the shed, he climbed stiffly from his cab, his head aching, his eyes drunk with sleep. All there was of brute in him was rampant, and anything that came in his way would have to bear the brunt of his unbalanced spleen.

Falutini, a great bunch of rags in his hand, was at the side of the engine, wiping the brass and softly humming. Fairfax heard it —

 
"Azuro puro,
Cielo azuro,
Mia Maddalena…"
 

"Stop that infernal bellow," he said, "will you?"

The Italian lifted himself upright and responded in his own tongue —

"I work, I slave, I endure. Now I may not sing? Macché," he cried defiantly, "I will sing, I will."

He threw his chest out, his black eyes on Tony's cross blue ones. He burst out carolling —

"Ah Mia Maddalena."

Fairfax struck his face; the Italian sprang at him like a cat. Falutini was as tall as Fairfax, more agile and with a hard head. However, with one big blow, Fairfax sent him whirling, and as he struck and felt the flesh and blood he discovered how glorious a thing a fight is, how nerve relaxing, and he received the other's assault with a kind of ecstasy. They were not unequally matched. Falutini's skin and muscles were like toughened velvet; he was the cock of his village, a first-rate boxer; and Tony's muscles were of iron, but Fairfax was mad and gloomy, and the Italian was desperate and disgusted, and he made the better show.

A few men lounged in and one called out: "You darned cusses are due to start in ten minutes."

Fairfax just then had his arm round the Italian's neck, the close cropped head came under his chin, and as Fairfax panted and as he smelt the garlic that at first had nauseated him in his companion, he was about to lay his man when the same voice that called before, yelled in horror —

"Look out, for God's sake, Fairfax, he's got a knife."

At the word, Fairfax gave a wrench, caught his companion's right hand with his left and twisted the wrist, and before he knew how he had accomplished it, he had flung the man and knife from him. The knife hit Number Twenty-four and rattled and the fireman fell in a lump on the ground. Fairfax stood over him.

"What a mean lout you are," he said in the jargon he had learned to speak, "what a mean pup. Now you get up, Tito, and clear out."

The fellow rose with difficulty, white, trembling, punched a little about the face, and breathing like a saw-mill. Some one handed the knife to Fairfax.

"It never was made in America. It's a deadly weapon. Ugh, you onion!"

The Italian wiped the sweat from his forehead with his shirt sleeve and spat out on the floor.

Fairfax felt better than he had felt for years. He went back to his engine.

"Get up, Tito," he commanded his fireman; "you get in quickly or I'll help you up. Give me the oil can, will you?" he said. And Tito, trembling, his teeth dry between his lips, obeyed.

Fairfax extended his hand, meeting his companion's eyes for the first time, and said frankly —

"My fault. No hard feeling, Tito. Bene benissimo."

He smiled and slapped the Italian on the back almost affectionately. Tito saw that radiant light for the first time – the light smile. The old gentleman had said a man could win the world with an expression like that upon his face.

"Keep your knife, Falutini; cut up garlic with it: don't use it on me, amico – partner."

They went to work without a word further on the part of either, and Number Twenty-four slipped out on to the switch and was wedded to the local on the main line.

Fairfax was relieved in mind, and the morbid horror of his crisis had been beaten and shaken out.

"What brutes we are," he thought, "what brutes and animals. It is a wonder that any spirit can grow its wings at any time."

He drew up into a station and stopped, and, leaning out of his window, watched the passengers board the train. Pluff, pluff, pant, pant. The steal and flow and glide, the run and the motion that his hand on the throttle controlled and regulated, became oftentimes musical to him, and when he was morose he would not let the glide and the roll run to familiar melodies in his head, above all, no Southern melodies. "Tramp, tramp, tramp, the boys are marching," that was the favourite with Number Twenty-four. He had used to whistle it as he modelled in his room in New Orleans, where the vines grew around his window and Maris made molasses cake and brought it up hot when the syrup was thick on the side, and downstairs a voice would call, "Emmeline, oh, Emmeline." That sacred voice…! When Number Twenty-four was doing her thirty miles an hour, that was the maximum speed of the local, her wheels were inclined to sing —

 
"Flow gently, sweet Afton,
Among thy green braes:
Flow gently, I'll sing thee
A song in thy praise.
My Mary's asleep
By thy murmuring stream,
Flow gently, sweet Afton,
Disturb not her dream."
 

And little Gardiner leaned hard against his arm and Bella ran upstairs to escape the music because she did not like to cry, and his aunt's dove-like eyes reproached him for his brutal flight. He would not hear any ballads; but to-night, no sooner had he rolled out again into the open country than he began to hum unconsciously the first tune the wheels suggested. They were between the harvest fields and in the moonlight lay the grain left by the reapers.

 
"Cielo azuro
Giornata splendida,
Mia Maddalena."
 

Fairfax laughed when he recognized it. He glanced over at Falutini who was leaning out of his window dejectedly. At the next station, whilst the engine let off steam, Fairfax called to his fireman, and the man, as he turned his face to his chief, looked more miserably homesick than revengeful.

"I used to know a chap from Italy!" Fairfax said in his halting Italian, "a molto bravo diavolo. Shake her down, Tito, and brace her up a little, will you?"

The fireman bent to the furnace, its blast red on his face; from under the belly of the engine the sparks sang as they fell into the water gutter along the track.

"My chap was a marble cutter from Carrara."

Tito banged the door of the furnace. "I too am from Carrara."

"Good!" cried Fairfax, "good enough." And to himself he said: "I'll be darned if I ever knew Benvenuto Cellini's real name!"

"Carrara," continued his companion, "is small. He may have been a cousin. What was his name?"

"Benvenuto Cellini," replied Tony, easily, and rang his bell.

Once more they rolled out into the night. As they drove through the country Fairfax saw the early moonlight lie along the tracks, sifting from the heavens like a luminous snow. No breeze stirred and over the grain fields the atmosphere hung hot and heavy, and they rushed through a sea of heat and wheat and harvest smells. The wind of their going made a stir, and as Fairfax peered out from his window his head was blown upon by the wind of the speed.

Falutini from his side of the cab said, "Benvenuto Cellini. That is not a Carrara man, no, no."

"I never knew him by any other name," said the engineer. "I like Italians." He threw this cheerfully over his shoulder at his inferior.

There was a childlike and confiding smile on the Italian's face; brutal as all Italian peasants are, brutal but kindly and unsuspicious as a child, ready to love and ready to hate.

"Only you mustn't use your knife; it's not well thought of in America. You'll get sent to gaol."

The Limited whistled from around a curve, came roaring toward them, tore past them, cutting the air, and Fairfax's local plugged along when the mile-a-minute left them. Tony was conscious that as he hummed the sound grew full and louder; he was accompanied by a voice more assured than his own, and in melodious fraternity the two men sang together. So they took their train in.