Kitabı oku: «Fairfax and His Pride: A Novel», sayfa 11

CHAPTER XXI

The Kennys did not know what had happened to Misther Fairfax. He sang on the stairs now and again as he had done when he first came to Nut Street. He bought the children sweet Jackson balls and the baby nearly died from "wan in its troat," and his mother picked him up by his socks and rattled the sticky sweet out of the child's larynx, and the cat finished it.

Tony's foreman was asked in to have supper and a late cup of coffee, and Miss Cora Kenny, whom "Pop" had sent to the Troy convent the first week of Antony's appearance in the Gents' Boarding and Lodging House, came home for a Catholic holiday, and she helped her mother. They made macaroni for Tito Falutini – "high Falutini," as Mrs. Kenny called him. The name stuck, and the macaroni stuck as well, fast to the plate; but the Italian, in bashful gratitude, his eyes suffused with smoke and tears, ate gratefully, gesticulating his satisfaction, and Cora Kenny studied him from the stove where she slaved to tempt the appetites of Fairfax and his friend.

Fairfax was proud of Falutini: he was not an ordinary acquaintance; he sang after supper, standing stiffly in a corner of the kitchen, his red shirt well opened at the throat, and his moustache like black velvet above his red lips.

"He sings betther than the theayter, Misther Fairfax," Mr. Kenny said; "it makes yer eyes thrick ye," and blew his nose, and Cora asked the singer softly if he could give them "When the band begins to play," or "Gallagher's Daughter Belle." Tito smiled hopefully, and when Fairfax laughingly translated, assured Cora Kenny by means of Fairfax again, that if determination could make a man learn a foreign song, he would sing her "Gallagher's Daughter Belle" next Saturday night.

"Ah," she breathed, "she'd not be home then!"

"No," said Kenny, who was a lazy husband but a remarkable father, "that she wud not!"

The Italian fireman and the Irish lodging-house keeper's daughter gazed in each other's eyes. "Gallagher's Daughter Belle" … dum … dum … Fairfax hummed it, he knew it. Kenny's daughter Cora —that would be more to the point: and he thought of Molly. He had not seen her since he had kissed her a fortnight before. Cora said she had never been bold before, had never let herself think how jealous she was, but to-night Mr. Tito High-Falutini's eyes made her a new woman. Cora said to her mother over her shoulder —

"Shure, Molly Shannon's the onlucky gurl."

"How's that, Cora?"

"Lost her job."

"No!" exclaimed Mrs. Kenny, sympathetically, "and with what doin'?"

Shure, the foreman's daughter was a chum with Cora. The boss had made the girl prisents of collars, and it seemed, so Bridget said – Cora with exquisite subtlety dropped her voice, and after a second Mrs. Kenny exclaimed —

"Cora, you're a bad gurl to hark to such goings on, much less belave thim," and pushed her daughter back and brought out herself the crowning delicacy of the feast, a dish that needed no foreign help to compose, steaming praties cooked in their shimmies, as she expressed it. Cora sat down by High-Falutini, Mrs. Kenny went into the next room to her littlest children, and Kenny lit a fresh pipe, held the bowl in his hand, and opposite his distractingly pretty little daughter kept a thoughtful eye upon the pair. And Fairfax went upstairs two steps at a time.

It was after eleven, dense and hot, but he had gone up eagerly. Of late, whenever he had a few spare moments he took them, and all Sundays he remained in his room. There was an odour in the apartment, one that persistently rose above the tenement smells, a damp, moist, earthy perfume, to Fairfax delicious beyond words. Mosquitoes were rampant, but he had been brought up in a mosquito-ridden country, and he had rigged a bit of muslin across his window, and burned Mrs. Kenny's gas with heartless inconsideration.

On a small wooden stool stood something covered with cloths damped night and morning by Fairfax, and during the day by Matty Kenny, a public-school girl of twelve years of age, a pretty, half-witted little creature, whom of all Nut Street Fairfax liked and whom he blindly trusted. Between school hours the little girl ran up and patted with a sponge the mysterious image in Misther Fairfax's hall room. Tell? Ah, shure, Misther Fairfax, cross her heart and hope to die but she'd not. As her duties consisted in tidying Antony's room, her visits were not remarked. Now Antony lifted off the first cloth; he drew out the stool under the light, flung off his coat, rolled up his sleeves, loosened his cravat, got from his drawer a small spatular instrument, and looking at his unveiled work, meditatively wiped the dried clay from his tool. Then he drew off the last bit of cheesecloth, uncovering a statuette modelled in clay with great delicacy and great assurance. The gaslight fell yellow on it and the little statue seemed to swim, to oscillate and illumine. It was the figure of a little girl, her hair loose around her face, holding to her cheek a dead blackbird. The art of the work was its great sincerity, the calm, assured modelling, the tender truthfulness; the form of the child, her dress, even her strapped shoes were only indicated, nevertheless it was a perfect bit of realism, though crude. But the head, the attitude, the cheek and the face, the little caressing enfolding hands, were Greek in their perfect execution.

A flush rose on the young man's face, his eyes brightened, he gave a soft touch here and there with the little instrument, but he had done all he could to this creation. It was only in perishable clay, it must crumble and dry; how could he perpetuate it? He thought of having it cast in terra-cotta, but how and where? The figure vacillated in the gaslight, and taunted him with its perishability, its evanescence, frail, transient as childhood is transient. "Bella," he mused before it, "little cousin." His right hand had not quite lost its cunning, then? He could construct and direct a locomotive, but he had not lost all his skill. For what the statue proved to him, for its evidence of his living art and his talent, he loved it, he turned it and viewed it on all sides, whistling softly under his breath, not morbid about his tunes now.

Tito High-Falutini pushed the door open. "Goin' home, Tony, la Signora Kenni has turned me out."

Fairfax pointed to his statue. "Look. If we were in Carrara somebody would lend me a quarry or I would steal one, and turn little Bella into a snow image." He spoke in English, entirely uncomprehended by his companion. He put his hand on Tito's arm.

"Did you do that, Tony? It is valuable. In Italy we make terra-cotta figures like that and sell them."

"Do you think, Tito," his companion replied, "that I would sell little Bella for a few lire, you commercial traveller?"

Tito was acquainted with the Italian quarter, he would find some one who baked in terra-cotta. They had brought their trades with them. Tony could do others: a Savoyard with a hand-organ, those things were very gentile, very brave indeed, and money, said Tito, gloating, money, – why that would cost a dollar at least.

Fairfax covered up the clay and pushed the stool back in its corner.

"You can make a fool of yourself, too," he said good-humouredly, and pushed Falutini out. "Go home and dream of Kenny's daughter Cora, and don't forget to buy a can of crude oil and order a half dozen of those cock-screws. Good-night." He banged the door.

He undressed, still softly whistling, unpinned the curtain from the window, and what there was of heat and freshness came into the room with the mosquitoes that had huddled at the glass and the sill. He had heard Cora Kenny's information: Molly had lost her place because she would not do what the boss wanted. They always wanted one thing in the collar factories. The boss was a beast. He heaved a deep sigh. He had not been lonely the last fortnight, his work had absorbed him. There was no way for him to go on with it, he had no time, nor means. It had brought him near to his people, to his mother, to his kinsmen, to the child who had died, to the one that remained. But he knew his loneliness would return, his need of companionship, of expression and life, and he was too healthy, too strong to be nourished by his sentimental thought of the child-woman or to live on the sale of terra-cotta statues. He cradled his young head with its fair hair on his arm and fell asleep, and over the yards the harvest moon rose yellow and shone through the small window and on Antony. He might have been a boy asleep at school, his face looked so young and so unstained, and the same light shone on the angel of the resurrection at the gate of the rural cemetery, on Gardiner's little grave in Woodlawn, and on his mother's grave in New Orleans, where the brick walls keep the coffins high above the Mississippi's tide and silt.

The moonlight could not penetrate to the corner where, under the damp cloths, Bella wept over the blackbird pressed against her cheek.

CHAPTER XXII

Fairfax expected to find a melancholy, wet-eyed little creature with a hard-luck story when he went to Troy, and although he knew that Molly would never reproach him, he knew as well that he had treated her very badly. From the day he had asked her to become Mrs. Antony Fairfax, and heard Cora Kenny's news, he had not been near his sweetheart. His sweetheart! Since he had read "The Idylls of the King" in his boyhood, no woman had seemed too high or too fine for him: he had been Lancelot to Guinevere, the Knight to the Lady: Molly Shannon had not been in any romance he had ever read.

He found her sitting among her lodging-house keeper's children in a room tidied by her own hands. During her leisure, she had made herself a pink gingham dress with small white rosebuds on it, and around her neck a low white collar she had pinned with a tortoise-shell brooch. Her dress was the simplest Fairfax had ever seen her wear. It was cool and plain, and the Irish girl's milk-white skin, her auburn hair, her eyes with the black flecks in them, her young round breast, her bare fore-arm, as she rocked Patsy O'Brien, were charming, and her cry, as Fairfax came in, and the hands she pressed to her heart were no less charming.

She sprang up, her work fell to the floor: she stood deathly white and trembling. Her emotion, her love, affected the young man very deeply. He did not think of the obstacles between them, of her station, or of anything as he came into Mrs. O'Brien's parlour-bedroom amongst her six ubiquitous children and disturbed the cradle to get to Molly Shannon. He thought of one fact only, that he had kissed her: how had he forgotten the honey of it for a fortnight? Without so much as bidding her good-morning, he repeated the ecstasy and kissed her. She had time to grow faint and to regain her life in his arms, and under her happy breath she whispered: "Ah, I must quiet Patsy. Ah, let me go, he'll hurt his throat." And she bent, blooming and heart-breakingly happy, over the cradle.

Mrs. Kenny called him as he went past the door. "Shure," she said, "I've got bad news for ye, Misther Fairfax, dear."

He stopped on the threshold. "There is only one death on the earth that could give me any pain, Mrs. Kenny. I reckon it's – "

"It's not death then," she hastened, "shure it's a little thing, but poor Matty's that crazy that the child has gone out to her aunty's and wurra a bit will she come home."

"Matty!" Fairfax exclaimed.

"Shure, the moniment in your bedroom, Misther Fairfax."

He flew upstairs. The corner inhabited for him by a fairy companion was empty. The image of his talent, of his little love, of his heart's hope, had disappeared. Mrs. Kenny did not follow him upstairs as one would have supposed that she would do. He locked his door, the cloths lay in a pile, damp and soggy. Why had they not left the fragments – the precious morsels? His eyes filled with impotent, angry grief; he tore his table drawer open and found the designs which he had made for the figure. The sketches seemed crude and poor beside the finished work whose execution had been inspired. This destruction unchained again his melancholy. He was overwhelmed; the accident seemed like a brutal insistence of Destiny, and he seemed bound to the coarse, hard existence to which he had taken in desperation. With this destruction he saw as well the wiping out of his life of Bella.

Ah, at Troy that day he had done more than break a clay image of her. He opened the door as if he would have called to Mrs. Kenny, then slammed it, unable to speak from excitement, and a dogged look crossed his face. The night was muggy, his throat burned with a sudden thirst, and he exulted that it did so. On his empty room, empty to him for ever, for the figure in the corner had disenchanted it of all its horrors for fourteen happy days and nights, he looked once and then he fled. He threw himself down the stairs and out into the late mid-summer night.

The coloured porter at the Delavan put him to bed at one o'clock in a comfortable room. As the fellow's black face bent above him, Tony, who saw it blur and waver before his intoxicated eyes, murmured —

"Emmy, Emmy, don't tell my mother, and wake me at seven, for I run out at nine sharp."

CHAPTER XXIII

The paymaster, Peter Rainsford, had found little in West Albany to excite the tepid interest he still retained in life, but Tony Fairfax, the driver of Number Twenty-four, had attracted his attention. Each time that Fairfax came to report Rainsford made a vain effort to engage him in conversation. The agent wondered what the engine-driver's story was, and having one of his own, hoped for Fairfax's sake that there was anything but a class resemblance between them.

Detained late this night at his desk, he pushed back his lamp to contemplate Tito Falutini, who, his hat pressed against his red flannel breast, his teeth sparkling, came in to report. Tito told a tale in a jargon which only an etymologist could have sifted into words.

"Well, what do you think has become of him?" Rainsford asked.

The Italian gesticulated with his hat far and wide.

"You took the train to Fonda alone, without an engineer, Falutini? How was it the fellows didn't stop you at Fonda? It doesn't seem possible."

The official opened a ledger and ran his eye over the names.

"I can put Steve Brodie on Number Twenty-four to-morrow morning. You should have reported at once in West Albany, Falutini."

The name of Steve Brodie was intelligible to Tito. "Nota io," he said, "not a fire for any man, only Toni."

Rainsford wrote a few moments in his ledger. "Want me to strike your name right off the books now, Falutini? I've a good mind to do it anyway. You should have reported at nine this morning."

"Want to find Fairfax," said the Italian.

The disappearance did not speak well for the young man in whom the boss had taken an interest.

"Has he paid up at Kenny's?" Rainsford asked hopelessly.

Falutini did not understand. "Signora Kenni," informed the fireman, "mutche cri, kids mutche cri, altro." Fairfax, the fellow made Rainsford understand, had left his clothes and belongings.

"Ah," Rainsford thought, "it looks worse than at first."

"No," Falutini explained, "no fight." Then he broke forth into an explanation from which Rainsford vainly tried to create some order. Statues and terra-cotta figures mingled with an explanation of theft of some property of Fairfax's and his flight in consequence.

"I'll close up here in a quarter of an hour, and go over and see Mrs. Kenny. Steve Brodie will take your engine, and you look out for yourself, my man, and don't get bounced when you come in to report to-morrow."

Rainsford saw Mrs. Kenny in the kitchen-bedroom-parlour of the first-class hotel (Gents only). When he came in and sat down in the midst of the Irish family Rainsford did not know that he was the second gentleman that had crossed the threshold since the sign had swung in the window. Mary Kenny was intelligible, charmingly so, and her account was full of colour; and the young man's character was drawn by a woman's lips, with a woman's tenderness.

"Ah, wurra sor," she finished, "Oi cud go down on me knees to him if it wasn't for Pathrick Kenny. It was an evil day when that Hitalian came to the dure. Wud ye now?" she offered, as though she suggested that he should view sacred relics, "wud ye feel like goin' up to his room and castin' an eye?"

Peter Rainsford did so, feeling that he was taking a man at a disadvantage, but consoling himself with the thought that Fairfax's disappearance warranted the invasion. Mrs. Kenny, the baby on her arm, stood by his side, and called over the objects as though she were a showman at a museum.

"That's his bury, sor, and the best wan in the hotel, and them's his little ornyments an' foolin's in order on the top. Matty reds his room up, an' never a hand but mine puts his wash to rights." She pulled a drawer open. "His beautiful starched shirts, I doos them with me own hands and charges him as though he was me son; an' there is his crayvats, an' over there," she pointed with her thumb, "stud the image, bad cess to the Hitalian an' his likes, Mr. Rainsford, an' many's the time I've stud beyont the dure an' heard him sing and whustle beautiful, whilst he was a-carvin' of it."

Rainsford looked at a small design pinned against the wall: he considered it long.

"Do ye think that he's kilt then?" asked the Irish woman.

The paymaster returned briskly. "No, I don't think so. I hope he has not come to any harm."

"His readin' buks, sor," she said, "wud ye cast an eye?"

But here Rainsford refused, and returning to his own lodgings higher up in the town, and on a better scale, went home thoughtful, touched, and with a feeling of kinship with the truant engineer. Before, however, he could take any steps to look for Fairfax, a coloured man from somewhere appeared with the request that Mrs. Kenny send all Fairfax's things. The mysterious lodger enclosed, moreover, a week's board in advance, but no address; nor had the coloured man any information for Nut Street, and a decided antipathy existed between George Washington and Mary Kenny. She was pale when she packed up Fairfax's belongings and cried into his trunk, as she laid the drawing of Bella Carew next to the unopened packet of his mother's treasures. She was unconscious of what sacred thing she touched, but she was cut to the heart, as was poor Falutini. Peter Rainsford, who had not gone far in his friendship with the elusive Fairfax, was only disappointed.

At the close of the following Sunday afternoon, Rainsford was reading in his room when Fairfax himself came in.

"Why, hello, Fairfax," the paymaster's tone was not that of a disaffected patron to a delinquent engineer. "You are just two weeks late in reporting Number Twenty-four. But I'm sincerely glad you came, whatever the reason for the delay."

Rainsford's greeting was that of a friend to a friend. Fairfax, surprised, lifted his eyebrows and smiled "thanks." He took the chair Rainsford offered. "Why thank you, Rainsford." He took a cigar which Rainsford handed him. He was in the dress of a railroad man off duty.

"Now I don't know anybody I've been more curious about," said the paymaster. "Where on earth did you go to, Fairfax? You don't know how you have mystified us all here, and in fact, me from the first."

"There are no end of mysteries in life," said the young man, still smiling; "I should have wondered about you, Mr. Rainsford, if I had had either the time or the courage!"

"Courage, Fairfax?"

"Why yes," returned the engineer, twisting his cigar between his fingers, "courage to break away from the routine I've been obliged to follow."

Fairfax saw before him a spare man of about forty years of age. The thin hair, early grey, came meekly around the temples of a finely made and serious brow, but the features of Rainsford's face were delicate, the skin was drawn tightly over the high cheek-bones. There was an extreme melancholy in his expression; when defeat had begun to write its lines upon his face, over the humiliating stain, Resignation had laid a hand.

"Well, I'll spare you wondering about me, Fairfax," the agent said; "I am just a plain fellow, that's all, and for that reason, when I saw that one of the hands on my pay-roll was clearly a gentleman, and a very young one too, it interested me, and since I have been to Kenny's" – he hesitated a little – "since I have heard something about you from that good soul, why, I am more than interested, I am determined!"

Fairfax, his head thrown back, smoked thoughtfully, and Rainsford noted the youthfulness of the line of his neck and face, the high idealism of the brow, the beautiful mouth, the breeding and the sensitiveness there.

"Why, it's a crime, that's what it is. You are young, you're a boy. Thank God for it, it is not too late. Would you care to tell me what brought you here like this? I won't say what misfortune brought you here, Fairfax," – he put his nervous hand to his lips – "but what folly on your part."

Rainsford took for granted the ordinary reasons for hard luck and the harvest of wild oats.

Fairfax said, "I have no people, Rainsford; they are all dead."

"But you have influential friends?"

"No," said Fairfax, "not one."

"You have extraordinary talent, Fairfax."

The young man started. "But what makes you think that?"

"Falutini told me."

Fairfax laughed harshly. "Poor Tito. He's a judge, I daresay." His face clouded, grew quite stern before Rainsford's intent eyes. "Yes," he said slowly, "I think I have talent; I think I must have a lot somewhere, but I have got a mighty dangerous Pride and it has driven me to a sort of revenge on Fate, an arrogant showing of my disdain – God knows of what and of whom!" More quietly he said: "Whilst my mother lived I could not beg, Rainsford, I couldn't starve, I couldn't scratch and crawl and live as a starving artist must when he is making his way. I wanted to make a living first, and I was too proud to take the thorny way an artist must."

Fairfax got up, put his hands in his pockets, and walked across Rainsford's small room. It was in excellent order, plainly furnished but well supplied with the things a man needs to make him comfortable. There were even a few luxuries, like pillows on the hard sofa, bookshelves filled with books and a student's lamp soft under a green shade. As he turned back to the paymaster Fairfax had composed himself and said tranquilly —

"I reckon you've got a pretty bad note against me in the ledger, haven't you, Rainsford?"

"Note?" repeated the other vaguely. "Oh, your bad conduct report. Well, rather."

"Who has got my job on Number Twenty-four?"

"Steve Brodie."

Fairfax nodded. "He surely does know how to drive an engine all right, and so do I, Rainsford."

"You mustn't run any more engines, Fairfax."

"I don't want to come back to West Albany and to the yards," said the engineer.

"I haven't much influence now," Rainsford said musingly, "but I have some friends still. I want you to let me lend you some money, a very small sum."

The blood rushed to Fairfax's face. He extended his hand impulsively.

"There, Rainsford, you needn't go on. You are the first chap who has put out a rope to me. I did have twenty-five cents given me once, but otherwise – "

"I mean it sincerely, Fairfax."

"Rainsford," said the young man, with emotion in his voice, "you are a fine brand of failure."

"Will you let me stand by you, Fairfax?"

"Yes, indeed," said the other, "I will, but not in the way you mean. I reckon I must have felt what kind of a fellow you were or I wouldn't be here. At any rate you're the only person I wanted to see. I quite understand you can't take me back at the yards, and I don't want to drive in and out from West Albany. Could you do anything for me at the general company, Rainsford? Would they give me a job in Albany? I'd take a local though I'm up to an express."

"No," said Rainsford, "you mustn't think of driving engines; I won't lift my hand to help you."

"It is all I can do," returned the engineer quietly, after a second, "all I want." Then he said, "I've got to have it…"

"Why I'll lend you enough money, Fairfax, to pay your passage to France!"

"Stop!" cried the young man with emotion, "it's too late."

"Nonsense," said the other warmly, Fairfax's voice and personality charming him as it charmed others. "Why, you are nothing but a big, headlong boy! You have committed a tremendous folly; you've got art at your finger tips. Are you going to sweat and stew all your life in the cab of an engine? Why, you are insane."

"Stop," cried Fairfax again, "for the love of heaven…"

Rainsford regarded him, fascinated. He saw in him his own lost promises, his own lost chance; it seemed to him that through this young man he might in a way buy back the lost years.

"I'll not stop till I have used every means to make you see the hideous mistake you're making."

"Rainsford," said Antony, paling, "if you had made me this offer the day before I left Nut Street, I would have been in France by this. My God!" he murmured beneath his breath. "How I would have escaped!" – checked himself with great control for so young a man and so ardent a man. He was a foot taller than his desk-bowed pale companion, and he laid his hand impulsively on his chief's shoulder.

"If you can give me a job, Rainsford, do so, will you? I know I have no right to ask you, after the way I have treated the Company, but I am married. I have married Molly Shannon. You know her, the girl at Sheedy's." He waited a second, looking the other man in the eyes, then, with something of his old humour, he said, "There are two of us now, Rainsford, and I have got to make our living."