Kitabı oku: «Fairfax and His Pride: A Novel», sayfa 7
CHAPTER II
A girl who he judged by her frowzled hair and her heavy eyes had just been aroused from sleep, stood behind the counter pouring hot and steaming coffee into thick china cups. The smell to the hungry man was divine. Fairfax's mouth watered. From the one pot the coffee came out with milk added, and from another the liquid poured clear. Fairfax asked for coffee with milk and a sandwich, and as the girl pushed the plate with hunks of bread and ham towards him, he asked, "How much, please?" The girl raised her heavy lids. Her gray eyes could have sparkled if she had been less sleepy. She glanced at him and responded in a soft brogue —
"Two cints a cup. Sandwiches two cints apiece."
He took his breakfast over to the table where a customer was already seated before a huge breakfast. After watching Fairfax for a few moments, this man said to him —
"Got a rattling good appetite, Mister."
"I have, indeed," Fairfax returned, "and I'm going to begin over again."
The man wore a red shirt under his coat, his battered bowler was a-cock on his head. Antony often recalled Sanders as he looked that morning. His face from his neck up was clean. He exuded water and brown soap; he had a bright healthy colour; he was a good-looking workman, but his hands! Fairfax thought them appalling – grimed with coal. They could never be washed clean, Fairfax reflected, and one finger on the left hand was missing.
"Stranger?" the man asked him. "Just going through?"
And as Fairfax replied, he thought to himself, "He doesn't dream how strange I am and that I don't even know the name of the town."
He asked the man, "Much going on here?"
"Yards. Up here in West Albany it's nothing but yards and railroading."
"Ah," nodded Fairfax, and to himself: "This is the capital of New York State —Albany– that's where I am."
And it was not far enough away to please him.
The man's breakfast, which had been fed into him by his knife, was disposed of, and he went on —
"Good steady employment; they're decent to you. Have to be, good men are scarce."
A tall, well-set-up engineer came to the coffee counter, and Fairfax's companion called out to him —
"Got your new fireman yet, Joe?"
And the other, with a cheerful string of oaths, responded that he had not got him, and that he didn't want anybody, either, who wasn't going to stay more than five minutes in his cab.
"They've got a sign out at the yards," he finished, "advertising for hands, and when I run in at noon I'll call up and see what's doing."
Fairfax digested his meal and watched the entrance and exit of the railroad hands. Nearly all took their breakfast standing at the counter jollying the girl; only a few brakemen and conductors gave themselves the luxury of sitting down at the table. Antony went and paid what he owed at the counter, and found that the waitress had waked up, and, in spite of the fact that she had doled out coffee and food to some fifty customers, she had found time to glance at "the new one."
"Was it all right?" she asked.
She handed him the change out of his quarter. He had had a dime's worth of food.
"Excellent," Fairfax assured her; "first-rate."
Her sleeves came only to the elbow, her fore-arm was firm and white as milk. Her hands were coarse and red; she was pretty and her cheerfulness touched him.
He wanted to ask for a wash-up, but he was timid.
"I'll be back at lunchtime," he said to her, nodding, and the girl, charmed by his smile, asked hesitatingly —
"Workin' here?"
And as Fairfax said "No" rather quickly, she flashed scarlet.
"Excuse me," she murmured.
He was as keen to get out of the restaurant now as he had been to cross its threshold. The room grew small around him, and he felt himself too closely confined with these common workmen, with whom for some reason or other he began to feel a curious fraternity. Once outside the house, instead of taking his way into the more important part of West Albany, he retraced his steps down Nut Street, now filled with men and women. Opposite the gateman's house at the foot of the hill, he saw a sign hanging in a window, "New York Central Railroad," and under this was a poster which read, "Men wanted. Apply here between nine and twelve."
Fairfax read the sign over once or twice, and found that it fascinated him. This brief notice was the only call he had heard for labour, it was the only invitation given him to make his livelihood since he had come North. "Men wanted."
He touched the muscles of his right arm, and repeated "Muscles of iron and a heart of steel." There was nothing said on the sign about sculptors and artists and men of talent, and poets who saw visions, and young ardent fellows of good family, who thought the world was at their feet; but it did say, "Men wanted." Well, he was a man, at any rate. He accosted a fellow who passed him whistling.
"Can you tell me where a chap can get a shave in this neighbourhood? Any barbers hereabouts?"
The other grinned. "Every feller is his own razor in Nut Street, partner! You can find barber shops uptown."
"I want to get a wash-up," Fairfax said, smiling on him his light smile. "I want to get hold of a towel and some soap."
The workman pointed across the street. "There's a hotel. They'll fix you up."
Fairfax followed the man's indication, and he saw the second sign that hung in Nut Street. It gave the modest information, "Rooms and board three dollars a week. Room one dollar a week. All at Kenny's first-class hotel. Gents only." Of the proprietor who stood in the doorway, and whose morning toilet had gone as far as shirt and trousers, Antony asked —
"How much will it cost me to wash-up? I'd like soap and a towel and to lie down on a bed for a couple of hours."
The Irish hotel-keeper looked at him. Fairfax took off his hat, and he didn't explain himself further.
"Well," said Patrick Kenny, "yez don't look very dirthy. Charge fifteen cents. Pay in advance."
"Show me up," accepted Fairfax, and put the last of Bella's charity into the man's hand.
CHAPTER III
That was May. Five months later, when the Hudson flowed between flaming October shores, and the mists of autumn hung like a golden grail on the air, Fairfax leaned out of the window of the engine-cab and cried to another man, in another cab on the opposite track —
"Hello, Sanders; how's your health?"
It was the slang greeting of the time. The engineer responded that he was fine as silk, and rang his bell and passed on his rolling way.
Fairfax wore a red shirt, his trousers were thick with oil and grease. His collar, open at the neck, showed how finely his head was set upon his shoulders, and left free the magnificent column of his throat. Down to his neck came his crisp fair hair, just curling at the ends; his sleeves were up to his elbows and his bare arms were dirty, vigorous and powerful, with the muscles standing out like cords. He never looked at his hands any more, his clever sensitive hands. He had been Joe Mead's fireman for five months, a record ticket for Joe Mead's cab. Fairfax had borne cursing and raging from his chief, borne them with equanimity, feeding into the belly of his engine whatever disgust he felt. Thrown together with these strange men of a different class, he learned new things of life, and at first he was as amused as a child at play. He made two dollars a day. This amply fed him and kept him, and he put by, with a miserliness that was out of all keeping with his temperament, every cent he could spare from the necessities of life.
Not that Fairfax had any plans.
From the first opening of his eyes on West Albany, when he had crawled out of the baggage car in the dawn, he shut out his past from himself. He crushed back even his own identity. He earned his bread by the sweat of his brow in the real sense of the word, and for what reason he saved his money he could not have told. He had become a day labourer, a fireman on the New York Central road, and he was a first-rate hand. His figure in the rude, dirty clothes, his bowler always worn on the back of his blonde head, his limp (that big boot had gone hard with him on the day that he applied for a job at the boss's office), all were familiar in Nut Street by this. His voice, his smile, his rare good heart, made him a popular companion, and he was, too, popular with the women.
His miserable reception in New York, the bruises inflicted upon him by Cedersholm and his uncle, had embittered Tony Fairfax to an extent of which his humble Nut Street friends were ignorant. He didn't do them any harm, however. If any harm were done at all – and there is a question even regarding that – it was done to himself, for he crushed down his ambitions, he thrust them out of his heart, and he bit the dust with a feeling of vengeance. He had been a gentleman with talent, and his own world had not wanted him; so he went down to the people. All that his mother knew was that he had gone on to the north of the State, to perfect certain branches of his art, and that it was better for him to be in Albany. Reclining under the vines, she read his letters, smiling, fanning herself with a languid hand.
"Emmy, Master Tony's getting on, getting on."
"Yas'm, Mis' Bella, I do speck he is."
"Listen, Emmy." And Mrs. Fairfax would read aloud to the devoted negro the letters planned, concocted, by her son in his miserable lodgings, letters which cost him the keenest pangs of his life, kind and tender lines; things he would have done if he could; things he had hoped for and knew would never come true; joys he meant to bring her and that he knew she would grow old and never see; success and fame, whose very sound to him now was like the knell of fate. At the end of the letter he said —
"I am studying mechanics. I reckon you'll laugh at me, mother, but they are useful to a sculptor."
And she had not laughed in the way he meant as she kissed his letter and wet it with her tears.
CHAPTER IV
No Sunday duties took him to the yards, and washed and dressed, shaved and brushed, he became a beautiful man of the world, in a new overcoat and a new sleek hat, and over his hands thick doeskin gloves. He could afford to pay for his clothes, and like this he left Nut Street every Sunday at nine o'clock, not to see West Albany again till midnight. On the seventh day of the week he was a mystery to his chums and his landlady, and if any one in Nut Street had had time to be suspicious and curious they might have given themselves the trouble of following Fairfax. There were not many idlers, however, and no saloons. Drunkards were unwelcome, and Sunday was a day of rest for decent hard workers. When Antony, in his elegance, came out he used to pass between fathers of families in their shirt sleeves, if it were warm weather, and between complacent couples, and many of the hands slept all day. The most curious eyes were those of Molly Shannon, the girl at the restaurant, and her eyes were more than curious.
Fairfax had been courteous to her, bidding her good-morning in a way that made her feel as though she were a lady. He had been there for his breakfast and lunch several months until finally Molly Shannon drove him away. This she did not do by her boldness, for she was not bold, but by her comeliness and her sex and her smile. Fairfax fed his Pride in his savage immolation before the monster of iron and steel; by his slavery to work he revenged himself upon his class. His Pride grew; he stood up against Fate, and he thought he was doing a very fine thing, when his Pride also stood up in the restaurant when he took his cup of coffee from the red-handed girl of the people, pretty Molly Shannon from Killarney. Fairfax went farther up the street. He found another eating house, and later ate his sandwich on his knees at noon in the cab of his engine.
When Molly Shannon found that he was not coming there for his coffee any more, she grew listless, and doled out food to the other men with a lack of science and interest that won her sharp reproofs and coarse jokes. From her window over the restaurant she watched Mister Fairfax as every Sunday he went limping up the street. Molly watched him, her breast palpitating under the common shirtwaist, and the freckles on the milky white skin died out under the red that rose.
"He's got a girl," she reflected; "sure, he's got a girl."
One Sunday in October, a day of yellow sunlight and autumn air, when Nut Street and the yards and West Albany fringed the country like the hem of an ugly garment, Molly came down and out into the street, and at a distance she followed Fairfax. Fairfax cut down a couple of blocks further on to the main station. He went in and bought a ticket for Albany. He boarded the cars, and Molly followed.
She tracked him at a safe distance up Market Street to Eagle, and the young man walked so slowly that it was easy to keep him in sight. The man pursued by the Irish girl suggested nothing less than a New York Central fireman. He looked like any other well-set-up, well-made young gentleman out on a Sunday morning. In his fashionable coat, his fashionable hat, Molly saw him go through the doors of a stone church whose bells rang solemnly on the October air.
The girl was very much surprised.
She felt him safe even within the walls of the heathen church, and she went directly back to Nut Street, her holiday hanging heavy on her hands, and she went in and helped her patron wash the dishes, and upstairs that night she stopped in her simple preparations for bed and reddened.
"Sure, ain't I a silly! He's went to church to meet his girl!"
Her morning's outing, the tramp and the excitement, were an unusual strain to Molly, not to speak of her emotions, and she cried herself to sleep.
Fairfax sat every Sunday in the same pew. The seat was to the left of the altar, and he sang with an ardour and a mellowness that was lost neither on the people near him nor on the choir-master. All arts were sympathetic to him: his ear was good and his voice agreeable. His youth, his sacrifice, his dying art he put into his church singing, and once the choir-master, who had taken pains to mark him, stopped him in the vestibule and spoke to him.
"No," Fairfax said, "I am not a musician. Don't know one note from another, and can't learn. Only sing by ear, and not very sure at that!"
He listened indifferently. As the gentleman spoke of art and success, over Antony's handsome mouth there flitted a smile that had something of iron in it.
"I don't care for any of those things, sir," he replied. "I reckon I'm a barbarian, a rudimentary sort of man."
He took a certain pride and glory in his station as he talked. There was a fascination in puzzling this mild, charming man, one of his own class, whose very voice and accent were a relief after the conversations he heard daily.
"You see," he said, "I happen to be a fireman in the New York Central yards down at West Albany."
The quiet choir-master stared at him. "Oh, come, come!" he smiled.
Fairfax thrust his cane under his arm, drew off his glove, and held out his hand, looking into the other man's eyes. The musician's hand closed over Fairfax's.
"My dear young fellow," he said gravely, "you are a terrible loss to art. You would make your way in the musical world."
Fairfax laughed outright, and the choir-master watched him as others did as he limped away, his broad, fine back, his straight figure, and Fairfax's voice swelling out in the processional came to the musician's mind.
"There is a mystery about that chap," he thought. "He is a gentleman. The Bishop would be interested."
By contrast Sundays were delightful to Antony. Amusements possible to a workingman with the tastes of a gentleman were difficult to obtain. Church in the morning, a lazy stroll through the town, an excellent dinner at the Delavan House, set Fairfax up for the week. The coloured waiter thought his new patron was a Southerner, and suspected him of being a millionaire.
"Yass, sar, Mr. Kunnell Fairfax, sar."
Antony, in a moment of heart hunger for the South, had told George Washington his name. George Washington kept the same place for him every Sunday, and polished the stone china plates till they glistened, displayed for Antony all his dazzling teeth, bowed himself double, his napkin under his arm, and addressed Antony as "Kunnell"; and Antony over his dessert laughed in his sleeve (he took great pains to keep his hands out of sight). After luncheon he smoked and read the papers in the lobby, lounged about, wrote a Sunday letter to his mother, and then loitered about through old Albany. On Sunday afternoons when it was fine, he would choose School Street and the Cathedral close, and now, under the falling of the yellow leaves there was a beauty in the day's end that thrilled him hour by hour. He made these pilgrimages to keep himself from thinking, from dreaming, from suffering; to keep his hands from pencil and design; to keep his artist soul from crying out aloud; to keep his talent from demanding, like a starving thing, bread that he had no means to give. Sometimes, however, – sometimes, when the stimulus of an excellent dinner, and a restful morning, when the cheer of George Washington's droll devotion had died, then the young man's step would lag in the streets of Albany, and with his hands behind his back and his bright head bowed, he would creep musing, half-seeing where he went.
Taking advantage of his lassitude, like peris whose wings had been folded against Paradise, and whose forms had been leaning hard against the gate, his ideals, his visions, would rush in upon him, and he would nearly sink under the beating of their wings – under their voluptuous appeal, under their imperious demand.
On these occasions Fairfax would go home oppressed, and content himself with a glass of milk and light food at the restaurant, and dressed as he was even to the hat on his head, he would sink by the table in his little room and bury his face in his hands. Then he would count up his money. Working from May until October, he had saved only fifty dollars. After his calculations there was no magnitude in the sum to inspire him to new plans or to tempt him to make a fresh venture for art. He often thought, in looking back on those days, that it was nothing but his pride and his obstinacy that kept him there. The memory of his winter's creations, of his work in the studio, and his beasts with their powerful bodies and their bronze beauty, came upon him always with such cruel resentment and made him feel so impotent against the injustice of the great, that if drink had tempted Fairfax he would have gone to the nearest saloon and made a beast of himself.
The working hours were long and his employment physically exhausting, but he embraced his duties and fell in love with the great steel and iron creature which it was his work to feed and clean and oil. And when he left his engine silent in the shed, the roar and the motion absent, tranquil, breathless, and yet superb, Antony left his machine with regret, the regret of a lover for his mistress. He was fireman to a wild-cat engineer.
CHAPTER V
Fairfax, used to the Southern climate, found no fault with the heat of summer, bone-racking and blood-boiling though it was; but, remembering his past experience of winds and snow in January, he wondered how winter would seem in the yards, endured in the cab of the engine, but his toil had now toughened him, roughened him, and strengthened his heart of steel. November, with its Indian summer smoothness, with its fine, glorious light that glowed over West Albany, passed, and the year went out in beauty and December followed, still windless and mild. But that was the last touch of mercy. January rushed down upon them, fierce, tempestuous, and up and down the yards, from his window, Fairfax watched the whirling shrouds of snow sweep over the ground, cover the tracks, and through the veil the lights flickered like candles that the snuffers of the storm were vainly trying to extinguish. He put on an extra flannel shirt under his red shirt; he buttoned his vest high, got into his coat, jammed his hat on fiercely and shook himself like a reluctant dog before going to his work. Under his window he could hear the soughing of the wind and it sucked under the door; he was sure that he would never be warm here again.
"Jove!" he thought, "there will be two inches of snow inside my window when I get back at midnight." He drove his razor into the crack to stiffen the casement, and took an old flannel shirt and laid it along the ledge. As he did so the storm blew a whirl of snow across the pane.
"Siberia," he muttered to himself; "don't talk to me about Russia. This is far enough North for me!"
He could not have said why the thought of the children came, but its spirit came back to him. For months he had fiercely thrust out every memory of the children, but to-night, as the wind struck him, he thought of their games and the last time they had played that romping sport together. Like a warm garment to shield him against the cold he was just going to fight, he seemed to feel Bella's arms around his neck as they had clung whilst he rushed with her through the hall. It was just a year ago that he had arrived in the unfriendly city of his kinsmen, and as he thought of them, going down the narrow dark stairs of the shanty hotel, strangely enough it was not the icy welcome that he remembered, but Bella – Bella in her corner with her book, Bella with her bright red dress, Bella with her dancing eyes and her eager face.
"You've got an awfully light smile, Cousin Antony."
The door of the hotel eating-room was open and dimly lighted. Kenny and his wife were talking before the stove. They heard their lodger's step – a unique step in the house – and the woman, who would have gone down on her knees and blacked his big boot and the smaller boot, called out to him —
"Ah, don't yez go out unless ye have a cup of hot coffee, Misther Fairfax. It's biting cold. Come on in now."
Kenny's was a temperance hotel, obliged to be by the railroad. There were two others in the room besides the landlady and Kenny: Sanders and Molly Shannon. They sat together by the stove. As Fairfax came in Molly drew her chair away from the engineer. Fairfax accepted gratefully Mrs. Kenny's suggestion of hot coffee, and while she busied herself in getting it for him, he sat down.
"Running out at eight, Sanders?"
"You bet," said the other shortly. "New York Central don't change its schedule for the weather."
Sanders was suspicious regarding Fairfax and the girl, not that the fireman paid the least attention to Molly Shannon, but she had changed in her attitude to all her old friends since the new-comer first drank a cup of coffee in Sheedy's. Sanders had asked Molly to marry him every Sunday since spring, and he firmly believed that if he had begun his demands the Sunday before Fairfax appeared, the girl would be Mrs. Sanders now.
Molly wore a red merino dress. According to the fashion of the time it fitted her closely like a glove. Its lines revealed every curve of her young, shapely figure, and the red dress stopped short at the dazzling whiteness of her neck. Her skin and colouring were Irish, coral-like and pure. Her hair was auburn and the vivid tint of her costume was an unfortunate contrast; but her grey eyes with black flecks in them and long black lashes, her piquant nose and dimples, brought back the artistic mistake, as the French say. She was too girlish, too young, too pretty not to score high above her dreadful dress.
Fairfax, who knew why he did not eat at the coffee-house any more, looked at the reason, and the artist in him and the man simultaneously regarded the Irish girl.
"Somebody's got on a new frock," he said. "Did you make it, Miss Molly?"
"Sure," she answered, without lifting her eyes, and went all red from her dress to her hair.
Fairfax drank the hot coffee and felt the warmth at his heart. He heard Sanders say under his breath —
"Why, I bet you could make anything, Molly, you're so smart. Now I have a rip in my coat here; if Mrs. Kenny has a needle will you be a good girl and mend it?"
And Fairfax heard her say, "Sanders, leave me be."
Since Sanders had cooled to him, Fairfax took special pains to be friendly, for his pride shrank against having any jars here in these quarters. He could not bear the idea of a disagreement with these people with whom he was playing a false part. He took out a couple of excellent cigars from his waistcoat and gave one to Kenny, who stood picking his teeth in the doorway.
"Thank you, Mister Fairfax. For a felly who don't smoke, ye smoke the best cigars."
Sanders refused shortly, and as the whistle of an engine was heard above the fierce cry of the storm, he rose. He took the eight o'clock express from Albany to New York. He left all his work to his fireman, jumping on his locomotive at the last moment, always hanging round Molly Shannon till she shook him off like a burr. Fairfax put the discarded cigar back in his pocket. He was not due for some twenty minutes at the engine-house, and Sanders, gloomily considering his rival, was certain that Fairfax intended remaining behind with the girl. Indeed, Antony's impulse to do just this thing was strong. He was tempted to take Sanders' chair and sit down by Molly. She remained quietly, her eyes downcast, twisting her handkerchief, which she rolled and unrolled. Mrs. Kenny cleared away the dishes, her husband lit his cigar and beamed. Sanders got his hat off the hook, put on his coat slowly, the cloud black on his face. Fairfax wanted to make the girl lift her eyes to him, he wanted to look into those grey eyes with the little black flecks along the iris. As the language of the street went, Molly was crazy about him. He wanted to feel the sensation that her lifted lashes and her Irish eyes would bring. Temptations are all of one kind; there are no different kinds. What they are and where they lead depends upon the person to whom they come.
"Good-night," said Sanders, shortly. "Give up the door, Kenny, will you? You're not a ghost."
"I'm going with you, Sanders," Fairfax said; "hold on a bit."
Sanders' heart bounded and his whole expression changed. He growled —
"What are you going for? You're not due. It's cold as hell down in the yards."
Fairfax was looking at Molly and instinctively she raised her head and her eyes.
"Better give this cigar to your fireman, Sandy," Fairfax said to him as the two men buttoned up their coats and bent against the January wind.
"All right," muttered the other graciously, "give it over here. Ain't this the deuce of a night?"
The wind went down Sandy's throat and neither man spoke again. They parted at the yards, and Sanders went across the track where his fireman waited for him on his engine, and Fairfax went to the engine-house and found his legitimate mistress, his steel and iron friend, with whom he was not forbidden by common-sense to play.
