Chapter 8

The sum of money that had been expended upon that single dog--a dog even that could neither hunt rabbits nor herd sheep--had, it appeared, engendered a bitter animosity, a personal spite, in the hearts of the men on the store platform. They were men to whom two hundred dollars was the symbol of arduous months of toil, endless days of precariously rewarded labor with the stubborn, inimical forces of nature, with swamp and rock and thicket. Two hundred dollars! It was the price of a roof, of health, of life itself.

A hard palm swung upon the dog's ribs, and, in instant response, he fell upon his side. He rose more slowly; stood isolated, obviously troubled. He drew back stumbling from a menacing gesture; but there was no cringing visible in his immature, ill-proportioned body; his tail drooped, but from weariness, discouragement; his head was level; his eyes met the circle of eyes about him.

Gordon took no part in the baiting; he lit a cigar, snapped the match over his shoulder, carelessly watched his newest acquisition. A heavy, wooden-soled shoe shoved the dog forward. And Buckley Simmons, in an obvious improvement upon that manoeuver, kicked the animal behind the ear. The forelegs rose with the impact of the blow, and the body struck full length upon the platform, where it lay dazed. But, finally, the dog got up insecurely, wabbling; a dark blot spread slowly across the straw-colored head.

No one, it was evident, was prepared for the sudden knifelike menace of Gordon Makimmon's voice as he bent over the dog and wiped the blood upon his sleeve.

"Kick him again, Buck," he said; "kick him again and see how funny it'll be."

"Why, Gordon," Buckley Simmons protested, "we were all stirring him up a little; you didn't say anything--"

Makimmon picked the dog up, holding him against his side, the awkward legs streaming down in an uncomfortable confusion of joints and paws. "I paid two hundred dollars for this dog," he pronounced, "as a piece of dam' foolishness, a sort of drunken joke on Greenstream. But it's no joke; the two hundred was cheap. I've seen a lot of good men--I'm not exactly a peafowl myself--but this young dog's better'n any man I ever stood up to; he's got more guts."

He abruptly turned his back upon the gathering, and descended to the road, carrying the limp, warm body all the way home.

II

It was his own home to which he returned, the original dwelling of the Makimmons in Greenstream. He could not, he had told Lettice, be comfortable anywhere else; he could not be content with it closed against the living sound of the stream, or in strange hands. Some changes had been made since his marriage--another space had been enclosed beyond the kitchen, a chamber occupied by Sim Caley and his wife, moved from the outlying farm where Lettice had spent her weeks of "retreat" throughout the passing summers. The exterior had been painted leaden-grey, and a shed transformed into a small, serviceable stable. But the immediate surroundings were the same: the primitive sweep still rose from the well, a cow still grazed in the dank grass; the stream slipped by, mirroring its stable banks, the foliage inexhaustibly replenished by nature; beyond the narrow valley the mountain range shut out the rising sun, closed Greenstream into its deep, verdurous gorge.

High above, the veil of light was still rosy, but it was dusk about Gordon Makimmon's dwelling. Lettice, in white, with a dark shawl drawn about her shoulders, was standing on the porch. She spoke in a strain of querulous sweetness:

"Gordon, you've been the longest while. Mrs. Caley says your supper's all spoiled. You know she likes to get the table cleared right early in the evening."

"Is Mrs. Caley to have her say in this house or am I? That's what I want to know. Am I to eat so's she can clear the table, or is she to clear the table when I have had my supper?"

"When it suits you, Gordon, of course. Oh, Gordon! whatever are you carrying?"

"A dog!"

"I didn't know you wanted a dog." An accent of doubt crept into her voice, a hesitation. "I don't know if I want a dog around ... just now, Gordon."

"He won't do any harm; he's only a young dog, anyhow. Ain't you a young dog, a regular puppy? But, Lettice, he's got the grit of General Jackson; he stood right up against the crowd at the store."

"Still, Gordon, right now--"

"I told you he wouldn't do any harm," the man repeated in irritated tones; "he will be with me most of the time, and not around the house. You're getting too cranky for living, Lettice." He set the dog upon his feet. "What I'll call him I don't know; he's as gritty as--why, yes, I do, I'll call him General Jackson. C'm here, General."

The dog still wavered slightly. He stood intently regarding Gordon. "Here, here, General Jackson." After another long scrutiny he walked slowly up to Gordon, raised his head toward the man's countenance. Gordon Makimmon was delighted. "That's a smart dog!" he exclaimed; "smarter'n half the people I know. He's got to have something to eat. Lettice, will you tell Mrs. Caley to give General something to eat, and nothing's too good for him, either."

Lettice walked to the door of the kitchen and transmitted Gordon's request to the invisible Mrs. Caley. The latter appeared after a moment and stood gazing somberly at the man and dog. She was a tall, ungainly woman, with a flat, sexless body and a deeply-lined face almost the color of her own salt-raised bread. "This is General Jackson," Gordon explained out of the settling dark; "he'd thank you for a panful of supper. Come on, General, come on in the kitchen. No, Mrs. Caley won't bite you; she'll give us something to eat."

The room next to the kitchen, that had been Clare's, had been stripped of its furnishing, and a glistening yellow pine table set in the middle, with six painted wood chairs. The table was perpetually spread on a fringed red or blue cloth; the center occupied by a large silver-plated castor, its various rings filled with differently shaped bottles and shakers. At the end where Lettice sat heavy white cups and saucers were piled; at Gordon's place a knife and fork were propped up on their guards. On either side were the plates of Simeon and Mrs. Caley. Each place boasted a knife and formidable steel fork--the spoons were assembled in a glass receptacle--and a napkin thrust into a ring of plaited hair plainly marked with the sign of the respective owner.

Mrs. Caley silently put before Gordon a pinkish loin of pork, boiled potatoes and a bowl of purple, swimming huckleberries; this she fortified by a vessel of gravy and section of pie. There was tea. "Where's Lettice?" Gordon demanded. Apparently Mrs. Caley had not heard him. "Lettice," he raised his voice; "here's supper."

"I don't want anything to eat, thank you, Gordon," she returned from another room.

"You ought to eat," he called back, attacking the pork. Then he muttered, "--full of ideas and airs. Soft."

III

Beyond the dining room was their bedroom, and beyond that a chamber which, for years in a state of deserted, semi-ruin, Gordon had had newly floored and rendered weather-proof, and now used as a place of assemblage. He found Lettice there when he had finished supper.

She was sitting beside a small table which held a lighted lamp with a shade of minute, woven pieces of various silks. Behind her was a cottage organ, a mass of fretted woodwork; a wall pierced by a window was ornamented by a framed photograph of a woman dead and in her coffin. The photograph had faded to a silvery monotony, but the details of the rigid, unnatural countenance, the fixed staring eyes, were still clear. Redly varnished chairs with green plush cushions and elaborate, thread antimacassars, a second table ranged against the wall, bearing a stout volume entitled "A Cloud of Witnesses," and a cheap phonograph, completed the furnishing.

It was warm without, but Lettice had shut the window, the shawl was still about her shoulders. She was sewing upon a small piece of white material.

"Here, General, here," Gordon commanded, and the dog followed him seriously into the room. "Pat him, Lettice, so's he'll get to know you," he urged.

"I don't think I want to," she began; but, at her husband's obvious impatience, she experimented doubtfully, "Here, puppy."

"Can't you call him by his name?" he interrupted. "How ever'll he come to know it?"

"I don't want to call him at all," she protested, a little wildly. "I don't like him to-night; perhaps to-morrow I will feel different."

"Well, do or don't, that dog's a part of the house, and I don't want to hear Mrs. Caley say this or that about it, neither."

"Mrs. Caley isn't as bad as you make her out; it's me she's thinking about most of the time. I tell her men are not like women, they never think about the little things we do. Father was like that ... you are too. That's all the men I have known." Her voice trailed off into an abrupt silence, she sat staring into the room with the needlework forgotten in her hand.

Gordon turned to the dog, playing with him, pulling his ears. General Jackson, in remonstrance, softly bit Gordon's hand. "That's a dandy dog. Making yourself right at home, hey! Biting right back, are you! Let me feel your teeth, phew--"

"Gordon," Lettice exclaimed suddenly in a throaty voice, "I'm afraid.... Tell me it will be all right, Gordon."

He looked up from the dog, startled by the unaccustomed vibration of her tones. "Of course it will be all right," he reassured her hastily, making an effort to keep his impatience from his voice; "I never guessed you were so easy scared."

"I'll try not," she returned obediently. "Mrs. Caley says it will be all right, too." She seemed, he thought, even younger than when he had married her. She was absurdly girlish. It annoyed him; it seemed, unjustly, to place too great a demand upon his forbearance, his patience. A wife should be able to give and take--this was almost like having a child to tend. Lately she had been frightened even at the dark, she had wakened him over nothing at all, fancies.

He decided to pay no further attention to her imagining; and moved to the phonograph, where he selected one of a small number of waxy cylinders. "We'll see how the General likes music," he proclaimed. He slipped the cylinder over a projection, and wound the mechanism. A sharp, high scratching responded, as painful as a pin dragging over the ear drum, a meaningless cacophony of sounds that gradually resolved into a thin, incredibly metallic melody which appeared, mercifully, to come from a distance. To this was presently joined a voice, the voice, as it were, of a sinister, tin manikin galvanized into convulsive song. The words grew audible in broken phrases:

... was a lucky man, Rip van Winkle ... grummmble ... never saw the women At Coney Island swimming ...

General Jackson sat abruptly on his haunches, and lifted a long, quavering protest. As the cylinder went round and round, and the shrill performance continued, the dog's howling grew wilder; it reached a point where it broke into a hoarse cough, then again it recommenced lower in the scale, carrying over a gamut of indescribable, audible misery.

Gordon slapped his leg in acute enjoyment. "The General's a regular opera singer, a high-rolling canary. Go after it ... a regular concert dog."

"Gordon," Lettice said, in a small, strained voice. Apparently he had not heard her. "Gordon," she repeated more loudly. She had dropped the piece of sewing, her hands were clenched, her face wet and pallid. "Gordon!" she cried, her voice cutting through the sound of the phonograph and the howling dog; "stop it, do you hear! I'll go crazy! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!"

He silenced the machine in genuine surprise. "Why, everything works you up to-night. I thought you'd like to hear General Jackson sing; he's got a real deep barytone."

Lettice sat limply in her chair. "I stood it just as long as I could," she half whispered.

Gordon walked to the unshuttered window, gazing out; above the impenetrable, velvety dark of the western range the stars gleamed like drops of water. He felt unsettled, ill at ease; dissatisfaction irked his thoughts and emotions. His unrest was without tangible features; it permeated him from an undivined cause, oppressed him with indefinable longing. He got, he dimly realized, but a limited amount of satisfaction from the money now at his command. He was totally without financial instinct--money for itself, the abstraction, was beyond his comprehension. He had bought a ponderous gold watch, which he continually neglected to wind; the years of stage driving had sated him of horses; his clothes were already a subject of jest in Greenstream; and he had seriously damaged his throat, and the throat of Sim Caley, with cigars. He had been glad to return to the familiar, casual cigarettes, the generous bag of Green Goose for five cents; Sim had reverted to his haggled plug. He had no desire to build a pretentious dwelling--his instinct, his clannish spirit, was too closely bound up in the house of his father and grandfather to derive any pleasure from that.

After he had spent a limited amount, the principal at his disposal lay untouched, unrealized. He got a certain measure of content from its sheer bulk at his back; it ministered to his vanity, to his supreme self importance. He liked negligently to produce, in Simmons' store, a twenty or even fifty dollar currency note, and then conduct a search through his pockets for something smaller. He drank an adequate amount of whiskey, receiving it in jugs semi-surreptitiously by way of the Stenton stage; Greenstream County was "dry," but whiskey in gallons was comparatively inexpensive. He would have gambled, but two dollars was a momentous hazard to the habitual card players of the village. He thought, occasionally, of taking a short trip, of two or three days, to nearby cities outside his ken, or to the ocean--Gordon had never seen a large body of water; but his life had travelled such a narrow course, he was so accustomed by blood and experience to the feel of the mountains, that, when the moment arrived to consider an actual departure, he drew back ... put it off.

What he was subconsciously longing for was youth. He was instinctively rebelling, struggling, against the closing fetters of time, against the dilution of his blood by time, the hardening of his bones, the imperceptible slackening of his muscles. His intimate contact with the vigorous youth of Lettice had precipitated this rebellion, this strife in which he was doomed. He would have hotly repudiated the insinuation that he was growing old; he would still, perhaps, have fought the man who said that he was failing. And such a statement would be beside the fact; no perceptible decay had yet set up at the heart of his manhood. But the inception of that process was imminent; the sloth consequent upon Lettice's money was hastening it.

Lettice's youthful aspect, persisting in the face of her approaching motherhood, disconcerted him; it was inappropriate. Her freshly-flushed, rounded cheeks beside his own weather-beaten, lean jaw offered a comment too obvious for enjoyment. He resented, from his own depleting store, her unspent sum of days. It created in him an animosity which, as he turned from the window, noted almost with relief faint lines about her mouth, the sinking of her color.

She was sitting with her eyes shut, the sewing neglected in her lap, and did not see Mrs. Caley standing in the doorway. The woman's gaze lingered for a moment, with an unmasked, burning contempt, upon Gordon Makimmon, then swept on to the girl.

"Lettice!" she exclaimed, in a species of exasperated concern, "don't you know better than to sit up to all hours?"

IV

The following morning, "Oh, Gordon!" Lettice cried, "I like him ever so much; he played and played with me."

Gordon had gone to the post-office, and was descending the slope from the public road to his dwelling. He found Lettice sitting on the edge of the porch, and, panting vigorously, the dog extended before her, an expression of idiotic satisfaction on his shaggy face. They were, together, an epitome of extreme youth; and Gordon's discontent, revived from the night before, overflowed in facile displeasure.

"Don't you know better than to run him on a warm morning like this?" he complained; "as like as not now he'll take a fit; young dogs mustn't get their blood heated up."

The animation died from her countenance, leaving it almost sullen, her shoulders drooped dejectedly. "It seems nothing suits you," she observed; "you're cross when I don't like the dog and you're cross when I do. I can't satisfy you, anyhow."

"There's some difference in making over the dog and playing him out. Come here, General Jackson." The animal rose and yapped, backing playfully away. "Don't you hear me? Come right here." The dog, sensitive to the growing menace in the voice, moved still further away. "C'm here, damn you," Gordon shot out. The dog grew stubborn, and refused to move forward; and Gordon, his anger thoroughly aroused, picked up a large stone and threw it with all his force, missing General Jackson by a narrow margin.

"It seems to me," Lettice observed in a studiously detached voice, "I wouldn't throw stones at a dog I had paid two hundred dollars for."

Gordon was momentarily disconcerted. He had not intended to tell Lettice how much the General had cost. And yet, he reflected, since the village knew, with Sim Caley's wife in the house, it had been folly to hope to keep it from her.

"It's his pedigree," he explained lamely; "champion stock, imported." His temper again slowly got the better of his wisdom. "What if I did pay two hundred dollars for him?" he demanded; "it's harmless, ain't it? I'd a sight better do that than some other things I might mention."

"I only said," she repeated impersonally, "that I would not throw stones at a dog that had cost so much money."

"You're getting on the money now, are you? Going to start that song? That'll come natural to you. When I first married you I couldn't see how you were old Pompey's daughter, but I might have known it would come out. I might have known you weren't the daughter of the meanest man in Greenstream for nothing.... I suppose I'll hear about that money all the rest of my life."

"Perhaps I will die, and then you will have no bother."

"That's a nice way to talk; that makes me out a fine figure of a man ... with Mrs. Caley in the kitchen there, laying right over every word; the old vinegar bottle."

"Don't you say another word about Mrs. Caley," Lattice declared passionately; "she nursed my mother in her last sickness; and she took care of me for years, when there wasn't anybody else hardly knew if I was alive or not. If it wasn't for Mrs. Caley right now I guess I'd be in an early grave."

Gordon Makimmon stood silenced by the last outburst. The tall, meager figure of Mrs. Caley appeared upon the porch. She was clad in black calico, and wore grey felt slippers. Her head was lowered, her closed lips quivered, her bony fingers twitched. She never addressed a word to Gordon directly; and, he decided, when she did, it would be monumental, dumbfounding. The present moment was more than usually unpropitious; and, discovering General Jackson at his heels, he picked the dog up and departed for the stable, where he saw Sim Caley putting the horse into the buggy.

"I thought I'd go over to the farm beyond the priest's," he answered Gordon's query; "Tol'able's an awful slack hand with cattle."

"Your wife ought to run that place; she'd walk those steers around on a snake fence."

Simeon Caley preserved a diplomatic silence. He, too, was long and lean. He had eyes of the most innocent and tender blue imaginable in a countenance seamed and scarred by protracted debauch, disease, abuse. It was said of him that if all the liquor he had consumed were turned loose on the mountain it would sweep Greenstream village to the farther end of the valley.

His voice, like his eyes, was gentle. "Come right along, Gord; there's some draining you ought to see to. It's a nice drive, anyways." Gordon took the reins, slapping them on the rough, sturdy back of the horse, and they started up the precarious track to the road. General Jackson's head hung panting, wild-eyed, from the side of the vehicle.

V

It was late when they returned from the farm. Gordon left the buggy at the Courthouse. The thought of his dwelling, with Lattice's importunate fancies and complaints, was distasteful to him. A long-drawn-out evening in the monotonous sitting room, with the grim form of Mrs. Caley in the background, was insupportable. There was no light in the office of the _Bugle_, but there was a pale yellow blur in the lower windows of Peterman's hotel. It might be that a drummer had arrived, and was entertaining a local circle with the pungent wit of the road; and Gordon made his way toward the hotel.

It was a painted, wooden structure, two stories in height, with a wing that ran back from the road. The rooms in the latter section were reached from an outside, uncovered gallery, gained by a flight of steps at the back. Contrary to his expectation no one was in the office; a lamp shone on an empty array of chairs. But some one was on the gallery above; he could see a white skirt through the railing, make out the dark blot of a head upon the night. The illumination from within shone on his face.

The form above him leaned forward over the railing. "Mr. Makimmon," a woman's voice said, "if you want Mr. Peterman, I'll call him. He's at the back of the house."

Gordon was totally unaware of her identity.

"No," he replied, hesitatingly, "I wasn't after him in particular--"

"You don't know me," she challenged, laughing; "it's Meta Beggs; I teach the school, you know."

Instantly the memory returned to him of a woman's round, gleaming shoulders slipping into a web of soft white; he recalled the school-teacher's bitter arraignment of her life, her prospects. "I didn't know you," he admitted, "and that's the fact; it was the dark." He hesitated once more, conscious of the awkwardness of his position, talking upward to an indistinguishable shape. "I heard you were back," he continued impotently.

"Yes," she assented, "there was nothing else open.... Won't you come up and smoke a cigarette? It's pleasant here on the gallery."

He mounted the steps, making his way over the narrow, hollow-sounding passage to her side. She was seated overlooking the rift of the valley. "I'll get you a chair," she said, rising. At her side a door opened into a dim room. "No, no," he protested, "let me--in here?"

He entered the room. It was, he divined, hers. His foot struck against a chair, and his hand caught the back. A thin, clinging under-garment rested on it, which he deposited on a vague bed. It stuck to his fingers like a cobweb. There was just room on the balcony to arrange the chairs side by side.

VI

The spring night was potent, warm and damp; it was filled with intangible influences which troubled the mind and stirred the memory to vain, melancholy groping. Meta Beggs was so close to Gordon that their shoulders touched. He rolled a cigarette and lit it, resting his arms upon the railing. Her face was white in the gloom; not white as Lettice's had been, like a flower, but sharply cut like marble; her nose was finely modelled, her lips were delicately curved, but thin, compressed. He could distinguish over her the paramount air of dissatisfaction.

She aroused in him unbidden thoughts; without the slightest freedom of gesture or words she gave the impression of careless license. He grew instinctively, at once, familiar, confidential, in his attitude toward her. And she responded in the same manner; she did not draw back when their arms accidentally met.