Part 2

Every one knew that Jarlsen was stone-deaf since the blast, and Emma spoke of his hearing the--in one sense--post-mortem eulogies from a desire to combat the idea. Perhaps Jeremy feared she might appeal to him for encouragement on this point, for he hurried on to the next.

“Since the beloved lips is silent, I expect I’m the first singer in the city. He had a way of doing gargles on the upper notes that would beat a seraph singing. But I’m goin’ to organize as notional a rite as I can, bringing forty years of experience, man and boy, to bear on this one sad occasion. It’ll be the blasted best blast rite ever you saw. It’s queer they can’t cover them blasts or get the men off in time, or so’s they won’t touch the torch to it before the word’s given! I’ve had some corpses in two years from blasts, and all jest es ragged and singed es could be, let alone the blasts that’s lying deaf and blind round the city yet!”

The day of the mock-death service dawned clear and bright, which was held to be bad by the weather-weird-wise, as the Scotch among them said. Quarry had rum in his tea as early as 6 A. M. He was always up early on rum days, but he beat his own precedent this morning.

He insisted upon setting the house in readiness. He had formed a habit of talking to himself since he had grown fearful of committing himself with talking to the other men, for Quarry had many things to hide, and knew his limitations as regarded discretion. His main thought was that he would rather spend money on what was only an approach to Jarlsen’s corpse than hoard it. Besides that, he had the cosy consciousness that it had looked friendly when he and Emma had issued together from her room on the night when Jarlsen came singed to his wedding dance.

“The greatest thing happened me since my first drink,” he kept saying like a refrain, as he cut long festoons of coloured paper to hang about the mantel and the thinly gilt picture frames. He went By the Bridge to Jarlsen’s old room, which was still in some confusion, with his working clothes tossed aside by Wavering Jim. Jarlsen had folded them neatly when he had donned his wedding suit to go pay off the men. It was Jarlsen’s portrait in crayon that Quarry had come for. He tied it up with a lank bow-knot of cheap _crêpe_, and laughed in real mirth.

“Now, Jarlsen,” he said in banter, “I do seem to see myself somehow in the glass over your portrait. Funny, ain’t it?”

By the Bridge he purchased five sticks of pretzels, for in Soot City long sticks are run by venders through these open-work wares.

When all was ready at the Buttes’s, he helped lift the big Swede from Emma’s cot to the kitchen table. He was dressed, of course, in what was to have been his wedding suit, and the odd lengths of hair that were left him were brushed out on either side of his head to make a good show. His beard had not grown on one cheek, and Quarry surveyed him with great satisfaction. “Seems they’ve kind o’ singed them right-hand glands where the hair starts out,” he said. “It’s real hard to keep your complexion right here.”

Emma had been sleeping on a couple of ironing boards laid on the hard clay of the lean-to where the pans and scant house-tackle were kept. The thought of hardship had not occurred to her. She had saved her heartbroken minutes for the sordid privacy of the chill lean-to. The place had for her the charm of liberty, which, we are told, is the charm of paradise itself.

Her behaviour was not very agonized. She crouched on the blanketed boards and courted the slow tears that crept from her eyes and were healing to her hurt. They alone relieved her; and sometimes, when they would not come, she would grip the scant old skirt that covered her and pray in a loud whisper, with the vital faith of the poor.

When she woke on the morning of the blast rite they had already moved Jarlsen. He lay on the table, roused, but baffled by the strange dimness in him. No voices and no light could come into his world except through memory; he was heir to a limitless pain in the sense of tyrannic suppression that possessed him.

Etiquette assigned Emma the place by the stove. She took it at once as the mourners were gathering rapidly. The company at the wedding dance was indistinguishable in the crowd of to-day.

There were many operatives and all the foremen--of the new vein, the nutt, and bolt factory, etc. These last had their clerks in attendance. Miss Bentley came among the first arrivals, bringing Emma sweet crackers and a hymn-book.

And Emma cursed her--a great, ignorant, insolent, heartfelt curse--because she thought these things could console her; things the Misses Bentley would never offer each other if their men had the blast. But Miss Bentley was one more of those devout women, not a few, who, because of a congenital shyness, can not do a kindness kindly. Emma would have given thanks for the same things given another way.

The foremen also brought their wives, worthy women with sleek children, who consumed many pretzels with a brisk crunching that annoyed Emma greatly. She wanted people to be sad and unable to eat; to be upset with the trouble that had faded out her future with one too vivid moment of pain.

Quarry sat at a table that was covered with a white cloth. Upon this lay a Bible and a bound time-table. The fitness of this was in the binding, which was ecclesiastically purple.

The table was flanked by the Polacks, looking wretched, as if they had wept all night and grieved since morning on empty stomachs. They tuned their fiddles with writhing faces, and played the “Land o’ the Leal,” as the remaining space in Emma’s kitchen was being filled with the less shy among the labourers. The others stood at the open windows where the sunlight should have been.

Jeremy Black offered prayer, shyly enough, for the Methodist minister was attending as a layman. He prayed for this and that, rather inconsequently, and with a red face; but Emma liked it better than anything else in the service. It was like her own prayer of last night: “O Lord, thou knowest what I want and what I don’t want. Please don’t send me what I don’t want. Good-night.” Even to God Emma could not name Jarlsen’s death.

Her father came in at the climax of Jerry’s petition. He shook his head at Jarlsen’s big, quiet shape on the table, and announced in a voice that shook with emotion that “young men would be young men.” No one but Emma was galled with this needlessly irrelevant statement. In the less book-learned phases of life many people use expressions just because they admire them, not because they express their feeling, their fancy, or a fact. It is no more to be wondered at than the prayers they make, which would read like telegraphic messages in a High Church congregation.

After his prayer Jerry sang. It is confessed that he sang less for art than for audience. He loved to sing. His voice was thin and rather sweet; his intonation very sure and happy. He contrived to infuse a wistfulness into the most martial or condemnatory ballads, types of song he particularly affected.

There is always a good deal of preface to singing like his, and he was not above throat-clearing and loud swallowing. The verse he sang had been used at blast rites since the Swedes came first to Soot City. Its refrain was sung softly by every one to an accompaniment of rocking bodies:

“Don’t fret, old wife, nor cry, For God won’t pass you by; He may come late, but if you wait, You’ll get behind the sky.”

Then Quarry rose with some pomp and spoke thus: “Ladies and friends: Some lives is all chair-cars and champagne; some lives is neither. I’m not saying what they are, for this is no time to start more tears. Some feels the whip, some wears the willow, some gets their own way. These last says the skimpiest ‘Glory be to God!’

“This house is a house of mourning. The one ewe lamb went to the pasture, and come home bit by the wolf! Here to-day, there to-morrow! Our God is a very fearful thing!”

Quarry was considered an orator in Soot City. He always spoke at social functions and stirred his audiences.

“This man”--here the blackest Polack snorted like the report of firearms, and every one at the sound burst into weeping--“this man,” screamed Quarry, strengthening his effect, “was a good man! He knew ten at night as well as the town clock. He was a Christian gentleman, and done as well by his friends as he did by the chapel, and what more can a man do? In passing out, those that knowed him good, or any of the men that were pretty common with him, can put their hands on his hand, as some has the feelin’ it’s best.”

Thereupon Quarry made way for himself to the kitchen table, and stood striving against a triumph so strong that it seemed a physical sensation. And Jarlsen lay scorched, inert, and blasted.

To any one knowing the old Saxon custom of touching a corpse as a means of finding its unconfessed murderer the scene would have been more intense from the moment that the first hand--a woman’s--was laid on the least sore member of Jarlsen’s wrecked body.

None but Miss Bentley knew that the custom was a primitive habit of the race. She alone had a vision of spurting blood as the guilty hand touched its victim. That vision was usual to her at the blast rites, and she felt a strange thrill of uncertainty when she put her own innocent, helping hand on a blasted labourer.

The greater part of the crowd strolled off, subdued, into the bright morning. The rest lingered to lay hands on an old friend.

Jarlsen, the man who had given his ear to their sorrows and lent his high, searching voice to all their social joys, was virtually dead to them; and it was in tense silence that the heavy-footed workmen approached the table. Then there would be a sobbing sigh, and some one would pass out at the door. Few people can touch the dead without tears, and as Jerry Black said, “The blasts is dead men with live tongues.”

They had all gone; the room grew light as the crowd moved from the windows. Sunlight bathed the floor at Emma’s feet, and Black stood beside her, knowing she feared to be without him when Jarlsen was deaf to her and Quarry spoke his kind of love to her, and her father was only a peevish old child. Quarry laid a nervous hand on Jarlsen, who had been roused more than once through his tactile sense as some old friend’s hand had lain for a moment on his.

When Quarry’s touch fell on him, he cried out, “O Emma, Emma! am I dead, that I can not hear you? Is your voice gone behind the sky, that you hold your mouth yet? Is your hand cut off you? Don’t marry Quarry till I am home again! Emma, tell me where you are. It is all black inside me!”

Emma leaped to him. She was “swift as a wicked cat,” Quarry told her later on when he cursed her.

She hurt him cruelly, but Jarlsen smiled, and his blackened face grew brighter. “I shall not marry until Heaven--” she vowed, but he could not hear. The pain of her embrace was fearful, but she clung fast, and called out in her big voice the loyalty he longed for and that he felt in the suffering her strong arms caused him, even though he could not hear.

And then Jerry touched her. “I’m afraid he’s fainted,” he said, as though he apologized.

IV.

QUARRY THE SCHEMER.

“The winged word of spite outstrips a kindness.”

EMMA was too tired to feel her unhappiness, and too relieved, now that everything was over, to feel her loneliness very much. The blast rite had somehow robbed her of her hope of Jarlsen’s recovery, and established the idea of his death in her mind. Jeremy Black nursed him at first, after her outburst. In the neighbours’ phrase, he “turned and fed the poor blast.”

Emma’s crude nature found a pleasure--never before known to her--in food, and in lying on the lean-to floor and thanking God that her barber days were over. Her voice was harsh and loud; she had always hidden it from Jarlsen. To-day she sang and was not ashamed.

Then Black went mysteriously to the city. This might mean New York, Pittsburg, Philadelphia, or some nearer, smaller town than either of these. He left at the beginning of the drought, and Emma, with the rest of his townspeople, envied him sorely. Her resumed service to Jarlsen was automatic. He spoke, but she did not listen; she was afraid of being hurt if she heard his words. The drought made her double work, for her patient drank a great deal of water, and refused it with a wearied patience if it were not cold. She often went at noon to the Bridge well, her tin dipper growing burning hot beneath a sun that made the mica specks shine in the roadside dust. She lagged heavily down the hill, the people greeting her and she answering without knowledge of what they said. She had learned that forgetfulness is the better part of wisdom.

She could not ignore Quarry; he was merciless. On Sunday she went at six for Jarlsen’s drink from the well. She had a handful of oatmeal to put in it; and, as she leaned over and caught the dripping bucket, she heard Quarry’s voice in the alder thicket that smelt sweet with the heavy dew on it.

“She’s a real good girl, and I can’t help but feel, ef she could let me at her wedding dance, set alone with her waitin’ till Jarlsen come, that I owe it to her to marry her, and I think when she’s worn out her mourning thet she’d be agreeable. He was a queer fellow; hed them fancy virtues thet prevents a man from making a good husband jest as sure as his havin’ the vices would. He give his money to lame-legged and blind-eyed, and thet’s keepin’ it from wifie jest es much es if he give it up for drink.”

A woman’s voice answered him in full assent: “You’ll not be the only one to marry her, though; she’s got money now, and a rare head for livin’ straight.”

Emma had not seen the woman, but guessed it must be one of those who “wrought” in the offices of the plant, writing, or sorting the mass of mail. Excepting herself Quarry rarely spoke to any one of less class among the women.

She was very angry, and could see how Quarry had used it all in his talk; all the circumstances of her courtship he could twist into evidence that she had loved nothing of Jarlsen but what he had left her. She could hear the woman’s opinion that her conduct was not quite right, uttered in the dry tone she used when speaking of her straight life.

She said to herself just as fiercely as ever that Quarry was a liar, but she felt that happiness had given her the power to fight him, and now her happiness was gone. She remembered with a dim horror that Quarry had resumed a practice, since Jarlsen’s mishap, that she hoped her engagement had ended. Up to the day that they had spoken of their marriage publicly, Quarry would take things into his hands that Emma had lately touched and fondle them. He had done so again the day of the blast rite, she remembered.

She had intended to revel in her grief at chapel that morning, and Quarry had divined her intention. She meant to stand in the singing, as Jarlsen had stood, and sob when the preacher shivered and scowled and beat the reading-desk with his fists. She would not go now. She felt that no one would believe that she mourned for him if Quarry had been talking about her very much in the way she had heard. She burned to speak with him of the traitor’s part he had played.

It was as usual in Soot City as in other places for folks to bethink themselves of the church when trouble thwarts them; and so every one went to church expecting Emma. And Quarry’s tongue was not quite long enough to have reached the general ear in so short a time.

The congregation was very large, and the flattered minister observed Emma’s absence with satisfaction. He never thought that his hearers could have been ignorant of her intention to stay at home, and supposed that in the sudden calamity come upon the town they had found a warning anent churchless ways. He announced an extra service at three in the afternoon, and the only person who answered it was Jeremy Black’s foreman, who came to protest.

After service Quarry went straight to Emma’s room. He could not account for her absence; he had intended to sit with her in the front pew while she stood in the singing. He expected to colour his stories with her behaviour and satisfy every one that she had loved the money Jarlsen left her the best of all his attentions.

She was sitting with her charge, who lay with his face turned away from the sun--blind, maimed, deaf--yet as conscious of Quarry’s presence as when last week he had turned to him with lazy scorn and a short word.

“Emma,” said Quarry.

“Yes,” she said, after a pause. She had been wondering if he could have been telling about the money everywhere and “setting the men on her.”

Quarry looked at her and at Jarlsen with a twist in his mouth that he thought of as “his smile.” He realized that he could insult Emma thoroughly in the presence of a Soot citizen who could not stir to protect her.

“The women think you might as well marry,” he said. “You’ve got the fixin’s, and if you take me you’ve got the husband. The whole place expects a wedding off you. You’ve got the extra money to care for your friend here.”

“I’d rather give up the money than take you; besides,” she said spitefully, “there’s better men nor you in the town that knows I have money for my man. You ain’t no kind to love me after what I’ve had, and I don’t want you should make my love for this one shabby, talkin’ it over all the time. You can get out,” she said very quietly.

Quarry went; and, as he said himself, his heart was sour.

Then Emma stayed at Jarlsen’s side and prayed in the hot afternoon silence, and wondered why God didn’t do something worth while--that is how she thought it. But she never doubted Him nor the fate that He ordained, but rocked in her only rocking-chair and kissed her helpless lover boldly, longing for a woman’s touch as a sick child longs for its mother.

When Jarlsen spoke her name she trembled with love of him; she was awake now and filled with pity. She did not answer, but, like a child, prayed God to tell Jarlsen she heard him call, and then slept till the coolness of dusk awoke her. Jarlsen slept a little while too, and told her he had talked with her in dreams.

She got the supper, talking within herself. “I can feel things mend,” she said. “Every one will come out right, and my big man will live again and lick that terrible scant Christian, Quarry!”

She ate her supper opposite her silent old father. It was quite late; they had candles and a lamp, which was only an extravagance for courting-time in the sordid social usage of Soot City.

Emma had not thought of this till Ben Bowa, the youngest foreman, stood in the narrow doorway.

“I didn’t know to come in till I saw lights making the shine,” he explained in Swedes’ English. And then many more came in, and the kitchen was full. Jarlsen cried for water from the next room, and before Emma could get to her feet Quarry had gone to him.

“How can I show them I don’t want one of them?” she thought. There was no word of Jarlsen, and everything went on as it had when the one or two men courted her before Jarlsen took her.

Bowa cut profiles out of paper and asked whose they were, and the other men performed their trifling social accomplishments. They were endeavouring to “raise a laugh”; none came.

Late at night a wakeful neighbour heard Emma’s door close, and later God heard her sobbing. “That Quarry’s done me!” was what she said.

And through the night her eyes burned, and she felt that the darkness fell like a weight on them. She longed even for Miss Bentley or the Polack girls’ overdressed Madonnas.

V.

HOPE AHEAD.

“Only the saints and the feeble-minded suffer gladly.”

EMMA tossed restlessly that night. Once the cinder flare leaped upon her walls, staining them with a flickering orange glow. This incident emphasized to her mind the horrid blackness that had lately fastened on their household.

She awoke very early next morning in the final, nervous way that worried people dread, and sat huddled on the floor of the lean-to in the still, sunless cold. Jarlsen’s loud talk echoed in the empty kitchen, but she knew she could not wake him with her voice. The thought recurred to her with all the force of discovery that, waking or sleeping, the voices of this world were dead to him.

Black would return to-day. It was odd to call this hour to-day. The noontide that would bring Black again to Soot City seemed very different from any dim time of loud agonies like that which makes the dawns of the sore-hearted.

To-day she would also be paid the “blast money,” part accident insurance and part Jarlsen’s savings. The anticipation of this pleased her until she moved into disordered kitchen and saw the chairs as Bowa and the others had left them, and smelt the lamp that was a survival of the courting days she had prized. Then she groaned.

For a moment the idea of bringing out the leather barber’s apron and the keen razors, as a tacit contradiction to any report of her wealth, seemed a clear inspiration. But with Quarry and Wavering Jim to talk, she knew all delicate denial to be useless.

She opened the house and sat along the narrow doorsill, her back to one jamb, her knees drawn up and fixed against the other. As the sun came up, the cinder flare crept in a stealthy flush along the earth and lost its power in the heavens as the day grew bright.

At last the cold stung her hands, and the sun chased the shivers down her back, so that she went again into the house, forgetting that an hour since she had loathed it. Quarry was with Jarlsen, who clamoured on, asking questions whose answers he could not hear.

He was learning his deafness by degrees, for his fits of silence were longer, but with Quarry he talked always. Quarry’s touch was abominable to the Swede, and his presence pricked to the quick a soul whose every other approach was blockaded.

Emma, in pity, took up the jug of sweet oil to bathe the burns. Her hand was light from shaving, and it had learned a wonderful caution from the teachings of pain. She could mitigate its brown strength with a suddenness like the swift softnesses of Jarlsen’s old-time singing, and he would smile at her as she used to smile at his own skilled tunefulness. She almost stroked the scorches with her wise, soothing hands.

She had meant to spend the morning on the doorsill, in the hope that a passing woman might be kind and glance her way. She longed so for a woman’s friendship! She was sure that half the sting of her sorrow would vanish with recital.

At the last accident, when they brought home Jerry Black’s half-sister’s husband from a squeeze between the ore cars; as soon as every one had made quite sure he was dead, Martha Long--herself a personage even in the presence of a newly made widow--caught Jerry’s sister in her arms and rocked to and fro with her standing, until both women fell on the plush sofa.

Such scenes dignify sorrow in one type of the common mind.

Emma knew that Quarry had lied about her, and through the day she wondered what the lie might have been. The absence of feminine condolers worried her, and added to her dread of the time when the hands of the clock should reach half past one. That was the hour of Jarlsen’s leave-taking on the day before that set for their wedding. As the time approached the ticking of the clock seemed louder, and she went into the lean-to to escape from it. She lay there, covered over and quiet as though night had come.

The latch rattled, and Martha Long, with her thin face and burning eyes, stood in the lean-to doorway with her baby’s half-knit hood in her fingers. She cast a glance of piercing inquiry at Emma, and her emphasis was not conciliatory.

“Well,” she said, “God has strange ways with the righteous. You’ve had your troubles, poor girl!”

“I don’t see there’s need for that kind o’ talk,” said Emma vaguely; “them as gives it ain’t had overmuch, I guess!”