Part 3

“Well, no offence,” said Martha, overbearingly; “how is he?”

“Making out--no more. He ain’t got a piece of skin on him that don’t appear to be fried, and he talks till your heart splits in your body.”

“It’s a good sign if he’s rebellious. My brother was fearful meek. He could hear a little, and the whole town had hopes, when one morning he turned his head in to the wall, and he says to poor Jarlsen, who was tending him, ‘You give that oatmeal and water where it’s wanted,’ he says; ‘you can give me a pleasure drink for the last I get.’ He didn’t drink much ever, and Jarlsen give him a drop of something, and then he lay still and was dumb dead before your poor feller could rinch the glass. So it goes!” Martha ended dismally.

Emma did not find this quite satisfactory, so she said nothing.

“And there is something you have to be thankful for,” said Martha further, forgetting that nothing causes man to hate his lot like telling him to be thankful for it; “you’ve got a good man to fall back on. That Quarry’s more to you in most ways nor your born mother would be. Yesterday he was saying as how risky it was to marry where the language was different. Two tongues like that in a house means secrets.”

Emma had started up. “That Quarry says more than his prayers,” she cried out fiercely; “I knew he’d been lyin’ ’round about me. I don’t hold by his ways; and I’m goin’ to stick by that husk of a husband in there, ef he don’t get better till the day I die. He ain’t talked kind about me, and worse talk is due, I know, but I’ll bide my rights, and have ’em.”

Martha felt admiration. Emma was not as Quarry had reported her. She recited a few more “incidents,” and strolled, without leave-making and still knitting, toward the door. “Come in some night when you’re lonesome,” was all she had left in her heart of the invitation she had meant to give the girl in Bowa’s interest. It was plain to her woman’s eye that Emma loved Jarlsen maimed better than a town full of men of sound members.

She wondered, however, why the girl hadn’t the sense to take Quarry, who was getting in with the factory hands like water through a leak.

Black came in a moment after Martha’s departure. He had a wallet in his hand, and his face was clothed in a bright kindliness that turned Emma’s heart toward him.

“I’m glad you’ve had lady’s company,” he said.

“You’re looking daft, dear,” Emma answered, when she had studied him.

Suddenly the little fellow spread his hands. “Last night,” he said, “I went to heaven cheap--fifty cents entrance fee. I heard a man play on a fiddle; well, if the sweetest voice in heaven sang its best it couldn’t learn that feller much. I sat there and just pined away to hear the back door shut, or some other shabby kind of sound, just to show it was really I situated in the concert hall. But that’s not this,” he concluded, putting his hand on the wallet; “here’s your due.”

Jerry held it out to her. His face was red, and he made visible efforts to control its expression, which changed from conscious diplomacy to kindly eagerness.

“I seen a doctor in the town, a professor of blasts, kind of. He knows the ins and outs and conbinizations of paralysis pretty pat, and I told him I had a good friend laid up in a blast, and he said he’d charge maybe a hundred or maybe fifty dollars to come up on purpose to see him. So that’s your best way of layin’ out his money, Emma.”

“I was thinkin’ that would be good myself,” Emma answered with a quiver of gratitude on her lips.

“And I’m obliged to say that you could offer a little to Quarry, just to keep his tongue sweet. He’s got a fearful gainin’ way with his mouth, and them nutt and bolt hands will pick up and listen to all he has to say. They’ve been in schools, and are crazy for talkin’ and politics. The kind of foolishness men gets from schools is the worst kind.”

Jerry was angry.

“Ain’t he been talkin’ on me, maybe?” Emma asked.

“Perhaps so, perhaps no. He’s so mean you could buy him for a small price. He ain’t much of a luxury.”

As they talked they heard the dinner pails clanking as some of the men came down the homeward hill. Then an oar car sided under the window close by the house. In it were the workmen of the nutt and bolt factory--Quarry in their midst, his face ardently conceited and his gestures highly alcoholic.

Emma scanned him with a fierce contempt. “He wouldn’t be like that if he could stir around,” she exclaimed, pointing toward her own room door.

Then she stood by Jarlsen’s bed to avoid Quarry, and as she looked at him he laughed; it was his old, mirthful, kindly laughter. It seemed to the girl, who cherished him, that he had brought pain to their house, and had also been spared its consequences. She suffered--he slept.

VI.

A BAD BARGAIN.

“It is well to pay your debts, on the chance you’ll lose your money.”

IN four days’ time Black received a letter from the paralysis specialist that delighted him. It consisted solely of questions regarding trains and Soot City conveyances and the distance from the station to the patient’s abiding place. To the genial undertaker intercourse with a man too busy to con a time-table was social promotion.

He went at once to Emma, and in a mixed state of reverence and elation read her the physician’s curt note, with his own copious comment.

“Sounds ’cute, don’t he?” said Black. “He knows I understand him. It must be a kind of comfort to him comin’ to a strange place to find a man of his own stamp who feels just his way about the game o’ life.”

Putting his tongue in his cheek, he was soon lost in wonder to find himself, after long years of comparative obscurity, so very like this shining light of medical science.

Emma almost said her thought aloud; it was well she did not, for she was saying inwardly, “You can always tell when Jerry Black’s been to the city, he has such an extra green look.”

With Martha Long for aid, she prepared for the doctor joyfully. They washed everything just for the love of the unaccustomed, that seizes women under suspense. Everything had been washed for the wedding, and was still much cleaner than its ordinary state. There was one day when the house-cleaning was finished and the doctor not yet come; so Martha undertook a little rudimentary cooking, and Emma raked up the little space of yard and dug out the weeds from the beds of cinder-spotted marigolds.

She tended Jarlsen more and more, and the friendliness Martha showed toward her pleased her mightily. She would take her to the Swede’s bed and show her how his looks were coming back, and then, forgetful of her presence, would stand in silent wonder at the expression of wisdom fast becoming habitual to him.

He seemed to know more of what was, and is, and is to be, than any of the people she had seen, and he had not seemed so wise when he had lips wherewith to speak wisely. For a half hour and more she would sometimes watch him, unconscious of time, and at last a fit of longing, like a mother’s, would bend her to him. Anxious for his thoughts, she would put her hand on his temple as if feeling for them. He would smile and say “Emma”; then her blushes would come as they had when he was a bright mystery to her, because she dared not raise her eyes to his face; and she took the utterance of her name as an answer to her craving.

Quarry and her father had become cares she could not shoulder; she simply could not think of them. Quarry never returned from work without company, and he and his friends would sit in the yard on Emma’s chairs, which they carried from the kitchen without her permission. In a man she liked, this proceeding might have been annoying; but from Quarry it was a liberty that was enraging.

One day Emma heard him stirring up strife with his tongue; he was a fascinating speaker, even when--as the Swedes said--he “talked beside his mouth,” which is their idiom for conversational embellishment.

She called him to her. “Send them away,” she said shortly.

Without a word of dissent he made them move, and Mr. Butte shambled out to bring in the chairs.

“Take them in yourself,” she called wickedly. “You was strong enough to get them out there.”

With a more sullen compliance he put them just within the narrow doorsill.

Still she eyed him with her mouth stretched into something like a smile. “Put ’em in their places,” she said.

Again Quarry obeyed her.

Then her contemptuous smile became laughter. “You wouldn’t hev done thet ef you hedn’t got wind of what I’m goin’ to even to you. See here--you talk too much. Would you talk less if you had more money? I guess maybe. Here’s what you said at Martha Long’s party. You showed how it was a good thing August Jarlsen got the blast, because I kind o’ leaned toward you latterly. And as for you, you says you’d always leaned toward me, and it was better to have August Jarlsen saved learnin’ it.” The girl covered him with her tragic eyes, and expressed her own strong instinct in a gesture she had learned from the Polacks--she crossed herself with a rapid hand. She had never before felt Quarry to be so evil. “Now,” she said, “fifty dollars if you’ll stop that!”

For a moment delight leaped from his eyes. He threw out his hand; then he looked at her darkly, his expression altered to one of fear and misgiving.

“All right,” he said finally.

“Well, I’ll pay you later,” said Emma, and every word she spoke cut like a whip, her voice was so shrill with contemptuous anger.

She was a young girl, and had hoped he would not take the money; partly because she didn’t wish to believe that he could be mean enough to take it from her, when he knew that he was the last person the Swede would give it to, had he any longer the power to give.

Her lips shrank away from her teeth in contemptuous, writhing smiles when she thought of it.

She scarcely knew how to array herself for the doctor’s visit. She wanted to impress him with a sense of her fitness to nurse the patient. She had had visions of Jarlsen’s departure in an ambulance for some city hospital, where a uniformed woman would hear his groans and heed them for hire only.

Quarry knew nothing of the doctor’s advent. Emma understood that he would talk about it, and that her enemies would say she must be sure of Jarlsen’s death when she dared let loose a first-class pill-man on him.

Then, besides, the Englishman was unreasonable and iterative, like many Englishmen; and she knew how he would search his mind for ways to tell her that Jarlsen was as good as dead already. “I ought to pay him right away, or he’ll do a little of his fancy talkin’, maybe.”

Black went to the station in a funeral carriage, which was the more imposing as there were but four in Soot City. (Casually--he paid toll on the turnpike for the eight horses that drew these vehicles, and they were always taxed as “pleasure teams.” Again casually--he saw no joke in this, even when the mourners received legacies.) He wore a red tie with his black, professionally sombre clothes, and this he did as he would not imply Jarlsen’s death to the doctor, in case the physician should be standing on the platform and should see him before he could get speech of him. Black employed his imagination in this sort of futile arrangement of improbable circumstance.

On the doctor’s arrival they drove directly to the Buttes. They alighted at the Bridge and saw thence to Emma’s doorway, where Quarry was standing. He looked as though he had had rum in his tea, and as if even that had not reconciled him to existence.

“Where’s Emma?” he asked of Black.

“She’s in with August. Dr. Brent, this gentleman lives here; he’s an old friend of Mr. Butte’s, and Mr. Jarlsen’s too, I may say.”

Quarry, returned in the noon recess to find a perfect stranger about to invade the house; did not understand the situation, as was very evident. He grinned absently, and went toward Jarlsen’s room door.

“Emma, come out here.” His tone was wheedling, and his fingers were tapping nervously on the wall. She came out to him quickly; her eyes were bright and her face was full of a vigorous hope.

“Hurry up!” she said; “I want to bring the doctor in.”

“Could you oblige me with the trifle you named Thursday? I want to blow it right in this noon.”

Emma thought it wise to pay him at once, although her heart was beating in her ears--she longed so for the doctor’s opinion on Jarlsen. She hesitated, and then said: “It is in the wallet between the shake-downs in the lean-to chamber. Put it back where you found it.”

She forgot him as she greeted the doctor; her whole mind was full of the Swede.

VII.

TROUBLE ACCUMULATES.

“If you’re feeding a mean dog, be sure he’ll bite you when he’s had enough.”

THE doctor let Emma tell him her own complete narrative of Jarlsen’s mishap; nor did he interrupt once, save with questions that served as a spur to her flagging memory. Her mode of recital was detailed and feminine, obnoxious to science. She told, incidentally (but at great length) how Jarlsen had always treated her; and quoted his sayings, which were, in her retrospective judgment, prophetic. The doctor’s manner was so courteous that a more experienced girl than Emma could not have inferred that Jarlsen’s relations with her before the accident would not strike his physician as indicative of his condition after it.

Dr. Brent had a sober, inscrutable smile; he gave the observer an impression of seeing with great difficulty, although he wore no glasses. His manner was at times indifferent, yet he inspired confidence. As Jerry had said, “He don’t have to hustle to cure you, like these farmin’ pill-men we hev to Soot City.”

Emma was so rapt in the first uninterrupted recital of her troubles that she did not observe Quarry as he crossed the kitchen to the house door. He had the wallet in his hand, which shook; his face twitched and was chalk white.

“I hope that is not your father,” said Dr. Brent politely as he would say: “There is a shower coming; I hope it may not wet you.”

Emma looked at him and liked him, for she saw that he knew at a glance what Quarry was. And she had taken lessons in him for a lifetime and had not learned him yet. Then the doctor rose and went into Jarlsen’s room.

Waiting for the doctor’s opinion is one of the fearful things that civilization has imposed on humanity. It is during such intervals of suspense that a racked mind learns the pattern of the carpet, the similarity in outline of some familiar pieces of furniture, and of some impossible beast or bird sprawling on the wall papers. Emma discovered stains in the sheer curtains at the window. She prayed in a general way, and feared the moment when the doctor should appear again.

For the first time she observed that quite a crowd surrounded the house, looking in at the windows. They wore long faces beneath their eager eyes, and looked as though good news would be a (conversational) calamity. Jerry Black, however, stood among them with the perfect aspect of honest sympathy.

It was to him that Emma beckoned. He entered the house in response, with an air of great importance. He had been telling half the town by twos and threes, and as a great favour, exactly what he had said to Dr. Brent. The town listened in the hope of hearing what Dr. Brent had said to him.

Emma motioned him to stand close to her.

“When do you pay?” said she.

“’Most any time,” said Jerry. “You can pay the first day for a whole set of visits, or you can pay when he sends a bill, or ’most anyway.”

“How can I tell how often he’s comin’?”

“He ain’t let pass that he’s comin’ more than this once, but you’ll have to go high for this once. Think of the fares here and back; the car money alone is twenty-five dollars, and not countin’ chair-cars or meals.”

“Well, I’ll give him a hundred, and see how he likes that.”

“All right,” said Jerry; “you give it to him now. He’d be more likely to come later, if he knew we pay before he can put hat on to go home.”

She had planned it all; the money should be put in his hand just as he was leaving. She thought of no receipt, just as she thought of none for the money she put in the plate on those delightful courtship Sundays. Indeed, she felt the transactions to be similar.

She wanted to show, just as she had shown then, that though Jarlsen was her man, he was no pauper. The bill was to be paid in the sight of the surrounding multitude at the windows.

Presently Dr. Brent came out. He looked at the faces set in the window frames, and made no comment. Emma realized, with hope full grown to thankfulness, that had he felt there was nothing encouraging to say, he would have dispersed the waiting men and women before he spoke.

“Miss Butte,” he said, “I’ve seen worse than he recover. His sight is gone, sealed up with scorch; but he’ll hear again some day. Get him up as soon as the smart goes.”

Some one in the window said, “He’ll make wages dead easy if he hears again.”

“I’m glad,” said Dr. Brent, turning toward the window. “Encourage him to work when the smart is over.”

He declined Emma’s offered meal, and prepared for departure, writing on a bit of paper what he wished to have done for Jarlsen. When he rose, hat in hand, Emma spoke to him. Her voice had a thrill of pride in it, and her high spirit lent a dignity to the gaudy finery intended to decorate her awkward frock.

“Doctor,” she said, “will you set a minute?”

She entered the lean-to, erect and elastic. Three minutes passed while the crowd asked the doctor questions, which he answered in words of such strangeness to their ears that they enjoyed all the sensations of those who communicate with spirits. They laughed at his least word, and he, perceiving it, darkened his sayings the further.

When Emma returned, her face was set and her cheeks flamed, so that their heat alone drew the tears to her eyes. Her hands shook, and hardly held the bit of soiled paper and the stumpy pencil that she carried. “Will you tell me your name and address?” she asked of the doctor.

A sigh broke from her lips that tried not to be a groan.

Black looked at her, and the colour flew from his face. He said afterward that his heart beat so that he thought some one knocked on the door. He knew what had happened.

So did the doctor. “My accounts are payable in May,” he said, being kind, and knowing Soot City to be ignorant.

Emma smiled again, and, with the patronizing manner that is the outcome of complete shyness, said, “Well, you’re a real good doctor.”

And so, with a slight constriction of his kindly heart, he shook her hand and departed.

But she caught Black at his exit. “That Quarry’s stole!” said she.

Jerry looked sick and old; his voice sounded bitter. “I ain’t got a cent just now to spare,” he said. Then he grew fiercer, and cursed the Englishman exhaustively and with the awkwardness of a man unused to such conversational indulgence.

The crowd followed as far as the funeral carriage and stood to watch it disappear in billows of dust. The white horses and the black barouche were alike buff before they were out of sight of The Tracks.

And in sullen quiet Emma set herself to wait for Quarry, not trusting herself to look at Jarlsen lest the sight of him should soften her hate.

“He took the whole wallet!” she repeated to herself, “and he was the only man August wouldn’t give to. He knew it, too, or he’d hev asked something off him when first he seen we was settin’ it up together.”

VIII.

QUARRY’S ATTEMPT AT EXPLANATION.

“A man will say more to himself in excuse than he will to his God or his friend.”

EMMA’S eyes roved from object to object as though she sought escape; they always returned to the door, whence she expected Quarry. It was a duty, she reasoned, to turn this man’s stealing to swift shame. Words flocked to her tongue that she could not remember having used before, and her mind’s eye saw the Englishman wince under them. A demon of invective filled her brain with fierce thoughts as she tore the shake-downs apart in a final hunt for the wallet. And then a fit of sobs and shaking beset her as she waited again in the kitchen for what she hoped would be in some sort vengeance.

She remembered every mean and, in her characterizing adjective, every “useless” thing Quarry had done; how he had lied, and when. She remembered his drunkenness--that terrible drunkenness in which his self-assurance seemed boundless; the remembered vanity of his face startled her, and it seemed marvellous that his faults had not kept him from their household as they had kept him from their hearts.

When some person has been the provoking cause of emotions so strong that the mind can not shake off their grasp, it is quick to misconceive that person. Quarry’s voice was a shock to Emma when at last she heard it in the yard, although a short time ago she had seen and had speech with him.

Her heart sank when she found he was talking with himself and in a laudatory strain. His effort was to walk straight, but his accomplishment was slight. He lurched to and from either marigold border, so that the walk seemed serpentine to Emma’s shocked gaze. “No,” he said, “the ruins is covered with ivory; I shall pluck away the vine, and the presspit is discovered.” He spoke as he walked, doing as much as possible at each lucid interval between lapses. “No friend shall fall away into the presspit, like I nearly did.”

His fall was upon nothing more precipitous than the chair by the door. Seeing anger on Emma’s face, he attempted to soothe her with vague smiles of fearful extent; they travelled swiftly across his flushed face and divided it into north and south intemperate zones.

“Stop _that_,” called Emma; “you’ve done enough!”

“Not yet!” shouted Quarry, impelled by an erratic enthusiasm; “I’ll do more for my Emma. I’ve laid out the money real well. We’ll buy the deepo and live in it! It’s the finest house in Soot City, and if you want Jarlsen too, you can keep him for hired help. I don’t want there should be any stinting where love is king.”

“Give me my wallet,” said Emma.

“I have given it where it’ll do the most good. The town rejoices that a good deed was done. Mine the deed though not the money.” He used this phrase as a sort of chant.

“Quarry,” said Emma sternly, “sober up, and think true for a minute!”

But he interrupted to say: “Sober up? Emma, you’re enough to turn a saint. I am so sober that the boys laugh at me the way they done at Jarlsen, and I’ve done the wonderfullest thing! Money’ll be so loose you can pick it up off anything in such a little while! I invested yours in a great concern; it’s safe. I’m at the head of it!” He finished, with some tardy regard for truth, and, waving his arms comprehensively, lapsed again into vagueness.

“Where did you put it?” Emma uttered her queries with pains, as if she put them to a foreigner.

Then came lavish excuse. “I put it in an investment,” said he. He was a little sobered now, and wore a scared look. “Mr. Jarlsen, ’fore he was took with the blast, got me to promise to invest his money. He had a pulmonition of the blast, so he did.”

Emma looked at him again; her face was white and hopeless, and its young modelling seemed aged and heavy.

“You ain’t gone and sunk that altogether, Quarry, hev you? If you hev, there’s only the Stonepastures left. It’ll be a hard thing to pass the Bridge once for all and see your work-fellers comin’ through on the cars, and you only comin’ es fur es the Pastures from the factory. Can’t you think what you done with it?”

“I’ve spent it. It’s invested--but still--it’s spent.”

She saw that the men would have to take the matter up for her. At first anger had nerved her, but now she felt weakly despairing. It seemed to her that there was no use in effort to set right circumstances so awry, until, as she said, “things had stopped happening.”

“Well, you’re a thief, anyway,” she said, “and I’d fight you if I had any pith in me!”