Part 4

Quarry raised himself. “That’s you all over,” he remarked sadly. “I’ve seen you leap on Jarlsen quick as a wicked cat; and a lady as lifts a hand to a half-dead man is no lady. You have made my life very profane, Emma. I don’t find in you the flavour of a godly woman, Emma Butte,” he added with a final effort at dignity. “You’re a--a--mean girl!”

Emma rose, and, standing, looked him over thoroughly. No idea of law came to aid her ignorant helplessness. She understood now the saying that women were “put upon.” Some girls would have cried, but Emma had one sweet drop in the bitter draught. She would have to move to the Stonepastures, but by so doing she could pay the doctor, even though she had to shave again.

IX.

BREAKING UP A HOME.

“It is better to live under God’s sky than under a roof when there’s no luck there.”

YOU and I, knowing the use of pen, ink, and paper, and the efficacy of latter-day postal systems, must remember that there are degrees of education; also, that all the methods of communication in well organized communities are as unknown to the ignorant, Americo-alien population of such places as Soot City as is the fate of nations to the speculative schoolboy. Emma needed Black’s counsel, but she did not think of the post as a means of getting a letter to a man in her own town. She reasoned that post-office people would slight mail matter not destined to go by train to other cities. So her anxious heart kept her waking to catch the light, that she might get away in secret to Black’s house and there put her case in his ever-open and ever-busy hands.

Youthful weariness demands sleep. Emma was young and overweary, and, as a consequence, overslept.

It was in the fear that calamity might have stolen another march on her that she dressed herself. She had about her a neatness that enraged the down-at-heel disheartened, of which there are so many in labouring communities.

“The world,” she thought, “has thumped me till I ain’t got half the spring I hed to start on; and that’s the reason I’m goin’ to dress up. I’ll wear cuffs till I’ve got to sell ’em, and a collar, ef I do have to shave for a livin’.”

But she had not enough pleasure in living left to heat the coffee that her father had used at his breakfast; she was only thankful that he had gone away for his paper By the Bridge, and that she might set about vacating the house, with a will. She did not think of consulting him. When a man has consented all his life to anything and never met any circumstance, crucial or casual, with aught but irrelevant comment, he is rarely a factor in other people’s plans.

She was glad she had not had to get breakfast, for she had to tend Jarlsen. The day was wet, and his hurts seemed the sorer for the damp. When she had done all for him she laid her hand on his, but the dread of packing her wedding things was making war on her energies. She felt she could not rest till she had packed the white gown out of sight and mind. Before now she had held a private service of tears over her six wedding presents. Miss Bentley had given her a jacket edged with good fur, and her sister had given her some fine stockings; but her lover’s gift meant more to her than any other inanimate thing. It certainly meant more than bread, for she would have starved before she sold it, and died in happiness had her eyes but met it as they closed finally.

It was a large locket of reddish gold, embossed in clumsy arabesque; within were two photographs--of Jarlsen and of Cheyne Falls, where they were to have spent their wedding week. It was the fashionable tribute from groom to bride in Jarlsen’s circle of Soot citizens, and Emma felt that with this gift he conferred his higher class on her. It was just what he would have given the first foreman’s daughter. She opened the locket and looked in. Eve may have felt like her and Emma thought of her; it was an angel with a fiery sword who put them both out of God’s Eden, she remembered. But some of Eve’s memories must have been self-reproachful, and Emma was spared that misery. She was also a fine enough type to appreciate that.

She was shutting up her little shrine when Jerry Black found her. They met with tears that had not started at their meeting; for Jerry had wept at having to return in sorrow to the house where but yesterday hope had hurried him.

To begin a new series of troubles just as he had completed an old one told on his nerves. He had spent the long night praying for Emma, his head on his shiny rosewood dining table.

He always showed this table with pride; it was made from the extra wood he had been commissioned to buy for the Bentley coffins. He had made it himself, and time and again had shown it to Miss Bentley, in whom he felt a great disappointment, as she never manifested any satisfaction at the sight. The cats leaped upon it nightly, as it was Jerry’s habitual place of prayer, and it sometimes seemed to him that they exchanged glances with each other in his despite, glances of criticism at his fervour. He never drove them away, however.

“Emma,” he said, his lips trembling and his pale eyes filling fast, “your trouble’s fearful heavy, but you won’t give in. I’ve seen to Quarry, and it jest ain’t no use; you can’t get anything out of him; he give it all in to the Workers’ Protective Circle. He give it in to the aggression fund. They’re going to order a strike for the same pay for winter days nine hours’ work, as they get for a ten-hours’ summer’s day. I think that’s it. My work’s among the peaceful, and sometimes I thank God I hev it mostly among dead men, seein’ what the live ones is like. But, Emma, he’s give the money in, so’s the strike fund can grow. He’s a gainin’, winnin’ kind of speaker, and he’s give up what he took to their cause, and no one ain’t a-goin’ to touch him. Now you jest remember that the night’s blackest just before the sun comes, and don’t you loose your grip. When Jarlsen comes out from the blast you want him to find you jest es straight and steady es when he was took--don’t you now?”

The tears slipped from Emma’s eyes at the little man’s tone. Her face was as tranquil as it was sorrowing, and, as she answered, there was no bitterness in her voice and no fretfulness or rebellion in gesture or look. She did not feel bound to exhibit spirit in his presence. “O Jerry,” she said, “I think I do. But I can’t stay fit for him when I live with thieves who rob him. I’m glad he got the blast ef I have to get low-toned; he’ll be nearer a mate for me.”

Jerry stayed on and helped her. He packed away the white dress; he was used to handling things that were sacred to the memory of a happy past, and began to pull Emma’s house to pieces as only a woman could be expected to do. Martha Long came in; she was sewing as she walked. She was a brisk woman, and got through half her work on the wing.

“God’s name!” she said to Black, “what’s come to Emma? She looks hurt, and white as a death-sheet.”

Jerry told her what had happened, and Martha, without a word, went over and took both the girl’s hands in hers and pressed them to her sides; she never lost hold of her sewing, and presently set to work again.

“Well,” she half screamed in indignation, “of all the poison toads and irregular vipers in the world and out of it, I guess Quarry’s the lowest down. He’s a dirt-mean man! I suppose you’ll move out, and take the yeller house on the Pastures. There ain’t no one in it since last May, and it has a porch. You won’t stay there long,” Martha said with conviction. “Your kind don’t keep to no rent-free Stonepastures. You’ll come back to the town, and the crowd’ll cheer you--you’ll see.”

“Well,” Emma replied, “I’m going this afternoon.”

Accordingly, at five, or a little later, Jerry brought a funeral carriage By the Bridge, and old Butte and Emma and Jerry and Martha carried Jarlsen on a shake-down along the Tracks. The sun, as Jerry observed, was “leanin’ pretty near the west line,” and the sky was bright above the Stonepastures. It had cleared in the early afternoon, and all the odours, bad and good, seemed flying about, riding on the cool breezes that swept over the Tracks. The high-standing ripe grasses caught the level shafts of sun and bowed before the wind, glorified in the bright light. Jarlsen questioned them about his removal, but gave no evidence that he heard their replies except once, when he said that Emma “sounded” tired. But his voice died away in groanings, and he could not answer their other questions. Emma felt that he heard her voice and did not distinguish the words.

Jerry felt so too. He reminded Emma of the blind man in the Testament. “He seen the men first as trees,” he said, “even when he was cured with grace, and not with herbs and ointment and such; he didn’t get clear vision right away.”

Emma felt happier than she had thought possible. She ran back into the yard and slipped off her shoe. “I’ll get the favour of home for him,” she thought.

But while the handful of mould was still in her hand she put her shoe on again. “I’d liefer shake off the dust from my feet,” she said; “this ain’t no home to get the favour from.”

Martha Long stood at the gate, “You’re in a hurry to go,” she remarked.

“To-morrow begins the new month’s rent,” said Emma. “I quit to-day or pay to-morrow. I’m goin’ where there ain’t no rents to pay. I can’t afford rents and city doctors together.”

Martha’s face darkened. “I’m layin’ for him right here,” she called as the funeral carriage moved away. She was surprised at Emma’s good-bye mood; it was so resolute and cheerful. “He’s a pretty low reptile,” was the last thing she called to Emma as the conveyance grew smaller on the distant road.

X.

QUARRY RECKONS WITHOUT HIS HOSTESS.

“Strife’s a poor thing to come home to.”

IN two days’ time Emma was “settled in.” Hers was an odd house for the Stonepastures. She paid no rent for it, but there were curtains at the windows and a shoe-scraper and a mat at the door. She had not been up an hour on her first morning before the grass around the house was cut down with a borrowed sickle. The objectless, listless denizens of the district watched her with some pleasure. They had no individual life, merely existing as a class and watching the individuality of others take shape in thrift and then in prosperity with a dull envy. One man said she “hed a peck of ambition” in a tone that meant on the Pastures, in “Calamity Row,” that any endeavour to better one’s self comes to confusion.

At first the big boulders depressed her somewhat, but Jerry told her she could “garden on them” in the summer time; and, indeed, flowers could grow from the thin soil that edged them. For two weeks and more she lived, quietly amazed to find herself so happy. From day to day she watched the Swede’s improvement. As the pain left him he took to singing, but his voice was not so accurate as in the old days when he heard clearly. Many of the songs she had heard from him in courting time, and she was infinitely happy to know that he remembered them as well as she did. He would tell the meaning of each verse after he had sung it, as she cooked or sewed after shaving all day.

For she shaved again. It seemed very odd and yet very natural to her. She had a good deal of business to arrange before “resuming trade.” Her subscriptions to the Philadelphia Ledger and the Work-fellows’ Union had run out; in fact, her wedding day had been dependent on their expiration. Emma had a great idea of doing things the right way, and news has been the tradition of barber-shops since men’s vanity first devised a shorn chin.

Emma was gratified to find her standing unimpaired by her sojourn with the paupers. Socially she seemed secure. The women were prone to be officiously sympathetic, and were also inclined to disbelieve the tale of Quarry’s misdeed. “There’s faults on both sides, maybe,” and “Who can see the whole show through a slit in the tent?” were felt to be convenient phrases and used largely as such. The phrase “rent-free” found its way from the neighbours’ lips to Emma’s ears rather oftener than she cared for; it spurred her on to grudge herself food and deny herself the midday beer it had been her wont to consume. She worked from eight in the morning to six at night, with nothing but bread and soup at her slack time in the early afternoon.

The soup was much like Quarry’s stories--made up out of almost nothing. She carried it to work in a bottle with a screwed-on tin top; this she put into the little boiler that the shaving water was heated in, “and so,” she would say, to amuse a new customer, “thet’s all the cooking I hev to do; I boil my bottle, and there I am!”

She had rented a room By the Bridge from Miss Bentley, who was much surprised when Emma paid the rent; and through her new and improved business situation in the town she was able to command a “high-class custom.”

Since the evening that Quarry had suggested the depot as a place of residence Emma had been free of his presence. She had heard of him from the men, however, and knew that he was speaking to them from the Bridge every evening. Revolt was in the air of Soot City; there were meetings, quite covertly, conducted by socialistic workmen in the cause of workfellows’ profits. Monopoly and co-operative profit were talked of constantly, and Grigg sold many drinks. It is a pity that the workingmen who invent Utopias should attempt to sanctify them with an alcoholic immersion. It antagonizes even the fair-minded. The preachers took to finding comparisons, more or less apposite, between Dives and Lazarus, pronouncing the socialism of him who has not, grabbing from him who has, to be merely a modern variation of a scriptural scheme of all things in common. As some men go to church to find biblical sanction for their shortcomings; the ringleaders of what was fast becoming an agitation, took to the sanctuaries, whither the rest of the town felt it safe to follow them.

Emma regarded Quarry’s effrontery as monumental, but she never conceived a possibility of his coming to her new house in the Stonepastures. She felt that, as she had gone down in the world, he thought he had risen, and that the Stonepastures were very far away from him now. Her eyes would scan the road, in her swift evening walks searching for his slightly crooked form. The thought of him distressed her, as horror comes upon a child in the dark, and after nightfall she remembered him as such a power for evil. Returning from the town she always wore for warmth her leathern apron with a shawl, her jacket was too good to be worn out in the dark. This scruple was pure conscience, for she no longer had Jarlsen’s eye for which to save her dresses.

He could tell the difference in footfalls now, and distinguish voices. Emma longed for the moment when he should be able to hear her speak his name. This hoped-for moment occupied many of her hours, and she thought of it on the still, cold night when she saw Quarry walking toward the Pastures about ten yards ahead of her. She slackened her pace instantly, and he was soon lost in the starless dark.

She dreaded him. As she walked she feared she might stumble on him lying drunk in her path, with his mouth full of the hideous words he used at such times; or, this fear forgotten, her breath would come in loud pantings at the thought of his hands laid on her from behind. When she came to her own door there was still no sight of him; she looked both up and down the road to make sure. She could not see far, for most of the houses were dark; lights are too expensive for the rent-free Pastures. Raising the latch, she pushed the door quietly open and looked into her own home.

Quarry was at the kitchen table facing her, glaring in Jarlsen’s serenely blind countenance. Sleep had double-locked the Swede’s seared vision, and in complete unconsciousness he breathed freely, within a glance of Quarry’s eyes alive with malice.

Emma was frightened, so much so that she could not call. It seemed that Quarry must have something to kill with, in his coarse, cramped hands. It flashed across her that if she received him roughly he would strike or stab, and that an appearance of politeness would surely gain her time. Calmness came to her when she had determined how to act.

She rattled the latch, her heart jumping so that she felt as if it had thrown her into the room. Quarry let fall something that gave out the sound of thin metal as it struck the brick flooring round the stove. A flight of chills froze her blood, while her cheeks burned with a steady, excited glow.

Quarry could not avoid her eyes and she saw that were he to have the first word he would announce himself at bay and make trouble. She almost ran to him with her hand stretched out. “Quarry,” said she in a little voice that she strained to make audible, “Quarry, you’ll have a bite, won’t you? It’s a cold bite, but a ready one.”

Emma thought later that it was at the sound of Quarry’s name in her voice that Jarlsen wakened. He knew at once that Quarry was there, for a look that had been absent from his face since they moved from By the Tracks swept its strong patience and sweetness away. He stood on his feet and reached out for the Englishman. The bandages on his right hand seemed too tight, and the veins in it bursting.

“I’m not dead yet!” he said fiercely, “and no thanks to you!”

Emma could have cried for joy. To her it seemed more than likely that he saw again; but when she noticed how easily Quarry had eluded his big rival, the situation was obscured.

“Did I hurt him?” called Jarlsen eagerly. He had fallen back on his chair, but was sitting on its edge, his eyes burning, and the blood reddening the fine skin on his forehead.

She did not answer, having learned not to waste words on his deafness. She saw Quarry stoop down and lift up the knife he had let fall.

Then she spoke, and very gently. “You’d better stay here, Quarry,” she said; “you’re accustomed to your home here, and there’s most sleep in an old nest.”

And he stayed. Emma turned him in with old Butte, and lighted a new candle, which she left to illumine the rats through the night. Then she locked Jarlsen’s door on the outside, and tied the key around her neck. She reflected with pride that her Swede had only been sitting up for two days, and yet wanted to fight on the evening of the second. In her joy at his returning strength she lost sight of danger.

XI.

THE STRIKE.

“Having ears to hear, let them hear.”

THE sleep of young strength puts a wide distance between yesterday’s cares and to-day’s. The dawn that awoke Emma was gray, but it did not suggest the blight of ashes as had last night’s twilight. She was sure of the return of Jarlsen’s faculties, and she also knew that Quarry could have made no disturbance through the night. She was inclined to think that he meant to frighten them, and by daylight his acts seemed more like very bad manners than like an attempt at murder.

In the morning, before setting out, she changed the bandage on Jarlsen’s hand. The wide burns were “guttering,” seaming up in red lines. She told him this, and though he made no reply she felt sure, with unshakable, feminine sureness, that he had heard. She led him out to his hammock and placed him in it. Quarry was haranguing Old Butte, and the sound of his voice seemed to make the Swede nervous. Emma was certain that he had heard him.

She had always liked the Pastures as a place to walk; the air was less flat than in the town; and it was pleasant to set one’s face against poverty and one’s feet toward a place where people were rich enough to pay rent. Bentley’s Place overtopped the city on an artificial and costly eminence. The little house that was placed like a lodge was the terminal station of the narrow-gauge railway. She knew herself to be two miles and three quarters from that, and a mile or more from the plant.

Usually she met the day squad coming out from the town, the men standing in the ore cars, the smoke from their pipes and the straining, overworked little engine blown behind them toward the town--like a message sent home, Emma thought. But to-day no cars passed, and she, being a child of toil, was quick to know that this meant a strike. She hurried on to her earnings, remembering that when men are out of work they have all day in which to spend their savings. Women see so little in strikes but higher wages until some one is dead.

When she reached the Bridge it was crowded with people. Men who had not worked at the plant for years were exhorting their fellows not to submit to tyranny. Many large words were being misused with great pride by those who never had a chance to talk except when the crowd was too busy to listen. The women were not very carefully dressed, having had no time for fastenings or strings. They, together with the children they brought with them, seemed to regard the occasion as one of festivity.

Nothing was denounced very definitely. One stranger was said to be a reporter, whereupon half a dozen people beset him, anxious to have their views in the paper. Emma could learn nothing from any of them. They used Quarry’s and Bowa’s names frequently, so that she forebore mentioning under whose roof the Englishman had passed the night.

Her shop was in the fourth house from the Bridge; a steep diagonal path ran from its back door to the Tracks. The men were swarming to it before she was quite ready to have them, and many arrived by the rarely used footway. News came with them, and she found herself believing first one report and then another. Bowa came to be shaved; she was surprised at his thinking of a thing so incidental to a holiday toilet as a shave, but she supposed that he was resolved to die tidy, and said as much.

He could not be at the plant, he explained, and felt that he had no need to be there. His smile was exceedingly subtle, but his hands worked against his will in an embarrassed fashion.

The day wore on until about four o’clock. Her business had been immense, and she had listened to the many accounts and descriptions of the plant until she felt she knew it perfectly. In the centre was the powder house, where explosives were kept; on the city flank was the nutt and bolt factory, and very near, but south of it, the furnace. It was set on a steep “slide” of rock; its door, through which the furnace was fed, was on the summit side; and on the base side, lower on the slide by eight feet or more, was another door through which the “cinder” flew away at night into the darkness like a burning river. This door seems complicated on paper, though in fact its construction is simple. A skewer secures it at its upper edge--a skewer with a large loop at one end. Into this loop the hook of the fire-tenders’ strange implement is thrust when the door is to be opened. “The Devil’s Crook” is what the men have named the long oak stick finished at one end with an iron hook. It does look like a thing wherewith to herd black sheep.

Emma was weary of constant exclamation and argument. It was time she ate; so she closed her door and “boiled her bottle,” allowing the men who were already in the shop to remain there. She saw Bowa get up from his chair and leave by the back door, silent and hurried. As was natural, Emma turned to the window to see what had caught his eye in the street.