CHAPTER VII

CONCERNING ALEXANDER EMIL ST. IVES

In the make-up of this Alexander Emil St. Ives, who carried his name like a flaunting feather, his father played small part. During the life of the elder St. Ives, the family had lived on a farm in Rhode Island and the father, a dour, narrow man, had laid his commands upon the soil and had tilled it with his will as with an agricultural implement; in bad seasons often he had been the one farmer in the neighbourhood who harvested crops.

There were two sons. The elder boy, Edgar, resembled the father, though built on smaller, neater lines, with a face shaped like an egg. He had much of the father's obstinate force united to a faculty for grasping and retaining what seemed to him worth while. The younger son resembled the mother.

Mrs. St. Ives, timid, valiant creature, was incapable of not loving. For her first-born she entertained an affection purely maternal; for Emil, however, she harboured a feeling almost worshipful. The fact that she had borne him was to her a miracle ever new. He woke heaven in her heart and his love opened her soul as the sun's ray opens the flower. Neither husband nor elder son ever suspected the exquisite quality of her nature.

Edgar was a lad of fifteen when Emil was born. From the first he turned a cold face on the mite, and as time went on grew jealous of him up to the eyes. There was something august about Emil even in his ugly, defenceless childhood. He was of a singularly inquiring turn of mind and years afterward his mother delighted to relate how, when he was two years old, he had crawled a mile and a half from home, lured forward by the curiosity that later became his salient characteristic. His energies spent, he had rested on a flat rock. While his tiny body grew warm in the sun, his infant mind had lost itself in inarticulate reverie. If he could go on quite to the end of everything, even to that hazy, far-away point where blue met green, what should he find? It was this speculative tendency that gave his hair its wild aspect; that kindled in his eyes their roving, searching glance; that already, young as he was, made him look at life with an air of keen astonishment.

When he was eleven years old, his father died and the reins of management fell into Edgar's hands. That young man, being in no sense a typical farmer, immediately exchanged the farm, which the elder St. Ives had bequeathed him, for a large country store. By dint of shrewd management, he soon became a successful merchant. So rapidly did he rise that by the end of the second year, he had built himself a house and installed in it a shrewish wife who lost no time in presenting him with a swarm of children. He also placed in the house his mother, and the poor lady dwelt there under the lash of the wife's tongue, like a servant in constant fear of dismissal. In righteous mood, Edgar even went so far as to extend the protection of his roof to his young brother. In a tiny chamber over the kitchen the lad's first tentative inventions saw the light.

But between these two natures a gulf was fixed. If truth were told, they had not a trait in common. Edgar was provident and saving, Emil the reverse. Long ere he had obtained his majority, he had wheedled from his mother the little money she held in trust for him from his grudging and disapproving father. To be sure, the sum was very meagre and could not be stretched, by any calculation, to cover the technical training the lad coveted; therefore he had expended a part of it for scientific books and the rest had gone little by little into materials for his constant experimenting.

For the precious little inventions which cluttered Emil's chamber and sometimes found their unwelcome way into other parts of the house, Edgar had a withering contempt. He never missed an opportunity to have a fling at them and his scornful words entered the mother's heart like barbed arrows. However, in his nineteenth year Emil produced an apparatus for freshening sea water which it seemed must prove of inestimable value to all sea-faring folk. The mother in a flutter of excitement and even with tears, besought him to take his brother into his confidence. In fact this was necessary, if he wished to secure the use of an abandoned and much coveted granary for a shop. But the lad held back. The apparatus, despite its undoubted usefulness, seemed to him of trifling importance. The mother, however, foreseeing fortune ahead of him, urged the step and at length the boy consented. True to her prediction, after his first scornful inspection of the contrivance, Edgar admitted that it might have possibilities. Like most of the boy's experiments, this device was beyond his comprehension, but he could grasp the fact that sailors and fishermen, with the chance of shipwreck forever staring them in the face, might have use for it. He therefore offered to get it patented, then took steps to secure the patent--in his own name. As it chanced, the papers, bearing his signature but otherwise carefully copied from those which Emil had submitted for his inspection fell under the boy's eye.

The night following this discovery, a light appeared in the granary. Edgar, peering from his chamber window, perceived a demoniacal figure, smashing and demolishing everything the little shop contained. Even as he looked, it lifted a small instrument, which represented months of patient labour, and threw it with a crash to the floor. Instantly Edgar was out of the house. He scampered across the yard, his night gear fluttering in the light of the pale moon. Emil at that moment caught up the sea-water device and sent it crashing through the doorway. Being made largely of glass, the instrument shivered into a million minute fragments. Edgar and his wife and children, who had flocked to his side, covered their eyes. When they looked again, through the dust that still hung in the air, they beheld a bent figure, lit up by the gleam of the lantern, still moving in a whirl of rubbish.

Edgar in his scant raiment danced up and down.

"Thief!" he hissed.

For an instant the boy paused in his diabolical work:

"Thief!" He burst into terrifying laughter.

With one final wrench he brought down the work-bench and flung it across the pile; then kneeling, he applied a match to the mass. Crackling flames leaped upward. He got to his feet and stood with his figure silhouetted against the red glow. In that hour he had destroyed something more precious than his inventions, his books and all his little workmen's kit in which he had taken such pride. That which had gone down in flames hotter than those which raged around him, was the essential quality which is youth. Such searing emotions are the death of adolescence. He was visibly trembling. The hair was matted above the eyes which he lifted. Without a word he darted past them and disappeared into the night.

A quarter of a mile from the house he met his mother. She was waiting for him in the darkness. Quivering all over she took him in her long arms. But his anger had already subsided and he felt stealing over him a new and gratifying sense of release.

"Don't, Mother," he whispered hoarsely, "it was bound to come,--and you'll see--I'll soon send for you."

Her tears distressed him. For this cheated, baffled, frail and suffering mother who asked but one thing, that his ambition be gratified, Emil's feeling was fiercely paternal. It was the solitary oasis in a nature devoid of all other affections.

He caressed her with his hands, but presently he held them up before her. "With these," he whispered, "and with this," and he touched his forehead, "I'll do something. You'll see. The world needs me," he cried.

The world needed him! At that moment he felt that he could grasp the universe, instinct with unknown laws, and plunging his mind into it could drag forth some hitherto undiscovered force.

The world needed him! Poor, foolish, misguided, highly-gifted youth! Certainly he was more valuable to Society than its rickety children who would never grow up, its infirm old men, sick with alcoholism, its base and unworthy charges; yet for all these, he soon discovered, the great New York, glancing indifferently from her million windows, provided asylums; but for him, who had in his head that which should bring the world to his feet--for him nothing.

In turn he worked for a photographer, a printer, and an engraver, but as he failed to pay attention to his duties and urged upon his irate employers devices for improving the processes used in their work, he remained only a short time in each situation. By the third year, however, he drifted into a place that promised to be permanent.

The conservative lithographing establishment of Benjamin Just and Richard Lawless was in need of an apprentice. Being by this time much reduced in health and spirits, with all the fiery currents of his being at low ebb, Emil accepted this berth. For upwards of a year he worked with commendable sobriety; in fact, became no more than a pivot, a screw, a tiny whirling wheel in the life of the factory. But at the end of a twelvemonth his old fever broke out in aggravated form; the trivial bit of mechanism became a madman or a genius over night.

Waving some papers above his head, laughing naïvely and applauding himself, Emil approached the head draughtsman one day and exhibited a little model. But the draughtsman into whose hands all the choice work of the establishment fell, swore at him. 'The art of lithography,' he gave him to understand, 'was an old and honourable one; and as for cheapening the work, heaven knew, enough had been done in that line!' And he briefly consigned the young fool and his new-fangled process to hell.

Thereupon, Emil, nothing daunted, approached the two owners. Trembling all over with eagerness, he fixed them with his eyes in which a flame seemed to be leaping up and down.

"Just a thin flexible sheet, that is what I propose," he cried;--"a sheet which has all the qualities of the finest of your lithographic stones, but which is superior because cheaper and lighter and the possible supply unlimited. How's that? A sheet, which after one preparation for printing, will continue to yield clean proofs without dampening or resetting for a much longer time than the best of your lithographic stones," he continued.

"But how do you print from this precious sheet of yours?" inquired Mr. Lawless, a fat red man, who tried to look scornful and only succeeded in looking ridiculous. If truth were told, the partners, while appearing to have little faith in the scheme, felt in the pits of their stomachs an excited feeling similar to that produced by high swinging; indeed, their phlegmatic pulses beat to the same excited measure as the young inventor's.

"With a specially constructed cylinder press, that's now I'll print," answered Emil.

As a result of the conference, the owners, although professing scepticism, consented to give him a small room in which to perfect his invention and, in their generosity, even guaranteed to continue the payment of his former meagre salary.

From that day, Emil began to live a particular and intensely nervous life.

He was now one of a large army, consisting of press men, lithographers, zinc men, clerks, artists, stenographers, bookkeepers. The majority of these men did their work methodically and as a matter of duty. When they quitted the factory at night, they forgot the labour that had occupied them during the day. With Emil, however, it was otherwise.

In a tiny room, reeking with heat and dust and clamorous with the rumble of the presses, he worked, scarcely taking note of the passing of one day and the birth of another. Often he sought the factory at night. The general manager, a man with a forceful presence and a shrewd eye, scornfully shrugged his shoulders. He distrusted such enthusiasm; but the owners were more hopeful. At night they had a door left open for the erratic inventor.

Unconscious that he was observed, Emil hurried through the streets and bounded up the steps to his den. Then how he caressed his invention, how he stared straight before him with eyes that saw nothing, while his brain drew from the surrounding ether a crowd of images wonderful for their reality and vigour. Sometimes in these nights of limpid contemplation, he became as beautiful as an angel. At other times, inspiration was capricious and the particular idea that he sought must be pursued. At such times he would crack his fingers at the joints, wave backward and forward like a tree in a storm, rock like a ship on an angry sea. Somehow, he would wrest his idea from the vast Unknown. And when he had succeeded in fixing it, smiling peacefully, he would go to sleep like a child; go to sleep and dream of some far land where invention was not torture. Before his work-bench, exhausted, he was often discovered in the early dawn by Ding Dong when he came to sweep out.

Half-witted, deaf and dumb, with a face so hideous that caricature could not exaggerate it, Ding Dong had received his nick-name from some bookish artist or other. With a fat tongue useless in his wide mouth and ears like sails, though they served to convey no sound to his meagre brain, Ding Dong ate habitually of the food thrown away by saloons, drank the dregs left in whiskey glasses, and, with the agility of a little cat, accepted the stumps of cigarettes which the clerks good naturedly threw him.

Between him and Emil, existed a peculiar friendship, and many were the novel breakfast parties held in the little workroom at the hour when New York was just waking to life.

Ding Dong procured rolls and made coffee; then three partook of the meal, for there were always three, the inventor, Ding Dong and, to furnish the feminine element, Lulu, a tiny South American monkey. Pinched and sad Lulu seemingly was not devoid of coquetry, for she wrapped herself in a bit of bright flannel which she held together beneath her chin with one small black hand, while she peeped out from between the folds with her little mournful eyes.

Of all the prisoners in the great building, none was more miserable than this little monkey. A present to the wife of one of the partners, who detested her, she had been brought down to the factory where she led a truly miserable life. In order to be out of reach of the furnace man, who had once treated her cruelly, she ran up among the asbestos-covered pipes, and there remained, save when she suffered herself to be lured down by Ding Dong. It was as if these two touching creatures, the one so nearly bestial and the other so nearly human, strove to lessen each other's profound loneliness.

As Emil pulled at his long pipe, resting after his exertions of the night, something of his serenity stole over his companions and wrapped in the same mood of abstracted dreaminess, they watched the dawn together.

When the department overseer appeared, a shudder ran through the building. The presses rumbled and boys began to feed them with great sheets of paper. The band of pale, dispirited youths in the art department etched their designs. With dust, sweat, oaths, grinding muscles, shriek and thunder of machinery,--the day began. Hour after hour the passionate clamour increased to a poem, a hymn, a pæan to the God of Work.

At twelve o'clock the tension relaxed. Men from the different departments poured into the streets and sought the cafes and restaurants of the neighbourhood. A few, however, always remained in the building. For that hour they were no longer slaves. The head bookkeeper, an old man, stretched his legs, glad to get down from his high stool; one of the stenographers, with flying fingers resumed her work on a little red jacket for Lulu. Even Emil was affected by the sudden contagion of idleness that swept the building. Leaving the model of his press, he took time to stare from the windows at the roofs of New York. But despite his interest in his work these surroundings were beginning to tell upon him. One day in July, unable to bear the heat, he staggered out into the passage to get a drink from a pail of water that stood there. He was lifting the dripping dipper to his lips, when a pair of eyes met his with a sort of shock. When he stumbled back into the little den, Annie Lawless, springing up from a chair in her father's office, followed him.

"What's the matter?" she cried sharply, as he sank down with his head bowed on the work-bench. She started to summon someone, but a second glance at his pale face with tiny beads of perspiration around the nostrils, caused her to change her mind. She passed swiftly to the door and closed it. Then, detaching a jewelled smelling-bottle from her belt, she held it under his nose with her little shaking hand. When Emil came to himself, he saw bending over him a delicate face shaped like a pear, the cheeks white almost as his own. This face was furnished with soft open lips, like an infant's, and, by contradiction, with two blue eyes which, for the moment, looked into his with an almost maternal solicitude.

"Are you better?" The question was blended with the odour of violets, subtle and overpowering, with the gleam of diamonds, with the touch of a soft fabric, warm with life, beneath his cheek.

The next instant he sat up, flushing all over. And Annie Lawless blushed too.

"Yes, I'm all right, perfectly right," he muttered, and tried to laugh. "It's only this infernal heat," supporting his head in a strange fashion as if he feared it would drop off.

"Yes, it is awfully hot," Annie answered. "Is that the model for the cylinder press?" she asked presently. "I've heard Father speak of your inventions."

Emil, whose head was still giddy, had a childish wish that she would come near him again and put those hands, covered with rings, on his brow. He looked at her as she stood speaking. When she turned sidewise he noticed dreamily how small her waist was, he believed he could span it with his two hands; and her nose was slightly hooked, which combined with her quick movements, gave her somewhat of the appearance of a bird.

"I've heard Papa say that he thinks your press is going to be a big thing," she continued, "but I should think he ought to give you a better place to work in."

At these words Emil roused himself. He had not known before that Mr. Lawless believed in the press. "Why yes, if I had a decent place to work in--" he began.

"Papa ought to pay you more money," she said with conviction. "Why, he used to have a man who invented things and he gave him special rooms and a fine salary besides. Papa says a man with the inventive bee in his bonnet isn't fit to look after himself. But that man was," she concluded, "for he left Papa one day in the lurch and went to inventing things on his own account, and since then he has made a pile of money. You'll do that too if they aren't careful."

The upshot of the matter was that she began making plans for the relief of the stranger who, with his extraordinary air, seemed more interesting to her than anyone she had ever known.

"It may take a little time, but I'll manage it somehow," she told him as she left.

And she did manage it.

She saw Emil several times, arousing a perfect furor of gossip among the artists by the temerity of her visits. When she knew that her father and his partner were out of the building, she slipped in to see Emil, and, more than once as the summer advanced, she met him at an appointed place on his homeward walk.

Finally, acting on her advice, he sent in a written protest to his employers, stating that it was impossible for him to complete the work at his present salary and setting forth his desire for a more fully equipped workroom. In conclusion, he intimated that if his requests were not acceded to, in view of the services he had already rendered them, he should feel free to quit their employ.

The day following this step, Annie appeared with triumph written all over her face.

"It's all settled," she announced. "Mr. Just and the general manager were at our house last night. They talked about you and I listened at the library door. Papa made Mr. Wakefield admit that he'd been wrong in his estimate of you. And then Papa went on to say that he thought they might as well, first as last, offer to grub stake you. Do you know what that means?" she cried, laughing. "It means that they will pay all your expenses and give you rooms somewhere like that Mr. Pennyworth I told you about. He said already, by the different improvements you'd made on this and that machine, you'd saved the firm thousands of dollars. You didn't know that, I guess. He said you were too valuable a man to lose. And that's not all," she went on to cover her embarrassment, for Emil was staring at her, "you're to have a few weeks somewhere in the country if you want them, and I'm sure you need a vacation badly enough."

"How did you manage it?" he asked, speaking with difficulty.

"Oh, I just kept Papa thinking about you by the things I said. One day I said that the factory was horribly stuffy and I should think the artists, and you particularly, would just die. And then I asked him carelessly if he thought your press was going to be any good, and he said, 'Good!--well, if he can be got to finish it, that's all we want. The man's a genius!' And I laughed and told him he'd better look out or his genius would have sunstroke. I explained to him that you were probably so worn out that you couldn't finish it. I said a thing here and a thing there, mere nothings, but I made him uneasy, and then came your letter throwing up the whole scheme before it was completed. Oh I knew he'd do it, if it was managed all right!" she exclaimed gleefully. And then changing her tone: "Are you glad?" and she wrinkled her brow into anxious furrows beneath her light summer hat.

Emil took one of her little hands timidly. He turned a ring round and round on her tiny finger, staring at her, endeavouring to find words. Suddenly two arms were laid about his neck and all quivering in the storm of her own emotions, like a bird seeking shelter, she fluttered against his breast. Her hat had slipped to her shoulders. He felt that she was sobbing violently, and scarcely knowing what he did, he clasped her closely in his arms and muttering unintelligible words which he himself did not understand, he pressed his lips again and again to her small blond head.

But the plum that tumbles into our lap without the asking is seldom as fine as the fruit we climb for, strain for, spend hours in thirsting after. Three weeks--and this fierce agitation of the senses had subsided. It was an excitement, a fever, which at the time had been augmented by so many equivocal influences; by the noise of the presses which had seemed to keep time to his pulses, by the gleam of the girl's jewels, by the softness of her attire, by the fact, more than all else, that she was his chief's daughter.

A whiff of sea air and Emil looked back on the affair with utter weariness. Without a conscience, he was accustomed to follow simply the dictates of his own nature. The memory of the girl irked him, therefore with heavy sighs like a weary horse, he destroyed her letters. However, the phantom of love had passed very close, and it was not in vain that all the electric currents of his being had been set in motion. He was awake now to another world than that in which he had hitherto dwelt,--awake, with his great inquisitive eyes, attentive.

It was at this juncture that Rachel Beckett dawned on his horizon. When she came round the rock leading the cow, a novel sensation convulsed that strange uncultivated heart of his. A man's heart is a garden in which, before the coming of death, many flowers of emotion bloom; and the history of these flowers is the history of his life.