VIII
Outside, the village, the Greenstream Valley, was folded in still, velvety dark. He crossed the street, and sat on one of the iron benches placed under the trees on the Courthouse lawn. He could see a dull, reddish light shining through the dusty window of theBugleoffice. Shining like that, through his egotistical pride, the facts of his failure and impotence tormented him. It hurt him the more that he had been, simply, diddled, no better than a child in Simmons’ astute, practised hands. The latter’s rascality was patent, but Simmons could not have been successful unabetted by his own blind negligence. The catastrophe that had overtaken him rankled in his most vulnerable spot—his self-esteem.
He suffered inarticulately, an indistinguishable shape in the soft, summer gloom; about his feet, in the lush grass, the greenish-gold sparks of the fireflies quivered; above the deep rift of the valley the stars were like polished silver coins.
Vaguely, and then more strongly, out of a chaos of vain, sick regrets, his combativeness, his deep-lying, indomitable determination, asserted itself—he would not fall like an over ripe apple into Simmons’ complacent, waiting grasp. But to get, without resources, two hundred and fifty dollars by Saturday, was a preposterous task. Outside his, Clare’s, home, he had nothing to sell; and to sell that now, he realized with a spoken oath, would be to throw it away—the vultures, Hollidew and Co., would have heard of his necessity, and regulate their action, the local supply of available currency, accordingly.
There was no possible way of earning such a sum in four days; there was little more chance, he realized sardonically, of stealing it.... Sometimes large sums of money were won in a night’s gambling in the lumber and mining towns over the West Virginia line. But, for that, he would require capital; he would have his wages to-morrow; however, if he gambled with that and lost, Clare and himself would face immediate, irredeemable ruin. He dismissed that consideration from the range of possibilities. But it returned, hovered on the border of his thoughts—he might risk a part of his capital, say thirty dollars. If he lost that they would be little worse off than they were at present; while if he won ... he might easily win.
He mentally arranged the details, assuring himself, the while, that he was only toying with the idea.—He would pay the customary substitute to drive the stage to Stenton, and cross Cheap Mountain on foot; by dark he would be in Sprucesap, play that night, and return the following day, Friday.
With an effort he still put the scheme from his thoughts; but, while he kept it in abeyance, nothing further occurred to him. That gave him a possible reprieve; all else offered sure disaster. He rose, and walked slowly toward his home, revolving, testing, the various aspects of the trip to Sprucesap; at once deciding upon that venture, and repeating to himself the incontestable fact of its utter folly.
The dark was intense, blue-black, about his dwelling. He struck a match at the edge of the porch, a pointed, orange exclamation on the impenetrable gloom. Clare, weary of waiting, had gone to bed; her door was shut, her window tightly closed. The invisible stream gurgled sadly past its banks, the whippoorwills throbbed with ceaseless, insistent passion.
A sudden, jumbled vision of the past woven about this dwelling, his home, wheeled through Gordon’s mind, scenes happy and unhappy; prevailing want and slim, momentary plenty; his father dead, in his coffin with a stony, pinched countenance, a jaw still unrelaxed above the bright flag that draped his nondescript uniform. Later events followed—his elder, vanished brother bullying him; the brief romance of his sister’s courtship; the high, strident voice of his mother, that had always reminded him of her angry red nose—events familiar, sordid, unlovely, but now they seemed all of a piece of desirable, melancholy happiness; they endowed with a hitherto unsuspected value every board of the rough footing of the Makimmon dwelling, every rood of the poor, rocky soil, the weedy grass. He said aloud, in a subdued, jarring voice, “By God, but Simmons won’t get it!” But the dreary whippoorwills, the feverish crickets, offered him no confirmation, no assurance.
IX
At noon, on the day following, he stood on the top of Cheap Mountain, gazing back into the deep, verdant cleft of Greenstream. From Cheap the reason for its name was clear—it flowed now direct, now turning, in a vivid green stream along the bases of its mountainous ranges; it flowed tranquil and dark and smooth between banks of tangled saplings, matted, multifarious underbrush, towering, venerable trees. It slipped like a river, bearing upon its balmy surface the promise of asylum, of sleep, of plenty, through the primitive, ruthless forest, which in turn pressed upon it everywhere the menace of its oblivion, its fierce, strangling life.
He saw below him stretches of the steep, rocky trail by which he had mounted with the mounting sun; both had now reached the zenith of their day’s journey; from there he would sink into the shadow, the secretiveness, of night.... Greenstream village lay twenty-eight miles behind; it was seventeen more to Sprucesap: he hurried forward.
In his pocket rested not the thirty dollars, to which he had limited himself in thought, but his entire month’s salary,—he might lose all by the lack of a paltry dollar or so.
He was dressed with more care than on the day previous: he wore a dark suit, the coat to which now swung on a stick over his shoulder, a rubber collar, a tie of orange brocade erected on a superstructure of cardboard; his head was covered by a hard, black felt hat, pushed back from his sweating brow, and his trousers hung from a pair of obviously home-knitted, yarn suspenders. He shifted the stick from right to left. His revolver dragged chafing against a leg, and he removed it and thrust it into a pocket of the coat.
He followed by turn an old rutted postroad and faint, forest trails, and shortened distances by breaking through the trackless underbrush, watching subconsciously for rattlesnakes. The sun slowly declined, its rays fell diagonally, lengthening, through the trees; in a glade the air seemed filled with gold dust; the sky burned in a single flame of apricot. The air, rather than grow dark, appeared to thicken with raw color, with mauve and ultramarine, silver and cinnabar.
When he arrived at the little, deeply-grassed plain that held Sprucesap, it was bathed in a flaring after-glow, a magical, floating light. A double row of board structures faced each other across a street of raw clay and narrow, wood sidewalks; they were, for the most part, unpainted, hasty erections of a single story. A building labelled the Steel Spud Hotel was more pretentious. The others were eating houses, stores with small windows filled with a threatening miscellany—revolvers, leather slung shots and brass knuckles, besides lumbering boots, gaudy Mackinaw jackets, gleaming knives and ammunition. Beyond the street a single car track ran precariously over the green, and ended abruptly, without roadbed or visible terminus; at one side was a rude platform, on the other a great pile of bark, rotting from long exposure—the result of some artificial condition of the market, the spite of powerful and vindictive merchants.
A second hotel stood alone, beyond the car tracks, and there Gordon removed the marks of his journey, resettled his collar and the resplendent tie. He felt in his coat for the revolver, in order to transfer it to a more convenient pocket.... Its bulk, apparently, evaded his fingers. His search quickened—it had gone! He had lost it somewhere on his long, devious passage of Cheap Mountain. Without it he would be in the power of any spindling gambler who faced a dishonest ace. It would be necessary to procure another weapon before proceeding with his purpose ... ten dollars, perhaps fifteen; revolvers were highly priced in the turbulent distant wild. Could he afford to lose that amount from his slender store of dollars? Intact it was absurdly inadequate. He debated the choice—on one hand the peril of gambling unarmed, on the other his desperate need for money. Once more he considered Clare: in the end his arrogance of manhood brought a decision—he would preserve the money for play. He was, he thought insolently of himself, quick as a copperhead snake, and as dangerous. After supper he sat on the porch, twisting and consuming cigarettes, waiting for the night.
X
Large kerosene lamps dilated by tin reflectors lit the front of the Steel Spud. In their radiance he saw the gaily-attired form of a woman. She wore a white hat, with a sweeping, white ostrich plume, which hid her face with the exception of a retreating chin and prominent, carmine lips; while a fat, unwieldy body was covered by a waist of Scotch plaid silk—lines and squares of black and primary colors—and a short, scant skirt of blue broadcloth that, drawn up by her knees, exposed small feet in white kid and heavy ankles.
Gordon Makimmon paused, and she leaned forward to meet his challenging gaze. “Just in from camp?” she inquired, in a voice hoarse, repellent, conciliatory, and with a mechanical grimace which he identified as a smile. He stopped at the invitation in her tones, and nodded. “And looking for a good time,” he further informed her; “perhaps a little game.”
“Stop right where you are,” she declared. “You’ve found them both.” He mounted to the porch, and shook her extended hand, cushioned with fat, and oddly damp and lifeless. He could see her countenance now—it was plaster white with insignificant features and rose like an amorphous column from a swollen throat, a nose like a dab of putty, eyes obscured by drooping, pouchy lids, leaden-hued.
“It’s a good thing you seen me,” she told him, endeavoring to establish a relationship of easy confidence, “instead of them diseased Mags down the street. Shall we have a little drink upstairs?”
“It’s early,” he negligently interposed; “how about a turn of the cards first? Do you know any one who would take a hand?”
“I got my friend here, and there’s a gentleman at the hotel would accommodate us. They’re inside.” She rose, and moved toward the door, waving him to follow. Her slow, clumsy body and chinless, full-lidded head reminded him of a turtle; she gave a still deeper amphibious impression—there was something markedly cold-blooded, inhuman, deleted, in her incongruous, gaudy bulk—an impression of a low, primitive organism, the subtle smell of primal mud.
“Jake!” she called at the entrance to the crude hotel office; “Jake! Mr. Ottinger! here’s a gentleman wants a little game.”
Two men hastily rose and advanced toward the door. The first, Jake, was small, with the narrow, high shoulders, the long, pale face, the long, pale hands, of a cripple. The other, a young man with a sodden countenance discolored by old purplish bruises, wore a misfitting suit that drew across heavy, bowed shoulders, thick, powerful arms. He regarded Gordon Makimmon with no light dawning upon his lowering face; no greeting disturbed the dark, hard line of his mouth. But the other, with an apparently hearty, stereotyped flow of words, applauded Gordon’s design, approved his qualities of sportsmanship, courage.
“Give me the man from the woods for an open-handed sport,” he vociferated; “he ain’t a fool neither, he’s wise to the time of night. The city crowd, the wise ones, are the real ringside marks.”
“Come up to my room,” the woman directed from the foot of a stairway; “where no amateur John Condons will tell us how to play our cards. I got some good liquor, too.”
In her room she lit a small lamp, which proved insufficient, and Mr. Ottinger brought a second from his quarters. Gordon found himself in a long, narrow chamber furnished with two wooden beds, two identical, insecure bureaus, stands with wash basins and pitchers, and a table. The floor, the walls, the ceiling, were resinous yellow pine, and gave out a hot, dry smell from which there was no escape but the door, for the room was without other outlet.
A preliminary drink was indispensable; and, served in two glasses and a cracked toothbrush mug—Mr. Ottinger elected to imbibe his “straight” from the bottle—it was drunk with mutual assurances of tender regard. “Happy days,” the woman pronounced. Only three chairs were available, and after some shuffling, appropriate references to “honest and plain” country accommodations, the table was ranged by a bed on which Em—“Call me Em,” she had invited Gordon, “let’s be real homelike,”—seated herself.
The smaller man ostentatiously broke the seal from a new pack of cards, dexterously spreading them across the table. His hands, Gordon saw, were extraordinarily supple, and emanated a sickly odor of glycerine. His companion’s were huge and misshapen, but they, too, were surprisingly deft, quick.
“What’ll it be?” Jake demanded; “Jackpots; stud; straight draw—”
“Hell, let’s throw cold hands,” Mr. Ottinger interrupted, “chop the trimmings. We’re here for the stuff, ain’t we?” He was immediately reprehended for his brusque, unsociable manner.
“He’s got the idea, though,” Gordon approved; “we’re here for the stuff.” It was finally arranged that poker hands should be dealt, a draw allowed, and the cards shown, the highest cards to take the visible money. “A dollar a go?” Jake queried, cutting for the deal. On the bed by the woman’s side was a tarnished, silver bag, with an ornate, meretricious clasp; her two companions produced casual rolls of paper money; and Gordon detached five dollars from the slender amount of his wage, his paramount capital. On a washstand, within easy reach, stood the bottle of whisky flanked by the motley array of drinking vessels.
Gordon Makimmon’s five dollars vanished in as many minutes. Oppressed by consuming anxiety he could scarcely breathe in the close, stale air. Em gambled with an affectation of careless indifference; she asked in an off-hand manner for cards; paid her losses with a loud laugh. Jake invariably gave one rapid glance at his hand, and then threw it down upon the table without separating his discard. Mr. Ottinger, it was plain, was superstitious—he edged his hand open by imperceptible degrees until the denominations of the cards were visible, then hurriedly closed them from sight; often he didn’t look at his draw until all the hands were exposed. He wrinkled his face in painful efforts of concentration, protruded a thick and unsavory tongue. At the loose corners of Jake’s mouth flecks of saliva gathered whitely; in the fleering light of the kerosene the shadows on his face were cobalt. The woman’s face shone with drops of perspiration that formed slowly and rolled like a flash over her plastered skin.
Another round of drinks was negotiated, adding to the fiery discomfort of the sealed room, of the dry, dead atmosphere. Gordon won back his five dollars, and gained five more. “Let’s make it two a throw,” the woman proposed. The thickset, young man remuttered the period that they were there for the stuff. “Otty will have his little joke,” she proclaimed.
“It’s not funny,” he protested seriously.
“Two?” Jake demanded of Gordon. The latter nodded.
XI
Late in the night they were still playing without a change in their positions. Em still perspired; but Mr. Ottinger no longer protruded his tongue, a sullen anger was evident in his every move; Jake’s affable flow of conversation was hushed; Gordon’s face set. It was, indisputably, not funny—he had won nearly two hundred dollars. “Make it ten?” Jake queried. The others nodded. Now Gordon had two hundred and twenty dollars; an extraordinary, overwhelming luck presided over his cards, he won more frequently than the other three together. A tense silence enveloped the latter: they shuffled, demanded cards, threw down their hands, in a hurried, disorganized fashion. They glanced, each at the other, swiftly; it was evident that a common idea, other than the game, possessed them. Jake hovered a breath longer than necessary over the bottle, then pressed a drink upon Gordon. He refused; this, he recognized, was not a time for dissipation; he needed every faculty.
Two hundred and sixty dollars. The air of suppression, of tension, increased. Gordon’s only concern now was to get away, to take the money with him.
Em shuffled in a slipshod, inattentive manner; Mr. Ottinger opened his hand boldly, faced his bad luck with a stony eye; Jake labored under a painful excitement, obviously not connected with his losses; his long, waxy fingers quivered, a feverish point of fire flickered in either cadaverous cheek; his eyes glowed between hollow, sunken temples. “Four,” he demanded, with shaking lips. Mr. Ottinger rapped out a request for one. “I’m satisfied,” Gordon said.
“Don’t that sucker beat hell!” Em declared, the solicitous manner that, earlier in the evening, had marked her manner toward Gordon, carelessly discarded. “I’m taking three.” A sudden, visible boredom fell upon her as she glanced at her filled hand. “Leave us double it,” she remarked. Gordon nodded, and she threw her hand upon the table; it held four nines. She reached her fat, chalky arm toward the money, but Gordon was before her. “Four queens,” he shot out, grasping the crumpled bills.
Em cursed; then followed a short, awkward silence. It was Ottinger’s deal, but he did not pick up the scattered cards. Gordon gathered himself alertly, measuring the distance to the door. “I’ve got enough,” he remarked; “I’m going to quit.”
“You got enough, all right,” Em agreed. “Now, how’d you like to have a real good time?” She disposed herself upon her elbow, so that the sagging bulk of her body was emphasized through its straining apparel; one leg, incredible, leviathan, was largely visible.
“I’ve had enough,” Gordon repeated; “I’ll be moving.”
Em rose quickly, losing her air of coquetry. Gordon was facing the men, and was unprepared for the heavy blow she dealt upon the back of his neck. “Hang it on him, Otty!” she cried excitedly.
Mr. Ottinger shoved the card table from his path. It was now evident that it was, precisely, to “hang it on” whoever might be elected for that delicate attention which formed Otty’s purpose, profession, preoccupation, in life. He was, for a heavy man, active; and, before Gordon Makimmon could put out a protective arm, he returned the latter to the perpendicular with a jarring blow on the chin. Jake whipped out from a place of concealment on his person a plaited leather weapon with a globular end.
It was Jake, Gordon instinctively knew, who threatened him most; he could easily stop the hulking shape before him. He regained his poise, and returned blow for blow with Mr. Ottinger; neither man guarded, both were solely intent upon marking, crippling, the other. A chair fell, sliding across the floor; a washstand collapsed with a splintering crash of china, a miniature flood. Em stood on the outskirts of the conflict, armed with the whisky bottle; Jake crouched watchful with the leather club. Gordon cut his opponent’s face with short, vicious jabs; he was, as customary, cold—he saw clearly where every blow fell; he saw Otty’s nose grotesquely shapeless and blackened; he felt Otty’s teeth cut the skin of his knuckles and break off; he heard his involuntary gasp as he struck him a hammer-like blow over the heart.
Mr. Ottinger, in return, hit him frequently and with effect. Gordon was conscious of a warm, gummy tide spreading over his face, he saw with difficulty through rapidly closing eyes. “For Cri’s sake,” Otty gasped, “get to him, the town’ll be on us.”
Em made an ineffectual lunge with the bottle. Gordon swung the point of his elbow into her side, and she sat on the bed with a “G-G-God!” Jake hit him with the club on the shoulder blade; numbness radiated from the struck point; there was a loss of power in the corresponding arm. Jake hit him again, and a stabbing pain entered his side and stayed apparently tangled in splintered bone. He paused for a moment, and all three fell upon him, beating, clubbing, kicking. He fought on, now rapidly losing power. The woman threw herself on his back, forced him to his knees. “Won’t none of you do for him?” she complained hysterically. She pressed his head into her breast, and Mr. Ottinger hit him below and just back of his ear. Gordon slipped out full length on the floor.
He was waveringly conscious, but he had lost all interest, all sense of personal connection, with the proceedings. He dully watched Ottinger draw back, tenderly fingering his damaged features; he saw Em breathing stormily, empurpled. Jake, with the crimson flames in his long, pallid mask, the white saliva flecking his jaw, hung over him with a glassy, intent stare.
“Get the stuff,” the practical Ottinger urged; “it’s the stuff we’re after. Don’t go bug again.”
“Jake don’t hear you,” Em told him, “he’s off. I’m glad the fella’s going to be fixed, he jolted me something fierce.”
Jake swung the little, flexuous club softly against his palm, and Gordon suddenly realized that the cripple intended to kill him.—That was the lust which transfigured the gambler’s countenance, which lit the fires in the deathly cheeks, set the long fingers shaking. Gordon considered the idea, and, obscurely, it troubled him, moved him a space from his apathy. Instinctively, in response to a sudden movement of the figure above him, he drew his arm up in front of his head; and an intolerable pain shot up through his shoulder and flared, blindingly, in his eyes. It pierced his indifference, set in motion his reason, his memory; he realized the necessity, the danger, of his predicament ... the money!—he must guard it, take it back with him. Above, in a heated, orange mist, the woman’s face loomed blank and inhuman; farther back Mr. Ottinger’s features were indistinctly visible.
He must rise....
His groping hand caught hold of the rung of the chair, and, with herculean labor, he turned and raised himself a fraction from the floor. Jake directed a hasty blow at his head that missed him altogether. His other hand caught the chair, and he dragged himself dizzily into a kneeling posture. A sudden change swept over the three above him.
“Nail him where he is!” Em cried excitedly; “he’s getting up on you.” Gordon’s hands moved uncertainly upward on the chair; his knees rose from the floor. A shower of blows fell on him; the woman beat him with her pudgy fists; Mr. Ottinger was kicking at him; Jake was weeping, and endeavoring to get room in which to swing his club.
Gordon had one foot on the floor.
“Give me a chance at him,” Jake implored; “give me a chance. God, if I had a knife.”
If they took away the chair, Gordon knew, he was lost. He clung to it; pressed his breast against it; crept upward by means of it, slowly, slowly, through a storm of battering hands. It seemed to him that, in rising, he was shouldering aside the entire weight, the forces, of a universe, bent on his destruction, and against which he was determined to prevail. It was as though his will, the vitality which animated him, which was his soul, stood aside from his beaten and suffering body, and, with a cold, a cruel, detachment, commanded it upright.
The woman’s bulk got in Jake’s way, and he struck her across the eyes with the back of his hand, consigning her to eternal hell. Mr. Ottinger, confused by the irregularity of the turmoil, worked inefficiently, swinging at random his hard fists, kicking impartially.
Gordon now had both feet upon the floor; he straightened up. For a breath the three stood motionless, livid; and in that instant his hand fell upon the door knob, he staggered back into the hall, carrying with him a vision of his brocaded tie lying upon the floor.
XII
He stumbled hastily down the stairway, and found the narrow porch, the serene, enveloping night; down the street lamps made blots of brightness, but, beyond, the obscurity was profound, unbroken. Wave after wave of nausea swept over him, he clung to a porch support with cold sweat starting through the blood that smeared his countenance, stiffened in his shirt, that was warm upon his side. The sound of footfalls, sharp, repressed voices from above, stirred him into a fresh realization of his precarious position. The gamblers would follow him, rob him with impunity in the shadows of Sprucesap’s lawless street, drag him behind the angle of a building, where Jake would have ample scope for the swinging of his leathered lead....
He lurched down to the street, and silently merged into the awaiting night.
At dawn he appeared from a thicket, a mile beyond Sprucesap on the road to Greenstream, and negotiated successfully a ride on a load of fragrant upland hay to a point within a few miles of his destination. His coat, soiled and torn, was buttoned across a bare throat, for his shirt had been ripped into bandages; his face, apparently, had been harrowed for a red planting; he moved awkwardly, breathed with a gasp from a stabbing pain in the side ... but he moved, breathed. He drank with long delight from a sparkling spring. He had the money, two hundred and eighty dollars, safely in his pocket.
XIII
The afternoon was waning when he gazed again into the deep, sombrous rift of Greenstream: from where Gordon stood, on the heights, in the flooding sun, it appeared to be already evening below. As he descended the mountainside the cool shadows rose about him, enveloping him in the quietude, the sense of security, which brooded over the withdrawn valley—the resplendent mirage of nature kind, beneficent, the illusion of Nature as a tender and loving parent ... of Nature, as imminent, as automatic, as a landslip crushing a path to the far, secret resting place of its destiny.
Dr. Pelliter’s light carriage with its pair of weedy, young horses stood hitched by the road above the Makimmon dwelling; and, on entering the house, Gordon found Clare in bed and Pelliter seated at her side. A gaily-patched quilt hid all but her head. She smiled at Gordon through her pale mask of suffering; but her greeting turned to swift concern at his battered countenance. “An accident,” he explained impatiently.
The doctor greeted him seriously. He had, Gordon knew, a sovereign and inevitable remedy for all the ills of the flesh—pain, he argued, and disease were inseparable, subdue the first and the latter ceased to exist as an active ill, and a dexterously wielded hypodermic needle left behind him a trail of narcotized and relieved sufferers. Bottles of patent medicines, exhilarating or numbing as the purchaser might require, lined the shelves of his drug store.
But now his customary, soothing smile was absent, the small, worn case that contained the glittering syringe and minute bottles filled with white or vivid yellow pellets was not to be seen.
“Clare here’s gone and got herself real miserable,” he stated, rising and beckoning Gordon to follow him to the porch. “She’s bad,” he pronounced outside; “that pain’s got the best of her, and it’s getting the best of me. She ought to be cut, but she’s so weak, it’s gone so long, that I’m kind of slow about opening her. And the truth is, Gordon, if I was successful she wouldn’t have a chance of getting well here—it’ll take expert nursing, awful nice food; and then, at the shortest, she would be in bed a couple of months. She ought to go to the hospital in Stenton. That’s the real truth. I’m telling you the facts, Gordon; we can’t handle her here, she’d die on us.”
Gordon only half comprehended the other’s words—Clare dangerously ill ... a question of dying, hospitals. She had suffered for so long that, without losing his sympathy for her, it had seemed to him her inevitable condition. It had fallen naturally upon him to care for her, guard her against damp, prevent her from lifting objects beyond her strength. These continuous, small attentions held an important place in his existence—he thought about her in a mind devoted substantially to himself, and it brought him a glow of contentment, a pleasant feeling of ministration and importance. It had not occurred to him that Clare might grow worse, that she might, in fact, die. The idea filled him with sudden dismay. His heart contracted with a sharp hurt. “The hospital,” he echoed dully, “Stenton.”
“By rights,” the doctor iterated; “of course we’ll do what we can here, she might last for a couple of years more without cutting; and then, again, her heart might just quit. Still—”
“What would the hospital cost?” Gordon asked, almost unaware of having pronounced the words.
“It’d be dear—two hundred and some dollars anyway, and the money on the nail. The nursing would count up; then there would be something for operating, if it was only a little ... a lot of things you don’t allow for would turn up.”
Two hundred and more dollars! Gordon had a fleeting vision, against the empurpling banks, the dark, sliding water, and the mountainous wall capped with dissolving gold beyond, of a room filled with the hot glow of kerosene lamps; he saw Jake’s twitching, murderous countenance above him.... Two hundred dollars! He had two hundred and eighty dollars in his pocket. He had another vision—of Simmons; it was two hundred and fifty dollars that the latter wanted, must have, to-morrow. But Simmons swiftly faded before Clare’s need, the pressure of sickness.
“She couldn’t go down in the stage,” he muttered, “the shaking would kill her before ever she got there.”
“I’ll drive her to Stenton, Gordon,” the doctor volunteered, “if you’ve got the money handy.”
“I’ve got her,” Gordon Makimmon declared grimly.
“I’ll take her right to the hospital and give her to the doctor in charge. Everything will be done for her comfort. She has an elegant chance of pulling through, there. And you can see her when you go down with the stage—” Pelliter suddenly stopped; he appeared disconcerted by what he had said.
“Well,” Gordon demanded, his attention held by the other’s manner, “can’t I?”
“You were away from Greenstream yesterday and to-day,” the doctor replied evasively, “you didn’t hear ... oh, there’s nothing in it if you didn’t. I heard that Simmons had had you taken off the stage. Did you have trouble with Buckley, cut him with a whip? Buck has been blowing about showing you a thing or two.”
A feeling of angry dismay enveloped Gordon. He had recognized, obscurely, that Simmons and old man Hollidew dominated the community, but he had never before come in actual contact with their arbitrary power, he had never before been faced by the overmastering weapon of their material possessions, the sheer weight of their wealth. It stirred him to revolt, elemental and bitter; every instinct rose against the despotic power which threatened to overwhelm him.
“By God!” he exclaimed, “but they will find that I’m no sheep to drive into their lot and shear!”
“Now, about Clare,” the doctor interposed.
“When will you come for her?” Gordon inquired. He took from his pocket the roll of money he had won at Sprucesap, and counted two hundred dollars, which he tended to the doctor.
“To-morrow, about seven. Everything will be done for her, Gordon. I reckon that’s only an empty splash about the stage.”
The dusk had thickened in Clare’s room; he could scarcely distinguish her face white against the darkened squares of the quilt. “Whoever will get your supper,” she worried, when he had told her; “and the cow’ll need bedding, and those cheeses brought in off the roof, and—”
He closed her mouth with a gentle palm. “I’ve done ’em all a hundred times,” he declared. “We’re going to get you right, this spell, Clare,” he proclaimed; “you’ll get professional, real stylish, care at Stenton.”
She rose, trembling, on her arms. “Are they going to cut at me?” she asked.
The lie on his lips perished silently before her grave tones. “It’s not rightly a dangerous operation,” he protested; “thousands come out of it every year.”
“Gordon, I’m afeared of it.”
“No, you’re not, Clare Makimmon; there’s not a drop of fear in you.”
“It’s not just death I’m afeared of, it’s—oh; you will never understand for being a man,” her voice lowered instinctively; “somehow I hate the thought of those strange men hacking and spoiling my body. That’s just foolishness, I know, and my time’s pretty well gone for foolishness. I’ve always sort of tended my body, Gordon, and kept it white and soft. I thought if a man asked me in spite of—well, my face, he could take pride in me underneath. But that’s all done with; I ought to be glad for the ... Gordon!” she exclaimed more energetically, “it will cost a heap of money; how will you get it? don’t borrow.”
“I got it,” he interrupted her tersely, “and I didn’t borrow it neither.”
XIV
He woke at dawn. The whippoorwills, the frogs and crickets, were silent, and the sharp, sweet song of a mocking bird throbbed from a hedge. It was dark in the valley, but, high above, the air was already brightening with the sun; a symmetrical cloud caught the solar rays and flushed rosy against silver space. The valley turned from indistinct blue to grey, to sparkling green. The sun gilded the peaks of the western range, and slipped slowly down, spilling into the depth. It was almost cold, the pump handle, the rough sward, the foliage beyond, were drenched with white dew; a damp, misty veil lifted from the surface of the stream.
Clare declared that she felt stronger; she dressed, insisted upon frying his breakfast. “You ought to have somebody in,” she asserted later. They were on the shallow porch, waiting stiffly for the doctor. “But don’t get that eldest of your sister’s; last time she wore my sateen waist and run the colors.”
Just as she was leaving he slipped twenty dollars into her hand. “Write when you want more,” he directed; “and I’ll be down to see you ... yes, often ... the stage.” A leaden depression settled over him as the doctor’s carriage took her from sight. The house to which he turned was deserted, lonely. He locked the door to her room.
XV
One of the canvas-covered mountain wagons was unloading on the platform before Simmons’ store when Gordon entered the center of the village. A miscellaneous pile of merchandise was growing, presided over by a clerk with a pencil and tally book. Valentine Simmons, without his coat, in an immaculate, starched white waistcoat, stood upon one side.
Gordon, without delay, approached him. “I can give you a hundred dollars,” he informed the other, exhibiting that sum.
“Two hundred and fifty will be necessary,” Simmons informed him concisely, “to-day.”
“Come to reason—”
Valentine Simmons turned his back squarely upon him. A realization of the uselessness of further words possessed Gordon; he returned the money to his pocket. The contemptuous neglect of the other lit the ever-trimmed lamp of his temper. “What’s this,” he demanded, “I hear about driving stage? about Buck boasting around that he had had me laid off?”
“That’s not correct,” Simmons informed him smoothly; “Buckley has no power to do that ... the owners of the privilege decided that you were too unreliable.”
“Then it’s true,” Gordon interrupted him, “I’m off?” Simmons nodded. Gordon’s temper swelled and flared whitely before his vision; rage possessed him utterly; without balance, check, he was no more than an insensate force in the grip of his mastering passion. He would stop that miserable, black heart forever. Old Valentine Simmons’ lips tightened, his fingers twitched; he turned his back deliberately upon Gordon. The metal buckle which held the strap of his waistcoat caught the sun and reflected it into Gordon’s eyes. “How many gross pink celluloid rattles?” the storekeeper demanded of the clerk.
Gordon Makimmon’s hand crept toward his pocket ... then he remembered—he had lost that which he sought ... on the side of Cheap Mountain. If Simmons would turn, say something further, taunt him, he would kill him with his hands. But Simmons did none of these things; instead he walked slowly, unharmed, into the store.
XVI
Gordon had intended to avoid the vicinity of the Courthouse on the day of the sale of his home, but an intangible attraction held him in its neighborhood. He sat by the door to the office of theGreenstream Bugle, diagonally across the street. Within, the week’s edition was going to press; a burly young individual was turning the cylinders by hand, while the editor and owner dexterously removed the printed sheets from the press. The office was indescribably grimy, the rude ceiling was hung with dusty cobwebs, the windows obscured by a grey film. A small footpress stood to the left of the entrance, on the right were ranged typesetter’s cases with high, precarious stools, a handpress for proof and a table to hold the leaded forms. These, with the larger press, an air-tight sheet iron stove and some nondescript chairs, completed the office furnishings. Over all hung the smell of mingled grease, ink, and damp paper, flat and penetrating.
Without, the sun shone ardently; it cast a rich pattern of light and shade on the Courthouse lawn and the small assemblage of merely idle or interested persons gathered for the sale. The sheriff stood facing them under the towering pillars of the portico; his voice rang clearly through the air. To Gordon the occasion, the loud sing-song of the sheriff, appeared unreal, dreamlike; he listened incredulously to the meager cataloguing of his dwelling, the scant acreage, with an innate sense of outrage, of a shameful violation of his privacy. He was still unable to realize that his home and his father’s, the clearing that his grandfather had cut from the wild, was actually passing from his possession. He summoned in vain the emotions which, he told himself, were appropriate. The profound discouragement within him would not be lifted to emotional heights: lassitude settled over him like a fog.
The bidding began in scattered, desultory fashion, mounting slowly by hundreds. Eighteen hundred dollars was offered, and there the price obstinately hung.
The owner of theBugleappeared at his door, and nodded mysteriously to Gordon, who rose and listlessly obeyed the summons. The former closed the door with great care, and lowered a faded and torn shade over the front window. Then he retired to a small space divided from the body of the office by a curtain suspended from a sagging wire. He brought his face close to Gordon’s ear. “Have a nip?” he asked, in a solemn, guarded fashion. Gordon assented.
A bottle was produced from a cupboard, and, together with a tin cup, handed to him.
“Luck,” he pronounced half-heartedly, raising the cup to his lips. When the other had gone through a similar proceeding the process was carefully reversed—the bottle was returned to the cupboard, the tin cup suspended upon its hook, the steps retraced and the curtain once more coaxed up, the door thrown open.
The group on the Courthouse lawn were stringing away; on the steps the sheriff was conversing with Valentine Simmons’ brother, a drab individual who performed the storekeeper’s public services and errands. The sale had been consummated. The long, loose-jointed dwelling accumulated by successive generations of Makimmons had passed out of their possession.
A poignant feeling of loss flashed through Gordon’s apathy; suddenly his eyes burned, and an involuntary sharp inspiration resembled a gasp, a sob. A shadow ran over the earth. The owner of theBuglestepped out and gazed upward. At the sight of the soft, grey clouds assembling above an expression of determined purpose settled upon his dark countenance. He hurried into the office, and reappeared a few minutes later, a peaked corduroy hat drawn over his eyes, a piece of pasteboard in one hand, and, under his arm, a long, slender bundle folded in black muslin. The pasteboard he affixed to the door; it said, “Gone fishing. Back to-morrow.”
XVII
Minus certain costs and the amount of his indebtedness to Valentine Simmons, Gordon received the sum of one thousand and sixty dollars for the sale of his house. He was still sleeping in it, but the day was near when he must vacate. The greater part of his effects were gathered under a canvas cover on the porch, Clare’s personal belongings were still untouched in her room. He must wait for the disposition of those until he had learned the result of the operation.
He heard from Clare on an evening when he was sitting on his lonely porch, twisting his dextrous cigarettes, and brooding darkly on the mischances that had overtaken him of late. It was hot and steamy in the valley, no stars were visible; the known world, muffled in a close and imponderable cloak, was without any sign of life, of motion, of variety. Gordon heard footsteps descending heavily from the road, a bulky shape loomed up before him and disclosed the features of Dr. Pelliter.
He greeted Gordon awkwardly, and then fell momentarily silent. “She sent you a message, Gordon,” he pronounced at last.
“Clare’s dead,” Gordon replied involuntarily. So far away, he thought, and alone.... He must go at once and fetch her home. He rose.
“Clare said,” the doctor continued, “if your sister’s eldest was to come in to give her the sateen waist.” An extended silence fell upon the men; the whippoorwills sobbed and sobbed; the stream gurgled past its banks. Then:
“By God!” Gordon said passionately, “I don’t know but I’m not glad Clare’s gone—Simmons has got our house, I’m not driving stage ... Clare would have sorrowed herself out of living. Life’s no jig tune.”
The doctor left. Gordon continued to sit on the porch; at intervals he mechanically rolled and lit cigarettes, which glowed for a moment and went out, unsmoked. The feeling of depression that had cloaked him during the few days past changed imperceptibly to one of callous indifference toward existence in general. The seeds of revolt, of instability, which Clare and a measure of worldly position, of pressure, had held in abeyance, germinated in his disorganized mind, his bitter sense of injustice and injury. He hardened, grew defiant ... the strain of lawlessness brought so many years before from warring Scotch highlands rose bright and troublesome in him.
XVIII
Clare’s body was brought back to Greenstream on the following day. His sister and her numerous brood descended solicitously upon Gordon later; neighbors, kindly and officious, arrived ... Clare was laid out. There were sibilant, whispered conversations about a mislaid petticoat with a mechlin hem; drawers were searched and the missing garment triumphantly unearthed; silk mitts were discussed, discarded; the white shoes—real buck and a topnotch article—forced on. At last Clare was exhibited in the room that had been hers. There was no place in the Makimmon dwelling for general assemblage but the kitchen, and it had been pointed out by certain delicate souls that the body and the preparations for the funeral repast would accord but doubtfully. Besides, the kitchen was too hot.
Clare’s peaked, blue-white countenance was withdrawn and strange above a familiar, harsh black silk dress; her hands, folded upon her flat breast, lay in a doubled attitude dreadfully impossible to life. A thin locket of gold hung on a chain about her still throat. The odor of June roses that filled the corners, a subdued, red riot of the summer, the sun without, was overpowering.
As the hour appointed for the funeral approached a gratifying number of people assembled: the women clustered about the porch, hovered about the door which opened upon the remains; while the men gathered in a group above the stream, lingered by the fence. A row of dusty, hooded vehicles, rough-coated, intelligent horses, were hitched above.
The minister took his station by a table on which a glass of water had been placed upon a vivid red cover: he portentously cleared his throat. “The Lord giveth,” he began.... It was noon, pellucidly clear, still, hot; the foliage on the mountainsides was like solid walls of greenery rising to a canopy, a veil, of azure. Partridges whistled clear and flutelike from a nearby cover; the stream flashed in the sun, mirroring on its unwrinkled surface the stiff, somber figures gathered for the funeral.
The droning voice of the preacher drew out interminably through the sultry, golden hour. Women sniffed sharply, dabbled with toil-hardened hands at their eyes; the men, standing in the grass, shuffled their feet uneasily. “Let us pray,” the speaker dropped upon his knees, and his voice rose, grew more insistent, shrill with a touch of hysteria. From the back of the house a hen clucked in an excited, aggravated manner.
Gordon Makimmon stood at the end of the porch, morosely ill at ease: the memories of Clare as a girl, as a woman going about and performing the duties of their home, the dignity of his sense of loss and sorrow, had vanished before this public ceremony; they had sunk to perfunctory, conventional emotions before the glib flood of the paid eulogist, the facile emotion of the women.
Suddenly he saw, partially hidden by the dull dresses of the older women, a white, ruffled skirt, the turn of a young shoulder, a drooping straw hat. A meager, intervening form moved, and he saw that Lettice Hollidew had come to his sister’s funeral. He wondered, in a momentary, instinctive resentment, what had brought her among this largely negligent gathering. She had barely known Clare; Gordon was not certain that she had ever been in their house. He could see her plainly now—she stood clasping white gloves with firm, pink hands; her gaze was lowered upon the uneven flooring of the porch. He could see the soft contour of her chin, a shimmer of warm, brown hair. She was crisply fresh, incredibly young in the group of gaunt, worn forms; her ruffled fairness was an affront to the thin, rigid shoulders in rusty black, the sallow, deeply-bitten faces of the other women.
She looked up, and surprised his intent gaze: she flushed slightly, the gloves were twisted into a knot, but her eyes were unwavering—they held an appeal to his understanding, his sympathy, not to be mistaken. It was evident that that gaze cost her an effort. She was, Gordon remembered, a diffident girl. His resentment evaporated.... He speculated upon her reason for coming; and, speculating, involuntarily stood more erect. With a swift, surreptitious motion he straightened his necktie.
The Greenstream cemetery lay aslant on a rise above the village. From the side of the raw, yellow clay hole into which they lowered the coffin Gordon could see, beyond the black form of the minister, over the rows of uneven roofs, the bulk of the Courthouse, the sweep of the valley, glowing with multifarious vitality.
“Dust to dust,” said the minister; “ashes to ashes,” in the midst of the warm, the resplendent, the palpitating day. One of Gordon’s nephews—a shock of tow hair rising rebellious against an application of soap, stubby, scarred hands, shoes obviously come by in their descent from more mature extremities—who had been audibly snuffling for the past ten minutes, burst into a lugubrious, frightened wail. Through the solemn, appointed periods of the minister cut the sibilant, maternal promise of a famous “whopping.”