A FAIR EXILE
The train was ambling across the hot, russet plain. The wind, strong and warm and dry, sweeping up from the south, carried with it the subtle odor of September grass and gathered harvests. Out of the unfenced roads the dust arose in long lines, like smoke from some hidden burning which the riven earth revealed. The fields were tenanted with thrashing crews, the men diminished by distance to pygmies, the long belt of the engine flapping and shining like a ribbon in the flaming sunlight.
The freight-cars on the accommodation train jostled and rocked about and heaved up laterally till they resembled a long line of awkward, frightened, galloping buffaloes. The one coach was scantily filled with passengers, mainly poorly clothed farmers and their families.
A young man seated well back in the coach was looking dreamily out of the window, and the conductor, a keen-eyed young fellow, after passing him several times, said, in a friendly way:
"Going up to Boomtown, I imagine."
"Yes—if we ever get there."
"Oh, we'll get there. We won't have much more switching. We've only got an empty car or two to throw in at the junction."
"Well, I'm glad of that. I'm a little impatient, because I've got a case coming up in court, and I'm not exactly fixed for it."
"Your name is Allen, I believe."
"Yes; J. H. Allen, of Sioux City."
"I thought so. I've heard you speak."
The young lawyer was a tall, slender, dark-eyed man, rather sombre in appearance. He did not respond to the invitation in the conductor's voice.
"When do you reach the junction?"
"Next stop. We're only a few minutes late. Expect to meet friends there?"
"No; thought I'd get a lunch, that's all."
At the junction the car became pretty well filled with people. Two or three Norwegian families came clattering in, the mothers clothed in heavy shawls and cheap straw hats, the flaxen-haired children in faded cottonade and blue denims. They filled nearly half the seats. Several drummers came in, laughing loudly, bearing heavy valises. Then Allen heard, above the noise, the shrill but sweet voice of a girl, and caught the odor of violets as two persons passed him and took a seat just before him.
The man he knew by sight and reputation as a very brilliant young lawyer—Edward Benson, of Heron Lake. The girl he knew instantly to be utterly alien to this land and people. She was like a tropic bird seen amid the scant foliage of northern hills. There was evidence of great care and taste in every fold of her modish dress. Her hat was simple but in the latest city fashion, and hergloves were spotless. She gave off an odor of cleanliness and beauty.
She was very young and slender. Her face was piquant but not intellectual, and scarcely beautiful. It pleased rather by its life and motion and oddity than by its beauty. She looked at her companion in a peculiar way—trustfully, almost reverently—and yet with a touch of coquetry which seemed perfectly native to every turn of her body or glance of her eyes.
Her companion was a fine Western type of self-made man. He was tall and broad-shouldered, but walked a little stooping, like a man of fifty. He wore a long Prince Albert frock-coat, hanging loosely from his rather square shoulders. His white vest was noticeably soiled by his watch chain, and his tie was disarranged.
His face was very fine and good. His eyes were gray-blue, deep and quiet, but slightly smiling, as were his lips, which his golden-brown mustache shaded but did not hide. He was kept smiling in this quizzical way by the nervous chatter of the girl beside him. His profile, which was the view Allen had of him, was striking. His strong, straight nose and abrupt forehead formed a marked contrast to the rather characterless nose and retreating forehead of the girl.
The first words that Allen distinguished out of the merry war in which they seemed engaged were spoken in the tone of pretty petulance such women use—a coquette's defence.
"You did! you did! youdid!Now! You know youdid! You told me that! You told me you despised girls like me!"
"I said I despised women who had no object in life but dress," he replied, rather soberly.
"But you were hopping on me; you meant me, now! You can't deny it! You despise me, I know you do!" She challenged his flattery in her pouting self-depreciation.
The young man tried to stop her in her course, to change her mood, which was descending to real feeling. His low words were lost in the rumble of the car.
"Yes, yes, try to smooth it over; but you can't fool me any more. But I don't want you to flatter me and lie to me the way Judge Stearns did," she added, with a sudden change of manner. "I like you because you're straight."
The phrase with which she ended seemed to take on a new meaning, uttered by those red lips in childish pout.
"Now, why are you down on the judge? I don't see," said the man, as if she had gone back to an old attack.
"Well, if you'd seen what I have, you'd understand." She turned away and looked out of the window. "Oh, this terrible country! I'd die out here in six weeks. I know I should."
The young lawyer was not to be turned aside.
"Of course, I'm pleased to have you throw the judge over and employ me, but, all the same, I think you do him an injustice. He's a good, square man."
"Square man!" she said, turning to him with a suddenfury in her eyes. "Do you call it square for a man—married, and gray-haired, too—to take up with a woman like Mrs. Shellberg? Say, do you, now?"
"Well, I don't quite believe—"
"Oh, Ilie, do I?" she cried, with another swift change to reproach. "You can't take my word for Mrs. Shellberg's visits to his office."
"But he was her lawyer."
"But you know what kind of a woman she is! She didn't need to go there every day or two, did she? What did he always receive her in his private office for? Come, now, tell me that!"
"I don't know that he did," persisted the lawyer.
A sort of convulsion passed over her face, her little hands clinched, and the tears started into her eyes. Her voice was very quiet.
"You think I lie, then?"
"I think you are mistaken, just as other jealous women have—"
"You think I'm jealous, do you?"
"You act like a jeal—"
"Jealous of that gray-haired old wretch? No, sir! I—I—" She struggled to express herself. "I liked him, and I hated to lose all my faith in men. I thought he was good and honest when he prayed—Oh, I've seen him pray in church, the old hypocrite!" Her fury returned at the recollection.
Her companion's face grew grave. The smile went out of his eyes, leaving them dark and sorrowful.
"I understand you now," he said, at last. She turnedto look at him. "My practice in the divorce business out here has almost destroyed my faith in women. If it weren't for my wife and sister—"
She broke in eagerly: "Now Iknowyou know what I mean. Sometimes I think men are—devils!" She thrust this word forth, and her little face grew dark and strained. "But the judge kept me from thinking—I never loved my father; he didn't care for me; all he wanted to do was to make ten thousand barrels of beer a year and sell it; and the judge seemed like a father to me tillshecame and destroyed my faith in him."
"But—well, let Mrs. S. go. There are lots of good men and pure women in the world. It's dangerous to think there aren't—especially for a handsome young woman like you. You can't afford to keep in that kind of a mood long."
She looked at him curiously. "That's what I like about you," she said, soberly. "You talk to me as if I had some sense—as if I were a human being. If you were to flatter me, now, and make love to me, I never would believe in any man again."
He smiled again in his frank, good way, and drew a picture from his pocket. It was a picture of a woman bending down over a laughing, naked child, sprawling frogwise in her lap. The woman's face was broad and intellectual and handsome. The look of splendid maternity was in her eyes. They both looked at the picture in silence. The girl sighed.
"I wish I was as good as that woman looks."
"You can be if you try."
"Not with a big Chicago brewer for a father, and a husband that beats you whenever the mood takes him."
"I admit that's hard. I think the atmosphere of that Heron Lake hotel isn't any great help to you."
"Oh, they're a gay lot there! We fight like cats and dogs." A look of slyness and boldness came over her face. "Mrs. Shellberg hates me as hard as I do her. She used to go around telling: 'It's very peculiar, you know'"—she imitated her rival's voice—"'but no matter which end of the dining-room I sit, all the men look that way!'"
The young lawyer laughed at her in spite of himself.
And she went on: "But they don't, now. That's the reason she hates me," she said, in conclusion. "The men don't notice her when I'm around."
To hear her fresh young lips utter those words with their vile inflections was like taking a sudden glimpse into the underworld, where harlots dwell and the spirits of unrestrained lusts dance in the shadowy recesses of the human heart.
Allen, hearing this fragmentary conversation, fascinated yet uneasy, looked at the pair with wonder. They seemed quite unconscious of their public situation.
The young lawyer looked straight before him, while the girl, swept on by her ignoble rage, displayed still more of the moral ulceration which had been injected into her young life.
"I don't see what men find about her to like—unless it is her eyes. She's got beautiful eyes. But she's vulgar—ugh! The stories she tells—right before men, too!She'd kill any one that got ahead of her, that woman would! And yet she'll come into my room and cry and cry, and say: 'Don't take him away from me! Leave him to me!' Ugh! It makes me sick." She stamped her foot, then added, irrelevantly: "She wears a wig, too. I suppose that old fool of a judge thinks it's her own hair."
The lawyer sat in stony silence. His grave face was accusing in its set expression, and she felt it, and was spurred on to do still deeper injustice to herself—an insane perversity.
"Not that I care a cent—I'm not jealous of her. I ain't so bad off for company as she is. She can't take anybody away from me, but she must go and break down my faith in the judge."
She bit her lips to keep from crying out. She looked out of the window again, seeking control.
The "divorce colony" never appeared more sickening in its inner corruptions than when delineated by this dainty young girl. Allen could see the swarming men about the hotels; he could see their hot, leering eyes and smell their liquor-laden breaths as they named the latest addition to the colony or boasted of their associations with those already well known.
The girl turned suddenly to her companion.
"How do those people live out here on their farms?"
She pointed at a small shanty where the whole family stood to watch the train go by.
"By eating boiled potatoes and salt pork."
"Salt pork!" she echoed, as if salt pork were oldboot-heels or bark or hay. "Why, it takes four hours for salt pork to digest!"
He laughed again at her childish irrelevancy. "So much the better for the poor. Where'd you learn all that, anyway?"
"At school. Oh, you needn't look so incredulous! I went to boarding-school. I learned a good deal more than you think."
"Well, so I see. Now, I should have said pork digested in three hours, speaking from experience."
"Well, it don't. What do the women do out here?"
"They work like the men, only more so."
"Do they have any new things?"
"Not very often, I'm afraid."
She sighed. After a pause, she said:
"You were raised on a farm?"
"Yes. In Minnesota."
"Did you do work like that?" She pointed at a thrashing-machine in the field.
"Yes, I ploughed and sowed and reaped and mowed. I wasn't on the farm for my health."
"You're very strong, aren't you?" she asked, admiringly.
"In a slab-sided kind of a way—yes."
Her eyes grew abstracted.
"I like strong men. Ollie was a little man, not any taller than I am, but when he was drunk he was what men call a—a holy terror. He struck me with the water-pitcher once—that was just before baby was born. I wish he'd killed me." She ended in a sudden reactionto hopeless bitterness. "It would have saved me all these months of life in this terrible country."
"It might have saved you from more than you think," he said, quietly, tenderly.
"What do you mean?"
"You've been brought up against women and men who have defiled you. They've made your future uncertain."
"Do you think it's so bad as that? Tell me!" she insisted, seeing his hesitation.
"You're on the road to hell!" he said, in a voice that was very low, but it reached her. It was full of pain and grave reprimand and gentleness. "You've been poisoned. You're in need of a good man's help. You need the companionship of good, earnest women instead of painted harlots."
Her voice shook painfully as she replied:
"You don't think I'mallbad?"
"You're not bad at all—you're simply reckless.Youare not to blame. It depends upon yourself now, though, whether you keep a true woman or go to hell with Mrs. Shellberg."
The conductor eyed them, as he passed, with an unpleasant light in his eyes, and the drummers a few seats ahead turned to look at them. The tip had passed along from lip to lip. They were like wild beasts roused by the presence of prey. Their eyes gleamed with relentless lust. They eyed the little creature with ravening eyes. Her helplessness was their opportunity.
Allen, sitting there, entered into the terror and thetragedy of the girl's life. He imagined her reckless, prodigal girlhood; the coarse, rich father; the marriage, when a thoughtless girl, with a drunken, dissolute boy; the quarrels, brutal beatings; the haste to secure a divorce; the contamination of the crowded hotels in Heron Lake, where this slender young girl—naturally pure, alert, quick of impulse—was like a lamb among lustful wolves. His heart ached for her.
The deep, slow voice of the lawyer sounded on. His eyes, turned toward her, had no equivocal look. He was a brother speaking to a younger sister. The tears fell down her cheeks, upon her folded hands. Her widely opened eyes seemed to look out into a night of storms.
"Oh, what shall I do?" she moaned. "I wish I was dead—and baby, too!"
"Live for the baby—let him help you out."
"Oh, he can't! I don't care enough for him. I wish I was like other mothers, but I'm not. I can't shut myself up with a baby. I'm too young."
He saw that. She was seeking the love of a man, not the care of a child. She had the wifely passion, but not the mother's love. He was silent; the case baffled him.
"Oh, I wish you could help me! I wish I had you to help me all the time! I do! I don't care what you think—I do! I do!"
"Our home is open to you and baby, too," he said, slowly. "My wife knows about you, and—"
"Who told her—did you?" she flashed out again, angrily, jealously.
"Yes. My wife is my other self," he replied, quietly.
She stared at him, breathing heavily, then looked out of the window again. At last she turned to him. She seemed to refer to his invitation.
"Oh, this terrible land! Oh, I couldn't stay here! I'd go insane. Perhaps I'm going insane, anyway. Don't you think so?"
"No, I think you're a little nervous, that's all."
"Oh! Do you think I'll get my divorce?"
"Certainly, without question."
"Can I wait and go back with you?"
"I shall not return for several days. Perhaps you couldn't bear to wait in this little town; it's not much like the city."
"Oh, dear! But I can't go about alone. I hate these men, they stare at me so! I wish I was a man. It's awful to be a woman, don't you think so? Please don't laugh."
The young lawyer was far from laughing, but this was her only way of defending herself. These pert, bird-like ways formed her shield against ridicule and misprision.
He said, slowly, "Yes, it's an awful thing to be a woman, but then it's an awful responsibility to be a man."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean that we are responsible, as the dominant sex, for every tragic, incomplete woman's life."
"Don't you blame Mrs. Shellberg?" she said, forcing him to a concrete example with savage swiftness.
"No. She had a poor father and a poor husband, and she must earn her own living some way."
"She could cook, or nurse, or something like that."
"It isn't easy to find opportunity to cook or nurse. If it were as easy to earn a living in a pure way as it is in a vicious way, all men would be rich and virtuous. But what had you planned to do after your divorce?"
"Oh, I'm going to travel for two years. Then I'll try to settle down."
"What you need is a good husband, and a little cottage where you'd have to cook your own food—and tend the baby."
"I wouldn't cook for any man living," she broke in, to express her bitterness that he could so coldly dispose of her future. "Oh, this terrible train! Can't it go faster? If I'd realized what a trip this was, I wouldn't have started."
"This is the route you all go," he replied, with grim humor, and his words pictured a ceaseless stream of divorcées.
She resented his classing her with the rest, but she simply said: "You despise me, don't you? But what can we do? You can't expect us to live with men we hate, can you? That would be worse than Mrs. Shellberg."
"No, I don't expect that of you. I'd issue a divorce coupon with every marriage certificate, and done with it," he said, in desperate disgust. "Then this whole cursed business would be done away with. It isn't a question of our laxity of divorce laws," he said, after a pause, "it's a question of the senseless severity of thelaws in other States. That's what throws this demoralizing business into our hands here."
"It pays, don't it? I know I've paid for everything I've had."
"Yes, that's the demoralizing thing. It draws a gang of conscienceless attorneys here, and it draws us who belong here off into dirty work, and it brings us into contact with men and women—I'm sick of the whole business."
She had hardly followed him in his generalizations. She brought him back to the personal.
"You're sick of me, I know you are!" She leaned her head on the window-pane. Her eyes closed. "Oh, I wish my heart would stop beating!" she said, in a tense, profoundly significant tone.
Allen, sitting so close behind them, was forced to overhear, so piercingly sweet was her voice. He trembled for fear some one else might hear her. It seemed like profanation that any one but God should listen to this outcry of a quivering, writhing soul.
She faced her companion again. "You're the only man I know, now, that I respect, and you despise me."
"No, I don't; I pity you."
"That's worse. I want you to help me. Oh, if you could go with me, or if I could be with you!" Her gloved hands strained together in the agony of her desire.
His calm lips did not waver. He did not smile, even about the eyes. He knew her cry sprang from her need of a brother, not from the passion of a woman.
"Our home is yours just as long as you can bearthe monotony of our simple lives," he said, in his quiet way, but it was deep-throated and unmistakable in its sincerity.
She laid her hand on his arm and clasped it hard, then turned away her head, and they rode in silence.
After they left the car Allen sat, with savage eyes and grimly set mouth, going over the problem again and again. He saw that young and helpless creature walking the gantlet between endless ranks of lustful, remorseless men, snatching at her in selfish, bestial desire.
It made him bitter and despairing to think that women should be helpless—that they should need some man to protect them against some other man. He cursed the laws and traditions that had kept women subordinate and trivial and deceptive and vacillating. He wished they could be raised to the level of the brutes till, like the tigress or she-wolf, they could not only defend themselves, but their young.
He tried to breathe a sigh of relief that she had gone out of his life, but he could not. It was not so easy to shake off the shadow of his responsibility. He followed her in imagination on her downward path till he saw her stretching out her hands in pitiful need to casual acquaintances—alone and without hope; still petite, still dainty in spite of all, still with flashes of wit, and then—
He shuddered. "O my God! Upon whom does the burden of guilt lie?"
On the night of his return he sat among his romping babes, debating whether he should tell the story to hiswife or not. As the little ones grew weary the noise of the autumn wind—the lonely, woful, moaning prairie wind—came to his ears, and he shuddered. His wife observed it.
"What is it, Joe? Did you get a chill?"
"Oh no. The wind sounds a little lonesome to-night, that's all." But he took his little girl into his arms and held her close.
AN ALIEN IN THE PINES
A man and a woman were pacing up and down the wintry station platform, waiting for a train. On every side the snow lay a stained and crumpled blanket, with here and there a light or a chimney to show the village sleeping beneath.
The sky was a purple-black hemisphere, out of which the stars glittered almost white. The wind came out of the west, cold but amiable; the cracked bell of a switch-engine gurgled querulously at intervals, followed by the bumping of coupling freight-cars; roosters were crowing, and sleepy train-men were assembling in sullen silence.
The couple walked with arms locked like lovers, but the tones of their voices had the quality which comes after marriage. They were man and wife.
The woman's clear voice arose. "Oh, Ed, isn't this delicious? What one misses by not getting up early!"
"Sleep, for instance," laughed her husband.
"Don't drag me down. You know what I mean. Let's get up early every morning while we're up here in the woods."
"Shouldn't wonder if we had to. There'll be a lot to do, and I want to get back to Chicago by the 1st of February."
"This is an experience! Isn't it still? When is our train due?"
"Due now; I think that is our headlight up the track."
As he spoke an engine added its voice to the growing noise of the station, and drew solemnly down the frosty steel.
An eruption of shapeless forms of men from the depot filled the one general coach of the train. They nearly all were dressed in some sort of fur coat, and all had the look of men accustomed to out-door life—powerful, loud-voiced, unrefined. They were, in fact, travelling men, business men, the owners of mills or timber. The stolid or patient ox-like faces of some Norwegian workmen, dressed in gay Mackinac jackets, were sprinkled about.
The young wife was a fine type of woman anywhere, but these surroundings made her seem very dainty and startlingly beautiful. Her husband had the fair skin of a city man, but his powerful shoulders and firm step denoted health and wholesome living. They were both good to look at.
They soon felt the reaction to sleepiness which comes to those not accustomed to early rising, and the wife, soothed by the clank of the train, leaned her head on her husband's shoulder and dozed. He looked out upon the landscape, glad that his wife was not observing it. He did not know such desolation existed in Wisconsin.
On every side were the evidences of a ruined forest land. A landscape of flat wastes, of thinned and burned and uprooted trees. A desolate and apparently useless land.
Here and there a sawmill stood gray and sagging, surrounded by little cabins of unpainted wood, to testify to the time when great pines stood all about, and the ring of the swamper's axe was heard in the intervals of silence between the howls of a saw.
To the north the swells grew larger. Birch and tamarack swamps alternated with dry ridges on which an inferior pine still grew. The swamps were dense tangles of broken and uprooted trees. Slender pike-like stumps of fire-devastated firs rose here and there, black and grim skeletons of trees.
It was a land that had been sheared by the axe, torn by the winds, and blasted by fire.
Off to the west low blue ridges rose, marking the boundaries of the valley which had been washed out ages ago by water. After the floods pine forest had sprung up, and these in their turn had been sheared away by man. It lay now awaiting the plough and seeder of the intrepid pioneer.
Suddenly the wife awoke and sat up. "Why, we haven't had any breakfast!"
He smiled at her childish look of bewilderment. "I've been painfully aware of it for some time back. I've been suffering for food while you slept."
"Why didn't you get into the basket?"
"How could I, with you on my manly bosom?"
She colored up a little. They had not been married long, evidently. "How considerate you are!"
They were soon eating a breakfast with the spirit of picnickers. Occasionally she looked out of the window.
"What a wild country!" she said. He did not emphasize its qualities to her; rather, he distracted her attention from its desolation.
The train roared round its curves, conforming with the general course of the river. On every hand were thickening signs of active lumber industry. They flashed by freight trains loaded with logs or lumber or ties. Mills in operation grew thicker.
The car echoed with the talk of lumber. A brisk man with a red mustache was exhibiting a model of a machine to cut certain parts of machinery out of "two by fours." Another was describing a new shingle-mill he had just built.
A couple of elderly men, one a German, were discussing the tariff on lumber. The workmen mainly sat silent.
"It's all so strange!" the young wife said, again and again.
"Yes, it isn't exactly the Lake Shore Drive."
"I like it. I wish I could smell the pines."
"You'll have all the pines you can stand before we get back to Chicago."
"No, sir; I'm going to enjoy every moment of it; and you're going to let me help, you know—look over papers, and all that. I'm the heiress, you must remember," she added, wickedly.
"Well, we won't quarrel about that until we see how the legacy turns out. It may not be worth my time up here. I shall charge you roundly as your lawyer, depend on that."
The outlook grew more attractive as the train sped on. Old Mosinee rose, a fine rounded blue shape, on the left.
"Why, there's a mountain! I didn't know Wisconsin had such a mountain as that."
"Neither did I. This valley is fine. Now, if your uncle's estates only included that hill!"
The valley made off to the northwest with a bold, large, and dignified movement. The coloring, blue and silver, purple-brown and bronze-green, was harmonious with the grouping of lines. It was all fresh and vital, wholesome and very impressive.
From this point the land grew wilder—that is to say, more primeval. There was more of Nature and less of man. The scar of the axe was here and there, but the forest predominated. The ridges of pine foliages broke against the sky, miles and miles, in splendid sweep.
"This must be lovely in summer," the wife said, again and again, as they flashed by some lake set among the hills.
"It's fine now," he replied, feeling the thrill of the sportsman. "I'd like to shoulder a rifle and plunge into those snowy vistas. How it brings the wild spirit out in a man! Women never feel that delight."
"Oh, yes, we do," she replied, glad that something remained yet unexplained between them. "We feeljust like men, only we haven't the strength of mind to demand a share of it with you."
"Yes, you feel it at this distance. You'd come back mighty quick the second night out."
She did not relish his laughter, and so looked away out of the window. "Just think of it—Uncle Edwin lived here thirty years!"
He forebore to notice her inconsistency. "Yes, the wilderness is all right for a vacation, but I prefer Chicago for the year round."
When they came upon Ridgeley, both cried out with delight.
"Oh, what a dear, picturesque little town!" she said.
"Well, well! I wonder how they came to build a town without a row of battlemented stores?"
It lay among and upon the sharp, low, stumpy pine ridges in haphazard fashion, like a Swiss village. A small brook ran through it, smothered here and there in snow. A sawmill was the largest figure of the town, and the railway station was the centre. There was not an inch of painted board in the village. Everywhere the clear yellow of the pine flamed unstained by time. Lumber piles filled all the lower levels near the creek. Evidently the town had been built along logging roads, and there was something grateful and admirable in its irregular arrangement. The houses, moreover, were all modifications of the logging camps; even the drug store stood with its side to the street. All about were stumps and fringes of pines, which the lumbermen, for somegood reason, had passed by. Charred boles stood purple-black out of the snow.
It was all green and gray and blue and yellow-white and stern. The sky was not more illimitable than the rugged forest which extended on every hand.
"Oh, this is glorious—glorious!" said the wife. "Do I own some of this town?" she asked, as they rose to go out.
"I reckon you do."
"Oh, I'm so glad!"
As they stepped out on the platform, a large man in corduroy and wolf-skin faced them like a bandit.
"Hello, Ed!"
"Hello, Jack! Well, we've found you. My wife, Mr. Ridgeley. We've come up to find out how much you've embezzled," he said, as Ridgeley pulled off an immense glove to shake hands all round.
"Well, come right over to the hotel. It ain't the Auditorium, but then, again, it ain't like sleeping outdoors."
As they moved along they heard the train go off, and then the sound of the saw resumed its domination of the village noises.
"Was the town named after you, or you after the town?" asked Field.
"Named after me. Old man didn't want it named after him; would kill it," he said.
Mr. and Mrs. Field found the hotel quite comfortable and the dinner wholesome. They beamed upon each other.
"It's going to be delightful," they said.
Ridgeley was a bachelor, and made his home at the hotel also. That night he said: "Now we'll go over the papers and records of your uncle's property, and then we'll go out and see if the property is all there. I imagine this is to be a searching investigation."
"You may well think it. My wife is inexorable."
As night fell, the wife did not feel so safe and well pleased. The loud talking in the office below and the occasional whooping of a crowd of mill-hands going by made her draw her chair nearer and lay her fingers in her husband's palm.
He smiled indulgently. "Don't be frightened, my dear. These men are not half so bad as they sound."
Mrs. Field sat in the inner room of Ridgeley's office, waiting for the return of her husband with the team. They were going out for a drive.
Ridgeley was working at his books, and he had forgotten her presence.
She could not but feel a deep admiration for his powerful frame and his quick, absorbed action as he moved about from his safe to his desk. He was a man of great force and ready decision.
Suddenly the door opened and a stranger entered. He had a sullen and bitter look on his thin, dark face. Ridgeley's quick eyes measured him, and his hand softlyturned the key in his money drawer, and as he faced about he swung shut the door of the safe.
The stranger saw all this with eyes as keen as Ridgeley's. A cheerless and strange smile came upon his face.
"Don't be alarmed," he said. "I'm low, but I ain't as low as that."
"Well, sir, what can I do for you?" asked Ridgeley. Mrs. Field half rose, feeling something tense and menacing in the attitude of the two men.
But the intruder quietly answered, "You can give me a job if you want to."
Ridgeley remained alert. His eyes ran over the man's tall frame. He looked strong and intelligent, although his eyes were fevered and dull.
"What kind of a job?"
"Any kind that will take me out into the woods and keep me there."
There was a self-accusing tone in his voice that Ridgeley felt.
"What's your object? You look like a man who could do something else. What brings you here?"
The man turned with a sudden resolution to punish himself. His voice expressed a terrible loathing.
"Whiskey, that's what. It's a hell of a thing to say, but I can't let liquor alone when I can smell it. I'm no common hand, or I wouldn't be if I—But let that go. I can swing an axe, and I'm ready to work. That's enough. Now the question is, can you find a place for me?"
Ridgeley mused a little. The young fellow stood there, statuesque, rebellious.
Then Ridgeley said, "I guess I can help you out that much." He picked up a card and a pencil. "What shall I call you?"
"Oh, call me Williams; that ain't my name, but it'll do."
"What you been doing?"
"Everything part of the time, drinking the rest. Was in a livery-stable down at Wausau last week. It came over me, when I woke yesterday, that I was gone to hell if I stayed in town. So I struck out; and I don't care for myself, but I've got a woman to look out for—" He stopped abruptly. His recklessness of mood had its limits, after all.
Ridgeley pencilled on a card. "Give this to the foreman of No. 6. The men over at the mill will show you the teams."
The man started toward the door with the card in his hand. He turned suddenly.
"One thing more. I want you to send ten dollars of my pay every two weeks to this address." He took an envelope out of his pocket. "It don't matter what I say or do after this, I want that money sent. The rest will keep me in tobacco and clothing. You understand?"
Ridgeley nodded. "Perfectly. I've seen such cases before."
The man went out and down the walk with a hurried, determined air, as if afraid to trust his own resolution.
As Ridgeley turned toward his desk he met Mrs. Field, who faced him with tears of fervent sympathy in her eyes.
"Isn't it awful?" she said, in a half whisper. "Poor fellow, what will become of him?"
"Oh, I don't know. He'll get along some way. Such fellows do. I've had 'em before. They try it awhile here; then they move. I can't worry about them."
Mrs. Field was not listening to his shifty words. "And then, think of his wife—how she must worry."
Ridgeley smiled. "Perhaps it's his mother or a sister."
"Anyway, it's awful. Can't something be done for him?"
"I guess we've done about all that can be done."
"Oh, I wish I could help him! I'll tell Ed about him."
"Don't worry about him, Mrs. Field; he ain't worth it."
"Oh yes, he is. I feel he's been a fine fellow, and then he's so self-accusing."
Her own happiness was so complete, she could not bear to think of others' misery. She told her husband about Williams, and ended by asking, "Can't we do something to help the poor fellow?"
Field was not deeply concerned. "No; he's probably past help. Such men are so set in their habits, nothing but a miracle or hypnotism can save them. He'll end up as a 'lumber Jack,' as the townsmen call the hands in the camps."
"But he isn't that, Edward. He's finer, some way. You feel he is. Ask Mr. Ridgeley."
Ridgeley merely said: "Yes, he seemed to me to be more than a common hand. But, all the same, it won't be two weeks before he'll be in here as drunk as a wild cat, wanting to shoot me for holding back his money."
In this way Williams came to be to Mrs. Field a very important figure in the landscape of that region. She often spoke of him, and on the following Saturday night, when Field came home, she anxiously asked, "Is Williams in town?"
"No, he hasn't shown up yet."
She clapped her hands in delight. "Good! good! He's going to win his fight."
Field laughed. "Don't bet on Williams too soon. We'll hear from him before the week is out."
"When are we going to visit the camp?" she asked, changing the subject.
"As soon as it warms up a little. It is too cold for you."
She had a laugh at him. "You were the one who wanted to 'plunge into the snowy vistas.'"
He evaded her joke on him by assuming a careless tone. "I'm not plunging as much as I was; the snow is too deep."
"When you go I want to go with you—I want to see Williams."
"Ha!" he snorted, melodramatically. "She scorns me faithful heart. She turns—"
Mrs. Field smiled faintly. "Don't joke about it, Ed. I can't get that wife out of my mind."
A few very cold gray days followed, and then the north wind cleared the sky; and, though it was still cold, it was pleasant. The sky had only a small white cloud here and there to make its blueness the more profound.
Ridgeley dashed up to the door with a hardy little pair of broncos hitched to a light pair of bobs, and Mrs. Field was tucked in like a babe in a cradle.
Almost the first thing she asked was, "How is Williams?"
"Oh, he's getting on nicely. He refused to sleep with his bunk-mate, and finally had to lick him, I understand, to shut him up. Challenged the whole camp, then, to let him alone or take a licking. They let him alone, Lawson says. G'lang there, you rats!"
Mrs. Field said no more, for the air was whizzing by her ears, and she hardly dared look out, so keen was the wind; but as soon as they entered the deeps of the forest it was profoundly still.
The ride that afternoon was a glory she never forgot. Everywhere yellow-greens and purple shadows. The sun in a burnished blue sky flooded the forests with light, striking down through even the thickest pines to lay in fleckings of radiant white and gold upon the snow.
The trail (it was not a road) ran like a graceful furrowover the hills, around little lakes covered deep with snow, through tamarack swamps where the tracks of wild things thickened, over ridges of tall pine clear of brush, and curving everywhere amid stumps, where dismantled old shanties marked the site of the older logging camps. Sometimes they met teams going to the store. Sometimes they crossed logging roads—wide, smooth tracks artificially iced, down which mountainous loads of logs were slipping, creaking, and groaning. Sometimes they heard the dry click-clock of the woodsmen's axes or the crash of falling trees deep in the wood. When they reached the first camp Ridgeley pulled up the steaming horses at the door and shouted, "Hello, the camp!"
A tall old man with a long red beard came out. He held one bare red arm above his eyes. He wore an apron.
"Hello, Sandy!"
"Hello, Mr. Ridgeley!"
"Ready for company?"
"Am always ready for company," he said, with a Scotch accent.
"Well, we're coming in to get warm."
"Vera weel."
As they went in, under the roofed shed between the cook's shanty and the other and larger shanty, Mrs. Field sniffed. Sandy led them past a large pyramid composed of the scraps of beef bones, egg-shells, cans, and tea grounds left over during the winter. In the shed itself hung great slabs of beef.
It was all as untidy and suggestive of slaughter as the nest of a brood of eagles.
Sandy was beginning dinner on a huge stove spotted with rust and pancake batter. All about was the litter of his preparation. Beef—beef on all sides, and tin dishes and bare benches and huge iron cooking-pans.
Mrs. Field was glad to get out into the sunlight again. "What a horrible place! Are they all like that?"
"No, my camps are not like that—or, I should say,ourcamps," Ridgeley added, with a smile.
"Not a gay place at all," said Field, in exaggerated reserve.
But Mrs. Field found her own camps not much better. True, the refuse was not raised in pyramidal shape before the front door, and the beef was a little more orderly, but the low log huts, the dim cold light, the dingy walls and floors, the lack of any womanly or home touch, the tin dishes, the wholesale cooking, all struck upon her with terrible force.
"Do human beings live here?" she asked Ridgeley, when he opened the door of the main shanty of No. 6.
"Forty creatures of the men kind sleep and house here," he replied.
"To which the socks and things give evidence," said Field, promptly, pointing toward the huge stove which sat like a rusty-red cheese in the centre of the room. Above it hung scores of ragged gray and red socks and Mackinac boots and jackets which had been washed by the men themselves.
Around were the grimy bunks where the forty menslept like tramps in a steamer's hold. The quilts were grimy, and the posts greasy and shining with the touch of hands. There were no chairs—only a kind of rude stool made of boards. There were benches near the stove, nailed to the rough floor. In each bunk, hanging to a peg, was the poor little imitation-leather hand-bag which contained the whole wardrobe of each man, exclusive of the tattered socks and shirts hanging over the stove.
The room was chill and cold and gray. It had only two small windows. Its doors were low. Even Mrs. Field was forced to stoop in entering. This helped to make it seem like a den. There were roller-towels in the corner and wash-basins, and a grindstone which made it seem like a barn. It was, in fact, more cheerless than a barn, and less wholesome.
"Doesn't that hay in the bunks get a—a—sometimes?" asked Field.
"Well, yes, I shouldn't wonder, though the men are pretty strict about that. They keep pretty free from bugs, I think. However, I shouldn't want to run no river chances on the thing myself." Ridgeley smiled at Mrs. Field's shudder of horror.
"Is this the place?" The men laughed. She had asked that question so many times before.
"Yes,thisis where Mr. Williams hangs out. Say, Field, you'll need to make some new move to hold your end up against Williams."
Mrs. Field felt hurt and angry at his rough joke. In the dim corner a cough was heard, and as a yellow headraised itself over the bunk-board a man presented a ghastly face. His big blue eyes fixed themselves on the lovely woman with a look of childish wonder.
"Hello, Gus—didn't see you! What's the matter—sick?"
"Yah, ai baen hwick two days. Ai tank ai lack to hav doketer."
"All right, I'll send him up. What seems the matter?"
As they talked, Mrs. Field again chilled with the cold gray comfortlessness of it all: to be sick in such a place! The silent appearance of the man out of his grim corner was startling. She was glad when they drove out into the woods again, where the clear sunshine fell and the pines stood against the blazing winter sky motionless as iron trees. Her pleasure in the ride was growing less. To her delicate sense this life was sordid, not picturesque. She wondered how Williams endured it. They arrived at No. 8 just as the men were trailing down the road to work, after eating their dinner. Their gay-colored jackets of Mackinac wool stood out like trumpet notes in the prevailing white and blue and bronze-green.
The boss and the sealer came out and met them, and after introductions they went into the shanty to dinner. The cook was a deft young Norwegian—a clean, quick, gentlemanly fellow with a fine brown mustache. He cleared a place for them at one end of the long table, and they sat down.
It was a large camp, but much like the others. On the table were the same cheap iron forks, the tin plates,and the small tin basins (for tea) which made up the dinner-set. Basins of brown sugar stood about.
"Good gracious! Do people still eat brown sugar? Why, I haven't seen any of that for ages!" cried Mrs. Field.
The stew was good and savory, and the bread fair. The tea was not all clover, but it tasted of the tin. Mrs. Field said:
"Beef, beef—everywhere beef. One might suppose a menagerie of desert animals ate here. Edward, we must make things more comfortable for our men. They must have cups to drink out of; these basins are horrible."
It was humorous to the men, this housewifely suggestion.
"Oh, make it napkins, Allie!"
"You can laugh, but I sha'n't rest after seeing this. If you thought I was going to say, 'Oh, how picturesque!' you're mistaken. I think it's barbarous."
She was getting impatient of their patronizing laughter, as if she were a child. They changed their manner to one of acquiescence, but thought of her as a child just the same.
After dinner they all went out to see the crew working. It was the biggest crew anywhere in the neighborhood. Ridgeley got out and hitched the team to a tree, and took Field up to the skidway. Mrs. Field remained in the sleigh.
Near her "the swamping team," a span of big, deep-red oxen, came and went among the green tops of thefallen pines. They crawled along their trails in the snow like some strange machinery, and the boy in a blue jacket moved almost as listlessly. Somewhere in the tangle of refuse boughs the swampers' axes click-clocked, saws uttered their grating, rhythmic snarl, and great trees at intervals shivered, groaned, and fell with soft, rushing, cracking sweeps into the deep snow, and the swampers swarmed upon them like Lilliputians attacking a giant enemy.
There was something splendid (though tragic) in the work, but the thought of the homelessness of the men, their terrible beds, and their long hours of toil oppressed the delicate and refined woman. She began to take on culpability. She was partly in authority now, and this system must be changed. She was deep in plans for improvement, in shanties and in sleeping-places, when the men returned.
Ridgeley was saying: "No, we control about thirty thousand acres of pine as good as that. It ain't what it was twenty years ago, but it's worth money, after all."
It was getting near to dark as they reached No. 6 again, and Ridgeley drew up and helped them out and into the cook's shanty.
Mrs. Field was introduced to the cook, a short, rather sullen, but intelligent man. He stood over the red-hot stove, laying great slices of beef in a huge dripping-pan. He had a taffler, or assistant, in the person of a half-grown boy, at whom he jerked rough orders like hunks of stove wood. Some hit the boy and produced noticeable effects, others did not.
Meanwhile a triumphant sunset was making the west one splendor of purple and orange and crimson, which came over the cool green rim of the pines like theValhalla Marchin Wagner.
Mrs. Field sat there in the dim room by the window, seeing that splendor flush and fade, and thinking how dangerous it was to ask where one's wealth comes from in the world. Outside, the voices of the men thickened; they were dropping in by twos and fours, with teams and on foot.
The assistant arranged the basins in rows, and put one of the iron forks and knives on either side of each plate, and filled the sugar-basins, and dumped in the cold beans, and split the bread into slabs, and put small pots of tea here and there ready for the hands of the men.
At last, when the big pans of toast, the big plates of beef, were placed steaming on the table, the cook called Field and Ridgeley, and said:
"Set right here at the end." He raised his arm to a ring which dangled on a wire. "Now look out; you'll see 'em come—sidewise." He jerked the ring, and disappeared into the kitchen.
A sudden tumult, shouts, trampling, laughter, and the door burst open and they streamed in: Norwegians, French, half-breeds—dark-skinned fellows, all of them, save the Norwegians. They came like a flood, but they fell silent at sight of a woman, so beautiful and strange to them.
All words ceased. They sank into place beside the table with the thump of falling sand-bags. They wereall in their shirt-sleeves, but with faces cleanly washed, and the most of them had combed their hair; but they seemed very wild and hairy to Mrs. Field. She looked at her husband and Ridgeley with a grateful pleasure; it was so restful to have them close beside her.
The men ate like hungry dogs. They gorged in silence. Nothing was heard but the clank of knives on tin plates, the drop of heavy platters of food, and the occasional muttered words of some one asking for the bread or the gravy.
As they ate they furtively looked with great curiosity and admiration up at the dainty woman. Their eyes were bright and large, and gleamed out of the obscure brown of their dimly lighted faces with savage intensity—so it seemed to Mrs. Field, and she dropped her eyes before their glare.
Her husband and Ridgeley tried to enter into conversation with those sitting near. Ridgeley seemed on good terms with them all, and ventured a joke or word, at which they laughed with terrific energy, and fell as suddenly silent again.
As Mrs. Field looked up the second time she saw the dark, strange face of Williams a few places down, and opposite her. His eyes were fixed on her husband's hands with a singular intensity. Her eyes followed his, and the beauty of her husband's hands came to her again with new force. They were perfectly shaped, supple, warm-colored, and strong. Their color and deftness stood out in vivid contrast to the heavy, brown, cracked, and calloused, paw-like hands of the workmen.
Why should Williams study her husband's hands? If he had looked at her she would not have been surprised. The other men she could read. They expressed either frank, simple admiration or furtive desire. But this man looked at her husband, and his eyes fell often upon his own hands, which trembled with fatigue. He handled his knife clumsily, and yet she could see he, too, had a fine hand—a slender, powerful hand, like that people call an artist hand—a craftsman-like hand.
He saw her looking at him, and he flashed one enigmatical glance into her eyes, and rose to go out.
"How you getting on, Williams?" Ridgeley asked.
Williams resented his question. "Oh, I'm all right," he said, sullenly.
The meal was all over in an incredibly short time. One by one, two by two, they rose heavily and lumbered out with one last, wistful look at Mrs. Field. She will never know how seraphic she seemed sitting there amid those rough surroundings—the dim, red light of the kerosene lamp falling across her clear pallor, out of which her dark eyes shone with liquid softness, made deeper and darker by her half-sorrowful tenderness for these homeless fellows.
An hour later, as they were standing at the door, just ready to take to their sleigh, they heard the scraping of a fiddle.
"Oh, some one is going to play!" Mrs. Field cried, with visions of the rollicking good times she had heard so much about, and of which she had seen nothing so far. "Can't I look in?"
Ridgeley was dubious. "I'll go and see," he said, and entered the door. "Boys, Mrs. Field wants to look in a minute. Go on with your fiddling, Sam—only I wanted to see that you weren't sitting around in dishabill."
This seemed a good joke, and they all howled and haw-hawed gleefully.
"So go right ahead with your evening prayers. All but—you understand!"
"All right, captain," said Sam, the man with the fiddle.
When Mrs. Field looked in, two men were furiously grinding axes; several were sewing on ragged garments; all were smoking; some were dressing chapped or bruised fingers. The atmosphere was horrible. The socks and shirts were steaming above the huge stove; the smoke and stench for a moment were sickening, but Ridgeley pushed them just inside the door.
"It's better out of the draught."
Sam jigged away on the violin. The men kept time with the cranks of the grindstone, and all faces turned with bashful smiles and bold grins at Mrs. Field. Most of them shrank a little from her look, like shy animals.
Ridgeley threw open the window. "In the old days," he explained to Mrs. Field, "we used a fireplace, and that kept the air better."
As her sense of smell became deadened the air seemed a little more tolerable to Mrs. Field.
"Oh, we must change all this," she said. "It is horrible."
"Play us a tune," said Sam, extending the violin toField. He did not think Field could play. It was merely a shot in the dark on his part.
Field took it and looked at it and sounded it. On every side the men turned face in eager expectancy.
"He can play, that feller."
"I'll bet he can. He handles her as if he knew her."
"You bet your life. Tune up, Cap."
Williams came from the obscurity somewhere, and looked over the shoulders of the men.
"Down in front!" somebody called, and the men took seats on the benches, leaving Field standing with the violin in hand. He smiled around upon them in a frank, pleased way, quite ready to show his skill. He playedAnnie Laurie, and a storm of applause broke out.
"Hoo-ray!Bully for you!"
"Sam, you're out of it!"
"Sam, your name is Mud!"
"Give us another, Cap!"
"It ain't the same fiddle!"
He played again some simple tune, and he played it with the touch which showed the skilled amateur. As he played, Mrs. Field noticed a growing restlessness on Williams' part. He moved about uneasily. He gnawed at his finger-nails. His eyes glowed with a singular fire. His hands drummed and fingered. At last he approached, and said, roughly:
"Let me take that fiddle a minute."
"Oh, cheese it, Williams!" the men cried. "Let the other man play."
"What doyouwant to do with the fiddle—think it's a music-box?" asked Sam, its owner.
"Go to hell!" said Williams. As Field gave the violin over to him, his hands seemed to tremble with eagerness.
He raised his bow, and struck into an imposing, brilliant strain, and the men fell back in astonishment.
"Well, I'll be damned!" gasped the owner of the violin.
"Keep quiet, Sam."
Mrs. Field looked at her husband. "Why, Ed, he is playingSarasate!"
"That's what he is," he returned, slangily, too much astonished to do more than gaze. Williams played on.
There was a faint defect in the high notes, as if his fingers did not touch the strings properly, but his bow action showed cultivation and breadth of feeling. As he struck into one of those difficult octave-leaping movements his face became savage. On the E string a squeal broke forth; he flung the violin into Sam's lap with a ferocious curse, and then, extending his hands, hard, crooked to fit the axe-helve, calloused and chapped, he said to Field:
"Look at my hands! Lovely things to play with, aren't they?"
His voice trembled with passion. He turned and went outside. As he passed Mrs. Field his head was bowed, and he was uttering a groaning cry like one suffering physical pain.
"That's what drink does for a man," Ridgeley said, as they watched Williams disappear down the swampers' trail.
"That man has been a violinist," said Field. "What's he doing up here?"
"Came to get away from himself, I guess," Ridgeley replied.
"I'm afraid he's failed," said Field, as he put his arm about his wife and led her to the sleigh.
The ride home was made mainly in silence. "Oh, the splendid stillness!" the woman kept saying in her heart. "Oh, the splendid moonlight, the marvellous radiance!" Everywhere a heavenly serenity—not a footstep, not a bell, not a cry, not a cracking tree—nothing but vivid light, white snow dappled and lined with shadows, and trees etched against a starlit sky. Unutterable splendor of light and sheen and shadow. Wide wastes of snow so white the stumps stood like columns of charcoal. A night of Nature's making, when she is tired of noise and blare of color.
And in the midst of it stood the camp, with its reek of obscenity, foul odors, and tobacco smoke, to which a tortured soul must return.
The following Saturday afternoon, as Ridgeley and Field entered the office, Williams rose to meet them. He looked different—finer some way, Field imagined. At any rate, he was perfectly sober. He was freshly shaven, and though his clothes were rough, he appeared the man of education he really was. His manner was cold and distant.
"I'd like to be paid off, Mr. Ridgeley," he said. "I guess what's left of my pay will take me out of this."
"Where do you propose to go?" Ridgeley asked, with kindly interest.
Williams must have perceived his kindliness, for he answered: "I'm going home to my wife, to my violin. I am going to try living once more."
After he had gone out, Field said, "I wonder if he'll do it?"
"Oh, I shouldn't wonder. I've seen men brace up just as mysteriously as that and stay right by their resolutions. I thought he didn't look like a common lumber Jack when he came in."
"Ed, your playing did it!" Mrs. Field cried, when she heard of Williams' resolution. "Oh, how happy his wife will be! She'll save him yet!"
"Well, I don't know; depends on what kind of a woman she is."