III.THE BLAST RITE.
“Sometimes if you make ready for bad luck it doesn’t come.”
Noone in Soot City was surprised at a funeral for a man yet in the flesh. Such rites were a custom in the terrible, black little town, where the birds flew low for the damp of steam and the prevalence of soot in the air, and where any fine man who took life eagerly in the morning might be blasted at the noontide snack.
The Scandinavian labourers gavea tone to all the customs of the town, as the Polacks gave an intensity to all its dissipations. The drink of expatriated Poland is crude alcohol and water, and their drunkenness is a restless insanity that would be murderous in a less childish people. One idea that is directly referable to the Swede minds is that which gave rise to the blast rites. Their feeling had become general that a man might “get beyond the blast”—that is, get over its scorch and shock—if only his friends could be brought to behave as if he were really dead.
Emma was more than Norse in her superstitious observances. She would put a handful of soil from her bit of garden into her weddingshoes, just like any tow-headed bride in the Swede quarter. This was called “getting the favour of home.” It was very solemn, and often followed by hysterics.
But the circumstances of Jarlsen’s mishap favoured the idea of complete death. He had left a paper with his landlord, “Wavering Jim,” providing for Emma in case of “death, accident, or blast.” It wasn’t a legalized proceeding, but the ignorance of Soot City respected writing beyond most things, and no one would dispute a paper with names signed to it. The three hundred dollars coming thus yearly to Emma would mean a great deal of comfort to her.
The blast rite was to be at Emma’shouse, as Jarlsen’s body was as much an essential to it as if there could have been a sequent interment. The men came in and out a good deal and whispered as to how to tell Emma of her legacy, for every one felt it would be unbecoming to force the news on her. The way in which they broke it to her would have been tactful even for gentlemen.
Wavering Jim came down the tracks in an ore car that sided by the Buttes’s gate every night. He didn’t get out of it, but waved his hand to her. Emma guessed that he wanted to say something in private, and went to the gate to hear it. “Well,” he said, “the weather ain’t stopped bein’ fine, cert’in’y.”Emma knew it must be something very important to call for a preamble as ornate as this remark about the weather.
Jim paused and looked about him. “Quarry ain’t in,” said Emma instinctively. “Emma,” he said, “I’m stone sure you’re frettin’ yourself into a terrible chafe ’bout gettin’ Mr. Jarlsen proper accommodations, regardin’ soup, soft victual, and invalid’s board generally.”
The girl’s eyes bulged with apprehension. “We don’t want no subscription papers for us, and if Miss Bentley sends her soup here I’ll water the flowers with it. We ain’t no Stonepasture poverty yet, to drink the dishwater outer By theBridge kitchen. He can’t eat nothing but what I get and cook.”
“Now jest dry up, Emma Butte,” said Jim very gently; “old sheep Bentley with her soup and her weepin’ ain’t goin’ to come soothin’ and scratchin’ ’round this yard. Jarlsen left a little paper with me that fixes that. All that you’ve got to do is to practise your signature on his papers in the presence of a few old friends. He grabbed considerable ’fore he was taken,” said Jim sympathetically. Leaving the car, he walked nimbly down tracks. No one understands the Godsend news is, in a labouring community. Jim felt elated that he had lodged a man who had money to look after. Thisvicarious business transaction was the biggest in his life.
Then the undertaker called that evening. He made the same announcement. Small and sympathetic, he threw a cheerfulness into all his sombre doings. He was a rarely lovely man, and had as little jealousy as a sleeping child. He attended blast rites where he never made a penny, as faithfully as he did funerals whereby he supported himself and his friends.
His family were four striped cats.
He was extremely fond of prayers and hymns, and, consequently, women. The men never guessed it of him. They knew that he would lend money, but had not yet discovered that, hadthey been able to repeat a sacred stanza, they need not have repaid him.
Emma’s heart beat fast with gratitude when Jeremy Black kissed her. She felt all along that one of the women might have done so, and it added to her uneasiness about Quarry’s visiting, for he would look at her and smile, and then wag his shaggy head, as he had always done when he had been about the Tracks telling lies.
She held little, black-coated Jerry very close to her, as disappointed children hug the family cat or dog. The day before she had gone in to kiss Jarlsen, but his poor face was sore with scorch and his side was bruised from where the blast threwhim. So she had spread her longing hands over him in realization that the women wouldn’t love the barber and that her man couldn’t see her sorrow.
Jeremy was immensely pleased with her. He came soon to the subject of the blast rite, and arranged it in his deprecating way, holding his barber’s brown hand against his side and calling her Jarlsen’s love names, but in a safe, motherly voice that made Emma sure she need not fear the women even if they saw her with him. “Now, Emma, you can’t get a regular preacher to pray over anything but a sure and cold corpse, so we’ll get Quarry to say the sermon, alludin’ to past virtues and the futurecrown. It’ll make things right with Quarry, who ain’t the Tracks’ darling just exactly, and I’ll take the prayers myself. Then the Polacks will fiddle and I’ll sing ‘The land beyond the sky’ and ‘Peace comes after pain’—that’s a nice song, perfectly novel, with three acts and a chorus. I won’t let on it has a chorus, for them Polacks is so insaturated with alcohol they might get things noisy.”
“But do speak good and loud,” said Emma, “for August might hear something to please him.”
“That’s right,” said Jerry, “don’t you lose your grit. You kin never tell how far a man will get beyond the blast with good nursing.”
Every one knew that Jarlsen wasstone-deaf since the blast, and Emma spoke of his hearing the—in one sense—post-mortem eulogies from a desire to combat the idea. Perhaps Jeremy feared she might appeal to him for encouragement on this point, for he hurried on to the next.
“Since the beloved lips is silent, I expect I’m the first singer in the city. He had a way of doing gargles on the upper notes that would beat a seraph singing. But I’m goin’ to organize as notional a rite as I can, bringing forty years of experience, man and boy, to bear on this one sad occasion. It’ll be the blasted best blast rite ever you saw. It’s queer they can’t cover them blasts or get the men off in time,or so’s they won’t touch the torch to it before the word’s given! I’ve had some corpses in two years from blasts, and all jest es ragged and singed es could be, let alone the blasts that’s lying deaf and blind round the city yet!”
The day of the mock-death service dawned clear and bright, which was held to be bad by the weather-weird-wise, as the Scotch among them said. Quarry had rum in his tea as early as 6A. M.He was always up early on rum days, but he beat his own precedent this morning.
He insisted upon setting the house in readiness. He had formed a habit of talking to himself since he had grown fearful of committinghimself with talking to the other men, for Quarry had many things to hide, and knew his limitations as regarded discretion. His main thought was that he would rather spend money on what was only an approach to Jarlsen’s corpse than hoard it. Besides that, he had the cosy consciousness that it had looked friendly when he and Emma had issued together from her room on the night when Jarlsen came singed to his wedding dance.
“The greatest thing happened me since my first drink,” he kept saying like a refrain, as he cut long festoons of coloured paper to hang about the mantel and the thinly gilt picture frames. He went By the Bridge to Jarlsen’s old room, which wasstill in some confusion, with his working clothes tossed aside by Wavering Jim. Jarlsen had folded them neatly when he had donned his wedding suit to go pay off the men. It was Jarlsen’s portrait in crayon that Quarry had come for. He tied it up with a lank bow-knot of cheapcrêpe, and laughed in real mirth.
“Now, Jarlsen,” he said in banter, “I do seem to see myself somehow in the glass over your portrait. Funny, ain’t it?”
By the Bridge he purchased five sticks of pretzels, for in Soot City long sticks are run by venders through these open-work wares.
When all was ready at the Buttes’s, he helped lift the big Swede from Emma’s cot to thekitchen table. He was dressed, of course, in what was to have been his wedding suit, and the odd lengths of hair that were left him were brushed out on either side of his head to make a good show. His beard had not grown on one cheek, and Quarry surveyed him with great satisfaction. “Seems they’ve kind o’ singed them right-hand glands where the hair starts out,” he said. “It’s real hard to keep your complexion right here.”
Emma had been sleeping on a couple of ironing boards laid on the hard clay of the lean-to where the pans and scant house-tackle were kept. The thought of hardship had not occurred to her. She had saved her heartbroken minutesfor the sordid privacy of the chill lean-to. The place had for her the charm of liberty, which, we are told, is the charm of paradise itself.
Her behaviour was not very agonized. She crouched on the blanketed boards and courted the slow tears that crept from her eyes and were healing to her hurt. They alone relieved her; and sometimes, when they would not come, she would grip the scant old skirt that covered her and pray in a loud whisper, with the vital faith of the poor.
When she woke on the morning of the blast rite they had already moved Jarlsen. He lay on the table, roused, but baffled by the strange dimness in him. No voicesand no light could come into his world except through memory; he was heir to a limitless pain in the sense of tyrannic suppression that possessed him.
Etiquette assigned Emma the place by the stove. She took it at once as the mourners were gathering rapidly. The company at the wedding dance was indistinguishable in the crowd of to-day.
There were many operatives and all the foremen—of the new vein, the nutt, and bolt factory, etc. These last had their clerks in attendance. Miss Bentley came among the first arrivals, bringing Emma sweet crackers and a hymn-book.
And Emma cursed her—a great,ignorant, insolent, heartfelt curse—because she thought these things could console her; things the Misses Bentley would never offer each other if their men had the blast. But Miss Bentley was one more of those devout women, not a few, who, because of a congenital shyness, can not do a kindness kindly. Emma would have given thanks for the same things given another way.
The foremen also brought their wives, worthy women with sleek children, who consumed many pretzels with a brisk crunching that annoyed Emma greatly. She wanted people to be sad and unable to eat; to be upset with the trouble that had faded out her futurewith one too vivid moment of pain.
Quarry sat at a table that was covered with a white cloth. Upon this lay a Bible and a bound time-table. The fitness of this was in the binding, which was ecclesiastically purple.
The table was flanked by the Polacks, looking wretched, as if they had wept all night and grieved since morning on empty stomachs. They tuned their fiddles with writhing faces, and played the “Land o’ the Leal,” as the remaining space in Emma’s kitchen was being filled with the less shy among the labourers. The others stood at the open windows where the sunlight should have been.
Jeremy Black offered prayer, shyly enough, for the Methodist minister was attending as a layman. He prayed for this and that, rather inconsequently, and with a red face; but Emma liked it better than anything else in the service. It was like her own prayer of last night: “O Lord, thou knowest what I want and what I don’t want. Please don’t send me what I don’t want. Good-night.” Even to God Emma could not name Jarlsen’s death.
Her father came in at the climax of Jerry’s petition. He shook his head at Jarlsen’s big, quiet shape on the table, and announced in a voice that shook with emotion that “young men would be young men.” No one but Emma was galled withthis needlessly irrelevant statement. In the less book-learned phases of life many people use expressions just because they admire them, not because they express their feeling, their fancy, or a fact. It is no more to be wondered at than the prayers they make, which would read like telegraphic messages in a High Church congregation.
After his prayer Jerry sang. It is confessed that he sang less for art than for audience. He loved to sing. His voice was thin and rather sweet; his intonation very sure and happy. He contrived to infuse a wistfulness into the most martial or condemnatory ballads, types of song he particularly affected.
There is always a good deal of preface to singing like his, and he was not above throat-clearing and loud swallowing. The verse he sang had been used at blast rites since the Swedes came first to Soot City. Its refrain was sung softly by every one to an accompaniment of rocking bodies:
“Don’t fret, old wife, nor cry,For God won’t pass you by;He may come late, but if you wait,You’ll get behind the sky.”
“Don’t fret, old wife, nor cry,For God won’t pass you by;He may come late, but if you wait,You’ll get behind the sky.”
“Don’t fret, old wife, nor cry,For God won’t pass you by;He may come late, but if you wait,You’ll get behind the sky.”
“Don’t fret, old wife, nor cry,
For God won’t pass you by;
He may come late, but if you wait,
You’ll get behind the sky.”
Then Quarry rose with some pomp and spoke thus: “Ladies and friends: Some lives is all chair-cars and champagne; some lives is neither. I’m not saying what they are, for this is no time to start more tears. Some feels the whip,some wears the willow, some gets their own way. These last says the skimpiest ‘Glory be to God!’
“This house is a house of mourning. The one ewe lamb went to the pasture, and come home bit by the wolf! Here to-day, there to-morrow! Our God is a very fearful thing!”
Quarry was considered an orator in Soot City. He always spoke at social functions and stirred his audiences.
“This man”—here the blackest Polack snorted like the report of firearms, and every one at the sound burst into weeping—“this man,” screamed Quarry, strengthening his effect, “was a good man! He knew ten at night as well asthe town clock. He was a Christian gentleman, and done as well by his friends as he did by the chapel, and what more can a man do? In passing out, those that knowed him good, or any of the men that were pretty common with him, can put their hands on his hand, as some has the feelin’ it’s best.”
Thereupon Quarry made way for himself to the kitchen table, and stood striving against a triumph so strong that it seemed a physical sensation. And Jarlsen lay scorched, inert, and blasted.
To any one knowing the old Saxon custom of touching a corpse as a means of finding its unconfessed murderer the scene wouldhave been more intense from the moment that the first hand—a woman’s—was laid on the least sore member of Jarlsen’s wrecked body.
None but Miss Bentley knew that the custom was a primitive habit of the race. She alone had a vision of spurting blood as the guilty hand touched its victim. That vision was usual to her at the blast rites, and she felt a strange thrill of uncertainty when she put her own innocent, helping hand on a blasted labourer.
The greater part of the crowd strolled off, subdued, into the bright morning. The rest lingered to lay hands on an old friend.
Jarlsen, the man who had givenhis ear to their sorrows and lent his high, searching voice to all their social joys, was virtually dead to them; and it was in tense silence that the heavy-footed workmen approached the table. Then there would be a sobbing sigh, and some one would pass out at the door. Few people can touch the dead without tears, and as Jerry Black said, “The blasts is dead men with live tongues.”
They had all gone; the room grew light as the crowd moved from the windows. Sunlight bathed the floor at Emma’s feet, and Black stood beside her, knowing she feared to be without him when Jarlsen was deaf to her and Quarry spoke his kind of love to her, andher father was only a peevish old child. Quarry laid a nervous hand on Jarlsen, who had been roused more than once through his tactile sense as some old friend’s hand had lain for a moment on his.
When Quarry’s touch fell on him, he cried out, “O Emma, Emma! am I dead, that I can not hear you? Is your voice gone behind the sky, that you hold your mouth yet? Is your hand cut off you? Don’t marry Quarry till I am home again! Emma, tell me where you are. It is all black inside me!”
Emma leaped to him. She was “swift as a wicked cat,” Quarry told her later on when he cursed her.
She hurt him cruelly, but Jarlsensmiled, and his blackened face grew brighter. “I shall not marry until Heaven—” she vowed, but he could not hear. The pain of her embrace was fearful, but she clung fast, and called out in her big voice the loyalty he longed for and that he felt in the suffering her strong arms caused him, even though he could not hear.
And then Jerry touched her. “I’m afraid he’s fainted,” he said, as though he apologized.