VI.A BAD BARGAIN.
“It is well to pay your debts, on the chance you’ll lose your money.”
Infour days’ time Black received a letter from the paralysis specialist that delighted him. It consisted solely of questions regarding trains and Soot City conveyances and the distance from the station to the patient’s abiding place. To the genial undertaker intercourse with a man too busy to con a time-table was social promotion.
He went at once to Emma, andin a mixed state of reverence and elation read her the physician’s curt note, with his own copious comment.
“Sounds ’cute, don’t he?” said Black. “He knows I understand him. It must be a kind of comfort to him comin’ to a strange place to find a man of his own stamp who feels just his way about the game o’ life.”
Putting his tongue in his cheek, he was soon lost in wonder to find himself, after long years of comparative obscurity, so very like this shining light of medical science.
Emma almost said her thought aloud; it was well she did not, for she was saying inwardly, “You can always tell when Jerry Black’s beento the city, he has such an extra green look.”
With Martha Long for aid, she prepared for the doctor joyfully. They washed everything just for the love of the unaccustomed, that seizes women under suspense. Everything had been washed for the wedding, and was still much cleaner than its ordinary state. There was one day when the house-cleaning was finished and the doctor not yet come; so Martha undertook a little rudimentary cooking, and Emma raked up the little space of yard and dug out the weeds from the beds of cinder-spotted marigolds.
She tended Jarlsen more and more, and the friendliness Marthashowed toward her pleased her mightily. She would take her to the Swede’s bed and show her how his looks were coming back, and then, forgetful of her presence, would stand in silent wonder at the expression of wisdom fast becoming habitual to him.
He seemed to know more of what was, and is, and is to be, than any of the people she had seen, and he had not seemed so wise when he had lips wherewith to speak wisely. For a half hour and more she would sometimes watch him, unconscious of time, and at last a fit of longing, like a mother’s, would bend her to him. Anxious for his thoughts, she would put her hand on his temple as if feeling for them. He wouldsmile and say “Emma”; then her blushes would come as they had when he was a bright mystery to her, because she dared not raise her eyes to his face; and she took the utterance of her name as an answer to her craving.
Quarry and her father had become cares she could not shoulder; she simply could not think of them. Quarry never returned from work without company, and he and his friends would sit in the yard on Emma’s chairs, which they carried from the kitchen without her permission. In a man she liked, this proceeding might have been annoying; but from Quarry it was a liberty that was enraging.
One day Emma heard him stirringup strife with his tongue; he was a fascinating speaker, even when—as the Swedes said—he “talked beside his mouth,” which is their idiom for conversational embellishment.
She called him to her. “Send them away,” she said shortly.
Without a word of dissent he made them move, and Mr. Butte shambled out to bring in the chairs.
“Take them in yourself,” she called wickedly. “You was strong enough to get them out there.”
With a more sullen compliance he put them just within the narrow doorsill.
Still she eyed him with her mouth stretched into somethinglike a smile. “Put ’em in their places,” she said.
Again Quarry obeyed her.
Then her contemptuous smile became laughter. “You wouldn’t hev done thet ef you hedn’t got wind of what I’m goin’ to even to you. See here—you talk too much. Would you talk less if you had more money? I guess maybe. Here’s what you said at Martha Long’s party. You showed how it was a good thing August Jarlsen got the blast, because I kind o’ leaned toward you latterly. And as for you, you says you’d always leaned toward me, and it was better to have August Jarlsen saved learnin’ it.” The girl covered him with her tragic eyes, and expressedher own strong instinct in a gesture she had learned from the Polacks—she crossed herself with a rapid hand. She had never before felt Quarry to be so evil. “Now,” she said, “fifty dollars if you’ll stop that!”
For a moment delight leaped from his eyes. He threw out his hand; then he looked at her darkly, his expression altered to one of fear and misgiving.
“All right,” he said finally.
“Well, I’ll pay you later,” said Emma, and every word she spoke cut like a whip, her voice was so shrill with contemptuous anger.
She was a young girl, and had hoped he would not take the money; partly because she didn’twish to believe that he could be mean enough to take it from her, when he knew that he was the last person the Swede would give it to, had he any longer the power to give.
Her lips shrank away from her teeth in contemptuous, writhing smiles when she thought of it.
She scarcely knew how to array herself for the doctor’s visit. She wanted to impress him with a sense of her fitness to nurse the patient. She had had visions of Jarlsen’s departure in an ambulance for some city hospital, where a uniformed woman would hear his groans and heed them for hire only.
Quarry knew nothing of the doctor’s advent. Emma understoodthat he would talk about it, and that her enemies would say she must be sure of Jarlsen’s death when she dared let loose a first-class pill-man on him.
Then, besides, the Englishman was unreasonable and iterative, like many Englishmen; and she knew how he would search his mind for ways to tell her that Jarlsen was as good as dead already. “I ought to pay him right away, or he’ll do a little of his fancy talkin’, maybe.”
Black went to the station in a funeral carriage, which was the more imposing as there were but four in Soot City. (Casually—he paid toll on the turnpike for the eight horses that drew these vehicles, and theywere always taxed as “pleasure teams.” Again casually—he saw no joke in this, even when the mourners received legacies.) He wore a red tie with his black, professionally sombre clothes, and this he did as he would not imply Jarlsen’s death to the doctor, in case the physician should be standing on the platform and should see him before he could get speech of him. Black employed his imagination in this sort of futile arrangement of improbable circumstance.
On the doctor’s arrival they drove directly to the Buttes. They alighted at the Bridge and saw thence to Emma’s doorway, where Quarry was standing. He looked as though he had had rum in histea, and as if even that had not reconciled him to existence.
“Where’s Emma?” he asked of Black.
“She’s in with August. Dr. Brent, this gentleman lives here; he’s an old friend of Mr. Butte’s, and Mr. Jarlsen’s too, I may say.”
Quarry, returned in the noon recess to find a perfect stranger about to invade the house; did not understand the situation, as was very evident. He grinned absently, and went toward Jarlsen’s room door.
“Emma, come out here.” His tone was wheedling, and his fingers were tapping nervously on the wall. She came out to him quickly; her eyes were bright and her face was full of a vigorous hope.
“Hurry up!” she said; “I want to bring the doctor in.”
“Could you oblige me with the trifle you named Thursday? I want to blow it right in this noon.”
Emma thought it wise to pay him at once, although her heart was beating in her ears—she longed so for the doctor’s opinion on Jarlsen. She hesitated, and then said: “It is in the wallet between the shake-downs in the lean-to chamber. Put it back where you found it.”
She forgot him as she greeted the doctor; her whole mind was full of the Swede.