X.QUARRY RECKONS WITHOUT HISHOSTESS.
“Strife’s a poor thing to come home to.”
Intwo days’ time Emma was “settled in.” Hers was an odd house for the Stonepastures. She paid no rent for it, but there were curtains at the windows and a shoe-scraper and a mat at the door. She had not been up an hour on her first morning before the grass around the house was cut down with a borrowed sickle. The objectless, listless denizens of the district watched herwith some pleasure. They had no individual life, merely existing as a class and watching the individuality of others take shape in thrift and then in prosperity with a dull envy. One man said she “hed a peck of ambition” in a tone that meant on the Pastures, in “Calamity Row,” that any endeavour to better one’s self comes to confusion.
At first the big boulders depressed her somewhat, but Jerry told her she could “garden on them” in the summer time; and, indeed, flowers could grow from the thin soil that edged them. For two weeks and more she lived, quietly amazed to find herself so happy. From day to day she watched the Swede’s improvement. As the painleft him he took to singing, but his voice was not so accurate as in the old days when he heard clearly. Many of the songs she had heard from him in courting time, and she was infinitely happy to know that he remembered them as well as she did. He would tell the meaning of each verse after he had sung it, as she cooked or sewed after shaving all day.
For she shaved again. It seemed very odd and yet very natural to her. She had a good deal of business to arrange before “resuming trade.” Her subscriptions to the Philadelphia Ledger and the Work-fellows’ Union had run out; in fact, her wedding day had been dependent on their expiration. Emmahad a great idea of doing things the right way, and news has been the tradition of barber-shops since men’s vanity first devised a shorn chin.
Emma was gratified to find her standing unimpaired by her sojourn with the paupers. Socially she seemed secure. The women were prone to be officiously sympathetic, and were also inclined to disbelieve the tale of Quarry’s misdeed. “There’s faults on both sides, maybe,” and “Who can see the whole show through a slit in the tent?” were felt to be convenient phrases and used largely as such. The phrase “rent-free” found its way from the neighbours’ lips to Emma’s ears rather oftener than she cared for; it spurred her on togrudge herself food and deny herself the midday beer it had been her wont to consume. She worked from eight in the morning to six at night, with nothing but bread and soup at her slack time in the early afternoon.
The soup was much like Quarry’s stories—made up out of almost nothing. She carried it to work in a bottle with a screwed-on tin top; this she put into the little boiler that the shaving water was heated in, “and so,” she would say, to amuse a new customer, “thet’s all the cooking I hev to do; I boil my bottle, and there I am!”
She had rented a room By the Bridge from Miss Bentley, who was much surprised when Emma paidthe rent; and through her new and improved business situation in the town she was able to command a “high-class custom.”
Since the evening that Quarry had suggested the depot as a place of residence Emma had been free of his presence. She had heard of him from the men, however, and knew that he was speaking to them from the Bridge every evening. Revolt was in the air of Soot City; there were meetings, quite covertly, conducted by socialistic workmen in the cause of workfellows’ profits. Monopoly and co-operative profit were talked of constantly, and Grigg sold many drinks. It is a pity that the workingmen who invent Utopias should attempt tosanctify them with an alcoholic immersion. It antagonizes even the fair-minded. The preachers took to finding comparisons, more or less apposite, between Dives and Lazarus, pronouncing the socialism of him who has not, grabbing from him who has, to be merely a modern variation of a scriptural scheme of all things in common. As some men go to church to find biblical sanction for their shortcomings; the ringleaders of what was fast becoming an agitation, took to the sanctuaries, whither the rest of the town felt it safe to follow them.
Emma regarded Quarry’s effrontery as monumental, but she never conceived a possibility of his coming to her new house in the Stonepastures.She felt that, as she had gone down in the world, he thought he had risen, and that the Stonepastures were very far away from him now. Her eyes would scan the road, in her swift evening walks searching for his slightly crooked form. The thought of him distressed her, as horror comes upon a child in the dark, and after nightfall she remembered him as such a power for evil. Returning from the town she always wore for warmth her leathern apron with a shawl, her jacket was too good to be worn out in the dark. This scruple was pure conscience, for she no longer had Jarlsen’s eye for which to save her dresses.
He could tell the difference infootfalls now, and distinguish voices. Emma longed for the moment when he should be able to hear her speak his name. This hoped-for moment occupied many of her hours, and she thought of it on the still, cold night when she saw Quarry walking toward the Pastures about ten yards ahead of her. She slackened her pace instantly, and he was soon lost in the starless dark.
She dreaded him. As she walked she feared she might stumble on him lying drunk in her path, with his mouth full of the hideous words he used at such times; or, this fear forgotten, her breath would come in loud pantings at the thought of his hands laid on her from behind. When she came to her own doorthere was still no sight of him; she looked both up and down the road to make sure. She could not see far, for most of the houses were dark; lights are too expensive for the rent-free Pastures. Raising the latch, she pushed the door quietly open and looked into her own home.
Quarry was at the kitchen table facing her, glaring in Jarlsen’s serenely blind countenance. Sleep had double-locked the Swede’s seared vision, and in complete unconsciousness he breathed freely, within a glance of Quarry’s eyes alive with malice.
Emma was frightened, so much so that she could not call. It seemed that Quarry must havesomething to kill with, in his coarse, cramped hands. It flashed across her that if she received him roughly he would strike or stab, and that an appearance of politeness would surely gain her time. Calmness came to her when she had determined how to act.
She rattled the latch, her heart jumping so that she felt as if it had thrown her into the room. Quarry let fall something that gave out the sound of thin metal as it struck the brick flooring round the stove. A flight of chills froze her blood, while her cheeks burned with a steady, excited glow.
Quarry could not avoid her eyes and she saw that were he to have the first word he would announcehimself at bay and make trouble. She almost ran to him with her hand stretched out. “Quarry,” said she in a little voice that she strained to make audible, “Quarry, you’ll have a bite, won’t you? It’s a cold bite, but a ready one.”
Emma thought later that it was at the sound of Quarry’s name in her voice that Jarlsen wakened. He knew at once that Quarry was there, for a look that had been absent from his face since they moved from By the Tracks swept its strong patience and sweetness away. He stood on his feet and reached out for the Englishman. The bandages on his right hand seemed too tight, and the veins in it bursting.
“I’m not dead yet!” he saidfiercely, “and no thanks to you!”
Emma could have cried for joy. To her it seemed more than likely that he saw again; but when she noticed how easily Quarry had eluded his big rival, the situation was obscured.
“Did I hurt him?” called Jarlsen eagerly. He had fallen back on his chair, but was sitting on its edge, his eyes burning, and the blood reddening the fine skin on his forehead.
She did not answer, having learned not to waste words on his deafness. She saw Quarry stoop down and lift up the knife he had let fall.
Then she spoke, and very gently.“You’d better stay here, Quarry,” she said; “you’re accustomed to your home here, and there’s most sleep in an old nest.”
And he stayed. Emma turned him in with old Butte, and lighted a new candle, which she left to illumine the rats through the night. Then she locked Jarlsen’s door on the outside, and tied the key around her neck. She reflected with pride that her Swede had only been sitting up for two days, and yet wanted to fight on the evening of the second. In her joy at his returning strength she lost sight of danger.