The afternoon was waning, but the hot bowl of the sky seemed to shut down over the city more closely.
Farr held to the shaded sides of the streets, and yearned for a patch of green and a tree and its shade.
At last he came into a section of the city where vast mills, one succeeding another in rows which vanished in the distance, clacked their everlasting staccato of hurrying looms, venting clamor from the thousands of open windows. A canal of slow-moving, turbid water intersected the city and fed its quota of power to each mill. The fenced bank of the canal was green; and elms, languid in the fierce heat, gave shade here and there with wilted leaves. The masses of brick which inclosed the toilers within the mills puffed off tremulous heat-waves and suggested that humanity must be baking in those gigantic ovens.
A high fence interposed between the canal and the street; the mill lawn which extended between the canal and the shimmering brick walls was also inclosed. Signs posted on the fence warned trespassers not to venture.
A bridge carried the street across the canal, and Farr stood there for a time and watched the swirl of the water below. Then he sauntered on and surveyed the expanse of mill lawn with appraising and envious gaze.
The young man climbed the canal fence, exhibiting more of his cool contempt for authority by helping himself over the sharp spikes with the aid of a “No Trespassing” sign. The sickly odor of raw cotton came floating to his nostrils from the open windows. He strolled to the head of a transverse canal which sucked water from the main stream. A sprawling tree shaded a foot-worn plank where an old man, with bent shoulders and a withered face, trudged to and fro, clawing down into the black waters with a huge rake. He was the rack-tender—it was his task to keep the ribs of the guarding rack clear of the refuse that came swirling down with the water, for flotsam, if allowed to lodge, might filch some of the jealously guarded power away from the mighty turbines which growled and grunted in the depths of the wheel-pits. With rake in one hand and a long, barbed pole in the other the old man bent over the bubbling torrent that the rack's teeth sucked hissingly between them. Bits of wood, soggy paper, an old umbrella, all manner of stuff which had been tossed into the canal by lazy folks up-stream, he raked and pulled up and piled at the end of his foot-bridge.
“Hy, yi, old Pickaroon!” came a child's shrill voice from a mill window. “There's a tramp under your tree.”
The old man raised his head from his work at the rack.
“You must not come on dis place,” he cried, with a strong French-Canadian accent.
“Who says so?” inquired the stranger, putting his back against the tree and stretching out his legs.
“I—Etienne Provancher.”
“And I—my worthy alien—I am Walker Farr from Nowhere. Now that we have been properly introduced I will sit here and rest. I am here because I love the soothing sound of babbling waters on a hot day. Go about your work. I'll watch you. I love surprises. Who knows what next you'll draw forth from the depths of fate?
“I can have you arrest!” cried the old man.
The uninvited guest took off his broad-brimmed hat, laid it across his knees, and ran his hand through his shock of brown hair; it curled damply over his forehead and, behind, reached down nearly to his coat-collar, hiding his tanned neck. In some men that length of hair might have seemed affectation. It gave this man, as he sat there uncovered, that touch of the unusual which separates the person of strong individuality from the mere mob. Then he smiled on old Etienne—such a warm, radiant, compelling, disarming sort of smile that the rack-tender turned to his work again, muttering. His mouth twitched and the crinkles in his withered face deepened.
Walker Farr found a comfortable indentation in the tree-trunk and settled his head there.
“How much do you get a week for doing that, Etienne?” he inquired, with cool assurance.
The old man glance sideways sharply, but the smile won him.
“Six dollaire.”
“After supporting your family, what do you do with the rest of the money these generous mill-owners allow you?”
“I never was marry.”
The young man looked up at the mill windows where childish heads were bobbing to and fro.
“That was poor judgment, Etienne. You might have married and have a dozen children now, working hard for you in the mill. Just like those children yonder.”
The old man came to the end of his foot-bridge and flung down his rake and his pike-pole.
The sudden emotions of his Gallic forebears swept through him. His features worked, his voice was high with passion.
“Ba gar, I don't sleep the night because I think about dem poor childs. Dem little white face, dem arm, dem leg—all dry up—not so big as chicken leg. And all outdoor free to odder childs—not to them childs up dere.” He shook his fists at the mill windows. And some child who saw the motion, getting a hasty peep from a widow, squealed, “Hi yi, old Pickaroon!”
“It doesn't pay to get too excited over the sorrows of the world, my friend,” drawled the young man under the tree. “It doesn't do any good; and then somebody calls you names. I was something like you once. But I've changed my philosophy. I have hypnotized my altruism. Now I'm perfectly happy.”
Etienne stared without understanding these big words. But he had often told himself that he never expected to understand Yankee speech very well. He worked alone; he lived alone in his garret in the tenement block; he talked but little with any person. But this young man with the wonderful smile seemed to inspire him to talk—even to the extent of revealing his secrets.
He lowered his voice. “Thirty year I have work here. I live way up in the little room. Bread I eat with lard on it. It costs little. Of the six dollaire I save much. Ah,oui! Hist! Not for me I save it. Ah,non! To the priest I give it. To the good priest. And the poor childs what are sick—he send 'em to the farm—to have some outdoors. But I don't sleep the night because I think the dollaire come so slow—and so many poor childs are sick.”
He picked up his rake and pike and went back to his labor.
The man under the tree did not lose his smile.
“Yonder is a brand of altruism that cannot be hypnotized or modified like Knight Chick's, I fear,” he muttered. “You'd have to hit it on the head—kill it with sticks! And my definition of philanthropy has always been, 'giving away something you don't want in order to get yourself advertised.' Etienne is interesting. He is the only philanthropist I have even found who will eat lard instead of butter so as to save more for his philanthropy.” Now his smile grew hard. “Don't dare to open your eyes, Altruism,” he commanded. “I saw the lids quiver a minute ago while that old man was talking, but remember you're hypnotized.”
He saw the rack-tender lay down his pike so as to give both hands to his big rake.
He was pulling at something heavier than the ordinary flotsam—something far below the surface of the water. At last it broke through the black surface of the turbid flood. To Walker Farr, glancing carelessly, it seemed like a bedraggled bundle of rags with something white at the end.
“You come help, m'sieu',” called old Etienne. “It is a dead woman.”
Together they pulled the rake's dread burden slowly up the bars of the rack.
“You seem pretty cool about this,” gasped the young man.
“It is no new thing. Many drown themselves—they drown in the canal so they will be found. Women and girls, they drown themselves. So! Help me carry her.”
Farr gazed down on her after she had been laid on the canal bank. She was young, but thin and work-worn.
“Weaver,” commented old Etienne, laying back on her breast one of the hands he had lifted. “There's the marks on the fingers where she have tie so many knots so quick.”
There was a key on her breast; it was secured by a cord that passed out of sight between the buttons on her waist. Farr stooped and pulled on the key. A folded paper came with the key; the other end of the cord was tied around the paper.
“You must not—it is for the coroner,” protested Etienne. “I know the law—I have drag up so many.”
“My besetting sin is curiosity,” declared the young man, his calm impertinence unruffled. He pulled the wet paper from the noose of the cord. “We'll read this together.”
“I cannot read,” confessed the rack-tender. “You shall read it to me.” His little black eyes gleamed now with curiosity of his own. “I shall be glad to hear. The coroner he never read to me.”
The water had spread the ink and spotted the paper, but Farr was able to decipher the missive. He read aloud:
“'My head has grown bad since my husband died. It is grief, the awful heat, the work at the looms. They said if I would give my little girl away she could go to the country and grow well. But I could not give her up for ever. I could not earn the money to send her to board. I could not earn the money except to buy us bread here in the tenement block. And my bad head has been telling me it's best to kill myself and take her with me. So I kill myself before my head grows so bad that I might take away my little girl's life. It belongs to her and I hope she may be happy. Will somebody take her and give her happiness? It is wicked to kill myself, but my head is so bad I cannot think out the right way to do. This is the key to the room in Block Ten.
“'MRS. ELISIANE SIROIS.
“'Her name is Rosemarie.'”
Walker Farr finished reading and stared into the glittering eyes of the old man.
Etienne Provancher swore roundly and furiously—the strange, hard oaths that his ancestors had brought from the Normandy of the seventeenth century.
“So you shall see—it is as I have say.” He shook his fists again at the mill. Its open windows vomited the staccato chatterings of the myriad looms. “It chews up the poor people. Hear its dam' teeth go chank—chank—chank!”
“The Gallic imagination is always active,” said Farr, joggling the key at the end of the cord and eyeing it with peculiar interest. “But in this case it seems to picture conditions pretty accurately. I wonder just what a visitor would find inside the door that this key fits!”
“You shall go tell them at the office of the mill,” commanded Etienne. “Tell them they have killed another. They will telephone for the coroner. I will give the paper and the key when he come.” He held out his hand. “It is the law.”
“I have a natural hankering—sometimes—to break the law,” affirmed the young man. “I feel that fatal curiosity of mine stirring again, Friend Etienne. I will send the coroner. But coroners love mysteries. If we give him the letter it will take all the spice out of this affair. Let's make him happy—he can drag out the inquest and give his friends a long job on the jury.” He smiled and started away, shaking his head when the old man protested shrilly. “Better say nothing about this letter and the key. You'll get into trouble for letting a stranger come in here and carry away evidence. Better keep out of the law, Etienne.” He grabbed the “No Trespassing” sign for a hand-hold and climbed over the fence. “I'll come back and tell you, Etienne. But keep mum,” he advised.
“It is his smile—it makes me break the law,” mumbled the old man.
Walker Farr gave the first policeman—a fat and sweltering individual—a piece of gruesome news and in return casually asked the location of Block Ten.
The policeman grudgingly growled the information over his shoulder while waiting for the station to answer the call from his box.
The young man, taking his time, found the place at last, one in an interminable row of tenement-houses, all identical in structure and squalor, bearing the mark of corporation niggardliness in their cheap lumber and stingy accommodations.
The hallway that Farr entered was narrow and stifling—stale odors of thousands of dead-and-gone boiled dinners mingled there, and a stairway with a greasy handrail invited him. The key bore a number. He hunted till he found a room, far up, flight after flight. Through open doors he saw here and there aged women or doddering old men who were guardians of dirty babes who tumbled about on the bare floors.
“Either too old to run a loom or too young to lug a bobbin,” Farr informed himself; “that's why they aren't in the mill.”
Old folks and babes stared at him without showing interest.
No one looked at him when he opened the door in which the key fitted.
He stepped in quickly and closed and locked the door behind him.
It was a little room and pitifully bare, and it was under the roof, and the ceiling slanted across it so sharply that the young man, tall above the average, was compelled to bow his head.
A little girl, a wraith of a child, pale with the pallor of a prisoner, hardly more than a toddler, sat on the floor and stared up at the intruder, frozen, silent, immobile with the sudden, paralyzing terror that grasps the frightened child. Pathetically poor little playthings were scattered about her: a doll fashioned from gingham and cotton-waste, makeshift dishes of pasteboard, a doll-carriage made from a broken flower-basket with spools for wheels. The man who entered saw all with one glance and understood that here in this bare room this child had been compelled to drag out the weary hours alone while the mother had toiled. Here now the child waited patiently for—for that water-soaked bundle, with the white, dead face, that lay on the canal bank waiting for the coroner.
And when he realized it and saw this and looked down on that lonely, patient, wistful little creature making the best shift she could with those pitiable playthings, something came up from that man's breast into his throat. He had not supposed he had any of it left in his soul—it was tender, agonizing, heartrending pity.
She still stared at him, terrorized. Probably she had never seen any face come in at that door except her mother's.
His pity must have given Walker Farr a hint of how to deal with this frightened child. He did not speak to her. He made no move toward her.
He smiled!
But it was not the smile he had given the fat plutocrat in the automobile, nor yet the jocular radiance he had displayed to old Etienne. It was such a smile as the man had never smiled before—and he realized it. He did not want to smile. He wanted to weep. But he brought that smile from tender depths in his soul—depths he had not known of before—and tears came with the smile.
Before that time the lines in his face had fitted the smile of the cynic, the grimace of banter, of irony and insolence. But the strange glory that now glowed upon his features came there after the mightiest effort he had ever made to control his feelings and his expression.
He smiled!
In that smile he soothed, he promised, he appealed. Then when he saw the tense expression of fear fade away he smiled more broadly—he provoked reply in kind. And slowly upon the child's face an answering smile began to dawn—little crinkles at the corners of the drooping mouth, little flickerings in the blue eyes, until at last the two beaming faces pledged—on the part of the man tender protection, on the part of the child unquestioning confidence.
But he said no word—he dared not trust his voice.
He went down on his knees cautiously, her smile welcoming him now.
He held out his hands. She hesitated a moment and then gave into them her chiefest possession—her rag doll. It was as if she had pledged her faith in him. He danced the doll upon his broad palm, and the child's eyes, dancing too, thanked him for the courtesy he was paying to her dearest friend.
But Walker Farr realized that something strange and disquieting in the case of a man who believed himself a cynic was stirring within him. That hostage of the doll was not sufficient to satisfy the sudden queer craving. The knowledge of the hopeless helplessness of that little girl throbbed through him. The memory of the spectacle of what he had left on the canal bank made the pathos of this little scene in the garret doubly poignant as he looked into the child's eyes. Never, in his memory, had he invited a child to come to him.
Now he put out his hand—and it trembled. She snuggled her warm little fist into his grasp. And then she scrambled up and came and nestled confidingly against him. She couldn't see his face then, and he allowed the tears of a strong man who is overcome before he has understood—who wonders at himself—he allowed those tears to streak his cheeks and did not wipe them away.
Walker Farr was too perturbed to soliloquize just then in his philosopher's style, but he did realize that some part of his altruism had come out of its trance.
And after he had knelt there on the floor for a time he rose and took the child in his arms and sat down in a creaky rocking-chair and crooned under his breath, and was astonished to find that she had gone sound asleep. He stared into the dusk that was gathering outside the dormer window and wondered what ailed him.
He had heard many feet thudding on the stairs below. The workers were returning. The beehive was filling. There were many voices, clatter of dishes, chatter of patois.
He wondered how well the woman Sirois was known in the house—whether she had relatives—how soon somebody would come and beat upon the door.
He wondered just what disposition was made of children left in this manner.
If the woman had relatives who were forced to take the child it meant more of this horrible tenement life. The child in his arms was pale and thin; her bones seemed as inconsiderable as a bird's.
He did not know much about children's homes, orphanages, institutions for the reception of the homeless, but it seemed to him that such a tiny, frail little girl would be very, very lonely in such a place.
The skies grew dark without. He was cramped because he had sat for hours in one position, fearing to waken her. But when he moved she did not waken—he did not understand how soundly childhood can sleep. He laid her on the foot of the narrow bed and looked about the room, shielding a match with his hands. He had resolved to carry her out of that fetid, overcrowded babel of a tenement. Where? He did not know. He hunted to find her belongings. He found a few clothes. There was no receptacle in which he could pack them. He folded them and crowded the articles in his pockets. He stuffed in the doll and the rude playthings and hooked the basket doll-carriage upon his arm. She did not waken when he picked her up. He tiptoed down the stairs and nobody noticed him, In his own dizzy mind he could not determine whether he felt most like a thief or a lunatic. At any rate, he found himself walking the streets of the mill city at ten o'clock at night, carrying a little girl in his arms and all her earthly possessions in his pockets.
It came over him at last that the longer he kept her the more uncertain he became as to what disposal he should make of her, or else he was more loath to part with her; he didn't exactly know which.
Then she woke and spoke for the first time. “Me is te'bble hungry—and firsty,” she mourned.
“Good Lord! What's the matter with me?” grunted the young man. “If I had found a cat or a dog, the first thing I would have done would be to give 'em something to eat. I reckon I must have thought I had picked up an angel.” To her he said, smoothing her hair with his free hand. “We'll have sumpin for baby's tummy mighty quick.” He flushed at sound of that baby prattle from his lips. But it had popped out in the most natural manner possible.
He headed for the nearest night lunch-cart. He entered with his burden.
He elbowed aside men who were eating sandwiches and pie at the counter. With complete and rueful knowledge as to the extent of his resources, he ordered a bowl of bread and milk—“the best you can do for a hungry kiddie for ten cents,” he added.
“Anything for yourself?” inquired the waiter.
He shook his head and paid for the child's supper with his whole capital, two nickels. He held her on the end of the counter and, awkwardly but with tender carefulness, fed the bread and milk to her with a spoon. A healthy man's hunger gnawed within him and the savor of coffee from the big, bubbling urn tantalized him. He tipped the bowl to her lips and she drank the last of the milk with a happy little sigh, and he went out into the night again, carrying her in his arms.
He understood all the suspicions that policemen entertain in the case of night prowlers, and knew that they would be particularly and meddlesomely interested in one who prowled with a child in his arms. The child began to whimper softly. Her interest in the stranger who had won her with a smile, her slumber in his arms, her feast in strange surroundings, had kept her child's mind busy and pacified till then. Now she voiced childhood's unvarying lament—“I wants my mamma!”
He soothed her as best he could, promising, giving her all manner of assurance regarding her mother, wondering all the time what was to be done. Why had he interfered? Why had he taken upon himself the custody of this mite, so trifling a weight in his arms, but now resting—a giant of a burden—on his responsibility? He did not know. He owned up to that ignorance frankly. But he walked on, carrying her, and put away from his thoughts the sensible alternative of placing her in the hands of those duly appointed to care for such cases.
He told himself that, as a stranger in the city, he would not be able to find a refuge—an institution that time of night—and he knew that he was lying to himself, and wondered why.
The impulse that directed his course toward the canal was rather grim, but he remembered the tree which had been sanctuary for him that day. He carefully lowered the little girl over the fence and climbed after her. And she did not call any more for her mother because this strange new scene seemed to impress her and fill her with wonderment. She stared up into the dim, mysterious, rustling foliage of the tree for a long time. She patted her hands upon the grass as if it were something she had never seen or felt before. She seemed to be making her first acquaintance with Mother Nature—claiming the heritage of outdoors that children so intensely covet. The sloped ceiling and the walls of the attic room had been sky and landscape for her. She peered into the still waters of the canal and saw the stars reflected there, and cocked her ear to listen when sleepy birds stirred above and chirped in their dreams. And then she fell asleep again and he tucked her within his coat to keep from her the dampness of the faint mist rising from the canal.
The dawn flushed early and she woke when the birds did, and found so much to interest her—ants who ran up and down the tree, funny bugs that tumbled, robins who bounced along the sward on stiff legs—that she did not ask for her mother nor seem to find at all strange the companionship of this tall man whose face was so kind.
And so Etienne Provancher found them when he came with his rake and pike-pole at six o'clock, the hour when the great turbines began to grunt and rumble in their deep pits.
“It is Rosemarie—I found her in the room,” said Walker Farr.
The old man came close and gazed down on the pallor and pathos of this little snipped who still stared at the new wonders of outdoors.
“Anodder one, hey? You found her lock up?”
“Yes, and I brought her away—and I don't know just what the matter is with me, Etienne. I have not been inclined to put myself out for anybody in this world—man, woman, or child—of late years. I had made up my mind to let the world run itself.”
“It is the way the rich man say—he do not care. But the poor man should care—he should try to help odder poor man. He should care.”
“Oh, there are things that can happen to make a man stop caring. But I brought her away, just the same. I—I woke up—or something. I have been awake all night—I have been thinking—I had nothing else to do. Insomnia has made me insane—one night of it!” He laughed when the old man blinked at him. “I'm so crazy that I want you to help me find some good woman who will take this child to board in a comfortable home.”
“Who'll pay?”
“I'll pay. Oh, I am completely crazy—I'm going to work—earn money to pay her board.”
“I know a good woman near by—she have leetle house, cat, plant in window.”
“That's the kind.”
“I will tell you where she live. You shall say you come from Etienne Provancher and it will make you good for her.” He paused, raised a brown finger, then went on. “But you shall not know where she live onless I may pay half the board money for the poor little one. We have been togedder in it—I tell some lie to the coroner—we must be togedder in help the childs.”
There was firm resolve in old Etienne's face and tones.
“Partnership it shall be, my old boy,” agreed the young man, heartily. “I'm no pig—I won't keep a good man out of a real picnic.” He rose and swept the child into his arms. “Give me the address and hand her over the fence to me. I'll have to quit being nurse and find a real job. By the way, Etienne, I heard a fat man weeping yesterday because he couldn't get men to dig dirt for the Consolidated Water Company. He seemed to take a great fancy to me. Where's their office?”
He received both the information and the child after he had climbed the fence. Etienne was able to point out the little house of sanctuary from where he stood—and he waved his rake reassuringly from a distance when the good woman came to the door, answering Farr's knock. He danced into the house with the child, behind the good woman, who had answered Etienne's signal with a return flip of her apron; he was trying to bring a smile to the little face.
“You'll have to lie to her more or less about her mother, good woman. Etienne and I will tell you all about it when there's time. When she asks about her mother just give her something to eat and lie a bit.” He set the child upon the table where the good woman was making fresh cookies. He piled the little toys about her. “I'm going to market, to market to buy a fat pig, and I'll be home again, riggy-jig-jig,” he declared in a singsong that fetched a chuckle from the waif, and she followed him with a smile as he hurried out. “That smile will sweeten a day's work in the trench,” he assured himself. “I sure am some foster-father when I get started!”
A listless clerk at the Consolidated office gave him a ticket to be delivered to the foreman of construction—the foreman sent him out with other men on a rattling jigger-wagon. By being very humble, and with the aid of his smile, he succeeded in begging a corned-beef sandwich for his breakfast from a workman on the jigger who was carrying his lunch to work. He ate it very slowly so as to make the most of it.
The new trench was in a suburban plot which had just been opened up by a real-estate syndicate. It was a bare tract, flat and dusty, and the only trees were newly planted saplings that were about as large as fishing-poles. How the sun did beat into that trench! But Walker Farr threw off his coat and used again his ready asset—his smile. He smiled at the boss who sneered at the style of “fiddler's hair” worn by a dirt-flinger—smiled so sweetly that the boss came over later and hit him a friendly clap on the shoulder and said, “Well, old scout, here's hoping that times will be better!”
“I'll take her out on the bank of the canal this evening before bedtime and we'll have a lark,” reflected Walker Farr as he toiled in the hot trench. And he stopped quizzing himself as to the whys of this sudden devotion to a freakish notion. He seemed to know at last.
When the noon hour came Farr went and sat under a spindling tree and began to read in one of his little books, dismissing thoughts of hunger with the resoluteness of a man who had suffered hollow yearning of the stomach and knew how to conquer it.
But he could not escape the keen eyes and kindly generosity of the fraternity of toilers.
“A topper down on his luck a bit—see his clothes,” said the foreman, and he took tithes from willing men who were eating from pails that were pinched between their knees; he carried the food to the young man.
Farr accepted with gratitude, ate with thrifty moderation, and hid what remained in the pockets of his coat; it would serve for his supper.
He ate that supper after his day's work was done and after he had laved his face and hands in the overflow from a public fountain in a little square.
Then he hurried to the house of the good woman.
She was busy with her dishes in the kitchen and Rosemarie was on the knees of a young woman who sat and rocked in one of the sitting-room chairs.
Farr entered by the kitchen door and stood there, looking in with some confusion on the girl and child.
“It is only Zelie Dionne; she is my boarder,” the woman informed him. “She is a good girl and she has the very nice job in the cloth-hall of the big Haxton mill. She lives with me because I was neighbor of her good folks in the Tadousac country, so far away from here in our Canada. Come! I make you acquaint. You shall see. She is a good girl!”
Zelie Dionne rose and acknowledged the introduction with a French girl's pretty grace. A bit of a flush lighted the dusky pallor of her cheeks when Farr bent before her. The bow in her hair was cocked with true Gallic chic and her gown was crisply smart in its simplicity. Her big, dark eyes were the wonderful feature of her face, and Farr looked into them and seemed to lose a bit of his cool self-possession; he faltered in speech, groping for words in the first commonplaces.
“You must talk together. I must work,” said the good woman. She hurried back into her kitchen.
The child ran to Farr and climbed upon his knees.
“You have been good to Rosemarie. I thank you,” he said. “I suppose the good woman has told you how it has happened.”
“Yes, when I came at noon.” Her tones were peculiarly sweet and compassionate. A touch of accent gave piquancy to what she said. She looked at him meaningly. “I have been talking to our little Rosemarie and she will not cry any more for her good mamma who has gone up to the green hills because she is sick and must rest. So Rosemarie will be patient and live here and I will be play-mamma.”
“Yes, play-mamma,” agreed the child. “Good play-mamma! Two mammas! But only one papa!” She put up her arms and tucked them about his neck and snuggled down with a happy sense of complete understanding of his protection. At last, so it seemed to her, she had recovered the father she had never known. Poor, little, caged bird, her release from that lonely prison was dated in her happy consciousness from his appearance in the doorway, and all things had been well for her after he came—sunlight, the trees, the blue sky, and tender care, and the companionship of human beings. Therefore, the rush of a love her child's comprehension could not analyze had gone out to him.
Farr returned with significance the look Zelie Dionne's dark eyes gave him.
“I found the note. It made me go a-meddling. It left a legacy to somebody—and I accepted—without understanding why I did so.” He stroked the child's curls.
“I did not understand at first—when Madame Maillet told me,” she confessed, with a smile. “Old Etienne came at noon to tell her and she has told it to me. It is very sad—but yet it is comical when I look at you. But as I look at you I understand better. You have a good heart. I can see!”
“I am only a strolling stranger—here to-day and there to-morrow,” protested Farr. “I think the heat must have affected my head. It has been very warm lately. But when I saw her—” He choked suddenly.
“Oh, it is easy to understand,” said the girl, reassuringly. A mist of tears came across her big eyes, though her mouth did not lose the wistful smile. “The poor folks help one another—and they understand.”
“It wouldn't be right to give her to an orphanage,” insisted Farr. “She has missed too much already. Of course I don't pretend to know what a little girl needs—but I am willing to be told.”
“I will tell you and I will help.”
“I think old Etienne and I need you in the partnership—as adviser. I thank you.”
Then came the old Canadian, his wrinkled face tender with solicitous interest, and he chuckled when he welcomed the new member of the firm.
“Ah, Mam'selle Zelie she shall help us the very much in what we do not know,” he informed the young man, and continued, while the dark eyes flashed protest: “I am of the Tadousac country, and she is a good girl, for I have know her all the years since I trot her on my knee when she much small as the petite Rosemarie. I can tell you how she dance down the meadows in the ring-a-rosy play and how she—”
“Phut! Your tongue is as long as your rake and it goes reaching down into other folks' affairs, old Etienne! What cares this strange gentleman for what happened in Tadousac? Go use your key instead of your tongue. Unlock your little door so that Rosemarie may walk on the cool grass beside the canal.”
The old man grinned and started away.
“We're going out where the birds will sing good night to you,” Farr told the child and lifted her off his knees. But at the door she stopped and turned to Zelie Dionne, who had not risen.
“Come, play-mamma!”
“I will wait here till you come back, Rosemarie.”
But the child was coaxingly insistent, holding out her hand.
“I think it is because she has been so lonely all her life,” suggested Farr. “Now that she has found friends she wants them to be with her in her little pleasures. May I presume enough to add my invitation to hers?”
She came and the child walked between them, holding their hands.
“One papa and my play-mamma!” she said, looking up at them in turn.
Mother Maillet came to the kitchen door and waved adieu with her dish-towel.
“Ah, the family!” she cried. “Yesterday it was not—to-day it is. And grandpere marching off ahead!”
“Old folks and children—they say embarrassing things,” remarked Farr when they were on their way.
“One must be silly along with them to be disturbed by such chatter,” said Zelie Dionne, tartly.
They followed old Etienne through his little door and walked along the canal bank where the waters were still and glassy, for the big gates had been closed and power lay motionless and locked in the sullen depths till morning. The sunset behind the big mills glowed redly through the myriad windows.
They walked slowly because little Rosemarie found marvels for childish eyes at every step, and even the cool carpet of the grass provided unfailing delight as she set slow and cautious footsteps into its yielding luxuriance. The old man plodded ahead, muttering and frowning as he peered down at the flotsam in the motionless waters.
The silence between the two who accompanied the child continued a long time and Farr found it oppressive.
“I have never been in Canada,” he said. “I am sorry you did not care to have Etienne talk about your home. I would like to know more about that country.”
“He was talking about me instead of my home in Tadousac. I am not so important that I am to be talked about.”
“Where is Tadousac?”
Her vivacity returned, her dark eyes glowed. “Ah, m'sieu', you should go there. It is in the country of the good habitants where the St. Lawrence and the Saguenay meet. And now, as the sun is setting, the people are resting under the wide eaves of the little white houses, looking up where the hills are all so blue, or off across the wide bay. The white houses are very small and they crowd along the road, and the farms are narrow, and there is not much money in the homespun clothes or in the old clock, but the good world is wide about them and the people are not sad like those who sit yonder.”
She pointed across the canal to rows of wooden tenement-houses many stories in height; on narrow porches, nicked one above another, and on fire-escapes which were slowly cooling after hours on the forge of the sun, men, women, and children were packed, seeking a breath of fresh air.
“They stand at loom and spinner and slasher all day,” she said. “They are too tired to walk afar to the parks. They wait there for good air to come and it does not come.”
“I don't understand why they flock down here from Canada—why they stay,” he declared, bluntly.
“Ah, you look at me when you say that!” she cried, arching her brows. “You hear me talk about the sunset over the meadows and the hills, and you wonder why I am not there? Well, listen! There are fourteen sons and daughters of Onesime Dionne—that's my father—for all the habitant folks marry young, and the priest smiles and blesses the household when there are many children. And girls are not of much account in the house. The sons claim and receive their shares of the arpents of land when those boys are grown and married. The girl may marry—yes! But what if the right one does not ask? What if the right one has a father who says to him that he must obey and marry one the father has chosen? All kinds of things can happen in the habitant country, m'sieu'. So, then, the girl is less account in the house. And the letters come back from the girls who have gone down into the mills in the States. The pictures come back showing the new gown and the smart hat—and so!” She shrugged her shoulders and tossed her free hand. “One more girl for the big mill!”
He stared at her with some curiosity.
“You ask yourself which one of those things happened to me, do you not?”
“Perhaps,” he confessed.
“I talk little about myself. I talk about the habitant girls. I am fortunate. I do not breathe the air where the looms clack. I inspect in the cloth-hall because I have sharp eyes and nimble fingers.”
“But you came here alone—it is strange. I mean, do not the father and mother and all the family move here, usually?”
She lifted her chin and gazed at him with pride in her mien.
“If you go to Tadousac you shall find that my father owns a large farm and that one of his grandfathers was a captain with General Montcalm, and many Dionnes have lived on the land that was given to a brave man. I came to the States because I wanted to come. My people did not come.”
She clipped the last sentence in a manner that suggested to Farr that there was no more to be said on that topic. But she went on after a time in softened tones.
“It is not strange that so many came to the States, sir. The farms of Beauce, of l'Islet, of the Chaudiere, were so crowded. Years ago, the old folks used to tell me, the boys began to drive the little white horses hitched to buckboards across the border in the early summer, and the boys were strong and willing, and the farmers who laughed at them and called them Canucks hired them for the hay-fields just the same. And they slept in the haymows and under the trees and worked hard and brought back all their money. Then the big mills needed men and women and children, and the Yankee girls would not work in the mills any more. You must understand how it was: Ouillette, who had worked in the hay-field, would hear of the work in the mill, and the Ouillettes would sell and go to the city. And as soon as they had seen the lights and the theater and the car which ran with a stick on a wire, and had earned their first pay and had bought Yankee clothes they wrote home to their cousins the Pelletiers and the Pelletiers sat nights till late talking excitedly—and then they sold and came, and so it has gone on and on—the endless chain, one family pulling on its neighbor, down the long way from Canada to the States. But it may be all for the best. I am not wise in such things. But when the sun bakes and the fever comes and the children die in the tenements, then I wish the fathers and mothers were back on the little farms and that workers of some other race than the habitants were chained to the looms in the big mills. That may be a selfish thought, but my own people are dear to me.”
Farr was not in the mood to argue the economic side of that question with this girl who had so tersely told the story of two generations of mill-toilers. With that little waif between them, victim of the industrial Moloch which must roll on even if its wheels crushed the innocent here and there, he permitted sentiment to sway him. In fact, for a day and a night he had surrendered to sentiment and had found a strange sort of intoxication in the experience. His heart was with the humble folk and pity was in him—pity which was uncalculating and in which his cynicism was dissolving.
And when the stars were mirrored in the still canal and the grass was damp with the dew, they walked back to the house of Mother Maillet and little Rosemarie murmured her bit of a prayer and was tucked in bed.
“I hope that some day I may go to Tadousac,” said Farr to the girl, before he passed out of the good woman's house. “I would like to see the sunset, for you have praised it.”
“Ask for the house of Onesime Dionne, second beyond the big parish cross. It will be easy to find, and the sunset is very grand from the porch under the eaves.”
Farr went along with the old man and they walked slowly. Their way took them down narrow streets between the high tenements.
“Yes, you shall find it very grand at Tadousac—and M'sieu' Dionne is an honest man,” declared Etienne. “Now and then in the thirty year I have been visit up there in Tadousac, and I sit those day and whittle for the children and then little Zelie trot on my knee with the others. So I know the story of those place. And all the people up there don't care if I know, because I listen and am glad to know, and sometimes I can give advice, for I have live long on the States where great matters are happening. But Farmer Leroux would not listen to me when I advise about his good son Jean and Zelie Dionne. Farmer Leroux is a good man, but he is a hard man when his ugly mad get stir. And the children up there do what the father tell—because that is what the cure preach and it is the way of the habitants.”
“The old, old story—the Montagues and the Capulets on the banks of the river of the North.”
“I think I know something what you mean, m'sieu', though I don't know your friend you speak about. But if he say to his son, 'Ba gar, you don't marry no girl what I don't like her fadder because we have hosswhip one anodder t'ree or two time when we have fuss over line fence—or crowd our wagon when we go to market'—why, then that's your friend. And it start from there and grow into big thing, so that all the cure can say it don't make no friend of them. So they wait—Jean and Zelie! Ah yes, they wait!” He put his finger beside his nose and winked. “They love. They get marry some nice day. But now!” He flirted his gaunt fingers. “They say nottings. I maself say nottings. But I see some very queer look in Jean Leroux's eye when he say to me as I meet him at the gate of his fadder's farm, 'And how carries Zelie Dionne herself these days?' And though he look high over the tree and chew the straw and look very careless, ah, I see the big tear in his eye and hear him choke in his throat.”
“It's played out and old-fashioned, this letting old folks manage young folks that way just to satisfy old grudges,” scoffed Farr. “If they are in love they ought to get married and tell the old folks to go hang!”
Etienne stopped and gazed quizzically at the young man who thus expounded the law for lovers.
“I think you have in you none of the understanding of the French habitants who have live the three generation on one farm so that a young man, no matter if he love a mam'selle so very much that all the bread he eat taste ashes in his mouth—ah, he cannot say 'I will leave—I will go!' For then that young man must turn himself to be anodder young man—and the habitant does not so change.”
“I may be a poor judge,” acknowledged Farr. “I have never yet taken root in the soil of any one place.”
“And I think, mebbe, the girl you do not understand! Is it to stay in the home and hear every day about you love the pig of a Leroux, bah? No, no, m'sieu'! That's too proud, is Zelie Dionne. And so is Zelie Dionne too proud to take a son from a home that do not want her. So they wait.”
“It's a tough old world, Uncle Etienne,” said Farr. “Why, even I, lord of my own affairs as I am, don't know where I'm going to sleep to-night. Do you have a boarding-place?”
“I have my little room on the block up there—my room and my place at the big table. It is not grand. But there is place for you—and anodder little room. If you like you shall come and I will speak good for you.”
“All right, Etienne! Take me along and speak good for me.”
It was another such place as Block Ten. It was a crowded and stuffy warren, and the basement kitchen advertised itself with stale odors in all the corridors. But Farr was glad to stretch himself upon the narrow bed. He owned up to himself that he was a very weary bird of passage and confessed to his own heart, just as frankly, that he was a captive in the frail grasp of a little girl—and he did not try to understand.