“Only the saints and the feeble-minded suffer gladly.”
EMMA tossed restlessly that night. Once the cinder flare leaped upon
her walls, staining them with a flickering orange glow. This incident
emphasized to her mind the horrid blackness that had lately fastened on
their household.
She awoke very early next morning in the final, nervous way that
worried people dread, and sat huddled on the floor of the lean-to in
the still, sunless cold. Jarlsen’s loud talk echoed in the empty
kitchen, but she knew she could not wake him with her voice. The
thought recurred to her with all the force of discovery that, waking or
sleeping, the voices of this world were dead to him.
Black would return to-day. It was odd to call this hour to-day.
The noontide that would bring Black again to Soot City seemed very
different from any dim time of loud agonies like that which makes the
dawns of the sore-hearted.
To-day she would also be paid the “blast money,” part accident
insurance and part Jarlsen’s savings. The anticipation of this pleased
her until she moved into disordered kitchen and saw the chairs as Bowa
and the others had left them, and smelt the lamp that was a survival of
the courting days she had prized. Then she groaned.
For a moment the idea of bringing out the leather barber’s apron and
the keen razors, as a tacit contradiction to any report of her wealth,
seemed a clear inspiration. But with Quarry and Wavering Jim to talk,
she knew all delicate denial to be useless.
She opened the house and sat along the narrow doorsill, her back to
one jamb, her knees drawn up and fixed against the other. As the sun
came up, the cinder flare crept in a stealthy flush along the earth and
lost its power in the heavens as the day grew bright.
At last the cold stung her hands, and the sun chased the shivers down
her back, so that she went again into the house, forgetting that an
hour since she had loathed it. Quarry was with Jarlsen, who clamoured
on, asking questions whose answers he could not hear.
He was learning his deafness by degrees, for his fits of silence were
longer, but with Quarry he talked always. Quarry’s touch was abominable
to the Swede, and his presence pricked to the quick a soul whose every
other approach was blockaded.
Emma, in pity, took up the jug of sweet oil to bathe the burns. Her
hand was light from shaving, and it had learned a wonderful caution
from the teachings of pain. She could mitigate its brown strength with
a suddenness like the swift softnesses of Jarlsen’s old-time singing,
and he would smile at her as she used to smile at his own skilled
tunefulness. She almost stroked the scorches with her wise, soothing
hands.
She had meant to spend the morning on the doorsill, in the hope that
a passing woman might be kind and glance her way. She longed so for
a woman’s friendship! She was sure that half the sting of her sorrow
would vanish with recital.
At the last accident, when they brought home Jerry Black’s
half-sister’s husband from a squeeze between the ore cars; as soon
as every one had made quite sure he was dead, Martha Long--herself a
personage even in the presence of a newly made widow--caught Jerry’s
sister in her arms and rocked to and fro with her standing, until both
women fell on the plush sofa.
Such scenes dignify sorrow in one type of the common mind.
Emma knew that Quarry had lied about her, and through the day she
wondered what the lie might have been. The absence of feminine
condolers worried her, and added to her dread of the time when the
hands of the clock should reach half past one. That was the hour of
Jarlsen’s leave-taking on the day before that set for their wedding.
As the time approached the ticking of the clock seemed louder, and she
went into the lean-to to escape from it. She lay there, covered over
and quiet as though night had come.
The latch rattled, and Martha Long, with her thin face and burning
eyes, stood in the lean-to doorway with her baby’s half-knit hood in
her fingers. She cast a glance of piercing inquiry at Emma, and her
emphasis was not conciliatory.
“Well,” she said, “God has strange ways with the righteous. You’ve had
your troubles, poor girl!”
“I don’t see there’s need for that kind o’ talk,” said Emma vaguely;
“them as gives it ain’t had overmuch, I guess!”
“Well, no offence,” said Martha, overbearingly; “how is he?”
“Making out--no more. He ain’t got a piece of skin on him that don’t
appear to be fried, and he talks till your heart splits in your body.”
“It’s a good sign if he’s rebellious. My brother was fearful meek. He
could hear a little, and the whole town had hopes, when one morning he
turned his head in to the wall, and he says to poor Jarlsen, who was
tending him, ‘You give that oatmeal and water where it’s wanted,’ he
says; ‘you can give me a pleasure drink for the last I get.’ He didn’t
drink much ever, and Jarlsen give him a drop of something, and then he
lay still and was dumb dead before your poor feller could rinch the
glass. So it goes!” Martha ended dismally.
Emma did not find this quite satisfactory, so she said nothing.
“And there is something you have to be thankful for,” said Martha
further, forgetting that nothing causes man to hate his lot like
telling him to be thankful for it; “you’ve got a good man to fall
back on. That Quarry’s more to you in most ways nor your born mother
would be. Yesterday he was saying as how risky it was to marry where
the language was different. Two tongues like that in a house means
secrets.”
Emma had started up. “That Quarry says more than his prayers,” she
cried out fiercely; “I knew he’d been lyin’ ’round about me. I don’t
hold by his ways; and I’m goin’ to stick by that husk of a husband in
there, ef he don’t get better till the day I die. He ain’t talked kind
about me, and worse talk is due, I know, but I’ll bide my rights, and
have ’em.”
Martha felt admiration. Emma was not as Quarry had reported her. She
recited a few more “incidents,” and strolled, without leave-making
and still knitting, toward the door. “Come in some night when you’re
lonesome,” was all she had left in her heart of the invitation she had
meant to give the girl in Bowa’s interest. It was plain to her woman’s
eye that Emma loved Jarlsen maimed better than a town full of men of
sound members.
She wondered, however, why the girl hadn’t the sense to take Quarry,
who was getting in with the factory hands like water through a leak.
Black came in a moment after Martha’s departure. He had a wallet in
his hand, and his face was clothed in a bright kindliness that turned
Emma’s heart toward him.
“I’m glad you’ve had lady’s company,” he said.
“You’re looking daft, dear,” Emma answered, when she had studied him.
Suddenly the little fellow spread his hands. “Last night,” he said, “I
went to heaven cheap--fifty cents entrance fee. I heard a man play on a
fiddle; well, if the sweetest voice in heaven sang its best it couldn’t
learn that feller much. I sat there and just pined away to hear the
back door shut, or some other shabby kind of sound, just to show it
was really I situated in the concert hall. But that’s not this,” he
concluded, putting his hand on the wallet; “here’s your due.”
Jerry held it out to her. His face was red, and he made visible efforts
to control its expression, which changed from conscious diplomacy to
kindly eagerness.
“I seen a doctor in the town, a professor of blasts, kind of. He knows
the ins and outs and conbinizations of paralysis pretty pat, and I told
him I had a good friend laid up in a blast, and he said he’d charge
maybe a hundred or maybe fifty dollars to come up on purpose to see
him. So that’s your best way of layin’ out his money, Emma.”
“I was thinkin’ that would be good myself,” Emma answered with a quiver
of gratitude on her lips.
“And I’m obliged to say that you could offer a little to Quarry, just
to keep his tongue sweet. He’s got a fearful gainin’ way with his
mouth, and them nutt and bolt hands will pick up and listen to all he
has to say. They’ve been in schools, and are crazy for talkin’ and
politics. The kind of foolishness men gets from schools is the worst
kind.”
Jerry was angry.
“Ain’t he been talkin’ on me, maybe?” Emma asked.
“Perhaps so, perhaps no. He’s so mean you could buy him for a small
price. He ain’t much of a luxury.”
As they talked they heard the dinner pails clanking as some of the men
came down the homeward hill. Then an oar car sided under the window
close by the house. In it were the workmen of the nutt and bolt
factory--Quarry in their midst, his face ardently conceited and his
gestures highly alcoholic.
Emma scanned him with a fierce contempt. “He wouldn’t be like that if
he could stir around,” she exclaimed, pointing toward her own room door.
Then she stood by Jarlsen’s bed to avoid Quarry, and as she looked at
him he laughed; it was his old, mirthful, kindly laughter. It seemed to
the girl, who cherished him, that he had brought pain to their house,
and had also been spared its consequences. She suffered--he slept.