“Strife’s a poor thing to come home to.”
IN two 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 her with 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 pain left 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. Emma had 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 to grudge 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 paid the 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 to sanctify 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 in footfalls 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 door there 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 have something 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 announce himself 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 said fiercely, “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.