BLUE FLANNEL AND CORDUROY
The world was snow-bound--all that small world which lay between the
hills in the valley at Thirty-Mile. For two days it had been snowing,
great flakes so plume-like that they seemed almost artificial, making
one think of the blizzards which originate high in theatre-flies under
the sovereignty of a stage-hand who sweats at his task of controlling
the elements. For two days it snowed so heavily that all work moved
but intermittently at the up-river camp; and then, two days before
Christmas, the mercury dropped sharply into the bulbs and the weather
cleared.
Stephen O'Mara, standing at a window of his cabin late in the
afternoon, peering out upon that cold white world, was wondering if she
would have found it as wonderful as it seemed to him at that moment; he
was wondering whether he would have to break a fresh trail himself,
upon snow-shoes, if he were to join Fat Joe and Garry in town for the
holiday, when a team of horses came toiling into view far across the
snow. It was Big Louie, sitting huge and stolid upon his load of
supplies, coming in a whole day late and cracking his long lash over
the glossy backs of the bays which the lash was never allowed to touch.
Behind him another sledge appeared in turn, with two figures on the
seat, but even at that distance they looked neither so huge nor so
stolidly reconciled to the bite of the wind. Fallon was driving;
Shayne was beating his arms across his chest. And the second team was
fagged and caked with frozen lather. Big Louie had been breaking trail
for twelve bitterly hard hours, but his animals were still far from
spent--not so tired in fact but what they could throw forward their
heads and nicker at the sight of warm stables. Big Louie loved horses
as he loved nothing else in his whole dull world. Sober he fed them
bits of sugar, with strange throat-sounds which they must have
understood, it seemed; drunk he threatened the life of any man who
might chance to maltreat them. That was the reason Steve had made Big
Louie his head-teamster only two weeks before.
From his window he watched the heavy loads crawl up to the store-house
door; he watched the drivers throw tarpaulins over the boxes and knew
that they were too weary to unload that night. And he was still there
at the frosted pane when the three men, Big Louie still plowing ahead,
hove into view again from the direction of the stables and came
straight toward his own shack. He opened the door and bade them enter
before they had had a chance to knock. The swagger in the shoulders of
two of them told him what to expect. Big Louie was only clumsy, as
usual.
"You did well to make it," he told the latter, kindly, as he always
addressed him. His nod to the others, who reeked of white whiskey, was
in part a question, in no wise a welcome. "Well?" he asked.
Apparently there had been a conference beforehand, for there was no
hesitancy on the part of Fallon, who had been ordained spokesman.
"We've come for our time," he growled.
Steve nodded gravely.
"I see," he murmured. "May I ask what's your grievance, this time."
They were the satellites of Harrigan. Because of that he had kept them
all where his eyes could find them at times. And even though their
arch-leader in discontent had not crossed his path in many days he
listened now to an echo of Harrigan's activities.
"They're offering three a day in the Reserve camps." Fallon should not
have gloated. "Three a day and a bonus for the high week cut. We're
going back to the river."
"I see," again observed Steve. "Are they guaranteeing this wage for as
long as you want to work."
Apparently they had decided, too, that there should be no bargaining.
"We want our time," Fallon reiterated. "This is going to be a man's
year on the river!"
"You, also?" Steve inquired of Shayne.
That worthy gloated too.
"Yes, me also," he came back, "an' a hundred others, before the ice
goes out."
Big Louie he had given up for lost long before that, and yet it was
with Big Louie that Steve made a sincere effort.
"I'd like to have you stay, Louie," he faced the third man. "I need
you, for you can do more with horses than any man I know. You are
worth three a day to me. Do you care to think it over?"
Big Louie's eyes had been mournful when he stumbled in out of the cold.
They were that now. He started to turn toward the window for a look at
the stables, and then thought better of it. Resolutely, for him, he
shook his head.
"I am done--me," he muttered. "I work for no company that will leave
honest men to starve."
It was hopeless from the start, yet Steve tried again.
"I can promise you work as long as you are able to hold a rein," he
offered, but he moved nearer the door while he was speaking. "That is
all I can promise."
Perhaps Fallon believed that Big Louie was weakening; perhaps he felt
that the situation was too highly dramatic to be wasted, for he made a
wide flourish with one hand.
"We want our time, and we want it now," he threatened. "We're going to
show you who bosses this river, before we're done with you!"
Fallon shouldn't have gloated; he shouldn't have threatened. And
Shayne shouldn't have smiled. Steve had slipped the latch loose. Now
he swung open the door.
"Call for your time at the Morrison office," he said evenly, "and if
you're going--why, go!"
By collar and belt he swung him back and drove him sprawling into a
drift.
"Are you in a hurry, too, Shayne?" he asked pleasantly, and Shayne
buried his head beside Fallon's in the snow. Then Steve closed the
door carefully and turned again to Big Louie.
"Louie," he said, "I make it a rule to urge no man who does not wish to
stay. If it needs persuasion to keep you, I do not want you here. But
you are running with the wrong crowd, Louie; you'll learn it
someday--but someday may be too late."
The big, dreamy-eyed man was hardly listening, but he gestured toward
the door. And Steve treated his departure kindly, as he had always
treated his presence. Outside where Shayne and Fallon had picked
themselves up, Big Louie hesitated and fumbled in his pocket with a
cold-cramped hand. He delivered the letter which had been entrusted to
him, before he went down the hill. There are many men like Big Louie
who are pitifully faithful until events outstrip their intellects.
Steve was sorry for him; and a half hour later, after he had read Miss
Sarah's prim note requesting his presence at dinner at seven-thirty,
Christmas eve, he grew sorrier still while he watched the ill-assorted
trio meet once more, blanket-packs upon their backs and snow-shoes on
their feet. Big Louie had joined the other two from the direction of
the stables. There were words between them, for Steve saw the huge
man's arm lift to strike Shayne to the ground, and then drop harmlessly
back to his side. And Steve knew what that bit of pantomime meant.
Big Louie had been to bid his team good-bye. There was a smudge of
brown sugar across his coat, though the watcher was too far away to see
that. But he knew that Big Louie had been crying, knew that Shayne had
smiled. It was the second time that Shayne had smiled that
evening--his second bad mistake. Long after they had disappeared into
the north toward the Reserve Company's camps, Steve wondered that it
had not cost him his life.
Miss Sarah's note which had been almost a week on the way was very
primly correct, but the inevitable postscript which under-ran it
sounded a more intimate note.
"We are not excessively formal as a rule, Stephen," she wrote, "so a
dinner jacket will be adequate. As I am expecting two other guests
besides your friends, Mr. Morgan and Garrett Devereau, I must ask you
to let no business matters interfere with your promptness."
Steve dared not let himself wonder who those other guests would prove
to be, Miriam Burrell, he knew, had already written Garry that this was
to be the saddest Christmas, and the merriest, that she had ever known,
giving as respective reasons her inability to be with him, and the fact
that she was so entirely his. Because he would not let himself hope
this time he was not disappointed, or at least so he told himself, when
he found only Dexter Allison with Caleb, the next afternoon near six.
And on a sudden thought his eyes went roving around the room then,
looking for Archibald Wickersham; but Miss Sarah gave him no time for a
protracted scrutiny.
"Your room is ready, Stephen," she told him, and steered him toward the
stairs. "You have an hour in which to dress--and you know already that
I am old-maidenishly strict."
Surely Archibald Wickersham was the other guest whom they were
expecting. Allison's very presence argued that. Yet Steve's nose
played him a startling trick as he mounted upward. He could have sworn
that he smelled that faint perfume which always made him remember, now,
his first letter from her; had he not been afraid to hope he would have
been positive that there was a flurry of skirts retreating above him.
But he knew that she could not have come. He knew it! And then,
three-quarters of an hour later, when he had dressed and turned again
to the stairway, she was there at the foot of the flight, waiting for
him to appear. In a little low pink satin gown that made rounded her
slenderness--made her appear even smaller than she was--she gave him an
elaborate courtesy from the main floor, and flung up at him her
laughter.
"Merry Christmas, Sir Galahad," she called.
Just as he had paused there a half-score of years before, Stephen
O'Mara paused now, with Caleb and Miss Sarah again gazing up at him.
It was the first time Sarah Hunter had seen the grown-up Steve in
conventional black and white; her emotions were much the same as they
had been on that remoter day. But Steve did not even see her glowing
face below him in that instant, nor Caleb's, nor that of Allison
either, who watching Steve's eyes, had suddenly ceased to smile. Caleb
knew what his sister's thoughts were, however, for he was recalling
that black velvet suit with silver buttons himself. While Steve and
Barbara were shaking hands he gained her ear in whispered admiration.
"Sarah," he commented, "Sarah, you are clever!"
Miss Sarah was on the point of taking Dexter Allison's arm to lead the
way to table. Her reply was tuned to Caleb's ear alone.
"She had thought of him in terms of blue flannel and corduroy long
enough," she said. "If you please, Dexter--Stephen, do you and Barbara
want any dinner?"
Those two were still shaking hands. Steve, who was only dimly aware of
the fact that Garry and Fat Joe had arrived, the latter guilty of his
first dinner jacket and enormously proud of his guilt, stood looking at
Barbara while she was chattering at him, without hearing distinctly a
word she spoke. Miss Sarah's question helped to bring him back.
"You look as though I were a wraith," the girl accused him. "Am I so
pale after a few weeks of sophisticated city air?"
But her man had taken command of himself again, by then.
"I thought you looked like--shall I tell you what I thought?"
"Most certainly," she was forced to insist. "Wasn't it a bald enough
invitation for a pretty speech?"
"I thought you looked like a small pink bon-bon," responded Steve
leisurely, and while the rest laughed at her discomfiture, Fat Joe
leaned over and nudged Garry.
"What'd I tell you?" he demanded. "What'd I tell you? Say, ain't he
working well to-night?"
But for once Joe had himself been misled into premature enthusiasm such
as he had decried in Garry. For if Barbara had, in Miss Sarah's
phrase, been thinking of Steve in terms of blue flannels and corduroy,
until then, before the dinner ended she was aware of a difference in
the attitude of this man who loved her, too great to be explained by
the clothes he wore. The very light in his eyes, whenever she
contrived to catch him gazing at her, convinced her of what was behind
his new restraint; and then, immediately, perversely, she set herself
to break it down by those very methods best calculated to strengthen
it. More than once that evening Dexter Allison withdrew from the
general conversation to watch the play of his daughter's glances upon
O'Mara's tanned face; several times he fell to chewing his lip as was
his custom when deeply perplexed. Complications scarcely ever troubled
Dexter Allison. He was beginning to awake to one now which already
worried him more than he cared to admit.
There was no keeping the girl within doors after dinner was over. She
ran upstairs and changed into moccasins and white blanket coat, and
skirt that barely met the moccasin tops half-way. And Steve, who had
changed too and was waiting for her when she came down, had knotted a
crimson scarf about the middle of his belted jacket to match the white
one twisted about her throat. With much approval Miss Sarah noted,
while she watched them away on snow shoes, the bit of color it added to
his soberer garb; she promised herself to recall it to Caleb at some
future date. Caleb had very pronounced views regarding the lack of
vanity in men's dress. But for the time being she was content to go
upstairs and be alone with her campaigning.
The man and girl climbed far that night in quite unbroken silence.
They had reached the crest of the first hill and stopped with the
higher ridges in front of them, black bulks filigreed with white,
before Barbara decided that she would have to make him talk.
"Aren't you going to say anything at all?" she challenged then.
She needed no explanation of his mood. To a woman there is no subtler
flattery than a man's dumb acknowledgement of her unattainability. He
talked when she bade him talk, but she was not positive whether she was
vexed or not because their conversation was of common-place things: The
work he was doing, upon which he was aggravatingly reticent, or the
severity of the last storm, or the amazing clarity of the night.
Certainty, however, was hers that he was no longer sure of
himself--that he was fighting silently against a growing conviction
that she was beyond his reach.
It made her very happily sad, somehow, and when Steve told her about
Big Louie and his horses, the sadness became a lump in her throat, and
a blur in her eyes which the man could not help but see.
"It is too bad," he said slowly. "I have been sorrier for him myself,
since his going, than I've been over anything for years. I do not know
just why, but I'm afraid for him. The others--" He stopped there,
catching himself before he had said too much. "I could always tell Big
Louie how I wanted a thing done, and know without one little bit of
doubt that he would stick to my orders. But that is the trouble with
his kind. Because he has no initiative of his own, he has to depend
upon the ideas which other men supply him. And there is no guarantee
whether they will be good or bad ideas."
From the first he talked fitfully that night. On other occasions she
had noticed how his mind seemed to veer, whimsically, from one topic to
another with little apparent continuity of thought, only to swing back
again, just when she was beginning to feel that she had lost the thread
of inference, to point his argument with parallels that were new and
delightful wisdoms to her ears. But to-night his grave-voiced
divergences, oftener than not, left her thoughts behind his thoughts.
"It is a very easy country to get lost in," he next remarked, when he
had had to insist that his sense of direction, and not hers, should be
the one to be trusted. "He was never able to go fifty rods into the
brush himself, without getting completely turned around, and he was
born in these hills, at that."
Then he had to tell her that it was Big Louie to whom he was referring,
before she understood quite what he meant. But he abandoned that
trend, freakishly, the very next moment.
"It doesn't seem complicated," he pondered. "To a man who has come
into the world with his sense of north and south and east and west all
safely relegated to his backbone instead of having to depend upon the
flighty functions of his brain for his guide, it's about the simplest
thing there is. He finds his way without thinking about the lay of the
land, or moss on the trees, or the sun or stars. But the other
one--the one who has to stop and reason that he must travel so many
miles to the west to reach home in the afternoon, because he came that
many in the morning--why, he even gets to doubting his compass, until
night catches him without a roof over his head and no wood collected
for a camp-fire."
Long before then she had learned how sensitive a thing was his
spirit--and she wanted him to go on.
"It must be a terrible thing to--to know that one is lost." Her hands
were buried deep in her pockets; she found it hard to keep pace with
his stride. "I am always afraid of the night noises in the woods."
It was the girl in her which had spoken at which he smiled, but his
smile was absent-minded.
"That is very strange, too," he accepted her lead, after contemplating
it for a time. "It is always the one who can't trust his compass who
loses his head, once he knows he's mixed up. Big Louie was that way.
He was lost once, for two days, before we found him; he was half mad
with terror and pretty near dead with fatigue. He had been running in
a big circle for hours, and we had to corner him before he would see
that we were friends. He'd been listening to the night noises, you
see; dwelling on the blackness and the silence and his lack of a fire,
until his brain was no longer any use to him."
"What should one do?" she asked him faintly, when she knew that he was
waiting for her to speak. Yet his answer persisted in adding to that
word-image which his mind was molding.
"Quit letting yourself look back over your shoulder, to see if anything
is following you!" He was suddenly gruff, and she knew that he was
talking at himself. "Quit dwelling on the crackle in the brush, and
the darkness, and the things you are afraid to fear. The wise man
stops when he knows he's lost his bearings; he busies himself
collecting wood for a fire, if not to keep the chill from his body by
exercise, then because it keeps his mind off himself. And he sleeps if
he can. Anyhow he lies quiet and rests. And when morning comes he
uses his reason better for having rested, if his instincts still play
him false. He has a look at the stars before daybreak; he watches the
sun come up, and he holds a straight line by the height of land, or by
the river flow, and he hits familiar country soon."
This time the girl did not interrupt him. She was watching his face.
"And that doesn't apply just to one little corner of the woods, or one
little corner of life, either, does it?" he mused. "When a man's
instinct fails him, he can stop and get his bearings back; when he's
afraid he can kindle a fire within him, always, if he'll only rustle
around before it gets too dark to search for fuel. But at that it
isn't so very easy, in life, to get one's bearings straight again.
It's stormy, some nights, maybe, and the stars don't shine; sometimes
day dawns cloudy and the sun is not advertising its location too
strongly. Instinct has always been strong in me, but there have been
times, too, when I have had to hold my eyes mighty steady on some
object far beyond me, to keep my line dead straight." He stopped short
and faced her. "You would be afraid, yes," he told her, "but you would
try hard to discipline yourself. You would never go rushing blindly
into a worse tangle, spending your strength and breaking your sanity
down. Big Louie is a child; discipline is wasted on him. And--and I
have always been able to find my way myself."
She knew now toward what point he had been talking. Mentally he had
been wandering, as Big Louie once wandered in the flesh, in a wide
circle that fetched up again against that doubt in himself which was
hurting her, even while it was making her happy. He had taken the
example of Big Louie and applied it to his own life, and suddenly the
girl realized how infinitely greater was his philosophy thereof than
was hers.
"I shall try to remember that," she answered soberly. "If ever I am
lost I--I shall try to wait confidently for daylight, and keep my eyes
to the fore."
She was near to tears when he stooped and knelt in the snow to tighten
a thong slipping from one webbed foot. Below them stretched a plain of
shimmering frost-points, bounded by inscrutable walls of black timber.
Somewhere within the warmer heart of a swamp a fox yapped hungrily;
somewhere within her own heart his whimsical discourse had awakened a
sense of the mystery of his wilderness--its friendship for those who
love it--its implacable enmity for those who do not understand. And he
looked up just when that emotion came flooding into her face.
"It is wonderful--wonderful--wonderful!" she breathed, throwing out
both arms with that ecstatic impulsiveness which he knew so well. "Now
I know why you said men always return to it, once they have felt its
spell."
"You are lovelier than you know!" came back from him, almost gruffly
again; and she could not parry with lightness so swift and strained a
speech.
"You always tell me very pretty things," was all she could think of to
say in reply.
But then, rising, he flung back his head and shook himself as if
throwing off a burden too restraining and irksome. He laughed aloud,
and from that minute until he loosed her feet from the snowshoes he was
more like her "blue flannel and corduroy" lover again. But his attack
no longer made her fear herself.
"If I cared for you, yes," he made her admit before he would let her go
in that night. "If I cared for you, my engagement to no man could
stand in the way. But that is the reason I know I do not care."
She had seen him grave with doubt that night; seen him fight to shake
it off. There was doubt in his answer now.
"Because I am not----" But he could not force himself to ask it.
"Because I could never care as you would demand the woman should care
who marries you."
She wanted to help him a little, she didn't know just why. Pity is a
very dangerous emotion, when pity is not sought.
"You are loving me that way this minute," he said, but his words were
dogged. "Loving me more than you know."
There was neither reference to her letter nor mention of that night at
Thirty-Mile when she had stolen out to bid him good-bye. Other long
tramps followed, on other pale and zero nights, but his attitude
remained much the same. Whimsically at times he shared his innermost
thoughts with her; always he told her that he cared, with a gentleness
in the telling that made it hard for her to listen. Barbara least of
all realized what those days were doing to her, but before that week
had run its course even Caleb's eyes were opened to the change in Steve.
"I told you so," he said, but he took no delight in recommending it to
his sister's attention. "If he didn't know it before, she's taught him
this trip that he hasn't a chance."
"Your sensation is ancient history, Cal," was all she would reply.
And even though, so far as Steve's peace of mind was concerned, Miss
Sarah's scheming had not helped at all, that tiny lady still chose to
view her activities complacently the day Barbara took leave of her
again.
"Write me every detail of your plans," Miss Sarah ordered her. "Proxy
bridal preparations are better than none, my dear, and I am madly
interested."
At the last minute Barbara bobbed her dark head in reply.
"I will," she promised meekly. And then, wide eyes vague with fear:
"Aunt Sarah, I--I'm not sure that I want to be--married at all!"
* * * * * *
"You will be coming back," he told her again the day he put her on the
train. "You will be back in the spring?"
It was his old, hopeful challenge, with all the hope left out.
"I think so," she faltered in return. "I mean to come and see the
completion of your work, if father will let me." She knew a moment of
confusion. "I wonder, many nights, if you are safe, up here in the
hills."
Indeed, Miss Sarah had made progress, though the surface indications
were small. The girl would never think of him again simply in terms of
blue flannel and corduroy. But that was not the most disturbingly
vivid memory which she carried away with her.
"I love you," he framed the words silently as the train was pulling
out, and although their positions were reversed, the moment was so
reminiscent of that day when he had leaned out of her father's switch
engine cab and asked if she wanted a ride, that it made her throat ache.
She waved a small gloved hand to him on the platform.
She did not want to go.