No Sunday duties took him to the yards, and washed and dressed, shaved
and brushed, he became a beautiful man of the world, in a new overcoat
and a new sleek hat, and over his hands thick doeskin gloves. He could
afford to pay for his clothes, and like this he left Nut Street every
Sunday at nine o'clock, not to see West Albany again till midnight. On
the seventh day of the week he was a mystery to his chums and his
landlady, and if any one in Nut Street had had time to be suspicious and
curious they might have given themselves the trouble of following
Fairfax. There were not many idlers, however, and no saloons. Drunkards
were unwelcome, and Sunday was a day of rest for decent hard workers.
When Antony, in his elegance, came out he used to pass between fathers
of families in their shirt sleeves, if it were warm weather, and between
complacent couples, and many of the hands slept all day. The most
curious eyes were those of Molly Shannon, the girl at the restaurant,
and her eyes were more than curious.
Fairfax had been courteous to her, bidding her good-morning in a way
that made her feel as though she were a lady. He had been there for his
breakfast and lunch several months until finally Molly Shannon drove him
away. This she did not do by her boldness, for she was not bold, but by
her comeliness and her sex and her smile. Fairfax fed his Pride in his
savage immolation before the monster of iron and steel; by his slavery
to work he revenged himself upon his class. His Pride grew; he stood up
against Fate, and he thought he was doing a very fine thing, when his
Pride also stood up in the restaurant when he took his cup of coffee
from the red-handed girl of the people, pretty Molly Shannon from
Killarney. Fairfax went farther up the street. He found another eating
house, and later ate his sandwich on his knees at noon in the cab of his
engine.
When Molly Shannon found that he was not coming there for his coffee any
more, she grew listless, and doled out food to the other men with a lack
of science and interest that won her sharp reproofs and coarse jokes.
From her window over the restaurant she watched Mister Fairfax as every
Sunday he went limping up the street. Molly watched him, her breast
palpitating under the common shirtwaist, and the freckles on the milky
white skin died out under the red that rose.
"He's got a girl," she reflected; "sure, he's got a girl."
One Sunday in October, a day of yellow sunlight and autumn air, when Nut
Street and the yards and West Albany fringed the country like the hem of
an ugly garment, Molly came down and out into the street, and at a
distance she followed Fairfax. Fairfax cut down a couple of blocks
further on to the main station. He went in and bought a ticket for
Albany. He boarded the cars, and Molly followed.
She tracked him at a safe distance up Market Street to Eagle, and the
young man walked so slowly that it was easy to keep him in sight. The
man pursued by the Irish girl suggested nothing less than a New York
Central fireman. He looked like any other well-set-up, well-made young
gentleman out on a Sunday morning. In his fashionable coat, his
fashionable hat, Molly saw him go through the doors of a stone church
whose bells rang solemnly on the October air.
The girl was very much surprised.
She felt him safe even within the walls of the heathen church, and she
went directly back to Nut Street, her holiday hanging heavy on her
hands, and she went in and helped her patron wash the dishes, and
upstairs that night she stopped in her simple preparations for bed and
reddened.
"Sure, ain't I a silly! He's went to church to _meet_ his girl!"
Her morning's outing, the tramp and the excitement, were an unusual
strain to Molly, not to speak of her emotions, and she cried herself to
sleep.
Fairfax sat every Sunday in the same pew. The seat was to the left of
the altar, and he sang with an ardour and a mellowness that was lost
neither on the people near him nor on the choir-master. All arts were
sympathetic to him: his ear was good and his voice agreeable. His youth,
his sacrifice, his dying art he put into his church singing, and once
the choir-master, who had taken pains to mark him, stopped him in the
vestibule and spoke to him.
"No," Fairfax said, "I am not a musician. Don't know one note from
another, and can't learn. Only sing by ear, and not very sure at that!"
He listened indifferently. As the gentleman spoke of art and success,
over Antony's handsome mouth there flitted a smile that had something of
iron in it.
"I don't care for any of those things, sir," he replied. "I reckon I'm a
barbarian, a rudimentary sort of man."
He took a certain pride and glory in his station as he talked. There was
a fascination in puzzling this mild, charming man, one of his own class,
whose very voice and accent were a relief after the conversations he
heard daily.
"You see," he said, "I happen to be a fireman in the New York Central
yards down at West Albany."
The quiet choir-master stared at him. "Oh, come, come!" he smiled.
Fairfax thrust his cane under his arm, drew off his glove, and held out
his hand, looking into the other man's eyes. The musician's hand closed
over Fairfax's.
"My dear young fellow," he said gravely, "you are a terrible loss to
art. You would make your way in the musical world."
Fairfax laughed outright, and the choir-master watched him as others did
as he limped away, his broad, fine back, his straight figure, and
Fairfax's voice swelling out in the processional came to the musician's
mind.
"There is a mystery about that chap," he thought. "He is a gentleman.
The Bishop would be interested."
By contrast Sundays were delightful to Antony. Amusements possible to a
workingman with the tastes of a gentleman were difficult to obtain.
Church in the morning, a lazy stroll through the town, an excellent
dinner at the Delavan House, set Fairfax up for the week. The coloured
waiter thought his new patron was a Southerner, and suspected him of
being a millionaire.
"Yass, sar, Mr. Kunnell Fairfax, sar."
Antony, in a moment of heart hunger for the South, had told George
Washington his name. George Washington kept the same place for him every
Sunday, and polished the stone china plates till they glistened,
displayed for Antony all his dazzling teeth, bowed himself double, his
napkin under his arm, and addressed Antony as "Kunnell"; and Antony over
his dessert laughed in his sleeve (he took great pains to keep his hands
out of sight). After luncheon he smoked and read the papers in the
lobby, lounged about, wrote a Sunday letter to his mother, and then
loitered about through old Albany. On Sunday afternoons when it was
fine, he would choose School Street and the Cathedral close, and now,
under the falling of the yellow leaves there was a beauty in the day's
end that thrilled him hour by hour. He made these pilgrimages to keep
himself from thinking, from dreaming, from suffering; to keep his hands
from pencil and design; to keep his artist soul from crying out aloud;
to keep his talent from demanding, like a starving thing, bread that he
had no means to give. Sometimes, however,--sometimes, when the stimulus
of an excellent dinner, and a restful morning, when the cheer of George
Washington's droll devotion had died, then the young man's step would
lag in the streets of Albany, and with his hands behind his back and his
bright head bowed, he would creep musing, half-seeing where he went.
Taking advantage of his lassitude, like peris whose wings had been
folded against Paradise, and whose forms had been leaning hard against
the gate, his ideals, his visions, would rush in upon him, and he would
nearly sink under the beating of their wings--under their voluptuous
appeal, under their imperious demand.
On these occasions Fairfax would go home oppressed, and content himself
with a glass of milk and light food at the restaurant, and dressed as he
was even to the hat on his head, he would sink by the table in his
little room and bury his face in his hands. Then he would count up his
money. Working from May until October, he had saved only fifty dollars.
After his calculations there was no magnitude in the sum to inspire him
to new plans or to tempt him to make a fresh venture for art. He often
thought, in looking back on those days, that it was nothing but his
pride and his obstinacy that kept him there. The memory of his winter's
creations, of his work in the studio, and his beasts with their powerful
bodies and their bronze beauty, came upon him always with such cruel
resentment and made him feel so impotent against the injustice of the
great, that if drink had tempted Fairfax he would have gone to the
nearest saloon and made a beast of himself.
The working hours were long and his employment physically exhausting,
but he embraced his duties and fell in love with the great steel and
iron creature which it was his work to feed and clean and oil. And when
he left his engine silent in the shed, the roar and the motion absent,
tranquil, breathless, and yet superb, Antony left his machine with
regret, the regret of a lover for his mistress. He was fireman to a
wild-cat engineer.