He did not go South. There was nothing for him to go for. The idea of
his home uninhabited by her made him a coward. Emmeline sent him her
thimble, her lace collar, her wedding ring and a lock of her hair,
shining still and without a touch of grey. The packet, wrapped up in
soft paper and folded by jasmine leaves and buds, whose withered petals
were like a faded dress, Fairfax put away in his trunk and did not
untie; he did not wish to open his wound. And his face, thinner from his
illness and his loss, looked ten years older. The early happy ecstasy of
youth was gone, and a bitter, mature recklessness took its place, and
there was no hand to soothe him but Molly's, and she had gone back to
Troy. He tried what ways were open to a man of his age and the class he
had adopted, and he turned for distraction and relief and consolation to
their doors. But at those portals, at the threshold of the houses where
other men went in, he stopped. If his angel had deserted him, at any
rate the beast had not taken its place. The vast solitude and the cruel
loneliness, the isolation from his kind, made him an outcast too
wretched not to cry for help and too clean to wallow in order to forget
his state. His work saved his health and his brain. He made a model of
an engine in plaster and went mad over it; he set it on a shelf in his
room and when in June he drove his own engine and was an engineer on the
New York Central, he knew his locomotive, body and soul and parts, as no
other mechanic in the Company knew it. His chiefs were conscious of his
skill and intelligence. There were jealousies and enmities, and instead
of driving the express as he had hoped, he was delegated to a local on a
branch line, with an Italian for fireman who could not speak a word of
any but his own language.
"You speak Italian, don't you, Fairfax?" his boss at the office asked
him.
("Cielo azuro ... Giornata splendida...!") and he smelt the wet clay.
"I can _point_," laughed the engineer, "in _any_ language! and I reckon
I'll get on with Falutini."