When God Laughs and Other Stories
by
Jack London
Part 1 out of 3
This etext was prepared by Les Bowler, St. Ives, Dorset from
the 1911 Mills and Boon edition.
WHEN GOD LAUGHS, AND OTHER STORIES
CONTENTS
WHEN GOD LAUGHS
THE APOSTATE
A WICKED WOMAN
JUST MEAT
CREATED HE THEM
THE CHINAGO
MAKE WESTING
SEMPER IDEM
A NOSE FOR THE KING
THE "FRANCIS SPAIGHT"
A CURIOUS FRAGMENT
A PIECE OF STEAK
WHEN GOD LAUGHS (with compliments to Harry Cowell)
"The gods, the gods are stronger; time
Falls down before them, all men's knees
Bow, all men's prayers and sorrows climb
Like incense toward them; yea, for these
Are gods, Felise."
Carquinez had relaxed finally. He stole a glance at the rattling windows,
looked upward at the beamed roof, and listened for a moment to the savage
roar of the south-easter as it caught the bungalow in its bellowing jaws.
Then he held his glass between him and the fire and laughed for joy through
the golden wine.
"It is beautiful," he said. "It is sweetly sweet. It is a woman's wine,
and it was made for gray-robed saints to drink."
"We grow it on our own warm hills," I said, with pardonable California
pride. "You rode up yesterday through the vines from which it was made."
It was worth while to get Carquinez to loosen up. Nor was he ever really
himself until he felt the mellow warmth of the vine singing in his blood.
He was an artist, it is true, always an artist; but somehow, sober, the
high pitch and lilt went out of his thought-processes and he was prone to
be as deadly dull as a British Sunday--not dull as other men are dull, but
dull when measured by the sprightly wight that Monte Carquinez was when he
was really himself.
From all this it must not be inferred that Carquinez, who is my dear friend
and dearer comrade, was a sot. Far from it. He rarely erred. As I have
said, he was an artist. He knew when he had enough, and enough, with him,
was equilibrium--the equilibrium that is yours and mine when we are sober.
His was a wise and instinctive temperateness that savoured of the Greek.
Yet he was far from Greek. "I am Aztec, I am Inca, I am Spaniard," I have
heard him say. And in truth he looked it, a compound of strange and
ancient races, what with his swarthy skin and the asymmetry and
primitiveness of his features. His eyes, under massively arched brows,
were wide apart and black with the blackness that is barbaric, while before
them was perpetually falling down a great black mop of hair through which
he gazed like a roguish satyr from a thicket. He invariably wore a soft
flannel shirt under his velvet-corduroy jacket, and his necktie was red.
This latter stood for the red flag (he had once lived with the socialists
of Paris), and it symbolized the blood and brotherhood of man. Also, he
had never been known to wear anything on his head save a leather-banded
sombrero. It was even rumoured that he had been born with this particular
piece of headgear. And in my experience it was provocative of nothing
short of sheer delight to see that Mexican sombrero hailing a cab in
Piccadilly or storm-tossed in the crush for the New York Elevated.
As I have said, Carquinez was made quick by wine--"as the clay was made
quick when God breathed the breath of life into it," was his way of saying
it. I confess that he was blasphemously intimate with God; and I must add
that there was no blasphemy in him. He was at all times honest, and,
because he was compounded of paradoxes, greatly misunderstood by those who
did not know him. He could be as elementally raw at times as a screaming
savage; and at other times as delicate as a maid, as subtle as a Spaniard.
And--well, was he not Aztec? Inca? Spaniard?
And now I must ask pardon for the space I have given him. (He is my
friend, and I love him.) The house was shaking to the storm, as he drew
closer to the fire and laughed at it through his wine. He looked at me,
and by the added lustre of his eye, and by the alertness of it, I knew that
at last he was pitched in his proper key.
"And so you think you've won out against the gods?" he demanded.
"Why the gods?"
"Whose will but theirs has put satiety upon man?" he cried.
"And whence the will in me to escape satiety?" I asked triumphantly.
"Again the gods," he laughed. "It is their game we play. They deal and
shuffle all the cards . . . and take the stakes. Think not that you have
escaped by fleeing from the mad cities. You with your vine-clad hills,
your sunsets and your sunrises, your homely fare and simple round of
living!
"I've watched you ever since I came. You have not won. You have
surrendered. You have made terms with the enemy. You have made confession
that you are tired. You have flown the white flag of fatigue. You have
nailed up a notice to the effect that life is ebbing down in you. You have
run away from life. You have played a trick, shabby trick. You have
balked at the game. You refuse to play. You have thrown your cards under
the table and run away to hide, here amongst your hills."
He tossed his straight hair back from his flashing eyes, and scarcely
interrupted to roll a long, brown, Mexican cigarette.
"But the gods know. It is an old trick. All the generations of man have
tried it . . . and lost. The gods know how to deal with such as you. To
pursue is to possess, and to possess is to be sated. And so you, in your
wisdom, have refused any longer to pursue. You have elected surcease.
Very well. You will become sated with surcease. You say you have escaped
satiety! You have merely bartered it for senility. And senility is
another name for satiety. It is satiety's masquerade. Bah!"
"But look at me!" I cried.
Carquinez was ever a demon for haling ones soul out and making rags and
tatters of it.
He looked me witheringly up and down.
"You see no signs," I challenged.
"Decay is insidious," he retorted. "You are rotten ripe."
I laughed and forgave him for his very deviltry. But he refused to be
forgiven.
"Do I not know?" he asked. "The gods always win. I have watched men play
for years what seemed a winning game. In the end they lost."
"Don't you ever make mistakes?" I asked.
He blew many meditative rings of smoke before replying.
"Yes, I was nearly fooled, once. Let me tell you. There was Marvin Fiske.
You remember him? And his Dantesque face and poet's soul, singing his
chant of the flesh, the very priest of Love? And there was Ethel Baird,
whom also you must remember."
"A warm saint," I said.
"That is she! Holy as Love, and sweeter! Just a woman, made for love; and
yet--how shall I say?--drenched through with holiness as your own air here
is with the perfume of flowers. Well, they married. They played a hand
with the gods--"
"And they won, they gloriously won!" I broke in.
Carquinez looked at me pityingly, and his voice was like a funeral bell.
"They lost. They supremely, colossally lost."
"But the world believes otherwise," I ventured coldly.
"The world conjectures. The world sees only the face of things. But I
know. Has it ever entered your mind to wonder why she took the veil,
buried herself in that dolorous convent of the living dead?"
"Because she loved him so, and when he died . . ."
Speech was frozen on my lips by Carquinez's sneer.
"A pat answer," he said, "machine-made like a piece of cotton-drill. The
world's judgment! And much the world knows about it. Like you, she fled
from life. She was beaten. She flung out the white flag of fatigue. And
no beleaguered city ever flew that flag in such bitterness and tears.
"Now I shall tell you the whole tale, and you must believe me, for I know.
They had pondered the problem of satiety. They loved Love. They knew to
the uttermost farthing the value of Love. They loved him so well that they
were fain to keep him always, warm and a-thrill in their hearts. They
welcomed his coming; they feared to have him depart.
"Love was desire, they held, a delicious pain. He was ever seeking
easement, and when he found that for which he sought, he died. Love denied
was Love alive; Love granted was Love deceased. Do you follow me? They
saw it was not the way of life to be hungry for what it has. To eat and
still be hungry--man has never accomplished that feat. The problem of
satiety. That is it. To have and to keep the sharp famine-edge of
appetite at the groaning board. This was their problem, for they loved
Love. Often did they discuss it, with all Love's sweet ardours brimming in
their eyes; his ruddy blood spraying their cheeks; his voice playing in and
out with their voices, now hiding as a tremolo in their throats, and again
shading a tone with that ineffable tenderness which he alone can utter.
"How do I know all this? I saw--much. More I learned from her diary.
This I found in it, from Fiona Macleod: 'For, truly, that wandering voice,
that twilight-whisper, that breath so dewy-sweet, that flame-winged lute-
player whom none sees but for a moment, in a rainbow-shimmer of joy, or a
sudden lightning-flare of passion, this exquisite mystery we call Amor,
comes, to some rapt visionaries at least, not with a song upon the lips
that all may hear, or with blithe viol of public music, but as one wrought
by ecstasy, dumbly eloquent with desire.'
"How to keep the flame-winged lute-player with his dumb eloquence of
desire? To feast him was to lose him. Their love for each other was a
great love. Their granaries were overflowing with plenitude; yet they
wanted to keep the sharp famine-edge of their love undulled.
"Nor were they lean little fledglings theorizing on the threshold of Love.
They were robust and realized souls. They had loved before, with others,
in the days before they met; and in those days they had throttled Love with
caresses, and killed him with kisses, and buried him in the pit of satiety.
"They were not cold wraiths, this man and woman. They were warm human.
They had no Saxon soberness in their blood. The colour of it was sunset-
red. They glowed with it. Temperamentally theirs was the French joy in
the flesh. They were idealists, but their idealism was Gallic. It was not
tempered by the chill and sombre fluid that for the English serves as
blood. There was no stoicism about them. They were Americans, descended
out of the English, and yet the refraining and self-denying of the English
spirit-groping were not theirs.
"They were all this that I have said, and they were made for joy, only they
achieved a concept. A curse on concepts! They played with logic, and this
was their logic.--But first let me tell you of a talk we had one night. It
was of Gautier's Madeline de Maupin. You remember the maid? She kissed
once, and once only, and kisses she would have no more. Not that she found
kisses were not sweet, but that she feared with repetition they would cloy.
Satiety again! She tried to play without stakes against the gods. Now
this is contrary to a rule of the game the gods themselves have made. Only
the rules are not posted over the table. Mortals must play in order to
learn the rules.
"Well, to the logic. The man and the woman argued thus: Why kiss once
only? If to kiss once were wise, was it not wiser to kiss not at all?
Thus could they keep Love alive. Fasting, he would knock forever at their
hearts.
"Perhaps it was out of their heredity that they achieved this unholy
concept. The breed will out and sometimes most fantastically. Thus in
them did cursed Albion array herself a scheming wanton, a bold, cold-
calculating, and artful hussy. After all, I do not know. But this I know:
it was out of their inordinate desire for joy that they forewent joy.
"As he said (I read it long afterward in one of his letters to her): 'To
hold you in my arms, close, and yet not close. To yearn for you, and never
to have you, and so always to have you.' And she: 'For you to be always
just beyond my reach. To be ever attaining you, and yet never attaining
you, and for this to last forever, always fresh and new, and always with
the first flush upon us.
"That is not the way they said it. On my lips their love-philosophy is
mangled. And who am I to delve into their soul-stuff? I am a frog, on the
dank edge of a great darkness, gazing goggle-eyed at the mystery and wonder
of their flaming souls.
"And they were right, as far as they went. Everything is good . . . as
long as it is unpossessed. Satiety and possession are Death's horses; they
run in span.
"'And time could only tutor us to eke
Our rapture's warmth with custom's afterglow.'
"They got that from a sonnet of Alfred Austin's. It was called 'Love's
Wisdom.' It was the one kiss of Madeline de Maupin. How did it run?
"'Kiss we and part; no further can we go;
And better death than we from high to low
Should dwindle, or decline from strong to weak.'
"But they were wiser. They would not kiss and part. They would not kiss
at all, and thus they planned to stay at Love's topmost peak. They
married. You were in England at the time. And never was there such a
marriage. They kept their secret to themselves. I did not know, then.
Their rapture's warmth did not cool. Their love burned with increasing
brightness. Never was there anything like it. The time passed, the
months, the years, and ever the flame-winged lute-player grew more
resplendent.
"Everybody marvelled. They became the wonderful lovers, and they were
greatly envied. Sometimes women pitied her because she was childless; it
is the form the envy of such creatures takes.
"And I did not know their secret. I pondered and I marvelled. As first I
had expected, subconsciously I imagine, the passing of their love. Then I
became aware that it was Time that passed and Love that remained. Then I
became curious. What was their secret? What were the magic fetters with
which they bound Love to them? How did they hold the graceless elf? What
elixir of eternal love had they drunk together as had Tristram and Iseult
of old time? And whose hand had brewed the fairy drink?
"As I say, I was curious, and I watched them. They were love-mad. They
lived in an unending revel of Love. They made a pomp and ceremonial of it.
They saturated themselves in the art and poetry of Love. No, they were not
neurotics. They were sane and healthy, and they were artists. But they
had accomplished the impossible. They had achieved deathless desire.
"And I? I saw much of them and their everlasting miracle of Love. I
puzzled and wondered, and then one day--"
Carquinez broke off abruptly and asked, "Have you ever read, 'Love's
Waiting Time'?"
I shook my head.
"Page wrote it--Curtis Hidden Page, I think. Well, it was that bit of
verse that gave me the clue. One day, in the window-seat near the big
piano--you remember how she could play? She used to laugh, sometimes, and
doubt whether it was for them I came, or for the music. She called me a
'music-sot' once, a 'sound-debauchee.' What a voice he had! When he sang
I believed in immortality, my regard for the gods grew almost patronizing
and I devised ways and means whereby I surely could outwit them and their
tricks.
"It was a spectacle for God, that man and woman, years married, and singing
love-songs with a freshness virginal as new-born Love himself, with a
ripeness and wealth of ardour that young lovers can never know. Young
lovers were pale and anaemic beside that long-married pair. To see them,
all fire and flame and tenderness, at a trembling distance, lavishing
caresses of eye and voice with every action, through every silence--their
love driving them toward each other, and they withholding like fluttering
moths, each to the other a candle-flame, and revolving each about the other
in the mad gyrations of an amazing orbit-flight! It seemed, in obedience
to some great law of physics, more potent than gravitation and more subtle,
that they must corporeally melt each into each there before my very eyes.
Small wonder they were called the wonderful lovers.
"I have wandered. Now to the clue. One day in the window-seat I found a
book of verse. It opened of itself, betraying long habit, to 'Love's
Waiting Time.' The page was thumbed and limp with overhandling, and there
I read:--
"'So sweet it is to stand but just apart,
To know each other better, and to keep
The soft, delicious sense of two that touch . . .
O love, not yet! . . . Sweet, let us keep our love
Wrapped round with sacred mystery awhile,
Waiting the secret of the coming years,
That come not yet, not yet . . . sometime . . .
not yet . . .
Oh, yet a little while our love may grow!
When it has blossomed it will haply die.
Feed it with lipless kisses, let it sleep,
Bedded in dead denial yet some while . . .
Oh, yet a little while, a little while.'
"I folded the book on my thumb and sat there silent and without moving for
a long time. I was stunned by the clearness of vision the verse had
imparted to me. It was illumination. It was like a bolt of God's
lightning in the Pit. They would keep Love, the fickle sprite, the
forerunner of young life--young life that is imperative to be born!
"I conned the lines over in my mind--'Not yet, sometime'--'O Love, not
yet'--'Feed it with lipless kisses, let it sleep.' And I laughed aloud,
ha, ha! I saw with white vision their blameless souls. They were
children. They did not understand. They played with Nature's fire and
bedded with a naked sword. They laughed at the gods. They would stop the
cosmic sap. They had invented a system, and brought it to the gaming-table
of life, and expected to win out. 'Beware!' I cried. 'The gods are behind
the table. They make new rules for every system that is devised. You have
no chance to win.'
"But I did not so cry to them. I waited. They would learn that their
system was worthless and throw it away. They would be content with
whatever happiness the gods gave them and not strive to wrest more away.
"I watched. I said nothing. The months continued to come and go, and
still the famine-edge of their love grew the sharper. Never did they dull
it with a permitted love-clasp. They ground and whetted it on self-denial,
and sharper and sharper it grew. This went on until even I doubted. Did
the gods sleep? I wondered. Or were they dead? I laughed to myself. The
man and the woman had made a miracle. They had outwitted God. They had
shamed the flesh, and blackened the face of the good Earth Mother. They
had played with her fire and not been burned. They were immune. They were
themselves gods, knowing good from evil and tasting not. 'Was this the way
gods came to be?' I asked myself. 'I am a frog,' I said. 'But for my mud-
lidded eyes I should have been blinded by the brightness of this wonder I
have witnessed. I have puffed myself up with my wisdom and passed judgment
upon gods.'
"Yet even in this, my latest wisdom, I was wrong. They were not gods.
They were man and woman--soft clay that sighed and thrilled, shot through
with desire, thumbed with strange weaknesses which the gods have not."
Carquinez broke from his narrative to roll another cigarette and to laugh
harshly. It was not a pretty laugh; it was like the mockery of a devil,
and it rose over and rode the roar of the storm that came muffled to our
ears from the crashing outside world.
"I am a frog," he said apologetically. "How were they to understand? They
were artists, not biologists. They knew the clay of the studio, but they
did not know the clay of which they themselves were made. But this I will
say--they played high. Never was there such a game before, and I doubt me
if there will ever be such a game again.
"Never was lovers' ecstasy like theirs. They had not killed Love with
kisses. They had quickened him with denial. And by denial they drove him
on till he was all aburst with desire. And the flame-winged lute-player
fanned them with his warm wings till they were all but swooning. It was
the very delirium of Love, and it continued undiminished and increasing
through the weeks and months.
"They longed and yearned, with all the fond pangs and sweet delicious
agonies, with an intensity never felt by lovers before nor since.
"And then one day the drowsy gods ceased nodding. They aroused and looked
at the man and woman who had made a mock of them. And the man and woman
looked into each other's eyes one morning and knew that something was gone.
It was the flame-winged one. He had fled, silently, in the night, from
their anchorites' board.
"They looked into each other's eyes and knew that they did not care.
Desire was dead. Do you understand? Desire was dead. And they had never
kissed. Not once had they kissed. Love was gone. They would never yearn
and burn again. For them there was nothing left--no more tremblings and
flutterings and delicious anguishes, no more throbbing and pulsing, and
sighing and song. Desire was dead. It had died in the night, on a couch
cold and unattended; nor had they witnessed its passing. They learned it
for the first time in each other's eyes.
"The gods may not be kind, but they are often merciful. They had twirled
the little ivory ball and swept the stakes from the table. All that
remained was the man and woman gazing into each other's cold eyes. And
then he died. That was the mercy. Within the week Marvin Fiske was dead--
you remember the accident. And in her diary, written at this time, I long
afterward read Mitchell Kennerly's:--
"'There was not a single hour
We might have kissed and did not kiss.'"
"Oh, the irony of it!" I cried out.
And Carquinez, in the firelight a veritable Mephistopheles in velvet
jacket, fixed me with his black eyes.
"And they won, you said? The world's judgment! I have told you, and I
know. They won as you are winning, here in your hills."
"But you," I demanded hotly; "you with your orgies of sound and sense, with
your mad cities and madder frolics--bethink you that you win?"
He shook his head slowly. "Because you with your sober bucolic regime,
lose, is no reason that I should win. We never win. Sometimes we think we
win. That is a little pleasantry of the gods."
THE APOSTATE
"Now I wake me up to work;
I pray the Lord I may not shirk.
If I should die before the night,
I pray the Lord my work's all right.
Amen."
"If you don't git up, Johnny, I won't give you a bite to eat!"
The threat had no effect on the boy. He clung stubbornly to sleep,
fighting for its oblivion as the dreamer fights for his dream. The boy's
hands loosely clenched themselves, and he made feeble, spasmodic blows at
the air. These blows were intended for his mother, but she betrayed
practised familiarity in avoiding them as she shook him roughly by the
shoulder.
"Lemme 'lone!"
It was a cry that began, muffled, in the deeps of sleep, that swiftly
rushed upward, like a wail, into passionate belligerence, and that died
away and sank down into an inarticulate whine. It was a bestial cry, as of
a soul in torment, filled with infinite protest and pain.
But she did not mind. She was a sad-eyed, tired-faced woman, and she had
grown used to this task, which she repeated every day of her life. She got
a grip on the bedclothes and tried to strip them down; but the boy, ceasing
his punching, clung to them desperately. In a huddle, at the foot of the
bed, he still remained covered. Then she tried dragging the bedding to the
floor. The boy opposed her. She braced herself. Hers was the superior
weight, and the boy and bedding gave, the former instinctively following
the latter in order to shelter against the chill of the room that bit into
his body.
As he toppled on the edge of the bed it seemed that he must fall head-first
to the floor. But consciousness fluttered up in him. He righted himself
and for a moment perilously balanced. Then he struck the floor on his
feet. On the instant his mother seized him by the shoulders and shook him.
Again his fists struck out, this time with more force and directness. At
the same time his eyes opened. She released him. He was awake.
"All right," he mumbled.
She caught up the lamp and hurried out, leaving him in darkness.
"You'll be docked," she warned back to him.
He did not mind the darkness. When he had got into his clothes, he went
out into the kitchen. His tread was very heavy for so thin and light a
boy. His legs dragged with their own weight, which seemed unreasonable
because they were such skinny legs. He drew a broken-bottomed chair to the
table.
"Johnny," his mother called sharply.
He arose as sharply from the chair, and, without a word, went to the sink.
It was a greasy, filthy sink. A smell came up from the outlet. He took no
notice of it. That a sink should smell was to him part of the natural
order, just as it was a part of the natural order that the soap should be
grimy with dish-water and hard to lather. Nor did he try very hard to make
it lather. Several splashes of the cold water from the running faucet
completed the function. He did not wash his teeth. For that matter he had
never seen a toothbrush, nor did he know that there existed beings in the
world who were guilty of so great a foolishness as tooth washing.
"You might wash yourself wunst a day without bein' told," his mother
complained.
She was holding a broken lid on the pot as she poured two cups of coffee.
He made no remark, for this was a standing quarrel between them, and the
one thing upon which his mother was hard as adamant. "Wunst" a day it was
compulsory that he should wash his face. He dried himself on a greasy
towel, damp and dirty and ragged, that left his face covered with shreds of
lint.
"I wish we didn't live so far away," she said, as he sat down. "I try to
do the best I can. You know that. But a dollar on the rent is such a
savin', an' we've more room here. You know that."
He scarcely followed her. He had heard it all before, many times. The
range of her thought was limited, and she was ever harking back to the
hardship worked upon them by living so far from the mills.
"A dollar means more grub," he remarked sententiously. "I'd sooner do the
walkin' an' git the grub."
He ate hurriedly, half chewing the bread and washing the unmasticated
chunks down with coffee. The hot and muddy liquid went by the name of
coffee. Johnny thought it was coffee--and excellent coffee. That was one
of the few of life's illusions that remained to him. He had never drunk
real coffee in his life.
In addition to the bread, there was a small piece of cold pork. His mother
refilled his cup with coffee. As he was finishing the bread, he began to
watch if more was forthcoming. She intercepted his questioning glance.
"Now, don't be hoggish, Johnny," was her comment. "You've had your share.
Your brothers an' sisters are smaller'n you."
He did not answer the rebuke. He was not much of a talker. Also, he
ceased his hungry glancing for more. He was uncomplaining, with a patience
that was as terrible as the school in which it had been learned. He
finished his coffee, wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, and started
to rise.
"Wait a second," she said hastily. "I guess the loaf kin stand you another
slice--a thin un."
There was legerdemain in her actions. With all the seeming of cutting a
slice from the loaf for him, she put loaf and slice back in the bread box
and conveyed to him one of her own two slices. She believed she had
deceived him, but he had noted her sleight-of-hand. Nevertheless, he took
the bread shamelessly. He had a philosophy that his mother, because of her
chronic sickliness, was not much of an eater anyway.
She saw that he was chewing the bread dry, and reached over and emptied her
coffee cup into his.
"Don't set good somehow on my stomach this morning," she explained.
A distant whistle, prolonged and shrieking, brought both of them to their
feet. She glanced at the tin alarm-clock on the shelf. The hands stood at
half-past five. The rest of the factory world was just arousing from
sleep. She drew a shawl about her shoulders, and on her head put a dingy
hat, shapeless and ancient.
"We've got to run," she said, turning the wick of the lamp and blowing down
the chimney.
They groped their way out and down the stairs. It was clear and cold, and
Johnny shivered at the first contact with the outside air. The stars had
not yet begun to pale in the sky, and the city lay in blackness. Both
Johnny and his mother shuffled their feet as they walked. There was no
ambition in the leg muscles to swing the feet clear of the ground.
After fifteen silent minutes, his mother turned off to the right.
"Don't be late," was her final warning from out of the dark that was
swallowing her up.
He made no response, steadily keeping on his way. In the factory quarter,
doors were opening everywhere, and he was soon one of a multitude that
pressed onward through the dark. As he entered the factory gate the
whistle blew again. He glanced at the east. Across a ragged sky-line of
housetops a pale light was beginning to creep. This much he saw of the day
as he turned his back upon it and joined his work gang.
He took his place in one of many long rows of machines. Before him, above
a bin filled with small bobbins, were large bobbins revolving rapidly.
Upon these he wound the jute-twine of the small bobbins. The work was
simple. All that was required was celerity. The small bobbins were
emptied so rapidly, and there were so many large bobbins that did the
emptying, that there were no idle moments.
He worked mechanically. When a small bobbin ran out, he used his left hand
for a brake, stopping the large bobbin and at the same time, with thumb and
forefinger, catching the flying end of twine. Also, at the same time, with
his right hand, he caught up the loose twine-end of a small bobbin. These
various acts with both hands were performed simultaneously and swiftly.
Then there would come a flash of his hands as he looped the weaver's knot
and released the bobbin. There was nothing difficult about weaver's knots.
He once boasted he could tie them in his sleep. And for that matter, he
sometimes did, toiling centuries long in a single night at tying an endless
succession of weaver's knots.
Some of the boys shirked, wasting time and machinery by not replacing the
small bobbins when they ran out. And there was an overseer to prevent
this. He caught Johnny's neighbour at the trick, and boxed his ears.
"Look at Johnny there--why ain't you like him?" the overseer wrathfully
demanded.
Johnny's bobbins were running full blast, but he did not thrill at the
indirect praise. There had been a time . . . but that was long ago, very
long ago. His apathetic face was expressionless as he listened to himself
being held up as a shining example. He was the perfect worker. He knew
that. He had been told so, often. It was a commonplace, and besides it
didn't seem to mean anything to him any more. From the perfect worker he
had evolved into the perfect machine. When his work went wrong, it was
with him as with the machine, due to faulty material. It would have been
as possible for a perfect nail-die to cut imperfect nails as for him to
make a mistake.
And small wonder. There had never been a time when he had not been in
intimate relationship with machines. Machinery had almost been bred into
him, and at any rate he had been brought up on it. Twelve years before,
there had been a small flutter of excitement in the loom room of this very
mill. Johnny's mother had fainted. They stretched her out on the floor in
the midst of the shrieking machines. A couple of elderly women were called
from their looms. The foreman assisted. And in a few minutes there was
one more soul in the loom room than had entered by the doors. It was
Johnny, born with the pounding, crashing roar of the looms in his ears,
drawing with his first breath the warm, moist air that was thick with
flying lint. He had coughed that first day in order to rid his lungs of
the lint; and for the same reason he had coughed ever since.
The boy alongside of Johnny whimpered and sniffed. The boy's face was
convulsed with hatred for the overseer who kept a threatening eye on him
from a distance; but every bobbin was running full. The boy yelled
terrible oaths into the whirling bobbins before him; but the sound did not
carry half a dozen feet, the roaring of the room holding it in and
containing it like a wall.
Of all this Johnny took no notice. He had a way of accepting things.
Besides, things grow monotonous by repetition, and this particular
happening he had witnessed many times. It seemed to him as useless to
oppose the overseer as to defy the will of a machine. Machines were made
to go in certain ways and to perform certain tasks. It was the same with
the overseer.
But at eleven o'clock there was excitement in the room. In an apparently
occult way the excitement instantly permeated everywhere. The one-legged
boy who worked on the other side of Johnny bobbed swiftly across the floor
to a bin truck that stood empty. Into this he dived out of sight, crutch
and all. The superintendent of the mill was coming along, accompanied by a
young man. He was well dressed and wore a starched shirt--a gentleman, in
Johnny's classification of men, and also, "the Inspector."
He looked sharply at the boys as he passed along. Sometimes he stopped and
asked questions. When he did so, he was compelled to shout at the top of
his lungs, at which moments his face was ludicrously contorted with the
strain of making himself heard. His quick eye noted the empty machine
alongside of Johnny's, but he said nothing. Johnny also caught his eye,
and he stopped abruptly. He caught Johnny by the arm to draw him back a
step from the machine; but with an exclamation of surprise he released the
arm.
"Pretty skinny," the superintendent laughed anxiously.
"Pipe stems," was the answer. "Look at those legs. The boy's got the
rickets--incipient, but he's got them. If epilepsy doesn't get him in the
end, it will be because tuberculosis gets him first."
Johnny listened, but did not understand. Furthermore he was not interested
in future ills. There was an immediate and more serious ill that
threatened him in the form of the inspector.
"Now, my boy, I want you to tell me the truth," the inspector said, or
shouted, bending close to the boy's ear to make him hear. "How old are
you?"
"Fourteen," Johnny lied, and he lied with the full force of his lungs. So
loudly did he lie that it started him off in a dry, hacking cough that
lifted the lint which had been settling in his lungs all morning.
"Looks sixteen at least," said the superintendent.
"Or sixty," snapped the inspector.
"He's always looked that way."
"How long?" asked the inspector, quickly.
"For years. Never gets a bit older."
"Or younger, I dare say. I suppose he's worked here all those years?"
"Off and on--but that was before the new law was passed," the
superintendent hastened to add.
"Machine idle?" the inspector asked, pointing at the unoccupied machine
beside Johnny's, in which the part-filled bobbins were flying like mad.
"Looks that way." The superintendent motioned the overseer to him and
shouted in his ear and pointed at the machine. "Machine's idle," he
reported back to the inspector.
They passed on, and Johnny returned to his work, relieved in that the ill
had been averted. But the one-legged boy was not so fortunate. The sharp-
eyed inspector haled him out at arms length from the bin truck. His lips
were quivering, and his face had all the expression of one upon whom was
fallen profound and irremediable disaster. The overseer looked astounded,
as though for the first time he had laid eyes on the boy, while the
superintendent's face expressed shock and displeasure.
"I know him," the inspector said. "He's twelve years old. I've had him
discharged from three factories inside the year. This makes the fourth."
He turned to the one-legged boy. "You promised me, word and honour, that
you'd go to school."
The one-legged boy burst into tears. "Please, Mr. Inspector, two babies
died on us, and we're awful poor."
"What makes you cough that way?" the inspector demanded, as though charging
him with crime.
And as in denial of guilt, the one-legged boy replied: "It ain't nothin'.
I jes' caught a cold last week, Mr. Inspector, that's all."
In the end the one-legged boy went out of the room with the inspector, the
latter accompanied by the anxious and protesting superintendent. After
that monotony settled down again. The long morning and the longer
afternoon wore away and the whistle blew for quitting time. Darkness had
already fallen when Johnny passed out through the factory gate. In the
interval the sun had made a golden ladder of the sky, flooded the world
with its gracious warmth, and dropped down and disappeared in the west
behind a ragged sky-line of housetops.
Supper was the family meal of the day--the one meal at which Johnny
encountered his younger brothers and sisters. It partook of the nature of
an encounter, to him, for he was very old, while they were distressingly
young. He had no patience with their excessive and amazing juvenility. He
did not understand it. His own childhood was too far behind him. He was
like an old and irritable man, annoyed by the turbulence of their young
spirits that was to him arrant silliness. He glowered silently over his
food, finding compensation in the thought that they would soon have to go
to work. That would take the edge off of them and make them sedate and
dignified--like him. Thus it was, after the fashion of the human, that
Johnny made of himself a yardstick with which to measure the universe.
During the meal, his mother explained in various ways and with infinite
repetition that she was trying to do the best she could; so that it was
with relief, the scant meal ended, that Johnny shoved back his chair and
arose. He debated for a moment between bed and the front door, and finally
went out the latter. He did not go far. He sat down on the stoop, his
knees drawn up and his narrow shoulders drooping forward, his elbows on his
knees and the palms of his hands supporting his chin.
As he sat there, he did no thinking. He was just resting. So far as his
mind was concerned, it was asleep. His brothers and sisters came out, and
with other children played noisily about him. An electric globe at the
corner lighted their frolics. He was peevish and irritable, that they
knew; but the spirit of adventure lured them into teasing him. They joined
hands before him, and, keeping time with their bodies, chanted in his face
weird and uncomplimentary doggerel. At first he snarled curses at them--
curses he had learned from the lips of various foremen. Finding this
futile, and remembering his dignity, he relapsed into dogged silence.
His brother Will, next to him in age, having just passed his tenth
birthday, was the ringleader. Johnny did not possess particularly kindly
feelings toward him. His life had early been embittered by continual
giving over and giving way to Will. He had a definite feeling that Will
was greatly in his debt and was ungrateful about it. In his own playtime,
far back in the dim past, he had been robbed of a large part of that
playtime by being compelled to take care of Will. Will was a baby then,
and then, as now, their mother had spent her days in the mills. To Johnny
had fallen the part of little father and little mother as well.
Will seemed to show the benefit of the giving over and the giving way. He
was well-built, fairly rugged, as tall as his elder brother and even
heavier. It was as though the life-blood of the one had been diverted into
the other's veins. And in spirits it was the same. Johnny was jaded, worn
out, without resilience, while his younger brother seemed bursting and
spilling over with exuberance.
The mocking chant rose louder and louder. Will leaned closer as he danced,
thrusting out his tongue. Johnny's left arm shot out and caught the other
around the neck. At the same time he rapped his bony fist to the other's
nose. It was a pathetically bony fist, but that it was sharp to hurt was
evidenced by the squeal of pain it produced. The other children were
uttering frightened cries, while Johnny's sister, Jennie, had dashed into
the house.
He thrust Will from him, kicked him savagely on the shins, then reached for
him and slammed him face downward in the dirt. Nor did he release him till
the face had been rubbed into the dirt several times. Then the mother
arrived, an anaemic whirlwind of solicitude and maternal wrath.
"Why can't he leave me alone?" was Johnny's reply to her upbraiding.
"Can't he see I'm tired?"
"I'm as big as you," Will raged in her arms, his face a mass of tears,
dirt, and blood. "I'm as big as you now, an' I'm goin' to git bigger.
Then I'll lick you--see if I don't."
"You ought to be to work, seein' how big you are," Johnny snarled. "That's
what's the matter with you. You ought to be to work. An' it's up to your
ma to put you to work."
"But he's too young," she protested. "He's only a little boy."
"I was younger'n him when I started to work."
Johnny's mouth was open, further to express the sense of unfairness that he
felt, but the mouth closed with a snap. He turned gloomily on his heel and
stalked into the house and to bed. The door of his room was open to let in
warmth from the kitchen. As he undressed in the semi-darkness he could
hear his mother talking with a neighbour woman who had dropped in. His
mother was crying, and her speech was punctuated with spiritless sniffles.
"I can't make out what's gittin' into Johnny," he could hear her say. "He
didn't used to be this way. He was a patient little angel.
"An' he is a good boy," she hastened to defend. "He's worked faithful, an'
he did go to work too young. But it wasn't my fault. I do the best I can,
I'm sure."
Prolonged sniffling from the kitchen, and Johnny murmured to himself as his
eyelids closed down, "You betcher life I've worked faithful."
The next morning he was torn bodily by his mother from the grip of sleep.
Then came the meagre breakfast, the tramp through the dark, and the pale
glimpse of day across the housetops as he turned his back on it and went in
through the factory gate. It was another day, of all the days, and all the
days were alike.
And yet there had been variety in his life--at the times he changed from
one job to another, or was taken sick. When he was six, he was little
mother and father to Will and the other children still younger. At seven
he went into the mills--winding bobbins. When he was eight, he got work in
another mill. His new job was marvellously easy. All he had to do was to
sit down with a little stick in his hand and guide a stream of cloth that
flowed past him. This stream of cloth came out of the maw of a machine,
passed over a hot roller, and went on its way elsewhere. But he sat always
in one place, beyond the reach of daylight, a gas-jet flaring over him,
himself part of the mechanism.
He was very happy at that job, in spite of the moist heat, for he was still
young and in possession of dreams and illusions. And wonderful dreams he
dreamed as he watched the steaming cloth streaming endlessly by. But there
was no exercise about the work, no call upon his mind, and he dreamed less
and less, while his mind grew torpid and drowsy. Nevertheless, he earned
two dollars a week, and two dollars represented the difference between
acute starvation and chronic underfeeding.
But when he was nine, he lost his job. Measles was the cause of it. After
he recovered, he got work in a glass factory. The pay was better, and the
work demanded skill. It was piecework, and the more skilful he was, the
bigger wages he earned. Here was incentive. And under this incentive he
developed into a remarkable worker.
It was simple work, the tying of glass stoppers into small bottles. At his
waist he carried a bundle of twine. He held the bottles between his knees
so that he might work with both hands. Thus, in a sitting position and
bending over his own knees, his narrow shoulders grew humped and his chest
was contracted for ten hours each day. This was not good for the lungs,
but he tied three hundred dozen bottles a day.
The superintendent was very proud of him, and brought visitors to look at
him. In ten hours three hundred dozen bottles passed through his hands.
This meant that he had attained machine-like perfection. All waste
movements were eliminated. Every motion of his thin arms, every movement
of a muscle in the thin fingers, was swift and accurate. He worked at high
tension, and the result was that he grew nervous. At night his muscles
twitched in his sleep, and in the daytime he could not relax and rest. He
remained keyed up and his muscles continued to twitch. Also he grew sallow
and his lint-cough grew worse. Then pneumonia laid hold of the feeble
lungs within the contracted chest, and he lost his job in the glass-works.
Now he had returned to the jute mills where he had first begun with winding
bobbins. But promotion was waiting for him. He was a good worker. He
would next go on the starcher, and later he would go into the loom room.
There was nothing after that except increased efficiency.
The machinery ran faster than when he had first gone to work, and his mind
ran slower. He no longer dreamed at all, though his earlier years had been
full of dreaming. Once he had been in love. It was when he first began
guiding the cloth over the hot roller, and it was with the daughter of the
superintendent. She was much older than he, a young woman, and he had seen
her at a distance only a paltry half-dozen times. But that made no
difference. On the surface of the cloth stream that poured past him, he
pictured radiant futures wherein he performed prodigies of toil, invented
miraculous machines, won to the mastership of the mills, and in the end
took her in his arms and kissed her soberly on the brow.
But that was all in the long ago, before he had grown too old and tired to
love. Also, she had married and gone away, and his mind had gone to sleep.
Yet it had been a wonderful experience, and he used often to look back upon
it as other men and women look back upon the time they believed in fairies.
He had never believed in fairies nor Santa Claus; but he had believed
implicitly in the smiling future his imagination had wrought into the
steaming cloth stream.
He had become a man very early in life. At seven, when he drew his first
wages, began his adolescence. A certain feeling of independence crept up
in him, and the relationship between him and his mother changed. Somehow,
as an earner and breadwinner, doing his own work in the world, he was more
like an equal with her. Manhood, full-blown manhood, had come when he was
eleven, at which time he had gone to work on the night shift for six
months. No child works on the night shift and remains a child.
There had been several great events in his life. One of these had been
when his mother bought some California prunes. Two others had been the two
times when she cooked custard. Those had been events. He remembered them
kindly. And at that time his mother had told him of a blissful dish she
would sometime make--"floating island," she had called it, "better than
custard." For years he had looked forward to the day when he would sit
down to the table with floating island before him, until at last he had
relegated the idea of it to the limbo of unattainable ideals.
Once he found a silver quarter lying on the sidewalk. That, also, was a
great event in his life, withal a tragic one. He knew his duty on the
instant the silver flashed on his eyes, before even he had picked it up.
At home, as usual, there was not enough to eat, and home he should have
taken it as he did his wages every Saturday night. Right conduct in this
case was obvious; but he never had any spending of his money, and he was
suffering from candy hunger. He was ravenous for the sweets that only on
red-letter days he had ever tasted in his life.
He did not attempt to deceive himself. He knew it was sin, and
deliberately he sinned when he went on a fifteen-cent candy debauch. Ten
cents he saved for a future orgy; but not being accustomed to the carrying
of money, he lost the ten cents. This occurred at the time when he was
suffering all the torments of conscience, and it was to him an act of
divine retribution. He had a frightened sense of the closeness of an awful
and wrathful God. God had seen, and God had been swift to punish, denying
him even the full wages of sin.
In memory he always looked back upon that as the one great criminal deed of
his life, and at the recollection his conscience always awoke and gave him
another twinge. It was the one skeleton in his closet. Also, being so
made, and circumstanced, he looked back upon the deed with regret. He was
dissatisfied with the manner in which he had spent the quarter. He could
have invested it better, and, out of his later knowledge of the quickness
of God, he would have beaten God out by spending the whole quarter at one
fell swoop. In retrospect he spent the quarter a thousand times, and each
time to better advantage.
There was one other memory of the past, dim and faded, but stamped into his
soul everlasting by the savage feet of his father. It was more like a
nightmare than a remembered vision of a concrete thing--more like the race-
memory of man that makes him fall in his sleep and that goes back to his
arboreal ancestry.
This particular memory never came to Johnny in broad daylight when he was
wide awake. It came at night, in bed, at the moment that his consciousness
was sinking down and losing itself in sleep. It always aroused him to
frightened wakefulness, and for the moment, in the first sickening start,
it seemed to him that he lay crosswise on the foot of the bed. In the bed
were the vague forms of his father and mother. He never saw what his
father looked like. He had but one impression of his father, and that was
that he had savage and pitiless feet.
His earlier memories lingered with him, but he had no late memories. All
days were alike. Yesterday or last year were the same as a thousand years-
-or a minute. Nothing ever happened. There were no events to mark the
march of time. Time did not march. It stood always still. It was only
the whirling machines that moved, and they moved nowhere--in spite of the
fact that they moved faster.
When he was fourteen, he went to work on the starcher. It was a colossal
event. Something had at last happened that could be remembered beyond a
night's sleep or a week's pay-day. It marked an era. It was a machine
Olympiad, a thing to date from. "When I went to work on the starcher," or,
"after," or "before I went to work on the starcher," were sentences often
on his lips.
He celebrated his sixteenth birthday by going into the loom room and taking
a loom. Here was an incentive again, for it was piece-work. And he
excelled, because the clay of him had been moulded by the mills into the
perfect machine. At the end of three months he was running two looms, and,
later, three and four.
At the end of his second year at the looms he was turning out more yards
than any other weaver, and more than twice as much as some of the less
skilful ones. And at home things began to prosper as he approached the
full stature of his earning power. Not, however, that his increased
earnings were in excess of need. The children were growing up. They ate
more. And they were going to school, and school-books cost money. And
somehow, the faster he worked, the faster climbed the prices of things.
Even the rent went up, though the house had fallen from bad to worse
disrepair.
He had grown taller; but with his increased height he seemed leaner than
ever. Also, he was more nervous. With the nervousness increased his
peevishness and irritability. The children had learned by many bitter
lessons to fight shy of him. His mother respected him for his earning
power, but somehow her respect was tinctured with fear.
There was no joyousness in life for him. The procession of the days he
never saw. The nights he slept away in twitching unconsciousness. The
rest of the time he worked, and his consciousness was machine
consciousness. Outside this his mind was a blank. He had no ideals, and
but one illusion; namely, that he drank excellent coffee. He was a work-
beast. He had no mental life whatever; yet deep down in the crypts of his
mind, unknown to him, were being weighed and sifted every hour of his toil,
every movement of his hands, every twitch of his muscles, and preparations
were making for a future course of action that would amaze him and all his
little world.
It was in the late spring that he came home from work one night aware of
unusual tiredness. There was a keen expectancy in the air as he sat down
to the table, but he did not notice. He went through the meal in moody
silence, mechanically eating what was before him. The children um'd and
ah'd and made smacking noises with their mouths. But he was deaf to them.
"D'ye know what you're eatin'?" his mother demanded at last, desperately.
He looked vacantly at the dish before him, and vacantly at her.
"Floatin' island," she announced triumphantly.
"Oh," he said.
"Floating island!" the children chorussed loudly.
"Oh," he said. And after two or three mouthfuls, he added, "I guess I
ain't hungry to-night."
He dropped the spoon, shoved back his chair, and arose wearily from the
table.
"An' I guess I'll go to bed."
His feet dragged more heavily than usual as he crossed the kitchen floor.
Undressing was a Titan's task, a monstrous futility, and he wept weakly as
he crawled into bed, one shoe still on. He was aware of a rising, swelling
something inside his head that made his brain thick and fuzzy. His lean
fingers felt as big as his wrist, while in the ends of them was a
remoteness of sensation vague and fuzzy like his brain. The small of his
back ached intolerably. All his bones ached. He ached everywhere. And in
his head began the shrieking, pounding, crashing, roaring of a million
looms. All space was filled with flying shuttles. They darted in and out,
intricately, amongst the stars. He worked a thousand looms himself, and
ever they speeded up, faster and faster, and his brain unwound, faster and
faster, and became the thread that fed the thousand flying shuttles.
He did not go to work next morning. He was too busy weaving colossally on
the thousand looms that ran inside his head. His mother went to work, but
first she sent for the doctor. It was a severe attack of la grippe, he
said. Jennie served as nurse and carried out his instructions.
It was a very severe attack, and it was a week before Johnny dressed and
tottered feebly across the floor. Another week, the doctor said, and he
would be fit to return to work. The foreman of the loom room visited him
on Sunday afternoon, the first day of his convalescence. The best weaver
in the room, the foreman told his mother. His job would be held for him.
He could come back to work a week from Monday.
"Why don't you thank 'im, Johnny?" his mother asked anxiously.
"He's ben that sick he ain't himself yet," she explained apologetically to
the visitor.
Johnny sat hunched up and gazing steadfastly at the floor. He sat in the
same position long after the foreman had gone. It was warm outdoors, and
he sat on the stoop in the afternoon. Sometimes his lips moved. He seemed
lost in endless calculations.
Next morning, after the day grew warm, he took his seat on the stoop. He
had pencil and paper this time with which to continue his calculations, and
he calculated painfully and amazingly.
"What comes after millions?" he asked at noon, when Will came home from
school. "An' how d'ye work 'em?"
That afternoon finished his task. Each day, but without paper and pencil,
he returned to the stoop. He was greatly absorbed in the one tree that
grew across the street. He studied it for hours at a time, and was
unusually interested when the wind swayed its branches and fluttered its
leaves. Throughout the week he seemed lost in a great communion with
himself. On Sunday, sitting on the stoop, he laughed aloud, several times,
to the perturbation of his mother, who had not heard him laugh for years.
Next morning, in the early darkness, she came to his bed to rouse him. He
had had his fill of sleep all the week, and awoke easily. He made no
struggle, nor did he attempt to hold on to the bedding when she stripped it
from him. He lay quietly, and spoke quietly.
"It ain't no use, ma."
"You'll be late," she said, under the impression that he was still stupid
with sleep.
"I'm awake, ma, an' I tell you it ain't no use. You might as well lemme
alone. I ain't goin' to git up."
"But you'll lose your job!" she cried.
"I ain't goin' to git up," he repeated in a strange, passionless voice.
She did not go to work herself that morning. This was sickness beyond any
sickness she had ever known. Fever and delirium she could understand; but
this was insanity. She pulled the bedding up over him and sent Jennie for
the doctor.
When that person arrived, Johnny was sleeping gently, and gently he awoke
and allowed his pulse to be taken.
"Nothing the matter with him," the doctor reported. "Badly debilitated,
that's all. Not much meat on his bones."
"He's always been that way," his mother volunteered.
"Now go 'way, ma, an' let me finish my snooze."
Johnny spoke sweetly and placidly, and sweetly and placidly he rolled over
on his side and went to sleep.
At ten o'clock he awoke and dressed himself. He walked out into the
kitchen, where he found his mother with a frightened expression on her
face.
"I'm goin' away, ma," he announced, "an' I jes' want to say good-bye."
She threw her apron over her head and sat down suddenly and wept. He
waited patiently.
"I might a-known it," she was sobbing.
"Where?" she finally asked, removing the apron from her head and gazing up
at him with a stricken face in which there was little curiosity.
"I don't know--anywhere."
As he spoke, the tree across the street appeared with dazzling brightness
on his inner vision. It seemed to lurk just under his eyelids, and he
could see it whenever he wished.
"An' your job?" she quavered.
"I ain't never goin' to work again."
"My God, Johnny!" she wailed, "don't say that!"
What he had said was blasphemy to her. As a mother who hears her child
deny God, was Johnny's mother shocked by his words.
"What's got into you, anyway?" she demanded, with a lame attempt at
imperativeness.
"Figures," he answered. "Jes' figures. I've ben doin' a lot of figurin'
this week, an' it's most surprisin'."
"I don't see what that's got to do with it," she sniffled.
Johnny smiled patiently, and his mother was aware of a distinct shock at
the persistent absence of his peevishness and irritability.
"I'll show you," he said. "I'm plum' tired out. What makes me tired?
Moves. I've ben movin' ever since I was born. I'm tired of movin', an' I
ain't goin' to move any more. Remember when I worked in the glass-house?
I used to do three hundred dozen a day. Now I reckon I made about ten
different moves to each bottle. That's thirty-six thousan' moves a day.
Ten days, three hundred an' sixty thousan' moves. One month, one million
an' eighty thousan' moves. Chuck out the eighty thousan'"--he spoke with
the complacent beneficence of a philanthropist--"chuck out the eighty
thousan', that leaves a million moves a month--twelve million moves a year.
"At the looms I'm movin' twic'st as much. That makes twenty-five million
moves a year, an' it seems to me I've ben a movin' that way 'most a million
years.
"Now this week I ain't moved at all. I ain't made one move in hours an'
hours. I tell you it was swell, jes' settin' there, hours an' hours, an'
doin' nothin'. I ain't never ben happy before. I never had any time.
I've ben movin' all the time. That ain't no way to be happy. An' I ain't
going to do it any more. I'm jes' goin' to set, an' set, an' rest, an'
rest, and then rest some more."
"But what's goin' to come of Will an' the children?" she asked
despairingly.
"That's it, 'Will an' the children,'" he repeated.
But there was no bitterness in his voice. He had long known his mother's
ambition for the younger boy, but the thought of it no longer rankled.
Nothing mattered any more. Not even that.
"I know, ma, what you've ben plannin' for Will--keepin' him in school to
make a book-keeper out of him. But it ain't no use, I've quit. He's got
to go to work."
"An' after I have brung you up the way I have," she wept, starting to cover
her head with the apron and changing her mind.
"You never brung me up," he answered with sad kindliness. "I brung myself
up, ma, an' I brung up Will. He's bigger'n me, an' heavier, an' taller.
When I was a kid, I reckon I didn't git enough to eat. When he come along
an' was a kid, I was workin' an' earnin' grub for him too. But that's done
with. Will can go to work, same as me, or he can go to hell, I don't care
which. I'm tired. I'm goin' now. Ain't you goin' to say goodbye?"
She made no reply. The apron had gone over her head again, and she was
crying. He paused a moment in the doorway.
"I'm sure I done the best I knew how," she was sobbing.
He passed out of the house and down the street. A wan delight came into
his face at the sight of the lone tree. "Jes' ain't goin' to do nothin',"
he said to himself, half aloud, in a crooning tone. He glanced wistfully
up at the sky, but the bright sun dazzled and blinded him.
It was a long walk he took, and he did not walk fast. It took him past the
jute-mill. The muffled roar of the loom room came to his ears, and he
smiled. It was a gentle, placid smile. He hated no one, not even the
pounding, shrieking machines. There was no bitterness in him, nothing but
an inordinate hunger for rest.
The houses and factories thinned out and the open spaces increased as he
approached the country. At last the city was behind him, and he was
walking down a leafy lane beside the railroad track. He did not walk like
a man. He did not look like a man. He was a travesty of the human. It
was a twisted and stunted and nameless piece of life that shambled like a
sickly ape, arms loose-hanging, stoop-shouldered, narrow-chested, grotesque
and terrible.
He passed by a small railroad station and lay down in the grass under a
tree. All afternoon he lay there. Sometimes he dozed, with muscles that
twitched in his sleep. When awake, he lay without movement, watching the
birds or looking up at the sky through the branches of the tree above him.
Once or twice he laughed aloud, but without relevance to anything he had
seen or felt.
After twilight had gone, in the first darkness of the night, a freight
train rumbled into the station. When the engine was switching cars on to
the side-track, Johnny crept along the side of the train. He pulled open
the side-door of an empty box-car and awkwardly and laboriously climbed in.
He closed the door. The engine whistled. Johnny was lying down, and in
the darkness he smiled.
A WICKED WOMAN
It was because she had broken with Billy that Loretta had come visiting to
Santa Clara. Billy could not understand. His sister had reported that he
had walked the floor and cried all night. Loretta had not slept all night
either, while she had wept most of the night. Daisy knew this, because it
was in her arms that the weeping had been done. And Daisy's husband,
Captain Kitt, knew, too. The tears of Loretta, and the comforting by
Daisy, had lost him some sleep.
Now Captain Kitt did not like to lose sleep. Neither did he want Loretta
to marry Billy--nor anybody else. It was Captain Kitt's belief that Daisy
needed the help of her younger sister in the household. But he did not say
this aloud. Instead, he always insisted that Loretta was too young to
think of marriage. So it was Captain Kitt's idea that Loretta should be
packed off on a visit to Mrs. Hemingway. There wouldn't be any Billy
there.
Before Loretta had been at Santa Clara a week, she was convinced that
Captain Kitt's idea was a good one. In the first place, though Billy
wouldn't believe it, she did not want to marry Billy. And in the second
place, though Captain Kitt wouldn't believe it, she did not want to leave
Daisy. By the time Loretta had been at Santa Clara two weeks, she was
absolutely certain that she did not want to marry Billy. But she was not
so sure about not wanting to leave Daisy. Not that she loved Daisy less,
but that she--had doubts.
The day of Loretta's arrival, a nebulous plan began shaping itself in Mrs.
Hemingway's brain. The second day she remarked to Jack Hemingway, her
husband, that Loretta was so innocent a young thing that were it not for
her sweet guilelessness she would be positively stupid. In proof of which,
Mrs. Hemingway told her husband several things that made him chuckle. By
the third day Mrs. Hemingway's plan had taken recognizable form. Then it
was that she composed a letter. On the envelope she wrote: "Mr. Edward
Bashford, Athenian Club, San Francisco."
"Dear Ned," the letter began. She had once been violently loved by him for
three weeks in her pre-marital days. But she had covenanted herself to
Jack Hemingway, who had prior claims, and her heart as well; and Ned
Bashford had philosophically not broken his heart over it. He merely added
the experience to a large fund of similarly collected data out of which he
manufactured philosophy. Artistically and temperamentally he was a Greek--
a tired Greek. He was fond of quoting from Nietzsche, in token that he,
too, had passed through the long sickness that follows upon the ardent
search for truth; that he too had emerged, too experienced, too shrewd, too
profound, ever again to be afflicted by the madness of youths in their love
of truth. "'To worship appearance,'" he often quoted; "'to believe in
forms, in tones, in words, in the whole Olympus of appearance!'" This
particular excerpt he always concluded with, "'Those Greeks were
superficial--OUT OF PROFUNDITY!'"
He was a fairly young Greek, jaded and worn. Women were faithless and
unveracious, he held--at such times that he had relapses and descended to
pessimism from his wonted high philosophical calm. He did not believe in
the truth of women; but, faithful to his German master, he did not strip
from them the airy gauzes that veiled their untruth. He was content to
accept them as appearances and to make the best of it. He was superficial-
-OUT OF PROFUNDITY.
"Jack says to be sure to say to you, 'good swimming,'" Mrs. Hemingway wrote
in her letter; "and also 'to bring your fishing duds along.'" Mrs.
Hemingway wrote other things in the letter. She told him that at last she
was prepared to exhibit to him an absolutely true, unsullied, and innocent
woman. "A more guileless, immaculate bud of womanhood never blushed on the
planet," was one of the several ways in which she phrased the inducement.
And to her husband she said triumphantly, "If I don't marry Ned off this
time--" leaving unstated the terrible alternative that she lacked either
vocabulary to express or imagination to conceive.
Contrary to all her forebodings, Loretta found that she was not unhappy at
Santa Clara. Truly, Billy wrote to her every day, but his letters were
less distressing than his presence. Also, the ordeal of being away from
Daisy was not so severe as she had expected. For the first time in her
life she was not lost in eclipse in the blaze of Daisy's brilliant and
mature personality. Under such favourable circumstances Loretta came
rapidly to the front, while Mrs. Hemingway modestly and shamelessly
retreated into the background.
Loretta began to discover that she was not a pale orb shining by
reflection. Quite unconsciously she became a small centre of things. When
she was at the piano, there was some one to turn the pages for her and to
express preferences for certain songs. When she dropped her handkerchief,
there was some one to pick it up. And there was some one to accompany her
in ramblings and flower gatherings. Also, she learned to cast flies in
still pools and below savage riffles, and how not to entangle silk lines
and gut-leaders with the shrubbery.
Jack Hemingway did not care to teach beginners, and fished much by himself,
or not at all, thus giving Ned Bashford ample time in which to consider
Loretta as an appearance. As such, she was all that his philosophy
demanded. Her blue eyes had the direct gaze of a boy, and out of his
profundity he delighted in them and forbore to shudder at the duplicity his
philosophy bade him to believe lurked in their depths. She had the grace
of a slender flower, the fragility of colour and line of fine china, in all
of which he pleasured greatly, without thought of the Life Force
palpitating beneath and in spite of Bernard Shaw--in whom he believed.
Loretta burgeoned. She swiftly developed personality. She discovered a
will of her own and wishes of her own that were not everlastingly entwined
with the will and the wishes of Daisy. She was petted by Jack Hemingway,
spoiled by Alice Hemingway, and devotedly attended by Ned Bashford. They
encouraged her whims and laughed at her follies, while she developed the
pretty little tyrannies that are latent in all pretty and delicate women.
Her environment acted as a soporific upon her ancient desire always to live
with Daisy. This desire no longer prodded her as in the days of her
companionship with Billy. The more she saw of Billy, the more certain she
had been that she could not live away from Daisy. The more she saw of Ned
Bashford, the more she forgot her pressing need of Daisy.
Ned Bashford likewise did some forgetting. He confused superficiality with
profundity, and entangled appearance with reality until he accounted them
one. Loretta was different from other women. There was no masquerade
about her. She was real. He said as much to Mrs. Hemingway, and more, who
agreed with him and at the same time caught her husband's eyelid drooping
down for the moment in an unmistakable wink.
It was at this time that Loretta received a letter from Billy that was
somewhat different from his others. In the main, like all his letters, it
was pathological. It was a long recital of symptoms and sufferings, his
nervousness, his sleeplessness, and the state of his heart. Then followed
reproaches, such as he had never made before. They were sharp enough to
make her weep, and true enough to put tragedy into her face. This tragedy
she carried down to the breakfast table. It made Jack and Mrs. Hemingway
speculative, and it worried Ned. They glanced to him for explanation, but
he shook his head.
"I'll find out to-night," Mrs. Hemingway said to her husband.
But Ned caught Loretta in the afternoon in the big living-room. She tried
to turn away. He caught her hands, and she faced him with wet lashes and
trembling lips. He looked at her, silently and kindly. The lashes grew
wetter.
"There, there, don't cry, little one," he said soothingly.
He put his arm protectingly around her shoulder. And to his shoulder, like
a tired child, she turned her face. He thrilled in ways unusual for a
Greek who has recovered from the long sickness.
"Oh, Ned," she sobbed on his shoulder, "if you only knew how wicked I am!"
He smiled indulgently, and breathed in a great breath freighted with the
fragrance of her hair. He thought of his world-experience of women, and
drew another long breath. There seemed to emanate from her the perfect
sweetness of a child--"the aura of a white soul," was the way he phrased it
to himself.
Then he noticed that her sobs were increasing.
"What's the matter, little one?" he asked pettingly and almost paternally.
"Has Jack been bullying you? Or has your dearly beloved sister failed to
write?"
She did not answer, and he felt that he really must kiss her hair, that he
could not be responsible if the situation continued much longer.
"Tell me," he said gently, "and we'll see what I can do."
"I can't. You will despise me.--Oh, Ned, I am so ashamed!"
He laughed incredulously, and lightly touched her hair with his lips--so
lightly that she did not know.
"Dear little one, let us forget all about it, whatever it is. I want to
tell you how I love--"
She uttered a sharp cry that was all delight, and then moaned--
"Too late!"
"Too late?" he echoed in surprise.
"Oh, why did I? Why did I?" she was moaning.
He was aware of a swift chill at his heart.
"What?" he asked.
"Oh, I . . . he . . . Billy.
"I am such a wicked woman, Ned. I know you will never speak to me again."
"This--er--this Billy," he began haltingly. "He is your brother?"
"No . . . he . . . I didn't know. I was so young. I could not help it.
Oh, I shall go mad! I shall go mad!"
It was then that Loretta felt his shoulder and the encircling arm become
limp. He drew away from her gently, and gently he deposited her in a big
chair, where she buried her face and sobbed afresh. He twisted his
moustache fiercely, then drew up another chair and sat down.
"I--I do not understand," he said.
"I am so unhappy," she wailed.
"Why unhappy?"
"Because . . . he . . . he wants me to marry him."
His face cleared on the instant, and he placed a hand soothingly on hers.
"That should not make any girl unhappy," he remarked sagely. "Because you
don't love him is no reason--of course, you don't love him?"
Loretta shook her head and shoulders in a vigorous negative.
"What?"
Bashford wanted to make sure.
"No," she asserted explosively. "I don't love Billy! I don't want to love
Billy!"
"Because you don't love him," Bashford resumed with confidence, "is no
reason that you should be unhappy just because he has proposed to you."
She sobbed again, and from the midst of her sobs she cried--
"That's the trouble. I wish I did love him. Oh, I wish I were dead!"
"Now, my dear child, you are worrying yourself over trifles." His other
hand crossed over after its mate and rested on hers. "Women do it every
day. Because you have changed your mind or did not know your mind, because
you have--to use an unnecessarily harsh word--jilted a man--"
"Jilted!" She had raised her head and was looking at him with tear-dimmed
eyes. "Oh, Ned, if that were all!"
"All?" he asked in a hollow voice, while his hands slowly retreated from
hers. He was about to speak further, then remained silent.
"But I don't want to marry him," Loretta broke forth protestingly.
"Then I shouldn't," he counselled.
"But I ought to marry him."
"OUGHT to marry him?"
She nodded.
"That is a strong word."
"I know it is," she acquiesced, while she strove to control her trembling
lips. Then she spoke more calmly. "I am a wicked woman, a terribly wicked
woman. No one knows how wicked I am--except Billy."
There was a pause. Ned Bashford's face was grave, and he looked queerly at
Loretta.
"He--Billy knows?" he asked finally.
A reluctant nod and flaming cheeks was the reply.
He debated with himself for a while, seeming, like a diver, to be preparing
himself for the plunge.
"Tell me about it." He spoke very firmly. "You must tell me all of it."
"And will you--ever--forgive me?" she asked in a faint, small voice.
He hesitated, drew a long breath, and made the plunge.
"Yes," he said desperately. "I'll forgive you. Go ahead."
"There was no one to tell me," she began. "We were with each other so
much. I did not know anything of the world--then."
She paused to meditate. Bashford was biting his lip impatiently.
"If I had only known--"
She paused again.
"Yes, go on," he urged.
"We were together almost every evening."
"Billy?" he demanded, with a savageness that startled her.
"Yes, of course, Billy. We were with each other so much . . . If I had
only known . . . There was no one to tell me . . . I was so young--"
Her lips parted as though to speak further, and she regarded him anxiously.
"The scoundrel!"
With the explosion Ned Bashford was on his feet, no longer a tired Greek,
but a violently angry young man.
"Billy is not a scoundrel; he is a good man," Loretta defended, with a
firmness that surprised Bashford.
"I suppose you'll be telling me next that it was all your fault," he said
sarcastically.
She nodded.
"What?" he shouted.
"It was all my fault," she said steadily. "I should never have let him. I
was to blame."
Bashford ceased from his pacing up and down, and when he spoke, his voice
was resigned.
"All right," he said. "I don't blame you in the least, Loretta. And you
have been very honest. But Billy is right, and you are wrong. You must
get married."
"To Billy?" she asked, in a dim, far-away voice.
"Yes, to Billy. I'll see to it. Where does he live? I'll make him."
"But I don't want to marry Billy!" she cried out in alarm. "Oh, Ned, you
won't do that?"
"I shall," he answered sternly. "You must. And Billy must. Do you
understand?"
Loretta buried her face in the cushioned chair back, and broke into a
passionate storm of sobs.
All that Bashford could make out at first, as he listened, was: "But I
don't want to leave Daisy! I don't want to leave Daisy!"
He paced grimly back and forth, then stopped curiously to listen.
"How was I to know?--Boo--hoo," Loretta was crying. "He didn't tell me.
Nobody else ever kissed me. I never dreamed a kiss could be so terrible .
. . until, boo-hoo . . . until he wrote to me. I only got the letter this
morning."
His face brightened. It seemed as though light was dawning on him.
"Is that what you're crying about?"
"N--no."
His heart sank.
"Then what are you crying about?" he asked in a hopeless voice.
"Because you said I had to marry Billy. And I don't want to marry Billy.
I don't want to leave Daisy. I don't know what I want. I wish I were
dead."
He nerved himself for another effort.
"Now look here, Loretta, be sensible. What is this about kisses. You
haven't told me everything?"
"I--I don't want to tell you everything."
She looked at him beseechingly in the silence that fell.
"Must I?" she quavered finally.
"You must," he said imperatively. "You must tell me everything."
"Well, then . . . must I?"
"You must."
"He . . . I . . . we . . ." she began flounderingly. Then blurted out, "I
let him, and he kissed me."
"Go on," Bashford commanded desperately.
"That's all," she answered.
"All?" There was a vast incredulity in his voice.
"All?" In her voice was an interrogation no less vast.
"I mean--er--nothing worse?" He was overwhelmingly aware of his own
awkwardness.
"Worse?" She was frankly puzzled. "As though there could be! Billy said-
-"
"When did he say it?" Bashford demanded abruptly.
"In his letter I got this morning. Billy said that my . . . our . . . our
kisses were terrible if we didn't get married."
Bashford's head was swimming.
"What else did Billy say?" he asked.
"He said that when a woman allowed a man to kiss her, she always married
him--that it was terrible if she didn't. It was the custom, he said; and I
say it is a bad, wicked custom, and I don't like it. I know I'm terrible,"
she added defiantly, "but I can't help it."
Bashford absent-mindedly brought out a cigarette.
"Do you mind if I smoke?" he asked, as he struck a match.
Then he came to himself.
"I beg your pardon," he cried, flinging away match and cigarette. "I don't
want to smoke. I didn't mean that at all. What I mean is--"
He bent over Loretta, caught her hands in his, then sat on the arm of the
chair and softly put one arm around her.
"Loretta, I am a fool. I mean it. And I mean something more. I want you
to be my wife."
He waited anxiously in the pause that followed.
"You might answer me," he urged.
"I will . . . if--"
"Yes, go on. If what?"
"If I don't have to marry Billy."
"You can't marry both of us," he almost shouted.
"And it isn't the custom . . . what. . . what Billy said?"
"No, it isn't the custom. Now, Loretta, will you marry me?"
"Don't be angry with me," she pouted demurely.
He gathered her into his arms and kissed her.
"I wish it were the custom," she said in a faint voice, from the midst of
the embrace, "because then I'd have to marry you, Ned dear . . . wouldn't
I?"
JUST MEAT
He strolled to the corner and glanced up and down the intersecting street,
but saw nothing save the oases of light shed by the street lamps at the
successive crossings. Then he strolled back the way he had come. He was a
shadow of a man, sliding noiselessly and without undue movement through the
semi-darkness. Also he was very alert, like a wild animal in the jungle,
keenly perceptive and receptive. The movement of another in the darkness
about him would need to have been more shadowy than he to have escaped him.
In addition to the running advertisement of the state of affairs carried to
him by his senses, he had a subtler perception, a FEEL, of the atmosphere
around him. He knew that the house in front of which he paused for a
moment, contained children. Yet by no willed effort of perception did he
have this knowledge. For that matter, he was not even aware that he knew,
so occult was the impression. Yet, did a moment arise in which action, in
relation to that house, were imperative, he would have acted on the
assumption that it contained children. He was not aware of all that he
knew about the neighbourhood.
In the same way, he knew not how, he knew that no danger threatened in the
footfalls that came up the cross street. Before he saw the walker, he knew
him for a belated pedestrian hurrying home. The walker came into view at
the crossing and disappeared on up the street. The man that watched, noted
a light that flared up in the window of a house on the corner, and as it
died down he knew it for an expiring match. This was conscious
identification of familiar phenomena, and through his mind flitted the
thought, "Wanted to know what time." In another house one room was
lighted. The light burned dimly and steadily, and he had the feel that it
was a sick-room.
He was especially interested in a house across the street in the middle of
the block. To this house he paid most attention. No matter what way he
looked, nor what way he walked, his looks and his steps always returned to
it. Except for an open window above the porch, there was nothing unusual
about the house. Nothing came in nor out. Nothing happened. There were
no lighted windows, nor had lights appeared and disappeared in any of the
windows. Yet it was the central point of his consideration. He rallied to
it each time after a divination of the state of the neighbourhood.
Despite his feel of things, he was not confident. He was supremely
conscious of the precariousness of his situation. Though unperturbed by
the footfalls of the chance pedestrian, he was as keyed up and sensitive
and ready to be startled as any timorous deer. He was aware of the
possibility of other intelligences prowling about in the darkness--
intelligences similar to his own in movement, perception, and divination.
Far down the street he caught a glimpse of something that moved. And he
knew it was no late home-goer, but menace and danger. He whistled twice to
the house across the street, then faded away shadow-like to the corner and
around the corner. Here he paused and looked about him carefully.
Reassured, he peered back around the corner and studied the object that
moved and that was coming nearer. He had divined aright. It was a
policeman.
The man went down the cross street to the next corner, from the shelter of
which he watched the corner he had just left. He saw the policeman pass
by, going straight on up the street. He paralleled the policeman's course,
and from the next corner again watched him go by; then he returned the way
he had come. He whistled once to the house across the street, and after a
time whistled once again. There was reassurance in the whistle, just as
there had been warning in the previous double whistle.
He saw a dark bulk outline itself on the roof of the porch and slowly
descend a pillar. Then it came down the steps, passed through the small
iron gate, and went down the sidewalk, taking on the form of a man. He
that watched kept on his own side of the street and moved on abreast to the
corner, where he crossed over and joined the other. He was quite small
alongside the man he accosted.
"How'd you make out, Matt?" he asked.
The other grunted indistinctly, and walked on in silence a few steps.
"I reckon I landed the goods," he said.
Jim chuckled in the darkness, and waited for further information. The
blocks passed by under their feet, and he grew impatient.
"Well, how about them goods?" he asked. "What kind of a haul did you make,
anyway?"
"I was too busy to figger it out, but it's fat. I can tell you that much,
Jim, it's fat. I don't dast to think how fat it is. Wait till we get to
the room."
Jim looked at him keenly under the street lamp of the next crossing, and
saw that his face was a trifle grim and that he carried his left arm
peculiarly.
"What's the matter with your arm?" he demanded.
"The little cuss bit me. Hope I don't get hydrophoby. Folks gets
hydrophoby from manbite sometimes, don't they?"
"Gave you fight, eh?" Jim asked encouragingly.
The other grunted.
"You're harder'n hell to get information from," Jim burst out irritably.
"Tell us about it. You ain't goin' to lose money just a-tellin' a guy."
"I guess I choked him some," came the answer. Then, by way of explanation,
"He woke up on me."
"You did it neat. I never heard a sound."
"Jim," the other said with seriousness, "it's a hangin' matter. I fixed
'm. I had to. He woke up on me. You an' me's got to do some layin' low
for a spell."
Jim gave a low whistle of comprehension.
"Did you hear me whistle?" he asked suddenly.
"Sure. I was all done. I was just comin' out."
"It was a bull. But he wasn't on a little bit. Went right by an' kept a-
paddin' the hoof out a sight. Then I come back an' gave you the whistle.
What made you take so long after that?"
"I was waitin' to make sure," Matt explained. "I was mighty glad when I
heard you whistle again. It's hard work waitin'. I just sat there an'
thought an' thought . . . oh, all kinds' of things. It's remarkable what a
fellow'll think about. And then there was a darn cat that kept movin'
around the house all' botherin' me with its noises."
"An' it's fat!" Jim exclaimed irrelevantly and with joy.
"I'm sure tellin' you, Jim, it's fat. I'm plum' anxious for another look
at 'em."
Unconsciously the two men quickened their pace. Yet they did not relax
from their caution. Twice they changed their course in order to avoid
policemen, and they made very sure that they were not observed when they
dived into the dark hallway of a cheap rooming house down town.
Not until they had gained their own room on the top floor, did they scratch
a match. While Jim lighted a lamp, Matt locked the door and threw the
bolts into place. As he turned, he noticed that his partner was waiting
expectantly. Matt smiled to himself at the other's eagerness.
"Them search-lights is all right," he said, drawing forth a small pocket
electric lamp and examining it. "But we got to get a new battery. It's
runnin' pretty weak. I thought once or twice it'd leave me in the dark.
Funny arrangements in that house. I near got lost. His room was on the
left, an' that fooled me some."
"I told you it was on the left," Jim interrupted.
"You told me it was on the right," Matt went on. "I guess I know what you
told me, an' there's the map you drew."
Fumbling in his vest pocket, he drew out a folded slip of paper. As he
unfolded it, Jim bent over and looked.
"I did make a mistake," he confessed.
"You sure did. It got me guessin' some for a while."
"But it don't matter now," Jim cried. "Let's see what you got."
"It does matter," Matt retorted. "It matters a lot . . . to me. I've got
to run all the risk. I put my head in the trap while you stay on the
street. You got to get on to yourself an' be more careful. All right,
I'll show you."
He dipped loosely into his trousers pocket and brought out a handful of
small diamonds. He spilled them out in a blazing stream on the greasy
table. Jim let out a great oath.
"That's nothing," Matt said with triumphant complacence. "I ain't begun
yet."
From one pocket after another he continued bringing forth the spoil. There
were many diamonds wrapped in chamois skin that were larger than those in
the first handful. From one pocket he brought out a handful of very small
cut gems.
"Sun dust," he remarked, as he spilled them on the table in a space by
themselves.
Jim examined them.
"Just the same, they retail for a couple of dollars each," he said. "Is
that all?"
"Ain't it enough?" the other demanded in an aggrieved tone.
"Sure it is," Jim answered with unqualified approval. "Better'n I
expected. I wouldn't take a cent less than ten thousan' for the bunch."
"Ten thousan'," Matt sneered. "They're worth twic't that, an' I don't know
anything about joolery, either. Look at that big boy!"
He picked it out from the sparkling heap and held it near to the lamp with
the air of an expert, weighing and judging.
"Worth a thousan' all by its lonely," was Jim's quicker judgment.
"A thousan' your grandmother," was Matt's scornful rejoinder. "You
couldn't buy it for three."
"Wake me up! I'm dreamin'!" The sparkle of the gems was in Jim's eyes, and
he began sorting out the larger diamonds and examining them. "We're rich
men, Matt--we'll be regular swells."
"It'll take years to get rid of 'em," was Matt's more practical thought.
"But think how we'll live! Nothin' to do but spend the money an' go on
gettin' rid of em."
Matt's eyes were beginning to sparkle, though sombrely, as his phlegmatic
nature woke up.
"I told you I didn't dast think how fat it was," he murmured in a low
voice.
"What a killin'! What a killin'!" was the other's more ecstatic utterance.
"I almost forgot," Matt said, thrusting his hand into his inside coat
pocket.
A string of large pearls emerged from wrappings of tissue paper and chamois
skin. Jim scarcely glanced at them.
"They're worth money," he said, and returned to the diamonds.
A silence fell on the two men. Jim played with the gems, running them
through his fingers, sorting them into piles, and spreading them out flat
and wide. He was a slender, weazened man, nervous, irritable, high-strung,
and anaemic--a typical child of the gutter, with unbeautiful twisted
features, small-eyed, with face and mouth perpetually and feverishly
hungry, brutish in a cat-like way, stamped to the core with degeneracy.
Matt did not finger the diamonds. He sat with chin on hands and elbows on
table, blinking heavily at the blazing array. He was in every way a
contrast to the other. No city had bred him. He was heavy-muscled and
hairy, gorilla-like in strength and aspect. For him there was no unseen
world. His eyes were full and wide apart, and there seemed in them a
certain bold brotherliness. They inspired confidence. But a closer
inspection would have shown that his eyes were just a trifle too full, just
a shade too wide apart. He exceeded, spilled over the limits of normality,
and his features told lies about the man beneath.
"The bunch is worth fifty thousan'," Jim remarked suddenly.
"A hundred thousan'," Matt said.
The silence returned and endured a long time, to be broken again by Jim.
"What in hell was he doin' with 'em all at the house?--that's what I want
to know. I'd a-thought he'd kept 'em in the safe down at the store."
Matt had just been considering the vision of the throttled man as he had
last looked upon him in the dim light of the electric lantern; but he did
not start at the mention of him.
"There's no tellin'," he answered. "He might a-ben gettin' ready to chuck
his pardner. He might a-pulled out in the mornin' for parts unknown, if we
hadn't happened along. I guess there's just as many thieves among honest
men as there is among thieves. You read about such things in the papers,
Jim. Pardners is always knifin' each other."
A queer, nervous look came into the other's eyes. Matt did not betray that
he noted it, though he said--
"What was you thinkin' about, Jim?"
Jim was a trifle awkward for the moment.
"Nothin'," he answered. "Only I was thinkin' just how funny it was--all
them jools at his house. What made you ask?"
"Nothin'. I was just wonderin', that was all."
The silence settled down, broken by an occasional low and nervous giggle on
the part of Jim. He was overcome by the spread of gems. It was not that
he felt their beauty. He was unaware that they were beautiful in
themselves. But in them his swift imagination visioned the joys of life
they would buy, and all the desires and appetites of his diseased mind and
sickly flesh were tickled by the promise they extended. He builded
wondrous, orgy-haunted castles out of their brilliant fires, and was
appalled at what he builded. Then it was that he giggled. It was all too
impossible to be real. And yet there they blazed on the table before him,
fanning the flame of the lust of him, and he giggled again.
"I guess we might as well count 'em," Matt said suddenly, tearing himself
away from his own visions. "You watch me an' see that it's square, because
you an' me has got to be on the square, Jim. Understand?"
Jim did not like this, and betrayed it in his eyes, while Matt did not like
what he saw in his partner's eyes.
"Understand?" Matt repeated, almost menacingly.
"Ain't we always ben square?" the other replied, on the defensive because
of the treachery already whispering in him.
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