CHAPTER IV
Jim awoke next morning to a sense not altogether one of satisfaction with the events of the night before. He realized he had inaugurated a clothespin war which further parleying might have postponed or prevented. Again he had acted swiftly, suddenly, surprisingly to himself. Yet as he thought it over he was less inclined to censure himself. He felt he was right when he insisted on building and operating his mill to suit himself—so long as he built and operated with fairness. He knew Welliver and the Club would not recede from their position, and that there remained only to surrender, play for delay, or fight. There is a certain satisfaction in striking first.
Jim’s watch told him it would not be six o’clock for another half-hour, and breakfast was not until seven. He dressed leisurely and descended to the piazza, where, grouped about the step of the buggy, stood Welliver, Michael Moran, and the old justice of the peace.
“Good morning,” called Welliver, chipper as a wren. “You’re an early bird. Thought I’d have to leave without saying good-by.”
“Hope you have a pleasant drive,” said Jim. He turned down the walk and strode away with the intention of tramping a mile or two before the dining-room opened.
“Wait a minute, son,” Welliver called. “Come here and shake hands with Mr. Moran—you’ll be meeting each other in a business way considerable. He owns this thirty-mile streak of rust you call a railroad. And Judge Frame.”
Jim shook hands. Moran returned his pressure heartily; but, while he offered a cordial welcome to Diversity, Jim was aware the man’s clear gray eyes were studying and appraising him. As for Zaanan Frame, he merely grunted.
“Haven’t had a change of heart since last night?” asked Welliver.
Jim smiled and shook his head. “Our folks will be quoting a discount of five tens this morning,” Be said.
“Son, when you’ve been in this business twenty years you’ll go slower.”
“Colts,” said Zaanan Frame, “kicks out the dashboard jest for fun. But most gen’ally, when an old hoss starts in to use his heels he means business.”
James said nothing. He was to discover that Zaanan Frame was given to making remarks to which it was difficult to retort; that Zaanan had a way of dropping a statement over a conversation as one would lower a candle-snuffer over the flame, and that a new subject to talk about became immediately desirable. The old justice was a final sort of person. Jim’s dislike for him grew like one of these huge white mushrooms which daring individuals pick and fry and eat—and sometimes survive.
“You are determined?” asked Mr. Welliver, making one last effort.
“I’m determined to run my own business,” said Jim.
Mr. Welliver shrugged his erect and beautifully tailored shoulders.
“When you’ve got enough—” he began, suggestively, but did not trouble to finish the sentence.
“Glad to have met you, gentlemen,” Jim said. “I’m off for a walk to stir up enthusiasm for breakfast.”
A man who has to have his clothes wet through before he can recognize it is raining may succeed as a professor of Greek or as an artificer of a ditch, but he is not likely to elbow aside numerous captains of industry. Though unequipped with that which the proverb declares to be the best teacher, Jim Ashe did have in its proper place inside his skull a brain reasonably able to travel from patent cause to obvious effect, or to reach a conclusion that birds which flock together are likely to be similarly feathered. The height of stupidity for a man in Jim’s situation would have been not to speculate on the manifest acquaintance between Mr. Welliver, Michael Moran, and Justice of the Peace Frame. He was not guilty of that stupidity, and as he walked along the road whose hot sands had cooled under the summer moon, he speculated on the significance of their early morning meeting. His thoughts ran something to the effect that to a man up a tree it looked as if Mr. Welliver had allies in the very heart of the territory of the Ashe Clothespin Company.
Jim walked briskly past his mills, then turned into an inviting lane which led upward toward a wood-lot. Presently he turned again, to return cross-lots along the hypotenuse of the triangle. To do this it was necessary to surmount the first line of defense, a five-strand, barb-wire fence, then to climb a knoll surmounted by a lonely hickory-tree. From the top of this knoll Jim hoped to have a general view of the country and so to acquaint himself at a glance with the topography of his new home. He scrambled up, and reached the top breathless. The last dozen feet had been steep, hiding the tiny plateau at the peak from sight. Immediately he straightened up. He was made to feel that he was not wholly welcome—indeed, that he was decidedly an intruder, for frowning at him with black brows and sullen black eyes was the young woman at whom he had stared on the station platform.
Her expression was hostile. If eyes and compressed lips can speak, that young woman was saying peremptorily and not at all politely, “Get out!”
“I beg your pardon,” Jim panted. “I had no idea—?”
“You must have seen me,” she said, coldly.
“But I didn’t see you,” said Jim. “I should not have intruded.”
“This spot is visible for a mile in any direction,” she said, shortly. Apparently she was determined to believe he had seen her and had climbed up to her, probably in the prosecution of the common masculine ambition to scrape up acquaintance with a stray and unprotected girl. Jim felt an embarrassing warmth about his ears.
“You stared at me yesterday,” she said, before he could speak.
“I did not stare at you,” he replied, unguardedly. “I was staring at the expression in your eyes—the hungry expression with which you looked after the train.”
She bit her lips; her eyes darkened; she was startled.
“Can people see it?” she asked, aloud, not of Jim, not of herself, not of anybody or anything that could frame an answer.
Jim ignored her exclamation and entered his defense. “I was walking to pass the time till breakfast. When I got to the wood-lot there I turned to cut across lots. I did not see you. I had other things on my mind than unexpected young women on hilltops at unholy hours in the morning. I am sorry I disturbed you.” He did not go, but stood looking down at her. She was looking past him down the valley toward the distant shimmer that was the great lake. For the moment he was negligible to her; again her eyes, her face, wore that expression as of the woman in the bread-line—of hunger.
In a moment her face relaxed till it spoke merely of discontent, dissatisfaction. Jim thought she would have been homely were it not for the graceful setting of her head on her shoulders, the splendid ease and symmetry of her position.
“I don’t have to explain to every chance stranger why I get up early in the morning and come here,” she said, not so much sullenly as with repression, as though she were damming up something within her.
“Of course not,” said Jim, inadequately.
Suddenly she flashed to her feet with a beautiful litheness and stood facing him, her hands clenched into little fists, her breast heaving.
“I will tell you. I’ve got to tell somebody. It’s because I hate this”—she swept her hand over Diversity. “It’s because it’s horrible, unbearable. It’s because I’m chained down here like a prisoner in a dungeon. That’s why I go to watch the train—it is going away, going out there where people live. That’s why I come up here. It’s my little window to look out of. I can see beyond Diversity. Sometimes a vessel passes. I imagine I am on it, going away—to Chicago—to New York—to San Francisco. Here I can turn my back on Diversity and see where its dead hand cannot reach. I hate the town, I hate the people, but most of all I hate the children. Oh, look shocked! But sit in a room with thirty of them ten months a year; watch their smugness; try to cram spelling and geography and arithmetic into them; try to make an impression on their dullness. They’re a nightmare! That’s why I come here—to look away from them, beyond them, to see a spot that’s not tainted with them. I was born here.” She said the last as though it were the summing up of all evil.
“My dear young lady,” said Jim, in a tone that was ludicrously paternal, “you’re working yourself up to—hysterics or something.”
She leaned against the old hickory-tree, panting, clutching the folds of her skirt with convulsive fingers.
“I want to go—go—go! I want to see things—to be a part of them. I’m smothered. This is living in a graveyard where there’s a perpetual fog. Other people live. Other people have things happen to them, and I—I don’t even dare read about them in books. I couldn’t stand it.”
Jim wanted to run, yet he wanted to stay. Here was a manifestation far outside the purview of his experience. It was a little adventure into a human soul, and Jim’s contact with the human soul had been superficial.
“If you want to go, why—why in thunder don’t you go?” he said, boyishly.
She flashed a gleam of scorn upon him. “I’m a girl—a girl—the most helpless, most defenseless, most easily damaged thing under the sun. Why don’t I go?” Her tone snapped with scorn. “What would I do? Who would take me in? What would become of me? Here I’m safe. I may die of it, but I’m safe. It might be less hideously barren if I weren’t. I’m alone. I’ve been alone since I was fifteen. Some day it’ll be too much for me and I’ll go. But I won’t be fooled into it. I’ll go with my eyes open, knowing why I go. If I go nobody’ll be to blame—except Diversity—for I’ll have made my choice deliberately. Don’t look shocked. I suppose there have been millions of others before me who had the same choice to make. I’m not unique. You men have made the world, and when you get a glimpse of it once in a while you’re shocked.”
“Miss”—Jim paused and bit his finger in bewilderment—“I don’t just know what you’re accusing us men of, nor the world in general. But I’ve lived a bit more than you. I’ve lived enough to know this—that there’s more good than evil. There are more folks who are trying to do right than who deliberately do wrong. I know that even in the bad ones there’s more good than bad. I believe if you were to take all the law and machinery of the law, all the police, all the social protection out of the world to-day, that to-morrow the force for right which is in the world would assert itself. There is so much more good than bad in the world that the bad would be held down by the mere weight of the good. You hear about the evil, because the evil thing is news, something to talk about, something to make readers for the newspapers. And it’s news because it’s out of the normal. So there seems to be a lot more bad than there is. Goodness is normal—so normal that nobody notices it.”
“Men always defend themselves plausibly.”
“I’m not defending men; I’m defending humanity.”
She fell silent, and gazed past him again to the twinkling blue of the lake. When she spoke it was less hardily, more wistfully than she had spoken before:
“The world is so big and so interesting. In any direction, if my eyes reached far enough, they would see something thrilling. To think there is so much—and I am refused a crumb!”
“I’m afraid something has happened to disturb you.”
She laughed shortly. “If something should I’d thank Heaven for it! It’s all so drowsy, so placid, and I’m tied to it as if to a stake, with a slow fire lighted round me.”
“But if you want to go so badly, if life here is so unendurable, what ties you to it?”
“The trifling accident of having been born a girl, added to the trifling episode of having lost my parents, added to the inconsequential condition that the forty dollars a month I get for teaching school is all that stands between me and starvation.”
She turned abruptly from him and started down the knoll. He followed.
“Don’t come with me,” she said, stopping. “I don’t know you. I don’t want to know you. After this I never want to see you again. I had to say these things to somebody. By accident it was you, but I hate you for it. You know. Never try to speak to me.”
She went away swiftly, leaving him to stare after her in bewilderment. He was startled. His sensation was such as if he had picked up a pebble and found it suddenly to be a live coal.
Later in the day he found her name to be Marie Ducharme, daughter of a French-Canadian lumber-lack who had risen to be a walking boss. He found that Diversity returned her dislike, or, if it did not return it, viewed her askance as a person who was “queer.”
To be “queer” in a village of less than a thousand souls is no inconsiderable crime.