“I want you to get it fixed. Oh, never mind why! Fire away!”
While Shays repeated the story Hennion swung to and fro in his swing chair.
He had not seen the chisel these halfdozen years, but he knew the battered handle and the woful cherub face as the face of an old friend. He knew the niche in the tool chest where it belonged, and the spot where the tool chest stood in the room high over the mansards, from whose windows one looked through the upper branches of the trees out on the Muscadine. There in the summer the maple leaves would flicker in the sunlight, and in winter through bare branches one could see the river. There Milly used to sit on the floor with a white apron on and a red ribbon, and chatter like a sweet-voiced canary bird.
He went over again the connection that had first flashed past his mind, between the chisel in the Champney tool chest and the one wrapped in a newspaper in his desk. Aidee visited Hicks Thursday night; Friday afternoon he was at the Champney house, where Miss Eunice had noticed emotion, conjectured a crisis, and was moved to give advice; Friday night Hicks broke jail and went to Shays, quarrelled with and killed Coglan, and went off to another world, leaving Shays with the chisel; Saturday morning comes Shays, along with the story that he was stumbling through now, anxiously shying around the forbidden part of it. Well, but—now as to Aidee—that was the second time he had been to Camilla for help, and Henry Champney had liked that sort of business no better than Hennion. It wouldn't do. As to Camilla, of course the “little maid” would be “game,” but that gameness was a bit too convenient for men like Aidee, who came along with a wheelbarrow full of celestial purposes in front and a cartload of tragedies behind. Hennion did not like the kind. A man ought to handle his own troubles and not drag women into them; that is to say, not Camilla. Why in thunder couldn't he keep his mouth shut, and buy a respectable burglar's outfit, like a gentleman, from a respectable hardware dealer! However, as to Miss Eunice's “crisis,” it looked as if Aidee must have been confessing his criminal family, instead of the condition of his heart. Aidee was having a run of hard luck. Still, his criminal family was out of the way now, which did not seem a bad idea. Any chance of Camilla's name being mentioned would have to be smothered of course, which meant smothering the whole thing.
“Go on, Jimmy. Your style's picking up.”
But, of course, Camilla now would take into her soul all the responsibilities in sight, and brood and sadden over her fancies, and have nightmares. That wouldn't do either.
“Very good, Jimmy.”
He must see Camilla, and be the first to tell her. Being inside the story now, he could give a healthy point of view from the inside.
“Plunk! jus' like that!” said Shays. “He went, plunk! I come up, and I looked, and he wa'n't there. Wa'n't nothin' there. He got under quick. He stayed, but I wa'n't goin' to stay. Wha' for? Wha's that for? Folks was cornin' down Maple Street and I come away. I ain't see no more of him, but Tom, he's under the table, and there ain't no use in that, not him, nor I ain't goin' to stay there, not him.”
“You wander, Jimmy. Who's 'him'?” Miss Eunice was a wise woman, and according to her wisdom love was a sort of continuity of surprise, because women wanted it that way, and they held the leading ideas on the subject. Humph! Well—Camilla's joining Aidee that way was curious, and in fact, that “continuity of surprise” was all right. Aidee preached a kind of contempt for law; his doctrine always led him to side with the individual man against men organised, and against the structure of things; and he might have infected Camilla with his view of things, or it might be that view of things natural to women, their gift and function. What would Camilla do next? “God knows!” She would see that the “continuity of surprise” was all right. What on earth was Jimmy Shays talking about?