In feeling Jarlsen was an American; his ideals were American. He went to church soberly, had a bust of Lincoln on his mantel, eschewed labour unions, and gave away a third of the not too princely stipend awarded him by the Bentleys for his position of payman.
For all that, when the native Swedes got very drunk of an evening and, congregating By the Bridge, swore in their high, unearthly voices, he would be much ashamed and wish and even urge them farther. For he too was born in Sweden, and said “y” for “j” even yet, if the men hurried him.
His room was By the Bridge. His wont was to ask the better set, the more American labourers, to his room of an evening. He then, like King David, charmed them with a harp. He would sit in front of the stove on a packing-box covered with pinkish jute, and there play and sing strange, sweet songs about birds and lonely mountains, and kings’ daughters and sad forests, and immortality; for these are of the kinds of songs that come from the North.
Jarlsen’s generosity was remarkable; for his countrymen are money-getters beyond any non-Semitic people. The knowledge of the value of money is born in them. There is a saying at the ore beds that testifies to this: “A Swede will go farther for a dollar than an Irishman will for a drink.”
But when Jarlsen took Emma Butte, in the face of the whole town, the men of his acquaintance marvelled greatly. If he were the man whom Soot City loved, Emma was the woman who ruled it. She “had not the class” that her lover had.
Coming into the city as a child, she had learned the less rough speech of the town labour and taken on herself the somewhat milder manners of the people she now saw. But she had never tried to make a place among them; she lived with her father, plying her odd trade—she was a barber—and making her oddest pennies in another way, as shall be presently set forth.
In the lighter social semblance of their town the Bentleys were paramount. Their doings came to the town ear somehow, and the people followed their lead, if it were a possible thing for them. For example, one of the clerical workers By the Bridge had invented an intrenching tool, a spade, which had been adopted by the army. As a consequence, he was invited to eat at the Bentleys’ Place. On his return from the feast he reported to his eager circle that not only had the ground-floor rooms been filled with people, but that Miss Bentley’s bedroom looked like an intelligence office, so full was it of the maids of the ladies below.
This detail of magnificence so possessed the minds of the female portion of the inventor’s acquaintance that By the Tracks was drawn on for Abigails. Male escort was frowned down completely. One might return from a Soot City revel with a man, but to go with one—if he were not “steady company”—was proof positive that there was no quarter-dollar wherewith to hire attendance. Emma was often retained as lady-in-waiting, and through this curiously pretentious institution met and obtained Jarlsen, as well as her fees.
Quarry boarded in the Butte household. No one knew why. He imposed on them always, and made them uncomfortable with his odd ways and bad tongue. His board was paid intermittently and with recurrent ill will. He was always a stranger and equally an inmate. He had a fashion of rapping at Emma’s window (her room was on the ground floor) and complaining to her of slights imposed on him by members of her acquaintance.
She felt him to be the only man life had shown her whose faults were not condoned by a liking for herself.