On these occasions Fairfax would go home oppressed, and content himself with a glass of milk and light food at the restaurant, and dressed as he was even to the hat on his head, he would sink by the table in his little room and bury his face in his hands. Then he would count up his money. Working from May until October, he had saved only fifty dollars. After his calculations there was no
magnitude in the sum to inspire him to new plans or to tempt him to make a fresh venture for art. He often thought, in looking back on those days, that it was nothing but his pride and his obstinacy that kept him there. The memory of his winter's creations, of his work in the studio, and his beasts with their powerful bodies and their bronze beauty, came upon him always with such cruel resentment and made him feel so impotent against the injustice of the great, that if drink had tempted Fairfax he would have gone to the nearest saloon and made a beast of himself.
The working hours were long and his employment physically exhausting, but he embraced his duties and fell in love with the great steel and iron creature which it was his work to feed and clean and oil. And when he left his engine silent in the shed, the roar and the motion absent, tranquil, breathless, and yet superb, Antony left his machine with regret, the regret of a lover for his mistress. He was fireman to a wild-cat engineer.
CHAPTER V
Fairfax, used to the Southern climate, found no fault with the heat of summer, bone-racking and blood-boiling though it was; but, remembering his past experience of winds and snow in January, he wondered how winter would seem in the yards, endured in the cab of the engine, but his toil had now toughened him, roughened him, and strengthened his heart of steel. November, with its Indian summer smoothness, with its fine, glorious light that glowed over West Albany, passed, and the year went out in beauty and December followed, still windless and mild. But that was the last touch of mercy. January rushed down upon them, fierce, tempestuous, and up and down the yards, from his window, Fairfax watched the whirling shrouds of snow sweep over the ground, cover the tracks, and through the veil the lights flickered like candles that the snuffers of the storm were vainly trying to extinguish. He put on an extra flannel shirt under his red shirt; he buttoned his vest high, got into his coat, jammed his hat on fiercely and shook himself like a reluctant dog before going to his work. Under his window he could hear the soughing of the wind and it sucked under the door; he was sure that he would never be warm here again.
"Jove!" he thought, "there will be two inches of snow inside my window when I get back at midnight." He drove his razor into the crack to stiffen the casement, and took an old flannel shirt and laid it along the ledge. As he did so the storm blew a whirl of snow across the pane.
"Siberia," he muttered to himself; "don't talk to me about Russia. This is far enough North for me!"
He could not have said why the thought of the children