She had been obliged to read much into his strange appeal; it was as though he turned the leaves of a book swiftly, disclosing only half-pages, with type blurred and indecipherable. She looked at him wonderingly; there was a cry in his last words that touched her. It had been easy the day before to simulate feeling in his assault upon Mrs. Craighill’s emotions at Rosedale but he had no wish to deceive this girl. Her eyes forbade it; and it was not so long ago that the sharp lash of her scorn had struck him in the face: “I don’t care for your acquaintance, Mr. Wayne Craighill.” She was saying now:
“I am glad if I have ever helped you, though I don’t in the least understand how that could be. It is not for me to help anyone. No one who isn’t strong can help another; we must be sure of ourselves first, and I am weak and I have made sad mistakes; I have done harm and caused heartache. And more than that, we belong to different worlds, you and I. I have tried to say this to you before, but we must understand it now. Our meetings have certainly been strange, but as I told you, I’m not superstitious. Very likely we shall never meet again, and you will go on your way just as though you never had seen me, and I will go about my business—and so——”
“But if you knew I was going to the bad, and you could save me and I asked you to help, would you feel the same way about it? Maybe the answer is that I’m not worth saving!”
She smiled at this, but his appeal touched her. He was nearly ten years her senior, and belonged, as she had said, to an entirely different world, and he wanted her help and begged for it. She felt his charm and realized the danger that lay in it, and she wished to be kind, but here was a case where sympathy must be offered guardedly. This interview was altogether too serious for comfort and she rose, facing him with an entire change of manner. It seemed that she was the older now, the one grown wise through long familiarity with the world.
“MEN WHO WORK WITH THEIR HANDS—THESE THINGS!”
“I’m a busy person, Mr. Craighill; I’m working just as hard as I can and I hope to do something pretty good one of these days, in spite of the gloomy view I take occasionally of my prospects. Now, why don’t you go in for something? Work, work, work! It’s the only way to be happy. You haven’t won the right to the leisure you’re throwing away. It’s cheating life to waste opportunities as you do. I saved just half a dollar a week for two years to get a chance to study drawing; I scrubbed and washed dishes in a hotel and ran a machine in a garment factory. And you may be sure that if I have to do it I’ll go back to the sewing-machine next summer and begin all over again without the slightest grudge against the world. I’m not going to be a beggar; I want to earn my right to a share in beautiful things.
“Why, Mr. Craighill,” she continued with increasing vehemence, “all the men I have ever known have been labouring men—men who work with their hands—these things!” In her passionate earnestness she held out her hands as though they were part of her case for labour. “My father was an anthracite miner, and he died at work. I’ve seen sad things in my life. I had a little brother who was crushed to death in a breaker. He was oiler boy, and he was so eager to get time to play at noon with the other boys that he crawled in to do his work before the machinery stopped and he was ground to pieces—fourteen years old, Mr. Craighill! I can’t get over that—that he was a child and he died trying to win time away from labour to play! I’ve seen them bring bodies of dead men out of mines all my life—my own father was killed by a fall of slate—but I’d rather sweep the streets, if I were you, or dig ditches, or drive mules down in the dark than just be—well, nothing in particular but somebody’s son with money to spend—and not the least bit of sense about spending it!”
Wayne Craighill had been scolded, and nagged, and prayed over without effect, but this speech was like a challenge; there was a cry of trumpets in it. And her reference to the dead men of the pit, and the mordant scorn of her last phrases set his blood tingling. He was aware now that it was a sweet and precious thing to be near her: no other voice had power to thrill like hers; no other eyes had ever searched his soul with so deep and earnest a questioning.
“If I will labour for you—if I will work with these hands for you”—he held them out in unconscious imitation of her own manner a moment before, looking down at them curiously—“will you take my life, what I can make of it, and go on to the end with me—you and I together?”