The Spinners' Book of Fiction Part 6

BY A curious coincidence, whenever George Fleming was translated to a wider berth, it was my luck to succeed him in the job he had just quitted. This had happened more than once, in the chances and changes that befall the younger men in the mining profession, before we began to jolly each other about it--always at long range.

When I heard he had resigned from the Consolidated Resumption, to everybody's surprise, at a time of great prosperity to the mine, I hailed my chance and congratulated myself that I should speedily be asked to fill his place: and I was!

I wrote him on the spot a playful letter, alluding to my long, stern chase and begging him to hold on this time till I could shake him by the hand; I had come to have a personal sentiment toward him apart from the natural desire to meet face to face the author of my continued advancement. But to this letter I received no word of reply.

His silence haunted me, rather--I thought about him a good deal while I was closing up my affairs in other directions before taking over the Consolidated Resumption. Meanwhile the company's cas.h.i.+er, Joshua Dean, a man of trust but small initiative, was filling the interregnum.

I found him living alone in the manager's house with the Flemings'

Chinese cook as man of all work. The Resumption has never tolerated a boarding-house or a village or compound within sight of its official windows. Its first manager was a son of the chief owner, who built his house in the style of a gentleman's country-seat, small but exclusive and quite apart from the work. I liked the somber seclusion of the place, planted deep with trees of about twenty years' growth, showing their delicate, changing greens against the darker belt of pines. But its aspect increased, if anything, that uneasy sensation, like a cold wind in my back, which I still had in thinking of Fleming.

I had driven out to dine with Dean on the evening of my arrival. It was the last week in January; there had been much rain already for the foot-hills. Wet sprays from the untrimmed rose hedges disputed my pa.s.sage through the inner gate. Discolored pine-needles lay in sodden drifts on the neglected gra.s.s. The hydrant leaked frozen puddles down the brick-paved walk. Mounting the veranda steps I laid my hand on the knocker, when an old Chinese servant popped his head out at a side-door and violently beckoned me in that way.

Dean, as I knew, had made his home with the Flemings for some time before their departure. After a few talks with him and a survey of the house I decided we might venture to continue the arrangement without getting in each other's way. It was a house peculiarly adapted to a _solitude a deux_. There was no telephone nearer than the office. I argued that Fleming was a man who could protect himself from frivolous intrusions, and his wife could have had but little in common with her neighbors in the village.

He had resigned on account of her health, I was told. It must have been a hasty flitting or an inconclusive one. The odd, attractive rooms were full of their belongings still. We two casual bachelors with our circ.u.mspect habits could make no impression on the all but speaking silence of those empty rooms. They filled me at times with a curious emotion of sadness and unrest.

Joshua seldom talked of the Flemings, though I knew he received letters from them. That he was deeply attached to their memory, h.o.a.rded it and brooded over it, I could not doubt. I even suspected some jealous sentiment on his part which made it hard for him to see me using their chairs, planting myself amongst their cus.h.i.+ons and investigating their book-shelves. I thought it strange they had left so many things behind them of a personal nature. They seemed to have ceased to care for what most of us rolling stones are wont to cling to. Their departure had something unspeakable in it--akin to sudden death, or a sickness of the heart that made life indifferent to them.

"They must have loved this room!" I said to him one evening. It was during the black rains of February--Dean and I with our chairs to the fire, waiting for the Eastern mail. The night watchman's orders were to stop for it if the trains were anywhere near on time. At this storm season the Westbound was frequently behind and the road to town a quagmire. We never looked for Fahey--he was the man I found there as night watchman--before eight o'clock. It had rained and snowed off and on since the month began. In the dark, low rooms the fire burned all day. The dining-room, which had blue-green walls in imitation of Flemish tapestry and weathered-oak furniture, was darkened still more by the pines that gave a cloistered look to the view from our back windows into a small, square court, high-walled and spread with pine-needles. The rooms we used were two small ones united, done in white and yellow and with slim curtains which we could crush back upon the rods; but even there one could not see to read by daylight. This continuous, arctic gloom added, no doubt, to the melancholy spell of the house, which nevertheless charmed me, and held me almost with a sense of impalpable presences sharing with Joshua and me our intimate, wistful seclusion. If I was happy, in a luxuriously mournful sort of way, I knew that he was not--that he grieved persistently over something that cast a greyness over his thoughts in keeping with the atmosphere. I knew that he knew without any names whom I meant whenever I spoke of _they_.

"Yes, they loved it," he said, answering my exclamation. "They made it, somehow, as character is said to shape its own set of features."

"Had they lived here long?"

"For a mine house, yes. It was, of course, a home. They had no other."

"A happy one?" I ventured.

"Can any one be called happy who has the gift of strong feeling, and two children at stake, in this world?" I had never heard him speak with such bitterness.

"But to have any one to feel for--that is life," I said. "I wish I had more of it myself."

"Life, then, is not happiness."

I left him the last word, and sitting so, both silent, we heard a screen-door at the kitchen-end blow to with a bang and a clatter of tinware that sent the blood to my face in wrath. I said something--about Jim and his fly-doors (Jim believed that flies or their ghosts besieged that house all winter)--when the old heathen himself came boiling into the room like a whole United States mail service delayed.

"Hoo! Heap bad ou'si'! Heap snow!" he panted, wiping drops from the lock of the mail-pouch with his ap.r.o.n.

My wrath increased, because once more Fahey had got past the front door with the mail, whereas each night I had promised myself to waylay him and change his roundabout method of delivery. "If I live till tomorrow,"

I said crossly, "I'll see if he can't climb those steps and hand us the bag himself."

Jim stood listening. "We might be at dinner," Joshua suggested.

"What's the matter with knocking?--what is the knocker for?" It struck me, as I spoke, that I had not heard the sound of the knocker since the day Jim stayed my own hand and shunted me in at the side; it seemed he must have practised the same vigilance with subsequent comers, for I could not recall one person who had entered the house announced by the bra.s.s lion's head on the door.

"_He_ no lock!" Jim planted himself in front of me; his voice quavered nervously. "All time I _un_-lock! Fi' 'tlock whistle blow--I go quick!

n.o.body wait. I all time run."

"Why should you run? What is the knocker for?" I repeated. At this I stepped past him startling him somewhat, and hurled open the front door.

I had heard our coy watchman going down the path.

"Tomorrow night, Fahey," I shouted, "you bring the bag in this way.

Knock, man! There's the knocker--see?"

Jim looked at me with eyes aghast. He gathered himself for speech, breathing deeply.

"Mis' Oth' (my name is Othet), I tell you: Long time-_long_ time, no man knock flon' do'. In this house, no good. No good knock. Sometime some-come-you no man see!" He lowered his voice to a rapid whisper, spreading his yellow palms tremulously. "You tell man come knock flon'

do'--I go 'way. Too much bad thing!"

Muttering to himself he retreated. "Now what has he got on his mind do you suppose? Could you make out what he was driving at?"

Dean smiled, a non-committal smile. "It would be rather awkward for us, wouldn't it, if Jim should leave? We are too far from the coast for city servants in winter. I doubt if any of the natives could be persuaded to stay in this house alone."

"You think Jim would leave if I made Fahey knock at that door every night?"

Joshua answered me obliquely. "If I could ever quote anything straight, I would remind you of a saying in one of George Eliot's novels that 'we've all got to take a little trouble to keep sane and call things by the same names as other people.' Perhaps Jim doesn't take quite trouble enough. I have difficulty sometimes myself to find names for things. I should like to hear you cla.s.sify a certain occurrence I have in mind, not unconnected, I think, with Jim's behavior tonight. I've never discussed it, of course. In fact, I've never spoken of it before." He smiled queerly. "It's very astonis.h.i.+ng how they know things."

"The menials?"

He nodded. "Jim was in the house at the time. No one knows that he heard it,--no one ever told him. But he is thinking of it tonight just as I am. He's never forgotten it for a moment, and never will."

Joshua dragged the charred logs forward and stooped amid their sparks to lay a fresh one with its back to the chimney. Then he rose and looked out; as he stood in the door, I could hear the hissing of fine snow turning to rain and the drenched bamboo whipping the piazza posts; over all, the larger lament of the pines, and, from the long rows of lights in the gulch, the diapason of the stamp-heads thundering on through the night.

"'Ident.i.ties of sensation,'" said Joshua, quoting again as he shut the door, "are strong with persons who live in lonely places! Jim and I have lived here too long."

"Well, I hope you won't live here another moment till you have told me that story," I urged, and we drew again to the fire.

"There was a watchman here before Fahey," he began, "an old plainsman, with a Bible name, Gideon. He looked like the pictures of old Ossawattamie Brown, and he had for the Flemings a most unusual regard.

It was as strong as his love for his family. It was because of what Fleming did for his son, young Gid, when they caught him stealing specimens with a gang of old offenders. Gid was nineteen, and a pretty good boy, we thought. Such things happen between men of the right sort every day, I suppose,--Fleming would say so. But it was his opportunity to do it for a man who could feel and remember, and he made a friend for life right there. It is too long a story to tell, but young Gid's all right--working in the city, married and happy,--trusted like any other man. It wasn't in the blood, you see.

"Before his boy got into trouble, Fleming used to call the old man 'Gideon,' talked to him any old way; but after his pride fell down it was always 'Mr. Gideon,' and a few words when he brought the mail, about the weather or the conduct of the trains. The old man appeared to stand taller in those moments at the door, when he brought to the house the very food of its existence. They lived upon their letters, for both the children were away. The army boy in the Philippines; it was during the Mindanao campaign; and Constance (Joshua, I noticed, took a deep breath before the name), the daughter, was at school in the East. Gideon could gauge the spirits of the two, waiting here for what he brought them. He kept tally of the soldier's letters, the thin blue ones that came strolling in by the transport lines. But hers--her letters were his pride.

"'It's there all right,' he would say--'she never misses a Monday mail, the little one!' or, as the winter months wore on--'you'll be counting the weeks now, madam. Six more letters and then the telegram from Ogden, and I hope it's my privilege to bring it, madam.' For as Fleming gave him his t.i.tle, the old man pa.s.sed it back with a glow of emphasis, putting devotion into the 'madam' and life service into the 'Mr.

Fleming, sir.'

"Then she came home--Constance--she was no longer the little one. Taller than her mother, and rather silent, but her looks were a language, and her motions about the house--I suppose no words could measure their pride in her, or their shrinking when they thought of her in contact with the world. People laughed a little, looking at her, when her mother talked of the years they were going to have together. And she would rebuke the laugh and say, 'We do not marry early in my family, nor the Flemings either.' When the August heat came on, they thought she was too pale--they spared her for a visit to some friends who had a houseboat off Belvedere, or some such place. It was an ambush of fate. She came home, thin, brown, from living on the water,--happy! too happy for safety. She brought her fate with her, the last man you'd suppose could ever cross her path. He was from Hawaii, an Englishman--not all English, some of us thought. Handsome as a snake; a face that kept no marks. Eyes all black--nothing of the pupil showing. They say such eyes are not to be trusted. I never liked him. I'd better not try to describe him.

"It seemed madness to me, but I suppose they were no more helpless than other fathers and mothers. He had plenty to say for himself, and introductions--all sorts of credentials, except a pair of eyes. They had to let it go on; and he took her away from them six months after she saw him first. That's happiness, if you call it so!"

Again I added, "It is life."

"There was not much left of it in this house after she went," Joshua mused. "It was then they asked me to come up and stay with them. A silence of three does not press quite so close as a silence of two. And we talked sometimes. The mine had taken a great jump; it was almost a mockery the way things boomed. The letters, I noticed, were not what the schoolgirl letters had been to her mother. They came all right, they were punctual, but something I felt sure was wrong. Mrs. Fleming would not have missed a mail for anything in the world--every hour's delay wore upon her. She would play her game of solitaire, long after bedtime, at that desk by the drop-light. It seemed she could not read; nothing held her. She was irritable with Fleming, and then she would pet him piteously to make up. He was always gentle. He would watch her over his book as she walked up and down in the back room in the light between the dining-room curtains. If he saw I noticed, he'd look away and begin to talk.

"I have gone a little ahead of my story, for this was after the dark weather came on and the mails were behind; we knew there was some new strain on her spirits. You could see her face grow small and her flesh waste away.

"One night we sat here, Fleming and I, and she was pacing in her soft, weary way in the back of the room. There came a knock. It was Gideon's, yet none of us heard the gate click nor any step outside. She stood back, for she never showed any impatience--she tried to pretend that she expected nothing. Fleming opened the door; he stood there an instant looking out.

"'Didn't you hear a knock?' he asked me. Before I could answer he went outside, closing the door, and we heard him go down the steps slowly.