“I think I like you,” she said at last. She studied him frankly, from head to toe, not with the insolence of the incalculably wealthy, but with the manner of one young creature scrutinizing another. She was very tall, but he was at least six inches taller than herself, and thin and muscular, brown of skin, and very dark. He had a lean face, almost hawkish in profile, and quietly fierce black eyes. His black hair rose erectly from his tanned forehead like a mane, and curled at the back of his neck. Like Cornelia, herself, he gave out an aura of immense strength, but his was less spectacular and more controlled and subtle.
Completing her scrutiny, Cornelia sank down on the grass in a swirl of petticoats. She sat cross-legged, revealing her calves. She kicked off her pointed satin slippers, and wiggled her toes with open relief. She squinted up at the young man humorously. “How old are you, Allan?”
“I’m twenty-six, Miss.” She noticed again, and with pleasure, that he had a sonorous voice.
“I’m nineteen.” She pulled up a handful of grass and began to chew on one blade. “And I’m going to be married. I’m going to be married to Patrick Peale; he’s in his uncle’s bank, in Philadelphia. After we are married, he will help my father.”
“That’s nice,” said Allan. “When is the happy day?”
The bright shine dimmed on her face, and she glanced away from him. “I don’t know, yet. It—it hasn’t been settled.” She threw away the grass.
“Does Mr. Patrick Peale know?” he asked shrewdly.
She turned her face back to him, and now her eyes were narrowed and repellent. “Don’t you think you are a little impertinent?” she remarked. Her mouth lost its fullness, and tightened, and she was no longer beautiful.
Allan shrugged. “If I’m presuming, Miss, you gave me the opportunity. I’m sorry.” He picked up the hoe, moved away from her, and began to stir up the dry earth along the flower border. It was as if he had dismissed and forgotten her. He whistled thoughtfully to himself. She watched him intently. Then she smiled.
“Now you don’t like me,” she said.
“Is it important?”
“Well, yes. I like people to like me. It makes everything very comfortable.”
He regarded her curiously. “But it’s not because you like people, yourself.”
She broke again into a loud shout of laughter. “I loathe them,” she said. “And so do you.” She tilted her head and studied him. “But we don’t let people know how we feel about them. That would spoil everything.”
“And we couldn’t use them.”
She nodded with delight. “You’re very clever, Allan. I you’ll make an excellent lawyer.” Her eyes glinted with mockery. “A labor lawyer.”
He bowed ironically and continued to work. Idly, her eyes fixed upon him, she reached out to the flower border and broke off a cluster of small white blossoms. She tucked them in her hair, and she saw that he was aware of her careless gesture. “You don’t like gardening, do you?” she said. “And how do I know? Well, we had a real gardener a year or two ago, and if any of us so much as looked sideways at his precious flowers he would have convulsions. I tore off those and you didn’t so much as blink.”
“They’re your flowers, Miss,” he answered indifferently.
She laughed. “If you were truly a gardener you would consider them yours, not mine. Tell me, Allan, what do you do in the winter?”
“I cut wood, clear away snow, tend horses, help my father when his firemen are sick, and many other things. I’ve been firing engines since I was twelve, to help me get some kind of an education.” He spoke with no resentment. He turned his head and looked at her fully. “And I’ve done coupling: dropping the coupling pins between cars.” He held up his right hand, and she saw that the middle finger was missing to the second joint.
If he had expected her to flinch or cringe or pale at the sight of his mutilation, he was disappointed. The gesture had had some measure of cruelty in it, some desire to shock. But Cornelia, though she stopped smiling, was more curious than anything else. She said, “My God, that’s a damned shame.”
“What language,” he said. “I thought well-bred young ladies didn’t use it.”
“I’ve heard of the brakemen and such losing fingers,” said Cornelia, ignoring his comment impatiently. “I suppose it can’t be helped.”
“Oh, I have ideas,” observed Allan. “Automatic coupler. I’m working it out. That’s why I’m not going back to coupling on the railroad this winter. If I did, and invented the automatic coupler your dad could claim it, and perhaps I’d get an insignificant royalty, if anything. I don’t want him to have it; I want lots of money for it. So, when it’s ready, I’ll look for the highest bidder among manufacturers, not railroad men.”
Cornelia smiled craftily. “You want to be rich, eh? Good. I like being rich, myself. Clever people always make money; fools are born poor, live poor, and die poor. Of course, that isn’t what the ministers say, but it’s true. My grandfather was born poor, but he had the wit to become wealthy and had no patience for men without ambition. We have a great deal of money—millions, I think—and I want more. Why don’t you ask me why?”
“Because I know.” He bent and tore out another handful of weeds. Cornelia nodded. “Yes, naturally.” She yawned, and he saw her pink tongue and almost all her teeth, for she made no effort to cover her mouth. Some of her hair had loosened and curled in moist ringlets about her damp pink cheeks. Allan looked at her with open admiration, and, seeing this, she winked at him. “Where do you live?” she asked.
“On Potter’s Road, with my parents and my brother Michael. He is firing on the railroad regularly now.”
“What are you, English, Scotch, Irish, or something?”
His dark face darkened grimly. “I’m Irish, Miss.” She brushed some grass stalks from her dress, and her movements were slow and fastidious, and she bent her head. He nodded to himself. He added, “Catholic Irish, too, not one of your Protestants.”
Cornelia got to her feet with one long fluid motion and threw back her hair. “What does it matter?” she asked without interest. “I don’t let my religion bother me,” he said, but there was a congested expression about his nose and mouth.
“Who does?” said Cornelia. “Only an idiot would allow it.” She shook out her flounces. “It must be almost four o’clock,” she went on. “I promised my mother to have dinner with her and my cousin and Uncle Jim—he’s my stepfather—and my sister Ruth. They don’t go to Newport in the summer, as we do. They don’t like it. Neither do I, particularly.”
“But you go, don’t you, Miss deWitt? I was wondering why you were in town at this time of year.”
Her eyes widened as if with surprise. She turned and looked up the terraces at her home, and now her face softened, became almost tender and brooding. “I love my home, Allan. I can’t bear to be away from it. No matter how long I live, or where I’ll ever go, I’ll always come back. So, even in the summer, I must return for a week or two, just to be sure the house is still here.” Her husky voice had become almost gentle. Allan, somewhat startled, looked up at the house also. The sun had left the arches of the first floor so that they had become flooded with a mysterious dusk, but the white pillars of the great piazza were incandescent with light and the upper windows blazed in the western sun.
“I’ll have a house like that someday,” Allan said. He was very grave and almost somber. “I think I don’t mind working here so long as I can look at it from any angle.”
Something in his voice made her swing to him suddenly and regard him with a kind of intense wonder. They stood staring at each other for a long time. Then Cornelia’s face became full of light and a kind of joy, and Allan smiled. A deep exchange of emotion passed between them, and Cornelia’s lips parted softly in an answering smile. For one of the very rare times in her life she forgot who she was; she forgot who Allan Marshall was. They were caught up in a communication in which the two young people understood each other, and recognized each other. W
hen Cornelia extended her hand to Allan it was an impulsive and entirely sincere gesture of fellowship. He took it at once, strongly but briefly.
He saw Cornelia’s eyes, and now they were wide and golden in the sunlight, and humid. The hair he deplored was vivid and alive as fire.
Then Cornelia was laughing, not her usual boisterous laugh, but a gentle one. She caught up her skirts and bounded up the small terrace. Once there, she looked down at Allan and it seemed to him that she had, for an instant or two, concentrated the sunshine in herself and that she was pouring it down upon him. She waved her hand and flew up the higher terraces like an arrow of brilliant color. He leaned on his hoe and watched her. An old woman, “the old devil,” had appeared on the piazza, grim, white-haired, tall and bent, leaning on her cane. Even from the distance below, Allan could see a change come over Sophia; her stiffness melted as she kissed Cornelia. Her loud harsh voice blurred into accents of mingled plaintiveness and affection. They walked around the side of the piazza together, Cornelia supporting the blackclad old woman.
Allan stood, gazing up at the house. For a young man so assured and compact of personality, he was oddly disturbed and shaken. Then he said to himself: Not some other house, but this. Not some faceless girl, but that one.
His thoughts did not seem vainglorious to him. He went on working, absorbed and intent, his black brows meeting over his eyes.
25
Mr. Victor Drummond, yawning, closed the lawbooks, winked at the blazing gaslights above his head, which flooded down on his silent office.
“I think, Allan, that’s enough for tonight.” He was a small and wiry man of fifty, with a bald head, a white mustache, and a peevish sharp face. He looked at his watch, yawned again, patted his waxed mustache, daintily thrust the books from him. “It’s ten o’clock.”
Allan Marshall stood up, piled the books together, folded the yellow sheets which he had been using, and on which were carefully inscribed many decisions in his hard small writing, and put them in his pocket. Under the brownness of his skin he was pale with fatigue. But the black glance he gave Mr. Drummond was indomitable. “I could go on all night,” he answered.
Mr. Drummond, though he despised this “scum of the gutters,” smiled, flattered. His position in Mr. Peale’s office was a minor one; he did the more listless and unimportant research, but he was thorough. Nothing was too dusty for him, nothing too tedious for his meticulous nature. He said with kind condescension, “You will make a fine lawyer one of these days, Allan. I look forward to the day when you will join me as my assistant in research. There is so much work! I can use a young man like you. I believe that in another year or so you will be ready.” He added, “You owe considerable to Mr. Peale. You never did tell me how you approached him, and how you convinced him of your natural bent for law.”
“I just walked into his office, when he was back from Washington, and told him,” said Allan simply. This little gray mouse of a man! Let him have his condescending and pseudoelegant ways. He was of immense use to Allan Marshall.
Mr. Drummond sighed blissfully. “Mr. Peale is a man of great democracy, Allan. How many gentlemen in his position would keep an open door for aspiring young men? He has what we call—uh—the ‘common touch.’ I well remember the day I first came to these offices. My parents”—and Mr. Drummond’s pigeon breast swelled pompously—“had been able to send me to Harvard. Mr. Peale once told me that the office could not function without me.” He laughed with a rich and modest sound. He patted his small stomach and sighed again complacently. The tips of his little fingers were dusty and ink-stained.
Allan kept his expression serious and attentive. He stood beside Mr. Drummond’s scarred, roll-top desk in an attitude of respect, his brown cap in his hand, his old, short and skimpy overcoat tight over his broad shoulders. His boots were broken and dirty. Mr. Drummond was too dull a man to see the subtle contempt in the black eyes fixed on him. ‘Tell me, Allan,” he said graciously. “Why are you so interested in the labor legislation passed during the last ten years? Where do you expect to use all this information?”
“Here, perhaps,” replied Allan. He smiled, and the smile was unpleasant. “Mr. Peale has a number of clients who are industrialists.” The smile became even more disagreeable. “Besides, I can be of great assistance to my own people, you know—the workers. Making for fine labor understanding between employer and employees.”
Mr. Drummond nodded seriously. “A very fine aspiration. One hopes there will be no more unpleasantness. Once your—people—are aware of the problems of industry, they will not be so eager to strike against their benefactors. And that reminds me: we have some little-used books on the subject. I will get them out for you on Wednesday. Elson’s Sacred Obligation of the Worker and The Bible’s Admonitions to the Toiler. In the latter is a chapter called, I believe, ‘Essay on the Subject of Scriptual Exhortations to the Hewer of Wood and the Drawer of Water.’ Very edifying. It calls for humility and gratitude on the part of the Man who Toils.”
“It sounds very interesting,” said Allan. His voice, deep, controlled, and full of eloquent inflections, filled the echoing office. Mr. Drummond listened, he scratched his chin. “Ah, yes,” he murmured. He was not too stupid; something was making him uneasy. He pushed back his chair. “I believe my buggy has been brought from the stables,” he said. “It is raining; very nasty weather this time of the year. You have a long walk, Allan.”
He strutted ahead of Allan through the long dark offices where the fires had been banked. A chill permeated the unseen corners; a gas lamp from the street permitted the two men to wind their way through the litter of desks and chairs and files. Mr. Drummond carefully locked the doors and, leading the way as usual, with the shabby young man behind him, descended the two flights of carpeted stairs to the street. Quicksilver rain, cold and piercing, dashed against the walls of the buildings, and the autumn wind howled down the long and empty avenues. The river was rising; they could hear its hoarse voice against the thunder of the gale. Mr. Drummond’s buggy was waiting at the curb. He lived in East Town, as did Allan, and at least half of the journey was in the direction of Allan’s home. It never occurred to Mr. Drummond to offer a member of the “lower classes” a lift behind the snug curtains of his vehicle. Allan watched the buggy roll briskly down the street; the wheels threw aside the sheets of silvery water which spread out from the gutters. He turned up the collar of his meager coat, pulled his hat down on his untidy mass of black hair, and swiftly followed the buggy, picking his way indifferently through puddles in the cobblestones.
His long legs carried him rapidly and easily through the deserted streets. He kept his head bent against the rain, his hands thrust in his pockets. He went over and over, in his mind, the recent decisions against labor. Law was a doubleedged sword. It was also a method of blackmail. “Justice” could be an avenger for the rights of man; she could also be employed to destroy the rights of man. “Justice” was the servant of the strong; she had a thousand faces. She had a thousand hands, which could be bought. The highest bidder could be certain to have her, a docile slave, in his own employ. Law, thought Allan, should have been represented as a pool of mercury, slippery and infinitely capable of assuming smaller and smaller particles.
The clock in the tower of the city hall clangored. Half-past ten. Allan’s father, Tim Marshall, would have finished with that dreary, nightly rosary business by now. Allan could see his father, in his striped engineer’s shirt, kneeling with his wife and younger son, Michael, beside him. He could see the beads slipping through scarred old fingers in the light of the kerosene lamps. He could see his mother, prematurely gray and old, following the prayers, and that muddy clod, Mike, dutifully repeating. The cheap tin crosses would glimmer a little in the yellowish light, trembling in the devout hands. “Hail Mary, full of Grace. … Our Father, Who art in Heaven. …” How was it possible to teach fools that such humble gibberish was the incantations of their serfdom? Well, thought Allan, it is just as well
they don’t know. A stone was in his way. He kicked it and, with satisfaction, watched it sail across the street. As he stood there a moment, the rain running down his face, a tiny mouse darted from the side of a building and ran, confused, in front of him. He kicked it with as little emotion as he had kicked the stone, and it rose in the air with a squeal and dropped, writhing, in the drowning gutter. He went on, humming to himself. The mouse reminded him of Mr. Drummond.
He never long forgot Cornelia deWitt. She was in New York now, in the fine mansion she occupied with her parents and her brothers on Fifth Avenue. He, Allan, had never been to New York except last summer, on a “long run” with his father. He remembered Fifth Avenue very well: the tall, square houses, the polished brass plates on the grilled doors, the silk-shrouded windows turned to the street. The carriages. The white steps. The gowns and furs of the women, their jewels, their parasols, their bonnets nodding with plumes, the rustle of their skirts, their silky laughter and pretty faces. The children with their nurses. The bright and vivid light on pale stone. He had found the deWitt house, closed for the summer, and shuttered. He had stood before it and had told himself that one day he would live in that house, and it would be his own. Cornelia, in his imagination, walked with him, holding his arm. He was not dressed in patched clothing. He wore a brocaded waistcoat, his ankles in spats, his shoulders covered with fine broadcloth, a gold-headed cane in his hand.
He walked faster, now, through the poor, silent streets which led to his home. A matter of time. Perhaps not too long a time. He was nearly twenty-seven; he could not wait much longer. Three ten-cent pieces, one quarter, and a few pennies, jingled against one of the hands thrust in his pockets. He fingered them, rubbed them together. He began to whistle some old Irish air taught him by his father, and the sound was loud and sweet and strong in the rainy silence. He whistled to Cornelia, and now his whole body was filled with urgent lust and anticipation. It did not matter to him that he had not seen her for several months. He did not fear that white-faced dandy, Patrick Peale. For Patrick Peale was engaged to marry Miss Laura deWitt next June. Two ghosts together, thought Allan, chuckling. He made it a point to acquaint himself, now, with everything that pertained to the deWitts, and he listened to all local gossip about them. There had been much malicious speculation about Miss Cornelia’s disappointment in not “snaring” Mr. Patrick; Allan had listened to the light sneers in the Peale offices.
Never Victorious, Never Defeated Page 29
