When Gideon Trezona, walking on the upper road eastward, came to his back gate and marched through, Dorothy and Dick and Wesley, coming down, felt the impact of his presence in a tiny tightening of their nerves, a faint tensing of their muscles. For their father's God was a God of Wrath, stern against evil.
"Well mither?" they heard him say in the kitchen.
"Well, fayther," said Eedie, merrily, revolving toward him to touch his stern cheek with loving fingers.
And the children's faces reflected the httle miracle they saw every day. Their mother was not afraid of Gideon Tre-zona or his God, either.
It was a fact: she had never been able to fear God very much. Did she not love Him? And He her?
Henry Duncane heading home saw, a little late, out of the tail of his eye, young Davies' sturdy figure at the side of the road. He braked abruptly to offer him a lift. Only tlien did he see that Davies had a companion. They both thanked him and got in.
Arthur Cole leaned on the seat back and poured his breathy voice into Henry's ear. "Thanks a lot, Mr. Duncane, Night shift, tonight. Be glad to get home. Say, what's your opinion of the School of Mines, at Houghton, Mr. Duncane?"
"Davies knows more about it."
"Good school," Davies said promptly.
"I'm thinking of going there," said Arthur rapidly. A lock of dark hair fell on his forehead. "I want to get ahead somehow. If I'm not too old already, I'd like to get a little schooling along engineering lines. Do you think they'd take me?"
"High school, Cole?"
Davies did the talking. Henry was silent as the car slipped swiftly down into towTi.
"Yeah, sure, and a year at the Normal before the war."
"You were in the war?"
"Yeah, I was in," said Cole as if he just remembered.
"They should take you."
"What about that, Mr. Duncane? Do you think I'd be smart? I'm married and all, but my wife could go back to teaching. I think she would, and if I could get in a couple of years . . ."
"Education never hurt anybody," Henry said.
'They slam it into you," warned Davies in his pleasant, rasping voice. "You'd have to buckle down."
"I could do that. If I care enough about anything, I can buckle down, don't worry. If it isn't too late, that's all. You were in the war, Mr. Duncane, but it hit you when you were
farther along. You had the stuff. But I guess, even at my age . . ."
"This all right, Cole?" Henry stopped the car at the foot of the hill, preparing to take the sharp-angled turn back toward his own house.
"Yeah sure, thanks very much. Good night, Mr. Duncane. Thanks for the encouragement."
"Sit still," said Henry to Davies.
The car made the acute angle and Henry stopped it again almost immediately, for Davies boarded with Mrs. Trestrial in the gray house on the right, just back of the pie-shaped vacant lot at the corner. He got out.
He wrinkled his nose. "Say, what's the old Cousin Jinny got? Saffron buns again? Do you smell saffron?"
"Smell it all the way to my house," Henry said, "pretty near every day." In his pleasantry there was the note of parting, but the car did not move yet so Davies stood still.
"Did I encourage him?" asked Henry softly of the evening.
"Not that I heard," said Davies in a surprised tone, and then he laughed.
Henry put the car into gear. They saluted each other. He pulled across the street into his own, driveway and Davies moved toward the scent of saffron and his supper.
Arthur Cole, proceeding down the block toward the town hall corner, walked with his face turned to look somewhat wistfully back over his shoulder.
CHAPTER FOUR
Behind the town hall to the north, the town of Thor spread up towards the woods in a double row of little frame houses that had once been all exactly alike. The Company had built them so. Tliey had grown different, of course. They had broken into varying colors, for one thing. Some were white or gray, some tan or yellow, with assorted trim. Pergolas and porches, stoops and shutters, had sprouted upon them in differing arrangements and, moreover, where one man had planted a vine his neighbor had put a tree. The boundaries of the tiny plots were a wooden fence, a fence of wire, a living hedge, or a border of whitewashed stones, according to fancy.
But for all of this, it was still immediately apparent that all these houses were exactlv alike in basic design. This design was as simple as could be.
For the Company, which had built them, owned them and rented them out for a minute amount, was not in the real estate business. Housing was necessary. Private construction, however, is not profitable in a mining town since the mines are the only reason for the town's existence and, therefore, property values cannot rise but instead are bound someday, when the ore is all gone, to disappear entirely. So the Company must provide, but the Company saw no reason to be extravagant about it.
^Fhe little dwellings were perfectly square boxes with two windows on each side and a peaked roof for a cover. Inside, the square floor space was evenly divided into four smaller squares and—except for a tiny staircase that went up out of the back room on the right, the dining room, to two small oblongs under the eaves—that was the house.
There were electric lights, but no gas stoves. There was a sink in each kitchen, but no other plumbing. At the back of the tiny plots, the outhouses stood exactly alike in basic design.
The third house from the corner on the left side of the street was painted white. It had a narrow useless porch all the way across the front and two clumps of straggly lilacs on either side of the steps.
The front door, dead center, opened to face a blank wall (the staircase went up behind it). This made a tiny entry open onto the right front room. The front room at the left, closed off by a door, was Cyril Varker's castle. Crowded into it he had his narrow bed, his wardrobe and his dresser, one chair, and a desk of his own. He sat in the shabby chair which had arms, and a cushioned seat, and was his throne. The one good lamp in the house was at his shoulder although, at the moment, light from the westering sun still came rosily through his south window. On the surface of the desk he had spread his kingdom.
His sister, Madeline, tapped on his door.
''Come."
She opened the door. "Suppertime.".
He turned his eyes up. He wondered whether she knew why it was that every evening she made sure to alert him to suppertime, made sure to rout him out of his private place and draw him forth into the part of the house that was common ground for the three of them.
"Arthur's not home yet," he protested mechanically.
"Soon be."
She came a step nearer and he could see, back of his elbow, her white fingers interlacing.
The perfect oval of her face was somber and brooding. "You and your dirty little pieces of paper," she said contemptuously.
"Dirty?"
"And mean."
"Oh come, Madeline." His laugh exploded.
Brother and sister, they were opposites. They opposed each other, and the tension between them was the strength of their bond. It was sometimes necessarv for one to attack
the other, out of a clear sky, to renew the close comfort of their angry polarity.
"What's mean about it?" Cyril asked reasonably. "I'm a convenience. I'm a service. I'm a business."
"It's secret, and it's cruel, and it's heartless," she said flatly.
Cyril was delighted. He tilted his head and his knob-knuckled hand neatened a pile of small pieces of paper. "You're the expert on the heart," he jeered, "as we agree to call it. Now it's one thing to be softhearted—another to be soft in the head."
"You'll get caught someday," she said, "and that won't be so clever."
"Caught."
"When the Company finds out."
"The Company won't find out," said Cyril calmly, "for the reason that anyone desperate enough to borrow money from me on my terms is in no state to make his position known to the Company. I see to that naturally. I'm not
accessible to everyone, you know. I pick and choose."
"You choose the ones you can frighten," she said. "You like that. That's why you'll lose your position when they do find out."
"I doubt if I'll lose my position unless I so choose," said Cyril airily. "I am a more or less valuable employee. The Company will pretend that perhaps I knew no better. So that I can pretend, too. And they won't lose my services. So you see what would happen? I would be warned—oh, very strongly perhaps—that this sort of thing won't do. Very well then, at such time that I am warned, I can decide how I wish to continue."
"How you wish to continue," she mocked his smug language.
"What makes you think the Company would take as sentimental a view as you do?" he taunted. "Do you know what would really infuriate the dear Company?" he said.
"All the money I've made. That would be the outrage," and he laughed again.
"What good is the money . . ." her fingers intertwined. She did not finish tlie sentence, but he did:
". . . to such as me, eh? What good is anything else?" he said, savagely. He looked up side\'a's.
"Come to supper," she murmured. It was as if she had drawn blood and was satisfied. But it was his turn now.
"What good is your soft heart?" he inquired. "It got you a child for a husband. It got you Arthur Cole. Why? Because he was red-eyed about you a year ago, and you didn't have the head to see he goes red-eyed after one thing and then another. You thought it was a deathless passion, eh, Madeline? Tristan and a somewhat fake Isolde."
"Oh don't . . ." she said somewhat wearily.
"Your heart was soft. He would kill himself if he couldn't have you. Last year, that is. So, in your womanly pit}', you conferred his heart's fondest wish upon him. In your soft head you assumed that you would of course be forever cradled in his devotion. Now he's red-eyed with ambition. And I could have told you he was red-eyed to be a military hero, before you. So he was a hero for a few months while that was hot in his head. Where are his medals now? Kicking around the house somewhere. Tarnished. Dusty. Half-forgotten. That's you too, Madeline."
"If it is," she said listlesslv, "what do you care?"
"I had quite an investment in you, if you remember?" he said brutally.
"Did you want me to marry for your profit? How could I do that? You have nothing to complain about. You get along well enough with Arthur."
"I make a nice buffer in this house too, don't I? Which is why you want me to come to supper before the supper's ready."
She looked stung by this perception.
"I do it with my hard head, you know," said Cyril. "After all, it costs me very little to live here."
She said furiously, "That's profit, then. If it saves you money."
He only laughed again. He felt satisfied. No need of any more now. He would keep some things to say another time. He got out of his chair, and for a moment they stood braced tight by their mutual antagonism, leaning on the strong ties
of the perpetual conflict that laced them together. She turned and went out and he followed.
Arthur Cole washed his face and hands in the kitchen sink and combed his hair with a wet comb. The long lock that wanted to fall forward was briefly imprisoned by the cohesive moisture, but it stirred as if it were alive, and before he had picked up his fork it was slipping down.
He was twenty-five. He was loose-jointed, tall, a rangy build. His face was thin and attractive although his well-cut lips were pushed forward as if he wore his mouth an inch ahead of where it ought to have been. He was attractive, Cyril thought, because of something restless and pushing, a qualit}' hinting that there would be at least no dull decline into safe routine for Arthur Cole.
The round oak table that nearly filled the tiny dining room was neatly laid, and the food was well-prepared. Madeline seemed to manage the little house with the back of her hand. Keeping house was not her vocation (and of no burning interest to her either) but she seemed able to accomplish it quickly and efficiently out of an overflow of her vitality. She ate daintily with good appetite looking, as always, lovely.
Arthur ate with a bent body and his head too low toward the table. It was the sole defect in his table manners.
"Got a ride home," he said as if this news were a plum he'd been saving, "with Henry Duncane."
Brother and sister sighed. Cyril had long remarked Arthur's habit of fastening on people who interested him, or with whom he wanted to claim intimacy, by a trick of calling them and them only by the full name. He would say George McKeever, for instance, when speaking of the superintendent, where most people said Mr. McKeever or, merely, the Old Man.
"Now there's a man," Arthur continued heartily, "who's got the world by the tail."
"How so?" said Cyril mildly. He was always mild with his brother-in-law. It was a saving of energ) Arthur was going to voice his worship of Henry Duncane again and there was no use resisting.
"There's a man who knows exactly where he's going!"
said Arthur vehemently. "And that's the way to be, beheve me! I spoke to him about school." He glanced at Madeline's quiet face. "I thought I'd ask because I'd think more of his advice than anybody else's around here."
"Did he advise?" inquired Cyril.
"Yep."
Cyril was amused. He thought Duncane probably had not said much or they'd have it in full flow. "Well?" he prodded.
"Listen, Madeline. Honest, I think I've got to give myself that chance." Arthur raised himself erect in the chair.
"You mean I'm to give you the chance," she said in a tone from which all bitterness was carefully expunged.
"All right," said Arthur, "why not? You don't mind teaching a couple of years."
"Don't I?"
"Well, if afterwards you'll have a lot more. A better place than this shack. Cyril, you don't think that's such a terrible thing to ask her to do? After all, she's got a profession. Lot of women can't earn money, but she can. I'm not asking her to support me, just to support herself for the time it takes. . . ."
"Where will you get the money .for your tuition and expenses?" mquired Cyril with malicious smoothness—for he had long known exactly where Arthur hoped to get it.
"Well."
Cyril smiled to himself. Arthur hadn't dared ask outright, yet. It was amusing.
Madeline said, "Oh, Arthur, sometime could we have one meal without . . ."
"But it's important!"
A fountain of energy and enthusiasm seemed to gush out of her husband. "It's my future! I know it is! It's what I need! Henry Duncane doesn't think it's impossible. It's not impossible. I don't want to be a miner all my life. I want to know something. I want to get somewhere. You know what's behind Henry Duncane, don't you? You know why it is when he shows up, everybody knows something is going to be done, and done right? You do know?"
"No, I don't know," said Madeline, dully passive under his pounding rhetorical questions.
"I do. It's his education. That's what makes him so sure of himself. That's the way to be, too. What I wouldn't give to be sure of myself. It makes all the difference. And when I think all it would take is a little time and money . . . two years even would pull me out of this. What can it cost?"
Madeline shook her head. She didn't speak. They had been here before. Cyril was a little bored by the repetition himself. He said now with malicious intent, "It will cost something certainly. However, I . . . er . . . guess you know I happen to have ... er ... a little put by."
He knew the leap of Madeline's startled eyes, but he looked up at Arthur. Arthur's head jerked. His forelock bounced. His brown eyes burned.
"It would be up to my sister, of course," said Cyril demurely. "If this is something she wants very much . . ."
Now he met Madeline's eyes and found them as angry as he had expected.
Cyril hadn't much faith in Arthur's ability to persist in any effort for two whole years. Too red-eyed, he thought. I'd give him six months. Still he might. Cyril didn't care one way or the other. He was watc
hing Madeline to see what she would do now.
She let her lids fall. "Let me think about it awhile longer," she murmured. "Please, Arthur."
"Ah, Maddy, say it now!" Arthur was aflame. "You heard what Cyril said. I'd never forget it. You'd never lose . . ."
"I told you I'd consider," she said, faintly, and pulled her hand out of his grasp. "Don't push me, Arthur."
Arthur simmered in excited hope. Cyril's qualified offer was a step indeed. He was bursting to insist and implore, but he tried to check himself. His eyes roved around the room for another topic—anything. But there was nothing. His whole head was filled with a single idea.
Cyril was aware of this. He glanced to communicate with his sister who would be aware, too, and he saw the pinched places around her beautiful mouth.
"These tomatoes are wonderful," he said, easily finding a topic when he wanted one. "Beauties. Delicious. You were right, Maddy. I thought you put them out too early."
Her hand took one of the perfect red fruits from the bowl,
and turned it. "1 picked these just an hour ago. They're fresh. And pretty?"
"We've got too many," Arthur said.
"I thought if they all ripen, I might put some of them up."
"Too many," he interrupted. "Say, take a few to Mrs. Dun-cane, why don't you?"
Under his browbone Cyril's eyes stretched.
"But Arthur," Madeline seemed flustered, "she must have . . ."
"No. No she hasn't. Not a thing in their garden. She's uh . . . you know . . . Didn't get anything in the ground. I think it would be kind of nice for you to do that."
"But I've barely met ... I hardlv know her."
"Nobody hardly knows her. Do it, will you? Do it just because I want vou to. Do it now."
"Now!"
"Why not? It's early. You can say we had them for supper and we thought of her. That's true isn't it?"
Cyril said curiously, "What's in your mind, Arthur?"
"I can't see how it could do any harm if my wife's nice to Henry Duncane's wife. After all, they might get friendly. Why not? Madeline's no dumbbell.- Mrs. Duncane might enjoy talking to her if they ever got to know each other."
The trouble in Thor Page 5
