The Cinder Buggy (18 page)

His face was lighted from within. He spoke in the absent, anonymous manner of one undergoing a mystical experience. Something of his mood entered Thane. With one impulse they had struck hands and now stood looking deeply into each other’s eyes.

“I don’t know as I see what you mean,” said Thane.

“No,” said John. “You wouldn’t. I’ve confused you, trying to get it all said at once. There is first the fact that we are friends. My feeling for you in that way has increased suddenly, I don’t quite know why. And now, above that, is my sense of responsibility for what has happened. You must accept my view of that. It shall be understood that I have a right to stand by and that I may be trusted... absolutely trusted... whatever comes....”

He groped and stopped and seemed to have gone to sleep with his eyes open.

Thane moved uneasily. John, returning to himself, started slightly and released Thane’s hand. When he spoke his voice was altered.

“I can’t make it come clear,” he said. “I thought I could.”

“I’ve looked my eyes out that way, too,” said Thane. “Let’s take it as it is.”

What John at first had so clear a vision of was an act of heroic self-denial. It thrilled him with momentary ecstasy. That may be understood. Man is an emotional formation, subject to sudden passions, one of which is the passion of sacrifice. Blindly on the spot he rears an altar, lays the wood in order and looks to see what offering hath in a miraculous manner provided itself to be burnt. Lo! there stands the one thing most beloved in all the world. The Lord sometimes interferes, as for Isaac. Sometimes the victim saves itself. Then again the man draws back. He has not the heart to do it.

John drew back. To conclude the covenant with Thane meant forswearing Agnes in his heart forever. That was a vow he could neither bring himself to make nor trust himself to keep. And yet, any secret reservation seemed treachery to Thane. So there he stood before this truth of contradiction and “looked his eyes out” at it. How came Thane to have a thought like that?

Agnes was observing them intently with one elbow on her knee, her chin in her hand, eyes half closed. She was not thinking. She was verifying a kind of knowledge that underlies the mind. She knew why John faltered, why he lost his way toward what he meant to do, what that was, and why he dropped Thane’s hand. She knew what it was of a sudden to become a woman and why a woman need never be afraid.

Far away in the sky of her immemorial self, so far that what she saw of it was but its heat’s reflection, passed a flash of contempt for those tame, romantic vanities in which now man sublimates the reckless impulses of his savage egoism. At that instant, too, as it were in the light of this archaic intuition, there stood upon her memory the figure of the Cornishman, and she was horribly ashamed.

Nevertheless she continued to feel cynical about the emotional male principle. It bored her. There was one obvious thing to do. There was in fact only one thing possible to be done. But apparently neither Thane nor John was ever going to think of it, or give her a chance to suggest it without boldly naming it. One might have thought they had forgotten her existence. They stood in the middle of the road, John with his back to her, Thane with his eyes in the heavens, sharing a vast man-silence. She was at the core of that silence; she was all there was there. That did not interest her at all. She wished to be somewhere else.

She got up quietly and walked away from them, away from New Damascus, with a very bad list and limp. They overtook her in four or five steps, one on each side.

“What’s this way now?” Thane asked.

No answer.

“She isn’t fit to walk,” said John. “Don’t let her; do it.”

She looked at Thane; the gesture he was making toward her froze in the air.

“Take her as you would a nettle, firmly,” John recommended.

“‘Tain’t what’s outside I’m afraid of,” said Thane.

Stepping ahead and turning, John confronted her. Thane did the same. She made to go around them, right. They moved that way. She made to go around them, left. They moved that way. With a frustate gesture she gave it up, turned a tormented profile and made them feel how much she despised them.

“Mrs. Thane,” said John, “do you wish to leave New Damascus—leave it now—tonight?”

Agnes turned on him in a sudden rage of exasperation.

“Fly, I suppose! Fly away with a—a—what is he? I forget.”

“Oh, oh,” John groaned.

“What are you?” she said to Thane.

“Puddler,” he answered, with dignity, the look of a hurt animal in his face.

“It’s very well known,” she said, “puddlers don’t fly. Besides it’s too late. We’ve stopped to think. We had to take time to change his clothes. He’s out of a job and has no money. He told me so. I wonder what the wives of puddlers do.”

“Some would envy you your sting,” said John, horrified at what she was doing to Thane. She understood him perfectly.

“But you are immune,” she said. “I have not married you. Or have I? Are you this puddler’s David? What are your rights in him? How come you to suppose that you have rights in me?”

“Tantrums, thank God, and not hysterics,” said John.

“Shall we spend the rest of the night in this way?” she asked. “And what then?”

“I am leaving New Damascus tonight,” said John, pursuing a flash of intuition.

Agnes gave him an incredulous glance.

“So far as I know, forever,” he continued. “This decision is my own. You have nothing to do with it. But if you were also about to leave, perhaps taking the same direction, why shouldn’t we go together, as far as it’s parallel?”

“Who goes or stays, no matter what happens, I shall not be in sight of New Damascus at daybreak,” said Agnes, her face averted from both John and her husband, and she spoke as one making a vow. “So, whatever you do,” she added, “please hurry.”

Thane would have asked her a question,
not
knowing how women consent; John restrained him with a sign.

“Then I’ll pick you up here,” he said, setting off abruptly. “And I won’t be very long.”

When he returned with a smart bay team and a light road wagon, his own rig, the moon was sinking. Agnes was asleep on the dewy grass in Thane’s coat. He wrapped her in the rug John held out to him and lifted her to the seat. She was docile and limp, like a groggy child. John had to hold her erect until Thane got up on the other side. She sat between them.

Where the road turns abruptly out of the valley John pulled up and looked back. It was now quite dark. All that he could see was the mill, like a live malignant cinder in the eye of darkness, glowing faintly, going almost out, then spurting forth quick tongues of flame. He had the sensation of a great solitary weight rolling about in his stomach. Tears came to his eyes. Until that moment he had not known that he cared for New Damascus. His caring was like an inherited memory.

And though he knew it not, this night was the time and his exit the sign that sealed the fate of New Damascus. It was left in the hands of Enoch, who fanatically withheld it from the steel age.

“Where to?” Thane asked.

“Wilkes-Barre tonight,” said John. “Then to Pittsburgh. I’m buying a mill at Pittsburgh that I want you to take hold of. We’ll discuss it tomorrow.”

“What shape of mill?” asked Thane.

John hesitated.

“Nothing like the mill behind us,” he said.

The idea of buying a mill had only that instant come to him. So of course he did not know what kind of mill it was.

He looked at Agnes. She was sound asleep, leaning on Thane, who had his arm around her. Again he looked at her. She was in the same position, but her eyes were wide open, staring straight ahead.

T
HE flying triangle reached Wilkes-Barre for breakfast.

While waiting for Agnes, John and Thane transacted an important piece of business.

“Look here,” said John.

He sat at a desk in the office and wrote rapidly on a sheet of hotel paper as follows:

MEMORANDUM OF CONTRACT

In consideration of one month’s wages paid in hand on the signing of this paper, Alexander Thane agrees to give his skill and services exclusively to the North American Manufacturing Company, Ltd., (John Breakspeare, agent), for a period of two years, and the North American Manufacturing Company, Ltd., agrees to pay Alexander Thane not less that five thousand dollars a year, plus a ten per cent, share in the profits.

“Put your name over mine,” he said, handing the paper to Thane, who read it slowly.

“This the mill you meant last night?”

“Yes,” said John.

“How did you come to know as I could run a mill?”

“I think you can,” John said.

Thane signed his name in large, bold writing, blotted it hard, and handed the paper back to John.

“You’re right,” he said. “I can. And if it appears for any reason as I can’t that thing ain’t no good and you can tear it up.”

It never occurred to him that the business had a fabulous aspect. He took what John said at its face value. He could imagine no other way of taking a friend’s word. And if it were unusual for a young puddler to become a participating mill superintendent over night, so urgently wanted that he must sign up before breakfast, that might be easily explained. His friend, John Breakspeare, was an extravagant person, very impulsive, with unexpected flashes of insight. Who else would have known what Thane could do? Anyhow he had got the right man to run the mill. Thane was sure of that. He supposed John was sure of it, too.

John just then was sure of nothing. His one anxiety was to get Thane and Agnes into some kind of going order. He was aware that his motives were exceedingly complex and would not examine them. He let himself off with saying it was his moral responsibility; he was to blame for having got them into a dilemma that neither was able to cope with. Yet all the time he was thrilled by what he did because he was doing it for Agnes.

Thane’s artlessness about the contract was an instant relief. A fatal difficulty might otherwise have arisen at that point. But it was also very surprising. Was he so extremely naïve? Or had he such a notion of his ability to conduct a mill as to think he would be worth five thousand a year and one-tenth of the profits? Yes, that was the explanation, John decided: and it gave him a bad twist in his conscience to think how hurt and unforgiving Thane would be if he knew the truth,—that he had signed a contract with a nonexistent company to superintend a mythical mill.

They ate a hearty breakfast, coming to it from a night in the open air with no sleep at all. Although they talked very little they were friendly under a truce without terms, all tingling with a sense of plastic adventure. There was no telling what would come of it; but it was exciting; and everything that happened was new.

Both Agnes and John had a surreptitious eye for the puddler’s manners. They were not intrinsically bad or disgusting. They were only fundamentally wrong. He delivered with his knife, took his coffee from his saucer, modelled and arranged his food before attacking it, cut all his meat at once, did everything that cannot be done, and did it all with a certain finish. That is to say, he was a neat eater, very handy with his tools, and cleaned up. He took pride in the. performance; his confidence in it was impervious. He was not in the least embarrassed or uneasy. He did not wait to see what they did. He did it his way and minded his own business.

Once John caught Agnes eyeing Thane aslant, and she stared him down for it. He could not decide whether she was scandalized or fascinated.

When they had finished Thane called for the reckoning and paid, John politely protesting, Agnes looking somewhat surprised. After that in all cases Thane paid for two and John paid for himself.

Instead of resting for a day in Wilkes-Barre they chose to go on by train to Pittsburgh and arrived there in the middle of the afternoon. John recommended a hotel where he was sure they could be quite comfortable while deciding how they wished to live. He was acquainted there. He would introduce them. In fact, it was where he meant to lodge himself. So of course they all went together.

John managed the whole affair of settling them in their rooms, doing it so tactfully, however, as to leave Thane with the sense of having done it himself. When at last there was not another thing to be thought of John held out his hand to Agnes, saying:

“Congratulations.”

This was subtle, wicked treachery, and in the act was a sting of shame, yet her coolness was so audacious he could not resist the temptation to try its depth. She took his hand and met his look with steady eyes.

“Thank you,” she said. “May I share them with my husband?”

“No, don’t,” he said. “They are all his. I’m about to lose my wits. Well, no matter.... Thane,”—turning to him,—“Mrs. Thane may want to do some shopping. The best places are three blocks east. I’ll see you in the morning. Or later, perhaps? There’s no hurry.”

“Tomorrow morning,” Thane answered.

They were standing in a group outside the Thanes’ rooms, loath to break up, each for a different reason.

“I’m under the same roof, you know, if you should need me,” said John.