Fairfax and His Pride: A Novel

He bade them look after bold Bella and teach her reason, and before he left he went in and looked at the little girl lying with her face on her hand, the stains of tears and travel on her face.

"I told her that I had come to marry you, Cousin Antony…"

"Little cousin! Honey child!"

His heart was tender to his discarded little love.

CHAPTER XX

Bella Carew's visit did disastrous work for Fairfax. The day following he was like a dead man at his engine, mechanically fulfilling his duties, his eyes blood-shot, his face worn and desperate. The fireman Falutini bore Fairfax's rudeness with astonishing patience. Their run was from nine until four, with a couple of hours lying off at Fonda, and back again to Albany along in the night.

The fatality of what he had been doing appeared to Antony Fairfax in its full magnitude. He had cut himself off from his class, from his kind for ever. Bella Carew, baby though she was, exquisite, refined, brilliant, what a woman she would be! At sixteen she would be a woman, at eighteen any chap, who had the luck and the fortune, could marry her. She would be the kind of woman that a man would climb for, achieve for, go mad for. As far as he was concerned, he had made his choice. He was engaged to be married to an Irish factory girl, and her words came back to him —

"If I'm any good, take me as I am. You couldn't marry the likes o' me."

Why had he ever been such a short-sighted Puritan, so little of a worldling as to entangle himself in marriage? More terribly the sense of his lost art had come in with the little figure he had admitted.

When he flung himself into his room Monday morning his brain was beyond his usual control, it worked like magic, and one by one they passed before him, the tauntingly beautiful aerial figures of his visions, the angelic forms of his ideals, and if under his hands there had been any tools he would have fallen upon them and upon the clay like a famished man on bread. He threw himself down on his lonely bed in his room through which magic had passed, and slept heavily until Mrs. Kenny pounded on the door and roused him an hour before his train.

At Fonda, in the shed, he climbed stiffly from his cab, his head aching, his eyes drunk with sleep. All there was of brute in him was rampant, and anything that came in his way would have to bear the brunt of his unbalanced spleen.

Falutini, a great bunch of rags in his hand, was at the side of the engine, wiping the brass and softly humming. Fairfax heard it —

"Azuro puro,Cielo azuro,Mia Maddalena…"

"Stop that infernal bellow," he said, "will you?"

The Italian lifted himself upright and responded in his own tongue —

"I work, I slave, I endure. Now I may not sing? Macché," he cried defiantly, "I will sing, I will."

He threw his chest out, his black eyes on Tony's cross blue ones. He burst out carolling —

"Ah Mia Maddalena."

Fairfax struck his face; the Italian sprang at him like a cat. Falutini was as tall as Fairfax, more agile and with a hard head. However, with one big blow, Fairfax sent him whirling, and as he struck and felt the flesh and blood he discovered how glorious a thing a fight is, how nerve relaxing, and he received the other's assault with a kind of ecstasy. They were not unequally matched. Falutini's skin and muscles were like toughened velvet; he was the cock of his village, a first-rate boxer; and Tony's muscles were of iron, but Fairfax was mad and gloomy, and the Italian was desperate and disgusted, and he made the better show.

A few men lounged in and one called out: "You darned cusses are due to start in ten minutes."

Fairfax just then had his arm round the Italian's neck, the close cropped head came under his chin, and as Fairfax panted and as he smelt the garlic that at first had nauseated him in his companion, he was about to lay his man when the same voice that called before, yelled in horror —

"Look out, for God's sake, Fairfax, he's got a knife."

At the word, Fairfax gave a wrench, caught his companion's right hand with his left and twisted the wrist, and before he knew how he had accomplished it, he had flung the man and knife from him. The knife hit Number Twenty-four and rattled and the fireman fell in a lump on the ground. Fairfax stood over him.

"What a mean lout you are," he said in the jargon he had learned to speak, "what a mean pup. Now you get up, Tito, and clear out."

The fellow rose with difficulty, white, trembling, punched a little about the face, and breathing like a saw-mill. Some one handed the knife to Fairfax.

"It never was made in America. It's a deadly weapon. Ugh, you onion!"

The Italian wiped the sweat from his forehead with his shirt sleeve and spat out on the floor.

Fairfax felt better than he had felt for years. He went back to his engine.

"Get up, Tito," he commanded his fireman; "you get in quickly or I'll help you up. Give me the oil can, will you?" he said. And Tito, trembling, his teeth dry between his lips, obeyed.

Fairfax extended his hand, meeting his companion's eyes for the first time, and said frankly —

"My fault. No hard feeling, Tito. Bene benissimo."

He smiled and slapped the Italian on the back almost affectionately. Tito saw that radiant light for the first time – the light smile. The old gentleman had said a man could win the world with an expression like that upon his face.

"Keep your knife, Falutini; cut up garlic with it: don't use it on me, amico – partner."

They went to work without a word further on the part of either, and Number Twenty-four slipped out on to the switch and was wedded to the local on the main line.

Fairfax was relieved in mind, and the morbid horror of his crisis had been beaten and shaken out.

"What brutes we are," he thought, "what brutes and animals. It is a wonder that any spirit can grow its wings at any time."

He drew up into a station and stopped, and, leaning out of his window, watched the passengers board the train. Pluff, pluff, pant, pant. The steal and flow and glide, the run and the motion that his hand on the throttle controlled and regulated, became oftentimes musical to him, and when he was morose he would not let the glide and the roll run to familiar melodies in his head, above all, no Southern melodies. "Tramp, tramp, tramp, the boys are marching," that was the favourite with Number Twenty-four. He had used to whistle it as he modelled in his room in New Orleans, where the vines grew around his window and Maris made molasses cake and brought it up hot when the syrup was thick on the side, and downstairs a voice would call, "Emmeline, oh, Emmeline." That sacred voice…! When Number Twenty-four was doing her thirty miles an hour, that was the maximum speed of the local, her wheels were inclined to sing —

"Flow gently, sweet Afton,Among thy green braes:Flow gently, I'll sing theeA song in thy praise.My Mary's asleepBy thy murmuring stream,Flow gently, sweet Afton,Disturb not her dream."

And little Gardiner leaned hard against his arm and Bella ran upstairs to escape the music because she did not like to cry, and his aunt's dove-like eyes reproached him for his brutal flight. He would not hear any ballads; but to-night, no sooner had he rolled out again into the open country than he began to hum unconsciously the first tune the wheels suggested. They were between the harvest fields and in the moonlight lay the grain left by the reapers.

"Cielo azuroGiornata splendida,Mia Maddalena."

Fairfax laughed when he recognized it. He glanced over at Falutini who was leaning out of his window dejectedly. At the next station, whilst the engine let off steam, Fairfax called to his fireman, and the man, as he turned his face to his chief, looked more miserably homesick than revengeful.

"I used to know a chap from Italy!" Fairfax said in his halting Italian, "a molto bravo diavolo. Shake her down, Tito, and brace her up a little, will you?"

The fireman bent to the furnace, its blast red on his face; from under the belly of the engine the sparks sang as they fell into the water gutter along the track.

"My chap was a marble cutter from Carrara."

Tito banged the door of the furnace. "I too am from Carrara."

"Good!" cried Fairfax, "good enough." And to himself he said: "I'll be darned if I ever knew Benvenuto Cellini's real name!"

"Carrara," continued his companion, "is small. He may have been a cousin. What was his name?"

"Benvenuto Cellini," replied Tony, easily, and rang his bell.

Once more they rolled out into the night. As they drove through the country Fairfax saw the early moonlight lie along the tracks, sifting from the heavens like a luminous snow. No breeze stirred and over the grain fields the atmosphere hung hot and heavy, and they rushed through a sea of heat and wheat and harvest smells. The wind of their going made a stir, and as Fairfax peered out from his window his head was blown upon by the wind of the speed.

Falutini from his side of the cab said, "Benvenuto Cellini. That is not a Carrara man, no, no."

"I never knew him by any other name," said the engineer. "I like Italians." He threw this cheerfully over his shoulder at his inferior.

There was a childlike and confiding smile on the Italian's face; brutal as all Italian peasants are, brutal but kindly and unsuspicious as a child, ready to love and ready to hate.

"Only you mustn't use your knife; it's not well thought of in America. You'll get sent to gaol."

The Limited whistled from around a curve, came roaring toward them, tore past them, cutting the air, and Fairfax's local plugged along when the mile-a-minute left them. Tony was conscious that as he hummed the sound grew full and louder; he was accompanied by a voice more assured than his own, and in melodious fraternity the two men sang together. So they took their train in.

CHAPTER XXI

The Kennys did not know what had happened to Misther Fairfax. He sang on the stairs now and again as he had done when he first came to Nut Street. He bought the children sweet Jackson balls and the baby nearly died from "wan in its troat," and his mother picked him up by his socks and rattled the sticky sweet out of the child's larynx, and the cat finished it.

Tony's foreman was asked in to have supper and a late cup of coffee, and Miss Cora Kenny, whom "Pop" had sent to the Troy convent the first week of Antony's appearance in the Gents' Boarding and Lodging House, came home for a Catholic holiday, and she helped her mother. They made macaroni for Tito Falutini – "high Falutini," as Mrs. Kenny called him. The name stuck, and the macaroni stuck as well, fast to the plate; but the Italian, in bashful gratitude, his eyes suffused with smoke and tears, ate gratefully, gesticulating his satisfaction, and Cora Kenny studied him from the stove where she slaved to tempt the appetites of Fairfax and his friend.

Fairfax was proud of Falutini: he was not an ordinary acquaintance; he sang after supper, standing stiffly in a corner of the kitchen, his red shirt well opened at the throat, and his moustache like black velvet above his red lips.

"He sings betther than the theayter, Misther Fairfax," Mr. Kenny said; "it makes yer eyes thrick ye," and blew his nose, and Cora asked the singer softly if he could give them "When the band begins to play," or "Gallagher's Daughter Belle." Tito smiled hopefully, and when Fairfax laughingly translated, assured Cora Kenny by means of Fairfax again, that if determination could make a man learn a foreign song, he would sing her "Gallagher's Daughter Belle" next Saturday night.

"Ah," she breathed, "she'd not be home then!"

"No," said Kenny, who was a lazy husband but a remarkable father, "that she wud not!"

The Italian fireman and the Irish lodging-house keeper's daughter gazed in each other's eyes. "Gallagher's Daughter Belle" … dum … dum … Fairfax hummed it, he knew it. Kenny's daughter Cora —that would be more to the point: and he thought of Molly. He had not seen her since he had kissed her a fortnight before. Cora said she had never been bold before, had never let herself think how jealous she was, but to-night Mr. Tito High-Falutini's eyes made her a new woman. Cora said to her mother over her shoulder —

"Shure, Molly Shannon's the onlucky gurl."

"How's that, Cora?"

"Lost her job."

"No!" exclaimed Mrs. Kenny, sympathetically, "and with what doin'?"

Shure, the foreman's daughter was a chum with Cora. The boss had made the girl prisents of collars, and it seemed, so Bridget said – Cora with exquisite subtlety dropped her voice, and after a second Mrs. Kenny exclaimed —

"Cora, you're a bad gurl to hark to such goings on, much less belave thim," and pushed her daughter back and brought out herself the crowning delicacy of the feast, a dish that needed no foreign help to compose, steaming praties cooked in their shimmies, as she expressed it. Cora sat down by High-Falutini, Mrs. Kenny went into the next room to her littlest children, and Kenny lit a fresh pipe, held the bowl in his hand, and opposite his distractingly pretty little daughter kept a thoughtful eye upon the pair. And Fairfax went upstairs two steps at a time.

It was after eleven, dense and hot, but he had gone up eagerly. Of late, whenever he had a few spare moments he took them, and all Sundays he remained in his room. There was an odour in the apartment, one that persistently rose above the tenement smells, a damp, moist, earthy perfume, to Fairfax delicious beyond words. Mosquitoes were rampant, but he had been brought up in a mosquito-ridden country, and he had rigged a bit of muslin across his window, and burned Mrs. Kenny's gas with heartless inconsideration.

On a small wooden stool stood something covered with cloths damped night and morning by Fairfax, and during the day by Matty Kenny, a public-school girl of twelve years of age, a pretty, half-witted little creature, whom of all Nut Street Fairfax liked and whom he blindly trusted. Between school hours the little girl ran up and patted with a sponge the mysterious image in Misther Fairfax's hall room. Tell? Ah, shure, Misther Fairfax, cross her heart and hope to die but she'd not. As her duties consisted in tidying Antony's room, her visits were not remarked. Now Antony lifted off the first cloth; he drew out the stool under the light, flung off his coat, rolled up his sleeves, loosened his cravat, got from his drawer a small spatular instrument, and looking at his unveiled work, meditatively wiped the dried clay from his tool. Then he drew off the last bit of cheesecloth, uncovering a statuette modelled in clay with great delicacy and great assurance. The gaslight fell yellow on it and the little statue seemed to swim, to oscillate and illumine. It was the figure of a little girl, her hair loose around her face, holding to her cheek a dead blackbird. The art of the work was its great sincerity, the calm, assured modelling, the tender truthfulness; the form of the child, her dress, even her strapped shoes were only indicated, nevertheless it was a perfect bit of realism, though crude. But the head, the attitude, the cheek and the face, the little caressing enfolding hands, were Greek in their perfect execution.

A flush rose on the young man's face, his eyes brightened, he gave a soft touch here and there with the little instrument, but he had done all he could to this creation. It was only in perishable clay, it must crumble and dry; how could he perpetuate it? He thought of having it cast in terra-cotta, but how and where? The figure vacillated in the gaslight, and taunted him with its perishability, its evanescence, frail, transient as childhood is transient. "Bella," he mused before it, "little cousin." His right hand had not quite lost its cunning, then? He could construct and direct a locomotive, but he had not lost all his skill. For what the statue proved to him, for its evidence of his living art and his talent, he loved it, he turned it and viewed it on all sides, whistling softly under his breath, not morbid about his tunes now.

Tito High-Falutini pushed the door open. "Goin' home, Tony, la Signora Kenni has turned me out."

Fairfax pointed to his statue. "Look. If we were in Carrara somebody would lend me a quarry or I would steal one, and turn little Bella into a snow image." He spoke in English, entirely uncomprehended by his companion. He put his hand on Tito's arm.

"Did you do that, Tony? It is valuable. In Italy we make terra-cotta figures like that and sell them."

"Do you think, Tito," his companion replied, "that I would sell little Bella for a few lire, you commercial traveller?"

Tito was acquainted with the Italian quarter, he would find some one who baked in terra-cotta. They had brought their trades with them. Tony could do others: a Savoyard with a hand-organ, those things were very gentile, very brave indeed, and money, said Tito, gloating, money, – why that would cost a dollar at least.

Fairfax covered up the clay and pushed the stool back in its corner.

"You can make a fool of yourself, too," he said good-humouredly, and pushed Falutini out. "Go home and dream of Kenny's daughter Cora, and don't forget to buy a can of crude oil and order a half dozen of those cock-screws. Good-night." He banged the door.

He undressed, still softly whistling, unpinned the curtain from the window, and what there was of heat and freshness came into the room with the mosquitoes that had huddled at the glass and the sill. He had heard Cora Kenny's information: Molly had lost her place because she would not do what the boss wanted. They always wanted one thing in the collar factories. The boss was a beast. He heaved a deep sigh. He had not been lonely the last fortnight, his work had absorbed him. There was no way for him to go on with it, he had no time, nor means. It had brought him near to his people, to his mother, to his kinsmen, to the child who had died, to the one that remained. But he knew his loneliness would return, his need of companionship, of expression and life, and he was too healthy, too strong to be nourished by his sentimental thought of the child-woman or to live on the sale of terra-cotta statues. He cradled his young head with its fair hair on his arm and fell asleep, and over the yards the harvest moon rose yellow and shone through the small window and on Antony. He might have been a boy asleep at school, his face looked so young and so unstained, and the same light shone on the angel of the resurrection at the gate of the rural cemetery, on Gardiner's little grave in Woodlawn, and on his mother's grave in New Orleans, where the brick walls keep the coffins high above the Mississippi's tide and silt.

The moonlight could not penetrate to the corner where, under the damp cloths, Bella wept over the blackbird pressed against her cheek.

CHAPTER XXII

Fairfax expected to find a melancholy, wet-eyed little creature with a hard-luck story when he went to Troy, and although he knew that Molly would never reproach him, he knew as well that he had treated her very badly. From the day he had asked her to become Mrs. Antony Fairfax, and heard Cora Kenny's news, he had not been near his sweetheart. His sweetheart! Since he had read "The Idylls of the King" in his boyhood, no woman had seemed too high or too fine for him: he had been Lancelot to Guinevere, the Knight to the Lady: Molly Shannon had not been in any romance he had ever read.

He found her sitting among her lodging-house keeper's children in a room tidied by her own hands. During her leisure, she had made herself a pink gingham dress with small white rosebuds on it, and around her neck a low white collar she had pinned with a tortoise-shell brooch. Her dress was the simplest Fairfax had ever seen her wear. It was cool and plain, and the Irish girl's milk-white skin, her auburn hair, her eyes with the black flecks in them, her young round breast, her bare fore-arm, as she rocked Patsy O'Brien, were charming, and her cry, as Fairfax came in, and the hands she pressed to her heart were no less charming.

She sprang up, her work fell to the floor: she stood deathly white and trembling. Her emotion, her love, affected the young man very deeply. He did not think of the obstacles between them, of her station, or of anything as he came into Mrs. O'Brien's parlour-bedroom amongst her six ubiquitous children and disturbed the cradle to get to Molly Shannon. He thought of one fact only, that he had kissed her: how had he forgotten the honey of it for a fortnight? Without so much as bidding her good-morning, he repeated the ecstasy and kissed her. She had time to grow faint and to regain her life in his arms, and under her happy breath she whispered: "Ah, I must quiet Patsy. Ah, let me go, he'll hurt his throat." And she bent, blooming and heart-breakingly happy, over the cradle.

Mrs. Kenny called him as he went past the door. "Shure," she said, "I've got bad news for ye, Misther Fairfax, dear."

He stopped on the threshold. "There is only one death on the earth that could give me any pain, Mrs. Kenny. I reckon it's – "

"It's not death then," she hastened, "shure it's a little thing, but poor Matty's that crazy that the child has gone out to her aunty's and wurra a bit will she come home."

"Matty!" Fairfax exclaimed.

"Shure, the moniment in your bedroom, Misther Fairfax."

He flew upstairs. The corner inhabited for him by a fairy companion was empty. The image of his talent, of his little love, of his heart's hope, had disappeared. Mrs. Kenny did not follow him upstairs as one would have supposed that she would do. He locked his door, the cloths lay in a pile, damp and soggy. Why had they not left the fragments – the precious morsels? His eyes filled with impotent, angry grief; he tore his table drawer open and found the designs which he had made for the figure. The sketches seemed crude and poor beside the finished work whose execution had been inspired. This destruction unchained again his melancholy. He was overwhelmed; the accident seemed like a brutal insistence of Destiny, and he seemed bound to the coarse, hard existence to which he had taken in desperation. With this destruction he saw as well the wiping out of his life of Bella.

Ah, at Troy that day he had done more than break a clay image of her. He opened the door as if he would have called to Mrs. Kenny, then slammed it, unable to speak from excitement, and a dogged look crossed his face. The night was muggy, his throat burned with a sudden thirst, and he exulted that it did so. On his empty room, empty to him for ever, for the figure in the corner had disenchanted it of all its horrors for fourteen happy days and nights, he looked once and then he fled. He threw himself down the stairs and out into the late mid-summer night.

The coloured porter at the Delavan put him to bed at one o'clock in a comfortable room. As the fellow's black face bent above him, Tony, who saw it blur and waver before his intoxicated eyes, murmured —

"Emmy, Emmy, don't tell my mother, and wake me at seven, for I run out at nine sharp."

CHAPTER XXIII

The paymaster, Peter Rainsford, had found little in West Albany to excite the tepid interest he still retained in life, but Tony Fairfax, the driver of Number Twenty-four, had attracted his attention. Each time that Fairfax came to report Rainsford made a vain effort to engage him in conversation. The agent wondered what the engine-driver's story was, and having one of his own, hoped for Fairfax's sake that there was anything but a class resemblance between them.

Detained late this night at his desk, he pushed back his lamp to contemplate Tito Falutini, who, his hat pressed against his red flannel breast, his teeth sparkling, came in to report. Tito told a tale in a jargon which only an etymologist could have sifted into words.

"Well, what do you think has become of him?" Rainsford asked.

The Italian gesticulated with his hat far and wide.

"You took the train to Fonda alone, without an engineer, Falutini? How was it the fellows didn't stop you at Fonda? It doesn't seem possible."

The official opened a ledger and ran his eye over the names.

"I can put Steve Brodie on Number Twenty-four to-morrow morning. You should have reported at once in West Albany, Falutini."

The name of Steve Brodie was intelligible to Tito. "Nota io," he said, "not a fire for any man, only Toni."