Fairfax and His Pride: A Novel

At six he rose with a sigh, and, though it was growing dark, he began to draw aimlessly, and Rainsford, when he came in, found Tony sketching, and the young man said —

"You don't give a fellow much of your company these days, Peter. Have a cigarette? I've smoked a whole box myself."

"I'm glad to see you working, Fairfax."

"You don't know how glad I am," Fairfax exclaimed; "but the light's bad."

Putting aside his drawing-board, he turned to his friend, and, with an ardour such as he had not displayed since the old days at the Delavan, began to tell of his conception.

"I have given up my idea of a single figure. I shall make a bas-relief, a great circular tablet, if you understand, a wall with curving sides, and emblematic figures in high relief. It will be a mighty fine piece of work, Rainsford, if it's ever done."

"What will your figures be, Tony?"

"Ah, they won't let me see their forms or faces yet." He changed the subject. "What have you done with your Sunday, old man? Slept all day?"

"No, I've been sitting for an hour or two with Mrs. Fairfax."

Molly's husband murmured, "I'm a brute, and no one knows it better than I do."

Rainsford made no refutation of his friend's accusation of himself, but suggested —

"She might bring her sewing in the afternoons, Tony; it would be less lonely for her?"

Fairfax noticed the flush that rose along the agent's thin cheek.

"By Jove!" Fairfax reflected. "I wonder if old Rainsford is in love with Molly?" The supposition did not make him jealous.

The two men went home together, and Rainsford stayed to supper as he had taken a habit of doing, for Fairfax did not wish to be alone. But when at ten o'clock the guest had gone and the engineer and his wife were alone together in their homely room, Fairfax said —

"Don't judge me too harshly, Molly."

Judge him? Did he think she did?

"You might well, my dear."

He took the hand that did all the work for his life and home and which she tried to keep as "ladylike" as she knew, and said, his eyes full on her —

"I do the best I can. I'm an artist, that's the truth of it! There's something in me that's stronger than anything else in the world. I reckon it's talent. I don't know how good it is or how ignoble; but it's brutal, and I've got to satisfy it, Molly."

Didn't she know it, didn't Mr. Rainsford tell her? Didn't she want to leave him free?

"You're the best girl in the world!" he cried contritely, and checked the words, "You should never have married me."

She couldn't see the struggle in him, but she could observe how pale he was. She never caressed him. She had long since learned that it was not what he wanted; but she laid her hand on his head, for he was sitting on the bed, and it might have been his mother who spoke —

"You're clear tired out," she said gently. "Will I fix up a bed for you in the kitchen to-night? You'll lie better."

He accepted gratefully. To-morrow, being Monday, was the longest day in the week for him.

He could not permit himself to go to church again, but during the next few days he half expected to hear a knock at the door which should announce Bella. But she did not come, and he was glad that she did not, and more than once, in the evening, he walked around the school building, up – Street, looking at the lighted windows of the house where the doves were safely coted, and thought of the schoolgirl, with her books and her companions.

"… Not any more perfectly straight lines, Cousin Antony …"

And the leaves fell, piles of them, red and yellow, and were swept and burned in fires whose incense was sweet to him, and the trees in the school garden grew bare.

In the first days of his Albany life, his Visions had used to meet him in those streets; now there seemed to be no inspiration for him anywhere, and he wondered if it were his marriage that had levelled all pinnacles for him or his daily mechanical work? His associations with Tito Falutini? Or if it were only that he was no sculptor at all, not equal to his dreams!

In the leaf-strewn street, near the Canon's School, he called on the Images to return, and, half halting in his walk, he looked up at one lighted window as if he expected to see a girlish figure there and catch sight of a friendly little hand that waved to him; but there was no such greeting.

That afternoon, as he went into his studio, some one rose from the sofa, and his wife's voice called to him —

"Don't be startled, Tony. I just came for awhile to sit with you."

He was amazed. Molly had never crossed the threshold of the workroom before, not having been invited. She had brought her sewing. It was so lonely in the little rooms, she wondered if it wasn't lonesome in the studio as well?

Smoking and walking to and fro, his hands in his pockets, Fairfax glanced at his wife as she took up the little garments on which she was at work. Her skin was stainless as a lily save here and there where the golden fleck of a freckle marred its whiteness. Her reddish hair, braided in strands, was wound flatly around her head. There was a purity in her face, a Mystery that was holy to him. He crossed over to her side and lit the lamp for her.

"Who suggested your coming? Rainsford?"

"Nobody. I wanted to come, just."

He threw himself down on the sofa near her. "I can't work!" he exclaimed. "I've not been able to do anything for weeks. I reckon I'm no good. I'm going to let the whole thing go."

Molly folded her sewing and laid it on the table. "Would you show me what you've been workin' at, Tony?"

The softness of her brogue had not gone, but she had been a rapid pupil unconsciously taught, and her speech had improved.

"I've destroyed most of my work," he said, hopelessly; "but this is something of the new scheme I've planned."

He went over to the other part of the studio and uncovered the clay in which he had begun to work, and mused before it. He took some clay from the barrel, mixed it and began to model. Molly watched him.

"I get an idea," he murmured; "but when I go to fix it it escapes and eludes me. It has no form. I want a group of figures in the foreground and the idea of distance and far-away on the other side."

"It will be lovely, Tony," she encouraged him. "I mind the day we walked in the cemetery for the first time and you looked at the angel so long."

"Yes." He was kneeling, bending forward, putting the clay on with his thumb.

"Ever since then" – Molly's tone was meditative – "that angel seems like a friend to me. Many's the time when there's a hard thing to do he seems to open the door and I go through, and it's not so hard."

She was imaginative, Fairfax knew it. She was superstitious, like the people of her country. The things she said were often full of fancy, like the legends and stories of the Celts; but now he hardly heard her, for he was working, and she went back to her task by the lamp, and, under the quiet of her presence and its companionship, his modelling grew. He heard her finally stir, and the clock struck seven, and they had had no supper. Until she crossed the floor, he did not speak. Then he turned —

"I'll work on a little longer. I want to finish this hand."

"Take your time, Tony. I'll be going home slowly, anyway."

She was at the door, stood in it, held it half-open, her arm out along the panel looking back at him. Her figure was in the shadow, but the light fell on her face, on her hair and on her hand. The unconscious charm of her pose, her slow pause, her attitude of farewell and waiting, the solemnity of it, the effect of light and shadow, struck Fairfax.

"Molly," he cried, "wait!"

But she had dropped her arm. "You'll be coming along," she said, smiling, "and it's getting late."

He found that the spell for work was broken after she left, though a fleeting idea, a picture, an image he could not fix, tantalized him. He followed his wife. He had passed the most peaceful hour in his Canal Street studio since he had signed the lease with the money of his mother's ring. He would have told Molly this, but Rainsford was there for supper.

CHAPTER XXXI

Molly came and sat with him Saturday afternoons and Sundays. Fairfax made studies of his wife as she sewed, a modern conception of a woman sitting under a lamp, her face lifted, dreaming. He told Rainsford that when the lease was up he should vacate the studio, for he could not go on with his scheme for the monument. He had the memories of Molly's coming to him during the late autumn and winter afternoons. The remembrance of these holidays soothed and pardoned many faults and delinquencies. She seemed another Molly to the Sheedy counter girl, the Troy collar factory girl, and an indefinable Presence came with her, lingered as she sewed or read some book she had picked up, and if Fairfax the artist watched the change and transformation of her face as it refined and thinned, grew more delicate and meditative, it was Fairfax the man who recalled the picture afterward.

She was exceedingly gentle, very silent, ready with a word of encouragement and admiration if he spoke to her. She knew nothing of the art he adored, but seemed to know his temperament and to understand. She posed tranquilly while the short days met the early nights; she disguised her fatigue and her ennui, so that he never knew she grew tired, and the Presence surrounded her like an envelope, until Antony, drawing and modelling, wondered if it were not the soul of the child about to be born to him, and if from the new emotion his inspiration would not stir and bless him at the last?

What there was of humour and fantasy in her Irish heart, how imaginative and tender she was, he might have gathered in those hours, if he had chosen to talk with her and make her his companion. But he was reserved, mentally and spiritually, and he kept the depths of himself down, nor could he reveal his soul which from boyhood he had dreamed to give to One Woman with his whole being. He felt himself condemned to silence and only partially to develop, and no one but Molly Fairfax, with her humility and her admiration, could have kept him from unholy dreams and unfaithfulness.

His life on the engine was hard in the winter. He felt the cold intensely, and as his art steadily advanced, his daily labour in the yards grew hateful, and he pushed the days of the week through till Sunday should come and he be free. His face was set and white when Rainsford informed him that it would be impossible to give him "Saturdays off" any longer. Antony turned on his heel and left the office without response to his chief, and thought as he strode back to his tenement: "It's Peter's personal feeling. He's in love with Molly, and those days in the studio gall him."

Molly, who was lying down when he came in, brushed her hand across her eyes as if to brush away whatever was there before he came. She took his hat and coat; his slippers and warm jacket were before the stove.

"Rainsford has knocked me off my Saturdays," he said bitterly.

She stopped at the hook, the things in her hand. "That's hard on you, Tony, and you getting on so well with your work."

She didn't say that she could not have gone on any more … that the walk she took the week before to Canal Street had been her last; but Fairfax, observing her, rendered keen by his own disappointment, understood. He called her to him, made her sit down on the sofa beside him.

"Peter has been better to you than I have," he said sadly. "I've tired you out, my dear, and I've been a selfish brute to you."

He saw that his words gave her pain, and desisted. He was going to be nothing more from henceforth but an engineer. He would shut the studio and take her out on Sundays. She received his decision meekly, without rebuffing it, and he said —

"Molly, if I had not come along, I reckon you would have married Peter Rainsford. There! Don't look like that!"

"Tony," she replied, "I'd rather be wretched with you – if I were, and I'm not, dear. I'd rather be unhappy along of you than the happiest queen."

He kissed her hand with a gallantry new to her and which made her crimson, and half laugh and half cry.

She went early to bed, and Antony, alone in the kitchen, raked down the coals, covered the fire in the stove, heard the clock tick and the whistles of the boat on the river. In the silence of the winter night, as it fell around him, he thought: "I reckon I'll have to try to make her happy, even if I cut out my miserable talent and kill it." And as he straightened himself he felt the Presence there. The solemn Presence that had come with her to his workshop and kept him company, and it was so impressive that he passed his hand across his forehead as though dazed, and opened the door of his bedroom to see her and be assured. She was already asleep; by her side, the little basket prepared, waited for the life to come. He stepped in softly, and his heart melted. He knelt down and buried his face in the pillow by her side, and without waking she turned her face toward him in her sleep.

CHAPTER XXXII

He did not go to the studio for a month, but though he remained with her the poor girl profited little by his company. He smoked countless cigarettes, in spite of the fact that he had doctor's bills to look forward to. In the long winter evenings he read books that he fetched from the library while the blizzards and storms swept round the window, and the next day his duties stared him in the face. He dreamed before the stove, his cigarette between his fingers, and Molly watched him; but Rainsford, when he came, did not find her any more alone.

Finally, in the last Sunday of January, after the noon dinner, she fetched him his coat and muffler.

"I can't let you stay home any more like this, Tony," she told him. "Take your things and go to the studio; I'm sure you're dying to, and don't hurry back. I'm feeling fine."

He caught her suggestion with an eagerness that made her bite her lip; she kept her face from him lest he should see her disappointment. He exclaimed joyously —

"Why, I reckon you're right, Molly. I will go for awhile. I'll work all the better for the holiday."

He might have said "sacrifice."

As he got into his things he asked her: "You're sure you'll not need anything, Molly? You think it's all right for me to go?"

She assured him she would rest and sleep, and that the woman "below stairs" would come up if she wanted anything. He mustn't hurry.

He took the studio key. He was gone, his uneven step echoed on the narrow stairs. She listened till it died away.

Fairfax before his panel during the afternoon worked as though Fate were at his heels. When he came in the room was bitter cold, and it took the big fire he built long to make the shed inhabitable; but no sooner had the chill left the air, and he unwrapped his plaster, than a score of ideas came beating upon him like emancipated ghosts and shades, and he saw the forms, though the faces were still veiled. He sang and whistled, he declaimed aloud as the clay he mixed softened and rolled under his fingers… It let him shape it, its magic was under his thumb, its plasticity, its response fascinated the scupltor. He tried now with the intensity of his being to fix his conception for the gate of Death and Eternal Life. He had already made his drawing for the new scaffolding, and it would take him two Sundays to build it up. Falutini would help him.

It seemed strange to work without Molly sitting in her corner. He wondered how long the daylight would last; he had three months still until spring; that meant twelve Sundays. He thought of Molly's approaching illness, and a shadow crossed his face. Why had he come back only to tempt and tantalize himself with freedom and the joy of creation?

Sunday-Albany outside was as tranquil as the tomb, and scarcely a footstep passed under his window. The snow lay light upon the window-ledge and the roof, and as the room grew warmer the cordial light fell upon him as he worked, and a sense of the right to labour, the right to be free, made him take heart and inspired his hand. He began the sketch of his group on a large scale.

As he bent over his board the snow without shifted rustling from the roof, and the slipping, feathery shower fell gleaming before his window; the sound made him glance up and back towards the door. As he did so he recalled, with the artist's vivid vision, the form of his wife, as she had stood in the opened door, her arm along the panel, in the attitude of waiting and parting.

"By Jove!" he murmured, gazing as though it were reality. Half wondering, but with assurance, he indicated what he recalled, and was drawing in rapidly, absorbed in his idea, when some one struck the door harshly from without, and Rainsford called him.

Fairfax started, threw down his pencil, and seized his hat and muffler – he worked in his overcoat because he was cold – to follow the man who had come to fetch him in haste.

CHAPTER XXXIII

Over and over again that night in his watch that lasted until dawn, as he walked the floor of his little parlour-kitchen and listened, as he stood in the window before the soundless winter night and listened, Fairfax said the word he had said to her when she had paused in the doorway —

"Wait…!"

For what should she wait?

Did he want her to wait until he had caught the image of her on his mind and brain that he might call upon it for his inspiration?

He called her to "wait!"

Until he should become a great master and need her with her simplicity and her humble mind less than ever? Until he should be honoured by his kind and crowned successful and come at last into his own, and she be the only shadow on his glory? Not for that!

Until Fairfax one day should need the warmth of a perfectly unselfish woman's heart, a self-effacing tenderness, a breast to lean upon? She had given him all this.

He smelled the ether and strange drugs. The doctor came and went. The nurse he had engaged from the hospital, "the woman from below stairs" as well, came and went, spoke to him and shut him out.

He was conscious that in a chair in a corner, in a desperate position, his head in his hands, Rainsford was sitting. Of these things he was conscious afterward, but he felt now that he only listened, his every emotion concentrated in the sense of hearing. What was it he was so intent to hear? The passing of the Irrevocable or the advent of a new life? He stood at length close to her door, and it was nearly morning. A clock somewhere struck four presently, and the whistle of the Limited blew; but those were not the sounds he waited to hear.

At five o'clock, whilst it was still dark in the winter morning, he started, his heart thumping against his breast, a sob in his throat. Out of the stillness which to him had been unbroken, came a cry, then another, terribly sweet and heart-touching – the cry of life. He opened the door of his wife's room and entered softly in his stocking feet. There seemed to be a multitude between him and his wife and child. He did not dare to approach, but stood leaning against the wall, cold with apprehension and stirred to his depths. He seemed to stand there for a lifetime, and his knees nearly gave way beneath him. His hand pressed against his cheek. He leaned forward.

"Wait!"

He almost murmured the word that came to his lips.

For what should Molly Fairfax wait? Life had given her a state too high. She had brought much grace to it and much love. She had given a great deal. To wait for return, for such gifts, was to wait for the unattainable.

She went through the open door that she saw open, perhaps not all unwillingly; and she was not alone, for the child went with her, and they came to Fairfax and told him that she had gone through gently murmuring his name.

CHAPTER XXXIV

As Nut Street, with the destruction of his little statue, had been wiped out of his history, so the two rooms overlooking the river and steamboats knew Antony Fairfax no more. He turned the key in the door the day they carried away the body of his wife, and when he came back from the snowy earth and the snowy white city where he left her with his hour-old child, he went to the Delavan House as he had done before, and buried his head in his arms on his lowly bed in a hotel room and wept.

The following day he sent word to Rainsford to look out for another engineer in his place. He had driven his last trip.

Tito Falutini wrung his friend's hand, and told Fairfax, in his broken Italian-English, that he knew a fellow would take the rooms as they stood. "Would Tony give the job to him?" Save for his clothes and Molly's things, and they were few, he took nothing, not even the drawings decorating the wall on which other Irish eyes should look with admiration.

He interviewed the jewellers again. They gave him four hundred dollars and took his mother's ring. He paid his doctor's bills and funeral expenses, and had fifty dollars left until he should finish his bas-relief. He went to live at the Canal Street studio and shut himself up with his visions, his freedom, his strange reproach and his sense of untrammelled wings.

He worked with impassioned fervour, for now he knew. He modelled with assurance, for now he saw. His hands were so eager to create the idea of his brain that he sighed as he worked, fairly panted at his task as though he ran a race with inspiration. Half-fed, sometimes quite sleepless, he lost weight and flesh. He missed the open-air life of the engine and the air at his ears. But now at his ears were the audible voices of his conceptions. February and March passed. His models were, a mannequin, his studies of Molly Fairfax, and once the daughter of the man who rented him the workshop stood before him draped in the long garment; but he sent her away: she was too living for his use. He ate in little cheap restaurants down by the riverside, or cooked himself coffee and eggs over his lamp, and wondered who would be the first to break the silence and isolation, for it was six weeks before he saw a single human being save those he passed in the street.

"Rainsford," he said to the agent, who on the last day of March came slowly in at noon, walking like a man just out of a long illness, "I reckoned you'd be along when you were ready. I've waited for you here."

Fairfax's hand was listlessly touched by his friend's, then Rainsford went over and took Molly's place by the lamp. Fairfax checked the words, "Not there, for God's sake, Rainsford!" He thought, "Let the living come. Nothing can brush away the image of her sitting there in the lamplight, no matter how many fill the place."

Rainsford's eyes were hollow, and his tone as pale as his face, whose sunken cheeks and hollows, to Fairfax, marked the progress of a fatal disease. His voice sounded hoarse and strained; he spoke with effort.

"I've come to say good-bye. I've given up my job here in West Albany. I'm going to try another country, Tony."

The sculptor sat down on the lounge where he had used to sit near his wife, and said solicitously —

"I see you're not well, old man. I don't wonder you're going to try a better climate. I hope to heaven I shall never see another snow-flake fall. I assure you I feel them fall on graves."

There was a moment's silence. The agent passed his hand across his face and said, as if reluctant to speak at all —

"Yes, I am going to try another country." He glanced at Fairfax and coughed.

"California?" questioned Antony. "I hope you'll get a job in some such paradise. Do you think you will?"

The other man did not reply. He looked about the studio, now living-room and workshop, and said —

"I should like to see what you have been doing, Fairfax. How are you getting on?"

Tony, however, did not rise from the sofa nor show any inclination to comply, and his friend irrelevantly, as though he took up the young man's problems where he had left them, before his own sentiment for Molly had estranged him from her husband —

"You must be pretty hard up by now, Tony." He drew from his waistcoat pocket his wallet, and took out a roll of bills which he folded mechanically and held in his transparent hand. "Ever since the day you came in to take your orders from me in West Albany, I've wanted to help you. Now I've got the money to do so, old man."