Fairfax and His Pride: A Novel

He always thought that on that day he was as mentally unhinged as a healthy young man can be. Unbalanced by hunger, despair and rage, his kindly face was drawn and bore the pallor of death. He was dirty and unshaven, his heavy boot weighed on his foot like lead. Without any special direction he limped across the tracks and once, as he stopped to look up and down the rails on which the daylight was beginning to glimmer, in his eyes was the morbidness of despair. A signalman from his box could see him over the yards, and Fairfax reflected that if he lingered he might be arrested, and he limped away.

"Rome, Rome," he muttered under his breath, "thou hast been a tender nurse to me! Thou hast given to the timid shepherd-boy muscles of iron and a heart of steel."

The night before he had rushed headlong from his uncle's house, smarting under injustice, and had walked blindly until he came to the Forty-second Street station. His faint and wretched spirit longed for nothing but escape from the brutal city where he had squandered his talent, crushed his spirit and made a poor apprenticeship to ingratitude. A baggage car on the main line, with an open door, was the only means of transportation of which Fairfax could avail himself, and he had crept into it undiscovered, stowed himself away, hoping that the train's direction was westward and expecting to be thrown out at any moment. Thus far his journey had been made undiscovered. He didn't wonder where he was – he didn't care. Any place was good enough to be penniless in and to jump off from! His one idea at the moment was food.

"God!" he thought to himself, "to be hungry like this and not be a beggar or a criminal, just a duffer of a gentleman of no account!"

He reached the engine-house and passed before the line of iron locomotives, silent and vigorous in their quiescent might, and full of inert power. He set his teeth, for the locomotives made him think of his beloved beasts. A choking sensation came in his throat and tears to his blue eyes. He thrust his hands in the pockets of his overcoat and went on. In front of him a city street came down to the tracks, and sharp across it cut the swinging gates which fell as Fairfax approached. Behind him the switches snapped; another train, this time a fast express, rushed past him. He watched it mutely; the flinging up of the dust around the wheels, the siss and roar and wind of its passing smote through him. It was gone.

He limped on. The street leading down to the tracks was filthy with mud and with the effects of the late rain. It was to Fairfax an avenue into an empty and unknown town. Small, vile, cobbled with great stones, the alley ran between lines of two-storied frame buildings, tenement houses which were the home of the railroad employes. The shutters were all closed, there was not a sign of life. Fairfax came up with the signal-box by the swinging gate, and a man with a rolled red flag stood in the doorway. He looked at Fairfax with little curiosity and the young man decided not to ask him any questions for fear that his stolen ride should be discovered. As he passed on and went into the empty street, he mused —

"It is curious how we are all taking pains to escape consequences to which we say we are indifferent. What matter is it if he does arrest me? I should at least have a cup of coffee at the station house."

On either side of the alley through which Fairfax now walked there was not a friendly door open, or a shutter flung back from a window. At the head of the street Fairfax stopped and looked back upon the yards and the tracks of the workshops. The ugly scene lay in the mist of very early morning and the increasing daylight made its crudeness each moment more apparent. As he stood alone in Nut Street, on either side of him hundreds of sleeping workmen, the sun rose over the yards, filling the dreary, unlovely outlook with a pure glory. To Fairfax's senses it brought no consolation but the sharp suffering that any beauty brings to the poet and the seer. It was a new day – he was too young to be crushed out of life because he had an empty pocket, and faint as he was, hungry as he was, the visions began to rise again in his brain. The crimson glory, as it swam over the railroad yards, over the bridge, over the unsightly buildings, was peopled by his ideals – his breath came fast and his heart beat. The clouds from which the sun emerged took winged shapes and soared; the power of the iron creatures in the shed seemed to invigorate him. Fairfax drew a deep breath and murmured: "Art has made many victims. I won't sacrifice my life to it." And he seemed a coward to himself to be beaten so early in the race.

"Muscles of iron and a heart of steel," he murmured again, "a heart of steel."

He turned on his feet and limped on, and as he walked he saw a light in an opposite window with the early opening of a cheap restaurant. The shutters on either side of Nut Street were flung back. He heard the clattering of feet, doors were pushed open and the workers began to drift out into the day. Antony made for the light in the coffee house; it was extinguished before he arrived and the growing daylight took its place. A man from a lodging-house passed in at the restaurant door.

Fairfax's hands were deep in the pockets of his overcoat, his fingers touched a loose button. He turned it, but it did not feel like a button. He drew it out; it was twenty-five cents. He had not shaken out quite all the children's coins on the hall floor. This bit of silver had caught between the lining and the cloth and resisted his angry fling. As the young man looked at it, his face softened. He went into the eating-house with the other man and said to himself as he crossed the door-sill —

"Little cousin! you don't know what 'serious' money this is!"

CHAPTER II

A girl who he judged by her frowzled hair and her heavy eyes had just been aroused from sleep, stood behind the counter pouring hot and steaming coffee into thick china cups. The smell to the hungry man was divine. Fairfax's mouth watered. From the one pot the coffee came out with milk added, and from another the liquid poured clear. Fairfax asked for coffee with milk and a sandwich, and as the girl pushed the plate with hunks of bread and ham towards him, he asked, "How much, please?" The girl raised her heavy lids. Her gray eyes could have sparkled if she had been less sleepy. She glanced at him and responded in a soft brogue —

"Two cints a cup. Sandwiches two cints apiece."

He took his breakfast over to the table where a customer was already seated before a huge breakfast. After watching Fairfax for a few moments, this man said to him —

"Got a rattling good appetite, Mister."

"I have, indeed," Fairfax returned, "and I'm going to begin over again."

The man wore a red shirt under his coat, his battered bowler was a-cock on his head. Antony often recalled Sanders as he looked that morning. His face from his neck up was clean. He exuded water and brown soap; he had a bright healthy colour; he was a good-looking workman, but his hands! Fairfax thought them appalling – grimed with coal. They could never be washed clean, Fairfax reflected, and one finger on the left hand was missing.

"Stranger?" the man asked him. "Just going through?"

And as Fairfax replied, he thought to himself, "He doesn't dream how strange I am and that I don't even know the name of the town."

He asked the man, "Much going on here?"

"Yards. Up here in West Albany it's nothing but yards and railroading."

"Ah," nodded Fairfax, and to himself: "This is the capital of New York State —Albany– that's where I am."

And it was not far enough away to please him.

The man's breakfast, which had been fed into him by his knife, was disposed of, and he went on —

"Good steady employment; they're decent to you. Have to be, good men are scarce."

A tall, well-set-up engineer came to the coffee counter, and Fairfax's companion called out to him —

"Got your new fireman yet, Joe?"

And the other, with a cheerful string of oaths, responded that he had not got him, and that he didn't want anybody, either, who wasn't going to stay more than five minutes in his cab.

"They've got a sign out at the yards," he finished, "advertising for hands, and when I run in at noon I'll call up and see what's doing."

Fairfax digested his meal and watched the entrance and exit of the railroad hands. Nearly all took their breakfast standing at the counter jollying the girl; only a few brakemen and conductors gave themselves the luxury of sitting down at the table. Antony went and paid what he owed at the counter, and found that the waitress had waked up, and, in spite of the fact that she had doled out coffee and food to some fifty customers, she had found time to glance at "the new one."

"Was it all right?" she asked.

She handed him the change out of his quarter. He had had a dime's worth of food.

"Excellent," Fairfax assured her; "first-rate."

Her sleeves came only to the elbow, her fore-arm was firm and white as milk. Her hands were coarse and red; she was pretty and her cheerfulness touched him.

He wanted to ask for a wash-up, but he was timid.

"I'll be back at lunchtime," he said to her, nodding, and the girl, charmed by his smile, asked hesitatingly —

"Workin' here?"

And as Fairfax said "No" rather quickly, she flashed scarlet.

"Excuse me," she murmured.

He was as keen to get out of the restaurant now as he had been to cross its threshold. The room grew small around him, and he felt himself too closely confined with these common workmen, with whom for some reason or other he began to feel a curious fraternity. Once outside the house, instead of taking his way into the more important part of West Albany, he retraced his steps down Nut Street, now filled with men and women. Opposite the gateman's house at the foot of the hill, he saw a sign hanging in a window, "New York Central Railroad," and under this was a poster which read, "Men wanted. Apply here between nine and twelve."

Fairfax read the sign over once or twice, and found that it fascinated him. This brief notice was the only call he had heard for labour, it was the only invitation given him to make his livelihood since he had come North. "Men wanted."

He touched the muscles of his right arm, and repeated "Muscles of iron and a heart of steel." There was nothing said on the sign about sculptors and artists and men of talent, and poets who saw visions, and young ardent fellows of good family, who thought the world was at their feet; but it did say, "Men wanted." Well, he was a man, at any rate. He accosted a fellow who passed him whistling.

"Can you tell me where a chap can get a shave in this neighbourhood? Any barbers hereabouts?"

The other grinned. "Every feller is his own razor in Nut Street, partner! You can find barber shops uptown."

"I want to get a wash-up," Fairfax said, smiling on him his light smile. "I want to get hold of a towel and some soap."

The workman pointed across the street. "There's a hotel. They'll fix you up."

Fairfax followed the man's indication, and he saw the second sign that hung in Nut Street. It gave the modest information, "Rooms and board three dollars a week. Room one dollar a week. All at Kenny's first-class hotel. Gents only." Of the proprietor who stood in the doorway, and whose morning toilet had gone as far as shirt and trousers, Antony asked —

"How much will it cost me to wash-up? I'd like soap and a towel and to lie down on a bed for a couple of hours."

The Irish hotel-keeper looked at him. Fairfax took off his hat, and he didn't explain himself further.

"Well," said Patrick Kenny, "yez don't look very dirthy. Charge fifteen cents. Pay in advance."

"Show me up," accepted Fairfax, and put the last of Bella's charity into the man's hand.

CHAPTER III

That was May. Five months later, when the Hudson flowed between flaming October shores, and the mists of autumn hung like a golden grail on the air, Fairfax leaned out of the window of the engine-cab and cried to another man, in another cab on the opposite track —

"Hello, Sanders; how's your health?"

It was the slang greeting of the time. The engineer responded that he was fine as silk, and rang his bell and passed on his rolling way.

Fairfax wore a red shirt, his trousers were thick with oil and grease. His collar, open at the neck, showed how finely his head was set upon his shoulders, and left free the magnificent column of his throat. Down to his neck came his crisp fair hair, just curling at the ends; his sleeves were up to his elbows and his bare arms were dirty, vigorous and powerful, with the muscles standing out like cords. He never looked at his hands any more, his clever sensitive hands. He had been Joe Mead's fireman for five months, a record ticket for Joe Mead's cab. Fairfax had borne cursing and raging from his chief, borne them with equanimity, feeding into the belly of his engine whatever disgust he felt. Thrown together with these strange men of a different class, he learned new things of life, and at first he was as amused as a child at play. He made two dollars a day. This amply fed him and kept him, and he put by, with a miserliness that was out of all keeping with his temperament, every cent he could spare from the necessities of life.

Not that Fairfax had any plans.

From the first opening of his eyes on West Albany, when he had crawled out of the baggage car in the dawn, he shut out his past from himself. He crushed back even his own identity. He earned his bread by the sweat of his brow in the real sense of the word, and for what reason he saved his money he could not have told. He had become a day labourer, a fireman on the New York Central road, and he was a first-rate hand. His figure in the rude, dirty clothes, his bowler always worn on the back of his blonde head, his limp (that big boot had gone hard with him on the day that he applied for a job at the boss's office), all were familiar in Nut Street by this. His voice, his smile, his rare good heart, made him a popular companion, and he was, too, popular with the women.

His miserable reception in New York, the bruises inflicted upon him by Cedersholm and his uncle, had embittered Tony Fairfax to an extent of which his humble Nut Street friends were ignorant. He didn't do them any harm, however. If any harm were done at all – and there is a question even regarding that – it was done to himself, for he crushed down his ambitions, he thrust them out of his heart, and he bit the dust with a feeling of vengeance. He had been a gentleman with talent, and his own world had not wanted him; so he went down to the people. All that his mother knew was that he had gone on to the north of the State, to perfect certain branches of his art, and that it was better for him to be in Albany. Reclining under the vines, she read his letters, smiling, fanning herself with a languid hand.

"Emmy, Master Tony's getting on, getting on."

"Yas'm, Mis' Bella, I do speck he is."

"Listen, Emmy." And Mrs. Fairfax would read aloud to the devoted negro the letters planned, concocted, by her son in his miserable lodgings, letters which cost him the keenest pangs of his life, kind and tender lines; things he would have done if he could; things he had hoped for and knew would never come true; joys he meant to bring her and that he knew she would grow old and never see; success and fame, whose very sound to him now was like the knell of fate. At the end of the letter he said —

"I am studying mechanics. I reckon you'll laugh at me, mother, but they are useful to a sculptor."

And she had not laughed in the way he meant as she kissed his letter and wet it with her tears.

CHAPTER IV

No Sunday duties took him to the yards, and washed and dressed, shaved and brushed, he became a beautiful man of the world, in a new overcoat and a new sleek hat, and over his hands thick doeskin gloves. He could afford to pay for his clothes, and like this he left Nut Street every Sunday at nine o'clock, not to see West Albany again till midnight. On the seventh day of the week he was a mystery to his chums and his landlady, and if any one in Nut Street had had time to be suspicious and curious they might have given themselves the trouble of following Fairfax. There were not many idlers, however, and no saloons. Drunkards were unwelcome, and Sunday was a day of rest for decent hard workers. When Antony, in his elegance, came out he used to pass between fathers of families in their shirt sleeves, if it were warm weather, and between complacent couples, and many of the hands slept all day. The most curious eyes were those of Molly Shannon, the girl at the restaurant, and her eyes were more than curious.

Fairfax had been courteous to her, bidding her good-morning in a way that made her feel as though she were a lady. He had been there for his breakfast and lunch several months until finally Molly Shannon drove him away. This she did not do by her boldness, for she was not bold, but by her comeliness and her sex and her smile. Fairfax fed his Pride in his savage immolation before the monster of iron and steel; by his slavery to work he revenged himself upon his class. His Pride grew; he stood up against Fate, and he thought he was doing a very fine thing, when his Pride also stood up in the restaurant when he took his cup of coffee from the red-handed girl of the people, pretty Molly Shannon from Killarney. Fairfax went farther up the street. He found another eating house, and later ate his sandwich on his knees at noon in the cab of his engine.

When Molly Shannon found that he was not coming there for his coffee any more, she grew listless, and doled out food to the other men with a lack of science and interest that won her sharp reproofs and coarse jokes. From her window over the restaurant she watched Mister Fairfax as every Sunday he went limping up the street. Molly watched him, her breast palpitating under the common shirtwaist, and the freckles on the milky white skin died out under the red that rose.

"He's got a girl," she reflected; "sure, he's got a girl."

One Sunday in October, a day of yellow sunlight and autumn air, when Nut Street and the yards and West Albany fringed the country like the hem of an ugly garment, Molly came down and out into the street, and at a distance she followed Fairfax. Fairfax cut down a couple of blocks further on to the main station. He went in and bought a ticket for Albany. He boarded the cars, and Molly followed.

She tracked him at a safe distance up Market Street to Eagle, and the young man walked so slowly that it was easy to keep him in sight. The man pursued by the Irish girl suggested nothing less than a New York Central fireman. He looked like any other well-set-up, well-made young gentleman out on a Sunday morning. In his fashionable coat, his fashionable hat, Molly saw him go through the doors of a stone church whose bells rang solemnly on the October air.

The girl was very much surprised.

She felt him safe even within the walls of the heathen church, and she went directly back to Nut Street, her holiday hanging heavy on her hands, and she went in and helped her patron wash the dishes, and upstairs that night she stopped in her simple preparations for bed and reddened.

"Sure, ain't I a silly! He's went to church to meet his girl!"

Her morning's outing, the tramp and the excitement, were an unusual strain to Molly, not to speak of her emotions, and she cried herself to sleep.

Fairfax sat every Sunday in the same pew. The seat was to the left of the altar, and he sang with an ardour and a mellowness that was lost neither on the people near him nor on the choir-master. All arts were sympathetic to him: his ear was good and his voice agreeable. His youth, his sacrifice, his dying art he put into his church singing, and once the choir-master, who had taken pains to mark him, stopped him in the vestibule and spoke to him.

"No," Fairfax said, "I am not a musician. Don't know one note from another, and can't learn. Only sing by ear, and not very sure at that!"

He listened indifferently. As the gentleman spoke of art and success, over Antony's handsome mouth there flitted a smile that had something of iron in it.

"I don't care for any of those things, sir," he replied. "I reckon I'm a barbarian, a rudimentary sort of man."

He took a certain pride and glory in his station as he talked. There was a fascination in puzzling this mild, charming man, one of his own class, whose very voice and accent were a relief after the conversations he heard daily.

"You see," he said, "I happen to be a fireman in the New York Central yards down at West Albany."

The quiet choir-master stared at him. "Oh, come, come!" he smiled.

Fairfax thrust his cane under his arm, drew off his glove, and held out his hand, looking into the other man's eyes. The musician's hand closed over Fairfax's.

"My dear young fellow," he said gravely, "you are a terrible loss to art. You would make your way in the musical world."

Fairfax laughed outright, and the choir-master watched him as others did as he limped away, his broad, fine back, his straight figure, and Fairfax's voice swelling out in the processional came to the musician's mind.

"There is a mystery about that chap," he thought. "He is a gentleman. The Bishop would be interested."

By contrast Sundays were delightful to Antony. Amusements possible to a workingman with the tastes of a gentleman were difficult to obtain. Church in the morning, a lazy stroll through the town, an excellent dinner at the Delavan House, set Fairfax up for the week. The coloured waiter thought his new patron was a Southerner, and suspected him of being a millionaire.

"Yass, sar, Mr. Kunnell Fairfax, sar."

Antony, in a moment of heart hunger for the South, had told George Washington his name. George Washington kept the same place for him every Sunday, and polished the stone china plates till they glistened, displayed for Antony all his dazzling teeth, bowed himself double, his napkin under his arm, and addressed Antony as "Kunnell"; and Antony over his dessert laughed in his sleeve (he took great pains to keep his hands out of sight). After luncheon he smoked and read the papers in the lobby, lounged about, wrote a Sunday letter to his mother, and then loitered about through old Albany. On Sunday afternoons when it was fine, he would choose School Street and the Cathedral close, and now, under the falling of the yellow leaves there was a beauty in the day's end that thrilled him hour by hour. He made these pilgrimages to keep himself from thinking, from dreaming, from suffering; to keep his hands from pencil and design; to keep his artist soul from crying out aloud; to keep his talent from demanding, like a starving thing, bread that he had no means to give. Sometimes, however, – sometimes, when the stimulus of an excellent dinner, and a restful morning, when the cheer of George Washington's droll devotion had died, then the young man's step would lag in the streets of Albany, and with his hands behind his back and his bright head bowed, he would creep musing, half-seeing where he went.

Taking advantage of his lassitude, like peris whose wings had been folded against Paradise, and whose forms had been leaning hard against the gate, his ideals, his visions, would rush in upon him, and he would nearly sink under the beating of their wings – under their voluptuous appeal, under their imperious demand.

On these occasions Fairfax would go home oppressed, and content himself with a glass of milk and light food at the restaurant, and dressed as he was even to the hat on his head, he would sink by the table in his little room and bury his face in his hands. Then he would count up his money. Working from May until October, he had saved only fifty dollars. After his calculations there was no magnitude in the sum to inspire him to new plans or to tempt him to make a fresh venture for art. He often thought, in looking back on those days, that it was nothing but his pride and his obstinacy that kept him there. The memory of his winter's creations, of his work in the studio, and his beasts with their powerful bodies and their bronze beauty, came upon him always with such cruel resentment and made him feel so impotent against the injustice of the great, that if drink had tempted Fairfax he would have gone to the nearest saloon and made a beast of himself.