Fairfax and His Pride: A Novel

"I reckon Joe Mead's got another fireman, Molly?"

"Ah, no," she laughed, "Joe's been here every day to see when you would be working, and when Joe don't come the other felly comes to see when you'll let him off!"

Life, then, was going on out there in the yards. He heard the shriek of the engines, the fine voices of the whistles, and the square of his sunny window framed the outer day. People were going on journeys, people were coming home. He had come back, and little Gardiner…

"Sit down," he said brusquely to the girl who stood at his side; "sit down, for God's sake, and talk to me; tell me something, anything, or I shall go crazy again."

CHAPTER X

He recovered rapidly; his hard work had strengthened his constitution, and Molly Shannon modestly withdrew, and Mary Kenny, the landlady, who had disputed the place from the first, took it and gave Antony what further care he needed. He missed Molly the first day she left him, missed her shawl and hat and the music of her Irish voice. He had sent for books through Joe Mead, and read furiously, realizing how long he had been without intellectual food.

But the books made him wretched.

Not one of them was written for an artist who had been forced by hard luck to turn into a day labourer. All the beautiful things he read made him suffer and desire and long, and worse still, made him rebel. One phrase out of Werther lingered and fascinated him —

"The miseries of mankind would be lighter if – God knows why this is so – if they would not use all their imagination to remember their miseries and to recall to themselves the souvenirs of their unhappy past."

The unhappy past! Well, was it not sad at his age to have a past so melancholy that one could not recall it without tears?

Every one but Sanders came to see him, and jolly him up. Joe Mead gave him to understand that he only lived for the time when Tony should come back to feed "the Girl," as he called his engine. Tony looked at his chief out of cavernous eyes. Joe Mead had on his Sunday clothes and would not light his cigar out of deference to Tony's sick-room.

"You're forty, Mead, aren't you?"

"About that, I guess."

"And I am only twenty-three," returned Fairfax. "Is that going to be a picture of me at forty?" he thought, and answered himself violently: "My mother's pride and mine forbid."

"Sanders doesn't come to see me, Joe?"

"Nope," returned the other, "you bet your life. If he ain't waiting for you at the door with a gun when you come down it's only because he is off on his job."

When his chief got up to leave him, Fairfax said, "I want you to get me a book on mechanics, Joe, practical mechanics, and don't pay over a dollar and a half."

He owed Molly Shannon more than he could ever return. The doctor told him, because he imagined that it would give the young fireman satisfaction, that the nursing had saved his life. Sanders was not at the stair-foot when Fairfax finally crept down to take his first outing. It was the middle of February and a mild day. Indeed, he had been at work over a fortnight when he caught sight of Molly and Sanders standing at the head of Nut Street, talking.

As he came up to them, Sanders turned a face clouded with passion on Fairfax.

"You cursed hound!" he growled under his breath, and struck out, but before he could reach Fairfax Molly threw herself on Sanders and caught the blow on her arm and shoulder. In spite of her courage she cried out and would have fallen but for Fairfax. The blow, furiously directed by an able-bodied man, had done worse work than Sanders intended, and the poor girl's arm hung limp and she fainted away.

"Mother of God," muttered Sanders, "I have killed you, Molly darling!"

Her head lay on Fairfax's shoulder. "Let's get her into the coffee house," he said shortly.

Sanders was horrified at the sight of the girl he adored lying like death from his blow, and with a determination which Fairfax could not thwart the engineer took the girl in his own arms.

"Give her to me," he said fiercely, "I'll settle with you later. Can't take her into the coffee house: they've turned her out on account of you. There's not a house that would take her but the hotel. I'm going to carry her to my mother."

Followed by a little group of people whom Fairfax refused to enlighten, they went down the street, and Sanders disappeared within the door of the shanty where his family lived.

The incident gave Antony food for thought, and he chewed a bitter cud as he shut himself into his room. He couldn't help the girl's coming to him in his illness. He could have sent her about her business the first day that he was conscious. She would not have gone. She had lost her place and her reputation, according to Sanders, because of her love for him. There was not any use in mincing the matter. That's the way it stood. What should he do? What could he do?

He took off his heavy overcoat and muffler, rubbed his hands, which were taking on their accustomed dirt and healthy vigour, poured out a glass of milk from the bottle on his window sill, and drank it, musing. The Company had acted well to him. The paymaster was a mighty fine man, and Antony had won his interest long ago. They had advanced him a month's pay on account of his illness. He brushed his blonde hair meditatively before the glass, settled the cravat under the low rolling collar of his flannel shirt. He was a New York Central fireman on regular duty, no further up the scale than Molly Shannon – as far as Nut Street and the others knew. Was there any reason why he should not marry her? She had harmed herself to do him good. He was reading his books on mechanics, a little later he was going to night school when his hours changed; he was going to study engineering; he had his yard ambitions, the only ones he permitted himself to have.

It was four o'clock of the winter afternoon, and the sunset left its red over the sky. Through his little window he saw the smoke of a locomotive rise in a milky column, cradle and flow and melt away. The ringing of the bells, the crying note of the whistles, had become musical to Fairfax.

There was no reason why he should not marry the Irish girl who doled out coffee to railroad hands… Was there none? The figure of his mother rose before him, beautiful, proud, ambitious Mrs. Fairfax. She was waiting for his brilliant success, she was waiting to crown him when he should bring his triumphs home. The ugly yards blurred before his eyes, he almost fancied that a spray of jasmine blew across the pane.

He would write —

"Mother, I have married an Irish girl, a loving, honest creature who saved my life and lost her own good name doing so. It was my duty, mother, wasn't it? I am not striving for name or fame; I don't know what art means any more. I am a day labourer, a common fireman on an engine in the Albany yards – that's the truth, mother."

"Good heavens!" He turned brusquely from the window, paced his room a few times, limping up and down it, the lame jackdaw, the crippled bird in his cage, and his heart swelled in his breast. No – he could not do it. The Pride that had led him here and forced him to make his way in spite of fate, the Pride that kept him here would not let him. He had ambitions then? He was not then dead to fame? Where were those dreams? Let them come to him and inspire him now. He recalled the choir-master of St. Angel's church. He could get a job to sing in St. Angel's if he pleased. He would run away to Albany. He had run away from New York; now he would run from Nut Street like a cad and save his Pride. He would leave the girl with the broken arm, the coffee-house door shut against her, to shift for herself, because he was a gentleman. Alongside the window he had hung up his coat and hat, and they recalled to him her things as they had hung there. There had been something dove-like and dear in her presence in his room of sickness. His Pride! He could hear his old Mammy say —

"Massa Tony, chile, you' pride's gwine to lead yo thru black waters some day, shore."

He said "Come in" to the short, harsh rap at the door, and Sanders entered, slamming the door behind him. His face was hostile but not murderous; as usual his bowler was a-cock on his head.

"See here, Fairfax, she sent me. She ain't hurt much, just a damned nasty bruise. I gave her my promise not to stick a knife into you."

Fairfax pushed up his sleeves; his arms were white as snow. He had lost flesh.

"I'll fight you right here, Sanders," he said, "and we'll not make a sound. I'm not as fit as you are, but I'll punish you less for that reason. Come on."

Molly's lover put his hand in his pockets because he was afraid to leave them out. He shook his head.

"I gave the girl my word, and I'd rather please Molly than break every bone in your – body, and that's saying a good deal. And here on my own hook I want to ask you a plain question."

"I shan't answer it, Sandy."

The other with singular patience returned, "All right. I'm going to ask just the same. Are you … will you … what the hell…!" he exclaimed.

"Don't go on," said Fairfax; "shut up and go home."

Instead, Sanders took off his hat, a sign of unusual excitement with him. He wiped his face and said huskily —

"Ain't got a chance in the world alongside you, Fairfax, and I'd go down and crawl for her. That's how I'm about her, mate." His face broke up.

Fairfax answered quietly, "That's all right, Sanders – that's all right."

The engineer went on: "I want you to clear out and give me my show, Tony. I had one before you turned up in Nut Street."

"Why, I can't do that, Sanders," said Fairfax gently; "you oughtn't to ask a man to do that. Don't you see how it will look to the girl?"

The other man's face whitened; he couldn't believe his ears.

"Why, you don't mean to say…?" he wondered slowly.

The figure under the jasmine vine, the proud form and face of his mother, grew smaller, paler as does the fading landscape when we look back upon it from the hill we have climbed.

"The doctor told me Molly had saved my life," Fairfax said. "They have turned her out of doors in – Street. Now you must let me make good as far as I can."

The young man's blue eyes rested quietly on the blood-shot eyes of his visitor. Sanders made no direct answer; he bit his moustache, considered his companion a second, and clapping his hat on his head, tore the door open.

"You are doing her a worse wrong than any," he stammered; "she ain't your kind and you don't love her."

His hand whitened in its grip on the door handle, then giving one look at his companion as though he meditated repeating his unfortunate attack upon him, he flung himself out of the door, muttering —

"I've got to get out of here… I don't dare to stay!"

CHAPTER XI

By the time the sublime spring days came, Fairfax discovered that he needed consolation. He must have been a very stubborn, dull animal, he decided, to have so successfully stuffed down and crushed out Antony Fairfax. Antony Fairfax could not have been much of a man at any time to have gone down so uncomplainingly in the fight.

"A chap who is uniquely an artist and poet," he wrote to his mother, "is not a real man, I reckon."

But he had not described to her what kind of a fellow stood in his stead. Instead of going to church on Sundays he exercised in the free gymnasium, joined a base-ball team – the firemen against the engineers – and read and studied more than he should have done whenever he could keep his eyes open. Then spring came, and he could not deny another moment, another day or another night, that he needed consolation.

The wives and daughters of the railroad hands and officials – those he saw in Nut Street – were not likely to charm his eyes. Fairfax waited for Easter – waited with a strange young crying voice in his heart, a threatening softness around his heart of steel.

He went on rapidly with his new studies; his mind grasped readily whatever he attacked, and his teacher, less worldly than the choir-master at St. Angel's, wondered at his quickness, and looked at his disfigured hands. Joe Mead knew Tony's plans and his ambitions; by June they would give Fairfax an engine and Mead would look out for another fireman to feed "the Girl." The bulky, panting, puffing, sliding thing, feminine as the machine seemed, could no longer charm Fairfax nor occupy all his thoughts.

He had been sincere when he told Sanders that he would look out for Molly Shannon. The pinnacle this decision lifted him to, whether felt to be the truth or purely a sentimental advance, nevertheless gave him a view which seemed to do him good. The night after Sanders' visit, Fairfax slept in peace, and the next day he went over to Sanders' mother and asked to see Molly Shannon. She had left Nut Street, had run away without leaving any address. Fairfax did not push his chivalry to try to find her. He slept better than ever that night, and when during the month Sanders himself went to take a job further up in the State and the entire Sanders family moved to Buffalo, Fairfax's slumbers grew sounder still. At length his own restless spirit broke his repose.

April burst over the country in a mad display of blossoms, which Fairfax, through the cab of his engine, saw lying like snow across the hills. He passed through blossoming orchards, and above the smell of oil and grease came the ineffable sweetness of spring, the perfume of the earth and the trees. Just a year ago he had gone with Bella and Gardiner to Central Park, and he remembered Gardiner's little arm outstretched for the prize ring he could never secure, and Bella's sparkling success. The children had been in spring attire; now Fairfax could buy himself a new overcoat and did so, a grey one, well-made and well-fitting, a straw hat with a crimson band, and a stick to carry on his Sunday jauntings – but he walked alone.

He flung his books in the bottom drawer of his bureau, locked it and pitched the key out of the window. He would not let them tempt him, for he had weakly bought certain volumes that he had always wanted to read, and Nut Street did not understand them.

"It's the books," he decided; "I can't be an engineer if I go on, nor will I be able to bear my lonely state."

Verse and lovely prose did not help him; their rhythm and swell drew away the curtains from the window of his heart, and the golden light of spring dazzled the young man's eyes. He eagerly observed the womenkind he passed, and Easter week, with its solemn festival, ran in hymn and prayer toward Easter Day. New frocks, new jackets, new hats were bright in the street. On Easter Sunday Fairfax sat in his old place by the choir and sang. The passion and tenderness brooding in him made his voice rich and the choir-master heard him above the congregation. From the lighted altar and the lilies, from the sunlight streaming through the stained windows, inspiration came to him, and as Fairfax sat and listened to the service he saw in imagination a great fountain to the left of the altar, a fountain of his building that should stand there, a marble fountain held by young angels with folded wings, and he would model, as Della Robbia modelled, angels in their primitive beauty, their bright infancy. The young man's head sank forward, he breathed a deep sigh. He owed every penny that he had laid by to Mrs. Kenny, to the tailor and the doctor, and in another month he would be engineer on probation. His inspiration left him at the church door. He walked restlessly up to the station and with a crowd of excursionists took his train to West Albany. Luncheon baskets, crying babies, oranges, peanuts, and the rest of the excursion paraphernalia filled the car. Fairfax looked over the crowd, and down by the farther door caught sight of a familiar face and figure.

It was Molly Shannon coming back to Nut Street for Easter. For several months the girl had been working in the Troy collar factory, and drawn by the most powerful of magnets was reluctantly returning to Nut Street on her holiday. Molly had no new dress for Easter. She hadn't even a new hat. Her long hours in the factory and her state of unhappy, unrequited love, had worn away the crude brilliance of her form. She was pale, thinner, and in her cheap dress, her old hat with its faded ribbon, with her hands clasped over a little imitation leather handbag, she sat utterly alone, as youth and beauty should never be.

Fairfax limped down the car and took his place by her side.

CHAPTER XII

Mrs. Kenny, with prodigal hospitality, took Molly in for over Sunday. Fairfax walked alongside of her to his boarding-house, carrying the imitation leather bag, talking to her, laughing with her, calling the colour back and making her eyes bright. He found himself, with his young lady, before the threshold of Kenny's hotel. "Gents only." Whether this was the rule or an idea only, Fairfax wondered, for Molly was not the first one of the gentler sex who had been cordially entertained in the boarding-house! Mrs. Kenny's sister and her sister's child, her mother and aunts three, had successively come down on the hotel during Fairfax's passing, and been lavishly entertained, anywhere and everywhere, even under Fairfax's feet, for he had come out one morning from his door to find two little girls sleeping on a mattress in the hall.

All his lifelong Fairfax retained an adoration for landladies. They had such tempting opportunities to display qualities that console and ennoble, and the landladies with whom he had come in contact took advantage of their opportunities! It didn't seem enough to wait five weeks for a chap to pay up, when one's own rent was due, but the landlady must buy chicken at ruinous prices when a chap was ill, and make soup and put rice in it, and carry it steaming, flecked with rich golden grease, put pot-pie balls in it and present it to a famishing fireman who could do no more than kiss the hand, the chapped hand, that brought the bowl.

"Now wud ye, Misther Fairfax?"

He would, as if it had been his mother's!

Nut Street was moral, domestic and in proportion severe. Mary Kenny had not been born there; she had come with her husband from the happy-go-lucky, pig-harbouring shanties of County Cork. She was the most unprejudiced soul in the neighbourhood. Between boarders, a lazy husband, six children and bad debts, she had little time to gossip, but plenty of time in which to be generous.

"I wull that!" she assured Molly. "Ye'll sleep in the kitchen on a shakedown, and the divil knows where it'll shake from for I haven't a spare bed in the house!"

Molly would only stay till Monday… Fairfax put her little bag on the kitchen table, where a coarse cloth was spread, and the steam greeted them of a real Irish stew, and the odour of less genuine coffee tickled their appetites.

Molly Shannon considered Fairfax in his new Easter Sunday spring clothes. From his high collar, white as Nut Street could white it, to his polished boots – he was a pleasant thing to look upon. His cravat was as blue as his eyes. His moustache was brushed carefully from his young, well-made mouth, and he beamed with good humour on every one.

"Shure, dinner's dished, and the childer and Kenny are up to the cemetery pickin' vi'lets. Set right down, the rest will be along. Set down, Misther Fairfax and Molly Shannon."

After dinner, up in his room, the walls seemed to have contracted. The kitchen's smoky air rose even here, and he flung his window wide to the April sweetness. The atmosphere was too windless to come in and wrestle with the smell of frying, but he saw the day was golden as a draught waiting to be quaffed. The restricted schedule of Sunday cast a quiet over the yards, and from the distance Fairfax heard sounds that were not distinguishable in the weekday confusion, the striking of the hour from the Catholic Church bell, the voices of the children playing in the streets. There was a letter lying on his bureau from his mother: he had not had the heart to read it to-day. The gymnasium was shut for repairs, there was no ball game on for Easter Day, and, after a second's hesitation, he caught up his hat from where he had dropped it at his feet and rushed downstairs into the kitchen.

Molly, her sleeves rolled up, was washing dishes for Mrs. Kenny.

"Don't you want to come out with me for a walk?" Fairfax asked her.

"Go along," said Mrs. Kenny, giving her a shove with her bare elbow. "I'll make out alone fine. The suds is elegant. If you meet Kenny and the children, tell them there's not a bit left but the lashins of the stew, and to hurry up."

CHAPTER XIII

There was a divine fragrance in the air. Fairfax stopped to gather a few anemones and handed them to his silent companion.

"Since you have grown so pale in the collar factory, Miss Molly, you look like these flowers."

He stretched out his, arms, bared his head, flung it up and looked toward the woodland up the slope and saw the snow-white stones on the hill, above the box borders and the cedar borders of the burial place: above, the sky was blue as a bird's wing.

"Let me help you." He put his hand under her arm and walked with her up the hill. They breathed together; the sweet air with its blossomy scent touched their lips, and the ancient message of spring spoke to them. He was on Molly's left side; beneath his arm he could feel her fluttering heart and his own went fast. At the hill top they paused at the entrance to a pretentious lot, with high white shafts and imposing columns, broken by the crude whiteness of a single marble cross. Brightly it stood out against the air and the dark green of cedar and box.

"This is the most perfect monument," he said aloud, "the most harmonious; indeed, it is the only relief to the eye."

On every grave were Easter garlands, crosses and wreaths; the air was heavy with lilac and with lily.

Except for a few monosyllables Molly said nothing, but now, as they paused side by side, she murmured —

"It's beautiful quiet after the racket of the shops; it's like heaven!"

Fairfax's glance wandered over the acres of monuments, marking the marble city, and came back to the living girl at his side.

"It's a strange place for two young people to stroll about in, Miss Molly."

Molly Shannon stood meekly, her work-stained hands clasped loosely before her and in her form were the beauties of youth, virginity, chastity, promise of life and fecundity, and, for Fairfax, of passion.

"Ah, I don't know," she answered him slowly, "I think it's lovely and quiet here. Back in Troy next week when we work overtime and the boss gets mad, I'll think of it likely, I guess."

He talked to her as they strolled, realizing his need of companionship, and his pent-up heart poured itself forth as they walked between the graves, and he told the Irish girl of Bella and little Gardiner, and of his grief.

"I don't know what I did that day," he finished. "I was a brute to my aunt and to the little girl. I laid him down on his bed and rushed out like a crazy man; the house seemed to haunt me. I must have been ill then. I recall that my aunt called to me and that Bella hung on my arm and that I shook her off. I recall that my uncle followed me downstairs and stood by me while I got into my overcoat, but I was too savage and too miserably proud to answer him. I left him talking to me and the little girl crying on the stairs."

She asked him timidly, "What had they done to make you hate them so?" She told herself in her humility that he was a gentleman and not for her.

He continued, carried away by the fact of a good listener, and, although she listened, she understood less than Benvenuto Cellini, less, even, than the children. He came up against so many things that were impossible to tell her that he stopped at length, laughing.

"You see how a chap runs on when he has a friend by him, Miss Molly. Why do you go back to the collar factory?"

He stopped short, remembering what Sanders had said, and that Nut Street had shut its doors against her. They had come down through the cemetery to the main avenue that stretched, spacious and broad, between the dwellings of the dead. They sauntered slowly side by side, an incongruous, appealing couple. He saw her worn shoes, the poor skirt, the hands discoloured as were his, through toil, and his glance followed up the line of her form and his artistic sense told him that it was lovely. Under her coarse bodice the breast gently swelled with her breath, her eyes were downcast, and there was an appealing charm about her that a young man in need of love could not gainsay. Pity for her had been growing long in Fairfax – since the first day he saw her in the coffee house, since the time when he had decided to go elsewhere for his meals.