Читать книгу The Price - Lynde Francis - Страница 12

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For an hour or more after his return to the river front, Griswold idled up and down the levee; and the end of the interval found him still undecided as to the manner and direction of his flight—to say nothing of the choice of a destination, which was even more evasive than the other and more immediately pressing decision.

It was somewhere in the midst of the reflective hour that the elate triumph of success began to give place to the inevitable reaction. The partition which stands upon the narrow dividing line between vagrancy and crime is but a paper wall, and any hot-hearted insurrectionary may break through it at will. But to accept the conditions of vagrancy one must first embrace the loathsome thing itself. Griswold remembered the glimpse he had had of himself in the bar mirror of the pot-house, and the chains of his transformed identity began to gall him. It was to little purpose that he girded at his compunctions, telling himself that he was only playing a necessary part; that one needs must when the devil drives. Custom, habit, convention, or whatever it may be which differentiates between the law-abiding and the lawless, would have its say; and from railing bitterly against the social conditions which made his act at once a necessity and a crime, he began to feel a prickling disgust for the subterfuges to which the crime had driven him.

Moreover, there was a growing fear that he might not always be able to play consistently the double rôle whose lines were already becoming intricate and confusing. To be true to his ideals, he must continue to be in utter sincerity Griswold the brother-loving. That said itself. But on the other hand, to escape the consequences of his act, he must hold himself in instant readiness to be in savage earnest what a common thief would be in similar straits; a thing of duplicity and double meanings and ferocity, alert to turn and slay at any moment in the battle of self-preservation.

He had thought that the supreme crisis was passed when, earlier in the day, he had pawned the last of his keepsakes for the money to buy the revolver. But he had yet to learn that there is no supreme crisis in the human span, save that which ends it; that all the wayfaring duels with fate are inconclusive; conflicts critical enough at the moment, but lacking finality, and likely to be renewed indefinitely if one lives beyond them.

He was confronting another of the false climaxes in the hour of aimless wanderings on the river front. More than once he was tempted to buy back his lost identity at any price. Never before had he realized what a precious possession is the fearlessness of innocency; weighed against it, the thick packet of bank-notes in the tramp's bundle, and all that it might stand for, were as air-blown bubbles to refined gold. Yet he would not go back; he could not go back. To restore the money would be more than a confession of failure; it would be an abject recantation—a flat denial of every article of his latest social creed, and a plunge into primordial chaos in the matter of theories, out of which he could emerge only as a criminal in fact.

When the conflict of indetermination became altogether insupportable, he put it aside with the resolution which was the strong thread in the loosely twisted warp of his character and forced himself to think concretely toward a solution of the problem of flight. The possession of the money made all things possible—in any field save the theoretical—and the choice of dwelling or hiding-places seemed infinite.

His first thought had been to go back to New York. But there the risk of detection would be greater than elsewhere, and he decided that there was no good reason why he should incur it. Besides, he argued, there were other fields in which the sociological studies could be pursued under conditions more favorable than those to be found in a great city. In his mind's eye he saw himself domiciled in some thriving interior town, working and studying among people who were not unindividualized by an artificial environment. In such a community theory and practice might go hand in hand; he could know and be known; and the money at his command would be vastly more of a moulding and controlling influence than it could possibly be in the smallest of circles in New York. The picture, struck out upon the instant, pleased him, and having sufficiently idealized it, he adopted it enthusiastically as an inspiration, leaving the mere geographical detail to arrange itself as chance, or subsequent events, might determine.

That part of the problem disposed of, there yet remained the choice of a line of flight; and it was a small thing that finally decided the manner of his going. For the third time in the hour of aimless wanderings he found himself loitering opposite the berth of the Belle Julie, an up-river steamboat whose bell gave sonorous warning of the approaching moment of departure. Toiling roustabouts, trailing in and out like an endless procession of human ants, were hurrying the last of the cargo aboard. Griswold stood to look on. The toilers were negroes, most of them, but with here and there among the blacks and yellows a paler face so begrimed with sweat and dust as to be scarcely distinguishable from the majority. The sight moved Griswold, as thankless toil always did; and he fell to contrasting the hard lot of the laborers with that of the group of passengers looking on idly from the comfortable shade of the saloon-deck awning. Griswold's thought vocalized itself in compassionate musings.

"Poor devils! They've been told that they are freemen, and perhaps they believe it. But surely no slave of the Toulon galleys was ever in bitterer bondage. … Free?—yes, free to toil and sweat, to bear burdens and to be driven like cattle under the yoke! Oh, good Lord!—look at that!"

The ant procession had attacked the final tier of boxes in the lading, and one of the burden-bearers, a white man, had stumbled and fallen like a crushed pack-animal under a load too heavy for him. Griswold was beside him in a moment. The man could not rise, and Griswold dragged him not untenderly out of the way of the others.

"Why didn't you stand from under and let it drop?" he demanded gruffly, as an offset to the womanish tenderness; but when the man gasped for breath and groaned, he took another tone: "Where are you hurt?"

The crushed one sat up and spat blood.

"I don't know: inside, somewheres. I been dyin' on my feet any time for a year or two back."

"Consumption?" queried Griswold, briefly.

"I reckon so."

"Then you have no earthly business in a deck crew. Don't you know that?"

The man's smile was a ghastly face-wrinkling.

"Reckon I hain't got any business anywheres—out'n a horspital or a hole in the ground. But I kind o' thought I'd like to be planted 'longside the woman and the childer, if I could make out some way to git there."

"Where?"

The consumptive named a small river town in Iowa.

"And you were going to work your passage on the boat?"

"I was allowin' to try for it. But I reckon I'm done up, now."

In Griswold impulse was the dominant chord always struck by an appeal to his sympathies. His compassion went straight to the mark, as it was sure to do when his pockets were not empty.

"What is the fare by rail to your town?" he inquired.

"I don't know: I never asked. Somewheres between twenty and thirty dollars, I reckon; and that's more money than I've seen sence the woman died."

Griswold hastily counted out a hundred dollars from his pocket fund and thrust the money into the man's hand.

"Take that and change places with me," he commanded, slipping on the mask of gruffness again. "Pay your fare on the train, and I'll take your job on the boat. Don't be a fool!" he added, when the man put his face in his hands and began to choke. "It's a fair enough exchange, and I'll get as much out of it one way as you will the other. What is your name? I may have to borrow it."

"Gavitt—John Wesley Gavitt."

"All right; off with you," said the liberator, curtly; and with that he shouldered the sick man's load and fell into line in the ant procession.

Once on board the steamer, he followed his file-leader aft and made it his first care to find a safe hiding-place for the tramp's bundle in the knotted handkerchief. That done, he stepped into the line again, and became the sick man's substitute in fact.

Inured to hard living as he was, the substitute roustabout had made no more than a half-dozen rounds between the levee and the cargo-deck of the Belle Julie before he was glad to note that the steamer's lading was all but completed. It was toil of the shrewdest, and he drew breath of blessed relief when the last man staggered up the plank with his burden. The bell was clanging its final summons, and the slowly revolving paddle-wheels were taking the strain from the mooring lines. Being near the bow line Griswold was one of the two who sprang ashore at the mate's bidding to cast off. He was backing the hawser out of the last of its half-hitches when a carriage was driven rapidly down to the stage and two tardy passengers hurried aboard. The mate bawled from his station on the hurricane-deck.

"Now, then! Take a turn on that spring line out there and get them trunks aboard! Lively!"

The larger of the two trunks fell to the late recruit; and when he had set it down at the door of the designated state-room, he did half-absently what John Gavitt might have done without blame: read the tacked-on card, which bore the owner's name and address, written in a firm round hand: "Charlotte Farnham, Wahaska, Minnesota."

"Thank you," said a musical voice at his elbow. "May I trouble you to put it inside?"

Griswold wheeled as if the mild-toned request had been a blow, and was properly ashamed. But when he saw the speaker, consternation promptly slew all the other emotions. For the owner of the tagged trunk was the young woman to whom, an hour or so earlier, he had given place at the paying teller's wicket in the Bayou State Security.

She saw his confusion, charged it to the card-reading at which she had surprised him, and smiled. Then he met her gaze fairly and became sane again when he was assured that she did not recognize him: became sane, and whipped off his cap, and dragged the trunk into the state-room. After which he went to his place on the lower deck with a great thankfulness throbbing in his heart and an inchoate resolve shaping itself in his brain.

Late that night, when the Belle Julie was well on her way up the great river, he flung himself down upon the sacked coffee on the engine-room guard to snatch a little rest between landings, and the resolve became sufficiently cosmic to formulate itself in words.

"I'll call it an oracle," he mused. "One place is as good as another, just so it is inconsequent enough. And I am sure I've never heard of Wahaska."

Now Griswold the social rebel was, before all things else, Griswold the imaginative literary craftsman; and no sooner was the question of his ultimate destination settled thus arbitrarily than he began to prefigure the place and its probable lacks and havings. This process brought him by easy stages to pleasant idealizings of Miss Charlotte Farnham, who was, thus far, the only tangible thing connected with the destination-dream. A little farther along her personality laid hold of him and the idealizings became purely literary.

"She is a magnificently strong type!" was his summing up of her, made while he was lying flat on his back and staring absently at the flitting shadows among the deck beams overhead. "Her face is as readable as only the face of a woman instinctively good and pure in heart can be. Any man who can put her between the covers of a book may put anything else he pleases in it and snap his fingers at the world. If I am going to live in the same town with her, I ought to jot her down on paper before I lose the keen edge of the first impression."

He considered it for a moment, and then got up and went in search of a pencil and a scrap of paper. The dozing night clerk gave him both, with a sleepy malediction thrown in; and he went back to the engine-room and scribbled his word-picture by the light of the swinging incandescent.