Читать книгу Man of Strife - Grove Wilson - Страница 11

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AT the same time, he was appalled at the thought of failure. He had no resources except his salary. At first that had seemed large. Now it was shrunk to a pitiful inadequacy. The new expenses devoured it; it vanished. If he lost his place, destitution yawned. A horrifying thought to him who knew the meaning of that terrible word. He knew, he had learned early. The scar would last his life out....

He was a child, riding in a covered wagon on the road from Kansas to Minnesota. Rain fell ceaselessly. It beat on the canvas covering, oozed through, dripped through, poured through. There was only here and there a dry spot. It seemed as though it had rained for days, for ever. Perhaps not. Time is long to children.

His father, the big man with a full beard, a wide-rimmed, black hat, and a pipe in his mouth, sat on the spring seat beside Bruce’s mother. The rain fell more violently. His father cursed. “Damn and damn the rain. Hell light upon the mud. The distilled curse of Christ blight the damned state.”

His mother spoke. “You’re getting wet, father. Sit back and try and keep dry.”

“How in hell can I sit back and see where the damned team’s going?”

“You needn’t curse all the time.”

“This rain would make all the saints in hell curse.”

“May be. But the children wouldn’t hear them.”

“What? I’ll skin him alive if I hear one of ’em utter an oath. I will, by God. You remember that, you back there.” He turned his face over his shoulder to emphasize his words with a look. The eyes were light blue and kind, belying the fierceness of his threat. The nose was straight, the features firm, the countenance dignified, though alert. All the children thought him handsome and idolized him, but fled from the blast of his temper. Who had set the mark of Ishmael on the brow of this strange, superior man? No one knew; but he went up and down the ways of the world, lugging his family and a few old classics with him. He had Tacitus and Livy, Josephus and Plutarch and a ragged copy of Tristram Shandy that none of the children was permitted to look at. He was aloof yet tender; disdainful of, and indifferent to, his responsibilities as husband and father, yet tenacious in his affections; he was solitary, yet wretched when alone. He was a pioneer without endurance, an explorer without purpose. In a word, he was a nomad, and his migrations were as certain as the turn of the seasons.

They were rolling down a steep, slippery clay hill in Nebraska and the team, a mule and a horse, required his attention. The mule was a good animal—at times, but true to racial instincts, it abominated mud. Its small hooves gave it slight support and benumbing panic seized it when that upon which it set its feet yielded beneath it.

“That’s a bad looking mud hole, father. Can’t you drive around it?”

“Do you think I’m going to lay out roads in this cursed state? Others have gone through that hell hole, and I reckon we can.”

“Not with a mule, may be.”

“That’s a damned good mule. I wouldn’t trade him—Hi, there get up, get up, get up, oh, hell and damnation, get up. There by the eternal flat-eyed God, I hope you’re satisfied now.”

The mule was down in the mud, as mules have gone down in mud since the coming of the first hybrid. To a mule the temptation to lie down in mud is irresistible. Perhaps he doesn’t try to resist. At any rate, his indecision is brief. He goes down instantly, completely, finally, eternally. He lies down as one who is never more to rise. It is supreme negation. He just lies down. He doesn’t flounder or roll. He lies still. If he had a cud he’d chew it. He is content. He has returned to his original element. He gives every evidence of having decided that, while the world stands, there he will remain.

Again and again the long-lashed whip hissed out and at each blow raised a welt on his side. He never flicked an eyelash nor wobbled an ear. Suffering was the badge of all his tribe and he was the king of stoics. The curses that poured over him in a fiery torrent would have blasted a less resolute animal. They left him unscathed. Then the driver, followed by Harry, his oldest son, climbed out into the rain and attacked the mule bodily. Bruce and Clarence struggled to a vantage point on the back of the seat and, wide eyed, watched the contest. The two enraged men did everything imaginable to that mule. They poured water in his ears. One twisted his tall while the other dragged at the bridle. Their efforts might as well have been directed against the body of a prehistoric mastodon.

Once Harry forgot himself and swore. The attack on the animal was interrupted while the boy was bitterly upbraided for profanity. “If there’s any swearing to be done in this family, I’ll do it,” said Dr. Darton. “Now take hold of that cursed and double damned ass’s nose and twist his head while I larrup him.”

The men, like the mule, were covered with mud—a black, tarry substance that clung to them, plastered them, enveloped them. It was in Dr. Darton’s beard and in Harry’s hair. It caked their hands, it lent grotesque dimensions to their boots, it weighed them down, and their movements were slow, uncertain, like those of one afflicted with locomotor ataxia.

The horse, traveling companion to the obdurate mule, stood knee deep in mud, stolid, patient, passively ready to do his duty. The erratic conduct of his mate neither alarmed nor stunned him. It was impossible, but it was done. He waited.

The father and son, exhausted, at the end of their resources, cleaned themselves as well as possible and climbed back into the wagon.

“What are you going to do now?” asked Mrs. Darton.

“Nothing. Sit here, right here, all the rest of my blighted and condemned natural life.”

“It’s not a very pleasant place to live,” said the mother judicially, looking out upon the downpour. “And besides, someone may come along and want to pass.”

“Let ’em. Let the whole long-eared, double damned world come along. They can wait until that imp of hell starves himself into getting up.”

There was perhaps some magic in the words. The mule shook his head, cast a thoughtful eye upon the weather and got up. There was a shout of joy from the wagon, which died away when the animal, now on his feet, refused to budge. The whip, again brought into play, snapped viciously at the long ears. But the obstinate creature only lowered his head and leaned back as though suggesting that no power on earth could make him go a step further into that mud hole. Dr. Darton took him at his word and, drawing sharply on the reins, backed the team onto solid ground. He backed the wagon around, turned up the hill down which they had just come and toiled slowly to the top. The afternoon was waning and ice was forming in the wind-driven rain.

In low tones father and mother consulted as to their immediate future. A decision was reached and the team was turned toward Lincoln. A kind farmer gave them shelter in his barn for the night. Darton and Harry sat by the kitchen fire and dried their clothes.

During the night the wind and the rain came down together, violently, but by morning the rain had changed to a fine sleet, sharp like a knife. They set forward early and in the half-light of evening drove into Lincoln. They found, with difficulty, miserable lodgings in a poverty-stricken boarding house. As Mrs. Darton strove to make the family temporarily comfortable, she did not realize that for many long months she was to remain in that wretched house, that there her feet were to go down into the midst of suffering that would make her past experiences seem like the essence of roses.

They had intended to resume their journey the next morning, but when that time arrived the father was too sick to travel. The exposure he had suffered in his conflict with the mule brought on an attack of inflammation of the lungs. For some days he was dangerously ill.

The man who ran the boarding house had found, after the death of his wife, that he had no knack for the business. Seeing a chance to escape, he turned the lease over to Mrs. Darton and went hurriedly away.

The frame building, set flush with the street, was a hideous makeshift of a home. In the front room, which was dining-room and office, the plastering had fallen in great patches from the walls. The floor of cheap pine boards rose and fell drunkenly. The windows, cracked and broken, were mended with rags and newspapers. A sheet-iron stove was expected to warm this sieve against the fury of a Nebraska winter. It was impossible for human beings to live there, yet they lived and, with the exception of Dr. Darton, were well. He recovered of his pneumonia but, possibly, from the mud, had contracted an infection of the eyes that, during all the winter, robbed him of his sight. He was helpless, a dependent upon paupers.

Almost no one patronized the boarding house which Mrs. Darton labored to keep going. Only the outcast, clinging to his last cent, could persuade himself to cross its disreputable threshold. Those who came went away filled with amazement, ministered to, as they were, by a white-haired, white-faced angel, who served them well-cooked food. The experience was devastating. No one returned a second time. The whole thing savored of the supernatural.

In after years Bruce could remember only two or three things that happened during that winter. One was going with his older brother and sister to pick up coal in the railroad yards where there were fights with other ragamuffins for the precious fuel. Occasionally a kind-hearted fireman would fling a shovelful of coal into their yawning bag. But these excursions were not always pleasant. Harry came home one night beaten and disfigured. Bruce heard his sobs and for all the rest of his life he could hear them. Hard, choking, gripping, tearing sobs, pulled out of the young man’s breast by pain and rage. The gang at the yards had set upon him, beaten him, kicked him, choked him, left him half dead. It was horrible. Wretchedness attacking misery, the collective strength overwhelming the stranger. It was life in the raw; it was an expression of the instinct to survive, let who would die. It was senseless, violent; that is to say, it was the work of a mob.

Nevertheless they lived. The black winter ended and Dr. Darton, recovering, went away. How did he go? Bruce never knew, but he went and Harry with him. Then the worst days fell upon them. Perhaps there had been some money saved, who knows? If so, it was now spent. A grim landlord ousted them, as he had a right to do, from the tumble-down shack in which they had spent the winter. Perhaps they had never paid any rent. He may have been, after all, a kind-hearted man; but his patience or his resources or both were exhausted. They moved into a single room, six of them. Slept and ate there, in one room, ten by twelve. They lived on top of each other—in dirt, in rags, in terror.

No money, no word, came from the father. They starved. Literally. Mrs. Darton, in the presence of children crying for food, put aside her pride. She appealed to the town. The town could not help them. They were strangers, non-residents. There was no provision to feed such as they. Doubtless there were many in Lincoln who would have helped had they known of their distress. They did not know, they had no means of knowing.

The pinch of hunger became harder. That Bruce could remember. There were two days without food, without a scrap, nothing. Every instant Mrs. Darton expected a letter, with money, from her husband. But how long could this go on? Starvation is a slow process, but it is not endless.

At the instant of her keenest despair, Bruce rushed in upon her. He had been seeking food. Where? In the gutter, and he had found a dime! A fortune. It was salvation. Transformed into bread and cheese (a loaf could be had for five cents then), it became a feast, a banquet, a prodigality of food.

The dime from the gutter proved a talisman of good fortune. On the morrow the letter and money arrived. How much? Probably a very small amount. It was enough. It enabled them to leave Lincoln, to find an asylum, again temporary, in northern Iowa. Minnesota was their destination. They were gradually nearing it; once there, their long journeys would be at an end. But not their poverty; that was not to end so quickly; that was to stay with them always; that Bruce still had, a heritage from his improvident father—the nomad born in the wrong hemisphere.