Читать книгу Wild Geese Calling - Stewart Edward White - Страница 7

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THE CITY

JOHN WAS BACK within the promised four days. There had been no trouble arranging matters. Bull Kirby was reasonable. He sent his best wishes for Mrs Murdock. So did Hugh Barkley. Hugh was going to pack the stuff and see it was sent down. And John had found an unexpected purchaser for the horses. “Hated to see them go,” said John; “but what use would we have for them? Got a hundred and fifty dollars for the four—cash. Pretty good for the mountains! How’s Clara getting along?” he inquired belatedly after he had unloaded all his own news.

Clara was going to be all right—in time. She was over the first shock, had come to herself. “Of course, it’s still terrible to her. But,” said Sally, “deep down, she was sort of ready for it, somehow. You remember, that day, how she seemed to have a premonition? I like her sister and her brother-in-law,” observed Sally; “they are kind, simple people, and they have no children, so they are really glad to have Clara.”

The baby?

That, too, was all right. There had been no miscarriage, which was what they had feared. “I was out there twice,” said Sally, “but it’s a long way. He’s some sort of watchman, and they really don’t live in Seattle. You have to take a train. It’s out of town, up toward Everett.”

“Well, we’ll go see them,” said John vaguely, in dismissal of the subject. He examined Sally more closely. “What you got up your sleeve, Pink Cheeks? Out with it! I don’t know much, but I know them symptoms. You’ve got a gleam in your eye!”

But Sally would not tell.

“You come with me, and you’ll find out!” said she.

They took a car line that went up Third Street and took them beyond the Washington Hotel, perched on its clifflike hill, and the steps leading up to it. They descended and walked for a short distance along a street-by-courtesy. In time it would become a real street, but now it was indicated merely by elevated sidewalks two planks wide, and the marks of wheels between them. Almost as far as one could see were evidences of an old forest. Fire-scarred stumps stood high, for the trees had been cut in the wasteful age. Around them the breeze stirred a sea of bracken and bright fireweed. It was typical logged-off land, except that the rectangular arrangement of the sidewalks and four widely scattered new houses insisted that some optimist considered it a real-estate addition.

Sally led the way to the first of the new houses. She had a key. She led John all through the house, which should not have taken long, for it had only four rooms. But it was fresh and clean with paint and varnish and the smell of newness. It had a bathroom with an enamel tub, opening both ways into two bedrooms. It had a front door with frosted glass in the upper half of it, and eight shiny glass windows that slid up and down almost at a touch. To Sally’s impatience, John stopped short at the windows until he understood their system of counterweights. It had a front porch and a back porch, both under roof. The roofs were covered with sawed shingles, and there were gutters at their eaves that would carry rain to a barrel. The kitchen had a brand-new Agate stove, with shiny nickel curlicue ornamentations, and a commodious hot-water back that fed by thermal action into a cylindrical tank in the corner. John stuck there, also, while he figured out how it worked, making little admiring noises with his tongue against his teeth, while Sally plucked at his sleeve. She did not care how it worked, as long as it did work. There was also in the kitchen a deep white-enamel sink, flanked by drainboards of dazzling sandpapered white pine, and over them two nickel faucets. John turned one of the faucets, and it elicited a gasping gurgle, but no water.

“It isn’t turned on yet,” said Sally. “Neither is the gas.”

There was gas! No more lamps! In every room, and a fearful and wonderful overhead affair, that pulled up and down with counterweights, in the ceiling of the living room. In spite of Sally’s disclaimer, John tried one of the jets with a match. He grunted at his failure. John wasn’t saying anything. Sally was doing all the talking. She flitted from room to room as she remembered things to show John. He followed her about more slowly and contemplated gravely what was pointed out to him, but made no comment.

“There!” Sally came at length to an end. “What do you think?”

“Think, what?” John had assumed his wooden expression.

She looked him over disgustedly.

“Don’t be heavy sand!” said she.

“Why,” John became satisfactorily human, “I think it’s fine, of course. It’s pretty grand.” It’s maybe a little too grand, Sally caught the unspoken comment in his voice.

“We can get it for twenty-five dollars a month.”

“What?” John was startled and incredulous. “You sure?”

Sally nodded gravely. “Just that. Of course, it’s worth more. But they’re just starting here. They built these houses to get started. And they want somebody to live in them, you see, and so——”

“How did they come to pick out us?” John was still skeptical.

“They didn’t. I picked out them,” said Sally happily.

John looked down at her flushed cheeks and her eager dancing eyes.

“Reckon it’s lucky it was you and not me they seen first,” said he dryly.

“Then ... ?”

“Grab it,” said John.

“Then you do like it? Well have to buy some things. It’s unfurnished. And what we’ve got won’t anywhere near——”

“Grab it,” repeated John. “Before they find someone else. Let’s go right on down and do it now. Where do they hang out?”

But, it seemed, such a course was beyond human nature, beyond Sally’s human nature. She had to look over the house first. John supposed they had looked over the house. What more, for the love of Mike, was there to see?

“But now,” said Sally quaintly, “don’t you see, it’s a different house. It’s our house now!”

She moved about. She stood stock still in the middle of floors looking calculatingly about her, a finger on her lip. She perked her head sidewise, her eyes remote. John followed her patiently for a time, trying to make head or tail of the few snatches of phrase she threw out at him from an almost complete inner absorption. “Chintz,” she said, “bright-colored chintz, I think. Not looped back. To draw, on curtain rods.” She nodded her head twice. Then for some time she stared at the bare pine floor. “Rugs,” she remarked and at once disappeared through the kitchen door. Only once did she appeal to John directly, and then he did not catch the drift of her question.

“Can you wax pine?” she wanted to know.

John got tired of it after a while and went outdoors. Sally finished with her vision at last and went in search of him. She found him grubbing about beneath the all-pervasive bracken with a stick. He looked up.

“Say,” said he, “I bet you could grow good spuds in this soil!”

They closed with the real-estate firm. John paid a month’s rent in advance to clinch the deal. He opened a banking account with the small balance of his wages from Bull Kirby and the hundred and fifty dollars from the sale of the horses. At the same time he arranged for the transfer of his savings from the Portland bank. The total made quite a respectable amount. At least they were well enough off so that Sally need not worry about spending money in fixing up the house.

She was eager to get at it and to move from the Marshall House, but she must first make an excursion with John. John had never laid eyes on the sea, and now he wanted to do so before he took up the new job at the mill.

Sally was willing enough, though the excursion was by no means either simple or cheap. It involved a roundabout train journey by way of Tacoma to circumvent the Sound and the towering Olympics. They must stay overnight at a hotel. Sally mentioned these things; but her intuition of John told her that, for some mysterious reason, this was to him more than a pleasure jaunt. She could not fathom the reason as yet, but the compulsion was clear. She sensed that he could not be content without it.

They arrived at the coast in the middle of the afternoon and came to the beach across broad dunes of yellow sand and gray verbena. The tide was low and the beach flat and wide. Sally stopped, partly to look, partly to catch her breath after the heavy going. John did not stop. He continued on across the wet sands and halted only at the very edge of the water, when the slow reaching wash hissed its warning to his feet. There he stood, planted, and gazed out to sea.

Sally caught up with him; but she did not join him. For once he had forgotten Sally, had left Sally behind. She stood apart, watching his rapt face. She perceived that he was far away, in a remoteness opened to him by the vastness of the sea. And it came to Sally that she was like a bird on shore watching a strange far flight; but that at the same time her spirit was merging with John’s with a blending higher than themselves, not to be understood—at the border of mysticism. Sally’s thoughts dissolved into pure feeling.

When John had touched its edge the sea had been at the poise of its ebb. Its forces caught their moment of repose, so that the waves were small and fell somnolently, and from beneath them the wash crept, reluctant, and drained back with the relief of a tired sigh. But presently a deeper note swelled in the voice of the surf. The slack was over. New power stirred. The sea quickened; and up over the flat of the sands ran a foam-edged crescent of its ever-renewed challenge to the land.

John was oblivious; but Sally was nearer earth. She seized his arm, and together they scuttled away, and the water snatched after their flying feet, but gave up at last and retired chuckling as though daring them to try again.

They turned, a little breathless from their scamper, and laughed at John’s escape. If it hadn’t been for Sally he would have been caught knee-deep. And him with his only pair of store shoes on, not to mention his new suit of store clothes! But the moment still lingered with John. He turned his eyes again to the far horizon.

“Well,” said he and drew in a deep breath, “I reckon this is about as far as the Murdocks can go!”

They went back to the dry hot sand of the dunes and sat there and watched the hypnotic and ceaseless fall of the waves. They found themselves talking together soberly. John tried to express something of what he had sensed, but his perception had not been one of words, and they were difficult for him to find. However, since he spoke from the depths of him Sally did see and share and perhaps understood—if not better, at least more coherently than did John himself—the urge and fling that had lifted and let fall the chosen of each generation in this clan of Murdocks, but always westward, until now here stood this last of them at the sea!

Sally knew, for in her blood, too, that spirit stirred. She found herself telling John. Her own grandfather had crossed the Rockies in ’51.

“What did he do, ranching?” asked John. “Funny if he’d run across my folks, wouldn’t it?”

“I don’t think he did.” She shook her head. “He was a trader. He came in a wagon train with my grandmother and their little boy—my father—with him. He really started for California and the gold fields, but got switched off on the Oregon Trail, somehow, and they went down the Columbia and settled in Borland. I don’t know why. Anyway, that’s where we lived.”

John was listening, but idly. He lay on his side watching Sally, who was sitting up straight.

“Say,” said he, “I do like the way your mouth quirks up at the corners just the last thing! It’s kind of cute.”

“Oh, you!” Sally was impatient. This was not her mood.

“Well, it is!” insisted John. “Makes you look sort of happylike. Whether or no. At first it fooled me.”

He continued to look her over. It was a good chance; Sally was gazing out absently across the sea. Her skin looked awful white, noted John, as though he had never seen her before. Too much indoors, he thought. No, some people are white like that no matter how much they are in the sun. Sort of showed off her mouth, with its startlingly red lips and that funny quirk at the corners. Kinda cute, he repeated to himself. Her face was fine cut, delicate looking—no, not delicate—like a flower, somehow. And she was slim. You’d think she might be weak, but she was strong as a horse; just tackle her, if you want to find out, John chuckled at reminiscence. He liked that up-tilt way she carried her head.

“How come,” he asked suddenly, “you to be schoolma’am at Siler’s, anyway?”

Why the question popped into his head he did not know. Now that he had asked it he wondered that he had never asked it before. But his attunement with Sally had sharpened more than he could have understood. He had cut accurately into her abstraction.

“Why, honey!” cried John, sitting up. Sally was dabbing at her eyes.

“I had to make a living,” she said at last. “I was alone.”

“I know that,” said John gently. “I know lonesome. Want to tell me?” he asked after a little. “Here, blow your nose.”

Sally dutifully blew her nose on the proffered handkerchief. John was very tender toward Sally. She was just like a little girl: a poor little girl. John had lived with this woman all these months and had learned something about this woman, but of the little girl he had known nothing, nothing at all; and now he wanted very much to know about her. He paused for a moment to remark on how extraordinary this was.

“Do you realize,” said he to Sally, “that this is the very first time we’ve ever talked about us—our folks and all that, I mean? Don’t you think that’s funny? Wouldn’t you think we would have?” Then he answered his own questions. “I reckon,” said he, “we’ve been too busy on each other. I’d like to know,” he said a little wistfully, “if it ain’t too much for you.”

“My father’s name was Jefferson Slocum. He was a doctor, the only doctor in Borland, all his life. He brought me up. My mother died. He was the best man in the world. Everybody loved him. Why shouldn’t they? He wore himself out for them. Day and night. All his life. He was so understanding, so gentle, so patient! Everybody loved him, I tell you. He hadn’t an enemy in the world.” She choked. John waited without comment. “He made a mistake,” Sally continued, staring straight before her. “The child—it was a little girl—died because of it. Nobody held it against him. It was beautiful how everybody acted. But he held it against himself. It killed him. He was that sort. He’d lost all his money awhile back in some kind of a law suit. I had to do something.”

“I see,” said John. He laid his hand over hers, but offered no other caress. They sat side by side for a long time, looking over the sea. The sea breeze died. The sun turned huge and red and touched the horizon where, astonishingly, it flattened at the top into terraces of shifting fire. A line of black sea birds flew low across it. John’s perceptions of Sally were acute. He sensed her restored peace.

“Helps a lot to bring ’em out where the sun can get at them,” said he.

“What?” Sally aroused herself.

“Troubles. Grouches. Bothers. Blankets. Old clothes. Rutabagas,” said John.

The winter that ensued on their establishment in the new house and the new job was not unusual; but this far to the northwest the days were short, the nights long, and there was a good deal of rain. The rain bothered John at first, for his wandering life in the semi-aridity of the Great Basin had not accustomed his mind to the wet. Sally, a daughter of the west slope of the Cascades, took it casually enough. She bought herself a scarlet waterproof with a hood that she could pull up over her head, and a short light pair of rubber boots. These protected her completely, so that she rarely bothered with an umbrella. She carried shoes or slippers in an inside pocket. John admired this outfit enormously. He had never before seen what he called a red slicker. It set off Sally’s white skin and was just about a match for her lips. John actually liked to go out in the rain with Sally just to see the dew of mist on her cheeks, and how it brought into them a faint blush of color, and how her eyes seemed to darken somehow. With her hair all tucked away and the hood closely framing her face and the straight-lined fall of the red waterproof over her figure and the ridiculously tiny rubber boots, she looked just like a little girl. And John did especially like it when Sally looked like a little girl!

But it needed visibility for this particular esthetic gratification, and as John was away to work before daylight and back from work only after dark, they must make their walks of Sundays. No fun walking in the rain when it was dark! Therefore Sundays they tramped around looking over this city of their adoption. They even got as far out as Lake Washington under their own power; but they took the streetcar back. It was good training for John’s catlike fastidiousness against the wet. Shortly he learned to ignore it, like any other webfoot. To do it justice, the rain was rarely heavy, little more than a mist; and of course there were some fine days.

Thus they climbed all the hills. There was plenty of interest for such as they. Merely the ordinary streets of commerce and the closed shops were fun. The city library was open of a Sunday, and John went there with Sally and was duly impressed by all those books, but there was really not much to do there, unless you wanted to sit down and read, and John certainly did not want to do that, not in the precious daylight hours. Sally had a library card and brought books home. The museum held him longer: he found quite a lot of interesting things in the museum. But he liked it better out of doors.

“Need exercise,” he told Sally.

“I suppose you don’t get any at the mill,” said she ironically.

But that was different. That wasn’t exercise, that was work. John was not entirely convincing on this point, nor was he able to explain to Sally, for the reason that he did not himself understand his instinct for elbow room, for open air blowing from space unconfined. The park was better, with its winding soggy paths and its trees and bushes that shook off jewels when came a sudden breeze; or the water front, shut and shrouded, and tall ships resting, and the water cold and steel gray with winter. There was no life along the warehouses, but at the floats was life. There were the fishing boats, in for the season. They were moored stem to stern the whole length of the floats themselves; they were tied alongside of one another, row after row, until all the water between was filled in one solid pack. Their masts were like a bared forest. The owners lived aboard, inhabiting dog-kennel cabins in the fore parts, above which arose slim stovepipes. John and Sally stood ashore, high above, and looked down. Wood smoke arose from the pipes. Occasionally a hatch slid back, and a man crossed from boat to boat to reach a float or perhaps to disappear in the cabin of a friend. Often, when the rain let up or thinned, groups squatted together atop the houses, smoking pipes, mending sails or gear. It was a community apart, sufficient unto itself. From where they were, John and Sally could hear nothing, and there was little to see. Nevertheless the place held some sort of fascination for John.

He liked the zoo also, and, curiously enough, the wide maple-shaded streets of what was known as the “residential district,” in aristocratic withdrawal on the hills over toward the lighthouse. He liked to walk along them and look at the great houses with their stretches of lawn about them. There was no snobbishness nor envy nor even wonder in John’s interest. Merely that here was something different, and a spread of spaciousness. He did not care for church, though he dutifully accompanied Sally for a time. Then he begged off.

“You go for both of us, honey,” he pleaded. “I don’t believe it does me no good. Honest, I don’t.”

Sally was a little troubled. John, too, was troubled. He did not want to worry Sally. And he did not want Sally to get the wrong idea.

“It ain’t that I don’t think church is a fine thing,” he protested, “but somehow it don’t hit me. I’m no heathen. I believe just like you do.” He groped for expression. “Doggone it!” he burst out at last. “Trouble is I just can’t pump up any idea that that little drawly-voice squirt knows nigh as much about God as he makes out. And I sure do hate a fourflusher! I’m sorry, honey,” he pleaded with Sally, “but don’t you see, when I have to set and listen to that fellow for two hours straight it just makes me mad. And that ain’t a good thing to go to church for, now is it?”

In spite of herself, Sally had to laugh.

This was their first small separation in understanding, for to Sally church, as church, meant something, while to John church was the man who expressed it. Possibly that difference is fundamental in the sexes.

Thus John came into possession of Sunday-morning hours to be filled. He tried the experiment of staying home and doing something useful, but he did not like it without Sally. It occurred to him with a shock of compunction that Sally was alone there, without him, nearly the whole of every day. He wondered if Sally felt about it the same way as he did. She rejected the idea with spirit. If John imagined for one moment she sat around all day moping just because he wasn’t there he had another guess coming. For the first time John learned that Sally had other activities besides keeping house and making things for the house and sitting in the house waiting for John. Indeed, it appeared that Sally was taking the house rather lightly, that she, that any woman with any gumption at all, could take care of such a house, with her right hand tied behind her, in two shakes of a lamb’s tail. John had never thought of it at all, but his hazy acceptance of the scheme of things included woman’s place as in the home. Not as a duty; merely that there was her natural habitat.

But Sally, it seemed, got through and locked up and went away immediately after her noon meal; sometimes before.

“I go downtown,” she answered John. “I go to the park. Sometimes I take a walk in the country. Mostly downtown.”

John learned of Sally’s activities. Once she had well started talking about them, she kindled. She was reading, regularly, at the library.

“But I thought you could bring books home,” said John.

Not some of these books. They were for reference only. Sally must consult them because they were part of a regular course of reading she was doing.

“What about?” asked John.

“I don’t believe it would interest you,” said Sally. The only reason she was interested was that it had been the doctor’s one hobby. Chinese art, she replied to him. John looked blank. What little Chinese art he had seen—just lately, in their visits to the museum—had seemed to him just funny. It isn’t just funny, insisted Sally; it all has significance. John cut short the beginning of a breathless little defense of formal symbolism with a laugh.

“Help! Help!” he cried, holding up both hands in surrender. “I can’t even see your dust! Custer’s Last Stand down in Casey’s saloon is about my size.”

Sally laughed, too. That was the best thing about it. They could both laugh with real relish. But John was still curious.

“How do you know what books to read?” he wanted to know.

That was easy. There were lists, all made out. And a professor from the university came to the library and gave lectures once a week. There were all kinds of lectures, on other things, too.

“What else do you do?” asked John.

He listened to her account of her doings in growing amazement. After living with her all these months he had imagined he knew Sally. Here was revealed to him a whole new Sally he had never suspected. She was seeing things, making friends of her own, feeding avidly on interests strange to him. Sally did not at first perceive what she was doing. John’s comment enlightened her.

“I reckon you think I’m just an ignorant, uneducated mutt,” said he.

She stood appalled.

“John!” she cried. “Don’t you ever let me hear you say anything like that again! You! The finest, cleanest, straightest, strongest man I’ve ever seen! Uneducated! What do those silly little frills amount to compared to what life has taught you! Any—any sissy can know them! Why—why,” she fairly stuttered in her emotion, “you have more real education in your little finger than they have in their whole brains! The things you know—know!” she repeated and threw out her hands in despair of speech.

“What things?” asked John.

“The things that make me love you!” she cried passionately.

“I reckon that’s enough for me,” said John. But he was still sobered. “But I’m sure glad,” said he presently, “that things fixed up so we come to Seattle. I can see now it must have been pretty dry pickings for you up there on the mountain.”

It took him several days to recover from a new awe of Sally. But he did recover, as was indicated by the fact that he began to poke gentle fun at her over her “high-brow” activities.

Nevertheless the episode did have one somewhat amusing result, and one that took down a peg Sally’s feminine conceit that by now she knew all about John.

They were sitting together of an evening, on opposite sides of the table, with an overhead light pulled down between them. Sally was reading a book she had taken from the library; John was smoking his pipe.

“Sally,” he broke his silence abruptly, “I want you should take me in hand.”

She looked up vaguely, coming back from her book.

“Take you in hand?” she repeated.

“Just that. Fix me up. So people will take us to be the same breed of cats, you and I.”

“I don’t quite understand,” said Sally.

“Yes, you do—you ought to. I’m not up to the mark you were raised by; and you know it just as well as I do.”

He was entirely serious. Sally answered him soberly.

“I thought we had that all out. Do you want me to repeat what I said? I really meant it.”

“No. I don’t mean that. Thinking it over I’m inclined to agree with you. You’ve got one kind of education; I’ve got another. Perhaps we can swap some of it. I’d like to. If you could start me off easy.”

“Oh, I’d love that. We could begin on——” Sally’s eyes began to sparkle. But John broke across.

“That wasn’t what I was trying to talk about. Take that up later. That’s for inside. What I mean is outsides—like clothes.”

“Clothes? You want me to help you pick out some clothes?”

John relaxed to a brief smile.

“Reckon I am kind of hazy. I meant outsides—like clothes. Things that people see and maybe size you up by. Get the idea?”

“I might, if you’d tell me exactly what it is you are driving at!”

“I want you to ride herd on my talk a little. Now listen,” he forestalled any comment, “you can’t deny that more’n half the time I’m talkin’ like a man who didn’t know such a thing as grammar was ever invented. I say things like throwed for threw, and come for came, and them for those—all that sort of thing. You know better than that. Why don’t you call me down when you hear me say those things? You don’t like it.”

He surveyed Sally’s blank expression with a faint beginning of amusement.

“Don’t want to get to shame me or get to be poking at me all the time. Don’t want to do the schoolma’am on me,” he answered himself shrewdly. “That it?”

Sally nodded slowly. She was watching him, fascinated by this unsuspected aspect of John. He continued to astonish her.

“That,” he was saying, “would be all right if I didn’t know any better. But I do. I know all about that grammar stuff. Or at least,” he corrected himself, “as much as the Dalles had in stock. My old man was great on schooling, as far as he could give it to us kids. Wasn’t far. But he did his best. He had a great idea of the Murdocks.”

He looked at her as though he expected her to make some comment. But Sally was not yet that far oriented.

“I know better,” he repeated, “but a man talks the language of the folks he deals with. And I’ve dealt with a tough bunch. And you get the habit so you don’t really hear it no more.” He chuckled. “There I go! Now what I want: when you catch me sailing off the reservation that away, I want you should stop me right there and mend my speech. Keno?”

“I see.” Sally was doubtful. “Perhaps. I don’t know—I don’t know whether you’d like it quite that way. I don’t know whether I’d like it. Can’t you——”

“No, I can’t,” said John bluntly. “I’ve talked that talk so long it’s second nature. And if I stop all the time to think that close how I’m saying it, then I ain’t got a thing to say. Ain’t—have not,” he interrupted himself to contemplate the phrase. “Think I’ll hang onto ain’t,” said he. “That one’s a nice easy fit.” He looked at her with one eyebrow raised in inquiry for her decision.

She had to laugh a little, but it was evident to John that she still hesitated.

“Look here,” said he, “you’d hop me fast enough if I didn’t shave my face for company. Well, ain’t,” he emphasized the word defiantly, “I just as disgusting an object if I don’t shave my language?”

They laughed together over this. John chose to take the laughter for assent.

“Don’t worry, I won’t get mad. Every time I make one of these here grammatical solecisms——” He paused to cock an eye so expectantly that Sally heroically swallowed her astonishment. “Learned that one in school,” went on John parenthetically. “It’s a peach. Well, you just stop me and make me back track. Only,” he sat up straight in his chair, “when I do like this,” he held up two fingers from his clenched fist, “that means I aim to express myself. And you lay off!”

This somewhat fantastic arrangement worked out in practice much better than might have been expected. The imminence of Sally’s veto sharpened John’s own supervision of his speech. And the two-finger signal came into frequent use, for John often returned from work so full of things to tell Sally of his fascinating occupations at the mill that he must, as he said, get it out free, wide and handsome or bust.

For John, it seemed, was rapidly proving himself to be that most rare and valuable type of employee around a big operation, a quick and competent handy man. He caught on. When one of the specialists was so rushed as to need an assistant, John was called in. Thus he ran the whole gamut of the multitudinous jobs that intervene between the saw log and the finished product. He watched closely and intelligently and took hold deftly, so that, after a few experiences, he even got so far as to be trusted, on rare occasions of emergency, to do some things all by himself.

“They turned me in on the trimmer today,” he bragged to Sally. The trimming saw, he explained, was a circular saw whose edge stuck up through a slot in a table, and you shoved the rough slabs against it and trimmed off the bark edges, or made of a plank, too full of knots to rate as clear or number two, slats or four-inch or six-inch or whatever, according to the situation on it of the knots. “You got to have a good eye and quick judgment to do that, or you waste a lot of valuable stuff,” he boasted. “They don’t give that job to everybody!”

He had a similar gratifying triumph in the planing mill and was often called upon to lend a hand with machinery: his flair for understanding mechanics stood him well there. Indeed he came perilously near being assigned a permanent job in the engine room. John was glad to get out of that. He much preferred the roving commission. To each new thing he came with the zest of exploration.

Some things were as yet beyond him, he acknowledged to Sally. But he had hopes; and, though he could not meddle in them, he sometimes snatched spare time to stand by and absorb wisdom at second hand. Harry Martin liked him and was good natured. Harry was one of those in the sorting yard who determined the grades of the lumber as it came from the saw, shunting it to one or another rollway. His judgment must be instantaneous; and it was final. If a plank of clear got onto the mill-run rollway, thenceforward it was mill run and would be sold as such, a loss to the firm. Harry permitted John to stand at his elbow and make his guess, just for practice.

“My batting average ain’t so good—yet,” confessed John.

Nor could he hope to get his hands on the levers that set the band saws. A miss there meant a spoiled log. But John could, and did, stand by and make his own guess to himself as to what he would do and then check himself against what the sawyer actually did. Another limit to his ambition was the booming ponds.

“I can fork a bad bronc,” he acknowledged to Sally, “but I’d sure hate to tackle one of them logs.” The two fingers were down. “They’d roll me into the water so fast I’d think I was born a fish!”

But one evening he burst into the house, the two fingers held high.

“By golly, Sally!” he cried, “what do you think! Today old Higgins let me gum a saw—all myself! And he said I done a damn good job, too!”

Sally rejoiced. But later, when the exuberance of the occasion had spent, she had to confess herself not very clear as to its reason. The term was quaint, but obscure.

“Why,” said John, “after a while the teeth on a saw get wore down so far that sharpening and setting them don’t do no more good. They ain’t long enough to get shut of the sawdust. Then you’ve got to cut the notch between them deeper, which naturally makes the teeth long again. You cut down below the teeth into the saw’s gums. That’s gumming the saw.” And, it seemed, it is a delicate job to get them all even again, so you could set them, and John had a right to be proud, for saws are expensive, and——“Well, what you been doing with yourself today, honey?” asked John.

The long dark hours of winter were very pleasant. To John, returning from the mill, feeling his way along the plank sidewalk, the house, as he approached it, was like a brimming container of light. He went around by the kitchen door, for his mackinaw must be by now heavy with moisture. He hung it where it would dry out by morning. From that moment on he was in his own comfortable private world. For a little while he liked just to sit and smoke, resting up a bit. And if, as was often the case, a southeaster was hounding frightened scud across the skies, that was still better. Snug sanctuary from the weather was a thing to appeal to John. He liked the storms merely for the satisfaction of hearing rain on a roof that did not leak. He would stretch his powerful body and lean back in the sheer luxury of it and call out to Sally, finishing supper in the kitchen:

“How would you like to be making camp after a hard ride, and your blankets wet through, and a soggy tarp!”

The mill shut down at five; John was home soon after. While Sally cooked supper in the kitchen they talked back and forth through the open door. It was during that period, and while they were at table, that they cleared up the news of the day. Sally ran through her own day with zest, gaily. The town life stimulated her. She saw fun even in the marketing. She would imitate the slow, measured, groping accents of old Peterson, from whom she bought fish, that you’d swear the old cuss was out there in the kitchen with her. And that Wop who sold vegetables, talking fifteen to the dozen, glorifying his potatoes. Good as any vaudeville show you’d see on the stage. Then pretty soon Sally would come out all pink cheeked from the stove to say things were ready and disappear in the bedroom, and John would go out to get them and put them on the table; and by that time Sally was back looking fresh and starched and dainty as if she had never seen a stove. They played that fiction with entire gravity.

“Oh!” cried Sally in surprise. “There’s fish for supper! Isn’t that nice.”

Bedtime must be early, for they must be early afoot so that John could get down to the mill when the whistle blew. It always caught them unaware. They had so much to talk about. This struck John forcibly.

“Before we got married,” he told Sally, “if anybody’d told me I could think up enough things to say to any woman—any nice woman,” he amended, then looked confused as Sally laughed, “for more than ten minutes at a stretch, I’d have told him he was crazy in the head. And here there ain’t time enough!”

They had begun to explore each other’s minds. John had always admired what he conceived to be Sally’s enormous and mysterious erudition—Sally had had “advantages”—but from a distance. Now it began to look to him as though some of this mysterious region might be penetrable, with Sally to help him out. Not Chink art or such frills, John hastened to disclaim, but there was a lot of interesting stuff that Sally knew about and he didn’t, and that proved to be not so doggone out of reach of a mutt like him as he had thought it. Furthermore, every once in a while, John was treated to a flash of secret smug complacency in discovering that Sally did not know as much as he thought she did. This was base! John was ashamed of himself. But he liked it, and it gave him somehow a warm feeling toward her.

Curiously enough, the contrary experience had the same effect on Sally. She was delighted over this new tendency of John’s and entertained happily the prospect of “swapping educations,” as he had expressed it. But promptly she discovered that John’s humility had fooled her. John had a few unexplored areas of his own. She brought from the library books aimed at John’s cultural innocence and was astonished to find that he had already read some of them! Quaintly enough he seemed to feel that he ought to apologize for this.

“You pick up stuff here and there, knocking about the way I did,” said he.

His list was strangely haphazard, of course; but the thing that caught Sally was his point of view, which was entirely his own. As her quickened interest probed for his opinions, she realized how much weight has the convention of classic tradition on our own. To John, Shakespeare’s characters were just folks, and he had known people—especially the men—just like them. Yes, he’d read Shakespeare, the whole business. There was a book of him somebody’d left in a bunk house up in the Galiuros, down in Arizona. The covers had been “tore off.”

Sally glanced at the two fingers. They were folded. “Torn,” said Sally softly.

“Torn off,” agreed John equably, “but the reading was all there.” John was chiefly astonished at the remarkable thinness of the paper. “Why, the whole thing wasn’t thicker’n that,” he indicated.

“India paper,” supplied Sally.

John’s interest was caught.

“What’s the difference from common paper? Do they make it in India?” he asked.

But Sally did not know: she’d look it up in the encyclopedia next time she went to the library.

Going back to Shakespeare: yes, John thought he was interesting. “Othello; that was a good yarn. That Iago was sure a son of a——” John choked, “sea cook,” he caught himself. “But,” added John, now fully under way, “if Othello had been sure of himself, Iago wouldn’t have cut no ice. Oh, hell!” John thrust two fingers at Sally. “Let me be: I’m talking.”

“Sure of Desdemona, you mean,” said Sally.

“I do not. If he’d been sure of himself he’d have been sure of her. She was all right. But him being a nigger—well, a Moor then,” all the same thing, far as John was concerned. “Anyway, if he’d been a white man, it would never have occurred to him that any white woman could go back on him. As I remember that coon he had pretty much of a swelled head. Shakespeare made him out as thinking he was pretty much the old he-wolf around them parts. If it hadn’t been the color of his skin kind of made him touchy, far as women are concerned, he’d have kicked this Iago’s backbone out of the top of his head and then gone home and told Desdemona all about it.

“Hamlet was just a nut. If the old man had had sense enough to put him in the bughouse early, they’d have avoided a lot of trouble.”

Sally was a little taken aback at John’s attitude toward Claudius and Gertrude and their murder of the king.

“Those were tough times,” said he carelessly. “And what do you ever expect of politicians anyway? Look at Macbeth. And that Borgia outfit. Of course they were Wops,” he acknowledged. He returned to Hamlet. “Polonius was the boy who ought to have had the job—he had the sabe, except he was a kind of weak sister when it came to handling men.”

John’s interest in the plays proved to be highly selective. He had not much use for the more fanciful—Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Tempest, As You Like It. The historical plays had appealed to him most. He wanted to know if they were true, and if there were any more like that. They began to read history together. Shortly it became necessary to set the alarm clock nights as well as mornings, so they would know enough to go to bed.