Chapter 13

________________________________________________
_ Chapter XIII

In all growth there is emulation and striving for precedence between the spiritual and the physical, and this very emulation may determine the rate of progression of the whole. Sometimes the one, sometimes the other, may be in advance, but all the time the tendency is towards the distant goal. Sometimes the two keep abreast, and then there is the greatest harmony in speed. In Ellen Brewster at twelve and fifteen the spiritual outstripped the physical, as is often the case. Her eyes grew intense and hollow with reflection under knitting brows, her thin shoulders stooped like those of a sage bent with study and contemplation. She was slender to emaciation; her clothes hung loosely over her form, which seemed as sexless as a lily-stem; indeed, her body seemed only made for the head, which was flower-like and charming, but almost painful in its delicacy, and with such weight of innocent pondering upon the unknown conditions of things in which she found herself. At times, of course, there were ebullitions of youthful spirit, and the child was as inconsequent as a kitten. At those times she was neither child nor woman; she was an anomalous thing made up not so much of actualities as of instincts. She romped with her mates as unseen and uncomprehended of herself as any young animal, but the flame of her striving spirit made everything full of unread meaning.

Ellen was accounted a most remarkable scholar. She had left Miss Mitchell's school, and was in one of a higher grade. At fifteen she entered the high-school and had a master.

Andrew was growing old fast in those days, though not so old as to years. Though he was far from old, his hair was gray, his back bent. He moved with a weary shuffle. The men in the shop began to eye him furtively. "Andrew Brewster will get fired next," they said. "The boss 'ain't no use for men with the first snap gone." Indeed, Andrew was constantly given jobs of lower grades, which did not pay so well. Whenever the force was reduced on account of dulness in trade, Andrew was one of the first to be laid aside on waiting orders in the regular army of toil. On one of these occasions, in the spring after Ellen was fifteen, his first fit of recklessness seized him. One night, after loafing a week, he came home with fever spots in his cheeks and a curiously bright, strained look in his eyes. Fanny gazed sharply at him across the supper-table. Finally she laid down her knife and fork, rested her elbows on the table, and fixed her eyes commandingly upon him. "Andrew Brewster, what is the matter?" said she. Ellen turned her flower-like face towards her father, who took a swallow of tea without saying a word, though he shuffled his feet uneasily. "Andrew, you answer me," repeated Fanny.

"There ain't anything the matter," answered Andrew, with a strange sullenness for him.

"There is, too. Now, Andrew Brewster, I ain't goin' to be put off. I know you're on the shelf on account of hard times, so it ain't that. It's something new. Now I want to know what it is."

"It ain't anything."

"Yes, it is. Andrew, you ought to tell me. You know I ain't afraid to bear anything that you have to bear, and Ellen is getting old enough now, so she can understand, and she can't always be spared. She'd better get a little knowledge of hardships while she has us to help her bear 'em."

"This ain't a hardship, and there ain't anything to spare, Ellen," said Andrew; and he laughed with a hilarity totally unlike him.

That was all Fanny could get out of him, but she was half reassured. She told Eva that she didn't believe but he had been buying some Christmas present that he knew was extravagant for Ellen, and was afraid to tell her because he knew she would scold. But Andrew had not been buying Christmas presents, but speculating in mining stocks. He had resisted the temptation long. Year in and year out he had heard the talk right and left in the shop, on the street, and at the store of an evening. "I'll give you a point," he had heard one say to another during a discussion as to prices and dividends. He had heard it all described as a short cross-cut over the fields of hard labor to wealth and comfort, and he had kept his face straight ahead in his narrow track of caution and hereditary instincts until then. "The savings bank is good enough for me," he used to say; "that's where my father kept his money. I don't know anything about your stocks. I'd rather have a little and have it safe." The men could not reason him out of his position, not even when Billy Monroe made fifteen hundred dollars on a Colorado mine which had cost him fifteen cents per share, and left the shop, and drove a fast horse in a Goddard buggy.

It was even reported that fifteen hundred was fifteen thousand, but Andrew was proof against this brilliant loadstar of success, though many of his mates followed it afar, just before the shares dropped below par.

Jim Tenny went with the rest. "Tell you what 'tis, Andrew, old man," he said, clapping Andrew on the shoulder as they were going out of the shop one night, "you'd better go in too."

"The savings-bank is good enough for me," said Andrew, with his gentle doggedness.

"You can buy a trotter," urged Jim.

"I never was much on trotters," replied Andrew.

"I ain't going to walk home many times more, you bet," Jim said to Eva when he got home, and then he bent back her tensely set face and kissed it. Eva was crocheting hoods for fifteen cents apiece for a neighboring woman who was a padrone on a small scale, having taken a large order from a dealer for which she realized twenty cents apiece, and employed all the women in the neighborhood to do the work.

"Why not?" said she.

"Oh," said Jim, gayly, "I've bought some of that 'Golden Hope' mining stock. Billy Monroe has just made fifteen thousand on it, and I'll make as much in a week or two."

"Oh, Jim, you 'ain't taken all the money out of the bank?"

"Don't you worry, old girl," replied Jim. "I guess you'll find I can take care of you yet."

But the stock went down, and Jim's little venture with it.

"Guess you were about right, old man," he said to Andrew.

Andrew was rather looked up to for his superior caution and sagacity. He was continually congratulated upon it. "Savings-banks are good enough for me," he kept repeating. But that was four years ago, and now his turn had come; the contagion of speculation had struck him at last. That was the way with Lloyd's failing employes.

Andrew kept his stock certificate in a little, tin, trunk-shaped box which had belonged to his father. It had a key and a tiny padlock, and he had always stored in it the deed of his house, his savings-bank book, and his insurance policy. He carried the key in his pocket. Fanny never opened the box, or had any curiosity about it, believing that she was acquainted with its contents; but now when, on coming unexpectedly into the bedroom--the box was always kept at the head of the bed--she heard a rattle of papers, and caught Andrew locking the box with a confused air, she began to suspect something. She began to look hard at the box, to take it up and shake it when her husband was away. Fanny was crocheting hoods as well as Eva. Ellen wished to learn, but her mother would not allow that. "You've got enough to do to study your lessons," she said. Andrew watched his wife crochet with ill-concealed impatience.

"I ain't goin' to have you do that long," he said--"workin' at that rate for no more money. That Mrs. William Pendergrass that lets out these hoods is as bad as any factory boss in the country."

"Well, she got the chance," said Fanny, "and they won't let out the work except that way; they can get it done so much cheaper."

"Well, you sha'n't have it, anyhow," said Andrew, smiling mysteriously.

"Why, you ain't goin' to work again, be you, Andrew?"

"You wait."

"Well, don't you talk the way poor Jim did. Eva wasn't going to crochet any more hoods, and now Jim's out of work again. Eva told me yesterday that she didn't know where the money was comin' from. Jim's mother owns the place, and it ain't worth much, anyhow, and they can't take it from her in her lifetime, even if she was willing to let it go. Eva said she was goin' to try again for work herself in the shop. She thought maybe there might be some kind of a job she could get. Don't you talk like Jim did about his good-for-nothin' mining stock. I've been glad enough that you had sense enough to keep what little we had where 'twas safe."

"Ain't it most time for Ellen to be comin' home?" asked Andrew, to turn the conversation, as he felt somewhat guilty and uncomfortable, though his eyes were jubilant. He had very little doubt about the success of his venture. As it is with a man who yields to love for the first time in his life, it was with Andrew in his tardy subjection to the hazards of fortune. He was a much more devoted slave than those who had long wooed her. He had always taken nothing but the principal newspaper published in Rowe, but now he subscribed to a Boston paper, the one which had the fullest financial column, though Fanny exclaimed at his extravagance.

Along in midsummer, in the midst of Ellen's vacation, the mining stock dropped fast a point or more a day. Andrew's heart began to sink, though he was far from losing hope. He used to talk it over with the men who advised him to buy, and come home fortified.

All he had to do was to be patient; the fall meant nothing wrong with the mine, only the wrangle of speculators. "It's like a football, first on one side, and then on the other," said the man, "but the football's there all the same, and if it's that you want, you're all right."

One night when Nahum Beals and Atkins and John Sargent were in, Andrew repeated this wisdom, concealing the fact of its personal application. He was anxious to have some confirmation.

"I suppose it's about so," he said.

Then John Sargent spoke up. "No, it is not so," he said--"that is, not in many cases. There isn't any football--that's the trouble. There's nothing but the money; a lot of fools have paid for it when it never existed out of their imagination."

"About so," said Nahum Beals. Andrew and Atkins exchanged glances. Atkins was at once sympathizing and triumphant.

"Lots of those things appear to be doing well, and to be all right," said Andrew, uneasily. "The directors keep saying that they are in a prosperous condition, even if the stock drops." He almost betrayed himself.

John Sargent laughed that curious, inflexible laugh of his. "Lord, I know all about that," said he. "I had some once. First one thing and then another came up to hinder the working of the mine and the payments of dividends. First there wasn't any water, an unprecedented dry season in those parts, oldest inhabitants for evidence. Then there was too much water, no way to mine except they employed professional divers, everything under water. Then the transportation was to pay; then, when that was remedied, the ore didn't come out in shape to transport in the rough and had to be worked up on the premises, and new mills had to be built and new machinery put in, and a few little Irish dividends were collected for that. Then when they got the mills up and the machinery in, they struck another kind of ore that ought to be transported; then there came a landslide and carried half the road into a canon. So it went on, one thing and another. If ever that darned mine had got into working order, right kind of ore, water enough and not too much, roads and machinery all right, and everything swimming, the Day of Judgment would have come."

"Did you ever get anything out of it?" inquired Andrew.

"Anything out of it?" repeated the other. "Yes, I got enough worldly wisdom never to buy any more mining stock, after I had paid assessments on it for two years and the whole thing went to pieces."

"It may come up yet," said Andrew.

"There's nothing to come up," said John Sargent. He had been away from Rowe a year, but had just returned, and was again boarding with Atkins, and all the family lived on his board money. Andrew and Nahum Beals were smoking pipes. Andrew gently, like a philosopher, who smokes that he may dream; Nahum with furious jets and frequent removals of his pipe for scowling speeches. John Sargent did not smoke at all. He had left off cigars first, then even his pipe. He gave the money which he saved thereby to Mrs. Atkins as a bonus on his board money.

The lamp burned dimly in the blue fog of tobacco smoke, and the windows where the curtains were not drawn were blanks of silvery moonlight. Ellen sat on the doorstep outside and heard the talk. She did not understand it, nor take much interest in it. Their minds were fixed upon the way of living, and hers upon life itself. She could bring her simplicity to bear upon the world-old question of riches and poverty and labor, but this temporal adjunct of stocks and markets was as yet beyond her. Her mother had gone to her aunt Eva's and she sat alone out in the wide mystery of the summer night, watching the lovely shift of radiance and shadows, as she might have watched the play of a kaleidoscope, seeing the beauty of the new combinations, and seeing without comprehending the unit which governed them all. The night was full of cries of insistent life and growth, of birds and insects, of calls of children, and now and then the far-away roar of railroad trains. It was nearly midsummer. The year was almost at its height, but had not passed it. Growth and bloom was still in the ascendant, and had not yet attained that maturity of perfection beyond which is the slope of death.

Everywhere about her were the revolutions of those unseen wheels of nature whose immortal trend is towards the completion of time, and whose momentum can overlap the grave; and the child was within them and swept onward with the perfecting flowers, and the ripening fruit, and the insects which were feeling their wings; and all unconsciously, in a moment as it were, she unfolded a little farther towards her own heyday of bloom. Suddenly from those heights of the primitive and the eternal upon which a child starts and where she still lingered she saw her future before her, shining with new lights, and a wonderful conviction of bliss to come was over her. It was that conviction which comes at times to all unconquered souls, and which has the very essence of truth in it, since it overleaps the darkness of life that lies between them and that bliss. Suddenly Ellen felt that she was born to great happiness, and all that was to come was towards that end. Her heart beat loud in her ears. There was a whippoorwill calling in some trees to the left; the moon was dim under a golden dapple of clouds. She could not feel her hands or her feet; she seemed to feel nothing except her soul.

Then she heard, loud and sweet and clear, a boy's whistle, one of the popular tunes of the day. It came nearer and nearer, and it was in the same key with the child's thoughts and dreams. Then she saw a slender figure dark against the moonlight stop at a fence, and she jumped up and ran towards it with no hesitation through the dewy grass; and it was the boy, Granville Joy. He stood looking at her. He had a handsome, eager face, and Ellen looked at him, her lips parted, her face like a lily in the white light.

"Hulloo," said the boy.

"Hulloo," Ellen responded, faintly.

Granville extended one rough, brown, boyish hand over the fence, and Ellen laid her little, soft hand in it. He pulled her gently close, then Ellen lifted her face, and the boy bent his, and the two kissed each other over the fence. Then the boy went on down the street, but he did not whistle, and Ellen went back to the doorstep, and, looking about to be sure that none of the men in the sitting-room saw, pulled off one little shoe and drew forth a sprig of southernwood, or boy's-love, which was crushed under her foot.

That day Floretta Vining had told her that if she would put a sprig of boy's-love in her shoe, the very first boy she met would be the one she was going to marry; and Ellen, who was passing from one grade of school to another, had tried it. _

Read next: Chapter 14

Read previous: Chapter 12

Table of content of Portion of Labor


GO TO TOP OF SCREEN

Post your review
Your review will be placed after the table of content of this book