Clark's Field Part 21

Nevertheless, when Adelle looked for him the next Monday morning his was not among the faces of the men at work on the lofty retaining wall. She asked the contractor about him, but the boss merely shrugged his shoulders and said that somebody had seen the man getting on the late Sat.u.r.day night train for the city.

"It's too bad," he added, to punish Adelle for interfering in his business. "He was a mighty good worker, and you don't get that kind often these days. I'd rather have him than any four of these dagoes."

He waved a disdainful arm at the squad of sons of sunny Italy who were toiling along the wall.

Adelle did not forget the young stone mason, but she could do nothing more for him even had she known just what to do. Then one morning when she made her usual rounds, she was happily surprised to find him back on the job, working as was his wont a little to one side of his foreign mates with his own helper. His face looked as red as ever, and his eyes were also suspiciously red, but this was the only evidence of his spree that she could see. As Adelle advanced to the place where he was working, the mason glanced up and replied gruffly to her greeting,--

"Morning, ma'am!"

She knew that he was not ashamed of himself, merely embarra.s.sed. And she thought that if he had not felt kindly to her, he would not have come back to Highcourt to work after his spree--or was it, perhaps, his pleasant shack on the hill that lured him to his old job? Adelle did not tell him that she was glad to see him back, but pa.s.sed on without stopping. Presently, however, when his helper had disappeared for a load of mortar she came back to the place and watched him. He worked as steadily and swiftly as ever, his lithe bronze arm lifting the stones accurately to their places, his wrist giving a practiced flip to each trowel full of mortar, which landed it on the right spot. Adelle wanted to talk to him again, to ask him questions, but did not know how to begin. Apparently he meant to let her make all the advances.

"That's fascinating work," she said at length.

He flipped a fresh dab of mortar to place and replied,--

"You might think so lookin' on--but no work is fascinatin' when you've had too much of it. I've laid enough stone to last me a lifetime."

"What else had you rather do?"

"Oh," he said, pausing a moment to wipe the sweat from his face with the back of his s.h.i.+rt-sleeve, "'Most anything at times! I tried mining once, but it's worse and uncertain. And lumbering--no pay. When I was a kid I wanted to be a doctor--that's before I left school. A nice sort of doctor I'd make, wouldn't I?"

He laughed at himself, but Adelle felt that in spite of his mirthless laugh his mind was chafing. He was dissatisfied with himself and the work he was doing and hungered for some larger demand upon his powers than laying so many feet of rock wall per day. She herself had so little of this sort of hunger in her own soul that it made the young mason all the more interesting to her.

"You might save up your money and try--" she began.

"To be a doctor?" he laughed back. "I saved up once--got most five hundred dollars and a feller came along and persuaded me to put it into some land. Well, I got the land still.... No, ma'am, there ain't much chance to change for the workingman when he's once fixed in his creek bed. He must just roll along with the rest the best he can. And I'm better off than most because I've got a paying trade. Lots of boys like me and my brothers don't learn ever to do anything, and just slave on all their lives at any job comes handy until they are all wore out. Lots and lots. Their folks can't keep 'em in school and they never know enough to more'n sign their names. All they are good for is rough work, same as the dago helper here. He thinks two dollars a day big money. I guess it is to him."

He spat disdainfully with all an American's contempt for the inferior.

"I expect where he come from it was a fortune, two dollars a day, eh?"

He appealed to Adelle to appreciate the joke. "Think of that now! And he's got a woman and kids, and I bet has saved money, too. But he's only a dago," he explained tolerantly.

"Say," he resumed after a pause. "It costs more 'n two dollars to go to the opery in San Francisco."

"Did you go to the opera?" Adelle asked, recalling that Archie had said something about the current engagement of the New York Opera company.

They had a box or something for the season--they always did. "What did they give?"

"Oh, it was some German piece. It took place in the woods with a lot of folks in armor, but the music was fine, and there was one place where they had a castle upon a big hill, like that where my shack is, way off towards the clouds, and a river down in front going by with women in it swimming," and he described with relish the last act of the "Rheingold-dammerung," which Adelle recognized because she had seen it many times in Europe and been horribly bored by it. The story of the opera seemed to interest the young mason especially. He retold it minutely for Adelle's benefit, offering amusing explanations of its mythological mysteries.

"But how did you happen to go to the opera?" Adelle asked.

"Well," he said in vague diffidence, "I was feeling pretty good by that time, and I seen the poster. I had the price--why shouldn't I go?" he demanded brusquely; and with another sardonic laugh the real motive came out,--"I wanted to see what you folks who go to the opery see--how you enjoy yourselves. Well, the opery ain't so bad--it ain't one bit bad,"

and he attempted to hum the Rheingold music. "I believe I'll go to the opery again when I'm on the loose and don't know any better way to blow my money. I like music," he added inconsequentially. "Mother used to sing sometimes."

This was as far as they got conversationally that day. Something interrupted Adelle in the midst of the musical discussion and she did not have a chance to return to the wall. But she had almost daily opportunity for talk with the young mason in the succeeding weeks, for after his return from his spree, he worked steadily on his job every day. He was one of the very few American-born workmen employed at Highcourt, and after their misunderstanding and subsequent agreement, Adelle felt better acquainted with him than with the others. He taught her to handle the trowel and to lay stone. After a few attempts, she managed quite well and found a curious pleasure in the manual labor of fitting stone to stone and properly bedding the whole in cement. She learned to select the right pieces with a rapid glance and to chip an obtrusive corner or face a rock with a few taps of the heavy hammer. It gave her a pleasure akin to her experiments in jewelry, and it must be said the results were better. She used to show her visitors proudly the bit of wall she had laid up herself under the young mason's direction and a.s.sert that, instead of bookbinding or jewelry or other ladylike occupations, she meant to set up stone walls about Highcourt for her recreation. The Bellevue people considered her whim a harmless bit of eccentricity in the young mistress of Highcourt, and she was the object of many a good-humored joke about her new method of "beating the unions." Little did any of these pleasure-loving rich folk suspect where Adelle's instinct for manual labor came from, how natural it was for her to work at coa.r.s.e tasks with her large, shapely hands.

She needed all the distraction she could get, for these were not happy days for Adelle within her big new house. The inexplicable stringency of money grew worse, and there were constant quarrels between her and Archie over her "extravagance" when he was at home. Adelle could not understand why she should be obliged to curb her prodigal hand in making "improvements" at Highcourt. Did the trust officers not tell her that hers was a "large fortune," not far from five millions, enough surely to permit a woman freedom for every whim? If there was trouble about money, it must be Archie's fault: she wished she had never consented to take her property out of the safe keeping of the careful trust company. Her logic in these discussions, if irrefutable, was bitter, and Archie resented it, all the more because he knew that he had made a fool of himself with his wife's ample fortune, and allowed stronger men to bite him. He had not sufficient character to confess the fact and refrain altogether from further speculation. He tried instead to make good what had been lost in Seaboard and was always nagging Adelle to dispose of certain stocks and bonds that still remained from the investments of the prudent trust company. But Adelle was obstinate: she would not sell anything more. So Archie's large debit at his brokers went on rolling up, and there continued to be "words" at Highcourt whenever he was there, which was less often then he might have been.

Proverbially, money is the cause of the bitterest disputes in families.

Abstractly it might seem remarkable that this should be so, but the peculiar nature of property of all sorts is that it becomes the inmost shrine of its possessor's being, and when the shrine is robbed or desecrated, the injured personality resents the outrage with bitterness.

Many a man or woman will submit with Christian fort.i.tude to insults upon character or positive unjust burdens, but will flame into rebellion at the least touch upon the purse. In the case of Archie and Adelle it was all the more remarkable because neither had been born to wealth so that property could become a part of the nature: they were both "the spoiled children of fortune" as the story-books say, having had their wealth thrust upon them unexpectedly, and so might take its loss lightly. Not at all! Adelle felt as much wronged as if she had been the last of an ancient line of dukes and d.u.c.h.esses or had acc.u.mulated the riches of Clark's Field by a lifetime of toil and self-denial. Was it not _hers_?

Had the law not made it inalienably a part of her? Such is human nature in a capitalistic society.

Bellevue began to gossip about the couple at Highcourt, and divided as always into two camps with shades of opinion within each camp. The women were generally for Archie, even if he had been foolish with his wife's money and was conducting his "affair" with Irene Pointer rather recklessly. If his wife were less stupid and selfish about not going about with him in society, she could have "held him." The men liked Archie well enough, but knew that he was "no good."

x.x.xVII

It was some time after the young mason's return to his job before Adelle even learned his name. She had no curiosity about his name, indicating how little of the personal or sentimental there was in the interest she felt in him. He was just the "mason," and she always addressed him as "mason" until one day she heard the foreman call him--"Clark"; and then, when the foreman had pa.s.sed on, she said with mild curiosity,--

"Is your name Clark?"

"Yes," the man replied with a touch of pride in the pure English name,--"Clark without the e. I'm Tom Clark. Father's name was Stanley Clark, same as grandfather's. Everybody about Sacramento used to know old Stan Clark!"

"My name was Clark, too, before I was married," Adelle remarked.

"Did you spell it with an _e_?" Tom Clark asked.

"No, the same as yours, without the _e_," she replied.

"We must be related somewheres," the mason laughed, with a sense of irony.

"Where did your family come from?"

"Somewhere East--Missouri, I think. But that was long ago--before the gold times. Grandfather Stan came out in forty-nine and settled on the Sacramento River, and that was where father was raised."

Adelle felt a slight increase in her interest in the mason from their having the same name, and she remarked idly,--

"So your family lived once in Missouri?"

"The Clarks came from Missouri--that's all I know. Mother's folks were Scotch-Irish, and that's where I get my red head, I guess!"

Like most Americans of his cla.s.s he knew nothing more of his origin than the preceding two generations. The family was lost in the vague limbo of "back East somewheres." Yet he was proud that the Clarks had come from the East and were among the first Americans to enter the golden land of opportunity. And he apologized for the failure of his ancestors to attach to themselves a larger share of prosperity.

"If we could have hung on to grandfather's old ranch, we'd not one of us been working for other folks to-day. He had a hundred and sixty acres of as pretty a bit of land as there is in Sacramento Valley--part of it is now in the city limits, too. But father was sort of slack in some ways,--didn't realize what a big future California had,--so he sold off most of the ranch for almost nothing, and mother had to part with the rest."

He flipped a trowelful of mortar and whistled as if to express thus his sense of fate.

"Too bad," Adelle replied. "They say you ought never to sell any land.

It's all likely to be more valuable some day."

"Sure!" the mason rejoined sourly. "That's why most of us work for a few of you!"

"What do you mean?" Adelle asked, puzzled by the economic theory implied in this remark.