The Wild Olive Part 10

Part II

Strange

VII

Dressed in overalls that had once been white, he was superintending the stacking of wool in a long, brick-walled, iron-roofed shed in Buenos Aires when the thought came to him how easy it had all been. He paused for a minute in his work of inspection--standing by an open window, where a whiff of fresh air from off the mud-brown Rio de la Plata relieved the heavy, greasy smell of the piles of unwashed wool--just to review again the past eighteen months. Below him stretched the noisy docks, with their row of electric cranes, as regular as a line of street lamps, loading or unloading a mile of steamers lying broadside on, and flying all flags but the Stars and Stripes. Wines, silk, machinery, textiles were coming out; wheat, cattle, hides, and beef were pouring in. In the confusion of tongues that reached him he could, on occasions, catch the tones of Spaniard, Frenchman, Swede, and Italian, together with all the varieties of English speech from Highland Scotch to c.o.c.kney; but none of the intonations of his native land. The comparative rarity of anything American in his city of refuge, while it added to his sense of exile, heightened his feeling of security. It was still another of the happy circ.u.mstances that had helped him.

The strain under which he had lived during this year and a half had undoubtedly been great; but he could see now that it had been inward strain--the mental strain of unceasing apprehension, the spiritual strain of the new creature in casting off the old husk, and adapting itself not merely to new surroundings, but to a new life. This had been severe. He was not a rover, and still less an adventurer, in any of the senses attached to that word. His instincts were for the settled, the well-ordered, and the practical. He would have been content with any humdrum existence that permitted his peaceable, commercially gifted soul to develop in its natural environment. The process, therefore, by which Norrie Ford became Herbert Strange, even in his own thoughts, had been one of inner travail, though the outward conditions could not have been more favorable. Now that he had reached a point where his more obvious anxieties were pa.s.sing away, and the hope of safety was becoming a reality, he could look back and see how relatively easy everything had been.

He had leisure for reflection because it was the hour for the men's midday meal and siesta. He could see them grouped together--some thirty-odd--at the far end of the shed--st.u.r.dy little Italians, black-eyed, smiling, thrifty, dirty, and contented to a degree that made them incomprehensible to the ambitious, upward-toiling American set over them. They sat, or lounged, on piles of wood, or on the floor, some chattering, most of them asleep. He had begun like them. He had stacked wool under orders till he had made himself capable of being in command. He had been beneath the ladder; and though his foot was only on the lowest rung of it even now, he was satisfied to have made this first step upward.

He could not be said to have taken it to his own surprise, since he had prepared himself for it, and for other such steps to follow it, knowing that they must become feasible in time. He had been given to understand that what the Argentine, in common with some other countries, needed most was neither men nor capital, but intelligence. Men were pouring in from every corner of the globe; capital was keen in looking for its opportunity; but for intelligence the demand was always greater than the supply.

The first intimation of such a need had come to him on the _Empress of Erin_, in mid-Atlantic, by a chance opportunity of the voyage. It was on one of the first days of liberty when he had ventured to mix freely with his fellow-pa.s.sengers. Up to the present he had followed the rule of conduct adopted at the little Canadian station of Saint Jean du Clou Noir.

He went into public when necessary, but no oftener. He did then what other people did, in the way to attract the least attention. The season favored him, for amid the throngs of early autumn travellers, moving from country back to town, or from seaside resorts to the mountains he pa.s.sed unnoticed. At Quebec he was one of the crowd of tourists come to see the picturesque old town. At Rimouski he was lost among the trainful of people from the Canadian maritime provinces taking the Atlantic steamer at a convenient port. He lived through each minute in expectation of the law's tap on his shoulder; but he acquired the habit of nonchalance. On s.h.i.+pboard it was a relief to be able to shut himself up in his cabin--his suite!--feigning sickness, but really allowing his taut nerves to relax, as he watched first the outlines of the Laurentides, and then the sh.o.r.es of Anticosti, and lastly the iron-black coast of Labrador, follow each other below the horizon. Two or three appearances at table gave him confidence that he had nothing to fear. By degrees he allowed himself to walk up and down the deck, where it was a queer sensation to feel that the long row of eyes must of necessity be fixed upon him. The mere fact that he was wearing another man's clothes--clothes he had found in the cabin trunk that had come on board for him--produced a shyness scarcely mitigated by the knowledge that he was far from looking grotesque.

Little by little he plucked up courage to enter the smoking-room where the tacit, matter-of-course welcome of his own s.e.x seemed to him like extraordinary affability. An occasional word from a neighbor, or an invitation to "take a hand at poker," or to "have a c.o.c.ktail," was like an a.s.surance to a man who fancies himself dead that he really is alive. He joined in no conversations and met no advances, but from the possibilities of doing so he would go back to his cabin smiling.

The nearest approach to pleasure he allowed himself was to sit in a corner and listen to the talk of his fellow-men. It was sometimes amusing, but oftener stupid; it turned largely on food, with irrelevant interludes on business. It never went beyond the range of topics possible to the American or Canadian merchants, professional men, politicians, and saloon-keepers, who form the rank and file of smoking-room society on any Atlantic liner; but the Delphic wors.h.i.+pper never listened to Apollo's oracle with a more rapt devotion than Ford to this intercommunion of souls.

It was in this way that he chanced one day to hear a man speaking of the Argentine. The remarks were casual, choppy, and without importance, but the speaker evidently knew the ground. Ford had already noticed him, because they occupied adjoining steamer-chairs--a tall, sallow Englishman of the ineffectual type, with sagging shoulders, a drooping mustache, and furtive eyes. Ford had scarcely thought of the Argentine since the girl in the cabin had mentioned it--- now ten or twelve days ago; but the necessity of having an objective point, and one sufficiently distant turned his mind again in that direction.

"Did I hear you speaking yesterday of Buenos Aires?" he ventured to ask, on the next occasion when he found himself seated beside his neighbor on deck.

The Englishman drew his brier-root pipe from his mouth, glanced sidewise from the magazine he was reading, and jerked his head in a.s.sent.

"What kind of place did it seem to you?"

"Jolly rotten."

Pondering this reply, Ford might have lost courage to speak again had he not caught the eye of the Englishman's wife as she leaned forward and peeped at him across her husband's brier-root. There was something in her starry glance--an invitation, or an incitement--that impelled him to continue.

"I've been told it's the land of new opportunities."

The Englishman grunted without looking up. "I didn't see many."

"May I ask if you saw any?"

"None fit for a white man."

"My husband means none fit for a--gentleman. I liked the place."

From the woman's steely smile and bitter-sweet tones Ford got hints of masculine inefficiency and feminine contempt which he had no wish to follow up. He knew from fragments of talk overheard in the smoking-room that they had tried Mexico, California, and Saskatchewan in addition to South America. From the impatience with which she shook the foot just visible beneath the steamer-rug, while all the rest of her bearing feigned repose, he guessed her humiliation at returning empty to the land she had left with an Anglo-Saxon's pioneering hope, beside a husband who could do nothing but curse luck. To get over the awkward minute he spoke hurriedly.

"I've heard of a very good house out there--Stephens and Jarrott. Do you happen to know anything about them?"

"Wool," the Englishman grunted again. "Wool and wheat. Beastly brutes."

"They were horribly impertinent to my husband," the woman spoke up, with a kind of feverish eagerness to have her say. "They actually asked him if there was anything he could do. Fancy!"

"Oh, I know people of that sort put a lot of superfluous questions to you," Ford said. But the lady hurried on.

"As to questions, there are probably fewer asked you in Argentine than anywhere else in the world. It's one of the standing jokes of the place, both in Buenos Aires and out in the Camp. Of course, the old Spanish families are all right; but when it comes to foreigners a social catechism wouldn't do. That's one of the reasons the place didn't agree with us. We wanted people to know who we'd been before we got there; but that branch of knowledge isn't cultivated."

"More beastly Johnnies in the Argentine pa.s.sin' under names not their own," said the man, moved to speak, at last, "than in all the rest of the world put together. Heard a story at the Jockey Club--lot of beastly native bounders in the Jockey Club--heard a story at the Jockey Club of a little Irish Johnny who'd been cheatin' at cards. Three other a.s.ses kicked him out. Beggar turned at the door and got in his lick of revenge.

'Say boys, d'yez know why they call me Mickey Flanagan out here? Because it's me na-ame.' Beggar 'd got 'em all there."

Ford nerved himself to laugh, but made an excuse for rising.

"Oh, there's lots of cleverness among them," the lady observed, before he had time to get away. "In fact, it's one of the troubles with the country--for people like us. There's too much compet.i.tion in brains. My husband hit the right nail on the head when he said there was no chance for any beastly Johnny out there, unless he could use his bloomin'

mind--and for us that was out of the question."

Ford never spoke to them again, but he meditated on their words, finding himself at the end of twenty-four hours in possession of a new light.

"I've got to use my bloomin' mind." The words seemed to offer him the clew to life. It was the answer to the question, "What should I do _there_?"

which positively asked itself, whenever he thought of seeking a refuge in this country or in that. It came as a discovery that within himself was the power that would enable him to make the best of any country, and the country to make the best of him.

He could hardly have explained how his decision to try Argentina had become fixed. Until he saw whether or not he should get successfully ash.o.r.e at Liverpool there was a paralysis of all mental effort; but once on the train for London his plans appeared before him already formed. The country where few questions were asked and the past had no importance was clearly the place for him. Within a fortnight he was a second-cla.s.s pa.s.senger on board the Royal Mail Steam Packet _Parana_, bound for Buenos Aires--thus fulfilling, almost unexpectedly to himself, the suggestion made by the girl in the Adirondack cabin, whose star, as he began to believe, must rule his fate.

He thought of her now and then, but always with the same curious sense of remoteness--or unreality, as of a figure seen in a dream. Were it not for the substantial tokens of her actuality he possessed she would have seemed to him like the heroine of a play. He would have reproached himself for disloyalty if the intensity of each minute as he had to meet it had not been an excuse for him. The time would come when the pressure of the instant would be less great, and he should be able to get back the emotion with which he left her. Perhaps if she had been "his type of girl," her image would not have faded so quickly.

There was but one thing for which he was not grateful to her. She had fixed the name of Herbert Strange upon him in such a way that he was unable to shake it off. His own first name was the un.o.bjectionable monosyllable John--though he had always been known by his less familiar middle name, Norrie--and as John Ford he could have faced the world with a certain amount of bluff. He meant to begin the attempt immediately on reaching London, but the difficulty of appearing in a hotel under one name while everything he brought with him bore another was patent to him at once. Similarly, he could not receive the correspondence incidental to his outfit and his pa.s.sage under the name of Ford in a house where he was known as Strange. Having applied for his pa.s.sage as Strange, he knew it would create comment if he asked to be put down in the books as Ford. Do what he would he was obliged to appear on the printed list of second-cabin pa.s.sengers as Herbert Strange, and he had made at least one acquaintance who would expect to call him so after they reached land.

This was a little, clean-shaven man, in the neighborhood of sixty, always dressed at sea as he probably dressed on sh.o.r.e. He wore nothing but black, with a white s.h.i.+rt and a ready-made black bow-tie. He might have been a butler, an elderly valet, or a member of some discreet religious order in street costume. Ford had heard a flippant young Frenchman speak of him as an "ancien cure, qui a fait quelque betise"; and indeed there was about him that stamp of the ecclesiastic which is sometimes ineffaceable.

"I call myself Durand," he said to Ford, using the conveniently ambiguous French idiom, "je m'appelle Durand."

"Et je m'appelle Strange, I call myself Strange," Ford had replied, claiming the name for the first time without hesitation, but feeling the irrevocable nature of the words as soon as he had uttered them.

Out of the crowd of second-rate Europeans of all races who made up the second cabin, the man who called himself Strange had selected the man who called himself Durand by some obscure instinct of affinity. "He looks like an old chap who could give one information," was Strange's own way of putting it, not caring to confess that he was feeling after a bit of sympathy. But the give and take of information became the basis of their friends.h.i.+p, and imparted the first real stimulus to the young man's awkward efforts to use his mind.

Monsieur Durand had been thirty years in the Argentine, observing the place and the people, native and foreign, with the impartial shrewdness only possible to one who sought little for himself. It was a pleasure to share the fruits of his experience with one so eager to learn, for young men were not in the habit of showing him deference. He could tell Mr.

Strange many things that would be to his advantage--what to do--what to avoid--what sort of place to live in--what he ought to pay--and what sort of company to keep.

Yes, he knew the firm of Stephens and Jarrott--an excellent house. There was no Mr. Stephens now, only a Mr. Jarrott. Mr. Stephens had belonged to the great days of American enterprise in the southern hemisphere, to the time of Wheelwright, and Halsey, and Hale. The Civil War had put an end to that. Mr. Jarrott had come later--a good man, not generally understood. He had suffered a great loss a few years ago in the death of his brother-in-law and partner, Mr. Colfax. Mrs. Colfax, a pretty little woman, who hadn't old age in her blood either--one could see that--had gone back to the United States with her child--but a child!--blond as an angel--altogether darling--_tout a fait mignonne_. Monsieur Durand thought he remembered hearing that Mrs. Colfax had married again, but he couldn't say for certain. What would you? One heard so many things. He knew less of the family since the last boy died--the boy to whom he gave lessons in Spanish and French. Death hadn't spared the household--taking the three sons one after another and leaving father and mother alone. It was a thousand pities Mrs. Colfax had taken the little girl away. They loved her as if she had been their own--especially after the boys died. An excellent house! Mr. Strange couldn't do better than seek an entry there--it is I who tell you so--_c'est moi qui vous le dis_.

All this was said in very good English, with occasional lapses into French, in a soft, benevolent voice, with slow benedictory movements of the hands, more and more suggestive of an ecclesiastic _en civile_--or under a cloud. Strange stole an occasional glance into the delicate, clear-cut face, where the thin lips were compressed into permanent lines of pain, and the sunken brown eyes looked out from under scholarly brows with the kind of hopeful anguish a penitent soul might feel in the midst of purifying flames. He remembered again that the flippant young Frenchman had said, "Un ancien cure, qui a fait quelque betise." Was it possible that some tragic sin lay under this gentle life? And was the four-funnelled, twin-screwed _Parana_ but a ghostly s.h.i.+p bearing a cargo of haunted souls into their earthly purgatory?

"But listen, monsieur," the old man began next day. But listen! There would be difficulties. Stephens and Jarrott employed only picked men, men with some experience--except for the mere manual labor such as the Italians could perform. Wouldn't it be well for Mr. Strange to qualify himself a little before risking a refusal? Ah, but how? Monsieur Durand would explain. There was first the question of Spanish. No one could get along in the Argentine without a working knowledge of that tongue.

Monsieur Durand himself gave lessons in it--and in French--but in the English and American colonies of Buenos Aires exclusively. There were reasons why he did not care to teach among Catholics, though he himself was a fervent one, and he hoped--repentant. He p.r.o.nounced the last word with some emphasis, as though to call Strange's attention to it. If his young friend would give him the pleasure of taking a few lessons, they could begin even now. It would while away the time on the voyage. He had his own method of teaching, a method based on the Berlitz system, but not borrowed from it, and, he ventured to say, possessing its own good points. For example: _el tabaco--la pipa--los cigarillos. Que es esto?

Esto es la pipa_. Very simple. In a few weeks' time the pupil is carrying on conversations.