Windy McPherson's Son Part 36

In the lobby of a tall office building, where he stopped at a little cigar counter to get fresh tobacco for his pipe, he looked so fixedly at a woman clad in long soft furs, that in alarm she hurried out to her machine to wait for her escort, who had evidently gone up the elevator.

Once more in the street, Sam shuddered at the thought of the hands that had laboured that the soft cheeks and the untroubled eyes of this one woman might be. Into his mind came the face and figure of a little Canadian nurse who had once cared for him through an illness--her quick, deft fingers and her muscular little arms. "Another such as she," he muttered, "has been at work upon the face and body of this gentlewoman; a hunter has gone into the white silence of the north to bring out the warm furs that adorn her; for her there has been a tragedy--a shot, and red blood upon the snow, and a struggling beast waving its little claws in the air; for her a woman has worked through the morning, bathing her white limbs, her cheeks, her hair."

For this gentlewoman also there had been a man apportioned, a man like himself, who had cheated and lied and gone through the years in pursuit of the dollars to pay all of the others, a man of power, a man who could achieve, could accomplish. Again he felt within him a yearning for the power of the artist, the power not only to see the meaning of the faces in the street, but to reproduce what he saw, to get with subtle fingers the story of the achievement of mankind into a face hanging upon a wall.

In other days, in Caxton, listening to Telfer's talk, and in Chicago and New York with Sue, Sam had tried to get an inkling of the pa.s.sion of the artist; now walking and looking at the faces rolling past him on the long street he thought that he did understand.

Once when he was new in the city he had, for some months, carried on an affair with a woman, the daughter of a cattle farmer from Iowa. Now her face filled his vision. How rugged it was, how filled with the message of the ground underfoot; the thick lips, the dull eyes, the strong, bullet-like head, how like the cattle her father had bought and sold.

He remembered the little room in Chicago where he had his first love pa.s.sage with this woman. How frank and wholesome it had seemed. How eagerly both man and woman had rushed at evening to the meeting place.

How her strong hands had clasped him. The face of the woman in the motor by the office building danced before his eyes, the face so peaceful, so free from the marks of human pa.s.sion, and he wondered what daughter of a cattle raiser had taken the pa.s.sion out of the man who paid for the beauty of that face.

On a side street, near the lighted front of a cheap theatre, a woman, standing alone and half concealed in the doorway of a church, called softly, and turning he went to her.

"I am not a customer," he said, looking at her thin face and bony hands, "but if you care to come with me I will stand a good dinner. I am getting hungry and do not like eating alone. I want some one to talk to me so that I won't get to thinking."

"You're a queer bird," said the woman, taking his arm. "What have you done that you don't want to think?"

Sam said nothing.

"There's a place over there," she said, pointing to the lighted front of a cheap restaurant with soiled curtains at the windows.

Sam kept on walking.

"If you do not mind," he said, "I will pick the place. I want to buy a good dinner. I want a place with clean linen on the table and a good cook in the kitchen."

They stopped at a corner to talk of the dinner, and at her suggestion he waited at a near-by drug store while she went to her room. As he waited he went to the telephone and ordered the dinner and a taxicab. When she returned she had on a clean s.h.i.+rtwaist and had combed her hair. Sam thought he caught the odour of benzine, and guessed she had been at work on the spots on her worn jacket. She seemed surprised to find him still waiting.

"I thought maybe it was a stall," she said.

They drove in silence to a place Sam had in mind, a road-house with clean washed floors, painted walls, and open fires in the private dining-rooms. Sam had been there several times during the month, and the food had been well cooked.

They ate in silence. Sam had no curiosity to hear her talk of herself, and she seemed to have no knack of casual conversation. He was not studying her, but had brought her as he had said, because of his loneliness, and because her thin, tired face and frail body, looking out from the darkness by the church door, had made an appeal.

She had, he thought, a look of hard chast.i.ty, like one whipped but not defeated. Her cheeks were thin and covered with freckles, like a boy's.

Her teeth were broken and in bad repair, though clean, and her hands had the worn, hardly-used look of his own mother's hands. Now that she sat before him in the restaurant, in some vague way she resembled his mother.

After dinner he sat smoking his cigar and looking at the fire. The woman of the streets leaned across the table and touched him on the arm.

"Are you going to take me anywhere after this--after we leave here?" she said.

"I am going to take you to the door of your room, that's all."

"I'm glad," she said; "it's a long time since I've had an evening like this. It makes me feel clean."

For a time they sat in silence and then Sam began talking of his home town in Iowa, letting himself go and expressing the thoughts that came into his mind. He told her of his mother and of Mary Underwood and she in turn told of her town and of her life. She had some difficulty about hearing which made conversation trying. Words and sentences had to be repeated to her and after a time Sam smoked and looked at the fire, letting her talk. Her father had been a captain of a small steamboat plying up and down Long Island Sound and her mother a careful, shrewd woman and a good housekeeper. They had lived in a Rhode Island village and had a garden back of their house. The captain had not married until he was forty-five and had died when the girl was eighteen, the mother dying a year later.

The girl had not been much known in the Rhode Island village, being shy and reticent. She had kept the house clean and helped the captain in the garden. When her parents were dead she had found herself alone with thirty-seven hundred dollars in the bank and the little home, and had married a young man who was a clerk in a railroad office, and sold the house to move to Kansas City. The big flat country frightened her. Her life there had been unsuccessful. She had been lonely for the hills and the water of her New England village, and she was, by nature, undemonstrative and unemotional, so that she did not get much hold of her husband. He had undoubtedly married her for the little h.o.a.rd and, by various devices, began getting it from her. A son had been born, for a time her health broke badly, and she discovered through an accident that her husband was spending her money in dissipation among the women of the town.

"There wasn't any use wasting words when I found he didn't care for me or for the baby and wouldn't support us, so I left him," she said in a level, businesslike way.

When she came to count up, after she had got clear of her husband and had taken a course in stenography, there was one thousand dollars of her savings left and she felt pretty safe. She took a position and went to work, feeling well satisfied and happy. And then came the trouble with her hearing. She began to lose places and finally had to be content with a small salary, earned by copying form letters for a mail order medicine man. The boy she put out with a capable German woman, the wife of a gardener. She paid four dollars a week for him and there was clothing to be bought for herself and the boy. Her wage from the medicine man was seven dollars a week.

"And so," she said, "I began going on the street. I knew no one and there was nothing else to do. I couldn't do that in the town where the boy lived, so I came away. I've gone from city to city, working mostly for patent medicine men and filling out my income by what I earned in the streets. I'm not naturally a woman who cares about men and not many of them care about me. I don't like to have them touch me with their hands. I can't drink as most of the girls do; it sickens me. I want to be left alone. Perhaps I shouldn't have married. Not that I minded my husband. We got along very well until I had to stop giving him money.

When I found where it was going it opened my eyes. I felt that I had to have at least a thousand dollars for the boy in case anything happened to me. When I found there wasn't anything to do but just go on the streets, I went. I tried doing other work, but hadn't the strength, and when it came to the test I cared more about the boy than I did about myself--any woman would. I thought he was of more importance than what I wanted.

"It hasn't been easy for me. Sometimes when I have got a man to go with me I walk along the street praying that I won't shudder and draw away when he touches me with his hands. I know that if I do he will go away and I won't get any money.

"And then they talk and lie about themselves. I've had them try to work off bad money and worthless jewelry on me. Sometimes they try to make love to me and then steal back the money they have given me. That's the hard part, the lying and the pretence. All day I write the same lies over and over for the patent-medicine men and then at night I listen to these others lying to me."

She stopped talking and leaning over put her cheek down on her hand and sat looking into the fire.

"My mother," she began again, "didn't always wear a clean dress. She couldn't. She was always down on her knees scrubbing around the floor or out in the garden pulling weeds. But she hated dirt. If her dress was dirty her underwear was clean and so was her body. She taught me to be that way and I wanted to be. It came naturally. But I'm losing it all.

All evening I have been sitting here with you thinking that my underwear isn't clean. Most of the time I don't care. Being clean doesn't go with what I am doing. I have to keep trying to be flashy outside so that men will stop when they see me on the street. Sometimes when I have done well I don't go on the streets for three or four weeks. Then I clean up my room and bathe myself. My landlady lets me do my was.h.i.+ng in the bas.e.m.e.nt at night. I don't seem to care about cleanliness the weeks I am on the streets."

The little German orchestra began playing a lullaby, and a fat German waiter came in at the open door and put more wood on the fire. He stopped by the table and talked about the mud in the road outside. From another room came the silvery clink of gla.s.ses and the sound of laughing voices. The girl and Sam drifted back into talk of their home towns. Sam felt that he liked her very much and thought that if she had belonged to him he should have found a basis on which to live with her contentedly.

She had a quality of honesty that he was always seeking in people.

As they drove back to the city she put a hand on his arm.

"I wouldn't mind about you," she said, looking at him frankly.

Sam laughed and patted her thin hand. "It's been a good evening," he said, "we'll go through with it as it stands."

"Thanks for that," she said, "and there is something else I want to tell you. Perhaps you will think it bad of me. Sometimes when I don't want to go on the streets I get down on my knees and pray for strength to go on gamely. Does it seem bad? We are a praying people, we New Englanders."

As he stood in the street Sam could hear her laboured asthmatic breathing as she climbed the stairs to her room. Half way up she stopped and waved her hand at him. The thing was awkwardly done and boyish.

Sam had a feeling that he should like to get a gun and begin shooting citizens in the streets. He stood in the lighted city looking down the long deserted street and thought of Mike McCarthy in the jail at Caxton.

Like Mike, he lifted up his voice in the night.

"Are you there, O G.o.d? Have you left your children here on the earth hurting each other? Do you put the seed of a million children in a man, and the planting of a forest in one tree, and permit men to wreck and hurt and destroy?"

CHAPTER VI

One morning, at the end of his second year of wandering, Sam got out of his bed in a cold little hotel in a mining village in West Virginia, looked at the miners, their lamps in their caps, going through the dimly lighted streets, ate a portion of leathery breakfast cakes, paid his bill at the hotel, and took a train for New York. He had definitely abandoned the idea of getting at what he wanted through wandering about the country and talking to chance acquaintances by the wayside and in villages, and had decided to return to a way of life more befitting his income.

He felt that he was not by nature a vagabond, and that the call of the wind and the sun and the brown road was not insistent in his blood.

The spirit of Pan did not command him, and although there were certain spring mornings of his wandering days that were like mountain tops in his experience of life, mornings when some strong, sweet feeling ran through the trees, and the gra.s.s, and the body of the wanderer, and when the call of life seemed to come shouting and inviting down the wind, filling him with delight of the blood in his body and the thoughts in his brain, yet at bottom and in spite of these days of pure joy he was, after all, a man of the towns and the crowds. Caxton and South Water Street and LaSalle Street had all left their marks on him, and so, throwing his canvas jacket into a corner of the room in the West Virginia hotel, he returned to the haunts of his kind.

In New York he went to an uptown club where he owned a members.h.i.+p and into the grill where he found at breakfast an actor acquaintance named Jackson.

Sam dropped into a chair and looked about him. He remembered a visit he had made there some years before with Webster and Crofts and felt again the quiet elegance of the surroundings.

"h.e.l.lo, Moneymaker," said Jackson, heartily. "Heard you had gone to a nunnery."

Sam laughed and began ordering a breakfast that made Jackson's eyes open with astonishment.