Still Jim Part 44

Mrs. Flynn wiped her eyes on her ap.r.o.n. "G.o.d knows I'm an old fool," she said. "Change that dirty khaki suit so's I can wash it."

Jim chuckled and turned to Pen. She was watching the little tableau with all her hungry heart in her eyes.

"Pen! Oh, my dearest!" breathed Jim. Then he paused with a glance at his near-mother, who immediately began to rattle the stove lids.

"Get out and take a walk, the two of you. G.o.d knows I'm a good Catholic, but there's some things--get out, the two of you! Let your nerves ease up a bit. Sure we all pound and tw.a.n.g like a wet tent in the wind."

Out on the trail Jim spoke a little breathlessly: "Pen! If you would just let me put my head down on your shoulder, if you'd put your dear cheek on mine and smooth my hair, the heaven of it would carry me through the next few weeks. Just that much, Pen, is all I'd ask for!"

Tears were in Pen's eyes as she looked up into the fine, pleading face.

"Jim, I can't!"

"You wouldn't be taking it from Sara."

"Sara! Poor Sara! He wants no embraces from anyone! I'm no more married to Sara than a nurse to her patient. But I mean that as long as things are as they are, the honest thing, the safe thing, is for me not to--to--Oh, Jim, it's not square to any of us. We must keep on the straight, clear basis of friends.h.i.+p!"

But Jim had seen Pen's heart in her eyes and the call of it was almost more than his lonely heart could bear.

"Great heavens, Pen!" he cried. "Life is so short! We need each other so! What does it profit us or the world that all your wealth of tenderness should go untouched and all my hunger for it unsatisfied? If your touch on my hair will brace me for the fight of my life, why should you deny it to me?"

Pen tried to laugh. "Still, what's happened to your morals?"

Jim replied indignantly: "You can't apply a system of ethics to your cheek against mine except to say it's all wrong that I can't have you now, in my great need. And I warn you, Pen, I shall come to you thirsty until at last you give me what is mine. Only your cheek to mine is all I ask for, Penny."

Pen looked up at the pleading beauty of Jim's eyes. "Don't plead with me, Jim," she half whispered, "or I think my heart will break."

The two looked away from each other to the Elephant. The great beast seemed to sleep in the afternoon sun.

"Tell me about your plans, Still," said Pen, her voice not altogether steady.

"Murphy thinks I'm a fool," said Jim. "Perhaps I am. But Oscar Ames has been a good deal of a surprise to me: Just as soon as I took the trouble to explain the concrete matter to him, he got it instantly. And in a way he got my talk about the new social obligations you showed me."

Pen interrupted eagerly: "You don't know how much you did in that talk, Jim. Oscar has discovered you and he's as proud as Columbus. He has made me tell him everything I know about you. You see you have that rare capacity for making anyone you will take the trouble to talk to feel as if he was your only friend and confidant. Oscar has discovered that you are misunderstood, that he is the only person that really understands you and he's out now explaining to his neighbors how little they really know about concrete."

Jim looked surprised. "I don't know what I did, except to follow your instructions, but if it worked on Ames, it ought to work on the rest. I believe that after a few more talks with Ames, he will work against Fleckenstein, Pen, and that I will accomplish it by just talking the dam to him until he understands the technical side of it and the ideal I have about it. And if it will influence him, why not the others?"

Pen looked at him thoughtfully. "I believe you can do it, Jim. A sort of silent campaign, eh? And then what?"

"Well, if I can keep Fleckenstein out of Congress by those means, I believe that this project will never repudiate its debt! I am going to get the Department of Agriculture to send a group of experts out here at once. They will help not only the old farmers who over-irrigate but the new farmers who can't farm. And I'm going to get the farmers who have been successful to co-operate with the farmers who have failed. If I only had more time!

"You have three months before election," said Pen. "A lot can be done in three months."

Jim shrugged his shoulders. "I can only do my limit. Among other things I'm going to try to get the bankers and business men in Cabillo to fight the inflation of land values here on the Project. Incidentally, I'm going to keep on building my dam."

"How can I help?" asked Pen.

"I've told you how," said Jim, quietly.

"Oh, Still, that's not fair!" exclaimed Pen.

"Why not?" asked Jim, coolly. Pen flushed and looked away. They were nearing the tent house and she spoke hastily:

"I'll go in and talk with Sara."

"Better let me," said Jim.

"No," said Pen, "every woman has an inalienable right to bully and intimidate her own husband."

Jim laughed and left her, reluctantly. Pen went into the tent. Sara was looking flushed and tired. The look had been growing on him of late. He had been unusually tractable for a day or so and Pen's heart smote her as she greeted him. No matter how he tried her, Sara never ceased to be a pitiful and a tragic figure to her in his wrecked and aborted youth.

"Sara," she said, her voice very gentle and her touch very tender as she held a gla.s.s of water for him, "Jim wanted to come in and talk to you but I wouldn't let him."

Sara pushed the gla.s.s away. "Why not?"

"Because you and he quarrel so. Sara, it's a fair fight. You warned Jim that you would ruin him. He says you may have your choice of being watched or turned over to the authorities."

"He is a mutton head!" said Sara. "I suppose he thinks the crux of the matter is that seance with Freet. As if I'd do as coa.r.s.e work as that!

That's what I'd like, to be turned over to the authorities. Couldn't I tell a pretty story about the meeting with Freet up here? Freet actually thought Jim would come across with the contract! But that wasn't what I was after."

"Sara, when you talk like that, I despise you," said Pen.

"You despise me because I'm a cripple," returned Sara. "Why can't you be honest about it?"

"Don't you know me yet, Sara?" asked Pen, sitting down on the foot of his couch and looking at him entreatingly. "Don't you know that if you had taken your injury like a man, you'd have gotten a hold on my tenderness and respect that nothing could have destroyed? Sara, I've watched you degenerate for eight years, but I never realized to what a depth you had sunk until you came to the Project."

"What do you see in the Project," said Sara. "What does it really matter whether private or public interests control it? Who really cares?"

"Lots of people care. Jim cares."

"Pshaw!" sneered Sara. "All Jim Manning really cares about is his own pigheaded sense of race and nationality."

"Jim needs that sense for his propelling power," said Pen. "I believe that just as soon as a man loses his sense of nationality, he loses a lot of his social force. Love of country--a man that hasn't it lacks something very fine, like family pride and honor. Jim's sense of race is the keynote to his character. And just as much as the New Englanders have lost that sense, have they lost their grip on the trend of the nation. They are the type that can't do without it."

Sara eyed Pen curiously. She had turned to look out over the desert distances so that Sara saw her profile clean cut against the sky. She was only a girl and yet she had lived through much. Sara looked at her n.o.ble head, high arched above her ears; at her short nose and full soft mouth, at her straight brow, all blending in an outline that was that of the thinker, infinitely sad in its intelligence.

"That was a very highbrow statement of yours, Pen," he said, less harshly than usual. "How did you come to think about these things?"

Pen turned to look at him. "Marrying you made me," she said. "I had to use my mind. I had no family. I had no talents. I had to teach myself a sense of proportion that would keep you from wrecking me. I wanted to get to look at myself as one human living with millions of other humans and not as Pen, the center of her own universe." Pen laughed a little wistfully. "Since I couldn't mother children of my own, naturally, I had to mother the world."

Sara grunted. "Huh! Who can say my life has been altogether a failure?"

Sudden tears sprang to Pen's eyes. "Why, Sara, what a dear thing to say!

And I thought you would remove my hair because of Jim's message."

The sneer returned to Sara's voice. "You ask Jim if he ever heard of locking the barn too late? Tell him to bring on his 'armed guards.'"

Pen was startled. "Sara, what have you done?"

Sara laughed. "If you and Jim don't know, I'm not the proper one to tell you! One of your gentleman friends is outside, evidently waiting for you."