station, barred the passage along the road. He held the reins in one hand
and put the other about the waist of his companion. The two heads sought
each other and lips met. They clung to each other. The same moon that shed
its light on Rose McCoy in the distant farmhouse lighted the open place
where the lovers sat in the buggy in the road. Hugh had to close his eyes
and fight to put down an almost overpowering physical hunger in himself.
His mind still protested that women were not for him. When his fancy made
for him a picture of the school teacher Rose McCoy sleeping in a bed, he
saw her only as a chaste white thing to be worshiped from afar and not to
be approached, at least not by himself. Again he opened his eyes and looked
at the lovers whose lips still clung together. His long slouching body
stiffened and he sat up very straight in his chair. Then he closed his eyes
again. A gruff voice broke the silence. "That's for Mike," it shouted and a
great chunk of coal thrown from the train bounded across the potato patch
and struck against the back of the house. Downstairs he could hear old Mrs.
McCoy getting out of bed to secure the prize. The train passed and the
lovers in the buggy sank away from each other. In the silent night Hugh
could hear the regular beat of the hoofs of the farmer boy's horse as it
carried him and his woman away into the darkness.
The two people, living in the house with the old woman who had almost
finished her life, and themselves trying feebly to reach out to life, never
got to anything very definite in relation to each other. One Saturday
evening in the late fall the Governor of the State came to Bidwell. There
was a parade to be followed by a political meeting and the Governor, who
was a candidate for re-election, was to address the people from the steps
of the town hall. Prominent citizens were to stand on the steps beside the
Governor. Steve and Tom were to be there, and they had asked Hugh to come,
but he had refused. He asked Rose McCoy to go to the meeting with him, and
they set out from the house at eight o'clock and walked to town. Then they
stood at the edge of the crowd in the shadow of a store building and
listened to the speech. To Hugh's amazement his name was mentioned. The
Governor spoke of the prosperity of the town, indirectly hinting that
it was due to the political sagacity of the party of which he was a
representative, and then mentioned several individuals also partly
responsible. "The whole country is sweeping forward to new triumphs under
our banner," he declared, "but not every community is so fortunate as I
find you here. Labor is employed at good wages. Life here is fruitful and
happy. You are fortunate here in having among you such business men as
Steven Hunter and Thomas Butterworth; and in the inventor Hugh McVey you
have one of the greatest intellects and the most useful men that ever lived
to help lift the burden off the shoulder of labor. What his brain is doing
for labor, our party is doing in another way. The protective tariff is
really the father of modern prosperity."
The speaker paused and a cheer arose from the crowd. Hugh took hold of the
school teacher's arm and drew her away down a side street. They walked home
in silence, but when they got to the house and were about to go in, the
school teacher hesitated. She wanted to ask Hugh to walk about in the
darkness with her but did not have the courage of her desires. As they
stood at the gate and as the tall man with the long serious face looked
down at her, she remembered the speaker's words. "How could he care for me?
How could a man like him care anything for a homely little school teacher
like me?" she asked herself. Aloud she said something quite different. As
they had come along Turner's Pike she had made up her mind she would boldly
suggest a walk under the trees along Turner's Pike beyond the bridge, and
had told herself that she would later lead him to the place beside the
stream and in the shadow of the old pickle factory where she and George
Pike had come so near being lovers. Instead she hesitated for a moment by
the gate and then laughed awkwardly and passed in. "You should be proud. I
would be proud if I could be spoken of like that. I don't see why you keep
living here in a cheap little house like ours," she said.
On a warm spring Sunday night during the year in which Clara Butterworth
came back to Bidwell to live, Hugh made what was for him an almost
desperate effort to approach the school teacher. It had been a rainy
afternoon and Hugh had spent a part of it in the house. He came over from
his shop at noon and went to his room. When she was at home the school
teacher occupied a room next his own. The mother who seldom left the house
had on that day gone to the country to visit a brother. The daughter got
dinner for herself and Hugh and he tried to help her wash the dishes. A
plate fell out of his hands and its breaking seemed to break the silent,
embarrassed mood that had possession of them. For a few minutes they were
children and acted like children. Hugh picked up another plate and the
school teacher told him to put it down. He refused. "You're as awkward as a
puppy. How you ever manage to do anything over at that shop of yours is
more than I know."
Hugh tried to keep hold of the plate which the school teacher tried to
snatch away and for a few minutes they struggled laughing. Her cheeks were
flushed and Hugh thought she looked bewitching. An impulse he had never had
before came to him. He wanted to shout at the top of his lungs, throw the
plate at the ceiling, sweep all of the dishes off the table and hear them
crash on the floor, play like some huge animal loose in a tiny world. He
looked at Rose and his hands trembled from the strength of the strange
impulse. As he stood staring she took the plate out of his hand and went
into the kitchen. Not knowing what else to do he put on his hat and went
for a walk. Later he went to the shop and tried to work, but his hand
trembled when he tried to hold a tool and the hay-loading apparatus on
which he was at work seemed suddenly a very trivial and unimportant thing.
At four o'clock Hugh got back to the house and found it apparently empty,
although the door leading to Turner's Pike was open. The rain had stopped
falling and the sun struggled to work its way through the clouds. He went
upstairs to his own room and sat on the edge of his bed. The conviction
that the daughter of the house was in her room next door came to him, and
although the thought violated all the beliefs he had ever held regarding
women in relation to himself, he decided that she had gone to her room to
be near him when he came in. For some reason he knew that if he went to
her door and knocked she would not be surprised and would not refuse him
admission. He took off his shoes and set them gently on the floor. Then he
went on tiptoes out into the little hallway. The ceiling was so low that
he had to stoop to avoid knocking his head against it. He raised his hand
intending to knock on the door, and then lost courage. Several times
he went into the hallway with the same intent, and each time returned
noiselessly to his own room. He sat in the chair by the window and waited.
An hour passed. He heard a noise that indicated that the school teacher had
been lying on her bed. Then he heard footsteps on the stairs, and presently
saw her go out of the house and go along Turner's Pike. She did not go
toward town but over the bridge past his shop and into the country. Hugh
drew himself back out of sight. He wondered where she could be going.
"The roads are muddy. Why does she go out? Is she afraid of me?" he asked
himself. When he saw her turn at the bridge and look back toward the house,
his hands trembled again. "She wants me to follow. She wants me to go with
her," he thought.
Hugh did presently go out of the house and along the road but did not meet
the school teacher. She had in fact crossed the bridge and had gone along
the bank of the creek on the farther side. Then she crossed over again on
a fallen log and went to stand by the wall of the pickle factory. A lilac
bush grew beside the wall and she stood out of sight behind it. When she
saw Hugh in the road her heart beat so heavily that she had difficulty in
breathing. He went along the road and presently passed out of sight, and a
great weakness took possession of her. Although the grass was wet she sat
on the ground against the wall of the building and closed her eyes. Later
she put her face in her hands and wept.
The perplexed inventor did not get back to his boarding house until late
that night, and when he did he was unspeakably glad that he had not knocked
on the door of Rose McCoy's room. He had decided during the walk that
the whole notion that she had wanted him had been born in his own brain.
"She's a nice woman," he had said to himself over and over during the
walk, and thought that in coming to that conclusion he had swept away all
possibilities of anything else in her. He was tired when he got home and
went at once to bed. The old woman came home from the country and her
brother sat in his buggy and shouted to the school teacher, who came out of
her room and ran down the stairs. He heard the two women carry something
heavy into the house and drop it on the floor. The farmer brother had given
Mrs. McCoy a bag of potatoes. Hugh thought of the mother and daughter
standing together downstairs and was unspeakably glad he had not given way
to his impulse toward boldness. "She would be telling her now. She is a
good woman and would be telling her now," he thought.
At two o'clock that night Hugh got out of bed. In spite of the conviction
that women were not for him, he had found himself unable to sleep.
Something that shone in the eyes of the school teacher, when she struggled
with him for the possession of the plate, kept calling to him and he got
up and went to the window. The clouds had all gone out of the sky and the
night was clear. At the window next his own sat Rose McCoy. She was dressed
in a night gown and was looking away along Turner's Pike to the place where
George Pike the station master lived with his wife. Without giving himself
time to think, Hugh knelt on the floor and with his long arm reached across
the space between the two windows. His fingers had almost touched the back
of the woman's head and ached to play in the mass of red hair that fell
down over her shoulders, when again self-consciousness overcame him. He
drew his arm quickly back and stood upright in the room. His head banged
against the ceiling and he heard the window of the room next door go softly
down. With a conscious effort he took himself in hand. "She's a good woman.
Remember, she's a good woman," he whispered to himself, and when he got
again into his bed he refused to let his mind linger on the thoughts of
the school teacher, but compelled them to turn to the unsolved problems he
still had to face before he could complete his hay-loading apparatus. "You
tend to your business and don't be going off on that road any more," he
said, as though speaking to another person. "Remember she's a good woman
and you haven't the right. That's all you have to do. Remember you haven't
the right," he added with a ring of command in his voice.
CHAPTER XIII
Hugh first saw Clara Butterworth one day in July when she had been at home
for a month. She came to his shop late one afternoon with her father and a
man who had been employed to manage the new bicycle factory. The three got
out of Tom's buggy and came into the shop to see Hugh's new invention, the
hay-loading apparatus. Tom and the man named Alfred Buckley went to the
rear of the shop, and Hugh was left alone with the woman. She was dressed
in a light summer gown and her cheeks were flushed. Hugh stood by a bench
near an open window and listened while she talked of how much the town had
changed in the three years she had been away. "It is your doing, every one
says that," she declared.
Clara had been waiting for an opportunity to talk to Hugh. She began asking
questions regarding his work and what was to come of it. "When everything
is done by machines, what are people to do?" she asked. She seemed to take
it for granted that the inventor had thought deeply on the subject of
industrial development, a subject on which Kate Chanceller had often talked
during a whole evening. Having heard Hugh spoken of as one who had a great
brain, she wanted to see the brain at work.
Alfred Buckley came often to her father's house and wanted to marry Clara.
In the evening the two men sat on the front porch of the farmhouse and
talked of the town and the big things that were to be done there. They
spoke of Hugh, and Buckley, an energetic, talkative fellow with a long jaw
and restless gray eyes who had come from New York City, suggested schemes
for using him. Clara gathered that there was a plan on foot to get control
of Hugh's future inventions and thereby gain an advantage over Steve
Hunter.
The whole matter puzzled Clara. Alfred Buckley had asked her to marry him
and she had put the matter off. The proposal had been a formal thing, not
at all what she had expected from a man she was to take as a partner for
life, but Clara was at the moment very seriously determined upon marriage.
The New York man was at her father's house several evenings every week.
She had never walked about with him nor had they in any way come close to
each other. He seemed too much occupied with work to be personal and had
proposed marriage by writing her a letter. Clara got the letter from the
post-office and it upset her so that she felt she could not for a time go
into the presence of any one she knew. "I am unworthy of you, but I want
you to be my wife. I will work for you. I am new here and you do not know
me very well. All I ask is the privilege of proving my merit. I want you to
be my wife, but before I dare come and ask you to do me so great an honor I
feel I must prove myself worthy," the letter said.
Clara had driven into town alone on the day when she received it and later
got into her buggy and drove south past the Butterworth farm into the
hills. She forgot to go home to lunch or to the evening meal. The horse
jogged slowly along, protesting and trying to turn back at every cross
road, but she kept on and did not get home until midnight. When she reached
the farmhouse her father was waiting. He went with her into the barnyard
and helped unhitch the horse. Nothing was said, and after a moment's
conversation having nothing to do with the subject that occupied both their
minds, she went upstairs and tried to think the matter out. She became
convinced that her father had something to do with the proposal of marriage
that he knew about it and had waited for her to come home in order to see
how it had affected her.
Clara wrote a reply that was as non-committal as the proposal itself. "I
do not know whether I want to marry you or not. I will have to become
acquainted with you. I however thank you for the offer of marriage and when
you feel that the right time has come, we will talk about it," she wrote.
After the exchange of letters, Alfred Buckley came to her father's house
more often than before, but he and Clara did not become better acquainted.
He did not talk to her, but to her father. Although she did not know it,
the rumor that she was to marry the New York man had already run about
town. She did not know whether her father or Buckley had told the tale.
On the front porch of the farmhouse through the summer evenings the two men
talked of the progress, of the town and the part they were taking and hoped
to take in its future growth. The New York man had proposed a scheme to
Tom. He was to go to Hugh and propose a contract giving the two men an
option on all his future inventions. As the inventions were completed
they were to be financed in New York City, and the two men would give up
manufacture and make money much more rapidly as promoters. They hesitated
because they were afraid of Steve Hunter, and because Tom was afraid Hugh
would not fall in with their plan. "It wouldn't surprise me if Steve
already had such a contract with him. He's a fool if he hasn't," the older
man said.
Evening after evening the two men talked and Clara sat in the deep shadows
at the back of the porch and listened. The enmity that had existed between
herself and her father seemed to be forgotten. The man who had asked her to
marry him did not look at her, but her father did. Buckley did most of the
talking and spoke of New York City business men, already famous throughout
the Middle West as giants of finance, as though they were his life-long
friends. "They'll put over anything I ask them to," he declared.
Clara tried to think of Alfred Buckley as a husband. Like Hugh McVey he
was tall and gaunt but unlike the inventor, whom she had seen two or three
times on the street, he was not carelessly dressed. There was something
sleek about him, something that suggested a well-bred dog, a hound perhaps.
As he talked he leaned forward like a greyhound in pursuit of a rabbit. His
hair was carefully parted and his clothes fitted him like the skin of an
animal. He wore a diamond scarf pin. His long jaw, it seemed to her, was
always wagging. Within a few days after the receipt of his letter she
had made up her mind that she did not want him as a husband, and she was
convinced he did not want her. The whole matter of marriage had, she was
sure, been in some way suggested by her father. When she came to that
conclusion she was both angry and in an odd way touched. She did not
interpret it as fear of some sort of indiscretion on her part, but thought
that her father wanted her to marry because he wanted her to be happy. As
she sat in the darkness on the front porch of the farmhouse the voices of
the two men became indistinct. It was as though her mind went out of her
body and like a living thing journeyed over the world. Dozens of men she
had seen and had casually addressed, young fellows attending school at
Columbus and boys of the town with whom she had gone to parties and dances
when she was a young girl, came to stand before her. She saw their figures
distinctly, but remembered them at some advantageous moment of her contact
with them. At Columbus there was a young man from a town in the southern
end of the State, one of the sort that is always in love with a woman.
During her first year in school he had noticed Clara, had been undecided
as to whether he had better pay attention to her or to a little black-eyed
town girl who was in their classes. Several times he walked down the
college hill and along the street with Clara. The two stood at a street
crossing where she was in the habit of taking a car. Several cars went
by as they stood together by a bush that grew by a high stone wall. They
talked of trivial matters, a comedy club that had been organized in the
school, the chances of victory for the football team. The young man was one
of the actors in a play to be given by the comedy club and told Clara of
his experiences at rehearsals. As he talked his eyes began to shine and he
seemed to be looking, not at her face or body, but at something within her.
For a time, perhaps for fifteen minutes, there was a possibility that the
two people would love each other. Then the young man went away and later
she saw him walking under the trees on the college campus with the little
black-eyed town girl.
As she sat on the porch in the darkness in the summer evenings, Clara
thought of the incident and of dozens of other swift-passing contacts
she had made with men. The voices of the two men talking of money-making
went on and on. Whenever she came back out of her introspective world of
thought, Alfred Buckley's long jaw was wagging. He was always at work,
steadily, persistently urging something on her father. It was difficult
for Clara to think of her father as a rabbit, but the notion that Alfred
Buckley was like a hound stayed with her. "The wolf and the wolfhound," she
thought absent-mindedly.
Clara was twenty-three and seemed to herself mature. She did not intend
wasting any more time going to school and did not want to be a professional
woman, like Kate Chanceller. There was something she did want and in a
way some man, she did not know what man it would be, was concerned in the
matter. She was very hungry for love, but might have got that from another
woman. Kate Chanceller would have loved her. She was not unconscious of
the fact that their friendship had been something more than friendship.
Kate loved to hold Clara's hand and wanted to kiss and caress her. The
inclination had been put down by Kate herself, a struggle had gone on in
her, and Clara had been dimly conscious of it and had respected Kate for
making it.
Why? Clara asked herself that question a dozen times during the early weeks
of that summer. Kate Chanceller had taught her to think. When they were
together Kate did both the thinking and the talking, but now Clara's mind
had a chance. There was something back of her desire for a man. She wanted
something more than caresses. There was a creative impulse in her that
could not function until she had been made love to by a man. The man she
wanted was but an instrument she sought in order that she might fulfill
herself. Several times during those evenings in the presence of the two
men, who talked only of making money out of the products of another man's
mind, she almost forced her mind out into a concrete thought concerning
women, and then it became again befogged.
Clara grew tired of thinking, and listened to the talk. The name of Hugh
McVey played through the persistent conversation like a refrain. It became
fixed in her mind. The inventor was not married. By the social system under
which she lived that and that only made him a possibility for her purposes.
She began to think of the inventor, and her mind, weary of playing about
her own figure, played about the figure of the tall, serious-looking man
she had seen on Main Street. When Alfred Buckley had driven away to town
for the night, she went upstairs to her own room but did not get into bed.
Instead, she put out her light and sat by an open window that looked out
upon the orchard and from which she could see a little stretch of the road
that ran past the farm house toward town. Every evening before Alfred
Buckley went away, there was a little scene on the front porch. When the
visitor got up to go, her father made some excuse for going indoors or
around the corner of the house into the barnyard. "I will have Jim Priest
hitch up your horse," he said and hurried away. Clara was left in the
company of the man who had pretended he wanted to marry her, and who, she
was convinced, wanted nothing of the kind. She was not embarrassed, but
could feel his embarrassment and enjoyed it. He made formal speeches.
"Well, the night is fine," he said. Clara hugged the thought that he was
uncomfortable. "He has taken me for a green country girl, impressed with
him because he is from the city and dressed in fine clothes," she thought.
Sometimes her father stayed away five or ten minutes and she did not say a
word. When her father returned Alfred Buckley shook hands with him and then
turned to Clara, apparently now quite at his ease. "We have bored you, I'm
afraid," he said. He took her hand and leaning over, kissed the back of it
ceremoniously. Her father looked away. Clara went upstairs and sat by the
window. She could hear the two men continuing their talk in the road before
the house. After a time the front door banged, her father came into the
house and the visitor drove away. Everything became quiet and for a long
time she could hear the hoofs of Alfred Buckley's horse beating a rapid
tattoo on the road that led down into town.
Clara thought of Hugh McVey. Alfred Buckley had spoken of him as a
backwoodsman with a streak of genius. He constantly harped on the notion
that he and Tom could use the man for their own ends, and she wondered if
both of the men were making as great a mistake about the inventor as they
were about her. In the silent summer night, when the sound of the horse's
hoofs had died away and when her father had quit stirring about the house,
she heard another sound. The corn-cutting machine factory was very busy and
had put on a night shift. When the night was still, or when there was a
slight breeze blowing up the hill from town, there was a low rumbling sound
coming from many machines working in wood and steel, followed at regular
intervals by the steady breathing of a steam engine.
The woman at the window, like every one else in her town and in all the
towns of the mid-western country, became touched with the idea of the
romance of industry. The dreams of the Missouri boy that he had fought, had
by the strength of his persistency twisted into new channels so that they
had expressed themselves in definite things, in corn-cutting machines and
in machines for unloading coal cars and for gathering hay out of a field
and loading it on wagons without aid of human hands, were still dreams and
capable of arousing dreams in others. They awoke dreams in the mind of the
woman. The figures of other men that had been playing through her mind
slipped away and but the one figure remained. Her mind made up stories
concerning Hugh. She had read the absurd tale that had been printed in the
Cleveland paper and her fancy took hold of it. Like every other citizen
of America she believed in heroes. In books and magazines she had read
of heroic men who had come up out of poverty by some strange alchemy to
combine in their stout persons all of the virtues. The broad, rich land
demanded gigantic figures, and the minds of men had created the figures.
Lincoln, Grant, Garfield, Sherman, and a half dozen other men were
something more than human in the minds of the generation that came
immediately after the days of their stirring performance. Already industry
was creating a new set of semi-mythical figures. The factory at work in the
night-time in the town of Bidwell became, to the mind of the woman sitting
by the window in the farm house, not a factory but a powerful animal,
a powerful beast-like thing that Hugh had tamed and made useful to his
fellows. Her mind ran forward and took the taming of the beast for granted.
The hunger of her generation found a voice in her. Like every one else she
wanted heroes, and Hugh, to whom she had never talked and about whom she
knew nothing, became a hero. Her father, Alfred Buckley, Steve Hunter and
the rest were after all pigmies. Her father was a schemer; he had even
schemed to get her married, perhaps to further his own plans. In reality
his schemes were so ineffective that she did not need to be angry with him.
There was but one man of them all who was not a schemer. Hugh was what she
wanted to be. He was a creative force. In his hands dead inanimate things
became creative forces. He was what she wanted not herself but perhaps a
son, to be. The thought, at last definitely expressed, startled Clara, and
she arose from the chair by the window and prepared to go to bed. Something
within her body ached, but she did not allow herself to pursue further the
thoughts she had been having.
On the day when she went with her father and Alfred Buckley to visit Hugh's
shop, Clara knew that she wanted to marry the man she would see there. The
thought was not expressed in her but slept like a seed newly planted in
fertile soil. She had herself managed that she be taken to the factory and
had also managed that she be left with Hugh while the two men went to look
at the half-completed hay-loader at the back of the shop.
She had begun talking to Hugh while the four people stood on the little
grass plot before the shop. They went inside and her father and Buckley
went through a door toward the rear. She stopped by a bench and as she
continued talking Hugh was compelled to stop and stand beside her. She
asked questions, paid him vague compliments, and as he struggled, trying to
make conversation, she studied him. To cover his confusion he half turned
away and looked out through a window into Turner's Pike. His eyes, she
decided, were nice. They were somewhat small, but there was something gray
and cloudy in them, and the gray cloudiness gave her confidence in the
person behind the eyes. She could, she felt, trust him. There was something
in his eyes that was like the things most grateful to her own nature,
the sky seen across an open stretch of country or over a river that ran
straight away into the distance. Hugh's hair was coarse like the mane of a
horse, and his nose was like the nose of a horse. He was, she decided, very
like a horse; an honest, powerful horse, a horse that was humanized by the
mysterious, hungering thing that expressed itself through his eyes. "If I
have to live with an animal; if, as Kate Chanceller once said, we women
have to decide what other animal we are to live with before we can begin
being humans, I would rather live with a strong, kindly horse than a wolf
or a wolfhound," she found herself thinking.
CHAPTER XIV
Hugh had no suspicion that Clara had him under consideration as a possible
husband. He knew nothing about her, but after she went away he began to
think. She was a woman and good to look upon and at once took Rose McCoy's
place in his mind. All unloved men and many who are loved play in a half
subconscious way with the figures of many women as women's minds play with
the figures of men, seeing them in many situations, vaguely caressing them,
dreaming of closer contacts. With Hugh the impulse toward women had started
late, but it was becoming every day more active. When he talked to Clara
and while she stayed in his presence, he was more embarrassed than he had
ever been before, because he was more conscious of her than he had ever
been of any other woman. In secret he was not the modest man he thought
himself. The success of his corn-cutting machine and his car-dumping
apparatus and the respect, amounting almost to worship, he sometimes saw in
the eyes of the people of the Ohio town had fed his vanity. It was a time
when all America was obsessed with one idea, and to the people of Bidwell
nothing could be more important, necessary and vital to progress than the
things Hugh had done. He did not walk and talk like the other people of the
town, and his body was over-large and loosely put together, but in secret
he did not want to be different even in a physical way. Now and then there
came an opportunity for a test of physical strength: an iron bar was to be
lifted or a part of some heavy machine swung into place in the shop. In
such a test he had found he could lift almost twice the load another could
handle. Two men grunted and strained, trying to lift a heavy bar off the
floor and put it on a bench. He came along and did the job alone and
without apparent effort.
In his room at night or in the late afternoon or evening in the summer when
he walked on country roads, he sometimes felt keen hunger for recognition
of his merits from his fellows, and having no one to praise him, he praised
himself. When the Governor of the State spoke in praise of him before a
crowd and when he made Rose McCoy come away because it seemed immodest for
him to stay and hear such words, he found himself unable to sleep. After
tossing in his bed for two or three hours he got up and crept quietly out
of the house. He was like a man who, having an unmusical voice, sings to
himself in a bath-room while the water is making a loud, splashing noise.
On that night Hugh wanted to be an orator. As he stumbled in the darkness
along Turner's Pike he imagined himself Governor of a State addressing
a multitude of people. A mile north of Pickleville a dense thicket grew
beside the road, and Hugh stopped and addressed the young trees and bushes.
In the darkness the mass of bushes looked not unlike a crowd standing at
attention, listening. The wind blew and played in the thick, dry growth and
there was a sound as of many voices whispering words of encouragement. Hugh
said many foolish things. Expressions he had heard from the lips of Steve
Hunter and Tom Butterworth came into his mind and were repeated by his
lips. He spoke of the swift growth that had come to the town of Bidwell
as though it were an unmixed blessing, the factories, the homes of happy,
contented people, the coming of industrial development as something akin to
a visit of the gods. Rising to the height of egotism he shouted, "I have
done it. I have done it."
Hugh heard a buggy coming along the road and fled into the thicket. A
farmer, who had gone to town for the evening and who had stayed after the
political meeting to talk with other farmers in Ben Head's saloon, went
homeward, asleep in his buggy. His head nodded up and down, heavy with
the vapors rising from many glasses of beer. Hugh came out of the thicket
feeling somewhat ashamed. The next day he wrote a letter to Sarah Shepherd
and told her of his progress. "If you or Henry want any money, I can let
you have all you want," he wrote, and did not resist the temptation to tell
her something of what the Governor had said of his work and his mind.
"Anyway they must think I amount to something whether I do or not," he said
wistfully.
Having awakened to his own importance in the life about him, Hugh wanted
direct, human appreciation. After the failure of the effort both he and
Rose had made to break through the wall of embarrassment and reserve that
kept them apart, he knew pretty definitely that he wanted a woman, and
the idea, once fixed in his mind, grew to gigantic proportions. All women
became interesting, and he looked with hungry eyes at the wives of the
workmen who sometimes came to the shop door to pass a word with their
husbands, at young farm girls who drove along Turner's Pike on summer
afternoons, town girls who walked in the Bidwell Main Street in the
evening, at fair women and dark women. As he wanted a woman more
consciously and determinedly he became more afraid of individual women. His
success and his association with the workmen in his shop had made him less
self-conscious in the presence of men, but the women were different. In
their presence he was ashamed of his secret thoughts of them.
On the day when he was left alone with Clara, Tom Butterworth and Alfred
Buckley stayed at the back of the shop for nearly twenty minutes. It was a
hot day and beads of sweat stood on Hugh's face. His sleeves were rolled to
his elbows and his hands and hairy arms were covered with shop grime. He
put up his hand to wipe the sweat from his forehead, leaving a long, black
mark. Then he became aware of the fact that as she talked the woman looked
at him in an absorbed, almost calculating way. It was as though he were a
horse and she were a buyer examining him to be sure he was sound and of
a kindly disposition. While she stood beside him her eyes were shining
and her cheeks were flushed. The awakening, assertive male thing in him
whispered that the flush on her cheeks and the shining eyes were indicative
of something. His mind had been taught that lesson by the slight and wholly
unsatisfactory experience with the school teacher at his boarding-house.
Clara drove away from the shop with her father and Alfred Buckley. Tom
drove and Alfred Buckley leaned forward and talked. "You must find out
whether or not Steve has an option on the new tool. It would be foolish to
ask outright and give ourselves away. That inventor is stupid and vain.
Those fellows always are. They appear to be quiet and shrewd, but they
always let the cat out of the bag. The thing to do is to flatter him in
some way. A woman could find out all he knows in ten minutes." He turned to
Clara and smiled. There was something infinitely impertinent in the fixed,
animal-like stare of his eyes. "We do take you into our plans, your father
and me, eh?" he said. "You must be careful not to give us away when you
talk to that inventor."
From his shop window Hugh stared at the backs of the heads of the three
people. The top of Tom Butterworth's buggy had been let down, and when he
talked Alfred Buckley leaned forward and his head disappeared. Hugh thought
Clara must look like the kind of woman men meant when they spoke of a lady.
The farmer's daughter had an instinct for clothes, and Hugh's mind got the
idea of gentility by way of the medium of clothes. He thought the dress
she had worn the most stylish thing he had ever seen. Clara's friend Kate
Chanceller, while mannish in her dress, had an instinct for style and had
taught Clara some valuable lessons. "Any woman can dress well if she knows
how," Kate had declared. She had taught Clara how to study and emphasize by
dress the good points of her body. Beside Clara, Rose McCoy looked dowdy
and commonplace.
Hugh went to the rear of his shop to where there was a water-tap and washed
his hands. Then he went to a bench and tried to take up the work he had
been doing. Within five minutes he went to wash his hands again. He went
out of the shop and stood beside the small stream that rippled along
beneath willow bushes and disappeared under the bridge beneath Turner's
Pike, and then went back for his coat and quit work for the day. An
instinct led him to go past the creek again and he knelt on the grass at
the edge and again washed his hands.
Hugh's growing vanity was fed by the thought that Clara was interested in
him, but it was not yet strong enough to sustain the thought. He took a
long walk, going north from the shop along Turner's Pike for two or three
miles and then by a cross road between corn and cabbage fields to where he
could, by crossing a meadow, get into a wood. For an hour he sat on a log
at the wood's edge and looked south. Away in the distance, over the roofs
of the houses of the town, he could see a white speck against a background
of green--the Butterworth farm house. Almost at once he decided that the
thing he had seen in Clara's eyes and that was sister to something he had
seen in Rose McCoy's eyes had nothing to do with him. The mantle of vanity
he had been wearing dropped off and left him naked and sad. "What would she
be wanting of me?" he asked himself, and got up from the log to look with
critical eyes at his long, bony body. For the first time in two or three
years he thought of the words so often repeated in his presence by Sarah
Shepard in the first few months after he left his father's shack by the
shore of the Mississippi River and came to work at the railroad station.
She had called his people lazy louts and poor white trash and had railed
against his inclination to dreams. By struggle and work he had conquered
the dreams but could not conquer his ancestry, nor change the fact that he
was at bottom poor white trash. With a shudder of disgust he saw himself
again a boy in ragged clothes that smelled of fish, lying stupid and half
asleep in the grass beside the Mississippi River. He forgot the majesty of
the dreams that sometimes came to him, and only remembered the swarms of
flies that, attracted by the filth of their clothes, hovered over him and
over the drunken father who lay sleeping beside him.
A lump arose in his throat and for a moment he was consumed with self-pity.
Then he went out of the wood, crossed the field, and with his peculiar,
long, shambling gait that got him over the ground with surprising rapidity,
went again along the road. Had there been a stream nearby he would have
been tempted to tear off his clothes and plunge in. The notion that he
could ever become a man who would in any way be attractive to a woman like
Clara Butterworth seemed the greatest folly in the world. "She's a lady.
What would she be wanting of me? I ain't fitten for her. I ain't fitten for
her," he said aloud, unconsciously falling into the dialect of his father.
Hugh walked the entire afternoon away and in the evening went back to his
shop and worked until midnight. So energetically did he work that several
knotty problems in the construction of the hay-loading apparatus were
cleared away.
On the second evening after the encounter with Clara, Hugh went for a walk
in the streets of Bidwell. He thought of the work on which he had been
engaged all day and then of the woman he had made up his mind he could
under no circumstances win. As darkness came on he went into the country,
and at nine returned along the railroad tracks past the corn-cutter
factory. The factory was working day and night, and the new plant, also
beside the tracks and but a short distance away, was almost completed.
Behind the new plant was a field Tom Butterworth and Steve Hunter had
bought and laid out in streets of workingmen's houses. The houses were
cheaply constructed and ugly, and in all directions there was a vast
disorder; but Hugh did not see the disorder or the ugliness of the
buildings. The sight that lay before him strengthened his waning vanity.
Something of the loose shuffle went out of his stride and he threw back his
shoulders. "What I have done here amounts to something. I'm all right," he
thought, and had almost reached the old corn-cutter plant when several men
came out of a side door and getting upon the tracks, walked before him.
In the corn-cutter plant something had happened that excited the men. Ed
Hall the superintendent had played a trick on his fellow townsmen. He had
put on overalls and gone to work at a bench in a long room with some fifty
other men. "I'm going to show you up," he said, laughing. "You watch me.
We're behind on the work and I'm going to show you up."
The pride of the workmen had been touched, and for two weeks they had
worked like demons to outdo the boss. At night when the amount of work done
was calculated, they laughed at Ed. Then they heard that the piece-work
plan was to be installed in the factory, and were afraid they would be paid
by a scale calculated on the amount of work done during the two weeks of
furious effort.
The workman who stumbled along the tracks cursed Ed Hall and the men for
whom he worked. "I lost six hundred dollars in the plant-setting machine
failure and this is all I get, to be played a trick on by a young suck like
Ed Hall," a voice grumbled. Another voice took up the refrain. In the dim
light Hugh could see the speaker, a man with a bent back, a product of the
cabbage fields, who had come to town to find employment. Although he did
not recognize it, he had heard the voice before. It came from a son of
the cabbage farmer, Ezra French and was the same voice he had once heard
complaining at night as the French boys crawled across a cabbage field in
the moonlight. The man now said something that startled Hugh. "Well," he
declared, "it's a joke on me. I quit Dad and made him sore; now he won't
take me back again. He says I'm a quitter and no good. I thought I'd come
to town to a factory and find it easier here. Now I've got married and have
to stick to my job no matter what they do. In the country I worked like a
dog a few weeks a year, but here I'll probably have to work like that all
the time. It's the way things go. I thought it was mighty funny, all this
talk about the factory work being so easy. I wish the old days were back. I
don't see how that inventor or his inventions ever helped us workers. Dad
was right about him. He said an inventor wouldn't do nothing for workers.
He said it would be better to tar and feather that telegraph operator. I
guess Dad was right."
The swagger went out of Hugh's walk and he stopped to let the men pass out
of sight and hearing along the track. When they had gone a little away a
quarrel broke out. Each man felt the others must be in some way responsible
for his betrayal in the matter of the contest with Ed Hall and accusations
flew back and forth. One of the men threw a heavy stone that ran down along
the tracks and jumped into a ditch filled with dry weeds. It made a heavy
crashing sound. Hugh heard heavy footsteps running. He was afraid the men
were going to attack him, and climbed over a fence, crossed a barnyard, and
got into an empty street. As he went along trying to understand what had
happened and why the men were angry, he met Clara Butterworth, standing and
apparently waiting for him under a street lamp.
* * * * *
Hugh walked beside Clara, too perplexed to attempt to understand the new
impulses crowding in upon his mind. She explained her presence in the
street by saying she had been to town to mail a letter and intended walking
home by a side road. "You may come with me if you're just out for a walk,"
she said. The two walked in silence. Hugh's mind, unaccustomed to traveling
in wide circles, centered on his companion. Life seemed suddenly to
be crowding him along strange roads. In two days he had felt more new
emotions and had felt them more deeply than he would have thought possible
to a human being. The hour through which he had just passed had been
extraordinary. He had started out from his boarding-house sad and
depressed. Then he had come by the factories and pride in what he thought
he had accomplished swept in on him. Now it was apparent the workers in the
factories were not happy, that there was something the matter. He wondered
if Clara would know what was wrong and would tell him if he asked. He
wanted to ask many questions. "That's what I want a woman for. I want
some one close to me who understands things and will tell me about them,"
he thought. Clara remained silent and Hugh decided that she, like the
complaining workman stumbling along the tracks, did not like him. The
man had said he wished Hugh had never come to town. Perhaps every one in
Bidwell secretly felt that way.
Hugh was no longer proud of himself and his achievements. Perplexity had
captured him. When he and Clara got out of town into a country road, he
began thinking of Sarah Shepard, who had been friendly and kind to him when
and put the other about the waist of his companion. The two heads sought
each other and lips met. They clung to each other. The same moon that shed
its light on Rose McCoy in the distant farmhouse lighted the open place
where the lovers sat in the buggy in the road. Hugh had to close his eyes
and fight to put down an almost overpowering physical hunger in himself.
His mind still protested that women were not for him. When his fancy made
for him a picture of the school teacher Rose McCoy sleeping in a bed, he
saw her only as a chaste white thing to be worshiped from afar and not to
be approached, at least not by himself. Again he opened his eyes and looked
at the lovers whose lips still clung together. His long slouching body
stiffened and he sat up very straight in his chair. Then he closed his eyes
again. A gruff voice broke the silence. "That's for Mike," it shouted and a
great chunk of coal thrown from the train bounded across the potato patch
and struck against the back of the house. Downstairs he could hear old Mrs.
McCoy getting out of bed to secure the prize. The train passed and the
lovers in the buggy sank away from each other. In the silent night Hugh
could hear the regular beat of the hoofs of the farmer boy's horse as it
carried him and his woman away into the darkness.
The two people, living in the house with the old woman who had almost
finished her life, and themselves trying feebly to reach out to life, never
got to anything very definite in relation to each other. One Saturday
evening in the late fall the Governor of the State came to Bidwell. There
was a parade to be followed by a political meeting and the Governor, who
was a candidate for re-election, was to address the people from the steps
of the town hall. Prominent citizens were to stand on the steps beside the
Governor. Steve and Tom were to be there, and they had asked Hugh to come,
but he had refused. He asked Rose McCoy to go to the meeting with him, and
they set out from the house at eight o'clock and walked to town. Then they
stood at the edge of the crowd in the shadow of a store building and
listened to the speech. To Hugh's amazement his name was mentioned. The
Governor spoke of the prosperity of the town, indirectly hinting that
it was due to the political sagacity of the party of which he was a
representative, and then mentioned several individuals also partly
responsible. "The whole country is sweeping forward to new triumphs under
our banner," he declared, "but not every community is so fortunate as I
find you here. Labor is employed at good wages. Life here is fruitful and
happy. You are fortunate here in having among you such business men as
Steven Hunter and Thomas Butterworth; and in the inventor Hugh McVey you
have one of the greatest intellects and the most useful men that ever lived
to help lift the burden off the shoulder of labor. What his brain is doing
for labor, our party is doing in another way. The protective tariff is
really the father of modern prosperity."
The speaker paused and a cheer arose from the crowd. Hugh took hold of the
school teacher's arm and drew her away down a side street. They walked home
in silence, but when they got to the house and were about to go in, the
school teacher hesitated. She wanted to ask Hugh to walk about in the
darkness with her but did not have the courage of her desires. As they
stood at the gate and as the tall man with the long serious face looked
down at her, she remembered the speaker's words. "How could he care for me?
How could a man like him care anything for a homely little school teacher
like me?" she asked herself. Aloud she said something quite different. As
they had come along Turner's Pike she had made up her mind she would boldly
suggest a walk under the trees along Turner's Pike beyond the bridge, and
had told herself that she would later lead him to the place beside the
stream and in the shadow of the old pickle factory where she and George
Pike had come so near being lovers. Instead she hesitated for a moment by
the gate and then laughed awkwardly and passed in. "You should be proud. I
would be proud if I could be spoken of like that. I don't see why you keep
living here in a cheap little house like ours," she said.
On a warm spring Sunday night during the year in which Clara Butterworth
came back to Bidwell to live, Hugh made what was for him an almost
desperate effort to approach the school teacher. It had been a rainy
afternoon and Hugh had spent a part of it in the house. He came over from
his shop at noon and went to his room. When she was at home the school
teacher occupied a room next his own. The mother who seldom left the house
had on that day gone to the country to visit a brother. The daughter got
dinner for herself and Hugh and he tried to help her wash the dishes. A
plate fell out of his hands and its breaking seemed to break the silent,
embarrassed mood that had possession of them. For a few minutes they were
children and acted like children. Hugh picked up another plate and the
school teacher told him to put it down. He refused. "You're as awkward as a
puppy. How you ever manage to do anything over at that shop of yours is
more than I know."
Hugh tried to keep hold of the plate which the school teacher tried to
snatch away and for a few minutes they struggled laughing. Her cheeks were
flushed and Hugh thought she looked bewitching. An impulse he had never had
before came to him. He wanted to shout at the top of his lungs, throw the
plate at the ceiling, sweep all of the dishes off the table and hear them
crash on the floor, play like some huge animal loose in a tiny world. He
looked at Rose and his hands trembled from the strength of the strange
impulse. As he stood staring she took the plate out of his hand and went
into the kitchen. Not knowing what else to do he put on his hat and went
for a walk. Later he went to the shop and tried to work, but his hand
trembled when he tried to hold a tool and the hay-loading apparatus on
which he was at work seemed suddenly a very trivial and unimportant thing.
At four o'clock Hugh got back to the house and found it apparently empty,
although the door leading to Turner's Pike was open. The rain had stopped
falling and the sun struggled to work its way through the clouds. He went
upstairs to his own room and sat on the edge of his bed. The conviction
that the daughter of the house was in her room next door came to him, and
although the thought violated all the beliefs he had ever held regarding
women in relation to himself, he decided that she had gone to her room to
be near him when he came in. For some reason he knew that if he went to
her door and knocked she would not be surprised and would not refuse him
admission. He took off his shoes and set them gently on the floor. Then he
went on tiptoes out into the little hallway. The ceiling was so low that
he had to stoop to avoid knocking his head against it. He raised his hand
intending to knock on the door, and then lost courage. Several times
he went into the hallway with the same intent, and each time returned
noiselessly to his own room. He sat in the chair by the window and waited.
An hour passed. He heard a noise that indicated that the school teacher had
been lying on her bed. Then he heard footsteps on the stairs, and presently
saw her go out of the house and go along Turner's Pike. She did not go
toward town but over the bridge past his shop and into the country. Hugh
drew himself back out of sight. He wondered where she could be going.
"The roads are muddy. Why does she go out? Is she afraid of me?" he asked
himself. When he saw her turn at the bridge and look back toward the house,
his hands trembled again. "She wants me to follow. She wants me to go with
her," he thought.
Hugh did presently go out of the house and along the road but did not meet
the school teacher. She had in fact crossed the bridge and had gone along
the bank of the creek on the farther side. Then she crossed over again on
a fallen log and went to stand by the wall of the pickle factory. A lilac
bush grew beside the wall and she stood out of sight behind it. When she
saw Hugh in the road her heart beat so heavily that she had difficulty in
breathing. He went along the road and presently passed out of sight, and a
great weakness took possession of her. Although the grass was wet she sat
on the ground against the wall of the building and closed her eyes. Later
she put her face in her hands and wept.
The perplexed inventor did not get back to his boarding house until late
that night, and when he did he was unspeakably glad that he had not knocked
on the door of Rose McCoy's room. He had decided during the walk that
the whole notion that she had wanted him had been born in his own brain.
"She's a nice woman," he had said to himself over and over during the
walk, and thought that in coming to that conclusion he had swept away all
possibilities of anything else in her. He was tired when he got home and
went at once to bed. The old woman came home from the country and her
brother sat in his buggy and shouted to the school teacher, who came out of
her room and ran down the stairs. He heard the two women carry something
heavy into the house and drop it on the floor. The farmer brother had given
Mrs. McCoy a bag of potatoes. Hugh thought of the mother and daughter
standing together downstairs and was unspeakably glad he had not given way
to his impulse toward boldness. "She would be telling her now. She is a
good woman and would be telling her now," he thought.
At two o'clock that night Hugh got out of bed. In spite of the conviction
that women were not for him, he had found himself unable to sleep.
Something that shone in the eyes of the school teacher, when she struggled
with him for the possession of the plate, kept calling to him and he got
up and went to the window. The clouds had all gone out of the sky and the
night was clear. At the window next his own sat Rose McCoy. She was dressed
in a night gown and was looking away along Turner's Pike to the place where
George Pike the station master lived with his wife. Without giving himself
time to think, Hugh knelt on the floor and with his long arm reached across
the space between the two windows. His fingers had almost touched the back
of the woman's head and ached to play in the mass of red hair that fell
down over her shoulders, when again self-consciousness overcame him. He
drew his arm quickly back and stood upright in the room. His head banged
against the ceiling and he heard the window of the room next door go softly
down. With a conscious effort he took himself in hand. "She's a good woman.
Remember, she's a good woman," he whispered to himself, and when he got
again into his bed he refused to let his mind linger on the thoughts of
the school teacher, but compelled them to turn to the unsolved problems he
still had to face before he could complete his hay-loading apparatus. "You
tend to your business and don't be going off on that road any more," he
said, as though speaking to another person. "Remember she's a good woman
and you haven't the right. That's all you have to do. Remember you haven't
the right," he added with a ring of command in his voice.
CHAPTER XIII
Hugh first saw Clara Butterworth one day in July when she had been at home
for a month. She came to his shop late one afternoon with her father and a
man who had been employed to manage the new bicycle factory. The three got
out of Tom's buggy and came into the shop to see Hugh's new invention, the
hay-loading apparatus. Tom and the man named Alfred Buckley went to the
rear of the shop, and Hugh was left alone with the woman. She was dressed
in a light summer gown and her cheeks were flushed. Hugh stood by a bench
near an open window and listened while she talked of how much the town had
changed in the three years she had been away. "It is your doing, every one
says that," she declared.
Clara had been waiting for an opportunity to talk to Hugh. She began asking
questions regarding his work and what was to come of it. "When everything
is done by machines, what are people to do?" she asked. She seemed to take
it for granted that the inventor had thought deeply on the subject of
industrial development, a subject on which Kate Chanceller had often talked
during a whole evening. Having heard Hugh spoken of as one who had a great
brain, she wanted to see the brain at work.
Alfred Buckley came often to her father's house and wanted to marry Clara.
In the evening the two men sat on the front porch of the farmhouse and
talked of the town and the big things that were to be done there. They
spoke of Hugh, and Buckley, an energetic, talkative fellow with a long jaw
and restless gray eyes who had come from New York City, suggested schemes
for using him. Clara gathered that there was a plan on foot to get control
of Hugh's future inventions and thereby gain an advantage over Steve
Hunter.
The whole matter puzzled Clara. Alfred Buckley had asked her to marry him
and she had put the matter off. The proposal had been a formal thing, not
at all what she had expected from a man she was to take as a partner for
life, but Clara was at the moment very seriously determined upon marriage.
The New York man was at her father's house several evenings every week.
She had never walked about with him nor had they in any way come close to
each other. He seemed too much occupied with work to be personal and had
proposed marriage by writing her a letter. Clara got the letter from the
post-office and it upset her so that she felt she could not for a time go
into the presence of any one she knew. "I am unworthy of you, but I want
you to be my wife. I will work for you. I am new here and you do not know
me very well. All I ask is the privilege of proving my merit. I want you to
be my wife, but before I dare come and ask you to do me so great an honor I
feel I must prove myself worthy," the letter said.
Clara had driven into town alone on the day when she received it and later
got into her buggy and drove south past the Butterworth farm into the
hills. She forgot to go home to lunch or to the evening meal. The horse
jogged slowly along, protesting and trying to turn back at every cross
road, but she kept on and did not get home until midnight. When she reached
the farmhouse her father was waiting. He went with her into the barnyard
and helped unhitch the horse. Nothing was said, and after a moment's
conversation having nothing to do with the subject that occupied both their
minds, she went upstairs and tried to think the matter out. She became
convinced that her father had something to do with the proposal of marriage
that he knew about it and had waited for her to come home in order to see
how it had affected her.
Clara wrote a reply that was as non-committal as the proposal itself. "I
do not know whether I want to marry you or not. I will have to become
acquainted with you. I however thank you for the offer of marriage and when
you feel that the right time has come, we will talk about it," she wrote.
After the exchange of letters, Alfred Buckley came to her father's house
more often than before, but he and Clara did not become better acquainted.
He did not talk to her, but to her father. Although she did not know it,
the rumor that she was to marry the New York man had already run about
town. She did not know whether her father or Buckley had told the tale.
On the front porch of the farmhouse through the summer evenings the two men
talked of the progress, of the town and the part they were taking and hoped
to take in its future growth. The New York man had proposed a scheme to
Tom. He was to go to Hugh and propose a contract giving the two men an
option on all his future inventions. As the inventions were completed
they were to be financed in New York City, and the two men would give up
manufacture and make money much more rapidly as promoters. They hesitated
because they were afraid of Steve Hunter, and because Tom was afraid Hugh
would not fall in with their plan. "It wouldn't surprise me if Steve
already had such a contract with him. He's a fool if he hasn't," the older
man said.
Evening after evening the two men talked and Clara sat in the deep shadows
at the back of the porch and listened. The enmity that had existed between
herself and her father seemed to be forgotten. The man who had asked her to
marry him did not look at her, but her father did. Buckley did most of the
talking and spoke of New York City business men, already famous throughout
the Middle West as giants of finance, as though they were his life-long
friends. "They'll put over anything I ask them to," he declared.
Clara tried to think of Alfred Buckley as a husband. Like Hugh McVey he
was tall and gaunt but unlike the inventor, whom she had seen two or three
times on the street, he was not carelessly dressed. There was something
sleek about him, something that suggested a well-bred dog, a hound perhaps.
As he talked he leaned forward like a greyhound in pursuit of a rabbit. His
hair was carefully parted and his clothes fitted him like the skin of an
animal. He wore a diamond scarf pin. His long jaw, it seemed to her, was
always wagging. Within a few days after the receipt of his letter she
had made up her mind that she did not want him as a husband, and she was
convinced he did not want her. The whole matter of marriage had, she was
sure, been in some way suggested by her father. When she came to that
conclusion she was both angry and in an odd way touched. She did not
interpret it as fear of some sort of indiscretion on her part, but thought
that her father wanted her to marry because he wanted her to be happy. As
she sat in the darkness on the front porch of the farmhouse the voices of
the two men became indistinct. It was as though her mind went out of her
body and like a living thing journeyed over the world. Dozens of men she
had seen and had casually addressed, young fellows attending school at
Columbus and boys of the town with whom she had gone to parties and dances
when she was a young girl, came to stand before her. She saw their figures
distinctly, but remembered them at some advantageous moment of her contact
with them. At Columbus there was a young man from a town in the southern
end of the State, one of the sort that is always in love with a woman.
During her first year in school he had noticed Clara, had been undecided
as to whether he had better pay attention to her or to a little black-eyed
town girl who was in their classes. Several times he walked down the
college hill and along the street with Clara. The two stood at a street
crossing where she was in the habit of taking a car. Several cars went
by as they stood together by a bush that grew by a high stone wall. They
talked of trivial matters, a comedy club that had been organized in the
school, the chances of victory for the football team. The young man was one
of the actors in a play to be given by the comedy club and told Clara of
his experiences at rehearsals. As he talked his eyes began to shine and he
seemed to be looking, not at her face or body, but at something within her.
For a time, perhaps for fifteen minutes, there was a possibility that the
two people would love each other. Then the young man went away and later
she saw him walking under the trees on the college campus with the little
black-eyed town girl.
As she sat on the porch in the darkness in the summer evenings, Clara
thought of the incident and of dozens of other swift-passing contacts
she had made with men. The voices of the two men talking of money-making
went on and on. Whenever she came back out of her introspective world of
thought, Alfred Buckley's long jaw was wagging. He was always at work,
steadily, persistently urging something on her father. It was difficult
for Clara to think of her father as a rabbit, but the notion that Alfred
Buckley was like a hound stayed with her. "The wolf and the wolfhound," she
thought absent-mindedly.
Clara was twenty-three and seemed to herself mature. She did not intend
wasting any more time going to school and did not want to be a professional
woman, like Kate Chanceller. There was something she did want and in a
way some man, she did not know what man it would be, was concerned in the
matter. She was very hungry for love, but might have got that from another
woman. Kate Chanceller would have loved her. She was not unconscious of
the fact that their friendship had been something more than friendship.
Kate loved to hold Clara's hand and wanted to kiss and caress her. The
inclination had been put down by Kate herself, a struggle had gone on in
her, and Clara had been dimly conscious of it and had respected Kate for
making it.
Why? Clara asked herself that question a dozen times during the early weeks
of that summer. Kate Chanceller had taught her to think. When they were
together Kate did both the thinking and the talking, but now Clara's mind
had a chance. There was something back of her desire for a man. She wanted
something more than caresses. There was a creative impulse in her that
could not function until she had been made love to by a man. The man she
wanted was but an instrument she sought in order that she might fulfill
herself. Several times during those evenings in the presence of the two
men, who talked only of making money out of the products of another man's
mind, she almost forced her mind out into a concrete thought concerning
women, and then it became again befogged.
Clara grew tired of thinking, and listened to the talk. The name of Hugh
McVey played through the persistent conversation like a refrain. It became
fixed in her mind. The inventor was not married. By the social system under
which she lived that and that only made him a possibility for her purposes.
She began to think of the inventor, and her mind, weary of playing about
her own figure, played about the figure of the tall, serious-looking man
she had seen on Main Street. When Alfred Buckley had driven away to town
for the night, she went upstairs to her own room but did not get into bed.
Instead, she put out her light and sat by an open window that looked out
upon the orchard and from which she could see a little stretch of the road
that ran past the farm house toward town. Every evening before Alfred
Buckley went away, there was a little scene on the front porch. When the
visitor got up to go, her father made some excuse for going indoors or
around the corner of the house into the barnyard. "I will have Jim Priest
hitch up your horse," he said and hurried away. Clara was left in the
company of the man who had pretended he wanted to marry her, and who, she
was convinced, wanted nothing of the kind. She was not embarrassed, but
could feel his embarrassment and enjoyed it. He made formal speeches.
"Well, the night is fine," he said. Clara hugged the thought that he was
uncomfortable. "He has taken me for a green country girl, impressed with
him because he is from the city and dressed in fine clothes," she thought.
Sometimes her father stayed away five or ten minutes and she did not say a
word. When her father returned Alfred Buckley shook hands with him and then
turned to Clara, apparently now quite at his ease. "We have bored you, I'm
afraid," he said. He took her hand and leaning over, kissed the back of it
ceremoniously. Her father looked away. Clara went upstairs and sat by the
window. She could hear the two men continuing their talk in the road before
the house. After a time the front door banged, her father came into the
house and the visitor drove away. Everything became quiet and for a long
time she could hear the hoofs of Alfred Buckley's horse beating a rapid
tattoo on the road that led down into town.
Clara thought of Hugh McVey. Alfred Buckley had spoken of him as a
backwoodsman with a streak of genius. He constantly harped on the notion
that he and Tom could use the man for their own ends, and she wondered if
both of the men were making as great a mistake about the inventor as they
were about her. In the silent summer night, when the sound of the horse's
hoofs had died away and when her father had quit stirring about the house,
she heard another sound. The corn-cutting machine factory was very busy and
had put on a night shift. When the night was still, or when there was a
slight breeze blowing up the hill from town, there was a low rumbling sound
coming from many machines working in wood and steel, followed at regular
intervals by the steady breathing of a steam engine.
The woman at the window, like every one else in her town and in all the
towns of the mid-western country, became touched with the idea of the
romance of industry. The dreams of the Missouri boy that he had fought, had
by the strength of his persistency twisted into new channels so that they
had expressed themselves in definite things, in corn-cutting machines and
in machines for unloading coal cars and for gathering hay out of a field
and loading it on wagons without aid of human hands, were still dreams and
capable of arousing dreams in others. They awoke dreams in the mind of the
woman. The figures of other men that had been playing through her mind
slipped away and but the one figure remained. Her mind made up stories
concerning Hugh. She had read the absurd tale that had been printed in the
Cleveland paper and her fancy took hold of it. Like every other citizen
of America she believed in heroes. In books and magazines she had read
of heroic men who had come up out of poverty by some strange alchemy to
combine in their stout persons all of the virtues. The broad, rich land
demanded gigantic figures, and the minds of men had created the figures.
Lincoln, Grant, Garfield, Sherman, and a half dozen other men were
something more than human in the minds of the generation that came
immediately after the days of their stirring performance. Already industry
was creating a new set of semi-mythical figures. The factory at work in the
night-time in the town of Bidwell became, to the mind of the woman sitting
by the window in the farm house, not a factory but a powerful animal,
a powerful beast-like thing that Hugh had tamed and made useful to his
fellows. Her mind ran forward and took the taming of the beast for granted.
The hunger of her generation found a voice in her. Like every one else she
wanted heroes, and Hugh, to whom she had never talked and about whom she
knew nothing, became a hero. Her father, Alfred Buckley, Steve Hunter and
the rest were after all pigmies. Her father was a schemer; he had even
schemed to get her married, perhaps to further his own plans. In reality
his schemes were so ineffective that she did not need to be angry with him.
There was but one man of them all who was not a schemer. Hugh was what she
wanted to be. He was a creative force. In his hands dead inanimate things
became creative forces. He was what she wanted not herself but perhaps a
son, to be. The thought, at last definitely expressed, startled Clara, and
she arose from the chair by the window and prepared to go to bed. Something
within her body ached, but she did not allow herself to pursue further the
thoughts she had been having.
On the day when she went with her father and Alfred Buckley to visit Hugh's
shop, Clara knew that she wanted to marry the man she would see there. The
thought was not expressed in her but slept like a seed newly planted in
fertile soil. She had herself managed that she be taken to the factory and
had also managed that she be left with Hugh while the two men went to look
at the half-completed hay-loader at the back of the shop.
She had begun talking to Hugh while the four people stood on the little
grass plot before the shop. They went inside and her father and Buckley
went through a door toward the rear. She stopped by a bench and as she
continued talking Hugh was compelled to stop and stand beside her. She
asked questions, paid him vague compliments, and as he struggled, trying to
make conversation, she studied him. To cover his confusion he half turned
away and looked out through a window into Turner's Pike. His eyes, she
decided, were nice. They were somewhat small, but there was something gray
and cloudy in them, and the gray cloudiness gave her confidence in the
person behind the eyes. She could, she felt, trust him. There was something
in his eyes that was like the things most grateful to her own nature,
the sky seen across an open stretch of country or over a river that ran
straight away into the distance. Hugh's hair was coarse like the mane of a
horse, and his nose was like the nose of a horse. He was, she decided, very
like a horse; an honest, powerful horse, a horse that was humanized by the
mysterious, hungering thing that expressed itself through his eyes. "If I
have to live with an animal; if, as Kate Chanceller once said, we women
have to decide what other animal we are to live with before we can begin
being humans, I would rather live with a strong, kindly horse than a wolf
or a wolfhound," she found herself thinking.
CHAPTER XIV
Hugh had no suspicion that Clara had him under consideration as a possible
husband. He knew nothing about her, but after she went away he began to
think. She was a woman and good to look upon and at once took Rose McCoy's
place in his mind. All unloved men and many who are loved play in a half
subconscious way with the figures of many women as women's minds play with
the figures of men, seeing them in many situations, vaguely caressing them,
dreaming of closer contacts. With Hugh the impulse toward women had started
late, but it was becoming every day more active. When he talked to Clara
and while she stayed in his presence, he was more embarrassed than he had
ever been before, because he was more conscious of her than he had ever
been of any other woman. In secret he was not the modest man he thought
himself. The success of his corn-cutting machine and his car-dumping
apparatus and the respect, amounting almost to worship, he sometimes saw in
the eyes of the people of the Ohio town had fed his vanity. It was a time
when all America was obsessed with one idea, and to the people of Bidwell
nothing could be more important, necessary and vital to progress than the
things Hugh had done. He did not walk and talk like the other people of the
town, and his body was over-large and loosely put together, but in secret
he did not want to be different even in a physical way. Now and then there
came an opportunity for a test of physical strength: an iron bar was to be
lifted or a part of some heavy machine swung into place in the shop. In
such a test he had found he could lift almost twice the load another could
handle. Two men grunted and strained, trying to lift a heavy bar off the
floor and put it on a bench. He came along and did the job alone and
without apparent effort.
In his room at night or in the late afternoon or evening in the summer when
he walked on country roads, he sometimes felt keen hunger for recognition
of his merits from his fellows, and having no one to praise him, he praised
himself. When the Governor of the State spoke in praise of him before a
crowd and when he made Rose McCoy come away because it seemed immodest for
him to stay and hear such words, he found himself unable to sleep. After
tossing in his bed for two or three hours he got up and crept quietly out
of the house. He was like a man who, having an unmusical voice, sings to
himself in a bath-room while the water is making a loud, splashing noise.
On that night Hugh wanted to be an orator. As he stumbled in the darkness
along Turner's Pike he imagined himself Governor of a State addressing
a multitude of people. A mile north of Pickleville a dense thicket grew
beside the road, and Hugh stopped and addressed the young trees and bushes.
In the darkness the mass of bushes looked not unlike a crowd standing at
attention, listening. The wind blew and played in the thick, dry growth and
there was a sound as of many voices whispering words of encouragement. Hugh
said many foolish things. Expressions he had heard from the lips of Steve
Hunter and Tom Butterworth came into his mind and were repeated by his
lips. He spoke of the swift growth that had come to the town of Bidwell
as though it were an unmixed blessing, the factories, the homes of happy,
contented people, the coming of industrial development as something akin to
a visit of the gods. Rising to the height of egotism he shouted, "I have
done it. I have done it."
Hugh heard a buggy coming along the road and fled into the thicket. A
farmer, who had gone to town for the evening and who had stayed after the
political meeting to talk with other farmers in Ben Head's saloon, went
homeward, asleep in his buggy. His head nodded up and down, heavy with
the vapors rising from many glasses of beer. Hugh came out of the thicket
feeling somewhat ashamed. The next day he wrote a letter to Sarah Shepherd
and told her of his progress. "If you or Henry want any money, I can let
you have all you want," he wrote, and did not resist the temptation to tell
her something of what the Governor had said of his work and his mind.
"Anyway they must think I amount to something whether I do or not," he said
wistfully.
Having awakened to his own importance in the life about him, Hugh wanted
direct, human appreciation. After the failure of the effort both he and
Rose had made to break through the wall of embarrassment and reserve that
kept them apart, he knew pretty definitely that he wanted a woman, and
the idea, once fixed in his mind, grew to gigantic proportions. All women
became interesting, and he looked with hungry eyes at the wives of the
workmen who sometimes came to the shop door to pass a word with their
husbands, at young farm girls who drove along Turner's Pike on summer
afternoons, town girls who walked in the Bidwell Main Street in the
evening, at fair women and dark women. As he wanted a woman more
consciously and determinedly he became more afraid of individual women. His
success and his association with the workmen in his shop had made him less
self-conscious in the presence of men, but the women were different. In
their presence he was ashamed of his secret thoughts of them.
On the day when he was left alone with Clara, Tom Butterworth and Alfred
Buckley stayed at the back of the shop for nearly twenty minutes. It was a
hot day and beads of sweat stood on Hugh's face. His sleeves were rolled to
his elbows and his hands and hairy arms were covered with shop grime. He
put up his hand to wipe the sweat from his forehead, leaving a long, black
mark. Then he became aware of the fact that as she talked the woman looked
at him in an absorbed, almost calculating way. It was as though he were a
horse and she were a buyer examining him to be sure he was sound and of
a kindly disposition. While she stood beside him her eyes were shining
and her cheeks were flushed. The awakening, assertive male thing in him
whispered that the flush on her cheeks and the shining eyes were indicative
of something. His mind had been taught that lesson by the slight and wholly
unsatisfactory experience with the school teacher at his boarding-house.
Clara drove away from the shop with her father and Alfred Buckley. Tom
drove and Alfred Buckley leaned forward and talked. "You must find out
whether or not Steve has an option on the new tool. It would be foolish to
ask outright and give ourselves away. That inventor is stupid and vain.
Those fellows always are. They appear to be quiet and shrewd, but they
always let the cat out of the bag. The thing to do is to flatter him in
some way. A woman could find out all he knows in ten minutes." He turned to
Clara and smiled. There was something infinitely impertinent in the fixed,
animal-like stare of his eyes. "We do take you into our plans, your father
and me, eh?" he said. "You must be careful not to give us away when you
talk to that inventor."
From his shop window Hugh stared at the backs of the heads of the three
people. The top of Tom Butterworth's buggy had been let down, and when he
talked Alfred Buckley leaned forward and his head disappeared. Hugh thought
Clara must look like the kind of woman men meant when they spoke of a lady.
The farmer's daughter had an instinct for clothes, and Hugh's mind got the
idea of gentility by way of the medium of clothes. He thought the dress
she had worn the most stylish thing he had ever seen. Clara's friend Kate
Chanceller, while mannish in her dress, had an instinct for style and had
taught Clara some valuable lessons. "Any woman can dress well if she knows
how," Kate had declared. She had taught Clara how to study and emphasize by
dress the good points of her body. Beside Clara, Rose McCoy looked dowdy
and commonplace.
Hugh went to the rear of his shop to where there was a water-tap and washed
his hands. Then he went to a bench and tried to take up the work he had
been doing. Within five minutes he went to wash his hands again. He went
out of the shop and stood beside the small stream that rippled along
beneath willow bushes and disappeared under the bridge beneath Turner's
Pike, and then went back for his coat and quit work for the day. An
instinct led him to go past the creek again and he knelt on the grass at
the edge and again washed his hands.
Hugh's growing vanity was fed by the thought that Clara was interested in
him, but it was not yet strong enough to sustain the thought. He took a
long walk, going north from the shop along Turner's Pike for two or three
miles and then by a cross road between corn and cabbage fields to where he
could, by crossing a meadow, get into a wood. For an hour he sat on a log
at the wood's edge and looked south. Away in the distance, over the roofs
of the houses of the town, he could see a white speck against a background
of green--the Butterworth farm house. Almost at once he decided that the
thing he had seen in Clara's eyes and that was sister to something he had
seen in Rose McCoy's eyes had nothing to do with him. The mantle of vanity
he had been wearing dropped off and left him naked and sad. "What would she
be wanting of me?" he asked himself, and got up from the log to look with
critical eyes at his long, bony body. For the first time in two or three
years he thought of the words so often repeated in his presence by Sarah
Shepard in the first few months after he left his father's shack by the
shore of the Mississippi River and came to work at the railroad station.
She had called his people lazy louts and poor white trash and had railed
against his inclination to dreams. By struggle and work he had conquered
the dreams but could not conquer his ancestry, nor change the fact that he
was at bottom poor white trash. With a shudder of disgust he saw himself
again a boy in ragged clothes that smelled of fish, lying stupid and half
asleep in the grass beside the Mississippi River. He forgot the majesty of
the dreams that sometimes came to him, and only remembered the swarms of
flies that, attracted by the filth of their clothes, hovered over him and
over the drunken father who lay sleeping beside him.
A lump arose in his throat and for a moment he was consumed with self-pity.
Then he went out of the wood, crossed the field, and with his peculiar,
long, shambling gait that got him over the ground with surprising rapidity,
went again along the road. Had there been a stream nearby he would have
been tempted to tear off his clothes and plunge in. The notion that he
could ever become a man who would in any way be attractive to a woman like
Clara Butterworth seemed the greatest folly in the world. "She's a lady.
What would she be wanting of me? I ain't fitten for her. I ain't fitten for
her," he said aloud, unconsciously falling into the dialect of his father.
Hugh walked the entire afternoon away and in the evening went back to his
shop and worked until midnight. So energetically did he work that several
knotty problems in the construction of the hay-loading apparatus were
cleared away.
On the second evening after the encounter with Clara, Hugh went for a walk
in the streets of Bidwell. He thought of the work on which he had been
engaged all day and then of the woman he had made up his mind he could
under no circumstances win. As darkness came on he went into the country,
and at nine returned along the railroad tracks past the corn-cutter
factory. The factory was working day and night, and the new plant, also
beside the tracks and but a short distance away, was almost completed.
Behind the new plant was a field Tom Butterworth and Steve Hunter had
bought and laid out in streets of workingmen's houses. The houses were
cheaply constructed and ugly, and in all directions there was a vast
disorder; but Hugh did not see the disorder or the ugliness of the
buildings. The sight that lay before him strengthened his waning vanity.
Something of the loose shuffle went out of his stride and he threw back his
shoulders. "What I have done here amounts to something. I'm all right," he
thought, and had almost reached the old corn-cutter plant when several men
came out of a side door and getting upon the tracks, walked before him.
In the corn-cutter plant something had happened that excited the men. Ed
Hall the superintendent had played a trick on his fellow townsmen. He had
put on overalls and gone to work at a bench in a long room with some fifty
other men. "I'm going to show you up," he said, laughing. "You watch me.
We're behind on the work and I'm going to show you up."
The pride of the workmen had been touched, and for two weeks they had
worked like demons to outdo the boss. At night when the amount of work done
was calculated, they laughed at Ed. Then they heard that the piece-work
plan was to be installed in the factory, and were afraid they would be paid
by a scale calculated on the amount of work done during the two weeks of
furious effort.
The workman who stumbled along the tracks cursed Ed Hall and the men for
whom he worked. "I lost six hundred dollars in the plant-setting machine
failure and this is all I get, to be played a trick on by a young suck like
Ed Hall," a voice grumbled. Another voice took up the refrain. In the dim
light Hugh could see the speaker, a man with a bent back, a product of the
cabbage fields, who had come to town to find employment. Although he did
not recognize it, he had heard the voice before. It came from a son of
the cabbage farmer, Ezra French and was the same voice he had once heard
complaining at night as the French boys crawled across a cabbage field in
the moonlight. The man now said something that startled Hugh. "Well," he
declared, "it's a joke on me. I quit Dad and made him sore; now he won't
take me back again. He says I'm a quitter and no good. I thought I'd come
to town to a factory and find it easier here. Now I've got married and have
to stick to my job no matter what they do. In the country I worked like a
dog a few weeks a year, but here I'll probably have to work like that all
the time. It's the way things go. I thought it was mighty funny, all this
talk about the factory work being so easy. I wish the old days were back. I
don't see how that inventor or his inventions ever helped us workers. Dad
was right about him. He said an inventor wouldn't do nothing for workers.
He said it would be better to tar and feather that telegraph operator. I
guess Dad was right."
The swagger went out of Hugh's walk and he stopped to let the men pass out
of sight and hearing along the track. When they had gone a little away a
quarrel broke out. Each man felt the others must be in some way responsible
for his betrayal in the matter of the contest with Ed Hall and accusations
flew back and forth. One of the men threw a heavy stone that ran down along
the tracks and jumped into a ditch filled with dry weeds. It made a heavy
crashing sound. Hugh heard heavy footsteps running. He was afraid the men
were going to attack him, and climbed over a fence, crossed a barnyard, and
got into an empty street. As he went along trying to understand what had
happened and why the men were angry, he met Clara Butterworth, standing and
apparently waiting for him under a street lamp.
* * * * *
Hugh walked beside Clara, too perplexed to attempt to understand the new
impulses crowding in upon his mind. She explained her presence in the
street by saying she had been to town to mail a letter and intended walking
home by a side road. "You may come with me if you're just out for a walk,"
she said. The two walked in silence. Hugh's mind, unaccustomed to traveling
in wide circles, centered on his companion. Life seemed suddenly to
be crowding him along strange roads. In two days he had felt more new
emotions and had felt them more deeply than he would have thought possible
to a human being. The hour through which he had just passed had been
extraordinary. He had started out from his boarding-house sad and
depressed. Then he had come by the factories and pride in what he thought
he had accomplished swept in on him. Now it was apparent the workers in the
factories were not happy, that there was something the matter. He wondered
if Clara would know what was wrong and would tell him if he asked. He
wanted to ask many questions. "That's what I want a woman for. I want
some one close to me who understands things and will tell me about them,"
he thought. Clara remained silent and Hugh decided that she, like the
complaining workman stumbling along the tracks, did not like him. The
man had said he wished Hugh had never come to town. Perhaps every one in
Bidwell secretly felt that way.
Hugh was no longer proud of himself and his achievements. Perplexity had
captured him. When he and Clara got out of town into a country road, he
began thinking of Sarah Shepard, who had been friendly and kind to him when