THEY followed the Susquehanna northward into Jean’s country—“my country” she had called it. They saw dawn and sunset brighten the glad water into silver and gold and bronze. They moved slowly, for it is sweet to loiter in that lovely valley when June is young, and a man in search of his soul may catch glimpses of it on the hilltops. When the days were hot they tramped at night and many pleasant adventures were theirs. We are foolish—we men—in our loving, thinking that we can hide the blind god’s arrow when it quivers in our hearts; and these men believed that each hid from the other his happiness in the knowledge that they journeyed toward her hills—“my country!” They loitered the more because Wayne knew she might not be there; she must be about her errands in the South and West, and he had no idea what effect her grandfather’s death might have had upon her affairs. At any rate it would be sweet to see the hills of her youth and the places that had known her.
They paused one afternoon at a little town to which their bags had been expressed. They had now come into the region where the irregular outlines of the anthracite breaker are roughly etched on the horizons, and Joe at once found acquaintances. The prospect of a baseball contest between the local nine and its formidable rival from a neighbouring town thrilled the community. Joe’s eligibility as an amateur was not discussed; the opposing nine openly boasted of a retired professional. He was got into uniform without ado, and put his left arm in commission with a few hours’ practice. The young fellow’s joy in this opportunity to display his skill emphasized to Wayne the irreconcilable difference between Jean Morley with her high aspirations and this young fellow with his childish ideals. There was no hour of the day that did not bring its thought of her.
Wayne sat amid a turbulent throng in the ball park and watched Joe with pride. And is there in the history of sport another game so exacting in its demands on skill, judgment and strength, so prolific of surprise, as our national game? Or did ever Greek athlete bend his lithe body into forms half so graceful as those seen a hundred times on the diamond in every contest! The shortstop at his nimble pick-up and throw has no points to yield to the Discobolus of Myron. Behold Joe Denny, a master of the pitcher’s art and all its subtle psychology! The man at the bat is less his antagonist than his victim. He plays upon doubt, hesitation, and suspense. His good nature, expressed in a half-ironic grin, is part of his equipment. That deliberate search for the proper footing, those tentative thrusts of his shoe into the earth, are features of his strategy. His glance at the bases is the most casual—never furtive or anxious. He holds the stage, the coolest figure in the scene. A declaration of war between powers is awaited less anxiously than his delivery. He caresses and woos the ball, but is at all times its master. He lifts it with a graceful sweep above his head; arms and body are in perfect agreement; the mind has devised the exact curve and speed of the flight, and the arm is shrewd in execution. The world leans to the ordained, controlled flight; there is quick after-play; and again young Atlas, a trifle bored by his applause, takes the ball into his hands and by wit and strength lures another batter to destruction. Whatever Joe’s right arm might have been, his left had its own peculiar cunning. After two innings he had the opposing batters at his mercy; his grin broadened under the stimulus of the cheering. He struck out three men in succession and the crowd was wild.
“They was fruit,” said Joe later, as he and Wayne ate supper in the village hotel. “They hadn’t any eye. They fanned before the ball started.”
“It’s too bad to waste you. You ought to go back into the game,” said Wayne. “You’d better write to those fellows who wanted you in New York before you cracked your arm. They’re always looking for talent.”
“Ain’t we goin’ to work? Ball playin’ ain’t work, it’s fun,” replied Joe; but Wayne knew that the taste of the joys of the game had whetted Joe’s appetite, and that only loyalty to himself kept him from going back to it.
A few nights later they walked into Denbeigh. This was Jean’s country at last and this was the town where she had grown to womanhood, and gone to school, and seen the dead men brought out of the pit. And here she and Joe had played together and had been sweethearts—this was in Wayne’s thought and not less in Joe’s we may well believe. But they did not speak her name and had not spoken it since the night Wayne visited Joe in the garage; and that was very long ago!
Wayne, more and more inexplicable to Joe, insisted that they should go to a miner’s boarding house, though there was a fair commercial hotel in the place. Wayne passed well enough for an American labourer now—big, vigorous, bearded, and shabby as to clothes. It was a question whether Joe, who had been faithful to his razor, did not inspire greater confidence in the beholder. A stranger in such a community is a marked man and his motives are sharply questioned; but Joe was on his own soil, and a power, it seemed, among the men of the pit, and he gave satisfactory assurances as to Wayne’s intentions. Pittsburg has few lines of contact with the anthracite country—a fact of which Wayne had been cognizant in choosing the upper Susquehanna for his exile, and his own name, if he had not dropped it, would have meant little here.
Joe had believed that when confronted by a day’s real work Wayne’s determination would weaken. Wayne was a man of whims, to be sure, but Joe had no illusions as to the nobility of labour, and having himself enjoyed the fleshpots of the Craighill kitchen he was confident that the food of the miner’s boarding house would give Wayne pause, if nothing else did. But Wayne kept doggedly to his resolution. He had received his commission to labour from Jean’s hands, and he had come into her country as into holy land. He was not a miner and under the law could not go down into the earth as he had expected, to wrest coal from its great caverns; but Joe found work for him as a teamster at the Florence colliery, hauling timbers and other supplies, and he himself instructed Wayne in his duties. The humour of the thing tickled Joe; Wayne Craighill with a pipe in his mouth, driving a mule team and running when the whistle blew, was certainly funny. And when the day’s work was done Wayne smoked and talked with the motley crowd at the boarding house and made them like him—as was his way. He caught a glimpse now and then, through the office window, of Craig, the chief engineer—a classmate of his at the “Tech,” bending over blue-prints of the workings; but they never met face to face.
Joe had found work for himself in the mines, and came up at night as black as the blackest, but with his cheer unabated. He watched Wayne carefully, believing that at any time the old passion for drink would reassert itself; and he wrote, with much labour, half-humorous post-card bulletins of Wayne’s doings to Walsh and Wingfield. “Thumping mules and eating boiled pork and greens with the Dagoes. Hasn’t drank a drop,” read one of these reports; and Walsh, growling and swearing in his glass box, gave currency to a report that Wayne was on a ranch in Colorado; but Paddock and Wingfield knew the truth and marvelled, and Paddock insisted that they must let the man have his way.
It must not be thought that Wayne Craighill was tamely submissive to this new order of life. His arms and back ached for the first week, but he profited by his wood-cutting in the Virginia hills where his palms had been well toughened by the axe. The little room in which he slept was without a single comfort that he had known; he had been fastidious at table, and only the honest appetite created by his day’s work made possible the food set before him. He was possessed by a righteous feeling that he was punishing his body for all its misdeeds; his spirit, too, was subjected to hourly humiliations. He had been cursed as a fool by a dull “boss,” but had swallowed the cursing meekly. At supper one night his neighbour produced a bottle of whiskey and passed it down the line. It was vile stuff, but the odour of it struck home. Wayne rose abruptly and almost ran from the room. And all this time he heard nothing of Jean, though he had seen the house where she had lived—a little cottage of one story, with a flower garden about it, now sadly gone to weeds. It had last been opened, he learned, when Andrew Gregory was buried from it. He passed it daily, picturing her as she had lived there and wondering if the place would ever know her again.
As his muscles hardened the day’s work worried him less, and he fell into the habit of taking long walks at night to exhaust his surplus energy. The goal of these was usually Golden Bridge, a point about a mile from town. The bridge—golden in nothing but its name—was a covered wooden structure of a picturesque type happily preserved in this region. He used to climb out on the stone pier at one end of it and sit there, hearing the song of the Susquehanna amid a blur of frog choruses and chants of insects. And these times were sacred to thoughts of Jean, for this was her country, these her hills, with their filmy scarfs of summer cloud thrown over their shoulders, and this her river, that had known all the years of her life. And there one night she came, as though in answer to his longing.
He sat huddled on the pier, clasping his knees and smoking, when he heard someone crossing the bridge behind him. He had rarely been disturbed by pedestrians, and this had endeared the place to him. He turned as a woman emerged from the covered way into the moonlight; and his heart knew her even before his eyes.
“Jean!”
He jumped down into the road and stood uncovered. She drew away, smothering a cry, for he was not the Wayne Craighill she had seen last in his sister’s house. Toil in the summer heat had trained him fine and his beard had aged him. They gazed at each other long, the moonlight flowing round them; then their hands met.
“I might have known it would be here,” she said half to herself, then aloud: “I have known this place always. They call it Golden Bridge—we children played here, and I used to sit on the bank over there and try to draw the bridge.”
They stood leaning on the stone barrier. She was hatless and dressed in white—the gown spoke of her new life.
“I just came this afternoon, and I’m staying with friends until I can sell the house—grandfather’s cottage; it’s mine now. I have work to do here—I kept my breaker boys until the last.”
The mention of her grandfather sent his memory clanging back to that dark night of Andrew Gregory’s death; but she seemed happy—it was her “country” and she was at home.
“I must go back. I came out here for old times’ sake, and I’m glad I saw you here first. I knew you were in Denbeigh.”
“How did you know?”
“Joe wrote me. He told me what you were doing—the hard work, and all about it. I wrote to him first—I wanted him to know that my going away to do the pictures made no difference, that I still felt bound to him, and that I was ready to marry him at any time.”
Her contact with the world had not, then, changed her feeling about Joe, as he had hoped it might. They turned toward town and she walked beside him, with her free stride, her shoulders erect, her head high.
“We have never mentioned you—Joe and I—not even when we came here. I came because you have lived here; I look up at these hills of yours every morning and feel that I am among friends. And they have helped me. It is because of you that I am here, Jean. I couldn’t do what I am doing here if it were not for you.”
“Please—you mustn’t say that!”
He bent his head stubbornly; but he knew that he must respect the line she had drawn between them.
“You didn’t go to Mr. Walsh? I thought you had made up your mind to do that.”
“I changed it; the evil got into me again. I was not ready. I haven’t got the devil out of my system, but the load’s a little lighter. I can get face to face with myself now occasionally—and that’s something I hadn’t done before. The face has changed a little,” he laughed. “I hardly know myself outwardly.”
His dress was that of the poorest labourer; he was coatless and carried his cheap cap in his hand.
“Nobody knows me here; I’m always forgetting whether I’m Smith or Jones. Joe allayed all suspicions—he’s been good to me.”
“Joe is a good boy; he was always that.”
“Jean!”
He had paused in the road and the despair Joe’s name had awakened in his heart was in his cry.
“He will never let you do it—you don’t believe yourself that he will take you at your word. Won’t you give me my chance?”
“No! No!”
“You don’t love him—you don’t care for him, Jean.”
“That isn’t it—that has nothing to do with it. I treated him cruelly, heartlessly, and it’s no question now of whether I care for him or not.”
“If he’s said his last word, that means that he doesn’t care—he doesn’t realize how much you are offering him.”
“You are not just to him; he understands it—everything—and he cares—that’s what makes it so hard!”
She ceased speaking and walked away a little and stood with hands clenched, as she tried to control the deep feeling that possessed her. He waited, not understanding; but the light broke upon him suddenly.
“Does he know about you and me, Jean? Is that the reason?”
“Oh, why do you ask me that?” she cried, answering by the evasion. “That hurt me more than anything else when he was so sick; I talked to him just before he left the parish house, and he was ill and weak, and I told him I was ready; but he wouldn’t do it—he wouldn’t come back because of you. You don’t understand how he loves you; how you are his great hero; how humbly he serves you. He would die for you. He wrote to me about it while I was away—letters that wrung my heart—they were all of you, how you were fighting to master yourself; and he was so proud of you for going to work here at the mines. I wouldn’t tell you this, only I don’t want you to think of him so contemptuously, as something to be lightly flung aside. He loves me in his foolish, boyish way as he always did from the time we were children; but he loves you more; it’s because of you that he never wavers in his refusal to take me back. I tell you this because I want you to appreciate him—what he has done for you—what he would do for you and me.”
He was touched, but not greatly, by what she said. Joe’s nobility was admirable enough—but it did not ease Wayne’s burden or brighten his hope. His impatience of restraint—lulled for a time by hard labour—flashed up like a fiery torch in his heart.
She talked now of her work, and of the places she had visited, winning and holding his interest.
“The best time I had was in the South. I went to some of the cotton-mill towns in North Carolina, and the little coloured children were great fun. But they were harder to do. They want me to illustrate a children’s Christmas book as soon as this is done—I suppose if I go on I shan’t come here any more. Grandfather was my only tie with the place.”
“I had just received your letter about him the evening your grandfather died. I had intended doing what I could, but my father had trifled with his case too long, and Mr. Gregory was at the house when I went up there that night. I had gone to the house for the last time.”
“Why?”
The question was unlike her, and he started guiltily. The truth about her grandfather’s death was one thing she must never know; but he was reassured at once. The question had sprung to her lips thoughtlessly.
“Oh, I beg your pardon! I didn’t mean to ask that.”
“It was inevitable. We irritated each other more and more, and then the break came. It was better that I should not go back any more.”
“I’m sorry it happened that way,” she replied.
They were at the edge of the town, and she put out her hand.
“I am glad I met you to-night—but I must not see you again. The people here would never understand it. But it pleases me that you came here; it brings you”—she hesitated—“it brings you nearer, some way, your being here in my country.”
“That’s why I came—because it is your country. We were at Gettysburg, Joe and I, and looking down on the battlefield where men had died, I thought of what they did there, and that brought back what you had said about labour; so I started for this place, knowing that if I could win my way to my own respect anywhere it would be here. And here I am, and I shall stay a while longer. Walsh will take me when I want to go—but I’m not sure of myself yet.”
“If I have helped, I am glad,” she said. He had kept her hand while he spoke, for this might be a long good-bye; and she laid her other hand lightly on his, an instant only, but his whole being tingled at the contact.
It was only a fleeting touch of hands, but they were nearer that moment than they had ever been before. They had gone far since that autumn afternoon when she had spurned him indignantly in the art gallery at Pittsburg. He lay awake until past midnight, thinking of her. Strangely enough, in spite of her reaffirmed obligation to Joe, she seemed less unattainable, more nearly of a world he knew. And as he sought words to express their relation to each other, they took this form: If there be, as men say, real differences that power and place and wealth create between man and man, she might never have attained to the station to which he was born; but by the sweat of his face he had climbed to hers.