The Cinder Buggy (23 page)

“Mrs. Thane wants you up to supper,” he said, abruptly.

“Thanks,” said John. “I’m ashamed of myself, tell her. I’ll stop in some evening.”

“You don’t know where it is,” said Thane.

“That’s so. Tell me how to find it.”

He wrote the directions down. Still, it was most indefinite. Some evening meant nothing at all. Thane took him by the shoulders and regarded him with an expression that John avoided.

“And I want you to come,” he said, with slow emphasis on the first pronoun. “To-morrow.”

“All right,” said John. “Meet me here at the office and I’ll go with you.”

It was a small house in a poor street, saved only by some large old trees. This surprised John, because Thane’s income was enough to enable them to live in a very nice way, in moderate luxury even. He was still more surprised at the indecorative simplicity of its furnishings. Thane’s nature was not parsimonious. He would not have stinted her. Then why had they set up a household more in keeping with the status of a first rate puddler than with that of the vice-president of a flourishing nail trust, receiving in salary and dividends more than twenty thousand a year? Yet simple, even commonplace as everything was there was evidence of taste beyond Thane’s. It must have been Agnes who did it.

The first thing Thane did on entering was to remove his collar and place it conspicuously on a table in the hallway by the foot of the staircase. “I forget that if I don’t see it going out,” he said. He unbuttoned the neck of his shirt, breathed and looked around with an air of satisfaction. “Beats living at a hotel,” he said, opening the door into a little front sitting room for John to see. “The only thing I picked out,” he said, “was that big chair,” referring to an enormous structure of hickory and rush that filled all one corner of the room. “I’ll show you upstairs,” he added. Coming to his own room he said: “This ain’t much to look at but that ain’t what it’s for. Nobody sees it.” It was furnished with a simple cot, another hickory chair and a plain pine table. On the table was a brass lamp ready to be lighted; also, tobacco jar, matches, some technical books, mechanical drawings, pencils and paper.

At the other end of the hall Thane stopped before a closed door. “She’s downstairs,” he said, at the same time knocking. He opened it softly, saying: “This is hers.” John got a glimpse of a little white bed, a white dressing table, some white chairs and two tiny pictures on the wall. A nun’s chamber could hardly have been more austere. He turned away. At the head of the staircase he looked back. Thane had momentarily forgotten him and was still standing on the threshold of the little white room gazing into it. Suddenly he remembered John, closed the door gently and joined him.

“We’ll see about supper,” he said, leading the way through the sitting room into the next one, where the table was spread.

Just then Agnes appeared from the kitchen, bearing a tray. John had another surprise. Her appearance made an unexpected contrast, so striking as to be almost theatrical. She wore a dainty apron. Behind that was an elaborate toilette. She was exquisite, lovely. His first thought was that she had prepared this effect for him. Yet he noticed that Thane was not in the least surprised. He looked at her calmly, taking it all for granted, as if this had been her normal way of appearing. And so it was.

She shook hands with John. Her manner was a little too cordial. “Supper is quite ready,” she said. “Please sit down.” She had served a joint
of
beef, mashed potatoes browned, some creamed vegetables. Thane surveyed the food.

“Nothing fried?” he said.

“Shall I fry you something?” she asked. “It won’t take a minute.” Her tone puzzled John. It expressed patience, readiness, even tractability, and yet submissiveness was in a subtle sense explicitly denied.

“I was only fooling,” Thane replied. He whetted the carving knife carefully, as for a feat of precision, ran his thumb over the edge and applied it to the roast with an extremely deft effect.

“Did you buy the house?” John asked. “It’s very charming.”

The note failed. He felt Agnes looking at him.

“Rent it,” said Thane. “Mrs. Thane thought we’d better rent a while, maybe as we’d want another shape of house afterward. I want her to get a girl. She says there ain’t nothing for a girl to do.”

There was a silence. John did not know which side to take. He spoke highly of the food.

“Mr. Thane tells me you also have left the hotel,” she said.

“You get tired of it,” John answered absently. He was wondering what to make of the fact that they were Mr. and Mrs. to each other. Twice he had been at the point of calling her Agnes. He wished to get one full look at her and tried to surprise her eyes. She avoided him. Then as if accepting a challenge she met his gaze steadily and utterly baffled his curiosity.

This time he could not be sure. A kind of wisdom was in her eyes that had never been there before. It might be only that she was on her guard, knowing the secret he was after.

Conversation suffered many lapses. There seemed so little they could talk about. All the three of them had in common was remniscent; and reminiscences were taboo. After supper they sat as far apart as three persons could in the small front room,—Thane in his big chair, Agnes in a stiff chair with some needlework over which her head was bent. Her knees were crossed. The men were fascinated by the swift, delicate, tantalizing, puncturing rhythm of her needle, and in the margin of John’s vision was exactly all she meant to be seen of a small silk-clad ankle and slippered foot.

If it was as he suspected, how could Thane endure it?

“We are very quiet,” she said, not looking up.

At that John began to talk about Thane,—of his work and the genius showing in it, of the methods he had evolved, of the things he had invented, of his way with his men and what a brilliant future he had. Agnes listened attentively, even tensely, as he could see, but made no comment; and Thane, sinking lower and lower in his chair, became intolerably embarrassed. He stopped it by beginning of a sudden to talk about John. He knew much less about John’s work, however, than John knew about his. For that reason the narrative fell into generalities and was not convincing. Agnes listened for a while and became restive. Suddenly she put her needlework away and asked if anyone would like refreshments. John looked at the time. It was past eleven o’clock and he arose to go. Thane would have detained him; Agnes politely regretted that he had to go so soon. Still, when she shook hands with him at the door her manner was spontaneous and warm and she pressed him to come again.

John walked about in the night without any mind at all. When his thoughts became coherent he found himself saying: “No. They are not man and wife. They are strangers. I wonder what goes on in that house. Why does she do it?... Why does she do it?”

Why did she?

A
S the door closed behind their visitor Agnes turned without speaking and went back to the front room where she sat at a little desk to write in a large black book. This was the last thing she did each day.

Thane leaned against the door jamb looking at her back. It was the view of her that sometimes thrilled him most. It made him see her again as she was that first night, in the moonlight, sitting at the edge of the mountain path, mysteriously averse. Approaching timidly he stood behind her chair, close enough to have touched her, as he longed to do if only he dared. He looked at his hands, turning them in the light; then at himself, downward, and was overcome with a sense of incongruity.

To him she was as untouchable as a butterfly. Her way of dressing so elaborately was at once an insurmontable barrier and a maddening provocation. Never did he see her in less formidable attire, not even at breakfast. Her morning gowns were forbidding in quite another way. Their effect was to put him on his sense of honor. If it should happen that he came home unexpectedly she was always in her room and when she appeared it was like this. Embellishment was her armor. It was constant and never slipped. Yet the need for it was only in those moments such as now when his feeling for her broke down his pride and moved him toward her in spite of himself. This was not often. It had happened only a few times since the first night in the hotel, when after supper she met his impulse by looking at him with such scorn and anger, even horror, that his desire instantly collapsed and left him aching cold. His pride was as black a beast as hers.

For a long time after that they had no way with each other, almost no way of meeting each other’s eyes. Then to his great surprise she offered truce, not in words but by implications of conduct. She became friendly and began to talk to him about himself, about his work and by degrees about themselves. It was she who proposed to take a house. She chose it, bought the things that went into it, ordered the pattern of their twain existence within its walls. He was for spending more money, telling her how much he made and how well they could afford having more. She was firm in her own way, asking him only if he were comfortable, and he was.

The only thing she would freely spend money for was clothes. He pondered this and found no clue to its meaning. They had no social life whatever. She never went out alone. Twice in a year they had been to the play and nowhere else. Except for the recurring frustrations of his impulse toward her, which left him each time worse mangled in his pride and filled with rage, shame and self-abomination, he was happy.

He had been standing there back of her chair for so long that he began to wonder if she was aware of his presence when she spoke abruptly.

“Yes?” she said, in a quick, sharp tone.

He quailed, with the look of a man turned suddenly hollow. His pride saved him. Without a word he turned and went upstairs. When his footsteps were near the top she called, “Goodnight.” Apparently he did not hear her. At least he did not answer. She went on writing.

The black book was the longer of her spirit’s solvency. Each night she wrote it up. There was first a record of all the money received from Thane. Then a record of all expenditures, under two heads,—money spent for household purposes, itemized, and money spent upon herself, for clothes, etc., unitemized. At the end of each month against her personal expenditures was entered,—“Item, to Agnes, for wages, $50.” If her personal expenditures exceeded her wage credit she wrote against the excess,—“Balance owing Alexander Thane, to be accounted for.”

Some day she would have a fortune of her own. Then she would return everything she had spent above her wages. That was what the record said. Anyone could see it at a glance. The book was always lying there on the desk. Perhaps covertly she wished he would have the curiosity to look into it and see what she was doing. He never did and he never knew. She meant sometime to tell him. What was the point of not telling him? Yet she didn’t, and the longer she put it off the more difficult it was, for a reason she was afraid to face. She would not face it for fear it was true. But even more she feared it might not be true.

So it appears that what went on in that house was as much an enigma to Thane as to John; and nobody could answer John’s question,—“Why does she do it?”—for Agnes who knew concealed the truth from herself.

T
HANE became vice-president also of the American Steel Company. Its capacity was greater than the need was for wire to make nails. For this reason the N. A. M. Co. enlarged its scope and began to make steel wire for all purposes, especially for that distinctively American product called barbed wire which ran the first year into thousands of miles of farm fencing. It was cheaper than the rude, picturesque rail fence which it immediately superseded and at the same time appealed in an unaccountable manner to the Yankee sense of humor.

Steel wire was indispensable to the steel age. There were bridges to be cast in the air like cobwebs, chasms to be spanned, a thousand giants to be snared in their sleep with threads of steel wire, single, double, or twisted by hundreds into cables. Enough of them would make a rope strong enough to halt the world in its flight if one end could be made fast in space. There could never have been a steel age without steel wire. But the steel age required first of all steel rails to run on. John saw this clearly. Iron rails wore out too fast under the increasing weight of trains; besides, the time had almost come when they simply couldn’t be made in quantities sufficient to meet the uncontrollable expansion of the railroad system. The importation of steel rails over the high tariff wall was increasing. American steel rails had been made experimentally, were still being made, but they were variable and much distrusted. When they were good they were excellent. They were just as likely to be very bad. They could not be guaranteed, owing to the variableness of steel obtained in this country by the Bessemer process.

This factor of variability was now eliminated by Thane’s celebrated mixer. For the first time there was the certainty of being able to produce American steel rails that would not only outwear iron as iron outwears oak, that would not only not break, that would not only be satisfactory when they were good, but rails that would be always the same and always good. It was natural that the American Steel Company should turn to rails. John knew the rail business upside down. He believed in railroads. When other people were thinking railroad building had been overdone he said it had not really begun. He imagined the possibility that the locomotive would double in size.

It did. Then it doubled again. It could not have done so without steel rails under its feet, and if it had not doubled and then doubled again this now would be a German world. Democracy even then was shaping its weapons for Armageddon through men who knew nothing about it. They were free egoists, seeking profit, power, personal success, everyone attending to his own greatness. Never before in the world had the practise of individualism been so reckless, so purely dynamic, so heedless of the Devil’s harvest. Yet it happened,—it precisely happened,—that they forged the right weapons. It seems sometimes to matter very little what men think. They very often do the right thing for wrong reasons. It seems to matter even less why they work. All that the great law of becoming requires is that men shall work. They cannot go wrong really. They cannot make wrong things. The pattern is foreordained.