Books: Life at High Tide

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"So she knew," he said, slowly. "After all, she knew. And I never
guessed." His head sank down on his arms.

It was a curious inconsistency in the mind of Ida Locke which had
prompted her to write in that red-covered note-book just what she had
written. No one would have guessed the secret strain of introspection
in her, nor guessed the impulse which led her to put into writing her
hidden life. Unless, indeed, that introspection and that impulse are
always part of the intuitions of love--yielded to or not, as may be.
The entries were scattered--as if put down when the stress of feeling
had overcome her. They ranged over the two years of their married
life. In each one she had seemed, with a startling lucidity, to have
apprehended exactly her husband's state of mind toward her. She had
written freely, baldly, without excess of sentimentality. "I know he
hates me sometimes; I see it in his eyes." Again: "He is hideously
kind." "He lives in a mental room that I can't break into." In another
place it ran: "Why is it? I am his mental equal; his superior in
education. I'm his wife and he asked me to marry him. And yet he can't
bear to have me near him. He hates me to-day." "I'm afraid," she wrote
again, "how Leonard will regard our child. If he should hate it, too.
Perhaps we shall both not live through it." And so it ran on, with
awful candor.

"I'm so sorry she had to know," Haldane sighed again and again. "And,
now, what's to be the end of it? What will Ida's mother do? Lord God,
she'll never forgive me--never."

* * * * *

Late that night Mrs. Locke came in. Haldane had scarcely stirred from
his chair. The note-book lay open before him on the desk. He looked at
her compassionately, for now his thoughts were all for the shrinking,
hurt woman beside him. She had never before seemed so fragile, so
dependent, and yet he could not but mark in her hearing a new
resolution of forces, a dignity as of a stern decision. Haldane did
not wait for her to question.

"You will want to know," he began, wearily, "if all this written here
is true. All this Ida wrote down. You want to ask me that? It's--it's
all true, quite true." He waited, but she gave no sign. "Quite true;
I--I suppose it wouldn't be worth while for me to explain things now.
You will think I've lied to you all along. In a way, I have. No, I
suppose you don't want to hear me make futile explanations, excuses."

"If there--there is anything to be said, Leonard, you had better say
it--now," she answered, nervously, twisting her handkerchief in her
fingers.

He hesitated painfully. "Everything I might say seems to be trying to
shift the load from my shoulders on to--another's," he said, at last.
"It was a mistake--that's all. A mistake for us. Before it began--our
marriage--it was different, but afterward--She was very good to me;
looked after me and all that, but--Oh, I'm afraid I'm only hurting you
the worse by saying all this. You won't, you can't understand. Let it
be that it was all my fault. It was, it was. Believe that, please....
And I know you won't want to stay here with me any longer--after this.
I quite understand that. A man who--who felt as she wrote it all down
here--such a man you wouldn't, you couldn't--" He stopped hopelessly.
"I can't bear to have you go," he burst out, impulsively. "Where will
you go? Back there to Iowa?"

She nodded sorrowfully.

"And have no more music? And--and--oh, it's cruel. _Why_ had you
to find it out? It didn't matter anyway when it was all done with. Why
_did_ you have to know? ... And you haven't any money. You must
let me help you. Let me do that--just that. Can't you forget it all
enough for that? Surely you've liked me--for what you've liked in me,
let me help you. Great heavens, if I thought of you alone out there,
without money--_Must_ you go?"

Haldane was fast losing control of himself. With an effort he pulled
himself together and tried to smile.

"You're right to go," he said. "Right. You wouldn't want anything to
do with me now."

He looked up at her, though loath to meet her eyes. There was a
wonderful pity in her face. "Don't!" he cried, sharply, not
understanding.

"I want to say this," he broke out again, almost roughly. "I never
guessed that she knew how I felt toward her. I wasn't cruel or
beastly--I was kind. They say that's cruelty, too. I tried--my God!
how I tried!--never to let her know the truth. That's all I can say
for myself; ... you'd better go."

She was so silent that at last he faced her again. She was crying
softly, and, it appeared, without bitterness. Haldane stared at her
curiously.

"I wanted to know that--that last you said," Mrs. Locke gasped, with
difficulty. "I--I--I've been thinking it all over in my room. It's very
hard to say--please let me go on with it just as I can, I--I've said I
wanted to hear that last. But I knew it--in my heart--all the time.
I knew you couldn't be cruel to a living thing. And--and--somehow--
it changed--things. I've had such a terrible struggle all alone. I've
tried to pray over it and--oh, I'm afraid I'm very wrong and very
wicked--I almost know I am." Her voice sank to a whisper. "But--oh,
Leonard ... somehow I just seemed to feel inside me just how you felt,
just how--it was with you those two years. Oh, it's a dreadful thing
to say, isn't it? Poor Ida! She was so good to me, and yet sometimes--"
The trembling old woman's voice faltered and broke.

Haldane's eyes were full of tears. A great light was slowly breaking
for him. He dared not speak.

"Don't think I'm a wicked old woman, Leonard; I never even
guessed--till I came here--how I felt. And then you were like a
son--my son--the boy I wanted so, and--I loved the music so, and being
with you, more than anything I ever knew--it doesn't seem as if--"

Haldane put his hand on hers gently, "As if you could go away now?"

She turned to him with a little sad smile, and in her face was a sweet
dignity.

"Yes, I cannot go--now, my son."

THE YEARLY TRIBUTE

BY ROSINA HUBLEY EMMET

"For science is a cruel mistress. She exacts a yearly tribute of flesh
and blood like the dragons of ancient pagan mythology."

The eminent scientist paused momentarily here and viewed the earnest
young faces before him. In this poetic figure of speech he saw fit to
present to them the hardships of the life they had chosen to embark
upon. It was a hot June morning, and the heavy scent of syringa came
in through the high uncurtained windows of the lecture-hall. All the
students stared with reverence at this distinguished stranger, who had
come a long distance to speak to the graduating class; and one of its
members sighed deeply and turned his eyes to the window, and watched
some maple leaves moving languidly against the blue sky. The lecturer
heard his sigh, saw him fall into abstraction, realized the peculiar
character of his face; and marked him as a man who would serve to the
end, possibly becoming one of the victims of that cruel mistress.

* * * * *

Pilchard and Swan had stopped to rest in the middle of the plaza. The
black Mexican night was falling and a few stars blossomed in the sky,
but there was no abatement in the heat which had held since sunrise;
rather, indeed, the thickness of the atmosphere seemed intensified.
The two Americans, who had spent a whole year in Mexico and become
accustomed to the climate, attempted to make themselves comfortable.
Pilchard sank to a dilapidated bench and lighted a cigarette; and
Swan, not having even sufficient spirit to smoke, stretched himself
bodily on the flat stones which paved the plaza, and placed his old
hat upon his upturned face.

Both young men seemed depressed, and without speaking they listened to
the moaning of the ocean which heaved and glistened in the distance;
and when Pilchard finally said, "So poor Murphy is gone too," and Swan
responded, "His troubles are over, poor fellow," it showed how
completely they had been absorbed in the same thought.

"And Mulligan last week," Pilchard continued, "and all the others who
went before, and Peele taken sick this afternoon. Swan, we're the only
white men left."

"And we've only got ten days left."

"Oh, I guess we can do it, so long as we're out of the swamp."

"So long as the swamp isn't in us."

They were alluding to the railroad they had come to Mexico to build.
The time-limit given in the contract would expire in ten days, and it
would be a race to get the tracks through the town and down to the new
docks in that time. Swan, whenever he thought of it, became restless,
and now he sat up with a jerk, and his old hat slipped off his face.
Even in that dim light Swan's ugliness was apparent. He measured over
six feet and was loose-jointed and ungainly; he had big flat feet, and
big bony, capable hands; and his features, which were big and bony
too, seemed in proportion to nothing but his general ungainliness.
Swan was an inventive Yankee with no background and no tradition. He
could not even claim the proverbial Connecticut farm. His people had
been dreary commercials in a middle-sized New Hampshire town, and he
had worked his way through college to fit himself for a scientific
career. His memory of his deceased parents was so colorless that it
seemed to Swan as if they had never existed, and his contacts had been
so dull, his outlook so dreary, that he had almost no conception of
beauty. His plain college room, where, by the hour, he had worked out
mathematical problems, and a grimy engine-room (which was the next
stage of his advancement), where he had stood in a greasy black shirt,
surrounded by an unceasing whir of machinery, and bossed a gang of
men--these had been the things which had substituted for him romance
and passion and life; and finally, when Pilchard, a college friend,
had persuaded him to come down to Mexico and build a railroad, he had
taken off his greasy black shirt and gone, principally because this
was such a big undertaking, and it would undoubtedly in the end lead
to something very much bigger.

The company which was causing the railroad to be built had established
large exporting-houses in San Francisco, which sent down certain
articles of merchandise to Mexico, and the railroad was designed to
transport this freight from one of the southwestern seaport towns to
the city of Mexico. The undertaking included the erection of docks
with swinging elevators to lift the freight from the vessels and
deposit it in the cars, and as the pay was very large and Pilchard was
an adventurous soul, he undertook the job when it was offered to him,
and going to the manager's office, impressed him with his boldness and
ability, and signed his name to the contracts without reading them
through; then gayly, and feeling no uneasiness, he buttoned his coat
over the neatly folded paper and went to see Swan.

Swan, in a greasy black shirt, was in the engine-room, hard at work,
and he was just about to reprimand one of the men when Pilchard came
in. Although it was early in May, a spell of precocious heat had taken
New York by the throat, and what with the whir of rapidly turning
wheels, and the smell of hot machine-oil and perspiring men, there was
something filthy and degraded about the atmosphere. Swan suddenly
realized this, although it was the only atmosphere he knew anything
about. Glancing upward, he saw a little patch of blue sky through the
top of one of the grimy windows ... a white cloud sailed past ... and
then another ... something akin to longing welled in his heart,
something like a wave of despair and hope, a desire to lift himself
into a higher and less degraded world.... He looked toward the door
and saw Pilchard, and crossing the room, he greeted him warmly and
read the contract Pilchard pulled from his pocket.

"That's a queer business," said Swan, when he had finished.

"How so?"

"Man alive, haven't you read what you've signed your name to?"

"Certainly I've read it."

"And you think you can put the job through in a year?"

"Why not?" asked Pilchard, with his "cock-sure" smile.

Swan, like every one else, was taken in by this smile, and to convince
himself he read the contract again, out loud this time, and in a
thoughtful way. Pilchard listened.

The contract guaranteed that a railroad covering two hundred and fifty
miles, between the city of Mexico and the little seaport of Zacatula,
on the Pacific Ocean, would be built and completed in one year's time,
work starting on the 25th of June. Docks and freight-elevators were
included in the work, and if the tracks were not in fit condition for
the trains to run by the date specified, every penny of the very large
pay would be forfeited by the builders. A strange contract, indeed!
Pilchard, however, as he heard it read, betrayed by no sign that he
was as much surprised as Swan.

"Well," said Swan, looking up and meeting that "cock-sure" smile, "you
think you can do it in a year?"

"I'm certain I can."

"Of course," Swan continued, not yet convinced, "it's the worst
country on earth; full of swamp and yellow fever."

"I'll run in a gang of Mexican Indians to lay the ties. They can stand
their own climate."

"But you'll have to take down some white men, too, good fellows who
know the business. You can't be the only man to do the bossing. It'd
kill you."

All this time Pilchard was closely watching Swan, and almost
unconsciously something had been growing in his mind. Swan had an
ugly, resolute face, and endurance seemed to be expressed in every
line of his body. Behind him the engine roared, and spit steam, and
ground out the produce of a great city factory; his face and hands
were grimy and covered with grease, and the black cinders around his
deep-set eyes gave him a terrible, deathly look. Pilchard saw
instantly that he must have Swan to do the work. He must take him down
to Mexico or else the railroad would never be built. Swan would come,
too, because there was a look of tragic fatigue in his deep-set eyes,
an expression of sick nausea in the lines about his mouth, that showed
how gladly he would change, how completely he had come to the end of
his hopes here; so Pilchard suggested with a careless smile that they
go down to Mexico together. "Of course," he said, "I don't say that it
mightn't be better for me to do it alone--two heads to a job, you
know, isn't always a good arrangement; but you've got a pretty mean
berth here. It'll take years for you to get a rise, and you're wasting
your youth and health shut up with this filthy gang of men. This job
of mine would push you right along, and you'll get others like it.
Better come."

Swan reflected. His work was the only thing on earth that he cared
for, and to progress in his work, to keep putting through more and
more difficult jobs, was what he had always aimed to do. But had he a
right to take advantage of Pilchard's generosity? He glanced around
the room, conscious of the incessant chattering of the different parts
of the engine, which he must keep going in order to turn out the
produce of a great city factory. He was no more here than one of the
many parts of that engine, and if some day he should be absorbed into
the midst of those whirring wheels and ground up like corn, who would
ever be the wiser?

So he went.

* * * * *

"Had a letter from the company today," Pilchard observed, suddenly.

"That so?"

"They're going to send a fellow down from Frisco on the steamer that
touches on the 25th. Everything plays into their hands. Steamer
reaches here the day the contract expires."

"Well, that's all right."

"They request that I meet the fellow and show him around."

"That's easy, too."

Pilchard breathed smoke through his nose in his self-possessed way,
and said nothing more, until Swan suddenly broke out:

"Well, I for one won't be sorry to get out of this hole. I'll get the
job done, of course, but we've just had a terrible setback. I think
Peele's dying."

"Lord!"

"I came away from him only half an hour ago. He may last through the
night, but I doubt it. Anyhow, if he lives or dies, we're devilish
pressed for time. I'm beginning to think we'll have to work at night,
too."

"At night?"

"There's a full moon. Here she comes now." Swan looked at the full
moon, which, as the darkness increased, grew in radiance.

Pilchard breathed more smoke through his nose, then said with a sigh:
"That's hard luck, Swan. I'm sorry."

"Hey?"

"And yet it's a lucky thing that you're as strong as you are. It's a
lucky thing you haven't got the responsibilities at home that I have."

"I don't see what you mean."

"Why, you know I'm engaged! I'm as good as married. That poor girl's
got everything ready for the wedding. You met her that day last year
you came up to Maine before we left New York."

"Yes, I met her."

"And you remember how much she thought of me?" Pilchard spoke slowly.
It was impossible to tell why he did so. Was it because he did not
care to discuss the woman he loved with an outsider like Swan, or was
it because he was going on tiptoe, because he wondered what he must
say next, because he was waiting, hoping that something unexpected
would develop?

Swan, however, dropped the question of Pilchard's marriage.

"You mean, I suppose, that you won't work at night."

"I can't. I'm not well enough."

Swan grunted and sighed and stretched all his limbs, shaking his great
shoulders as if he were trying to shake out the ague. Then he cleared
his throat again and turned to Pilchard.

"See here, Pilchard, it's time we came to some understanding."

"Understanding?" Pilchard queried in a surprised voice.

"Yes, about this job. About the pay--m--not so much the pay as the
credit. This job ought to give a man a name. It's been a big piece of
engineering and devilish hard work to put it through. I've planned the
whole thing and watched every stroke of what's been done, and I
deserve at least half the credit, if not all."

Swan spoke in a brutal, masterful way. Perhaps he realized as he did
so how completely the acknowledgment of his services depended on
Pilchard's generosity. Pilchard alone had signed the contract, and
Swan's existence was no more to the company than the existence of the
other workmen. Moreover, the eleven mechanics they had brought down
had all been carried off by fever, and there was no one else who, in
case of necessity, could testify to the splendid work Swan had done,
practically alone. All this was in Pilchard's mind as well as Swan's,
and all this suddenly showed Pilchard how completely Swan was in his
power. He must play a careful game.

"Why, what the devil do you mean?" he asked, speaking rather angrily.

"What do I mean? I mean that this is all too unbusinesslike. It's too
vague. I'm risking my life to put this business through, and I want to
get what I deserve. It's the biggest thing I've ever done, and I won't
do it for nothing."

"For nothing? Man alive, you're almost accusing me of dishonesty! I
told you when we started out that I'd give you half the pay. If I'd
ever supposed you didn't trust my word I'd have had it drawn up on
paper. And as for the credit, you deserve it all, and you'll get it
all ... and that's all."

Pilchard ended with a self-conscious laugh, and got up to go indoors
and take a few drinks before he went to bed. He stood for a moment,
uncertainly, before Swan, wondering with a strange distrust, which
lately had been growing upon him, what Swan really thought. Swan was
so silent and reserved, and he worked with such unflinching constancy,
that Pilchard often felt as if he too must be developing some plan. It
was fortunate, he told himself, that there were only ten days more.
His nerves could not have held out much longer; but after he had
filled himself with several drinks and was sitting in gauzy pajamas
beside an open window, things began to look brighter. Ten days might
develop unheard-of things. To work all night on the borders of a swamp
in this rainy season, which is almost certain death for a white
man--Pilchard closed his eyes and peacefully slept....

Swan continued to sit on the bench, and throwing back his head, looked
at the sky. A full moon swung above him, huge and tropical and red,
seeming to garnish the black depths that lay behind it and that great
black mouth that opened immeasurably into the west. All his actual
surroundings faded away, and, as is often the case with men at these
moments, he thought of a woman that he had seen once and had never
forgotten.

That cool summer day just a year ago that he had spent on the coast of
Maine, whither he had gone to see Pilchard about some final
arrangements for their journey to Mexico--Pilchard had introduced him
to the girl he was going to marry, and it had somehow happened that he
and she had taken a short walk together along a cliff where some pines
were growing, and which looked forlornly enough across the solitary
ocean. Nothing but the most commonplace words had passed between them;
they had talked of Pilchard and his enterprise, and had stopped to
look at the view, and had gazed out over the rolling waves. He had
scarcely dared look at his companion, but once he had helped her over
some rocks, and he remembered that her foot had slipped, and for an
instant her body had swayed against his. He remembered, too, that she
had pale cheeks and dreamy eyes, and a slim hand laden with rings that
held back her skirts. This slight experience had made a changed man of
him. New senses existed for him, new hopes for the future that turned
him dizzy, a splendid and deeper insight into life. The sordid
realities of his life no longer claimed all his thoughts; they were
beautified by rare and exquisite dreams, and by repetitions of that
strange welling of hope and despair which had come to him in the grimy
engine-room. After all, there were things in the world other than
engines and boilers and steel tracks; there were plenty of uses for
him besides calculating and experimenting and bossing a lot of filthy
men. He, too, could serve and wait and hope and ... die!

* * * * *

Swan spent the remainder of that night with Peele, and as the sick man
was still alive at sunrise, and Swan was obliged to oversee the men,
he swallowed some coffee and went off, leaving Pilchard in charge.
About noon Pilchard came out to him with a white face.

"What's the matter?" Swan asked, full of apprehension.

"Peele died before you'd been gone an hour."

"We must see to having him buried at once."

"He's underground already."

"Where we'll all be if we stay much longer."

"Where I feel as if I ought to be," Pilchard groaned.

"What d'ye mean?"

"I mean that I'm about ready to give up. If it wasn't for you I would
give up. I'm as weak as water. I just saw Peele die, and that finished
me. Ugh! It was awful!"

And Pilchard, who certainly was pale, drew a flask from his pocket and
took a long drink. He seemed to drink to his own weakness. He seemed
to glory in the fact that he had given up, and that he knew Swan never
would.

Swan realized this and looked wearily across the swamp they had just
covered. It was all his work. A narrow mound of solid earth ran back
as far as eye could reach, and on it two shining steel rails glittered
in the blazing sun. On either side lay wet, poisonous ground covered
with deadly growths and exuding fearful odors and devitalizing forces
which even the heat could not dissipate. In that noonday light which
burned and burned and made no impression on the moisture, Swan's face
was wilted like a white flower which is dead and turning yellow. His
eyes, too, were like things once living and now dead. The muscles
around his mouth twitched like electric wire.

"It isn't possible for me to finish it alone," he told himself. He
knew that he could finish the job by working both night and day, but
could he stand the strain? Had he, after all, a stronger physique than
any other white man had ever had before? He leaned far back as if he
were trying to fold himself up, and then bent forward in the same
manner, trying, with a desperation like death, to relieve the weakness
that was numbing his limbs. He suddenly felt dizzy as he looked at the
hot distance where some big leaves were waving--dizzy as he knew that
he must fail.

"By God!" he exclaimed, striking the pile of dirt. "By God! I'll do it!"

Pilchard put on his hat and smiled. He had been waiting for this. "If
you say you will, I bet you will!" he told Swan. "That's why you'll
always come out ahead." As he said this he looked intently at Swan,
who was still sitting on the pile of dirt. He noticed for the first
time the peculiar look in his eyes and the trembling of his whole
body.

Swan sat silent. He saw the dark perspiring bodies of the Indians who
were laying ties, and his lifelong ambition to be a great engineer
suddenly presented itself to him in the old strong unemotional way.

"For science is a cruel mistress. She exacts her yearly tribute of
flesh and blood like the dragons of ancient pagan mythology."

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