Changeling, and Other Stories
And scornfully she left him.
IV
He came into the kitchen, two evenings later, from the parlor. His
father sat by the table, reading his paper. His mother pottered about
the turf fire, teasing it into flame. In a corner Joe sat, polishing
the barrel of a breech-loading fowling-piece with an old rag. His
father caught the glimpse of paper in his hand.
"Were you writing, Willie John?"
"Ay," Grant answered; "I was writing a letter to America."
He moved toward the fireplace and turned slowly about again to his
father.
"You were saying," he asked, "that that place of McKenna's was for
sale. I wonder how much he 'd want for it."
"He 'd take four thousand pounds," his father answered. "Maybe less."
"I 'm afraid I have n't got that much." Grant shook his head. "I 've
only two thousand."
"We can lend you the difference, Willie John," Joe broke in. He
squinted down the barrel of the rifle. "Can't we, Dad?"
"Ay sure!" his father answered.
"I 'm much obliged to both of you," Grant said.
He reached for his hat.
"Are you going out, Willie John?" his mother asked.
"I thought I 'd go up and call on Eunice Doran," Grant answered her.
"I might as well be neighborly."
He went out, and there was silence in the kitchen for a few minutes.
Joe clicked the lock of the gun.
"Do you mind that wild gander I put a ring on three years ago?" he
asked his father. "It's back again. I saw it over the marshes to-day."
"It 'll take a mate and settle down in the marsh now." His father
nodded. "It took it three years to find out that home is a good place.
It's a queer, silly bird--the barnacle goose."
A little ripple of laughter came from the mother's lips as she stood
over and poked the turf. The elder Grant looked up, astonished.
"What are you laughing at, Sarah Ann?" he inquired.
"I was thinking," she answered.
"What was it you were thinking about?" he pursued.
"Oh nothing!" she parried. "I was just thinking."
And she went on teasing the fire, while a subtle, affectionate smile
played about the corners of her eyes.
BELFASTERS
"Oh, I'll go down unto Belfast to see that seaport gay."--A COUNTRY
POET.
To him the whole conversation, the whole setting, the whole event, was
unreal as ghosts are unreal, or objects on a foggy night. Here was
this woman, who had been so nigh to him, and to whom he had been so
much, talking of leaving him, in as matter-of-fact a manner as though
she were speaking of taking a street-car. Here was the murk of a
February evening in Belfast, the minute rain yellowing the
street-lamps; the cable-cars rushing by brusquely and short-temperedly,
a "get out of the way and be damned to you!" in their crashing, abrupt
passage. She was thinking of leaving him, she was thinking of leaving
him for good, all because of a strike, mind you! just for nothing more
than a strike!
"Well, I 'd best be going," she said.
"Well--" He shifted from one foot to the other. "I think it's very
foolish of you," he said.
She smiled, as he looked at her, that strange secret smile of hers that
meant she had drawn into herself. He knew every expression on her
face--for a year now.
"What is it you want me to do?" he asked for the fourth time.
"Give the workers in the mill what they want. They ask only bare
justice. A couple o' shillings a week! What is it to you?"
"I will not." He shook his head. His great red beard shook too.
"You 're a hard man, Aleck," she said softly. "You 're no' exactly
human. And you 're getting on, Aleck. You 're no' young any more. Be
a wee bit soft, man. It's no shame."
"I will not."
"Ah, well!" She stepped toward the curb, ready to signal a car. He
followed her with his look. Of all the women in his life she had been
most to him:--she, just a working-girl! He was fond of her. He was
more than in love with her. His feeling towards her was no phenomenon
but an accepted fact. He admired her, too, which was more than he did
any woman, though she had been more to him than any but a wife should
be. He admired her for that too--she had gone into the relation so
calmly, so open-mindedly, so fearlessly. He admired her; in her was no
slight, common blood.
"But, Jennie, I can't leave you like that."
She turned to face him. He was abashed by her steadfast brown eyes.
"Why for no'?" she asked. "Aleck, I 'm no lassie that's been fooled.
What is between us, Aleck, is because I liked you and I knew you liked
me. Don't let that bother your head. I 've done you no hurt, Aleck,
nor you me. That's our own affair."
"But why break like this? What for?"
"For this, Aleck. You 're the owner and the master. I 'm a worker. I
've always been a worker. You mind I 've never taken a thing from you,
Aleck. I 'm one of the people you 're fighting, Aleck, and I stick by
my folks. While this fight's on, Aleck, you and I are finished.
That's the way I feel, Aleck. I can't change it."
"You're foolish!"
"I don't think I am." This time she signaled the car. It stopped with
its ill-tempered, hurried air.
"When'll I see you again?"
"When you do what my folks ask in justice, Aleck, and not before." And
she was gone.
He stood for a few minutes in the rain. A touch of panic seized him.
For a year he had not been so lonely. He felt he was on the verge of
doing a foolish thing.
"I will not!" he said doggedly.
He turned down the road sullenly. A great desire was on him to catch
the next car and intercept her at a changing-station.
"Stop making a fool o' yourself," he said to himself. "You 'll do no
such thing."
He plugged on steadily, unmindful of where he was going. He was aboil
with perturbation.
"I ha'e gi'en them a couple o' raises this year a'ready!"
He was blind to everything but the action of the workers of his mill,
of his father's mill, of his grandfather's mill, defying him openly and
stubbornly. And now they had to take Jeanie Lindsay from him, the only
woman he had liked wholly in all his days.
"To hell with them!" he said savagely. His red beard bristled.
He stopped suddenly. He shook his fist at an arc-lamp.
"I 'll close the mill," he muttered aloud. "I 'll close down. I will
so. I 've just had enough o' it. They ha'e no softie in Aleck
Robe'son. I 'll close it. Be damned but I will! I will! I will so!"
From Aleck Robertson's earliest infancy he had been bred to the mill,
as his father had been by his father before him. It is a small,
compact building, off the Falls Road, the Robertson mill is, harboring
not more than four hundred employees. But their fame is not in Belfast
alone. Many the royal house in Europe before the war had its bride's
linen from the Robertson factory. It is a small mill, as it should be,
with a small door, and on a by-street is the lintel with the name
"Robert Robertson & His Son, Founded 1803."
A queer family, these Robertsons of Belfast, very solid, very stubborn.
In five generations there has been but one son to the family, and no
daughters. "The Scottish weaver-bird, laying but one egg," some dry
doctor dubbed them. So they be. They are a tall, solid dynasty,
marrying toward middle age a bride solid as themselves. Young Aleck,
red-bearded and rangy, could remember his father, as tall and rangy as
he, and bearded, too, as his grandfather was, both silent, speculative
men, students of the Shorter Catechism, and shrewd observers of life,
possessors of the trust of glossy linen. They had their duties: to
mind their own business; to take care of the mill, and to make fine
cloth.
"They can see the linen in the flax, they Robertsons!" a workman of
theirs once boasted, and it was true.
At Portrush golf-club you may hear about him. "The championship of
Ireland," they tell me, "Captain Macneill got it then and he held it
for three years and then your Uncle Simon for a year, and then Mr.
Campbell o' Kilkee, and then--who was it, then?--the linen man of
Belfast--what the deuce is his name? Robson? Robinson? Robertson,
that's it! You'd hardly remember him; he was not a showy player, not
an affable man, but sound! Ah, damned sound!"
At his school they have difficulty in recalling him. The president
remembers him vaguely as a solemn youth with freckles and gigantic
hands.
They seem to have gone through life, he and his mill, with one object
in the world--to produce linen that is the pride of Ulster. They have
each their worthy, definite place in the world. On him there rests the
mill, a legacy as important and dynastic in its way as one of the
former German principalities. He toured Ireland studying flax. He saw
it raise its bluish green stems in spring, soft as down. He saw it
rise and the wind ruffle and bend it, like still water. He saw the
strange blue flower break out on it, as blue as a near star. It was
plucked from the ground in summer time, acres and acres of it plucked
carefully by a numerous population, and stacked like corn. And the
nights after the flax-pulling there would be great joy-making in the
villages, dancing and singing and drinking and love-making under the
inscrutable Irish stars. It was taken then to the dikes and left
rotting in the water, while mephitic gases rolled over the
country-side. It was then scutched in the scutch-mills, where wheels
run by water, by men with querulous dispositions and hacking
consumptive coughs. To him and his like it came then, in soft, glossy,
whitish strands, like the hair of Scandinavian women. He turned it
over to his operatives, weavers and throwsters and pickers, men
hunchbacked from bending over their looms, and women very free in their
ways and not often pretty. Now it covered the stubborn hills of Ulster
and soon it covered the groaning tables of kings.
"It's an unco thing, the flax!" his Scots-Irish workmen used to say.
Aleck Robertson had the same thought, when he considered, though he
never phrased it, that the prosperity and good fame and management of
his linen-mill was his religion.
Life for him flowed by in a groove as regular and as well fitting as
one of the bands on his own looms. Since his father died, ten years
ago, he had been following the same routine, getting up in the morning,
in the club where he stayed, and going to work, taking a
street-car--though the Robertson firm was famous, it was not
rich--attending to the work, and coming back in the evenings to spend
the time with a few friends over a tumbler of Scotch.
"Why for do you no' take a wife and settle down, Aleck?" an occasional
friend asked him.
"Och, I 'm all right as I am," he would answer.
Life at thirty-eight had become for Aleck Robertson a succession of
minor hedonisms. He liked the sting of the shower-bath in the morning,
the goodly taste of breakfast. He liked to hear the bustle and rumble
of the works as he entered. He liked his lunch. He enjoyed his game
of golf, and his occasional holidays in Scotland, or France, where he
patronized the bathing-beaches, and played for small stakes at _petits
chevaux_. Every week he attended a music-hall, and occasionally he was
seen as escort to a minor actress.
"Aleck!" some of his cronies said. "He's a card!"
He had, for such girls as were not frightened by his beard and his
position, a queer, provocative glint in his eye, which they would savor
and giggle at.
"He 's a pleasant fellow, Mr. Robertson," they agreed. "He could be
fine and pleasant to a girl he liked, I 'll warrant you! They do
say--" and here some immaterial scandal was told.
It was strange how he ran across Jean Lindsay, for he made it a rule to
have nothing to do socially--if one could call it socially--with the
girls in the mill. He had noticed her a few times about the place--a