Changeling, and Other Stories
stately sort of girl with calm brow and eyes. He admired the fine
figure she had--the shapely arms and rich bosom. A woman, that! None
of your fragile dolls! And twice he had seen her leave the works at
quitting time, a figure in a Paisley shawl and skirt and blouse, none
of the cheap finery of the mill worker.
"Yon 's a fine girl!" he thought, and forgot her.
It was one night on Cave Hill he discovered her again, a soft June
night with a half-moon in the sky. He had been out for a tramp and sat
down to watch the city beneath him. He heard a rustle in the heather
beside him. He got up immediately.
"I beg your pardon." He noticed suddenly a girl looking at him, seated
not ten yards away. "I did n't know there was any one here."
"It's all right, Mr. Robertson." The voice was calm and self-possessed
as that of any woman of the great world. He had to look a few instants
before he recognized her.
"You 've seen me at the works," she explained.
"Why, of course I have," he remembered. "What are you doing here all
alone?"
"Oh, I like to come up of an evening among the heather," she told him.
"It's a bonny wee flower. I don't wonder the bees love it. The
Danes," she added slowly, "used to make a heather ale, but that's gone
now. It must have tasted fine."
"It's a queer hour to come here."
"It's a lot of other time I have," she replied, "and I tending your
weavers from all but dawn until the fall o' day! I like it this time,
though, for you see things now you would n't see in the daytime. You
can hear the plover at night, calling like children. And just now a
badger passed me, gray as a gaffer. I bees waiting, too," she said,
and she smiled, "when the moon comes up to see the fairies dancing on
the hillside. There must be a lot o' the child in me," she explained,
"because I do be thinking long."
"There's not many girls come up here their lonesome."
"There 's none think me beauty enough to come with."
"Thon 's a town of blind men." And they both laughed.
"Maybe I 'm not missing much."
"By God! You are!" And he leaned forward and kissed her.
That night when he went home, thinking over the kissing and the
laughing and the gentle caresses, the thing that impressed him most was
how natural it all had been. She had received it all, and he had given
it, as though it were just like the scented heather, and the wind and
the moon. He met her another night by careful chance, and again there
was all of the child in her, eagerness and pensiveness and artless
kissing and bubbling laughter. He could feel her eyes laugh.
He met her a third time on the great hill above the town, and this time
it was by appointment. She had become a great pleasantness to him, a
greater pleasantness than he could ever have imagined before, there was
something so apart from the world. The thought of meeting that night
made his great chest heave involuntarily.
That night he sensed, when he met her, she was all woman, not child
alone. He kissed her and they sat down in the springy heather bells.
She was silent.
"It's been a long day," she said at length, "a long, long day." She
looked at him and smiled.
He turned to catch her up to him. She held him at the length of her
arm.
"What is your name?" she asked. "Your first name?"
"Aleck."
"Do you mean true, Aleck?" Not only her mouth, but her eyes, her whole
being was questioning. "Aleck, do you mean true?"
"Ay! I mean true."
And he had became her lover, her secret lover.
For one whole year she was a delight and a mystery to him. There was
not in him, though, the whirling passion that makes for love epics. It
was just good for him to know her. Had he been twenty he would have
married her, nor been content until he had her bound by candle, book,
and bell. But he was in his thirties now, and steady and solid and
wise. She asked nothing of him. She accompanied him here and there,
to Bangor, to Antrim Glens, dressed in modest decency. Their relation
she accepted with dignity. She was not possessive, as a commoner woman
might be. She was not fulsome in her affection for him. It was very
restrained.
"I like you well, Aleck," was all she uttered. "I like you fine, my
big red man."
At the works she never noticed him, nor he her. Once, indeed, he had
wanted her to leave and take a little house somewhere, but her eyes had
flashed terribly at the first words.
"I 'm sorry, Jeanie," he faltered. "I 'm queer and sorry."
"You hurt me," she confessed. "You did so." She relented at his
distress. "Ah, sure, don't take on about it. A wee word--it comes out
so easy. I should not have looked so fierce. But I know you did n't
mean to belittle me, Aleck."
He could never quite understand her. No woman in his life had ever
acted so. There had been venal women, and foolish women, and women
whom other women would instinctively recognize as evil. But Jean was a
mixture of the opposites of these things, and she was also Jean.
He loved to stand and watch her. She reminded him of a picture he had
once seen--one of a series of four depicting the seasons; and Jean
resembled the one called "Autumn," a figure of a woman in a purple
Grecian robe walking through a wood of falling leaves, a mature woman,
with kindliness and wisdom in her eyes, and a certain proud grace to
her. Jean often looked like that.
She thought, too, in a simple way. Her opinions were definite as rocks.
"It's no' right, Aleck!" She would raise her brown eyes calmly and
fearlessly to him, discussing a manner of trading or a phase of
municipal politics.
She had only one fault to find with him. She would pat his head and
say:
"There 's only one thing about you, Aleck, you 're not exactly human.
There 's a wee thing missing somewhere, red fellow. They workers of
yours, they 're no more in your eye than the machinery they handle. I
'd like to have you a wee bit softer, Aleck. I would so."
"I 'm soft enough toward you," he would object.
"It's no' the same thing, mannie. You 're soft toward me because I 'm
close to you. But outside that you 're hard. You don't see people.
You must n't think with the head, Aleck. You must think a wee bit wi'
the heart. Na, na! Toward every one, I mean."
He often regretted, in his club at night, after leaving her, that she
was not the sort of person he could marry. It would be so pleasant to
have a house with her in it, the fine big woman, with the wise head and
the warm heart, with the temperament rich as wine. She would go well
in a house of her own, fitting in it naturally, as some fine old clock
would, or some mellow furniture of long ago. And to be greeted by her
in the evening--
"It would be queer and pleasant," he thought in his stilted Belfast
idiom. "Och, ay! It would that!"
But she was not the manner of woman the Robertsons married. His dead
fathers would turn in their graves were he to pick a wife from out the
mill-hands.
The august and chaste and cold assembly of the Robertson wives had no
room in it for anything as warm and handsome and as plebeian as Jean.
The wives the Robertsons chose were of their own rank, meager spinsters
with a little money, with the accomplishments of gentlewomen, the
playing of certain tunes on the piano, the knitting of afghans, the
speaking of a prim English instead of Belfast Scots--an acidulous
gentility.
Ay! If it hadn't been so!
The interview with the foreman had been stormy. It became furious. It
had ended disastrously, so disastrously he did n't care a tinker's
curse.
"I ha'e gi'en you two raises a'ready, and here you 're back for more.
Be damned to it, men, is it the king's mint you take me for?"
"Ay, you ha' gi'en us the raises, Mister Aleck, but the rents ha'
raised again. There 's no place to flit to tha' 's cheaper. The price
o' food is unchristian--"
"Is that my fault?"
"Na! Na! It's no' your fault. It's just the times. And there 's
childer comin'--"
"Is that my fault?"
"Ah, Mister Aleck, be reasonable! We got to live. Down at
Richardson's mill they 're gi'en the third raise. And at the United--"
"Now, listen to me, men," he roared like a maddened bull. "You 've got
to make a choice. Either get on with what you have, or I 'll close the
mill. I swear to my God I 'll close the mill."
"We 've got to live," the men said sullenly. An old workman stepped
out.
"Mister Aleck," he pleaded, "I 've worked for your da all my life, and
I was a wee nipper when your grandfa'er was here. I mind him well.
You 've got neither chick nor child, and if you have n't, the mill goes
wi' you--"
Good God! So it did. He had never thought of that.
"--so it is n't as though you wanted the money--"
"I will not!" One part of his brain formulated the reply and his lips
uttered it. The other part was busy on this new discovery, that with
him the mills died. Of course they did.
"Well, then, be damned to you! Close your mill!"
"Be damned to the whole lot of you! Take your week's notice from the
day. Saturday week the mill closes, and I swear to my God it never
opens again."
Why should it, he asked himself when they were gone, why should it?
He sat back after they had left him and for an instant the magnitude of
the thought that there would be no successor shook him physically, left
him all of a tremble. He had never thought of it before, incredible as
that may seem.
"No! There'll be no other. I'm the last." He lighted a match to put
to his pipe, but he let it go out. "I 'm the last."
All his life, at this moment, seemed shattered--the comfortable running
order of it junked into a grotesque and cold puzzle, as a complicated
engine will be ruined by a thunderbolt. The mills were gone, for he
would not give in to any raise, and Jeanie Lindsay too--she was so much
to him, so much that she obtruded herself on every thought he had.
For the first time in his existence, sitting on the ruin, it occurred
to him after all what a poor thing this complicated mechanism had been.
He could remember his boyhood, a drear Sabbatical term of years, spent
with a bearded father and a thin, acidulous mother. At school he had
not been liked.
"It was no' so pleasant, now that I come to think of it."
And he was supposed to approach a strict spinster in marriage, that the
destiny of the Robertsons should be accomplished; to be intimate with a
frigid stranger, that another lonely and not-liked boy would be brought
into the world, between a dour father and a mother of marked gentility,
in a house that was cold no matter how warm the summer, and dark though
the sun shone.
"I will not!"
The face of the Lindsay girl came between him and the tepid vision he
had conjured, as in some motion-picture device. And he saw her warmth
and bonniness, her slow laughter, her calm eyes. Why, under God's
name, must she be born in a region where the Robertson tradition did
not pick? Why must she be so desirable, and eligible wives so insipid?
"Ah, be damned to her!" he snapped viciously. "The whole thing can go
to the de'il. It's a dog's life, that's what it is, and I 'm through.
Ay, I am so."
For a year he wandered across Europe, and to and fro in it. He saw
Denmark and Jutland, and though he had sworn good-by to linen, he could
not help examining the quality of the flax grown there, and he did n't
think much of it--as no good Belfast man should. He visited Holland
and approved the industrious population, but adjudged them "o'er
pleased wi' themsel's." Paris he knew before, but it palled on him
now. One of his old dreams had been to go there with Jeanie Lindsay.
"It's kind o' empty," he thought. England rather irritated him.
People there, knowing he came from Ireland, wished to know what he