University of Virginia Library

6. VI

CLAY believed that Alice Langham's visit to the mines had opened his eyes fully to vast differences between them. He laughed and railed at himself for having dared to imagine that he was in a position to care for her. Confident as he was at times, and sure as he was of his ability in certain directions, he was uneasy and fearful when he matched himself against a man of gentle birth and gentle breeding, and one who, like King, was part of a world of which he knew little, and to which, in his ignorance concerning it, he attributed many advantages that it did not possess. He believed that he would always lack the mysterious something which these others held by right of inheritance. He was still young and full of the illusions of youth, and so gave false values to his own qualities, and values equally false to the qualities he lacked. For the next week he avoided Miss Langham, unless there were other people present, and whenever she showed him special favor, he hastily recalled to his mind her failure to sympathize in his work, and assured himself that if she could not interest herself in the engineer, he did not

care to have her interested in the man. Other women had found him attractive in himself; they had cared for his strength of will and mind, and because he was good to look at. But he determined that this one must sympathize with his work in the world, no matter how unpicturesque it might seem to her. His work was the best of him, he assured himself, and he would stand or fall with it.

It was a week after the visit to the mines that President Alvarez gave a great ball in honor of the Langhams, to which all of the important people of Olancho, and the Foreign Ministers were invited. Miss Langham met Clay on the afternoon of the day set for the ball, as she was going down the hill to join Hope and her father at dinner on the yacht.

“Are you not coming, too?” she asked.

“I wish I could,” Clay answered. “King asked me, but a steamer-load of new machinery arrived to-day, and I have to see it through the Custom-House.”

Miss Langham gave an impatient little laugh, and shook her head. “You might wait until we were gone before you bother with your machinery,” she said.

“When you are gone I won't be in a state of mind to attend to machinery or anything else,” Clay answered.

Miss Langham seemed so far encouraged by this speech that she seated herself in the boathouse at the end of the wharf. She pushed her mantilla back from her face and looked up at him, smiling brightly.

“ `The time has come, the walrus said,' ” she quoted, “ `to talk of many things.' ”

Clay laughed and dropped down beside her. “Well?” he said.

“You have been rather unkind to me this last week,” the girl began, with her eyes fixed steadily on his. “And that day at the mines when I counted on you so, you acted abominably.”

Clay's face showed so plainly his surprise at this charge, which he thought he only had the right to make, that Miss Langham stopped.

“I don't understand,” said Clay, quietly. “How did I treat you abominably?”

He had taken her so seriously that Miss Langham dropped her lighter tone and spoke in one more kindly:

“I went out there to see your work at its best. I was only interested in going because it was your work, and because it was you who had done it all, and I expected that you would try to explain it to me and help me to understand, but you didn't. You treated me as though I had no interest in the matter at all, as though I was not capable of understanding

it. You did not seem to care whether I was interested or not. In fact, you forgot me altogether.”

Clay exhibited no evidence of a reproving conscience. “I am sorry you had a stupid time,” he said, gravely.

“I did not mean that, and you know I didn't mean that,” the girl answered. “I wanted to hear about it from you, because you did it. I wasn't interested so much in what had been done, as I was in the man who had accomplished it.”

Clay shrugged his shoulders impatiently, and looked across at Miss Langham with a troubled smile.

“But that's just what I don't want,” he said. “Can't you see? These mines and other mines like them are all I have in the world. They are my only excuse for having lived in it so long. I want to feel that I've done something outside of myself, and when you say that you like me personally, it's as little satisfaction to me as it must be to a woman to be congratulated on her beauty, or on her fine voice. That is nothing she has done herself. I should like you to value what I have done, not what I happen to be.”

Miss Langham turned her eyes to the harbor, and it was some short time before she answered.

“You are a very difficult person to please,” she

said, “and most exacting. As a rule men are satisfied to be liked for any reason. I confess frankly, since you insist upon it, that I do not rise to the point of appreciating your work as the others do. I suppose it is a fault,” she continued, with an air that plainly said that she considered it, on the contrary, something of a virtue. “And if I knew more about it technically, I might see more in it to admire. But I am looking farther on for better things from you. The friends who help us the most are not always those who consider us perfect, are they?” she asked, with a kindly smile. She raised her eyes to the great ore-pier that stretched out across the water, the one ugly blot in the scene of natural beauty about them. “I think that is all very well,” she said; “but I certainly expect you to do more than that. I have met many remarkable men in all parts of the world, and I know what a strong man is, and you have one of the strongest personalities I have known. But you can't mean that you are content to stop with this. You should be something bigger and more wide-reaching and more lasting. Indeed, it hurts me to see you wasting your time here over my father's interests. You should exert that same energy on a broader map. You could make yourself anything you chose. At home you would be your party's leader in politics, or you could be a great general, or a great financier. I say this because I know there are better things in you, and because I want you to make the most of your talents. I am anxious to see you put your powers to something worth while.”

Miss Langham's voice carried with it such a tone of sincerity that she almost succeeded in deceiving herself. And yet she would have hardly cared to explain just why she had reproached the man before her after this fashion. For she knew that when she spoke as she had done, she was beating about to find some reason that would justify her in not caring for him, as she knew she could care—as she would not allow herself to care. The man at her side had won her interest from the first, and later had occupied her thoughts so entirely, that it troubled her peace of mind. Yet she would not let her feeling for him wax and grow stronger, but kept it down. And she was trying now to persuade herself that she did this because there was something lacking in him and not in her.

She was almost angry with him for being so much to her and for not being more acceptable in little things, like the other men she knew. So she found this fault with him in order that she might justify her own lack of feeling.

But Clay, who only heard the words and could

not go back of them to find the motive, could not know this. He sat perfectly still when she had finished and looked steadily out across the harbor. His eyes fell on the ugly ore-pier, and he winced and uttered a short grim laugh.

“That's true, what you say,” he began, “I haven't done much. You are quite right. Only—” he looked up at her curiously and smiled—“only you should not have been the one to tell me of it.”

Miss Langham had been so far carried away by her own point of view that she had not considered Clay, and now that she saw what mischief she had done, she gave a quick gasp of regret, and leaned forward as though to add some explanation to what she had said. But Clay stopped her. “I mean by that,” he said, “that the great part of the inspiration I have had to do what little I have done came from you. You were a sort of promise of something better to me. You were more of a type than an individual woman, but your picture, the one I carry in my watch, meant all that part of life that I have never known, the sweetness and the nobleness and grace of civilization,—something I hoped I would some day have time to enjoy. So you see,” he added, with an uncertain laugh, “it's less pleasant to hear that I have failed to make the most of myself from you than from almost any one else.”

“But, Mr. Clay,” protested the girl, anxiously, “I think you have done wonderfully well. I only said that I wanted you to do more. You are so young and you have—”

Clay did not hear her. He was leaning forward looking moodily out across the water, with his folded arms clasped across his knees.

“I have not made the most of myself,” he repeated; “that is what you said.” He spoke the words as though she had delivered a sentence. “You don't think well of what I have done, of what I am.”

He drew in his breath and shook his head with a hopeless laugh, and leaned back against the railing of the boat-house with the weariness in his attitude of a man who has given up after a long struggle.

“No,” he said with a bitter flippancy in his voice, “I don't amount to much. But, my God!” he laughed, and turning his head away, “when you think what I was! This doesn't seem much to you, and it doesn't seem much to me now that I have your point of view on it, but when I remember!” Clay stopped again and pressed his lips together and shook his head. His half-closed eyes, that seemed to be looking back into his past, lighted as they fell on King's white yacht, and he raised his arm and pointed to it with a wave of

the hand. “When I was sixteen I was a sailor before the mast,” he said, “the sort of sailor that King's crew out there wouldn't recognize in the same profession. I was of so little account that I've been knocked the length of the main deck at the end of the mate's fist, and left to lie bleeding in the scuppers for dead. I hadn't a thing to my name then but the clothes I wore, and I've had to go aloft in a hurricane and cling to a swinging rope with my bare toes and pull at a wet sheet until my finger-nails broke and started in their sockets; and I've been a cowboy, with no companions for six months of the year but eight thousand head of cattle and men as dumb and untamed as the steers themselves. I've sat in my saddle night after night, with nothing overhead but the stars, and no sound but the noise of the steers breathing in their sleep. The women I knew were Indian squaws, and the girls of the sailors' dance-houses and the gambling-hells of Sioux City and Abilene, and Callao and Port Saíd. That was what I was and those were my companions. “Why!” he laughed, rising and striding across the boat-house with his hands locked behind him, “I've fought on the mud floor of a Mexican shack, with a naked knife in my hand, for my last dollar. I was as low and as desperate as that. And now—” Clay lifted his head and smiled. “Now,” he said, in a lower voice and addressing Miss Langham with a return of his usual grave politeness, “I am able to sit beside you and talk to you. I have risen to that. I am quite content.”

He paused and looked at Miss Langham uncertainly for a few moments as though in doubt as to whether she would understand him if he continued.

“And though it means nothing to you,” he said, “and though as you say I am here as your father's employee, there are other places, perhaps, where I am better known. In Edinburgh or Berlin or Paris, if you were to ask the people of my own profession, they could tell you something of me. If I wished it, I could drop this active work tomorrow and continue as an adviser, as an expert, but I like the active part better. I like doing things myself. I don't say, `I am a salaried servant of Mr. Langham's;' I put it differently. I say, `There are five mountains of iron. You are to take them up and transport them from South America to North America, where they will be turned into railroads and ironclads.' That's my way of looking at it. It's better to bind a laurel to the plough than to call yourself hard names. It makes your work easier—almost noble. Cannot you see it that way, too?”

Before Miss Langham could answer, a deprecatory

cough from one side of the open boat-house startled them, and turning they saw MacWilliams coming toward them. They had been so intent upon what Clay was saying that he had approached them over the soft sand of the beach without their knowing it. Miss Langham welcomed his arrival with evident pleasure.

“The launch is waiting for you at the end of the pier,” MacWilliams said. Miss Langham rose and the three walked together down the length of the wharf, MacWilliams moving briskly in advance in order to enable them to continue the conversation he had interrupted, but they followed close behind him, as though neither of them were desirous of such an opportunity.

Hope and King had both come for Miss Langham, and while the latter was helping her to a place on the cushions, and repeating his regrets that the men were not coming also, Hope started the launch, with a brisk ringing of bells and a whirl of the wheel and a smile over her shoulder at the figures on the wharf.

“Why didn't you go?” said Clay; “you have no business at the Custom-House.”

“Neither have you,” said MacWilliams. “But I guess we both understand. There's no good pushing your luck too far.”

“What do you mean by that—this time?”

“Why, what have we to do with all of this?” cried MacWilliams. “It's what I keep telling you every day. We're not in that class, and you're only making it harder for yourself when they've gone. I call it cruelty to animals myself, having women like that around. Up North, where everybody's white, you don't notice it so much, but down here—Lord!”

“That's absurd,” Clay answered. “Why should you turn your back on civilization when it comes to you, just because you're not going back to civilization by the next steamer? Every person you meet either helps you or hurts you. Those girls help us, even if they do make the life here seem bare and mean.”

“Bare and mean!” repeated MacWilliams incredulously. “I think that's just what they don't do. I like it all the better because they're mixed up in it. I never took so much interest in your mines until she took to riding over them, and I didn't think great shakes of my old ore-road, either, but now that she's got to acting as engineer, it's sort of nickel-plated the whole outfit. I'm going to name the new engine after her—when it gets here—if her old man will let me.”

“What do you mean? Miss Langham hasn't been to the mines but once, has she?”

“Miss Langham!” exclaimed MacWilliams.

“No, I mean the other, Miss Hope. She comes out with Ted nearly every day now, and she's learning how to run a locomotive. Just for fun, you know,” he added, reassuringly.

“I didn't suppose she had any intention of joining the Brotherhood,” said Clay. “So she's been out every day, has she? I like that,” he commented, enthusiastically. “She's a fine, sweet girl.”

“Fine, sweet girl!” growled MacWilliams. “I should hope so. She's the best. They don't make them any better than that, and just think, if she's like that now, what will she be when she's grown up, when she's learned a few things? Now her sister. You can see just what her sister will be at thirty, and at fifty, and at eighty. She's thoroughbred and she's the most beautiful woman to look at I ever saw—but, my son—she is too careful. She hasn't any illusions, and no sense of humor. And a woman with no illusions and no sense of humor is going to be monotonous. You can't teach her anything. You can't imagine yourself telling her anything she doesn't know. The things we think important don't reach her at all. They're not in her line, and in everything else she knows more than we could ever guess at. But that Miss Hope! It's a privilege to show her about. She wants to see everything, and learn everything, and she goes poking her head into openings and down

shafts like a little fox terrier. And she'll sit still and listen with her eyes wide open and tears in them, too, and she doesn't know it—until you can't talk yourself for just looking at her.”

Clay rose and moved on to the house in silence. He was glad that MacWilliams had interrupted him when he did. He wondered whether he understood Alice Langham after all. He had seen many fine ladies before during his brief visits to London, and Berlin, and Vienna, and they had shown him favor. He had known other women not so fine. Spanish-American señoritas through Central and South America, the wives and daughters of English merchants exiled along the Pacific coast, whose fair skin and yellow hair whitened and bleached under the hot tropical suns. He had known many women, and he could have quoted

But the woman he was to marry must have all the things he lacked. She must fill out and complete him where he was wanting. This woman possessed all of these things. She appealed to every ambition and to every taste he cherished, and yet he knew that he had hesitated and mistrusted

her, when he should have declared himself eagerly and vehemently, and forced her to listen with all the strength of his will.

Miss Langham dropped among the soft cushions of the launch with a sense of having been rescued from herself and of delight in finding refuge again in her own environment. The sight of King standing in the bow beside Hope with his cigarette hanging from his lips, and peering with half-closed eyes into the fading light, gave her a sense of restfulness and content. She did not know what she wished from that other strange young man. He was so bold, so handsome, and he looked at life and spoke of it in such a fresh, unhackneyed spirit. He might make himself anything he pleased. But here was a man who already had everything, or who could get it as easily as he could increase the speed of the launch, by pulling some wire with his finger.

She recalled one day when they were all on board of this same launch, and the machinery had broken down, and MacWilliams had gone forward to look at it. He had called Clay to help him, and she remembered how they had both gone down on their knees and asked the engineer and fireman to pass them wrenches and oil-cans, while King protested mildly, and the rest sat helplessly

in the hot glare of the sea, as the boat rose and fell on the waves. She resented Clay's interest in the accident, and his pleasure when he had made the machinery right once more, and his appearance as he came back to them with oily hands and with his face glowing from the heat of the furnace, wiping his grimy fingers on a piece of packing. She had resented the equality with which he treated the engineer in asking his advice, and it rather surprised her that the crew saluted him when he stepped into the launch again that night as though he were the owner. She had expected that they would patronize him, and she imagined after this incident that she detected a shade of difference in the manner of the sailors toward Clay, as though he had cheapened himself to them—as he had to her.