Part 17 (2/2)

The girl was very much surprised.

She felt him safe even within the walls of the heathen church, and she went directly back to Nut Street, her holiday hanging heavy on her hands, and she went in and helped her patron wash the dishes, and upstairs that night she stopped in her simple preparations for bed and reddened.

”Sure, ain't I a silly! He's went to church to _meet_ his girl!”

Her morning's outing, the tramp and the excitement, were an unusual strain to Molly, not to speak of her emotions, and she cried herself to sleep.

Fairfax sat every Sunday in the same pew. The seat was to the left of the altar, and he sang with an ardour and a mellowness that was lost neither on the people near him nor on the choir-master. All arts were sympathetic to him: his ear was good and his voice agreeable. His youth, his sacrifice, his dying art he put into his church singing, and once the choir-master, who had taken pains to mark him, stopped him in the vestibule and spoke to him.

”No,” Fairfax said, ”I am not a musician. Don't know one note from another, and can't learn. Only sing by ear, and not very sure at that!”

He listened indifferently. As the gentleman spoke of art and success, over Antony's handsome mouth there flitted a smile that had something of iron in it.

”I don't care for any of those things, sir,” he replied. ”I reckon I'm a barbarian, a rudimentary sort of man.”

He took a certain pride and glory in his station as he talked. There was a fascination in puzzling this mild, charming man, one of his own cla.s.s, whose very voice and accent were a relief after the conversations he heard daily.

”You see,” he said, ”I happen to be a fireman in the New York Central yards down at West Albany.”

The quiet choir-master stared at him. ”Oh, come, come!” he smiled.

Fairfax thrust his cane under his arm, drew off his glove, and held out his hand, looking into the other man's eyes. The musician's hand closed over Fairfax's.

”My dear young fellow,” he said gravely, ”you are a terrible loss to art. You would make your way in the musical world.”

Fairfax laughed outright, and the choir-master watched him as others did as he limped away, his broad, fine back, his straight figure, and Fairfax's voice swelling out in the processional came to the musician's mind.

”There is a mystery about that chap,” he thought. ”He is a gentleman.

The Bishop would be interested.”

By contrast Sundays were delightful to Antony. Amus.e.m.e.nts possible to a workingman with the tastes of a gentleman were difficult to obtain.

Church in the morning, a lazy stroll through the town, an excellent dinner at the Delavan House, set Fairfax up for the week. The coloured waiter thought his new patron was a Southerner, and suspected him of being a millionaire.

”Ya.s.s, sar, Mr. Kunnell Fairfax, sar.”

Antony, in a moment of heart hunger for the South, had told George Was.h.i.+ngton his name. George Was.h.i.+ngton kept the same place for him every Sunday, and polished the stone china plates till they glistened, displayed for Antony all his dazzling teeth, bowed himself double, his napkin under his arm, and addressed Antony as ”Kunnell”; and Antony over his dessert laughed in his sleeve (he took great pains to keep his hands out of sight). After luncheon he smoked and read the papers in the lobby, lounged about, wrote a Sunday letter to his mother, and then loitered about through old Albany. On Sunday afternoons when it was fine, he would choose School Street and the Cathedral close, and now, under the falling of the yellow leaves there was a beauty in the day's end that thrilled him hour by hour. He made these pilgrimages to keep himself from thinking, from dreaming, from suffering; to keep his hands from pencil and design; to keep his artist soul from crying out aloud; to keep his talent from demanding, like a starving thing, bread that he had no means to give. Sometimes, however,--sometimes, when the stimulus of an excellent dinner, and a restful morning, when the cheer of George Was.h.i.+ngton's droll devotion had died, then the young man's step would lag in the streets of Albany, and with his hands behind his back and his bright head bowed, he would creep musing, half-seeing where he went.

Taking advantage of his la.s.situde, like peris whose wings had been folded against Paradise, and whose forms had been leaning hard against the gate, his ideals, his visions, would rush in upon him, and he would nearly sink under the beating of their wings--under their voluptuous appeal, under their imperious demand.

On these occasions Fairfax would go home oppressed, and content himself with a gla.s.s of milk and light food at the restaurant, and dressed as he was even to the hat on his head, he would sink by the table in his little room and bury his face in his hands. Then he would count up his money. Working from May until October, he had saved only fifty dollars.

After his calculations there was no magnitude in the sum to inspire him to new plans or to tempt him to make a fresh venture for art. He often thought, in looking back on those days, that it was nothing but his pride and his obstinacy that kept him there. The memory of his winter's creations, of his work in the studio, and his beasts with their powerful bodies and their bronze beauty, came upon him always with such cruel resentment and made him feel so impotent against the injustice of the great, that if drink had tempted Fairfax he would have gone to the nearest saloon and made a beast of himself.

The working hours were long and his employment physically exhausting, but he embraced his duties and fell in love with the great steel and iron creature which it was his work to feed and clean and oil. And when he left his engine silent in the shed, the roar and the motion absent, tranquil, breathless, and yet superb, Antony left his machine with regret, the regret of a lover for his mistress. He was fireman to a wild-cat engineer.

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