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 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 thought of Home Rule and were shocked when they heard it. He went north to Scotland for golf, and the flat Scot accent made him homesick for Belfast.
"I think I 'll just run over to see how the old town 's getting on." The truth was, though he would n't acknowledge it to himself, he wanted to get news of Jeanie Lindsay. How was she? And was she the same as ever? And was she—the thought stabbed him strangely—laughing her slow laugh and looking her calm look for some other than he?
News he got of her quickly and with a vengeance. Going across Donegal Place he was tapped on the arm.
"I 'd like a wee word wi' you, Mr. Aleck Robertson."
He saw beside him a compact figure with a set jaw and savage eyes. He was mostly cognizant of the eyes. They blazed at him with unconcealed hatred.
"And who may you be?"
"You 'll know me fine afore I 'm through with you, Aleck Robertson. I 'm Tom Lindsay, Jeanie Lindsay's brother."
Robertson forgot the eyes in the question that jumped to his lips. He held out his hand.
"I ha'e heard her speak o' you. You 're the one that went to Newcastle, to the shipbuilding. And how 's Jean?"
Lindsay struck the proffered hand down.
"She 's the way you left her, wi' this difference: There 's a bastard o' yours on her arm this four months. And do you know what I 'm going to do to you for that, Aleck Robertson? I 'm going to kill you!"
"Wi' a baby!"
"Wi' a baby o' yours!"
"Wi' a baby o' mine!" Robertson was plainly dazed.
"You were no' expecting that, maybe?"
"No! I was no' expecting that." The big man tried to pull his faculties together.
"And where is she now? She 's no' gone away, is she?"
"No! She 's no' gone away. And she 's not where she might be, for all you did—in the poor-house! Nor tramping the streets, selling matches! No! She 's at home. In her father's house—"
"At home, you say?"
"She 's at home." Tom Lindsay put himself in Robertson's way. "And, now, listen to me—"
The red-bearded man shoved Tom aside as though he were a troublesome bush in the path.
"Will you get to hell out o' my way," he roared, "afore I gi'e you a clout on the lug?"
He started at breakneck speed down the street. The brother looked after him silently, his jaw loose with wonder.
He pushed aside the little gate in front of the garden and though he knocked at the door, he tried it, so impatient was he for entry, and finding it on the latch, he opened it as a gust of wind might. In the hall he met her coming to answer the knock, and suddenly as he saw her, all the bluster and the heartiness went out of him, and his knees turned to water and there was a great catch in his throat. He wanted to see her only, but the baby she had on her arm was she also, both of them one. It suddenly occurred to him that he too was a part of her, all three of them one. And he felt suddenly as Saul must have felt when, going toward Damascus, he was stricken to the earth.
She smiled at his perturbation. "I 'm glad to see you, Aleck." Calmly she shifted the child to her left arm. She put out her hand to him and he caught it and held on to it as a foundering sailor hangs on to a thrown line. She led him to the parlor.
"Have you no word," she smiled, "for me and this wee fellow o' yours?"
He looked at the both of them, she more like Ceres, the autumn spirit, than ever, buxom and wise and calmly happy, and the little thing of down and fluttering life in her arms, soft as a newly hatched chick, he sensed.
"When," he asked, and his voice in his own ears was hoarse as the cawing of a rook, "when are you going to marry me?"
"I 'm no' so sure," she said calmly, "that I 'm going to marry you at all."
"You 're going to marry me, Jeanie, and I 'll start the mill again, and we 'll all be fine—"
"And you 'll gi'e the working people the raises they're entitled to?"
"I will not," he flashed out suddenly, as of old. "They 're entitled to nothing."
"Then I'll ha' nothing to do wi' you." She looked at him calmly. "Nor will this wee fellow. I 'm a working-woman, Aleck, and he 's a working-woman's son. We 're no' your kind."
He saw the baby's face now, crumpled with sleep. Very like an old man's face it seemed to him, and yet there was something indefinably pulling about it.
"The wee workin'-fellow!" There was such a pathetic touch to the idea.
"By God!" he blurted suddenly. "I'll gi'e them the mill!"
She smiled again. "The wee thing then was missing in you, Aleck—I think you got it now. And I 'll marry you, Aleck, just when you say. It's no' too soon," she added simply.
For a minute he was sunk in abstraction while she patted his hand with the old, familiar gesture. He raised his head and spoke with conviction.
"You know, Jeanie, you know, it's queer to think that an hour ago I had no idea of all this. You and thon wee fellow, and the mill's working again and a' right between me and the men. I had made an end, and now there 'll be no end. You know, it seems ordained in a manner of speaking. Ay, as it were, ordained. It does," he said. "It does that. Ay, indeed. It does so."