"Timber"/Chapter 10
CHAPTER X
On Helen Foraker's suggestion, John had gone to live in the men's shanty with Milt Goddard, Black Joe and the balance of the crew that had not been shifted to the White camp.
"This is your job," she said. "I am only working for you. I'll be more comfortable if you see what is going on both on the river and at the mill, and you can't see if you stay in town."
It was not a congenial shelter for him. He was out of place, did not belong to the class of men with whom he ate and slept and his reputation as a "mixer" in that other existence he had lived did him no good here. More, Goddard was surly and gruff, as his deeply rooted jealousy prompted. Black Joe ignored John and would respond to none of his advances. When Taylor asked questions Joe would look about and grunt scornfully and say to some one:
"Did you hear that? He," brandishing his pipe stem toward John, "wants to know if—" repeating the question. Then he would answer explosively: "Of course it is!" Or: "Hell, no!" giving by tone and manner the inference that none but an addle-pate would have put such a query.
After their agreement was signed, Taylor had nothing of a personal nature in common with Helen Foraker. Their conversations were all brief and wholly concerned with the work and much of her talk was as Greek to Taylor. He watched the girl closely, with a growing humility, which, strangely, he did not resent. He saw her those first days, among the men in the ravine where teams snaked the logs from their jumble to the river's edge, where they were caught in a boom and dogged into rafts. She was sparing of words, untiring, always alert, and she knew what was going on. He heard her challenge the method of a teamster whose horses were stuck when the log they skidded jammed between two great stumps.
"Back now, and swing in gee," she said sharply. "Don't yell at them! You've got your team up in the air. Try it again—Haw, now!"
The log was obstinate, the teamster flushing as others looked on to see her directions sting his pride.
"If you don't like my way, why don't you try it yourself?" he asked.
She dropped from the log on which she stood, took the reins from him, tried and failed; let the team rest, rubbed their noses, eased the collars, and started them again—They strained together, skin wrinkling over their broad rumps, they grunted, swung, and the log started forward.
"Now you take them," she said, returning the lines. "You'll go farther with a low voice."
She had been right. The man grinned himself because he had been wrong and shown up fairly.
Taylor saw her rebuke a youth for carelessly driving in the dog-wedge.
"That won't hold," she said, kicking the wedge with her boot toe. "If that raft goes to pieces and that one log dead-heads, we're losing as much as we're paying you for a day's work. Knock it out and put it in right!"
The boy did. In the vernacular of the men, she got away with it; and because she knew and was sure she knew.
He saw a farmer who had come to work for a few days standing close behind a team as the driver prepared to skid out a log.
"That's dangerous," Helen called out.
The man grumbled that he had been in the woods before, but did not move.
The horses started forward and hung and strained—and one tooth of the heavy tongs slipped from its hold and the implement shot forward, spinning over, struck the man's thigh and bit savagely into the flesh before the horses, lurching forward at the sudden relief of strain, could be stopped. The tongs fell away but the polished steel was smeared with blood and the man's pants leg darkened quickly with it.
Helen was the first to his side, borrowing a knife, slitting his clothing, exposing the two ugly holes in the flesh, one of which spurted an alarming stream where an artery had been torn. She took the man's suspenders, bound them about his leg above the injury and twisted the tourniquet tight with a stick—She was gone most of the day, remaining in camp with the man until the doctor from Pancake had come to dress the injury, and then going herself to tell his family of the accident.
(They recounted this of her while she waited for the doctor: "'Swear', she says. 'Swear if it hurts too much. I've heard worse oaths than you can invent!'")
Another item: He heard men on the job scoffing at the idea of timber as a crop; in Pancake he saw men grin and mutter to one another as Helen passed, and knew that the girl was aware that she was being laughed at derisively. Her manner on such occasions was striking; the soldiers of his company would have given her the blanket characterization of the army and said that she was hard-boiled; his mother would have said that she carried a chip on her shoulder; Taylor himself thought her defiance splendid. She could not divorce herself from her forest; when men belittled it and the idea behind it, it was as though they had made uncouth fun of her. To be a friend of the girl required that sympathy for her undertaking be made evident; to be outside her favor it was necessary only to show no charity for the work her father started. Nothing else seemed to influence her to any extent.
Such things he saw, and others: Saw her jump lightly from log to log as she went over the face of that tangle, poised like a splendid animal, lithe and alive and as sure of her body as she was of her mind. He watched her cross the river, leaving behind a rank of logs which rose sluggishly from the immersion her weight gave them, but she reached the boom of high-riding cedars without wetting her stout boots. And he saw her in a canoe, driving the light craft upstream, arms and shoulders and torso working with a rhythm which set his heart in faster measure.
He had been at the mill one morning and was walking through the forest to the skidway. At the house Black Joe came from the woods and scarcely grunted in return to John's salutation. But after Taylor had passed, he heard the man hail him.
Turning about, he saw Aunty May standing in the kitchen door. They were within ear-shot of the woman, but Joe said, "Say, tell her Miss Helen won't be down for dinner. She wants to know if Hump Bryant's telephoned."
Taylor repressed a smile at this strange procedure which he had witnessed on several occasions, and repeated the information and the question.
"Tell him," said Aunty May, "that there ain't been a 'phone call all forenoon."
Gravely Taylor passed along the message and then, as the woman turned into the house and Joe went on, he resumed his way.
A childish shout from below checked him on the high bank and he looked down to see Bobby and Bessy in the baby trap. That was what all Foraker's Folly called the small, dry sand bar, separated from the bank by a dozen feet of shallow water and reached by a small foot bridge made of stakes driven firmly in and planks laid along them. Each fair morning Aunty May shooed her charges across the bridge and then drew the planks to shore, thereby isolating the children on their sand bar and leaving her wholly free for the housework.
"There!" she would say each time she disposed of them. "Now I know where you younguns are at!"
The peril of water was deeply planted in their hearts and they never attempted the easy wade to shore.
However, playing in the clean sand grew monotonous and though the children never openly protested, they were full of excuses to delay their isolation, full of enthusiasm when released and ever on the watch for some passer who might be waylaid and induced to talk. Bobby, seeing Taylor, had halted him without excuse, but when John stopped the youngster pointed toward shore and cried:
"Look! Looky!"
"At what?"
"There! Somepin— "
"A kic-kic," said Bessy.
Bobby grinned. "She means a cricket. That's what it is. I fought it was somepin worse."
Taylor smiled, seeing the ruse, commented casually and started on.
"Did you see Black Joe?" Bobby was standing on the shore side of the bar now, toes almost in the water, and Bessy was beside him, finger in her mouth, wide-eyed in expectancy at this game she knew so well.
"Yes, I saw Joe. Why?"
"Oh—we seen—saw him too."
Bessy waved a hand at the river behind her.
"We see wog go by-by," she trebled.
Her brother smiled and straightened her sunbonnet. "She says, we watch the logs go by," he interpreted.
"Wotta wog—wotta big wog."
"That means lots of big logs. She don't talk very plain."
Pause. Bobby broke it hastily, for pauses were dangerous.
"Did you see Aunty May? Was she all right?"
Taylor laughed heartily and said that Aunty May appeared in good health and squatted on the brink. This change, forecasting a visit, made Bobby grin.
"Aunty May says you need a—a—a—now, you know what Grandpa Humpy Bryant is?"
"An editor?"
"Nope. What he is for Bessy an' me. "
"He's your guardian, isn't—"
Taylor had interrupted himself but Bobby took no notice of his queer smile.
"That's what!" he cried. "Garden! Aunty May says you need one."
"Oh, so Aunty May thinks I need a guardian?"
"Uh-huh. She says so."
"What do you think, Bobby?"
Thus confronted with a question, the nature of which was beyond him, the boy was embarrassed.
"I don't fink," he said and laughed. Then, losing his self-consciousness: "I'm like what Aunty May says Aunt Helen is: I don't say somepin unless I fink somepin. An' when she finks she says. That's what Aunty May says. She only finks about somepin 'portant, Aunty May says."
"And then, likely, I'm not very important, Bobby?"
Again the child was beyond his depth and twisted his fingers.
"Milt, he finks about you. He says to Aunt Helen you're a damn dude—"
"Oh-h-h-h!" broke in Bessy, looking up at her brother, who flushed quickly. He crossed his heart solemnly, bending over her, grasping and shaking one of her arms. "Honest, Bessy, brother won't say it again. Honest, cross my heart!"
Taylor sat down on the bank, dangling his legs in the yellow sand.
"So Milt says I'm a dude, does he?"
Bobby nodded eagerly. Here was something he could follow; and this was becoming a deliciously long interruption to the morning's captivity.
"He says that to Aunt Helen two-free days ago. He says you a—a—," glancing cautiously at Bessy—"a dude, an' you don't know what's goin' on wif your logs an' you let a woman make money for you—That's what Milt says."
"Waf-wog! waf-wog!" shrilled Bessie as a raft rounded the far bend.
The children discarded Taylor, who had served his purpose with them for that day. He rose and went on, and they did not even turn to wave farewell.
"So I need a guardian—and I'm a damned dude—and I don't know what is going on with my logs—and I'm letting a woman make money for me—"
He looked up through the pines and laughed ruefully.
"I'll be damned if I don't have to plead guilty on two counts!" he said. "And—I'm not sure of the others."
Later he added:
"And she always says what she thinks, and she doesn't say anything about me. Therefore," making the mathematical symbol of deduction in the air with a forefinger, "she doesn't think about me at all."
It was that evening. Helen Foraker was at her desk and looked up with surprise as Taylor entered, for it was the first time he had been in her house since their business agreement.
"Did you ever stop to think," he began without preface, "that I don't know much about what's going on?"
"I have it right here; the daily reports from the mill," she said.
"Not that," smiling. "Those are your figures and I'd like to be able to know whether they're right or not. Not because I doubt you, but because this is my job. I'm so ignorant that I don't know anything about my own business!"
She sat back in her chair.
"I've been wondering if you'd wake up," she said quietly.
"Wondering! I didn't suppose you took time to think about me."
She traced a line on the blotter before her with a dry pen.
"I've had lots of time to think about you, John Taylor. A lot of time to wonder about you—and not enough time to make up my mind. I've never known many kinds of people; I've never known any one like you. I thought I sized you up the first time I saw you and I haven't had much evidence to change my opinion. Women are supposed to have a certain keen intuition; perhaps we have; perhaps that has kept me wondering if you wouldn't wake up.
"Sit down."
He took a chair and she folded her arms, looking squarely at him.
"Most people I have known don't wonder about themselves and so they don't understand themselves. That morning when we went to look at your logs you told me more about yourself than any—stranger ever has. What you said backed up my first impression, but because you said it made me suspect that something had given you a jolt. Ever since, I've been wondering if you'd be content to hang around the edges and let circumstances make a boomerang of your father's trick."
She stopped, and Taylor smiled gravely.
"Circumstances?" he asked. "You mean you've wondered if I'd be content to ride into my father's good opinion on your shoulders!"
She protested, but he rose abruptly from his chair.
"Yes, it is you!" he cried suddenly excited. "What prospect I have of making a little success here is because that drunken boy gave me the wrong turn at Seven Mile and sent me here to spend the first night under your roof! And it's you who have made me want to wake up. You took me with you to Thad Parker's that night and I looked death in the face and caught a glimpse of life," voice low and growing tense. "The next day you talked to me about waste and duty and Americanism in the terms of saw-logs and made it more convincing than any flag-waving I've ever listened to. I've watched you dominate men who won't even accept me as a companion. I've watched you do things that to you are everyday accomplishments which are away beyond me—
"Just being here has gotten under my skin! I didn't realize it until today, but I've been uncomfortable and out of place and I haven't known why. Now I do know. I'm thrown against a girl who is doing things for herself and for me. You're making money for me, you're winning my father's favor for me, and I don't like it!"
He paused, breathing rapidly, and saw a look in the girl's eyes that had never been there before when she looked at him, a vague shadow of admiration, and his heart leaped.
"My mind should be good for a little something—Lord knows it's had preparation and rest enough! I have a stout back and strong hands," spreading his big, white palms. "I want to do things for myself, I want to make my own money, to win my father's good opinion, but I don't know how to use the tools I have to work with."
He stopped abruptly and let his hands fall limply to his sides. Then he asked very simply:
"Will you teach me?"
In such a manner, the John Taylor who had come to the Blueberry to humor his father, that he might win wealth without soiling his great hands and who had first learned that there is some money from which fair-minded men recoil, reached the understanding that the reward is only one factor in achievement; in such a manner the John Taylor, who had been self-assured and self-satisfied and superficial, humbled himself, yet in that deference was nothing servile, but rather it had the nobility of simplicity and frankness; in such a manner, the man who had set out to find material things which would make one woman happy, came to another woman to find that peace which can come only with respect of self.
Helen's hands dropped to her chair arms and a happy flush spread over her cheeks, brightening her large eyes.
"I will teach you all I can, John Taylor!" she said.
Like an ambitious boy on his first job he sat that night while she sketched for him the rudiments of what he must learn before he could know what was being done for him. There was talk of Schribner rule and Doyle rule; allowance for defect, mill over-run; of costs and markets; of lumber grades and transportation, of felling and bucking and swamping; of circular and bandsaws and kerf, of those fundamentals which he had hoped to skip in any business; talk of the grubbing he had loathed, and this night he did not shy from it, but questioned and listened and remembered.
It was late when he rose. Helen followed him to the door and stood on the threshold looking out into the spring night. Frogs sang and the jovial chorus of crickets played above the murmurings of the river and the light breeze whispering in the pines. A screech owl uttered its tremulous call not far off and a whip-poor-will cried in the swamp. Taylor looked up at the girl. Her arm resting against the casing was very delicate in line but, silhouetted against the light, it seemed then like a part of some competent, dexterous machine; her face was mostly in shadow, but where the lamp glow fell on one cheek was an impression of softness, of gentleness, strong in its call to his senses. She was talking, but he was unconscious of her words; just heedful of the musical timbre of her voice.
His breath caught and a strange creep went over his skin. For the first time she was for him a woman, a female; she had been an antagonist, an example, and now she was a girl, wholly different from any he had ever known, capable, far-sighted, keen of mind—and most lovely! He walked slowly toward the men's shanty. Pauguk muttered savagely from her kennel as she caught his scent. Manifestations of the appeal which had emanated from Helen went as quickly as they had come, but they left him unsteadied; that moment had taken something away—he did not know what.
He entered the bunk building where a light still burned. Goddard was mending a horse collar and looked up and his gray eyes lighted unpleasantly, but he did not speak. Taylor brought out pen and paper and sat at the table beneath the hanging oil lamp to write to Marcia Murray. For a long interval he was there; a dozen times he started forward and touched the page with his pen, but no mark was made.
He did not want to write to Marcia Murray! He could not share with her this new enthusiasm for the job that he was to do with his own mind, his own back, his own hands! For this night she had no part in his life; for the first time in months he went through those last moments before turning in without remembering the sound of her words, the feel of her breath on his cheek, the touch of her cool fingers, the steady look in her clear eyes. Something had come into his heart which left no place for little Marcia. Marcia, the girl for whom he had braved his father's vitriolic scorn, for whom he had come on this distasteful errand!
The others had gone to their blankets; he rose, blew out the lamp and went to the door. A light was extinguished in Helen Foraker's room. He saw an indistinct figure appear at the window and draw back the curtains and linger a moment and disappear—and again that delicious creep went over his body.
From an indefinite distance, a slow, accelerating throb beat upon the air, stout and measured and progressing to its gentle rumble: the drumming of a cock partridge. Again it came—and again, as the bird, fevered with the great impulse in him, made the darkness pulse with his love making. Very quietly, as though awed by some soul-moulding experience, Taylor turned back to his bunk; the stimulus did not leave him; he tossed restlessly, eyes open, sleeping in brief snatches until dawn; he rose in the new day, to a new manner of living, of thinking, to work with Helen Foraker's men and his logs, to talk markets with Humphrey Bryant, to sit evenings with the girl and talk timber and labor and board-feet and now and then be unable to hear even his own words because of the blood that the beauty of her face sent crowding into his ears.
And so it was that he could write to his father that evening and tell him briefly that he had turned the stone to bread, and that his letters to Marcia Murray from thenceforth were not impelled by the urge which made the grouse beat his wings through the night, but were concerned with men and the deeds of commerce!