A Circle In The Sand

A Circle in the Sand by Kate Jordan

Author of "The Kiss of Gold," "The Other House," etc, etc.

Copyright 1898, by the author.

CHAPTER VI.

Dear Miss Garrick—Your breezy letter came like a voice from the outside world into the solitude of my sickroom. I am much better. In a week or two I'll be myself again. The consequences of the accident are a treacherously dizzy brain, a bandaged shoulder and head and a great weariness of everything under the sun. Your request stupefies me. I never heard of such reckless courage. Fancy you out among the miners in these times of bloodshed. Do you know what it means? I can imagine what you will say. You are a student of life, and a reading of selected passages will not content you. However, we won't tear this subject to shreds again.

Of course you know that from a mercantile standpoint your report of the strike, your description of the life of the women in that hopeless place, would be most valuable to the paper, and, if you still wish to go, please, for friendship's sake, ask Dr. Ericsson to go with you. I will write to him too. About the stories. Don't go into the intricacies of the strike. Tell the women's story in a woman's way. I'll feature them in the half weekly and Sunday editions. Sefain, whom you have seen in the office, is there now. I'll instruct him to illustrate your stories, and, as he does excellent work, too, they ought to make a hit. The relief fund which has been started will be forwarded to you for distribution. After all these instructions I urgently add—don't go. Faithfully, David Temple.

This letter was held closely in Anne's hand, hidden under the folds of her traveling cloak, as the train carried her over the hills of Pennsylvania. Dr. Ericsson had closed his eyes upon the gloominess of his surroundings and fallen asleep upon the opposite seat. She was free to think uninterruptedly, her eyes upon the long lines of windows curtained with mist and irisated with raindrops, the reaches of land patched with melting snow, the smoke from infrequent cottages struggling in the dampness and vanishing groundward as if affrighted.

Ten commonplace days and nights had passed since sudden grief like a flame had illumined her heart and set before her eyes its hopeless, passionate burden.

Since then she had been unquiet; the happiness of knowing David's injury would not be serious mixed with a curious disinclination to see him again and a sense of defeat. It appeared unconformable that this love should have unexpectedly awakened within her when she had thought herself too proud and strong. It seemed as if her senses had lightly succumbed to the potency of environment, as if passion were a mere impulse, and the man treading the same path with her a man to love, not the man her soul had irresistibly sought and found.

And yet something within her after all reasoning insisted on being heard. It had an ecstatic voice and gave its own golden meaning to the dark day. She seemed drawn to David by a warm, strong hand, and the delight of yielding sent a feeling of sublime weakness over her as comes to one wearied who slips the will and sinks to sleep. It was a happy fancy and hid the meager land under the hurrying twilight from her sight.

Dr. Ericsson gave his body a chilly shake and roused himself, opening one eye querulously and then the other.

"You'll regret taking me as a traveling companion, my dear. How long have I been asleep?"

"For hours. We'll get to Platt's Peak in time for dinner."

Anne cleared away a spot on the glass with her finger and gazed at the blankness beyond. "You'll be hungry, poor dear, won't you?"

"Dinner? Be thankful if we get doughnuts and cabbage or pork and fried bread. I know these places," he grunted. "You don't know what you've run into, young lady. I warned you. I might have saved my breath. "

"Fancy being able from actual experience to describe the pangs of hunger," said Anne, with a laugh.

"Don't madden me. I've arrived at the age when I respect a good dinner as much as anything on earth. As the irreproachable bourgeois said at the pantomime when the ballet appeared, 'I wish I hadn't carne.'"

"You're in a vile humor today," said Anne placidly. "I'm not."

"Of course you're not; you're a woman. You've had your way and you've made some one miserable, so there you are," he jerked out, a smile in his eyes. "But truly," he added in a different tone, "I had a letter from your aunt this morning which annoyed me very much. They'll be back some time in January. "

"But you'll surely be glad to see them."

"Oh, fundamentally of course! But there's the house to be renovated—not good enough as it is. And I am made distinctly aware that Olga is to be brought here on a husband hunting skirmish. Foreigners evidently have been given up as hopeless. My beautiful daughter has no money, you see."

He clasped his hands and looked belligerent. 

"Do you remember Olga at all? I took her down to your father's a few times when she was a little thing."

"I remember her very distinctly," and Anne laughed. "She scratched my face once. We quarreled all the time. I remember that a little guinea hen of mine died, and I buried it with proper, religious pomp, singing over it, 'Sister, thou wast mild and lovely.' But Olga wouldn't have this at all and interrupted the services with shrieks and dances. We parted the frankest of enemies. It will be curious to see her again. Do you know she wasn't at all pretty then?"

"Today she is a professional beauty with no other ambition than to make a good match. It will be strange to have l them back. But you won't desert me then, Anne?" And he looked wistful.

"I have Mrs. Micawber's staying qualities, you'll see," she said gayly.

It was dark now. Beyond the windows lay a tempestuous blackness crossed at times by the red and green of railroad lights.

Anne sat back and closed her eyes. There was work before her, and she meant to do it well. Besides the stubborn law she had always followed of putting the best of herself into her work there was now a determination to become a name in the world of journalism, and all for a reason that made her a little ashamed—the milliner who hummed a ballad while she twisted a ribbon for a hat, the dairymaid who eyed her rows of glistening pans with a critical eye while listening for a footstep, shared this ambition with her—simply the longing to appear well in one man's eyes and be loved by him.

The rain was beating in a drumming downpour on the roof of the car when the brakeman swung in, a red lantern in his hand. As he stood in the doorway, the spray driving against his crouched shoulders, the bloody blotch of light against his rain soaked clothes, he seemed a figure of doom, as if the misery, cold and death rampant there had taken human form and entered, crying in hoarse accents:

"Platt's Peak colliery!"

Anne's dreaming fell from her like a cloak shrugged from uneasy shoulders, and she sprang up, her face bright with sudden energy.

On Dr. Ericsson's arm she plunged through the black night to the railway station. This was little more than a shed over a flooring and supported by begrimed posts. It was dark save for the yellow rays from a small window opening into a boxlike house where two telegraph operators sat, the beat of the machines stealing into the shadow like the clucking of a tongue.

A man stood looking in. When he swung around, Anne found herself face to face with Donald Sefain. They had seen each other constantly without recognition and without exchanging a word. The meeting there under the circumstances was a trifle perplexing. Donald's expression was almost forbidding as he awkwardly pulled off his cap.

"Miss Garrick, I believe?"

"How are you, Donald?" cried Dr. Ericsson, stepping into the light. "I haven't seen you for an age." And he seized him by the shoulder.

"Oh, I'm all right!" he said indifferently. "You'll have to walk to the hotel. The cab service is very deficient here. We've all got to live like paupers whether we like it or not."

He hurried ahead, the effort of being conventionally polite evidently a new role.

"I'll show you the way," he said brusquely.

"I say, Donald"—and Dr. Ericsson's tone was just as genial as when he had first spoken—"are things very bad?" Donald's stormy eyes flashed from beneath the rim of his cap. His tone was almost insolent.

"Hell is loose here," he said.

CHAPTER VII.

It was a dark morning, and Dr. Ericsson's mood matched it. He had rheumatism. It had rained for three days, was still raining, and they had again given him fried bread for breakfast.

"Thank God, sunshine and laughter are in the world somewhere! It is well to remember that here," he said, poking the fire furiously.

Anne stood near him, drawing on a pair of loose dogskin gloves. A fur cap fitted like a bandage above her troubled eyes.

"Tuck me in, Anne, dear. Then look out, like a good girl, and see if there's a break in the dirty sky."

She swept the rag of curtain aside and gazed on the marvels of desolation before her. The hotel was on one of the highest hills, and she could see mountains of coal waste looming black in the mist, rivers like ink flowing beneath gaunt bridges, vast hollows of moist, shrunken land above the mines spreading like emptied arteries beneath the surface, houses, as if shaken by palsy, leaning sideways upon erratic foundations, and over all a light rain driven by a wind from the east.

"The sky is as dull as ever," said Anne, still standing with the curtain in her hand, and she added in a vehement whisper: "It's all wrong, uncle. There's something horribly wrong with the world."

"Have you just found that out?"

"Last night as we came home from the funeral of the man Red Evans killed"—her voice trembled—"it came to me what these people are. They are the moving, untombed dead. The starving men guarding the black pits, the women, nothing but child bearing blocks, the picker boys with their undersized, ghastly bodies, have dead souls, uncle—quite, quite dead."

"Don't look so tragic, my dear. One comfort—they don't know how really badly off they are; brought up to it, you see."

"I know it"—the curtain slipped from Anne's fingers—"but that's what makes me fairly sick when I think of it—their apathy, their stolid acceptance of all. They don't crave anything except enough food to keep them quiet, and they can 't get that. Then one of them grows frantic and the rest follow. Only now and then there's a Red Evans who has hate enough in him to kill the insulting despot who ruined his daughter and who has been crushing and cheating him for years. He went mad, and now the law is loose hunting for Red Evans as terriers hunt for a rat. If they find him, they'll hang him, and this is justice of course. But why need Red Evans ever have become what be was? Why? It's such a big, terrible question."

Dr. Ericsson caught her hand and kissed it.

"You should have put an iron casing round those too ready sympathies of yours, Anne, before you came here. We'll have a very hard time of it if we try to change conditions which have always been," he said mildly. "Besides, I've come to the conclusion myself for my own satisfaction that the small things of life are inevitably balanced here; so life in total with all its oppositious and wrongs must be as evenly balanced somewhere else. What are your plans for today? I wish I could go with you and Sefain. Confound this uncertain leg of mine!"

"I'm first going with money to Red Evans' sister," said Anne, seating herself on the arm of his chair and opening her notebook. "Then I want to see the interior of a mine if it's possible. I'd like to get an idea of the graves where these men spend their days. Tonight I must get a long 'special' ready."

"Sefain must go with you everywhere. Don't forget that. Goodby, my dear. Don 't fret over what can't be helped. Remember all workers are not like these. Think of niggers singing in a lily field! Ah. I wish I were there now!"

Anne hurried down the stairs and found Donald waiting for her with a venerable carriage. He did not see her as she carne up to him. Standing just outside the doorway, an Inverness cape flapping around him, he was sketching in the salient points of a noisy group across the road. One man stood on a barrel, his arms held up, while in howls he called on the others to resist. Around him were a score of men—Huns, Poles, with a smaller mixture of Irish and English—their working jeans discarded for antique and yellowed broadcloth. They were all stupidly listening without sign of answering spirit, their faces showing that they were hungry and shivering.

Donald was never fully aroused except when be worked. His brown, nervous fingers held the book intently, his eyes flashed keenly from the page to the men, but his dark face looked pinched in the raw morning. His air was frankly dissolute.

When Anne spoke to him, the smile of which he always seemed ashamed made his face attractive for a second before it settled again into the usual ungracious quiet.

The horse went at a crawling pace over the hills and across swampy land, and they talked of the work for the paper as if they were two men. No personalities were touched upon. There was nothing to brighten the drive, and after a long distance covered in the face of a mist that made Anne's cheeks like pale, wet roses they stopped before the house where Red Evans had lived.

The clamor following disgrace surrounded it. Women bowed by the malformations of toil and years stood shoulder to shoulder with idle men, all talking loudly, their eyes fastened upon the sulphur hued cottage, whose under story from the trembling of the tunneled land bad been shot out like a hag's jaw.

"She's in there," said Donald. "They say she's like a crazy woman. I'll go in with you."

He tied the horse to a post and shielded Anne through the curious crowd. After some imperative knocking and promises of help to the woman shrieking abuse from within the door was guardedly opened, and they stood before Red Evans' sister.

Anne shuddered at the face. The forces in a soul that damn seemed to have set fire to all the softness in the woman and left their flames blazing in her hollow eyes. With lank gray hair failing to her shoulders and veined hands clinched at her sides she stood at bay in the desolate room, bitten through with grief, an epitome of hatred, famine and fear. Unnoticed Donald swiftly made a sketch of her and at a sign from Anne slipped out, leaving her to her difficult task.

In the warmth of her sympathy and gratitude for the visible help she brought the beast in the sufferer was conquered, and with wild weeping she told the story of her life. She had been born on a sheep farm in Scotland near a river winding through a valley and had left it to come to her brother when his wife died. Anne saw the lost home plainly as the homely sentences sketched it—a place of perfume, light and healthy sleep. She realized the gloomy change to this black valley with Red Evans, the morbid slave; his daughter pretty and wild, ready to sell her soul for a trinket and at length flying away in shame, and the younger son, Joe, a picker boy, choked with miner's asthma.

(To be continued)

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