Stonepastures

A CITY WITHOUT A STREET.

“To know a man well you must learn his city.”

THERE are three districts in Soot City: By the Bridge, By the Tracks, and the Stonepastures.

Simeon Quarry--who lived with the Buttes By the Tracks, and who knew more of this story than I do--always began the tale of his town with this phrase, “As way back as ‘30”; for that was the year when the big birds sitting on the big boulders first watched the strangers with the strings and water levels, and heard the strangers’ words.

There abode in the wilderness of those days--for everything was Stonepastures then--a Methodist preacher with a taste for the scripturally obscure. His circuit included the site of Soot City, to which place he gave the name of Padan-Aram, which endures as the county name until to-day.

Among the strange words the birds heard were “ile,” “iron,” and “smelt-oven.” These sounds were each an “open sesame” to hordes of foreign workers, with a proportion of native Americans generalled by Jo Bentley--grandfather of the Bentley whose plant is still the first in Soot City.

In a single lustre there sprang from the arid strip of country confined with treeless hills--“Baldhead Rangers” and “Cleanshorns”--rows on rows of mean houses, containing men and women every year lessening their acquaintance with the world without. Soot City was their cradle, the arena of their endeavour, their deathbed, and their sepulchre.

By the Bridge dwelt foreman, bookkeepers, furnace masters, together with the Bentleys’ outdoor servants--for they had a great place now. The son had rowed in the Cambridge boat, the daughters had become Episcopalians and gave great house parties, and the people By the Bridge who knew them best were the lawyer, the doctor, the baker, and the undertaker, who conspired against the rest of humanity as occasion permitted.

Soot City has no street. Instead, it has narrow-gauge tracks, along which the workmen go forth to and return from labour in the empty ore cars. The houses By the Tracks are ranged on either side of them, and are inhabited by mechanics, iron workers, truckmen, freight handlers, and preachers of minor denominations.

Beyond the bridge are the Stonepastures, and beyond these the ore bed, the smelting place, and the nutt and bolt factory. The bridge straddles the tracks so that the highroad may traverse the town, and the narrow gauge runs from the gate of Bentley’s Place to the ore bed under the bridge and over the Stonepastures. The tracks are only four miles long, joining the main line at the furnaces.

No townsman ever looked at the sunset, because it went down on the Stonepastures. Every one’s sunset was “over there”; and in the mean hovels that stood out sharply to the town gaze in an evening’s afterglow dwelt men who had the white-lead poison in their hands, or who had been scorched in a blast, or who, trying to preserve themselves in alcohol, had failed.

The men were hungry and chafed, wrenching themselves from sleep of a morning to a dull day, three parts thirst to one of hunger. The children went to school and learned to know their parents’ mistakes, bringing home bitterness instead of bread. The mothers washed rags in rusty water, prayed and played with the children, or picked up scrap-iron for the men to sell.

Accident and sudden death were about as frequent as night and day. A squeeze between two ore cars, or a tendency to slumber on the tracks after a “cosey of arrack” at Grigg’s drinkshop, meant black on some one’s door-handle. But the “blast” was the horror that made the women kiss their men with the fervour of the last parting when they went off to work at the ore bed. The blast was not famous for respect of persons. It rarely killed, but its victims were rarely cured. There was a rocky stretch by the ore bed which young Bentley was having blown out for the town reservoir, and the new iron vein backed against it. Scarcely a blast had been managed without some one being thrown to the earth, mangled with jagged stones--“the throw” the men called them. It might be that some one would fall with the shock and find himself thereafter deaf to everything but the “dumb roaring,” and such a one would die of what the unlettered Methodist preacher said was “eternal injuries.” The very children feared the blast.

There were, however, three things that Soot City loved: Pay-day, Jarlsen, and the cinder flare. At night they would pause in their homeward way from drinkshop or chapel or Jarlsen’s neat sitting room, and look toward the smelting furnace. And as the blaze jumped into the yawning sky they would bless its fierceness, and look at the houses and tracks standing out clearly, saying along with their good-nights and good-byes, “God’s lookin’ at cher, Bill!”

For they named the light from the dumped cinder “The eye of God.”

II.

WEDDING GLOOM.

“Death doesn’t wait for a man to have his laugh out.”--_Salt-miners saying._

IT is hard for people who have never seen places like Soot City to believe in natures like Emma Butte’s and August Jarlsen’s. In river cities the labouring population may be augmented daily with a load of tramps and paupers who can travel on the river about as cheaply as their own feet can take them. No travel is as cheap as river boating. River fares cost much less than shoes, and no other cities have the shifting masses that the river cities get.

This is not the nature of an inland town whose mine or iron vein is booming. No one leaves it. What is usual with one man may become the common talk of his district, if he be an influence in it. The vice of a member of the town corporation is the sorrow of the county. The men have gained their livelihood at the hands of the town; they nurse their birthplace when its resource is threatened; they work for it. Even as they live by it they die for it.

In feeling Jarlsen was an American; his ideals were American. He went to church soberly, had a bust of Lincoln on his mantel, eschewed labour unions, and gave away a third of the not too princely stipend awarded him by the Bentleys for his position of payman.

For all that, when the native Swedes got very drunk of an evening and, congregating By the Bridge, swore in their high, unearthly voices, he would be much ashamed and wish and even urge them farther. For he too was born in Sweden, and said “y” for “j” even yet, if the men hurried him.

His room was By the Bridge. His wont was to ask the better set, the more American labourers, to his room of an evening. He then, like King David, charmed them with a harp. He would sit in front of the stove on a packing-box covered with pinkish jute, and there play and sing strange, sweet songs about birds and lonely mountains, and kings’ daughters and sad forests, and immortality; for these are of the kinds of songs that come from the North.

Jarlsen’s generosity was remarkable; for his countrymen are money-getters beyond any non-Semitic people. The knowledge of the value of money is born in them. There is a saying at the ore beds that testifies to this: “A Swede will go farther for a dollar than an Irishman will for a drink.”

But when Jarlsen took Emma Butte, in the face of the whole town, the men of his acquaintance marvelled greatly. If he were the man whom Soot City loved, Emma was the woman who ruled it. She “had not the class” that her lover had.

Coming into the city as a child, she had learned the less rough speech of the town labour and taken on herself the somewhat milder manners of the people she now saw. But she had never tried to make a place among them; she lived with her father, plying her odd trade--she was a barber--and making her oddest pennies in another way, as shall be presently set forth.

In the lighter social semblance of their town the Bentleys were paramount. Their doings came to the town ear somehow, and the people followed their lead, if it were a possible thing for them. For example, one of the clerical workers By the Bridge had invented an intrenching tool, a spade, which had been adopted by the army. As a consequence, he was invited to eat at the Bentleys’ Place. On his return from the feast he reported to his eager circle that not only had the ground-floor rooms been filled with people, but that Miss Bentley’s bedroom looked like an intelligence office, so full was it of the maids of the ladies below.

This detail of magnificence so possessed the minds of the female portion of the inventor’s acquaintance that By the Tracks was drawn on for Abigails. Male escort was frowned down completely. One might return from a Soot City revel with a man, but to go with one--if he were not “steady company”--was proof positive that there was no quarter-dollar wherewith to hire attendance. Emma was often retained as lady-in-waiting, and through this curiously pretentious institution met and obtained Jarlsen, as well as her fees.

Quarry boarded in the Butte household. No one knew why. He imposed on them always, and made them uncomfortable with his odd ways and bad tongue. His board was paid intermittently and with recurrent ill will. He was always a stranger and equally an inmate. He had a fashion of rapping at Emma’s window (her room was on the ground floor) and complaining to her of slights imposed on him by members of her acquaintance.

She felt him to be the only man life had shown her whose faults were not condoned by a liking for herself.

Every Sunday found her in a leather apron giving Quarry his Sunday morning’s dram of sweetened rum in his tea, to keep him quiet through shaving hours. He came from Ryde, Isle of Wight, and drank tea to the memory of his old home, which had long since forgotten him.

Then Emma would get to work. Her apron was of red leather hemmed up with brass-topped nails. It had a pocket lined with tin, where her lather brush was put when she took the razor from under the straps on her left sleeve to stroke a labourer’s jowl. Her lips would be pressed together tightly then, her curling hair caught back with a round comb, like a child’s. When she lathered she talked and laughed, but when she shaved she was silent.

Jarlsen shaved himself latterly, and no one understood it but Emma. All the men thought she “had a fluke and struck ile, when she was just digging for potatoes.” That she, in the exercise of her odd function, should have secured Jarlsen seemed to them a wonderful thing. But it was not.

Emma was a very good woman, and that is just the same as a lady to men of Jarlsen’s make.

He had begun to shave himself the day he felt he loved his barber. The town discovered his feelings the very day he did, and promptly prophesied trouble. “Jest es soon es he felt like marryin’ her he should hev broke her into shavin’ weekdays, an’ kep’ a clean chin on him all the time,” was what every one said.

Of course, in the eyes of her townspeople Emma put on airs also, for she took to going to church. She never went so far as to stand during the singing, for that would have cost her all her trade. No one stands up in the extremely unorthodox Methodist chapel Soot City operatives affect, except those who are converted or those desiring the prayers of converts.