Octopus — Book I, Chapter 5, Part 5
As Annixter's glance fell upon this building, he was surprised to see Dyke standing upon the curb in front of it, apparently reading from a newspaper that he held in his hand.
But Annixter promptly discovered that he was not reading at all.
From time to time the former engineer shot a swift glance out of the corner of his eye up and down the street.
Annixter jumped at a conclusion.
An idea suddenly occurred to him.
Dyke was watching to see if he was observed--was waiting an opportunity when no one who knew him should be in sight.
Annixter stepped back a little, getting a telegraph pole somewhat between him and the other.
Very interested, he watched what was going on.
Pretty soon Dyke thrust the paper into his pocket and sauntered slowly to the windows of a stationery store, next the street entrance of S. Behrman's offices.
For a few seconds he stood there, his back turned, seemingly absorbed in the display, but eyeing the street narrowly nevertheless; then he turned around, gave a last look about and stepped swiftly into the doorway by the great brass sign.
He disappeared.
Annixter came from behind the telegraph pole with a flush of actual shame upon his face.
There had been something so slinking, so mean, in the movements and manner of this great, burly honest fellow of an engineer, that he could not help but feel ashamed for him.
Circumstances were such that a simple business transaction was to Dyke almost culpable, a degradation, a thing to be concealed.
“Borrowing money of S. Behrman,” commented Annixter, “mortgaging your little homestead to the railroad, putting your neck in the halter.
Poor fool!
The pity of it.
Good Lord, your hops must pay you big, now, old man.
” Annixter lunched at the Yosemite Hotel, and then later on, toward the middle of the afternoon, rode out of the town at a canter by the way of the Upper Road that paralleled the railroad tracks and that ran diametrically straight between Bonneville and Guadalajara.
About half-way between the two places he overtook Father Sarria trudging back to San Juan, his long cassock powdered with dust.
He had a wicker crate in one hand, and in the other, in a small square valise, the materials for the Holy Sacrament.
Since early morning the priest had covered nearly fifteen miles on foot, in order to administer Extreme Unction to a moribund good-for-nothing, a greaser, half Indian, half Portuguese, who lived in a remote corner of Osterman's stock range, at the head of a canon there.
But he had returned by way of Bonneville to get a crate that had come for him from San Diego.
He had been notified of its arrival the day before.
Annixter pulled up and passed the time of day with the priest.
“I don't often get up your way,” he said, slowing down his horse to accommodate Sarria's deliberate plodding.
Sarria wiped the perspiration from his smooth, shiny face.
“You?
Well, with you it is different,” he answered.
“But there are a great many Catholics in the county--some on your ranch.
And so few come to the Mission.
At High Mass on Sundays, there are a few--Mexicans and Spaniards from Guadalajara mostly; but weekdays, for matins, vespers, and the like, I often say the offices to an empty church--'the voice of one crying in the wilderness.'
You Americans are not good churchmen.
Sundays you sleep--you read the newspapers.
” “Well, there's Vanamee,” observed Annixter.
“I suppose he's there early and late.
” Sarria made a sharp movement of interest.
“Ah, Vanamee--a strange lad; a wonderful character, for all that.
If there were only more like him.
I am troubled about him.
You know I am a very owl at night.
I come and go about the Mission at all hours.
Within the week, three times I have seen Vanamee in the little garden by the Mission, and at the dead of night.
He had come without asking for me.
He did not see me.
It was strange.
Once, when I had got up at dawn to ring for early matins, I saw him stealing away out of the garden.
He must have been there all the night.
He is acting queerly.
He is pale; his cheeks are more sunken than ever.
There is something wrong with him.
I
can't make it out.
It is a mystery.
Suppose you ask him?
” “Not I. I've enough to bother myself about.
Vanamee is crazy in the head.
Some morning he will turn up missing again, and drop out of sight for another three years.
Best let him alone, Sarria.
He's a crank.
How is that greaser of yours up on Osterman's stock range?
” “Ah, the poor fellow--the poor fellow,” returned the other, the tears coming to his eyes.
“He died this morning--as you might say, in my arms, painfully, but in the faith, in the faith.
A good fellow.
” “A lazy, cattle-stealing, knife-in-his-boot Dago.
” “You misjudge him.
A really good fellow on better acquaintance.
” Annixter grunted scornfully.
Sarria's kindness and good-will toward the most outrageous reprobates of the ranches was proverbial.
He practically supported some half-dozen families that lived in forgotten cabins, lost and all but inaccessible, in the far corners of stock range and canyon.
This particular greaser was the laziest, the dirtiest, the most worthless of the lot.
But in Sarria's mind, the lout was an object of affection, sincere, unquestioning.
Thrice a week the priest, with a basket of provisions--cold ham, a bottle of wine, olives, loaves of bread, even a chicken or two--toiled over the interminable stretch of country between the Mission and his cabin.
Of late, during the rascal's sickness, these visits had been almost daily.
Hardly once did the priest leave the bedside that he did not slip a half-dollar into the palm of his wife or oldest daughter.
And this was but one case out of many.
His kindliness toward animals was the same.
A horde of mange-corroded curs lived off his bounty, wolfish, ungrateful, often marking him with their teeth, yet never knowing the meaning of a harsh word.
A burro, over-fed, lazy, incorrigible, browsed on the hill back of the Mission, obstinately refusing to be harnessed to Sarria's little cart, squealing and biting whenever the attempt was made; and the priest suffered him, submitting to his humour, inventing excuses for him, alleging that the burro was foundered, or was in need of shoes, or was feeble from extreme age.
The two peacocks, magnificent, proud, cold-hearted, resenting all familiarity, he served with the timorous, apologetic affection of a queen's lady-in-waiting, resigned to their disdain, happy if only they condescended to enjoy the grain he spread for them.
At the Long Trestle, Annixter and the priest left the road and took the trail that crossed Broderson Creek by the clumps of grey-green willows and led across Quien Sabe to the ranch house, and to the Mission farther on.
They were obliged to proceed in single file here, and Annixter, who had allowed the priest to go in front, promptly took notice of the wicker basket he carried.
Upon his inquiry, Sarria became confused.
“It was a basket that he had had sent down to him from the city.
” “Well, I know--but what's in it?
” “Why--I'm sure--ah, poultry--a chicken or two.
” “Fancy breed?
” “Yes, yes, that's it, a fancy breed.
” At the ranch house, where they arrived toward five o'clock, Annixter insisted that the priest should stop long enough for a glass of sherry.
Sarria left the basket and his small black valise at the foot of the porch steps, and sat down in a rocker on the porch itself, fanning himself with his broad-brimmed hat, and shaking the dust from his cassock.
Annixter brought out the decanter of sherry and glasses, and the two drank to each other's health.
But as the priest set down his glass, wiping his lips with a murmur of satisfaction, the decrepit Irish setter that had attached himself to Annixter's house came out from underneath the porch, and nosed vigorously about the wicker basket.
He upset it.
The little peg holding down the cover slipped, the basket fell sideways, opening as it fell, and a cock, his head enclosed in a little chamois bag such as are used for gold watches, struggled blindly out into the open air.
A second, similarly hooded, followed.
The pair, stupefied in their headgear, stood rigid and bewildered in their tracks, clucking uneasily.
Their tails were closely sheared.
Their legs, thickly muscled, and extraordinarily long, were furnished with enormous cruel-looking spurs.
The breed was unmistakable.
Annixter looked once at the pair, then shouted with laughter.
“'Poultry'--'a chicken or two'--'fancy breed'--ho!
yes, I should think so.
Game cocks!
Fighting cocks!
Oh, you old rat!
You'll be a dry nurse to a burro, and keep a hospital for infirm puppies, but you will fight game cocks.
Oh, Lord!
Why, Sarria, this is as good a grind as I ever heard.
There's the Spanish cropping out, after all.
” Speechless with chagrin, the priest bundled the cocks into the basket and catching up the valise, took himself abruptly away, almost running till he had put himself out of hearing of Annixter's raillery.
And even ten minutes later, when Annixter, still chuckling, stood upon the porch steps, he saw the priest, far in the distance, climbing the slope of the high ground, in the direction of the Mission, still hurrying on at a great pace, his cassock flapping behind him, his head bent; to Annixter's notion the very picture of discomfiture and confusion.
As Annixter turned about to reenter the house, he found himself almost face to face with Hilma Tree.
She was just going in at the doorway, and a great flame of the sunset, shooting in under the eaves of the porch, enveloped her from her head, with its thick, moist hair that hung low over her neck, to her slim feet, setting a golden flash in the little steel buckles of her low shoes.
She had come to set the table for Annixter's supper.
Taken all aback by the suddenness of the encounter, Annixter ejaculated an abrupt and senseless, “Excuse me.
” But Hilma, without raising her eyes, passed on unmoved into the dining-room, leaving Annixter trying to find his breath, and fumbling with the brim of his hat, that he was surprised to find he had taken from his head.
Resolutely, and taking a quick advantage of his opportunity, he followed her into the dining-room.
“I see that dog has turned up,” he announced with brisk cheerfulness.
“That Irish setter I was asking about.
” Hilma, a swift, pink flush deepening the delicate rose of her cheeks, did not reply, except by nodding her head.
She flung the table-cloth out from under her arms across the table, spreading it smooth, with quick little caresses of her hands.
There was a moment's silence.
Then Annixter said: “Here's a letter for you.
” He laid it down on the table near her, and Hilma picked it up.
“And see here, Miss Hilma,” Annixter continued, “about that--this morning--I suppose you think I am a first-class mucker.
If it will do any good to apologise, why, I will.
I want to be friends with you.
I made a bad mistake, and started in the wrong way.
I don't know much about women people.
I want you to forget about that--this morning, and not think I am a galoot and a mucker.
Will you do it?
Will you be friends with me?
” Hilma set the plate and coffee cup by Annixter's place before answering, and Annixter repeated his question.
Then she drew a deep, quick breath, the flush in her cheeks returning.
“I think it was--it was so wrong of you,” she murmured.
“Oh!
you don't know how it hurt me.
I cried--oh, for an hour.
” “Well, that's just it,” returned Annixter vaguely, moving his head uneasily.
“I didn't know what kind of a girl you were--I mean, I made a mistake.
I thought it didn't make much difference.
I thought all feemales were about alike.
” “I hope you know now,” murmured Hilma ruefully.
“I've paid enough to have you find out.
I cried--you don't know.
Why, it hurt me worse than anything I can remember.
I hope you know now.
” “Well, I do know now,” he exclaimed.
“It wasn't so much that you tried to do--what you did,” answered Hilma, the single deep swell from her waist to her throat rising and falling in her emotion.
“It was that you thought that you could--that anybody could that wanted to--that I held myself so cheap.
Oh!
” she cried, with a sudden sobbing catch in her throat, “I never can forget it, and you don't know what it means to a girl.
” “Well, that's just what I do want,” he repeated.
“I want you to forget it and have us be good friends.
” In his embarrassment, Annixter could think of no other words.
He kept reiterating again and again during the pauses of the conversation: “I want you to forget it.
Will you?
Will you forget it--that--this morning, and have us be good friends?
” He could see that her trouble was keen.
He was astonished that the matter should be so grave in her estimation.
After all, what was it that a girl should be kissed?
But he wanted to regain his lost ground.
“Will you forget it, Miss Hilma?
I want you to like me.
” She took a clean napkin from the sideboard drawer and laid it down by the plate.
“I--I do want you to like me,” persisted Annixter.
“I want you to forget all about this business and like me.
” Hilma was silent.
Annixter saw the tears in her eyes.
“How about that?
Will you forget it?
Will you--will--will you LIKE me?
” She shook her head.
“No,” she said.
“No what?
You won't like me?
Is that it?
” Hilma, blinking at the napkin through her tears, nodded to say, Yes, that was it.
Annixter hesitated a moment, frowning, harassed and perplexed.
“You don't like me at all, hey?
” At length Hilma found her speech.
In her low voice, lower and more velvety than ever, she said: “No--I don't like you at all.
” Then, as the tears suddenly overpowered her, she dashed a hand across her eyes, and ran from the room and out of doors.
Annixter stood for a moment thoughtful, his protruding lower lip thrust out, his hands in his pocket.
“I suppose she'll quit now,” he muttered.
“Suppose she'll leave the ranch--if she hates me like that.
Well, she can go--that's all--she can go.
Fool feemale girl,” he muttered between his teeth, “petticoat mess.
” He was about to sit down to his supper when his eye fell upon the Irish setter, on his haunches in the doorway.
There was an expectant, ingratiating look on the dog's face.
No doubt, he suspected it was time for eating.
“Get out--YOU!
” roared Annixter in a tempest of wrath.
The dog slunk back, his tail shut down close, his ears drooping, but instead of running away, he lay down and rolled supinely upon his back, the very image of submission, tame, abject, disgusting.
It was the one thing to drive Annixter to a fury.
He kicked the dog off the porch in a rolling explosion of oaths, and flung himself down to his seat before the table, fuming and panting.
“Damn the dog and the girl and the whole rotten business--and now,” he exclaimed, as a sudden fancied qualm arose in his stomach, “now, it's all made me sick.
Might have known it.
Oh, it only lacked that to wind up the whole day.
Let her go, I don't care, and the sooner the better.
” He countermanded the supper and went to bed before it was dark, lighting his lamp, on the chair near the head of the bed, and opening his “Copperfield” at the place marked by the strip of paper torn from the bag of prunes.
For upward of an hour he read the novel, methodically swallowing one prune every time he reached the bottom of a page.
About nine o'clock he blew out the lamp and, punching up his pillow, settled himself for the night.
Then, as his mind relaxed in that strange, hypnotic condition that comes just before sleep, a series of pictures of the day's doings passed before his imagination like the roll of a kinetoscope.
First, it was Hilma Tree, as he had seen her in the dairy-house--charming, delicious, radiant of youth, her thick, white neck with its pale amber shadows under the chin; her wide, open eyes rimmed with fine, black lashes; the deep swell of her breast and hips, the delicate, lustrous floss on her cheek, impalpable as the pollen of a flower.
He saw her standing there in the scintillating light of the morning, her smooth arms wet with milk, redolent and fragrant of milk, her whole, desirable figure moving in the golden glory of the sun, steeped in a lambent flame, saturated with it, glowing with it, joyous as the dawn itself.
Then it was Los Muertos and Hooven, the sordid little Dutchman, grimed with the soil he worked in, yet vividly remembering a period of military glory, exciting himself with recollections of Gravelotte and the Kaiser, but contented now in the country of his adoption, defining the Fatherland as the place where wife and children lived.
Then came the ranch house of Los Muertos, under the grove of cypress and eucalyptus, with its smooth, gravelled driveway and well-groomed lawns; Mrs. Derrick with her wide-opened eyes, that so easily took on a look of uneasiness, of innocence, of anxious inquiry, her face still pretty, her brown hair that still retained so much of its brightness spread over her chair back, drying in the sun; Magnus, erect as an officer of cavalry, smooth-shaven, grey, thin-lipped, imposing, with his hawk-like nose and forward-curling grey hair; Presley with his dark face, delicate mouth and sensitive, loose lips, in corduroys and laced boots, smoking cigarettes--an interesting figure, suggestive of a mixed origin, morbid, excitable, melancholy, brooding upon things that had no names.
Then it was Bonneville, with the gayety and confusion of Main Street, the whirring electric cars, the zinc-sheathed telegraph poles, the buckboards with squashes stowed under the seats; Ruggles in frock coat, Stetson hat and shoe-string necktie, writing abstractedly upon his blotting pad; Dyke, the engineer, big-boned.
Powerful, deep-voiced, good-natured, with his fine blonde beard and massive arms, rehearsing the praises of his little daughter Sidney, guided only by the one ambition that she should be educated at a seminary, slipping a dime into the toe of her diminutive slipper, then, later, overwhelmed with shame, slinking into S. Behrman's office to mortgage his homestead to the heeler of the corporation that had discharged him.
By suggestion, Annixter saw S. Behrman, too, fat, with a vast stomach, the check and neck meeting to form a great, tremulous jowl, the roll of fat over his collar, sprinkled with sparse, stiff hairs; saw his brown, round-topped hat of varnished straw, the linen vest stamped with innumerable interlocked horseshoes, the heavy watch chain, clinking against the pearl vest buttons; invariably placid, unruffled, never losing his temper, serene, unassailable, enthroned.
Then, at the end of all, it was the ranch again, seen in a last brief glance before he had gone to bed; the fecundated earth, calm at last, nursing the emplanted germ of life, ruddy with the sunset, the horizons purple, the small clamour of the day lapsing into quiet, the great, still twilight, building itself, dome-like, toward the zenith.
The barn fowls were roosting in the trees near the stable, the horses crunching their fodder in the stalls, the day's work ceasing by slow degrees; and the priest, the Spanish churchman, Father Sarria, relic of a departed regime, kindly, benign, believing in all goodness, a lover of his fellows and of dumb animals, yet, for all that, hurrying away in confusion and discomfiture, carrying in one hand the vessels of the Holy Communion and in the other a basket of game cocks.
