Complete Works of Frank Norris

by Frank Norris

  Thursday morning she was in her room. Her trunk was already packed. There was nothing more to be done. She was off duty. There was neither care nor responsibility upon her mind. But she was too joyful, too happily exalted, too exuberant in gayety to pass her time in reading. She wanted action, movement, life, and instinctively threw open a window of her room, and, according to her habit, leaned upon her elbows and looked out and down upon the square. The morning was charming. Later in the day it probably would be very hot, but as yet the breeze of the earliest hours was stirring nimbly. The cool of it put a brisker note in the sombre glow of her cheeks, and just stirred a lock that, escaping from her gorgeous coils of dark-red hair, hung curling over her ear and neck. Into her eyes of dull blue — like the blue of old china — the morning’s sun sent an occasional unwonted sparkle. Over the asphalt and over the green grass-plots of the square the shadows of the venerable elms wove a shifting maze of tracery. Traffic avoided the place. It was invariably quiet in the square, and one — as now — could always hear the subdued ripple and murmur of the fountain in the centre.

  But the crowning delight of that morning was the sudden appearance of a robin in a tree close to Lloyd’s window. He was searching his breakfast. At every moment he came and went between the tree-tops and the grass-plots, very important, very preoccupied, chittering and calling the while, as though he would never tire. Lloyd whistled to him, and instantly he answered, cocking his head sideways. She whistled again, and he piped back an impudent response, and for quite five minutes the two held an elaborate altercation between tree-top and window-ledge. Lloyd caught herself laughing outright and aloud for no assignable reason. “Ah, the world was a pretty good place after all!”

  A little later, and while she was still at the window, Rownie brought her a note from Bennett, sent by special messenger.

  Ferriss woke up sick this morning. Nobody here but the two of us; can’t leave him alone. BENNETT.

  “Oh!” exclaimed Lloyd Searight a little blankly.

  The robin and his effrontery at once ceased to be amusing. She closed the window abruptly, shutting out the summer morning’s gayety and charm, turning her back upon the sunlight.

  Now she was more in the humour of reading. On the great divan against the wall lay the month’s magazines and two illustrated weeklies. Lloyd had bought them to read on the train. But now she settled herself upon the divan and, picking up one of the weeklies, turned its leaves listlessly. All at once she came upon two pictures admirably reproduced from photographs, and serving as illustrations to the weekly’s main article— “The Two Leaders of the Freja Expedition.” One was a picture of Bennett, the other of Ferriss.

  The suddenness with which she had come upon his likeness almost took Lloyd’s breath from her. It was the last thing she had expected. If he himself had abruptly entered the room in person she could hardly have been more surprised. Her heart gave a great leap, the dull crimson of her cheeks shot to her forehead. Then, with a charming movement, at once impulsive and shamefaced, smiling the while, her eyes half-closing, she laid her cheek upon the picture, murmuring to herself words that only herself should hear. The next day she left for the country.

  On that same day when Dr. Pitts arrived at the rooms Ferriss and Bennett had taken he found the anteroom already crowded with visitors — a knot of interviewers, the manager of a lecture bureau, as well as the agent of a patented cereal (who sought the man of the hour for an endorsement of his article), and two female reporters.

  Decidedly Richard Ferriss was ill; there could be no doubt about that. Bennett had not slept the night before, but had gone to and fro about the rooms tending to his wants with a solicitude and a gentleness that in a man so harsh and so toughly fibred seemed strangely out of place. Bennett was far from well himself. The terrible milling which he had undergone had told even upon that enormous frame, but his own ailments were promptly ignored now that Ferriss, the man of all men to him, was “down.”

  “I didn’t pull through with you, old man,” he responded to all of Ferriss’s protests, “to have you get sick on my hands at this time of day. No more of your damned foolishness now. Here’s the quinine. Down with it!”

  Bennett met Pitts at the door of Ferriss’s room, and before going in drew him into a corner.

  “He’s a sick boy, Pitts, and is going to be worse, though he’s just enough of a fool boy not to admit it. I’ve seen them start off this gait before. Remember, too, when you look him over that it’s not as though he had been in a healthy condition before. Our work in the ice ground him down about as fine as he could go and yet live, and the hardtack and salt pork on the steam whalers were not a good diet for a convalescent. And see here, Pitts,” said Bennett, clearing his throat, “I — well, I’m rather fond of that fool boy in there. We are not taking any chances, you understand.”

  After the doctor had seen the chief engineer and had prescribed calomel and a milk diet, Bennett followed him out into the hall and accompanied him to the door.

  “Verdict?” he demanded, fixing the physician intently with his small, distorted eyes. But Pitts was non-committal.

  “Yes, he’s a sick boy, but the thing, whatever it is going to be, has been gathering slowly. He complains of headache, great weakness and nausea, and you speak of frequent nose-bleeds during the night. The abdomen is tender upon pressure, which is a symptom I would rather not have found. But I can’t make any positive diagnosis as yet. Some big sickness is coming on — that, I am afraid, is certain. I shall come out here to-morrow. But, Mr. Bennett, be careful of yourself. Even steel can weaken, you know. You see this rabble” (he motioned with his head toward the anteroom, where the other visitors were waiting) “that is hounding you? Everybody knows where you are. Man, you must have rest. I don’t need to look at you more than once to know that. Get away! Get away even from your mails! Hide from everybody for a while! Don’t think you can nurse your friend through these next few weeks, because you can’t.”

  “Well,” answered Bennett, “wait a few days. We’ll see by the end of the week.”

  The week passed. Ferriss went gradually from bad to worse, though as yet the disease persistently refused to declare itself. He was quite helpless, and Bennett watched over him night and day, pottering around him by the hour, giving him his medicines, cooking his food, and even when Ferriss complained of the hotness of the bedclothes, changing the very linen that he might lie upon cool sheets. But at the end of the week Dr. Pitts declared that Bennett himself was in great danger of breaking down, and was of no great service to the sick man.

  “To-morrow,” said the doctor, “I shall have a young fellow here who happens to be a cousin of mine. He is an excellent trained nurse, a fellow we can rely upon. He’ll take your place. I’ll have him here to-morrow, and you must get away. Hide somewhere. Don’t even allow your mail to be forwarded. The nurse and I will take care of Mr. Ferriss. You can leave me your address, and I will wire you if it is necessary. Now be persuaded like a reasonable man. I will stake my professional reputation that you will knock under if you stay here with a sick man on your hands and newspaper men taking the house by storm at all hours of the day. Come now, will you go? Mr. Ferriss is in no danger, and you will do him more harm by staying than by going. So long as you remain here you will have this raft of people in the rooms at all hours. Deny yourself! Keep them out! Keep out the American reporter when he goes gunning for a returned explorer! Do you think this,” and he pointed again to the crowd in the anteroom, “is the right condition for a sick man’s quarters? You are imperilling his safety, to say nothing of your own, by staying beside him — you draw the fire, Mr. Bennett.”

  “Well, there’s something in that,” muttered Bennett, pulling at his mustache. “But—” Bennett hesitated, then: “Pitts, I want you to take my place here if I go away. Have a nurse if you like, but I shouldn’t feel justified in leaving the boy in his condition unless I knew you were with him continually. I don’t know what your practice is worth to you, s
ay for a month, or until the boy is out of danger, but make me a proposition. I think we can come to an understanding.”

  “But it won’t be necessary to have a doctor with Mr. Ferriss constantly. I should see him every day and the nurse—”

  Bennett promptly overrode his objections. Harshly and abruptly he exclaimed: “I’m not taking any chances. It shall be as I say. I want the boy well, and I want you and the nurse to see to it that he gets well. I’ll meet the expenses.”

  Bennett did not hear the doctor’s response and his suggestion as to the advisability of taking Ferriss to his own house in the country while he could be moved. For the moment he was not listening. An idea had abruptly presented itself to him. He was to go to the country. But where? A grim smile began to relax the close-gripped lips and the hard set of the protruding jaw. He tugged again at his mustache, scowling at the doctor, trying to hide his humour.

  “Well, that’s settled then,” he said; “I’ll get away to-morrow — somewhere.”

  “Whereabouts?” demanded the doctor. “I shall want to let you know how we progress.”

  Bennett chose to feel a certain irritation. What business of Pitts was it whom he went to see, or, rather, where he meant to go?

  “You told me to hide away from everybody, not even to allow my mail to be forwarded. But I’ll let you know where to reach me, of course, as soon as I get there. It won’t be far from town.”

  “And I will take your place here with Mr. Ferriss; somebody will be with him at every moment, and I shall only wire you,” continued the doctor, “in case of urgent necessity. I want you to have all the rest you can, and stay away as long as possible. I shan’t annoy you with telegrams unless I must. You’ll understand that no news is good news.”

  On that particular morning Lloyd sat in her room in the old farmhouse that she always elected to call her home as often as she visited Bannister. It was some quarter of a mile outside the little village, and on the road that connected it with the railway at Fourth Lake, some six miles over the hills to the east. It was yet early in the morning, and Lloyd was writing letters that she would post at Fourth Lake later in the forenoon. She intended driving over to the lake. Two days before, Lewis had arrived with Rox, the ponies and the phaeton. Lloyd’s dog-cart, a very gorgeous, high-wheeled affair, was always kept at Bannister.

  The room in which she now sat was delightful. Everything was white, from the curtains of the bed to the chintz hangings on the walls. A rug of white fur was on the floor. The panellings and wooden shutters of the windows were painted white. The fireplace was set in glossy-white tiles, and its opening covered with a screen of white feathers. The windows were flung wide, and a great flood of white sunlight came pouring into the room. Lloyd herself was dressed in white, from the clean, crisp scarf tied about her neck to the tip of her canvas tennis shoes. And in all this array of white only the dull-red flame of her high-piled hair — in the sunshine glowing like burnished copper — set a vivid note of colour, the little strands and locks about her neck and ears coruscating as the breeze from the open windows stirred them.

  The morning was veritably royal — still, cool, and odorous of woods and cattle and growing grass. A great sense of gayety, of exhilaration, was in the air. Lloyd was all in tune with it. While she wrote her left elbow rested on the table, and in her left hand she held a huge, green apple, unripe, sour, delicious beyond words, and into which she bit from time to time with the silent enjoyment of a school-girl.

  Her letter was to Hattie’s father, Mr. Campbell, and she wrote to ask if the little girl might not spend a week with her at Bannister. When the letter was finished and addressed she thrust it into her belt, and, putting on her hat, ran downstairs. Lewis had brought the dog-cart to the gate, and stood waiting in the road by Rox’s head. But as Lloyd went down the brick-paved walk of the front yard Mrs. Applegate, who owned the farmhouse, and who was at once Lloyd’s tenant, landlady, housekeeper, and cook, appeared on the porch of the house, the head of a fish in her hand, and Charley-Joe, the yellow tomcat, at her heels, eyeing her with painful intentness.

  “Say, Miss Searight,” she called, her forearm across her forehead to shade her eyes, the hand still holding the fish’s head, “say, while you’re out this morning will you keep an eye out for that dog of our’n — you know, Dan — the one with liver’n white spots? He’s run off again — ain’t seen him since yesterday noon. He gets away an’ goes off fighting other dogs over the whole blessed county. There ain’t a dog big ‘r little within ten mile that Dan ain’t licked. He’d sooner fight than he would eat, that dog.”

  “I will, I will,” answered Lloyd, climbing to the high seat, “and if I find him I shall drag him back by the scruff of his neck. Good-morning, Lewis. Why have you put the overhead check on Rox?”

  Lewis touched his cap.

  “He feels his oats some this morning, and if he gets his lower jaw agin’ his chest there’s no holding of him, Miss — no holding of him in the world.”

  Lloyd gathered up the reins and spoke to the horse, and Lewis stood aside.

  Rox promptly went up into the air on his hind legs, shaking his head with a great snort.

  “Steady, you old pig,” said Lloyd, calmly. “Soh, soh, who’s trying to kill you?”

  “Hadn’t I better come with you, Miss?” inquired Lewis anxiously.

  Lloyd shook her head. “No, indeed,” she said decisively.

  Rox, after vindicating his own independence by the proper amount of showing off, started away down the road with as high an action as he could command, playing to the gallery, looking back and out of the tail of his eye to see if Lewis observed what a terrible fellow he was that morning.

  “Well, of all the critters!” commented Mrs. Applegate from the porch. But Charley-Joe, with an almost hypnotic fixity in his yellow eyes, and who during the last few minutes had several times opened his mouth wide in an ineffectual attempt to mew, suddenly found his voice with a prolonged and complaining note.

  “Well, heavens an’ airth, take your fish, then!” exclaimed Mrs. Applegate suddenly, remembering the cat. “An’ get off’n my porch with it.” She pushed him away with the side of her foot, and Charley-Joe, with the fish’s head in his teeth, retired around the corner of the house by the rain barrel, where at intervals he could be heard growling to himself in a high-pitched key, pretending the approach of some terrible enemy.

  Meanwhile Lloyd, already well on her way, was having an exciting tussle with Rox. The horse had begun by making an exhibition of himself for all who could see, but in the end he had so worked upon his own nerves that instead of frightening others he only succeeded in terrifying himself. He was city-bred, and the sudden change from brick houses to open fields had demoralised him. He began to have a dim consciousness of just how strong he was. There was nothing vicious about him. He would not have lowered himself to kick, but he did want, with all the big, strong heart of him, to run.

  But back of him there — he felt it thrilling along the tense-drawn reins — was a calm, powerful grip, even, steady, masterful. Turn his head he could not, but he knew very well that Lloyd had taken a double twist upon the reins, and that her hands, even if they were gloved in white, were strong — strong enough to hold him to his work. And besides this — he could tell it by the very feel of the bit — he knew that she did not take him very seriously, that he could not make her afraid of him. He knew that she could tell at once whether he shied because he was really frightened or because he wanted to break the shaft, and that in the latter case he would get the whip — and mercilessly, too — across his haunch, a degradation, above all things, to be avoided. And she had called him an old pig once already that morning.

  Lloyd drove on. She keenly enjoyed this struggle between the horse’s strength and her own determination, her own obstinacy. No, she would not let Rox have his way; she would not allow him to triumph over her for a single moment. She would neither be forced nor tricked into yielding a single point however small. She wo
uld be mistress of the situation.

  By the end of half an hour she had him well in hand, and was bowling smoothly along a level stretch of road at the foot of an abrupt rise of land covered with scrub oak and broken with outcroppings of granite of a curious formation. Just beyond here the road crossed the canal by a narrow — in fact, a much too narrow — plank bridge without guard-rails. The wide-axled dog-cart had just sufficient room on either hand, and Lloyd, too good a whip to take chances with so nervous a horse as Rox, drew him down to a walk as she approached it. But of a sudden her eyes were arrested by a curious sight. She halted the cart.

  At the roadside, some fifty yards from the plank bridge, were two dogs. Evidently there had just been a dreadful fight. Here and there a stone was streaked with blood. The grass and smaller bushes were flattened out, and tufts of hair were scattered about upon the ground. Of the two dogs, Lloyd recognised one upon the instant. It was Dan, the “liver’n white” fox-hound of the farmhouse — the fighter and terror of the country. But he was lying upon his side now, the foreleg broken, or rather crushed, as if in a vise; the throat torn open, the life-blood in a great pool about his head. He was dead, or in the very throes of death. Poor Dan, he had fought his last fight, had found more than his match at last.

  Lloyd looked at the other dog — the victor; then looked at him a second time and a third.

  “Well,” she murmured, “that’s a strange-looking dog.”

  In fact, he was a curious animal. His broad, strong body was covered with a brown fur as dense, as thick, and as soft as a wolf’s; the ears were pricked and pointed, the muzzle sharp, the eyes slant and beady. The breast was disproportionately broad, the forelegs short and apparently very powerful. Around his neck was a broad nickelled collar.

  But as Lloyd sat in the cart watching him he promptly demonstrated the fact that his nature was as extraordinary as his looks. He turned again from a momentary inspection of the intruders, sniffed once or twice at his dead enemy, then suddenly began to eat him.