Still Jim

by Morrow, Honore

  "And now they are after me. And you, many of you, in this audience, are the sometimes innocent and sometimes paid instruments of my downfall. You accuse me of grafting, of lying and stealing. You don't understand."

  Jim paused and moistened his lips. The room was breathless. Pen could hear her heart beat. She dug her fingernails into her palm. Could he, could he find the words? Even if these people did not understand, could he not say something that would teach her how to help him? Jim did not see the crowded room. Before him was his father's dying face and Iron Skull's. His hands felt their dying fingers.

  "I am a New Englander. My people came to New England 250 years ago and fought the wilderness for a home. We were Anglo-Saxons. We were trail makers, lawmakers, empire builders. We founded this nation. We threw open the doors to the world and then we were unable to withstand the flood that answered our invitation. The New Englander in America is as dead as the Indian or the buffalo. My people have failed and died with the rest. I am the last of my line.

  "But I have the craving of my ancestry with something more. I can see the tragedy of my race. I know that the day will come when the civilization of America will be South European; that our every institution will be altered to suit the needs of the South European and Asiatic mind.

  "I want to leave an imperishable Anglo-Saxon thumb print on the map; a thumb print that no future changes can obliterate, a thumb print that shall be less transitory than the pyramids because it will be a part of the fundamental needs of a people as long as they hunger or thirst.

  "Look at the roster of the Reclamation Service. You will find it a roster of men whom the old vision has sent into dam building and road making. Here in the Service you will find the last stand of the Anglo-Saxon trail makers.

  "I want to build this dam. I want to build it so that, by God, it shall be standing and delivering water when the law that makes it possible shall have passed from the memory of man! And you won't let me build it. You, some of you Anglo-Saxons yourselves, destined to be obliterated as I shall be, are fighting me. You say that I am stealing. I, fighting to leave a thumb print!"

  Jim dropped into his seat and for a moment there was such silence in the room that the palm leaves outside the window could be heard rattling softly in the breeze. Then there broke forth a great round of handclapping, and during this Jim slipped out. He was not much deceived by the applause. He knew that it would take more than a burst of eloquence to overcome the influences at work against the Service.

  He returned to the dam that night, Pen and Sara came up the next day and that evening Jim went over to call. It was his first word with Pen since the walk to Wind Ridge. He found Sara sleeping heavily. Pen greeted him casually.

  "Hello, Still! Sara was suffering so frightfully after his trip that he took his morphine. It was insane of him to go to the Hearing, but he would do it. Sit down. We won't disturb him a bit."

  She pulled the blanket over the unconscious man in her usual tender way.

  "You are mighty good to him, Pen," said Jim.

  "I try to be. I guess I'm as good to him as he'll let me be, poor fellow. Jim, he was fine in his college days, wasn't he?"

  "I never saw a more magnificent physique," answered Jim. "He was a great athlete and I used to believe he was a greater financier than Morgan."

  Pen looked at Jim gratefully. "And if it hadn't been for the accident he would have been just as easy to get along with as the average man."

  Jim chuckled. "I don't know whether that's a compliment to Sara or an insult to the average man. What have you done with yourself during the investigation?"

  "Taken care of Sara, communed with my soul and the laundry problem and had several nice talks with Jane Ames. She is a dear."

  Jim nodded. Then he pulled the Secretary's letter from his pocket with a copy of his own answer and handed them to Pen. "I've come for advice and comment," he said.

  Pen read both and her cheeks flushed. "Have you sent your answer?"

  Jim nodded.

  Pen stared at him a moment with her mouth open, then she said, with heartfelt sincerity, "Jim, I'm perfectly disgusted with you!"

  Jim gasped.

  "Like the average descendant of the Puritan," Pen sniffed, "you are lying down on your job. Thank God, I'm Irish!"

  "Gee, Pen, you're actually cross!"

  "I am! If I were not a perfect lady I'd slap you and put my tongue out at you, anything that would adequately express my disdain! For pig-headed bigotry, bounded on the north by high principles and on the south by big dreams, give me a New Englander! You make me tired!"

  "For the Lord's sake, Pen!"

  Pen laid down her bit of sewing and looked at Jim long and earnestly, then she said, quietly, "Jim, why don't you go to work?"

  Jim looked flushed and bewildered. "I work eighteen hours a day."

  Pen groaned. "I'm talking about your capacity, not your output. You are only using half of what is in you, Still. You build the dam and you refuse to do anything else. Why, with your kind of creative, engineering mind, you are perfectly capable of administering the dam, too. Of handling all the problems connected with it in a cool, scientific way that would come very near being ideal justice. You know that the projects are an experiment in government activity. You know that the people who will control them have no experience or training that will fit them for handling the projects. Yet you refuse to help them. You are just as stupid and just as selfish as if you had built a complicated machine and had turned it over to children to run, refusing them all explanation or guidance."

  Pen paused, breathless, her cheeks scarlet, her eyes glowing. Jim watched her, his face pitifully eager. Perhaps, he thought, Pen was actually going to lay her finger on the cause of his inadequacy.

  "Instead of antagonizing every farmer on the Project, you ought to be making them feel that you are their partner and friend in a mighty difficult business. You told us yesterday that your ancestors not only made the trail but also the law of the trail. What are you doing? It's your own fault if you lose your job, Still!"

  Pen got up and turned Sara's pillow and shaded the light from his face, mechanically.

  "You are just like all the rest of what you call the Anglo-Americans. You go about feeling superior and abused and calling the immigrants hard names. You are just a lot of quitters. You have refused national service. If you are a dying race and you are convinced that the world can't afford to lose your institutions, how low down you are not to feel that your last duty to society is to show by personal example the value of your institutions."

  "I don't see what I can do," protested Jim.

  "That's just what I'm trying to show you," retorted Pen. "I have to plow through your ignorance first—clear the ground, you know! After you Anglo-Americans founded the government most of you went to money making and left it to be administered by people who were racially and traditionally different from you. You left your immigration problems to sentimentalists and money-makers. You left the law-making to money-makers. You refused to serve the nation in a disinterested, future-seeing way which was your duty if you wanted your institutions to live. You descendants of New England are quitters. And you are going to lose your dam because of that simple fact."

  Jim began to pace the floor. "Did you ever talk this over with Uncle Denny, Penelope?"

  "No!" she gave a scornful sniff. "If ever I had dared to criticize you, he'd have turned me out of the house. No one can live in New York and not think a great deal about immigration problems. And—I have been with you much in the past eight years, Jimmy. I can't tell you how much I have thought about you and your work. And then, just before old Iron Skull was killed, he turned you over to me."

  Jim paused before her. "He was worried about you, too," she went on. "He said you were not getting the big grasp on things that you ought and that I must help you."

  "I wonder if that was what he was trying to tell me when he was killed," said Jim. "The dear old man! Go on, Pen."

  "I've just th
is much more to say, Jim, and that is that if the Reclamation Service idea fails, it's more the fault of you engineers than of anyone else. The sort of thing you engineers do on the dam is typical of the Anglo-American in the whole country. You are quitters!"

  "Pen, don't you say that again!" exclaimed Jim, sharply. "I'm doing all I can!"

  * * *

  CHAPTER XIX

  THE MASK BALL

  "I have seen in the coyote pack that coyotes who will not hunt and fight for the pack must starve and die."

  Musings of the Elephant.

  "You are not!" returned Pen flatly. "You don't see the human side of your problem at all. You have made Oscar Ames hate you. Yet no man could live the life and do the things that Oscar has and not have developed a fine big side to his nature. You never see that. And the dam is more Oscar's than it is yours. It is for him. Still, somehow you have got to make every farmer on the Project your partner. Make them feel that you and the dam are theirs. Show them how to take care of the things the dam will produce. Jim, dear, make your thumb print in the hearts of men as well as in concrete, if you would have your work endure."

  Jim paced the floor steadily. Old visions were passing before his eyes. Once more he saw the degraded mansions on the elm-shaded streets. Old Exham, with its lost ideals. Ideals of what? Was Pen right? Was it the ideal of national responsibility that Exham had lost—the ideal that had built the town meeting house and the public school, that had produced the giants of those early days, giants who had ruled the nation with an integrity long lost to these later times.

  "My father said to me, 'Somehow we Americans have fallen down on our jobs!'" said Jim, pausing before Pen, finally. "Pen, I wonder if he would have thought your reason the right one?"

  Then he lifted Pen's chin to look long into her eyes. Slowly his wistful smile illumined his face. "Thank you, dear," he said and, turning, he went out into the night.

  The next night was given the Mask Ball in honor of the committee. Nobody knew what conclusion the eminent gentleman had reached in regard to Jim and his associates. But everyone did his best to contribute to the hilarity of the occasion.

  The gray adobe building where the unmarried office men and engineers lived was gay with colored lights and cedar festoons. The hall in the rear of the building had an excellent dancing floor. The orchestra was composed of three Mexicans—hombres—with mandolins and a guitar, and an Irish rough-neck who brought from the piano a beauty of melody that was like a memory of the Sod. The four men produced dance music that New York might have envied.

  Several Cabillo couples attended the dance. Oscar Ames and Jane and one or two other ranchers and their wives were there. All the wives of the officers' camp came and the bachelors searched both the upper and lower camps for partners, with some very charming results. Mrs. Flynn sat with Sara, and Jim insisted that instead of going with Jane and Oscar, as she had planned, that he be allowed to take Pen to the first ball she had attended since her marriage.

  Henderson had ordered that the costumes be kept a great secret. Through a Los Angeles firm he provided dominoes for the five committeemen. But there were half a dozen other dominoes at the ball, so the committee quickly lost its identity. Oscar Ames came as a hobo. Henderson had a policeman's uniform, while the two cub engineers wore, one, a cowboy outfit; the other, an Indian chief's. Mrs. Henderson was dressed as a squaw.

  Penelope wore a flower girl's costume, improvised from the remains of the chintz she had brought from New York. Jim viewed her with great complaisance. No one could look like Pen, he thought, and he would dance with her all the evening. Jim went as a monk. To his chagrin, when they reached the hall he found that Pen had made Mrs. Ames a costume exactly like her own, and with the complete face masks they wore, they might have been twins. They were just of a height and Mrs. Ames danced well. The children and the phonograph had long ago attended to that.

  There was nothing stupid about the ball from the very start. The policeman ended the grand march by arresting the hobo, who put up a fight that included two of the dominoes. The orchestra swung into "La Paloma" and in a moment the hall was full of swaying colors, drifting through the golden desert dust that filled the room. There were twice as many men at the ball as women. The latter were popular to the point of utter exhaustion.

  Henderson looked over the tallest domino, seized him by the throat and with wild flourishes of his club, backed him into a corner.

  "Say, Boss Still Jim," he whispered, "that old nut of a chairman doesn't look as if he had anything but skim milk in his veins. But do you sabez he's danced three times with that little fat ballet girl and he's hugging the daylights out of her. He'd ought to be investigated."

  The tall domino looked at the couple indicated. "I'll start investigating, myself," he whispered.

  "Wish I could get a dance with her, but I can't," said Henderson. "My Missis knows who I am. I ain't got her spotted yet, though. Yes, I have. That flower girl's her. I'd know the way she jerks her shoulders anywhere."

  He cut neatly in and separated the flower girl from the monk. "Look here, Minnie," he said gently. "You ain't called on to dance like a broncho, you know. Remember, you're the mother of a family! Cut out having too many dances with that monk. He holds you too tight. I think he's one of the committee men. You floss up to the tallest domino and give him a good time. That's the Boss."

  The flower girl sniggered and Henderson pushed her from him with marital impatience and took an Indian squaw away from the hobo.

  "Come on, little girl," he said. "You can dance all right. If my wife wasn't here I'd show you a time."

  The squaw stiffened and the monk swung her away from Jack, who immediately arrested old Dad Robins, the night watchman, who was taking a sly peak off his beat at the festivities. Henderson forced the delighted old man through a waltz, with himself as a very languishing partner.

  The hobo, dancing with one of the flower girls, said: "Jane, I've been trying to get a chance to warn you not to say anything to Mrs. Penelope about that deal with Freet. I was a fool to let you see that letter tonight. Now I'm getting into national politics, you've got to learn to keep your mouth shut."

  "How'd you know me?" whispered the flower girl.

  "You don't dance as good as Mrs. Pen," he replied.

  Here the monk stole the flower girl and danced off with her, firmly.

  "Remember the dance at Coney Island and how mean you were to me?" he whispered.

  "And how bossy and high-handed you were about the bathing? How did you know me?"

  The monk hugged the flower girl to him. "You haven't lived in my heart for all these years without my getting to know you!"

  And the flower girl sighed ecstatically.

  The tall domino, dancing with the other flower girl, felt the strains of Espanita creeping up his backbone, and he said,

  "There is something in the air out here that is almost intoxicating!"

  The flower girl answered: "It'll do more than that for you, if you'll give it a chance. It will make you see things."

  "I don't understand you," replied the domino in a dignified way.

  "I mean you'd see if you stayed here long enough that what Jim Manning needs is help, not investigating."

  "How do you know I'm not Manning?"

  The flower girl sniffed. "I'm an old woman so I can tell you that no woman would ever mistake him for anyone else after she'd once danced with him."

  "He is making a most regrettable record here," very stiffly from the domino.

  "Shucks! Why don't you fire Arthur Freet? I warn you right now that he's trying to get his hooks into this dam."

  "The Service might well dispense with both of them, I believe," said the domino.

  The flower girl sniffed again. "You politicians—" she began, when she was interrupted by a call at the door.

  The music stopped. A white-faced boy had mounted a chair and was shouting hysterically: "Where's the Boss? The hombres have shot my father!"

  "It's Dad R
obins' boy! Why, the old man was here a bit ago!" cried someone.

  The monk pulled off his mask and flung his robe in the corner. "Oscar," he said to the hobo, who had unmasked, "see to Mrs. Penelope."

  Then he grasped young Robins by the arm and rushed with him from the hall.

  Oscar hurried Pen and Jane up to the tent house with scant ceremony, then ran for the lower town. Mrs. Flynn and Sara were greatly surprised by the early return of the merrymakers. The four waited eagerly for news. Sara would not let any of the women stir from the tent, saying that it was unsafe until they knew what had happened. At midnight Oscar returned.

  "They got poor old Dad. After he left the hall, he was going past a lighted tent in the lower town when he heard sounds of a fight. He went in and found two drunken Mexicans fighting over a flask of whiskey. He took the whiskey and told them to go to bed. He started out into the street and the two jumped him and started to stab him to death. He yelled and the sheriff and his boy was the only folks in all that town dared to go help him. The two hombres shot the sheriff in the arm before he located them and got away. They had finished poor old Dad, though. Mr. Manning's got posses out and will start more at daylight. If you'll put Jane up for the night, Mrs. Flynn, I'll go back to the lower town. You'd ought to see those committeemen. Three of them would have gone out with a posse, I'll bet, if they hadn't remembered their dignity in time!"

  Jim had his hands full. By daylight the next morning there was every prospect of a wholesale battle between the Americans and the Mexicans. The camp was at fever pitch with excitement. The two shifts not at work swarmed the streets of the lower camp, the Mexicans at the far end, the Americans at the upper end near Dad Robins' house, whence came the sound of an old woman's hard sobs. After a hurried breakfast at the lower mess, Jim joined this crowd. The men circled round him, all talking at once. Jim listened for a time, then he raised his arm for silence. "It was booze did it! Booze and nothing else! Am I right?"