Still Jim

by Morrow, Honore

  In Cabillo Jim went, after a hasty breakfast, to see John Haskins. Haskins was a banker and a Harvard man who had come to Cabillo thirty years before with bad lungs. He was, Jim thought, an impartial, though keen, observer of events in the valley. He was in the banker's office but a few minutes.

  "Mr. Haskins," he said, "do you consider fifty dollars an acre too heavy a debt for the farmers to carry on their farms?"

  "Not for the experienced irrigation farmer," replied Haskins.

  Jim paused thoughtfully. "Experienced! And not twenty per cent. of them will be experienced." He made an entry in his notebook, then asked, "Is ten years too short a time to give the farmers to pay for the dam?"

  "Not with wise cropping."

  "Is it possible to find sufficient water power market to practically pay for the dam, without reference to the crops?" Jim went on.

  "Yes," answered Haskins.

  "If a group of farmers and business men will assume a debt, voluntarily, then repudiate it, are they sufficiently responsible persons to assume for all time the handling of the irrigation system and water power the government is developing for them?" Jim's voice was slow and biting.

  Haskins answered clearly, "No!"

  Jim's last question made Haskins smile. "Is this an intelligent group of men, these farmers and business men?"

  "Unusually so, especially the men who have been long in the desert and have struggled with its vicissitudes. Some of the Mexican farmers are difficult to handle, though, because they don't understand what the government is trying to do. For heaven's sake, Manning, why this catechism?"

  Jim laughed. "Oh, I want your opinion to quote. I'm about to put up a fight against Fleckenstein."

  "But that will be hardly proper, will it, considering your job? Not but what I think Fleckenstein ought to be fought!"

  "Oh, I'm not going on the stump. I'm merely going to fight him by attending to certain portions of my job that I've always neglected."

  Jim rose and Haskins shook his head ruefully. "More power to your elbow, old man. But nothing can beat Fleckenstein now, I'm afraid."

  "I'm going to mighty well try it," said Jim as he hurried out the door.

  His next visit was along the irrigation canal to a point where his irrigation engineer was watching the work on a small power station.

  "Hello, Marlow, how is Murphy doing?"

  Marlow laughed. "I made him timekeeper. He's assumed the duties of policeman, ward boss and of advertising agent for you."

  "Where is he?" asked Jim.

  "Coming right along the road there now."

  Jim started the machine on to meet the stocky figure that Marlow pointed out.

  Murphy grinned broadly as Jim invited him into the machine. "I want to talk to you, Murphy? How does the job go?"

  "Aw, it's no job! It's a joy ride. I thought I knew every farmer in the county but I didn't. A new one turns up every day to tell the Little Boss how to irrigate."

  "Murphy," said Jim, "how do you size up Fleckenstein?"

  Murphy looked at Jim curiously. "Just like everyone else does, as a crook."

  "How much pull has he with the farmers?"

  Murphy shrugged his shoulders. "How much pull would the devil himself have if he promised repudiation? Tell me that, Boss!"

  "Is the chap who is running against him any good?"

  "Who, Ives? Is a bag of jelly an implement of war? What have you got on your mind, Boss?"

  "Well, to tell the truth, Murphy, I've just come to! The election is just three months off, isn't it? I am going to try to lick Fleckenstein in that time."

  "Can't be done, Boss, unless you'll take the stump yourself."

  "Of course, that's out of the question," replied Jim. "But this is what I'm going to do. I'm going to see every farmer in the valley and have a good talk with him. I'm going to make him see this Project as I do. And I'm going to send for half a dozen of the best men in the Department of Agriculture to come out here and get the newcomers interested in scientific farming. I'm not going to mention Fleckenstein's name."

  Murphy looked at Jim, then out at the irrigating ditch along which the machine was moving slowly. "Boss," he said, "go ahead if it'll ease you up any, but you might as well try to fight a hydrophobia skunk with a perfume atomizer as to try them high-brow methods on Fleckenstein."

  Jim laughed. "Well, do you know of a better method, Murphy?"

  "Yes, the good, old-fashioned way of putting up more whisky, more money and more free rides than the other fellow does."

  Jim turned the machine back toward the power station. "Of course, you know that that is out of the question, Murphy."

  "Well, what do you want me to do, Boss?" asked Murphy.

  "Tomorrow is Sunday," said Jim. "I want you to come up to my house and discuss with me the characteristics of every man in the valley. I don't know anyone better qualified to know them."

  "I'll be there," said Murphy, climbing from the machine. He watched Jim drive away. "There's something about him that gets under my skin," said the ex-saloonkeeper. "I'll be holding his hand, next. Poor snoozer! Think of him trying to fight mud like Fleckenstein. But I'll back him if it'll relieve his mind any."

  Jim was back at the dam by mid-afternoon. He found Pen with Mrs. Flynn in the shining little kitchen of his adobe.

  "Penelope," he said, "is there any way we can rob Sara of his poison fangs? Certainly sending him away will do little good. I have been thinking of giving him his choice of being under espionage or of being turned over to the government. I've played with him, Pen, a little too long. Now that it's too late, I'm going to lock the door."

  Mrs. Flynn looked frightened. She never had seen this expression on Jim's face before. The scowl between his eyes was deep, his jaw was tense and his eyes were too large and too bright. But Pen's face flushed eagerly.

  "You are angry at last, Jimmy! Thank heaven for that! We can watch Sara, easily, if you will use your authority. And oh, I do so want to stay and help! Your temper is touched at last, Jim. I am thankful to Freet for that."

  Jim nodded grimly. "Will you go over to the tent with me? Or had I better have it out with Sara alone?"

  "Neither," said Pen. "I'll settle him myself. I feel like having a scrap with someone. What else are you going to do, Still? Shall you report Freet?"

  "That's out of the question. Freet is the least of my troubles, anyhow. I'll tell you all my plans." He looked from Mrs. Flynn, whose anxious eyes did not leave his face, to Pen, with her cheeks showing the scarlet of excitement. Something in their tense interest in him was suddenly very comforting to Jim and he smiled at them. And though it was a little strained it was the old flashing, sweet smile that those who knew him loved.

  "I don't know how I'm to get through the next few weeks," he said, "unless you two are very kind and polite to me."

  Mrs. Flynn suddenly threw her apron over her head. "God knows," she sobbed, "I've waited for you to smile this weary time! I've washed and mended all your clothes and cleaned your room and cooked everything I ever heard of and not a smile could I get. I thought you had something incurable!"

  Jim made a long stride across the room and hugged Mrs. Flynn, boyishly. "Didn't you tell me you felt like my mother? Don't you know mothers have to see through their boy's stupidity and selfishness down to the real trouble that lies underneath? No one will do it but a mother!"

  Mrs. Flynn wiped her eyes on her apron. "God knows I'm an old fool," she said. "Change that dirty khaki suit so's I can wash it."

  Jim chuckled and turned to Pen. She was watching the little tableau with all her hungry heart in her eyes.

  "Pen! Oh, my dearest!" breathed Jim. Then he paused with a glance at his near-mother, who immediately began to rattle the stove lids.

  "Get out and take a walk, the two of you. God knows I'm a good Catholic, but there's some things—get out, the two of you! Let your nerves ease up a bit. Sure we all pound and twang like a wet tent in the wind."

  Out on the trail Jim spo
ke a little breathlessly: "Pen! If you would just let me put my head down on your shoulder, if you'd put your dear cheek on mine and smooth my hair, the heaven of it would carry me through the next few weeks. Just that much, Pen, is all I'd ask for!"

  Tears were in Pen's eyes as she looked up into the fine, pleading face. "Jim, I can't!"

  "You wouldn't be taking it from Sara."

  "Sara! Poor Sara! He wants no embraces from anyone! I'm no more married to Sara than a nurse to her patient. But I mean that as long as things are as they are, the honest thing, the safe thing, is for me not to—to—Oh, Jim, it's not square to any of us. We must keep on the straight, clear basis of friendship!"

  But Jim had seen Pen's heart in her eyes and the call of it was almost more than his lonely heart could bear.

  "Great heavens, Pen!" he cried. "Life is so short! We need each other so! What does it profit us or the world that all your wealth of tenderness should go untouched and all my hunger for it unsatisfied? If your touch on my hair will brace me for the fight of my life, why should you deny it to me?"

  Pen tried to laugh. "Still, what's happened to your morals?"

  Jim replied indignantly: "You can't apply a system of ethics to your cheek against mine except to say it's all wrong that I can't have you now, in my great need. And I warn you, Pen, I shall come to you thirsty until at last you give me what is mine. Only your cheek to mine is all I ask for, Penny."

  Pen looked up at the pleading beauty of Jim's eyes. "Don't plead with me, Jim," she half whispered, "or I think my heart will break."

  The two looked away from each other to the Elephant. The great beast seemed to sleep in the afternoon sun.

  "Tell me about your plans, Still," said Pen, her voice not altogether steady.

  "Murphy thinks I'm a fool," said Jim. "Perhaps I am. But Oscar Ames has been a good deal of a surprise to me: Just as soon as I took the trouble to explain the concrete matter to him, he got it instantly. And in a way he got my talk about the new social obligations you showed me."

  Pen interrupted eagerly: "You don't know how much you did in that talk, Jim. Oscar has discovered you and he's as proud as Columbus. He has made me tell him everything I know about you. You see you have that rare capacity for making anyone you will take the trouble to talk to feel as if he was your only friend and confidant. Oscar has discovered that you are misunderstood, that he is the only person that really understands you and he's out now explaining to his neighbors how little they really know about concrete."

  Jim looked surprised. "I don't know what I did, except to follow your instructions, but if it worked on Ames, it ought to work on the rest. I believe that after a few more talks with Ames, he will work against Fleckenstein, Pen, and that I will accomplish it by just talking the dam to him until he understands the technical side of it and the ideal I have about it. And if it will influence him, why not the others?"

  Pen looked at him thoughtfully. "I believe you can do it, Jim. A sort of silent campaign, eh? And then what?"

  "Well, if I can keep Fleckenstein out of Congress by those means, I believe that this project will never repudiate its debt! I am going to get the Department of Agriculture to send a group of experts out here at once. They will help not only the old farmers who over-irrigate but the new farmers who can't farm. And I'm going to get the farmers who have been successful to co-operate with the farmers who have failed. If I only had more time!

  "You have three months before election," said Pen. "A lot can be done in three months."

  Jim shrugged his shoulders. "I can only do my limit. Among other things I'm going to try to get the bankers and business men in Cabillo to fight the inflation of land values here on the Project. Incidentally, I'm going to keep on building my dam."

  "How can I help?" asked Pen.

  "I've told you how," said Jim, quietly.

  "Oh, Still, that's not fair!" exclaimed Pen.

  "Why not?" asked Jim, coolly. Pen flushed and looked away. They were nearing the tent house and she spoke hastily:

  "I'll go in and talk with Sara."

  "Better let me," said Jim.

  "No," said Pen, "every woman has an inalienable right to bully and intimidate her own husband."

  Jim laughed and left her, reluctantly. Pen went into the tent. Sara was looking flushed and tired. The look had been growing on him of late. He had been unusually tractable for a day or so and Pen's heart smote her as she greeted him. No matter how he tried her, Sara never ceased to be a pitiful and a tragic figure to her in his wrecked and aborted youth.

  "Sara," she said, her voice very gentle and her touch very tender as she held a glass of water for him, "Jim wanted to come in and talk to you but I wouldn't let him."

  Sara pushed the glass away. "Why not?"

  "Because you and he quarrel so. Sara, it's a fair fight. You warned Jim that you would ruin him. He says you may have your choice of being watched or turned over to the authorities."

  "He is a mutton head!" said Sara. "I suppose he thinks the crux of the matter is that séance with Freet. As if I'd do as coarse work as that! That's what I'd like, to be turned over to the authorities. Couldn't I tell a pretty story about the meeting with Freet up here? Freet actually thought Jim would come across with the contract! But that wasn't what I was after."

  "Sara, when you talk like that, I despise you," said Pen.

  "You despise me because I'm a cripple," returned Sara. "Why can't you be honest about it?"

  "Don't you know me yet, Sara?" asked Pen, sitting down on the foot of his couch and looking at him entreatingly. "Don't you know that if you had taken your injury like a man, you'd have gotten a hold on my tenderness and respect that nothing could have destroyed? Sara, I've watched you degenerate for eight years, but I never realized to what a depth you had sunk until you came to the Project."

  "What do you see in the Project," said Sara. "What does it really matter whether private or public interests control it? Who really cares?"

  "Lots of people care. Jim cares."

  "Pshaw!" sneered Sara. "All Jim Manning really cares about is his own pigheaded sense of race and nationality."

  "Jim needs that sense for his propelling power," said Pen. "I believe that just as soon as a man loses his sense of nationality, he loses a lot of his social force. Love of country—a man that hasn't it lacks something very fine, like family pride and honor. Jim's sense of race is the keynote to his character. And just as much as the New Englanders have lost that sense, have they lost their grip on the trend of the nation. They are the type that can't do without it."

  Sara eyed Pen curiously. She had turned to look out over the desert distances so that Sara saw her profile clean cut against the sky. She was only a girl and yet she had lived through much. Sara looked at her noble head, high arched above her ears; at her short nose and full soft mouth, at her straight brow, all blending in an outline that was that of the thinker, infinitely sad in its intelligence.

  "That was a very highbrow statement of yours, Pen," he said, less harshly than usual. "How did you come to think about these things?"

  Pen turned to look at him. "Marrying you made me," she said. "I had to use my mind. I had no family. I had no talents. I had to teach myself a sense of proportion that would keep you from wrecking me. I wanted to get to look at myself as one human living with millions of other humans and not as Pen, the center of her own universe." Pen laughed a little wistfully. "Since I couldn't mother children of my own, naturally, I had to mother the world."

  Sara grunted. "Huh! Who can say my life has been altogether a failure?"

  Sudden tears sprang to Pen's eyes. "Why, Sara, what a dear thing to say! And I thought you would remove my hair because of Jim's message."

  The sneer returned to Sara's voice. "You ask Jim if he ever heard of locking the barn too late? Tell him to bring on his 'armed guards.'"

  Pen was startled. "Sara, what have you done?"

  Sara laughed. "If you and Jim don't know, I'm not the proper one to tell you! On
e of your gentleman friends is outside, evidently waiting for you."

  Pen looked out. Old Suma-theek was standing on the trail, arms folded, watching the tent patiently. He had had one interview with Sara soon after the crippled man had appeared at the dam. The talk had been desultory and in Pen's presence, but never after could the old Indian be induced to come into the tent.

  "He like a broken backed snake, your buck," he had said calmly to Pen, whom he had obviously adored from the first.

  Pen came down the trail to see what Suma-theek wanted. She knew there was no hurrying him, so she sat down on a stone and waited. Suma-theek seated himself beside her and rolled a cigarette. After he had smoked half of it, he said:

  "Boss Still Jim, he heap sad in his heart."

  Pen nodded.

  "You love him, Pen Squaw?" asked Suma-theek, earnestly.

  "We all do," replied Pen. "He and I have known each other many, many years."

  "Don't talky-talk!" cried Suma-theek impatiently. "I mean you love him with a big love?"

  Pen looked into Suma-theek's face. She had grown very close to the old Indian. And then, as if the flood in her heart was beyond her control, she said:

  "You will never tell, Suma-theek?" and as the Apache shook his head she went on eagerly, "I love him so much that after a while I must go away, old friend, or my heart will break!"

  The old Indian shook his head wonderingly. "Whites are crazy fools," he groaned. "You sabez he be here only three months more?"

  Pen started. "What do you mean, Suma-theek?"

  "You no tell 'em!" warned the old chief. "He tell Suma-theek this morning. Big Boss in Washington tell 'em he only stay three months, then be on any Projects no more."

  Pen sat appalled. "Oh, Suma-theek, that can't be true! You couldn't have heard right. I'll go and ask him now."

  Suma-theek laid a hand on her arm. "You no talk to him about it! You last one he want to know. I tell you so you go love him, then he no care what happen."