Heart's Kindred

“I donno. I feel like there was lots of God around,” she said.

She had waked the previous morning in the dimness of the coach and had found her head on his shoulder, his cheek on her hair, her hand in his hand. For a moment she lay still, remembering. Then she lifted her face slowly, lest she should waken him. But he was awake and smiled down at her, without moving, save that his clasp a little tightened. She struggled up, her flushed face still near his.

“Your arm,” she said; “ain’t it near dead?”

He sat quietly, and still smiling. “I give you my word,” he said, “I ain’t once thought of myself in connection with that arm’s dyin’.”

“Did you sleep?” she demanded, anxiously.

“I’m afraid,” he said ruefully, “I did – some.”

Having thought of him, she began to think of herself. She sat erect, her hands busy at her hair, her face crimson.

“Tell me something,” he said, and when she looked round at him: “did you care?”

“Did I care – what?” she asked.

He kept her eyes. “Did you?” he repeated.

“I care about bein’ a whole lot of bother to you,” she answered gravely. “An’ I’m goin’ to pay for my own breakfast.”

They breakfasted for the first time in the dining-car – both infinitely ill at ease, Lory confusedly ordering the first things on the card, the Inger indolently demanding flapjacks and bacon. And when they brought the bacon dry, he repudiated it, and asked gently if they thought he didn’t know how it was cooked or what? – ultimately securing, with the interested participation of the steward, a swimming dish of gravy. After that, Lory had slipped in a vacant seat on the other side of the car, and he had gone back to their own seat, and stared miserably out the window. He ought, he reflected, to have been showing her at every step of the way that he despised himself; and here instead he had made her ill at ease with him, afraid of him, eager to be away from him. That night, in the long dragging journey of their slow train, they had sat apart, as they had sat on the Overland.

Here on the avenue in Washington, she was merely disregarding him. For the first time in their days together, she seemed to be almost happy. That, he settled the matter, was because she was so soon to be free of him. There came upon him, for the hundredth time, the memory of her reason for coming to him in her need —

“I didn’t know no woman I could tell – nor no other decent man.”

It was the supreme compliment of his life – it was his justification. And how had he rewarded it…

Suddenly he felt her hand on his arm, and when he turned, she was looking away and before them. He followed her eyes and saw the white dome.

“It’s it,” she said, reverently.

“Yes,” he said. “It’s it, sure enough.”

They walked on, staring at it. All that could be in the heart of a people all the time was in their faces for the meaning of it.

In a little back street, ugly save for its abundant shade, they came to the home of Lory’s aunt. It was a chubby house, with bright eyes, and the possibilities, never developed, of a smile. There were a small, smothered yard, and an over-ripe fence, and the evidences of complete discouragement on the part of the house to distinguish itself from its neighbors, all made in the same mint.

A woman with an absorbed look answered the door; when she saw them, she slightly opened her mouth, but the absorbed look did not leave her eyes.

“For evermore,” she said. “It’s Lory Moor. And I ain’t a thing in the house to eat.”

The girl kissed her, and the woman suffered it, not without interest, but still in that other absorption, and led them into the house.

“How’d you ever come to come?” she said. “I have got some fresh baked bread, if that’ll do you.”

And at Lory’s protest,

“This your husband?” her aunt asked. “Well, I’ll tell you what, we can send him to the bakery.”

With this the Inger took matters in his own hands. There was something epic in his description.

“Miss Moor’s husband that was going to be,” he said, “is Mr. Bunchy Haight, a saloon keeper in Inch. She’s run away from him on her weddin’ night. And I’ve brought her to you. Wasn’t that right?”

“My gracious,” said her aunt.

“It’s just till I get a job,” Lory put in. “Was I right to come, Aunt ’Cretia?”

“Why, of course so, of course so,” said her aunt. “Jem Moor always was a weak fool. Can you make biscuits?”

Lory nodded.

“Then we’ll have biscuits and honey for supper,” she arranged it, and the principal thing settled: “How is Jem?” she said, and then took account of her niece’s presence with “How you have grown!”

In a little while they went out to the kitchen. And there the plump complacence of the little house gave way, and they stood facing its tragedy. As they entered, a chain rattled and drew across the zinc under the cooking-stove. An old man got to his feet, and one of his legs was chained to the leg of the wooden settle. He must have been eighty. His gray beard half covered his face. He stood with his head forward, and watched them immovably.

“It’s Hiram’s father,” said Aunt ’Cretia parenthetically. “We’ve kep’ him chained in the kitchen ’most a year now. His head ain’t right.”

The Inger went over to him, seized by a horror and a pity which shook him, and he stood with this leaping pity in his face. On a sudden impulse he put out his hand to the old man, with a groping sense that here was a language which the maddest could comprehend.

To his amazement, the old man jumped backward, his chain dragging and rattling on the floor. From his throat there came a sound, three times repeated, like a guttural giving forth of breath. Then slowly his lips drew back until they showed his toothless gums, where might have been fangs. He crouched and watched.

They stood so for a moment, looking at each other. Then the Inger wheeled and strode to the door, and went out in the little kitchen garden. Late sunlight slanted here, swallows were wheeling and twittering, and a comfortable cat was delicately walking a fence.

The man stood, feeling a sudden physical nausea. Something not in human happenings had happened. He felt as if he could never go into that room again. He sat down on the clothes reel. He had felt friendliness, and the old man had wanted to spring at him. It was monstrous, incredible. He found himself trying to make in his throat the sound that the old man had made.

He sat there until Lory came to the door to tell him that supper was ready. She was in a clean print gown, from her pack. She stood beside him, smiling, and telling him that the biscuits were hot and that her uncle had come. The gown, her smile, what she was saying, all brought him back, grateful, to the commonplace hour. He followed her, and spoke fearfully.

“Do we eat in the kitchen, do you know?” he asked.

To her negative he made no comment, and went with her through the kitchen, but he could not keep from looking. The old man sat on the settle, his eyes immovably fixed on them. “If I try to touch him, he’ll snarl,” the Inger thought. “He’ll snarl.”

Lory’s uncle, Hiram Folts, a petty clerk in one of the departments, was plainly staggered by this advent into his household, and plied his guests with questions. He was a thick, knotted man, who walked as if his feet hurt, and continually fumbled with blunt finger tips at his shaven jaw.

“I was saying to her yesterday, or Tuesday, – or was it Monday? – that she hadn’t heard from you folks in a long while,” he said.

The talk, the food, the motley dishes, the wall-paper and the colored pictures were the American middle-class home at its dreariest. But there was cheer and there was welcome, and the kindly hearts were potentialities of what might be in human relationship. Through the hour, came the dragging and the rattling of the old man’s chain on the zinc, and once a fretful, tired whining.

“Be good, pa!” Hiram Folts called, gently, and the whining ceased.

By some fortune, he had a meeting which took him early, leaving the household rocking with his hunt for a properly ironed collar. Lory electing to rest, the Inger set forth with his host, and left him as soon as he could, with the promise to be his guest for that night. This little man was one whom, in a saloon in Inch, the Inger would unmercifully have bedevilled. But sitting at his table, he had taken him at another value, and later had insisted hotly on paying his car fare.

Once alone down town in that city, the Inger walked with head erect, his eyes on the façades of buildings, on the lights, on all the aspects of a city street to which the habitués grow accustomed. This was, for the world of a city, the most beautiful world which he had ever walked. He knew not at all what it was that pleased him. But the order and smoothness of the streets, the leisure or pleasant absorption of the passers, the abundant light, the dignity of the stone, all these met him with another contact than that of muddy, roystering Inch, or the shining body of San Francisco, or the sullen, struggling soul of Chicago.

“A fellow must have a nerve to get drunk here,” was the way that he thought all this.

Before the office of The Post he halted and crossed. A lit bulletin board had called a crowd: