“There ain’t too much hot water,” she said. “If he uses too much there won’t be enough for the dishes. How long did you say he was staying?”
“I don’t know,” said Joan.
She set his place beside hers for the noon meal, and went back upstairs. He was dressed again and sitting in the bedroom. Now that he was clean, he looked very pale.
“You are much too thin, Frank,” she said, instantly troubled.
He gave the grin above which his eyes used to sparkle. But now they remained somber. “I haven’t eaten my fill steadily,” he said. “Seems to take a lot to feed me, Joan. I didn’t realize it before when I wasn’t doing it myself.”
He looked about the room restlessly. “What sort of a place is this you’re in? I haven’t seen your — I haven’t seen Bart yet. I can’t seem to think of you as married.” His eyes swept her figure delicately and moved away.
She said at once, “You see I’m going to have a baby soon, Frank.”
“Yes … I hope you’re happy.”
She did not answer. Now that Frank was here something of her own was near her again. She wanted to talk to him, to confide in him as she had never confided. But he kept his eyes steadily turned from her and his reserve held her away. “I’m happy about the baby,” she said.
She waited but he did not answer, so she knew they could not speak of herself. She said, “Now tell me about yourself — everything. I’ve thought about you so. Why didn’t you keep that job?”
“I never could work up in it. They kept me greasing parts and cleaning — all the young fellows who’d been to schools kept coming in and getting ahead. There isn’t any fairness in this rotten system, Joan. I’ve learned a lot since I’ve been away. I used to think if I worked hard and good, I’d get ahead anyway. I soon gave that up, like I gave up all that stuff Dad used to preach. He didn’t know anything real — all that talk.” His face was set in a bitter half-grin.
“He believed it,” she said quickly.
“Oh, sure,” he replied. “That’s why it was so poisonous. He was good enough, but that’s no use — not on this earth, not with things the way they are. There’s no chance for a fellow who hasn’t influence or money or something. Remember that letter you got me? That letter didn’t help me. Bair hadn’t any use for Bradley. He hardly looked at it. I got the job because they happened to need a hand just then. It was summer and things were busy.” He examined his hands carefully as if he had never seen them before. “Well, then things weren’t so busy and they dropped me, and there was nothing to do about that. I was hoping to get to be one of the regular ground crew. And about that time you wrote about Father — but I didn’t want to come to Middlehope.”
“No, it was better that you didn’t.”
He looked at her sharply and she added, “I mean you couldn’t have helped — it was all over.”
“That’s what I thought. So I went to Michigan with a fellow and got a job in the factory there. It was furnace work. I couldn’t stand it. I had to stoke the furnaces all day — my skin cracked on me — I was half-roasted. I used to look at my hands and expect the meat to drop off of them. Then I got into some trouble there. I got taken up by some fellows who were arrested for trying to start a strike. Joan, there wasn’t a job in that factory fit for a man to live by except the gatekeeper’s job. He could stand out in the sunshine and air. The rest of us just stood ten hours a day doing one thing, stoking, riveting, hitting the same place in each car as it came along. If you were on that assembly line you couldn’t stop a minute even to breathe or straighten your back — the next car was there and you had to do your share. Another man at the furnaces with me was named Jim Dobie — he was a West Virginia fellow, and his dad had been in the coal mines. He swore he’d never go back. But he did go back and I went with him. He said at least it was cool in the mines — cool and dark. I’d stared into that fire until I thought my eyeballs would burst. I thought if I could just get into some cool dark place … but I couldn’t stand the mine. Every day I had to go down and down — into blackness.” He was twisting his grimed hands and she saw him tremble a little. A light sweat broke out about his lips and he wiped it off and went on twisting his hands. “I’d look up at the sky before I went down. Then I’d have to go down. I had to stand being in a hole in the darkness, the earth and the rocks clamping me in. I never could stand being shut in anywhere, even when I was a kid. One morning — soon after I got your last letter — I looked up like that. It was the brightest morning I’d ever seen, sunshine everywhere and the leaves all glittering yellow — everything was sunshine. And I looked up and there was a plane flying high in all that light. I just laid down my stuff and quit. I guess you won’t understand. But I quit. I said, I’ll never go down again, not if I starve, not if I never fly. At least I won’t go down again.”
“I do understand,” she said. “I understand better than I can tell you.”
“I don’t see—’” he began, and the door opened and Bart came in.
Bart stretched his hand out toward Francis heartily. “I heard downstairs you were here,” he said. Upon his square unshaved face was his aimless good-natured grin. She saw him sharply, in Francis’ astonished eyes. She saw Bart’s rough looks and heard his crude laughter, she saw his simple mind. She saw his thick nostrils and little deep-set meaningless eyes, his huge useless strength, as useless as a beast’s unless it were harnessed to some primitive tool.
Her eyes met Francis’ eyes with brave pleading.
“You see I do understand,” she said.
She had been living here on this hillside, and beyond the rim of the stable hills the world had been roaring and whirling around her, as huge and unknown as the night sky against which she had drawn the shades, lest she be lost. Francis had been caught and held in that whirling, tossed and caught and thrown up again into this one still spot. She listened to him, hour upon hour. He did not pour out talk upon her. He was too wounded for that. In fragments, in torn bits of himself, in scattered words, he let her see. They wandered into the orchard, and into the woods. They sat by the stream in the valley under the falling leaves. In the house he was completely silent, with a guarded stopped silence. But alone with her outdoors he talked, pausing often to breathe deeply, to wipe his forehead when the sweat burst out, to break off suddenly, “Well, there’s no use in going into all that.” There was nothing left in him of that willful boy, tumbling down the stairs in the sunny old manse, crashing into the dining room shouting for food, whistling noisily everywhere, planning loudly for pleasure, arguing eternally for his own way. He moved, guarded and controlled, his head bent downward a little, as though he had been walking for a long time under a roof too low for him. But from the scraps she pieced out what was whirling about this still spot of earth. In the silence of the woods where the stream slipped so softly over smooth stones that it was scarcely to be heard, she listened.
“Things are shutting down on us everywhere now. You can’t get jobs. They don’t want you. Nobody cares if you starve.”
He said, “I came near starving right there in New York City — food everywhere, restaurants full of food, shops full of food, groceries, delicatessens, wagons full of food, people sitting eating everywhere. And I was so hungry I went crazy and went up to a taxi stopped at a traffic light. There was a woman inside — an old woman. I wouldn’t have spoken to a girl. I said, ‘Would you let me go with you to any restaurant to get a meal? I’m faint with hunger.’”
“Frank!” she cried. “Why didn’t you come home?”