Bertram Atkey

“ But, in any case, an hour with Bryce would prove whether it was worth while.
Her gaze turned to the wife, and the light of her resolve wavered and dimmed a little. Was this woman, this untidy, slatternly, narrow-faced, bloodless woman, capable of going up with her husband? She wondered. In her heart she knew that she was not. But also she knew that almost every woman has in her a strange reserve of spiritual strength and tenacity, though many live their whole lives through without drawing upon it
Mrs. Aire might have it. ”

“ The village accepted James Aire for what he seemed to be; one of themselves, a little rougher than a painter or carpenter, no rougher than a bricklayer or a farm-hand.
But Eleanor Malton knew otherwise. She had painted Aire working in the fierce raw yellows and reds of the gravel, splashed in a staring blaze against the gray-green and purple shadows of the pines beyond the pit, too often not to have realized how superior to the average physique was that of the gravel-digger. ”

“ She had come to the age of twenty-five unscathed of love, and though she had met many men, never till now had she encountered one who could release the passion which, lay intent within the soul of this superb woman. Many had tried, for her beauty was striking and she was rich. All had failed—all save Aire—her own laborer—no, not even that, but some strange, compelling and fantastic stranger built upon the débris of the banished slave of the gravel. ”

“ She heard, as she came up, the clash of iron and the grinding of heavy shovels from the pit, and as she rounded a high heap of waste gravel, she saw him.
He was balancing upon a red terrace of the gravel, packed almost as hard as solid stone, driving the bar deep into a hole for leverage enough to pry off a mass of the stuff for the man to shovel away below. He was intent on the work, and swung the bar vertically with a savage energy. She watched him in silence.
He was dressed as of old in the stained and shapeless corduroy and huge heavy boots. ”

“ On the crest of the sand-bank a line of flaring scarlet poppies that had dreamed motionless in the hot, airless sunshine throughout the day quivered and shook their garish heads, as though a little breeze had touched them, and a tiny cascade of dry sand poured down into the pit at the foot of the bank with a soft hissing sound, drowned by the bearing note of Aire's sharp-edged, polished shovel as it cut into the remaining pile. ”

“ Just as the sight of the tawny yellow pits always made her think of lions—that was due to the color and the waste, desert-like appearance of the pits; so any mention of sheer force always brought to her mind a memory of smashed flint, heavy iron bars, bare, reddish-yellow, muscle-corded aims and perspiration.
It was the sudden realization of great strength being put forth, forced upon her mind by this odor, which had impelled her to notice Aire physically, and the first glance brought her a wonder that she had not noticed the physical perfection of this man before. ”

“ It was the old cry—as old as the hour when man and woman first realized that they possessed power to distinguish what is good from that which is not good. The idea of some secret, sordid liaison with the ex-gravel-digger, haunted by the specter of his prying and impossible wife, was intolerable.
Divorce—of a kind? No doubt Annie Aire could be readily bought off—that was only a question of price. Eleanor Malton shuddered at the pit to which her train of thought had led her. ”

“ But if it is the Aire of old I love, why should I never suspect it until that Aire has disappeared? Oh, it is a mystery—a mystery."
She tried again.
"It is not his new talents—gifts—which attract me, for these are no more than pure accident?
"Is it the memory of the great, rough-hewn, barbarous strength of him? No, not that. I have never adored physique as some women do. I should find it easier to fear it." She frowned, casting about in her mind for means of escape from this strange, mysterious and almost sinister thraldom of love. ”

“ TO BRYCE the schoolmaster, to the doctor, and most of all to Eleanor Malton the month that followed was a month of amazement.
Aire leaped forward and up. What Eleanor and Bryce had planned to be a steady educating became less an educating than a pouring of knowledge into the new and incredibly capacious mind of the gravel-digger. He consumed that which Bryce had to offer like fire consuming dry bracken. He forgot nothing. His bewildering power of memory astonished Bryce. ”

“ The deep-down class instinct of the aristocrat raised its head defensively within her. But she beat the vague resentfulness back at once, for she knew that it was the evil residue of a moribund habit of thought nurtured by the tradition of many ages. She looked steadily at the gravel-digger, and knew that she was right to help this man out from the morass of ignorance, in which he had been condemned by custom and his own lack of intellectual enterprise, to live for the best of his youth. ”

“ The voice of Aire's wife came to the girl like a voice driving through fog.
"Look, miss! He can't read; he can't write; and he'll have no more need for these fine clothes and boots, 'cepting on a Sunday. He's cured; and he's forgot all the rubbish he learned when he was bad!" Eleanor let the insult embedded in the savage sentences pass. She was staring at the folded clothes by the box, the gray suit in which he had looked so well; at the books and papers, the stepping-stones of genius; and she could not bring herself to believe the woman. ”

“ As much to reassure himself that he knew the system of the internal combustion engine as to satisfy Aire he explained cursorily.
"Oh, I see, Doctor," said the gravel-digger. The doctor glanced at him, for it sounded as though the man really did see. It was impossible that any man could get from the doctor's slurred explanation anything but the sketchiest idea of the mechanism of a motor, and Aire was about the last man to be capable of that. Doctor Baynton had always regarded Aire, on the rare occasions when he thought of him at all, as wholly a "clod." ”

“ Aire, lost in his recapitulation of things learned that night, sat like a man whispering in his sleep, staring blankly before him.
Under his bandage the wound throbbed steadily without pain, a heavy, regular beat, as if it might have been a mechanical device supplying the energy for that light which had been lit in his brain. ”

“ She must see Aire—and his wife—at once, and reach some understanding. It was impossible to allow things to remain at the mercy of such a woman as Mrs. Aire. For, wronged in thought though not in deed, as the woman had been, nevertheless she could not be permitted to make matters worse than they were. Eleanor went chill as she pictured the sly gossip, the sidelong glances that must result if Mrs. Aire, her jealous rage no longer checked by fear, deliberately gossiped to injure the lady of the manor. ”

“ It came to her that she could do nothing better than to leave the village now, at once, hurry, flee back to Paris and the comparatively sane, conventional life with the Keyles.
She stood up, staring through the windows at the coming twilight. The weather had changed, and a slow autumn drizzle was falling.
In the pine wood there had been the broken gold of the sun rays falling through the interstices of the tree-tops, gold and warmth, and all the throat-catching, luring charm of solitude and secrecy. ”

“ Hare and there in the village a man of different character would slowly drag himself from the morass; but no sincere congratulation ever passed from his erstwhile fellows to him, and they regarded him only with dull envy, malice and dislike.
It seemed to Aire that they were little better than apes, trained in childhood at the free schools with a machine-made training that was speedily forgotten and willingly abandoned. He was—he had been—one of them himself. Only it had never occurred to him before, either to seek a way out of the morass, or that he must primarily help himself out. ”

“ Eleanor laughed.
"Harm?" she said. "It is the wisest thing in all the world to do."
The lean face of the gravel-digger flamed darkly.
"Then—then you wouldn't mind me asking you how I could learn to read while I'm out of the pit, Miss Eleanor," he said with some excitement. ”

“ The people of the village had been too long accustomed to the sight of James Aire among them, in his gravel-stained corduroys tied at the knees, his coarse colorless boots, to realize that he was in any notable degree different from any other working man. ”

“ She had heard from Doctor Baynton that he was uneasy about that peculiar indentation of the bone.
"There is not much room to spare in any skull, despite the humorists," he had said. Pressure on the brain is more easily caused than most people guess, and no one knows precisely what effect the slightest pressure may have."
She wondered whether the singular brightness in the eyes of the gravel-digger, hitherto so heavy-eyed, was an effect of pressure. Later, she was to know.
"Good evening, Aire," she said, smiling. "How are you now?" ”

“ He had returned early from a walk with Noyes—a clever and scholarly man who had been interested in Bryce's account of the amazing change and had come to talk with Aire.
His wife had not been in the kitchen and he assumed that she was out. He had gone into the bedroom to brush his hair and had come upon her there, crying.
"Why, what is the matter, Annie?" he asked.
"Oh, I dunno," she answered. "You was only changed into a toff by accident. It's a bit of bone pressing on your brain that makes you so—clever. ”

“ The schoolmaster said so one evening when he called at the Manor to ransack Eleanor's library for further material for his amazing pupil.
Eleanor had guests, a cousin, Graham Keyle and his sister, with whom she was going to the continent on the following day. They listened, astonished, to Bryce.
"It's the man's memory which startles one, Miss Malton," said the old schoolmaster, throwing out his hands. "He remembers without any effort everything. He never forgets, you understand. Even minute things. ”

“ For a long time now the pits had held a strange fascination for her, and she was no child, but a woman of twenty-five with a wide circle of friends in her own world and with a niche in the much narrower world of art. At twenty-five she was still unmarried. She lacked neither beauty nor wealth, but she had not yet met a man to whom it seemed worth while surrendering her freedom. ”

“ As one who has left behind a rare plant may become conscious suddenly of an imperative desire to return and see how it is thriving, so Eleanor was conscious of a desire to see bow her strange protégé Aire, was progressing. ”

“ It is only a variation of a situation that is old as history—the situation in which God has seen fit to endow a husband with gifts which hitherto He has withheld from the wife. I can tell you that there are two issues to such a situation, a happy and an unhappy issue. History is full of examples. But it rests as much with the wife as with the husband, and the solution is easy. They need only trust each other and be kind to each other. ”

“ The more difficult the subject the better he likes it, provided it is worth while."
All that the schoolmaster had said was true. Aire was wonderful. But his gigantic improvement had not confined itself to the more serous forms of knowledge.
Eleanor, through Bryce, had lent him—he would not accept a gift—a hundred pounds, and this he had halved with his wife.
His own fifty pounds he had spent wisely—largely upon clothing and personal things. Instinctively he had bought correctly, modeling himself largely upon the well-groomed doctor. ”

“ A well-made, and healthy clod, but practically mindless.
Yet there was a brightness of intelligence in the gravel-digger's face.
"Well, I'll have a look at the head," said the doctor, and went with his patient to the cottage.
Baynton lingered over the examination, though the reason for any delay was not very apparent. The torn flesh was healing well in spite of the bruise. But what concerned the doctor was the curious suggestion of a denting of the unbroken bone of the skull under the flesh wound. ”

“ It dawned upon even the slow-witted villagers that Aire was a handsome man, pronouncedly handsome. They might have forgiven him this, and in time even have condoned his appearance of being well-dressed and clean. But be was never seen at the beer-house now, and when he talked with any of them he used words which many of them did not understand. ”

“ And he is more than an insatiable collector and retainer of knowledge. He has a wonderful instinct for what is real and what is worthless. I think he is heir to a remarkable future."
"Mr. Bryce is right, Graham," said E1eanor. "Aire impresses one. It's impossible to avoid seeing that a great future is inevitable for him."
"Unless that tiny area of bone pressure upon the brain is removed or removes itself! A matter of one-hundredth of an inch, perhaps," Keyle reminded them. He was very much in love with Eleanor, and in the mood to detect far-off danger, or even to imagine it. ”

“ But the jests were always ancient, and the "humor" of the gossip almost always was to be found in the discomfiture of some person: a man might have bested a woman, a woman may have tricked some man, or one man may have outwitted another man. ”