Jerome Caryl

“ Now and then a gust of cold wind, sweet with unseen blossoms, smote him powerfully, bending his slender body before it like a sapling. A bird flashed past him with a blue dazzle of wings, and Jerome stopped and looked after it. It lit on the fence in front of the house, and shone there in the sunlight like a blue precious stone. The boy gazed at it, leaning on his spade. Jerome always looked hard out of all his little open windows of life, and saw every precious thing outside his daily grind of hard, toilsome childhood which came within his sight. ”

“ I care not a pin for my own life; and hard as you are you would never have the heart to destroy your own little Caryl. He may be called Caryl—you will not deny him that, although he has no right to be called Carne. ”

“ Mr. Curry’s songbirds found it so, and adapted themselves to its oddities in the easy manner of men and women of the world. It wasn’t, for that matter, the first time they had beheld the alluring little singer with a beau.
Any one who had known Jerome intimately during the slow-moving years in San Francisco would have been astonished [92] enough upon encountering him in the flushed midst of this new phase of his career. One of the first momentous changes was an entire absence of the classic tie clip, which Lili, in playful mood, had snatched off one day and flung far out to sea. ”

“ Now that his little son was gone, Jerome was asking himself how much longer this farce with Lili would have to be kept up.
Her eyes grew heavier and heavier. Her sumptuous hair was done into a tight braid down her back. She was already in her bunk, while Jerome sat glumly on the edge, still in his clothes.
She nodded and half drifted off for a moment; then, as he moved, she opened her eyes. And she murmured, her voice obscurely troubled and with no longer the petulant ring it had more or less carried all the evening: “Jerry....” ”

“ Across the young springing grass went Jerome—a slender little lad moving with an awkward rustic lope. It was the gait of the homely toiling men of the village which his young muscles had caught, as if they had in themselves powers of observation and assimilation. Jerome at twelve walked as if he had held plough-shares, bent over potato hills, and hewn wood in cedar swamps for half a century. ”

“ It’s awful queer how far you can kid yourself. The day you made love to me so hard behind the scenes in Honolulu I almost told myself I’d just decide he’d gotten a divorce from me long ago, and go ahead and marry you, Jerry. But then I happened to remember about some people I used to know who were arrested for bigamy, and I got cold feet.”
Jerome sat staring. Here were shallows and depths he had not glimpsed before. He shuddered a little at the thought of the thin ice on which he had been plunging in pursuit of his unhappy little romance. ”

“ Abel Edwards had said, confidentially, many a time to his boy, who had listened sagely and nodded.
Jerome obeyed his mother with the patient obedience of a superior who yields because his opponent is weaker than he, and a struggle beneath his dignity, not because he is actually coerced. Neither he nor his father ever answered back or contradicted; when her shrill voice waxed loudest and her vituperation seemed to fairly hiss in their ears, they sometimes looked at each other and exchanged a solemn wink of understanding and patience. ”

“ He must let them go, each his own way. It wrung his heart, but he must let his songbirds go. However, he would help them all he could; and if ever fortune smiled upon him again, he would call them back, even though they might be scattered to the very ends of the earth!
Jerome, on this last evening in Borneo, left the place where he was lodging and strolled along the waterfront, musing and trying to map his life. After an hour or so with his pipe as sole companion, and his thoughts roaming far, he turned back, deciding to go to bed early, since it would be necessary to rise at dawn. ”

“ As the baby improved, Jerome was willing to listen to reason. He had scarcely slept at night, though Lili had taken it a great deal more sensibly. The baby’s cold was, indeed, no great matter; but just as it was felt that there [183] was no longer even a remote danger, a mysterious new combination set in. Nobody seemed to be able to make it out. Breathing grew laboured, and the pulse was so feeble that they could barely find it.
Alarm returned. Jerome’s heart was again in a state of panic, while Mr. Curry, in the privacy of his own little cabin, spent a long time on his knees. ”

“ Squire Eben Merritt looked at Jerome almost as he might have done at his pretty Lucina. “By the Lord Harry, I believe you would, boy!” he said, under his breath.
“Such idle talk is not to the purpose,” Doctor Seth Prescott said, with a stately aside to the minister, who nodded with the utter accordance of motion of any satellite.
But Simon Basset spoke again, and as he spoke he hit the doctor, who sat next him, a hard nudge in his broadcloth side with a sharp elbow. ”

“ You would have done better had you waited, Mr. Upham. It is what I always tell young men.”
Then John Upham turned with the last turn of the trodden worm. “My wife and my children are my own!” he cried out, with a great roar. “It's between me and my Maker, my having 'em, and I'll answer to no man for it!” With that he was gone, and the door shut hard after him.
Then Doctor Prescott, no whit disturbed, turned to Jerome and looked at him. Jerome made his manners again. “You are the Edwards boy, aren't you?” said the doctor. ”

“ As Ann and Elmira did most of their work on the shoes during the day, Jerome fell into the habit of doing his part, the closing, in his uncle's shop at night. Every evening he would load himself with the sheaf of bound shoes and hasten down the road. He liked to work in company with a man, rather than with his mother and Elmira ”

“ At the sound of his voice Ann turned around. “It's your father!” she cried out, sharply—“it's your father come home. Abel, here's the children.”
Jerome eyed a small japanned box, or trunk, on the floor, a stout stick, and a handkerchief parcel. He noted then clots of melting snow where the old man had trod. Somehow the sight of the snow did more to restore his faculties than anything else. “For Heaven's sake, let us go to work!” he cried to Elmira, “or he'll die. He's exhausted with tramping through the snow. Get some of that brandy in the cupboard, quick, while I start up the fire.” ”

“ The impresario looked on with a glow of thanksgiving and relief, and was very glad indeed, as things had turned out, that Tony and Alfredo had put the clerk in the supply closet. “Lord, Lord! It’s wonderful the progress that boy is making!”
Yes, Jerome found the world a great place. And the most valuable lessons of all were lessons of contact with men—of all sorts, yet nearly all prepared to get the better of their fellows if possible.
II
But through everything ran the thread of his queer courtship. Lili baffled him, yet lured him on and on. And he wanted to be lured. ”

“ CHAPTER TEN
—AND ELSEWHERE I Before port was reached two facts important to this history had been established: the first that Jerome was to join the troupe—not, indeed, as a member of the chorus (since he had satisfactorily demonstrated to the impresario that his allusion to fog horns had not been in exaggeration) but instead as a clerical assistant to Mr. Curry; and the second, that he had fallen madly in love with Lili.
The first fact was simple enough; as for the second, no doubt the gods on far Olympus smiled a little. But love spurns the orthodox, and after all heeds few conventions. ”

“ There was no self-justification in it.
“I s'pose Doctor Prescott will be mad if he hears of your goin' there, an' I dun'no' but I should be in his place,” she said, as Jerome went out. Then, as he did not answer, she added, calling out shrilly:
“I don't see why John Upham can't call in Lawrence, if he wants a doctor; he's begun to study with his father; he can't have nothin' against him. I guess he knows as much as you do.” ”

“ Jerome had buried his past with its mistakes and its follies and humiliations, and he demanded of the world that it treat him accordingly.
Sometimes the startling suddenness of everything would momentarily overcome. And he didn’t know ... well, at any rate, he mustn’t permit life to run away with him; to have life run away with him might not be so bad as to have it crawl away with him; but it would be bad enough. Sometimes when Lili laughed he had a feeling that life was running away with him. He had moments of feeling a trifle wobbly about life. ”

“ When Jerome and Elmira came down-stairs he led the way at once into the north parlor, where the most of the guests were assembled. There were the village young women in their best attire, decked as to heads and bosoms with sweet drooping flowers, displaying all their humble stores of lace and ribbons and trinkets, jostling one another with slurring hisses of silk and crisp rattle of muslins, speaking affectedly with pursed lips, ending often a sibilant with a fine whistle, or silent, with mouths set in conscious smiles and cheeks hot with blushes. ”

“ Jerome got his hat, stole softly down-stairs, and out of the front door. “I've got to be alone somewhere, where I can think,” he said to himself, and forthwith made for the site of his mill; he could be sure of solitude there at that hour.
When he arrived, he sat down on a pile of logs and gazed unseeingly at the broad current of the brook, silvering out of the shadows to the light of a young moon. The roar of it was loud in his ears, but he did not seem to hear it. There are times when the spirit of the living so intensifies that it comes into a silence and darkness of nature like death. ”

“ The older I get the more insatiable I seem to grow.”
“Then you didn’t linger about the waterfront long enough,” he thrust back, “to be quite posted yourself about what’s going on.” His sad eyes had a little sparkle in them.
But of course her most effective weapon was always the unassailable gaze—not, however, that she used it quite consciously. And as she gazed, Jerome felt a trifle uneasy. He couldn’t help himself.
“You had no chance,” he expanded, “to hear about the Skipping Goone.”
She repeated the name after him with the inflection of one who half remembers or is not quite sure. ”

“ Always protected from the weather, Jerome's hair would have been brown; but his hats failed him like his shoes, and often in the summer season were crownless. However, his mother mended them as long as she was able. She was a thrifty woman, although she was a semi-invalid, and sat all day long in a high-backed rocking-chair. She was not young either; she had been old when she married and her children were born, but there was a strange element of toughness in her—a fibre either of body or spirit that kept her in being, like the fibre of an old tree. ”

“ When Jerome went home he had in his pocket a deed of the land, but on the right bank of the brook only, the lawyer having covenanted not to sell or build upon the left bank. Thus he had enough land upon which to build his mill when he should have saved the money. He felt nearer Lucina than he had ever done before. The sanguineness of youth, which is its best stimulant for advance, thrilled through all his veins. ”

“ Jerome laughed awkwardly. Nobody knew how much joy those words of Lawrence Prescott's gave him, and how hard he tried to check the joy, because it should not matter to him except for Elmira's sake.
“Did you ever see a girl with such sweet ways as your sister?” persisted Lawrence.
“Elmira is a good girl,” Jerome admitted, confusedly. He loved his sister, and would have defended her against depreciation with his life, but he compared inwardly, with scorn, her sweet ways with Lucina's.
“There isn't a girl her equal in this world,” cried her lover, enthusiastically. “Don't you say so, Jerome? ”

“ That evening, after Jerome Edwards had run home with his prospects of two shillings a week and Squire Eben Merritt's assistance, the friends met at the Squire's house. At eight o'clock they came marching down the road, the three of them—John Jennings in fine old broadcloth and a silk hat, with a weak stoop in his shoulders, and a languid shakiness in his long limbs; the lawyer striding nimbly as a grasshopper, with the utter unconsciousness of one who pursues only the ultimate ends of life ”

“ Jerome threw up his head in the thin, sparkling air. “I will have her yet,” he said, quite aloud; and “if I do not, I can bear that.”
He felt like one who would crush the stings of fate, even if against his own heart. He had grown old and thin during the last weeks; he had worked so hard and resolutely, yet with so little hope; and he who toils without hope is no better than a slave to his own will. That day, when he went home, his eyes were bright and his cheeks glowing. His mother and sister noticed the difference.
“I was afraid he was gettin' all run down,” Ann Edwards told Elmira ”

“ You've got to work for the breath of your nostrils, and not for the breath of your mind or your soul. You'll find you can't fight your lot in life, J'rome Edwards; you ain't got standin' room enough outside it.”
“I don't want to fight my lot in life,” Jerome replied, defiantly, “but I thought I'd go to school this winter.”
“You won't grub a bit better for one more winter of schoolin',” said his uncle, “and there's another reason—your mother, she's gettin' older, an' Elmira, she's a good-lookin' girl, but she's gettin' wore to skin an' bones. They're both on 'em workin' too hard. ”