A good woman

by Louis Bromfield

11

The choir met in the room of the church which was given over on the Sabbath to “the infant class” of the Sunday School for children under six. It was a large, barren room, with large chromos of Biblical scenes decorating the walls—the soldiers of Moses returning from the Promised Land, Moses smiting the Rock, the same as an Infant being discovered in the Bulrushes by a Princess dressed in garments as gaudy and inaccurate as those of a music-hall Cleopatra, Noah and his family receiving the Dove and Olive Branch. In the center of the room two dozen lilliputian chairs sat ranged in a circle, save on the occasions of choir practice, when a dozen adult chairs were brought in from the main Sunday School room to accommodate members of the choir.

Naomi arrived early, and, admitting herself with the private key that was her badge of office, turned on the gas and seated herself at the upright piano. There was no piano in the flat by the railroads, and she fell at once to playing, in order to recover her old careless facility. She had no sense of music; yet music was to her only what wine is to some temperaments: it served to unlock the doors of the restraining prison which forever shut her in. She played relentlessly in showers of loud, banging notes, heedless of discord and strange harmonies; and the longer she played, the more shameless and abandoned became the character of her playing. To-night she played from a none too sure memory The Ninety and Nine and Throw Out the Life Line (her favorites) and then I’m a Pilgrim, I’m a Stranger, which always made her want to cry, and then with a strong arm and a loud pedal she swept into Ancient of Days, which filled her with the strangest, emotional grandeur. There was a splendor in it which made her feel noble and heroic: it filled her with a sense of beauty and power. She saw herself vaguely as a barbarian queen, like Sheba, riding on an elephant, surrounded by guards and servitors. The image in her mind bore a strange resemblance to her memory of a highly painted artificial blonde, clad principally in sequins and crimson satin, whom she had once seen riding an elephant in the circus parade—a lady advertised as “the ten-thousand-dollar beauty.” But always when she had finished Ancient of Days, and the last note had died away, she was left with a melancholy feeling of depression and a sense of wickedness. The world about her became after one of these musical debauches a sad and unbearable place.

To-night, alone in the bare, unattractive room, she poured into the music all the pent-up emotions of days ... all her hatred of Emma, her fear of the new life on which she had embarked, but, most of all, that curious passionate half-wicked feeling she had for Philip. Beneath the spell of Ancient of Days this emotion for him seemed to become purified and free of all restraint. She poured into the banging, careless chords all the things which she could never bring herself to tell him—how the sight of him standing by the crib had made her feel suddenly ill with warm voluptuous feeling, how there were times when she wanted to lie down before him and beat her head on the floor to show him how she felt, how she wakened out of a sound sleep in the midst of the night with her hands aching to touch his face and his dark hair. In the splendor of the hymn it was as if all those things were realized. For a time she was that fantastic, barbaric queen of her imagination and Philip was her lover, dressed like one of the soldiers in the chromo of the return from the Promised Land, and sometimes in an overwhelming wave of wickedness she saw him as she had seen him on the night of the drums, standing half naked by the light of the dying fire.

It was thus that she saw him to-night, and, as if she meant to preserve the wild romantic feeling, she played and sang the whole hymn over again in her loud, flat voice. She was wildly happy, for in the end it seemed that Philip really belonged to her, and that they were alone once more by the lake at Megambo. They weren’t even missionaries and Swanson wasn’t there. And he loved her.

When she had finished, the spell clung to her until the last chord, held deliberately by the use of the loud pedal, died away, leaving her weak and exhausted, and prey suddenly to the horrible, sickening depression. She let her head fall forward on the piano. She wanted to cry, but she couldn’t cry, because people would be coming in at any moment. And suddenly she felt the touch of a hand on her shoulder and a voice saying, “That was splendid, Mrs. Downes! That’s the sort of music that will bring them to the Lord!”

It was the Reverend Castor. He had come in quietly, without a sound, and had been sitting there all the while listening to her while she desecrated the sanctity of a hymn with all her fleshly emotions. She tried to gain control of herself, and, without looking up, mopped her eyes and nose with her handkerchief. But it was no good: when she looked up he saw that she had been crying. She was blushing with shame, and the color made her seem almost pretty.

“Why, you’ve been crying!” he said.

She choked, recovered herself, and answered, “Yes ... I ... I can’t help it.... It always makes me cry—that hymn.”

He laid a big, bony, masculine hand on her shoulder. “But you mustn’t cry ... Mrs. Downes. You mustn’t cry.... It’s something to be joyful over.”

She looked (he thought) so young and pitiful and unhappy. If it were only possible to comfort her, to take her on his knee as if she were a little child. It was no more than that, this feeling toward her. He wanted to comfort her. But you couldn’t do that, of course, especially if you were a preacher.

“I watched your face while you were singing,” he said. “It was a beautiful sight ... so filled with joy and hope and exaltation ... like the face of one who has seen a vision. It was an inspiration—even to me, a man of God.”

She thought, “Oh, I am wicked. I am wicked!” And aloud, suddenly, without knowing why, she said, “Oh, I’m so unhappy!”

“But why, Naomi?”

He had called her by her name, without thinking, and suddenly he was frightened. He always thought of her thus, as if she had been his own child, and now the thought had slipped into words. He saw that she had noticed it, for she was blushing and avoided his eyes. She did not answer his question, and suddenly he said, “You mustn’t mind that ... that ... Mrs. Downes.... It only means ... that ... well, I always think of you as Naomi because I think of your mother-in-law as the Mrs. Downes.”

Still looking away, she answered, “I know ... I know.... It’s all right. You may call me that if you want, only ... only not in front of the others. I didn’t.... I think it would make me feel less alone.”

And then the door creaked, and Mrs. Wilbert Phipps came in. The Reverend Castor began fingering the piles of music, and Naomi began again to pound the piano with an hysterical violence.

“Good-evening, Mrs. Phipps.”

“Good-evening, Reverend Castor.”

“I’ve been looking over the anthems for next Sunday.”

“We haven’t sung O the Golden, Glowing Morning for a long while.”

“No ... but that’s an Easter hymn!”

“But we have sung it before on other occasions ... it’s so moving.”

“What do you think, Mrs. Downes?”

Naomi stopped in the midst of her playing. “I think it would be fine. It’s so full of joy.”

One by one the others arrived. Each had his favorite, some song which he or she found moving. Naomi, troubled and unhappy, yielded to their choice. She was not, it was plain to be seen, to be a leader save in name alone. The eleven singers took their seats. There was a rustling of music and Naomi plunged noisily into:

“O the Golden, Glowing Morning!
Stars above and Stars adorning!”

The voices rang out loud and clear, filling the infants’ classroom with a wild joy that seemed almost improper in so bare and chaste a place. They went on through a whole program of anthems and hymns, singing more and more loudly. At last, as the clock banged out eleven, the orgy of music came to an end, leaving them tired but happy, and filled with a strange excitement. At the piano, Naomi turned away to collect the sheets of music. There was a bustle of farewells and small talk and, one by one, or in pairs, the singers drifted out. It had been a happy evening: the happiness of these evenings in the infants’ classroom held the choir together. In all the dreary Town of slate-colored houses, the weekly orgy of singing provided a half-mystical joy that elsewhere did not exist. It was, for all the pious words that were chanted, a sort of pagan festival in which men and women found a wild, emotional abandon. It was from choir practice that Mrs. Swithers had run off with the county auditor, leaving behind a husband, an aged mother and three small children.

The music was kept in a cabinet in the Reverend Castor’s study, and before the others had all gone, Naomi hurried off to place it there. The depression had begun to settle over her once more, leaving her a prey to uneasiness. The drawer of the cabinet was jammed, and while she pulled and tugged at it, she heard the singers in little groups passing the door. She heard the dry Mrs. Wilbert Phipps say in a curious, excited voice, “No, Hanna, you mustn’t say that here. Wait until we get out,” and then the banging of the door. She pulled and tugged desperately at the drawer. The door banged again, and again. Without thinking, she counted the number of times it had closed ... ten times! They must all have gone, and she was left alone. She knew suddenly that she must escape before the Reverend Castor appeared. She could not stay alone with him there in the study. She could not. She could not.... Suddenly, in a wave of terror, she let the music slip to the floor, and turned to escape, but at the same moment the Reverend Castor came in. He stood for a second, looking at her with a queer, fixed expression in his kindly gray eyes, and then he said, gently, “What is it, Naomi? Did I frighten you?”

In her struggle with the drawer, her hat had slipped to the back of her head and her hair had fallen into disarray. Her pale face was flushed once more.

“No,” she said. “I just couldn’t get that awful drawer open.”

“I’ll do it for you.”

She couldn’t escape now. She couldn’t run past him out of the door. It would be too ridiculous. Besides, she had a strange, wicked desire not to escape. She sat down on one of the shabby leather chairs and put her hat straight. The Reverend Castor stooped without a word and gathered up the music, and then, with one hand, he opened the drawer easily. She saw it happen with a chill of horror. It was as if the drawer had betrayed her.

She rose quickly and said, “It really wouldn’t open for me. It really wouldn’t.... I tried and tried.” (He would think she had planned it all.)

But when he turned toward her, he said gently, “Yes, I know. It’s a funny drawer. It sticks sometimes like that.” He was so calm and so ... usual, she had suddenly, without knowing why, a queer certainty that he understood what was happening there deep inside her, and was trying to still her uneasiness. The knowledge made her want to cry. If only for a second Philip would treat her thus....

He was rubbing his hands together. “Well, that was what I call a real choir practice. We’ve always needed some one like you, Naomi, to put spirit into them. It’s the way you make the piano talk. Why, it was like a new choir to-night.”

She looked away from him. “I tried my best. I hope they liked it.”

“It was wonderful, my child.”

There was a sudden, awkward silence, and Naomi said nervously, “Well, I ought to be going.”

She moved toward the door, and the Reverend Castor took up his hat and coat. “I’ll walk with you, Naomi. I want some air.”

Despite herself, she cried out in a sudden hysteria, “No, no. You mustn’t do that.”

“But it isn’t safe down there by the railroads.”

“Oh, I’m not afraid.” She kept moving slowly toward the door.

“But I don’t mind the walk, Naomi. It’s no walk for a strong man like me.”

“Oh, it isn’t that....” She hesitated for a moment. “I don’t mean that.... I don’t know how to explain, only ... only you never walked home with Mrs. Timpkins when she was leading the choir ... and ... you see, if any one saw us....”

He looked suddenly at the floor, and a great sigh escaped him—a heart-breaking sigh, filled with the ghosts of disillusionment, of misery and disappointment.

“Yes ... I know,” he said gently. “I understand.”

The door closed behind her, and she was outside in the snow. She kept hearing the sigh. It haunted her as she hurried, confused and out of breath, down the long hill. She felt so sorry for him ... a kind, good man like that. And all at once she began to cry silently. There was no sound, but only tears and a lump in her throat.

12

The suspicion of Mary Conyngham, planted by Mabelle in the mind of Emma, lay there for days, flourishing upon fertile soil until at last it took on the sturdy form of reality and truth. In her pain at Philip’s coldness toward her and in her anger at the spectacle of an existence which had become as disorderly and unmanageable as her own house during Naomi’s presence in it, the thought of Mary Conyngham seldom left her. It burned her mind as she sat behind the cash-register, while she lay in bed at night alone in the house she had meant always to be Philip’s house. It gave her no peace. What right, she asked herself, had Mary Conyngham to steal her boy? Bit by bit, she built up the story from that one shred of gossip dropped by Mabelle.

She saw now that the name of Mary Conyngham explained everything. Mary had never gone to church, and perhaps hadn’t any faith in God, and so she had aggravated Philip’s strange behavior. It was probably Mary or the thought of her, that put into Philip’s head that fantastic idea of going to work in the Mills, in a place which had nearly cost him his life. She must have seen him almost every day. Why, she was even friendly with the Polacks and Dagoes. Who could say what things she hadn’t been guilty of down there in the Flats, where no decent person ever went? There was probably truth in the story that Irene Shane slept with that big Russian—what was his name—who had had the boldness to come to the very door when Philip was ill. No, all sorts of orgies might go on in the Flats and no one would ever know. It was awful, degrading of Philip, to have mixed himself up with such people.

And presently she began to suspect that Mary lay at the source of Philip’s behavior toward Naomi. A man didn’t give up living with his wife so easily unless there was another woman. A man didn’t do such things. Men were different from women. “Why,” she thought, “I’ve lived all these years without a man, and never once dreamed of re-marrying. I gave up my life to my son.”

It was Jason’s fault too (she thought). It was Jason’s bad blood in Philip. The boy wouldn’t have behaved like that if it hadn’t been for his father before him. That was where the weakness lay.

And now Mary probably came to see him at that room over the stables at night, and even in the daytime, because there was nothing to stop her coming and going. No one in the Flats would care, especially now, in the midst of the strike, and the Shanes wouldn’t even take notice of such a thing. Shane’s Castle had always been a sort of bawdy-house, and with the old woman dead the last trace of respectability had vanished....

She remembered, too, that Mary hadn’t been happy with her husband. Being married to a man like that who ran after women like Mamie Rhodes did something to a woman. Why, she herself could remember times when Jason’s behavior made her, out of revenge, want to be unfaithful to him; and if it could happen to her (Emma) why, what would be the effect on a godless woman like Mary Conyngham?

For a time she considered boldly the plan of going to Philip himself and forcing him to give up Mary Conyngham. Surely she could discuss a thing like that with her own son, to whom she had been both father and mother. There must be, no matter how deeply it lay buried, still a foundation of that sound and moral character which she had labored so long to create. “If only,” she thought, “I could make him feel again as he once felt. If only I could get through to the real Philip, my Philip, my little boy.” But he was hard, as hard as flint.

Twice she planned to go alone to the stable of Shane’s Castle, and once she got as far as the bridge before she lost courage and turned back. Always a shadow rose up between her and her resolution—the shadow of that day when, hidden by a screen in the corner of the restaurant, she had pled with him passionately, only to find herself beating her head against a wall of flint, to hear him saying, “You mustn’t talk like that. It’s not fair”; to see the thin jaw set in a hard line. No, she saw that it was impossible to talk to him. He was so strange and unruly that he might turn his back on her forever. The thought of it filled her with terror, and for two nights she lay awake, weeping in a debauch of self-pity.

But one thing was changed. In all the trouble with Philip, her doubts over marrying Moses Slade seemed to have faded away. At times when she felt tired and worn she knelt in her cold bedroom and thanked God for sending him to her. They could be married in two more months, and then ... then she would have some one to comfort her. She couldn’t go to him with her troubles now, lest the weight of them should frighten him. No, she saw that she must bear all her suffering alone until God saw fit to lift the cross from her shoulders.

One afternoon when Moses Slade had left, still breathing fire and thunder against Krylenko, she sat for a long time alone behind the screen, in the restaurant, looking out of the window. Her eyes saw nothing that passed, for she was seeing far beyond such things as shop-fronts and trolley-cars. She was thinking, “What has come over me lately? I haven’t any character any more. I’m not like Moses, who goes on fighting like an old war horse. I’ve let things slide. I haven’t faced things as I should. I’ve humored Philip, and see what’s come of it. When I kept hold on the reins everything went well, and now Philip’s ruining himself and going straight to the Devil. I should never have allowed Naomi to leave the house. She’s wax in his hands, with all her softness—she can never manage him and he needs to be managed just as his father did. If I’d treated his father the way Naomi treats Philip ... God knows what would have happened.”

She began automatically to stack the dishes on the table before her, as if she had gone back to the days when the restaurant had been only a lunch-room and she had herself waited on her customers.

“I must take hold,” she told herself. “There’s only one thing to do ... only one thing.... I must go and see Mary Conyngham. I must talk to her face to face and have it out. He’s my son. I bore him. I gave him life, and I have a right to save him.”

A kind of feverish energy took possession of her. It seemed that she could no longer sit there seeing the whole structure of her life going to ruin. She would save Philip. She would die knowing that he was a bishop. She would marry Moses Slade and go to Washington and work there to save the country from chaos, from drink, from strikes. She would rise in the end, triumphant as she had always been. She had been weak: she had rested at the time when she should have worked. She needed to act. She would act, no matter what it cost her. She would save Philip and herself.

In a kind of frenzy she seized her hat and coat and left the restaurant.

It was a warm day when the snow had begun to melt and the pavement was deep with slush. She hurried, wet to the knees, fairly running all the way, so that by the time she reached Mary Conyngham’s house her face was scarlet and wet with sweat.

Mary was in, but she was upstairs with the children, and the hired girl bade her wait in the parlor. There she seated herself on a rosewood chair, upholstered in horsehair, to mop her face and set her hat straight. And slowly the room began to have a strange effect upon her. Though the room itself was warm, it was as if she had come into a cool place. The rosewood furniture was dark and cool, and the great marble slab of the heavy mahogany commode. The wax flowers and the glass dome that protected them were cool, and the crystal chandelier and the great silver-bordered mirror. The whole room (queer and old-fashioned, Emma thought indignantly) was a pool of quiet ... a genteel room, a little thread-bare, but nevertheless possessed of an elegance all its own.

It exerted the queerest effect on Emma, dampening her spirits and extinguishing the indignation that a little while before had roared in her bosom like the flames in the belly of one of the furnaces. She began suddenly to feel tired again and filled with despair.

“It’s like her to keep an older woman waiting,” she thought. “Probably she knows well enough why I’ve come.”

She began to tap the carpet with the toe of her shoe and at last she rose and began to walk about, as if she felt that only by activity could she throw off from her the softening effect of that quiet room. She halted presently before the oval portrait, framed in gilt, of Mary’s mother, a very pretty woman, with dark hair and a spirited eye ... a woman such as Mary might have been if she hadn’t married that John Conyngham and had her spirit subdued. Well (thought Emma) she seemed nevertheless to have too much spirit for her own good or the good of any one else.

She was standing thus when Mary came in, dressed in a mauve frock, and looking pale and a little nervous. Emma thought, “She knows why I’ve come. It’s on her conscience. She’s afraid of me already.”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Downes,” said Mary, “but my sister-in-law has gone out, and I couldn’t come down until both children were asleep.”

It was odd, but her voice had upon Emma the same effect as the room. It seemed to sap the foundations of her assurance and strength by its very gentleness. It was strange how subdued and quiet Mary seemed, almost as if (Emma thought suspiciously) she had forgotten her early troubles and was now shamelessly and completely happy. Feeling that if she did not begin at once, she would not accomplish her plan, Emma plunged.

“It’s about Philip I’ve come to see you,” she said. “I knew that you were interested in him.”

Mary admitted the interest shamelessly.

“I don’t know what’s happened to him. He’s so changed ... not at all the boy he used to be.”

“Yes, he’s very different.... I think maybe he’s happier now.”

“Oh, he’s not happy. No one could be happy in his state of mind. Why, he’s even abandoned God.... Something, some one has gotten hold of him.”

The shadow of a frown crossed Mary’s smooth brow. She had the air of waiting ... waiting.... She said, “Perhaps I’ve chosen the wrong word. I mean that he seems on a more solid foundation.”

“Do you call what he’s doing solid?”

“If it’s what he wants to do.”

“He doesn’t know his own mind.”

“I mean he’s more like the real Philip. I think he is the real Philip now.”

Emma’s fingers began to strum the arm of her chair nervously. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, but if you mean that the old Philip wasn’t real, why, I think you’re saying a crazy thing. It’s this new one who’s queer. Do you mean to insinuate that I, his own mother ... the one who bore him ... who gave him life, doesn’t know who the real Philip is?”

It was clear that she was “working herself up.” Mary did not answer her at once, but when she raised her head, it was to say, with a curious, tense quietness, “No ... if you want the truth, Mrs. Downes, I don’t think you know Philip at all. I think that’s really what’s the matter. You’ve never known him.”

Emma found herself suddenly choked and speechless. “Do you know what you’re saying? I’ve never had any one say such a thing to me before ... me, his own mother! Why, do you know what we’ve been to each other ... Philip and me?” She plunged into a long recital of their intimacy, of the beautiful relationship that had always existed between them, of the sacrifices she had made. It went on and on, and Mary, listening, thought, “That’s how she talks to him. That’s why he can’t get free of her.” Suddenly she hated Emma. And then she heard Emma saying, in a cold voice, “Of course, I suppose in one way you do know him better than I do—in one way.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“You know what I mean. You ought to know ... you ... you ... who have stolen him away from me and from his own wife.”

Mary’s fingers dug suddenly into the horsehair of her chair. She felt a sudden primitive desire to fling herself upon Emma, to pull her hair, to choke her. The old tomboyish spirit, dead for so long, seemed suddenly to breathe and stir with life. She thought quickly, “I mustn’t. I mustn’t. It’s what she’d like me to do—to put myself on a level with herself. And I mustn’t, for Philip’s sake. It’s all bad enough as it is.” She grew suddenly rigid with the effort of controlling herself. She managed to say in a quiet voice, “I think you’re talking nonsense. I think you’re a little crazy.”

“Crazy, am I? That’s a nice thing to say!”

“I have talked to Philip just once since he came home, and that was on the day I met you in the street. I didn’t try to find him. He came to me.”

“Do you expect me to believe that?”

“It’s the truth. Beyond that I don’t care what you believe.”

“I want you to leave him alone.”

Suddenly Mary stood up. “I was leaving him alone. I meant never to see him, but I won’t leave him alone any longer. He would have been mine except for you. He’s belonged to me always and he needs me to protect him. No, I won’t leave him alone any longer.”

All at once she began to cry, and turning, she ran from the room and up the stairs. Emma, left behind on the horsehair sofa, felt suddenly foolish and outwitted. She was certain that Mary meant not to come back, but she remained in the cool, quiet room for a long time, as if her dignity demanded such an action. And at last, baffled and filled with a sense of flatness, she rose and walked out of the house.

The whole visit had been a failure, for it hadn’t come properly to a climax. It was ended before it began. But she had (she felt) done her best, all that a mother could do to save her only son. She had laid herself open to insult.... A block from Mary’s house she discovered that in her agitation she had forgotten her gloves. She halted abruptly, and then resumed her way. They didn’t matter. They were old gloves, anyway.

She couldn’t bring herself to go back and enter that depressing house again.

Upstairs in the room where the two children were asleep in their cribs, Mary lay on the bed and wept. Until this moment her love had seemed a far-off, distant thing, to be cherished sadly and romantically as hopeless, but now, all at once, it had become unbearably real. She saw Philip in a new way, as some one whom she might touch and care for with all the tenderness that had been wasted upon John Conyngham. She saw him as a lonely man who wanted one thing above all else from a woman, and that was understanding; and it was tenderness that she wanted to give him more than all else on earth. In the midst of her grief and fury, she meant to have him for her own. It seemed to her suddenly that it was only possible to free him from that terrible woman by sacrificing herself. If she gave herself—soul and body and heart—to Philip, she could save him. “He is mine,” she kept sobbing, half-aloud. “He is mine ... my own dear Philip.” Why (she asked herself) should she care at all for gossip, for the sacrifice of her own pride, for all the tangle that was certain to follow? He needed her, though she doubted whether the fact had ever occurred to him, and she needed him, and it had been so ever since they were children, and would be so when they were old. All at once she felt a sudden terror of growing old. She seemed to feel the years rushing by her. She knew that she could not go on thus until she died.

And after a little while, when her sobbing had quieted a little, she began to see the thing more coldly. She saw even that Philip was fantastic and hopeless, trying to escape as much from himself as from his mother and from Naomi. She saw even that he was impossible. She doubted whether there was in him the chance of happiness. Yet none of it made any difference, for those were the very reasons perhaps why she loved him. They were the reasons too, perhaps, why at least three women—his mother, his wife and herself—had found themselves in a hopeless tangle over him. It was simply that without knowing it he made demands upon them from which they could not escape. He had even touched Irene Shane in whose cold life men played no part. Mary loved him, she saw now, without reason, without restraint, and she knew that because she loved him she must save him from his own weakness and lead him out of his hopeless muddle into the light.

Because she was a sensible woman, the sudden resolution brought her a certain peace. She coldly took account of all the things that might follow her decision, and knew that she was decided to face them. She had to help him. It was the only thing that mattered.

As she stirred and sat up on the edge of the bed, the youngest child moved and opened its eyes, and Mary, in a sudden burst of joy, went over and kissed it. Bending down, she said, “Your mother, Connie, is a wicked woman.” The child laughed, and she laughed too, for there was a sudden peace and delight in her heart.

13

Philip had spent the morning of that same day among the tents where the strikers lived in the melting snow. He had made sketches, a fragment here, a fragment there—tiny glimpses that were in their own way more eloquent than the lifting of the whole curtain. They were a weekly affair now, done regularly on a fragment of some denunciating speech or editorial. They appeared weekly in the Labor Journal. Now he chose an editorial in which the Chairman of the Board of Mill Directors made a speech filled with references to Christ and appeals to end the strike and return to an era of Peace on Earth; now it was an address from the Governor of the State—a timid man, a bit of a fool, and destined one day to be President of the Nation. Moses Slade suffered twice more, for his pompous bombastic speeches made irresistible subjects for burlesque. But, as the weeks passed, Philip found himself less and less interested in making propaganda for the workers, and more and more concerned with the purity of his line. The room above the stable came to be papered in sketches made on bits of newsprint or fragments of butchers’ brown paper. A frenzy of work took possession of him, and for whole days at a time he never left the place, even to see his children. There were even times when he forgot the very existence of Mary Conyngham. But he did go faithfully twice a week to stay with the twins so that Naomi might go to choir practice. It was, he knew, the only pleasure which lay in his power to give her.

The importance of the thing appeared to make her happy, and to diminish the aching sense of strain that was never absent when they were together. She began, little by little, to grow used to a husband whose only activities were those of a nursemaid, but she still tried pathetically to please him. She made a heroic effort to dress neatly and keep the house in order (although there were times when he spent his whole visit to the twins in putting closets in order and gathering the soiled clothing into piles), and she never spoke any more of his coming back to her. The only fault seemed to be a jealousy which she could not conquer.

She kept asking him questions, disguised in a pitiful air of casualness, about what the Shanes’ house was like, and whether he thought Lily Shane as beautiful a woman as she was supposed to be. Once she even asked about Mary Conyngham. He always answered her in the same fashion—that he had never been inside the Shanes’ house, and did not know Lily Shane, and had spoken to Mary Conyngham but once since he had come home. Sometimes he fancied that it was more than mere jealousy that prompted her questions: he thought, too, there was something in them of wistful curiosity about a world filled with people she would never know. She still had the power of rousing a pity which weakened him like an illness.

He did tell her at last that he had seen Lily Shane three or four times walking in the park, once in the moonlight, and that he thought she was a beautiful woman; but he never told her how the figure of Lily Shane was inextricably a part of that strange illuminating vision that came to him as he stood by the vine-clad window. It was, he believed, the sort of thing no one would understand, not even Mary. Naomi would only think him crazy and go at once to tell his mother. They would begin all over again humoring him as a madman or a child. No, he did not know Lily Shane, and yet he did know her, in a strange, unearthly, mystical fashion, as if she stood as a symbol of all that strange, sensuous world of which he had had a single illuminating intuition as he stood by the window. It was a world in which all life was lived on a different plane, in which tragedies occurred and people were happy and unhappy, but it was a world in which success and happiness and tragedy and sorrow were touched by grandeur. There was in it nothing sordid or petty, for there were in it no people like Uncle Elmer and Naomi and Mabelle. One could enter it if one knew how to live. That, he saw, was a thing he must learn—how to live, to free himself of all that nastiness and intolerance and pettiness of which he had suddenly become aware. He had to escape from all those things which the old Philip, the one who was dead, had accepted, in the blindness of a faith in a nasty God, as the ultimate in living.

This new Philip, prey to a sickening awareness, had been working all the morning in the Flats and ate with Krylenko at the tent where the homeless strikers were fed soup and coffee and bread, and, on returning to the stable, he lay down on the iron bed and fell asleep. He did not know how long he lay there, but he was awakened presently by a curious feeling, half a dream, that some one had come into the room with him. Lying quietly, still half-lost in a mist of sleep, he became slowly aware that some one was walking softly about beyond the screen. Rising, he pushed it aside and, stepping out, saw who it was. Standing in the shadow near the window, peering at the drawings, was Lily Shane, hatless, with her honey-colored hair done in a knot at the back of her neck, her furs thrown back over her shoulders. At the sound of his step, she turned slowly and said, “Oh! I thought there was no one here. I thought I was alone.”

It was a soft voice, gentle and musical, exactly the right voice for such a figure and face. At the sound of it, he was aware suddenly that he must appear ridiculous—coatless, with his hair all rumpled. It was the first time he had ever spoken to such a woman, and something in her manner—the complete calm and assurance, the quiet, almost insolent lack of any apology, made him feel a gawky little boy.

“I ... I was asleep,” he said, desperately patting down his hair.

She smiled. “I didn’t look behind the screen. Hennery told me you hadn’t come in.” But there was a contradiction behind the smile, a ghost of a voice which said, “I did look behind the screen. I knew you were there.”

And suddenly, for the first time, Philip was stricken by an awful speculation as to how he looked when asleep. He knew that he was blushing. He said, “It doesn’t matter. It’s your stable, after all.”

“I didn’t mean to disturb you. I’ve stayed longer than I meant to ... but—you see ...”—she made a gesture toward the drawings—“I found all these more fascinating than I expected. I knew about you. My sister told me ... but I didn’t find what I expected. They’re so much better.... You see, it’s always the same. I couldn’t believe it of the Town. Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?”

He began to tremble a little. He’d never shown them to any one save Krylenko, who only wanted pictures for propaganda and liked everything, good and bad. And now some one who lived in a great world such as he could scarcely imagine, thought they were good. Suddenly all the worries, the troubles, slipping from him, left him shy and childlike.

“I don’t know whether they’re good or bad,” he said, “only ... only I’ve got to do them.”

She was standing before the painting of the Flats seen from the window, over which he had struggled for days. She smiled again, looking at him. “It’s a bit messy ... but it’s got something in it of truth. I’ve seen it like that. It was like that one moonlight night not so long ago. I was walking in the garden ... late ... after midnight. I noticed it.”

She sat down in one of the chairs by the stove. “May I stay and talk a moment?”

“Of course.”

“Sit down too,” she said.

Then he remembered that he was still without a coat, and, seizing it quickly, he put it on and sat down. His mind was all on fire, like a pile of tinder caught by a spark. He had never seen anything like this woman before. She wasn’t what a woman who had led such a life should have been. She wasn’t hard, or vulgar, or coarse, as he had been taught to believe. She must have been nearly forty years old, and yet she was fresh as the morning. And in her beauty, her voice, her manner, there was an odd quality of excitement which changed the very surface of everything about her. Her very presence seemed to make possible anything in the world.

She was saying, “What do you mean to do about it?”

“About what?”

She made a gesture to include the drawings. “All this.”

It seemed to him for the first time that he had never thought of what he meant to do about it. He had just worked, passionately, because he had to work. He hadn’t thought of the future at all.

“I don’t know ... I want to work until I can find what I know is here ... I mean in the Mills and in the Flats. And then ... some day ... I ... I want to go back to Africa.... I’ve been to Africa, you know. I was a missionary once.” He thought that from the summit of her worldliness she might laugh at him for being a missionary; but she didn’t laugh. She clasped her hands about her knee, and he saw suddenly that they were very beautiful hands, white and ringless, against the soft, golden sables. He wanted to seize a pencil and draw them.

She didn’t laugh at him. She only said, “Tell me about that ... about Africa ... I mean.”

And slowly he found himself telling the whole story, passionately, as he had never told it before, even to Mary Conyngham. He seemed to find in it things which he hadn’t seen before, strange lights and shadows. He told it from beginning to end, and when he had finished, she said, looking into the fire, without smiling, “Yes, I understand all that. I’ve never been religious or mystical, but I’ve always had my sister Irene. I’ve seen it with her. You see I’m what they call a bad lot. You’ve probably heard of me. I’m only thankful I’m alive and I try to enjoy myself in the only world I’m sure of.”

He went on, “You see, when I’ve learned more, I want to go back and paint that country. It had a fascination for me. I guess I’m like that Englishwoman ... Lady Millicent ... the one I told you about. She said there were some people who couldn’t resist it.”

When he finished, he saw that all his awe of her had vanished. He knew her better than any one in the world, for she had a miraculous way of understanding him, even those things which he did not say. The desire for the jungle and the hot lake swept over him in a turbulent wave. He wanted to go at once, without waiting. He was thirsty for a sight of the reedy marshes. The procession of black women moved somehow across the back of the room beyond Lily Shane. He was hot all at once, and thirsty for the water they carried up the slope to the parched ground.

She understood what he was trying to tell her ... she had caught a magnificence, a splendor, that was not to be put into words. He wasn’t afraid any more, or shy. It was as if she existed in an aura of contagious lawlessness.

She took out a cigarette from a lacquered box. “Do you mind if I smoke?”

“No.”

“I didn’t know....”

He watched her curiously. There lay in the soft curve of her body, in the long slim leg crossed over the other, in the curve of the fur thrown back across her shoulders, in the poise of her arm, all the perfection of some composition designed and executed by a great artist. It was a kind of perfection he had never dreamed of, something which had arisen mysteriously during years out of the curious charm of her own personality. It was, too, a completeness born of the fearlessness which he had sensed for a moment by the window. Suddenly he thought, “Some day I shall be of that world. I shall succeed and become great. And Mary, too, will share it.”

He had almost forgotten Mary, but it was only, he told himself shamefully, because she had been there with him all the while. It was almost as if she were a part of himself: whatever happened to him must happen also to her. It was not that he had fallen in love with this stranger, or even that he desired her: the emotion was something far beyond all that, a sort of dazzled bewilderment shot through with streaks of hope and glamour which brought near to him that world in which people were really alive.

Suddenly he summoned all his courage. He said, blushing under his dark skin, “I want to draw you. I want to make a picture of you.”

She moved a little and smiled.

“No,” he said, quickly. “Like that. Don’t move.”

He wanted to capture the grace and elegance of the pose, so that he might have it always, as a little fragment, caught and held, of this thing which he knew to exist, beyond his reach. She sat quietly. “Yes, of course ... only it’s almost dark now....”

He seized a pencil and a bit of paper, working swiftly, as he had done at the soup-kitchen. He must hurry (he thought) or she would be gone again back to Paris. She appeared presently to have forgotten him, and sat, with the remnant of the cigarette hanging from her long white fingers, while she stared into the fire. There was a curious sense of repose in the whole body, and a queer sadness too. She might have been quite alone. He had the feeling that she had forgotten his existence.

He worked nervously, with long, sure strokes, and with each one he knew that he was succeeding. In the end he would fix her thus forever on a fragment of paper. And then suddenly he heard some one enter the stable below, and, fumbling with the door, open it and hurry up the steps. He went on, pressed by the fear that if he were disturbed now the thing would never be finished. He had to have it. It would be a kind of fetish to keep off despair.

It was Lily Shane who moved first, stirred perhaps by a sense of being watched. As she moved, Philip turned too, and there, half-way up the stairs where she had halted at sight of them, stood Naomi, staring.

She was breathless, and beneath a carelessly pinned hat, from which wisps of hair escaped, her face showed red and shining as a midsummer day. For one dreadful moment the three remained silent, staring at each other. Lily Shane stared with a kind of bored indifference, but there was in Naomi’s eyes a hurt look of bewilderment. Suddenly she turned back, as if she meant to go away again without speaking to either of them. Philip knew the expression at once. She had looked thus on the day that Lady Millicent appeared out of the forest with the Arab marching before her. It was the look of one who was shut out from something she could not understand, which frightened her by its strangeness.

It was Lily Shane who moved first. The burnt cigarette dropped from her fingers; and she stamped on it. The action appeared to stir Naomi into life.

“Philip,” she said. “I came to tell you that your Pa has come home.”

14

It was Emma herself who saw him first. Returning flustered and upset from the call upon Mary Conyngham, she entered the slate-colored house closing the door stormily behind her. She would have passed the darkened parlor (where since Naomi’s departure the shades were always kept drawn to protect the carpet), but, as she explained it afterward, she “felt” that there was some one in the room. Peering into the darkness, she heard a faint sound of snoring, and, as her eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, she discerned the figure of a man lying on her best sofa, with his feet resting on the arm. He was sleeping with his mouth open a little way beneath a black mustache, waxed and curled with the care of a dandy.

As she stood there in the midst of the room, the figure in the shadows took form slowly, and suddenly she knew it ... the dapper, small body, dressed so dudishly, the yellow waistcoat with its enormous gold watch-chain, and cluster of seals. She knew, with a sudden pang, even the small, well-shaped hand, uncalloused by any toil, that lay peacefully at rest on the Brussels carpet. For a second she thought, “I’ve gone suddenly crazy from all the trouble I’ve had. What I’m seeing can’t be true.”

It took a great deal of courage for her to move toward the sofa, for it meant moving in an instant, not simply across the Brussels carpet, but across the desert of twenty-six years. It meant giving up Moses Slade and all that resplendent future which had been taking form in her mind only a moment before. It was like waking the dead from the shadows of the tomblike parlor.

She did not lack courage, Emma; or perhaps it was not courage, but the headlong thrust of an immense vitality which now possessed her. She went over to the sofa and said, “Jason! Jason Downes!” He did not stir, and suddenly the strange thought came to her that he might be dead. The wicked idea threw her into an immense confusion, for she did not know whether she preferred the unstable companionship of the fascinating Jason to the bright future that would be hers as the wife of Moses. Then, all at once, she saw that the gaudy watch-chain was moving up and down slowly as he breathed, and she was smitten abruptly by memories twenty-six years old of morning after morning when she had wakened, full of energy, to find Jason lying beside her sleeping in the same profound, conscienceless slumber.

“Jason!” she said again. “Jason Downes!” And this time there was a curious tenderness in her voice that was almost a sob.

He did not stir, and she touched his shoulder. He moved slowly, and then, opening his eyes, sat up and put his feet on the floor. He awakened lazily, and for a moment he simply sat staring at her, looking as neat and dapper as if he had just finished an elaborate toilet. Again memory smote Emma. He had always been like this: he had always wakened in the mornings, looking fresh and neat, with every hair in place. It was that hair-oil he persisted in using. Now that he’d come home, she would have to get antimacassars to protect the furniture against Jason’s oily head.

Suddenly he grinned and said, “Why! Hello! It’s you, Em.” It wasn’t a sheepish grin, but a smile of cocky assurance, such as was frozen forever upon the face of the enlarged portrait.

“Jason ... Jason! Oh, my God! Jason!” She collapsed suddenly and fell into the mahogany-veneer rocker. It was a strange Emma, less strange perhaps to Jason Downes than she would have been to the world outside, for suddenly she had become all soft and collapsed and feminine. All those twenty-six years had rolled away, leaving her helpless.

As if he had left the house only that morning, he sat on the arm of the chair and kissed her. He patted her hands and said, “You mustn’t cry like that, Em. I can’t bear to hear you. It breaks me all up.”

“If you knew how long I’d waited!” she sobbed. “Why didn’t you even write? Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?”

He seemed a little proud of himself. “I wanted it to be a surprise.”

He led her to the sofa and sat there, patting her hand and smiling, and comforting her while she wept and wept. “A surprise,” she echoed. “A surprise ... after twenty-six years....” After a time she grew more calm, and suddenly she began to laugh. She kept saying at little intervals, “If you knew how I’ve waited!”

“I’m rich now, Emma,” he said with the shadow of a swagger. “I’ve done well out there.”

“Out where ... Jason?”

“Out in Australia ... where I went.”

“You were in Australia?” He wasn’t in China at all, then. The story was so old that she had come to believe it, and with a sudden shock of horror she saw that they would now have to face the ancient lie. He hadn’t been in China, and he hadn’t been killed by bandits. Here he was back again, and you couldn’t keep a man like Jason shut up forever in the house. The Town would see him. She began once more to cry.

“There, there, Em!” he said, patting her hand again, almost amorously. “Don’t take it so hard. You’re glad I did come back, ain’t you?”

“I don’t know ... I don’t know. You don’t deserve anything ... even tears ... after treating a wife the way you’ve treated me. Don’t think I’m crying because I’m glad you’re back. It’s not that. I ought to turn you out. I’d do it, too, if I was an ordinary woman.”

She saw then that she still had to manage everything, including Jason. She saw that he was as useless as he had always been. She would have to “take hold.” The feminine softness melted away, and, sitting up, she blew her nose and said, “It’s like this, Jason. When you went away, I said you’d gone to China on business. And when you didn’t come back, I said I hadn’t had any letters from you and something must be wrong. You see I pretended I heard from you regularly because ... I wanted to protect you and because I was ashamed. I didn’t want people to think you’d deserted me after everybody had warned me against you. And so Elmer....”

“And how’s he?” said Jason. “Cold boiled mutton, I call ’im.”

“Wait till I finish my story, Jason. Try to keep your mind on what I’m saying. And so Elmer set the Government to investigating....”

“They were looking for me? The United States Government itself?” There was in his voice and manner a sudden note of gratification at his importance.

“Yes ... they hunted all over China.”

Jason was grinning now. “It’s lucky they was looking in China, because I was in Australia all the time.”

“And they said you must have been killed by bandits ... so I put on black and set out to support myself and Philip.”

“Why didn’t old pious Elmer help you out? I wouldn’t have gone away, except that I knew ’e was rich enough to look out for you.”

“Elmer’s tight, and besides I didn’t want him to be pitying me and saying, ‘I told you so’ every time I asked him for a cent.”

“And Philip? You haven’t told me about him yet.”

“We’ll come to him. We’ve got to settle this other thing first. You see, Jason, we’ve got to do something about that lie I told ... it wasn’t really a lie because I told it for your sake and Philip’s—to protect you both.”

“Yes, it is kind-a awkward.” He sat for a moment, trying to bring his volatile mind into profitable operation. At last he said, “You oughtn’t to have told that lie, Em.”

“I told you why I told it. God will understand me if no one else will.”

“Now, Em, don’t begin on that line.... It was always the line I couldn’t stand.... You ain’t no bleedin’ martyr.”

She looked at him with a sudden suspicion. “Jason, where did you pick up this queer talk ... all the queer words you’ve been using?”

“Australia, I guess ... living out among the cockneys out there.” He rose suddenly. “Em, I can’t sit any more in this dark. I can’t think in a tomb.” He went over and drew up the window-shades. As the fading winter light filled the room, he looked around him. “Why, it ain’t changed at all! Just the same ... wedding parlor suite and everything.” His glance fell on the wall above the fireplace. “And you still got my picture, Em. That was good of you.”

She showed signs of sobbing again. “It’s all I had....”

He was looking at the picture with a hypnotic fascination. “It’s funny, I ain’t changed much. You’d never think that picture was taken twenty-six years ago.” He took out a pocket mirror and began comparing his features with those in the enlarged photograph. What he said was true enough. Time had left no marks on the smooth, good-looking face, nor even on a mind that was like a shining, darting minnow. He was as slim and dapper as ever. The hair was much thinner, but it was still dark, and with the aid of grease and shrewd manipulation you couldn’t tell that he was really bald. Emma, watching him, had an awful suspicion that it was dyed as well; and the elegant mustaches too. She would be certain to discover, now that he had come back to share the same room and bed. She had a sudden, awful fear that she must look much older than he.

“I’m a little bald,” he said ruefully, “but nothing very much.”

“Jason,” she said sternly. “Jason ... we’ve got to settle this thing ... now ... before we do anything else. Did any one see you?”

“No, I don’t think so.” He replaced the pocket mirror with a mild, comic air of alarm at the old note of authority in her voice.

“You must think of something ... you’re better at such things than I am.” He had, she remembered, the proper kind of an imagination. She knew from experience how it had worked long ago when he had given her excuses for his behavior.

He looked at her with an absurd air of helplessness. “What can we say? I suppose you could say I lost my memory ... that I got hit on the head.” Suddenly a great light burst upon the empty face. “I did get a fall on the steamer going out. I fell down a stairway and for three days I didn’t know a thing. A fall like that might easily make you lose your memory.... A thing like that might happen.” As if the possibilities of such a tale had suddenly dawned upon him, his face became illumined with that look which must come at times into the faces of great creative artists. He said, “Yes, I might have lost my memory, not knowing who I was, or where I came from, and then, after twenty-six years, I got another fall ... how?... well out of the mow on my ranch in Australia, and when I came to, I remembered everything—that I had a wife in America. It’s true—it might happen. I’ve read of such things.”

Listening to him, Emma felt the story seemed too preposterous, and yet she knew that only heroic measures could save the situation. The bolder the tale, the better. It was, as he said, a story that might be true. Such things had happened. She could trust him, too, to make the tale a convincing one: the only danger lay in the possibility of his doing it too well. It occurred to her in the midst of her desperate planning that it was strange what wild, incredible things had happened in her life ... a life devoted always to hard work and Christian living.

Jason’s glittering mind had been working rapidly. He was saying, “You see, there’s the scar and everything.” He bent down, exposing the bald spot that was the only sign of his decay. “You see, there it is—the scar.”

She looked at him scornfully, for the crisis of her emotion had passed now, and she was beginning to feel herself once more. “Now, Jason,” she said, “I haven’t forgotten where that scar came from. You’ve always had it. You got it in Hennessey’s saloon.”

For a second the dash went out of him. “Now, Em, you’re not going to begin on that, the minute I get home.” And then quickly his imagination set to work again, and with an air of brightness, as if the solution he had thought of vindicated him completely, he said, “Besides I wasn’t bald in those days and nobody ever saw the scar. And the funny thing is that it was on that exact spot that I fell on the boat. It enlarged the scar.” He looked at her in the way he had always done when he meant to turn her mind into more amiable channels. “Now, isn’t that queer? It enlarged the scar.”

It was clear that she meant not to be diverted from the business at hand. “I suppose that’s as good a story as any. We’ve got to have a story of some kind. But you must stick to it, Jason, and don’t make it too good. That’s what you always do ... make it too good.” (Hadn’t she, years ago, trapped him time after time in a lie, because he could not resist a too elaborate pattern of embroidery?)

She said, “But there’s one thing I’ve got to do right away, and that is send word to Naomi to tell Philip.”

“Who’s Naomi?”

“She’s Philip’s wife.”

“He’s married?”

“He’s been married for five years.”

He made a clucking sound. “We’re getting on, Em.”

“And there’s more than that. You’re a grandfather.”

The smooth face wrinkled into a rueful expression. “It’s hard to think of myself as a grandfather. How old is the child, or the children?”

“They’re twins.”

He chuckled. “He did a good job, Philip.”

“Now, Jason....”

“All right, but how old are they?”

“Four months ... nearly five.”

“I must say that Philip took ’is time about it. Married five years.... Well, we didn’t waste any time, did we, Em.”

“Jason!”

She hated him when he was vulgar. She decided not to go into the reasons why Philip and Naomi had been married four years without children, because it was a thing which Jason wouldn’t understand—sacrificing the chance of children to devote yourself to God. There was nothing spiritual about Jason. It was one of his countless faults.

“But who did ’e marry, Em? You haven’t told me.”

“Her name was Naomi Potts. You wouldn’t know who she was. Her people were missionaries, and she was a missionary too.”

“Oh, my God!”

“I won’t have you blaspheming.”

“And what’s Philip like?”

“He was a missionary too.... He was three years in Africa ... until his health broke.”

“Oh, my God!” He grew suddenly thoughtful, moved perhaps by the suspicion that she had succeeded in doing to his son what she had failed to do to him.

She was at the door now. “I won’t listen to you talking like that any longer.” She turned in the doorway. “Don’t go out till I come back. You mustn’t be seen till we’ve worked this thing out. I’ve got to send word to them all.”

When she had gone, he picked up his hat, took a cigar from his vest pocket and lighted it. In the hallway, he shouted at her, “Are we still using the same room, Em? I’ll just move in my things and wash up a bit.”

In the sitting-room Emma sat down and wrote three notes—one to Naomi, one to Mabelle, and the third to Moses Slade. With a trembling hand she wrote to him, “God has sent Jason, my husband, back to me. He came to-day. It is His will that we are not to marry. Your heartbroken Emma.”

She summoned the slattern Essie, and, giving her instructions of a violence calculated to impress Essie’s feeble mind, she bade her deliver the three notes, Mr. Slade’s first of all. But once outside the sight of Emma, the hired girl had her own ideas of the order in which she meant to deliver them, and so the note to Moses Slade arrived last. But it made no difference, as the Honorable Mr. Slade, bearing a copy of the Labor Journal, was at the same moment on his way to Emma’s to break off the engagement, for he had discovered the author of the libelous drawings. The latest one was signed boldly with the name, “Philip Downes.” He never arrived at Emma’s house, for on his way he heard in Smollett’s Cigar Store that Jason Downes had returned, and so he saved himself the trouble of an unpleasant interview. For Essie, in the moment after the returned prodigal had made known to her his identity, had put on a cast-off hat of Emma’s and set out at once to spread the exciting news through the Town.

When she returned at last from delivering the three notes, Emma was “getting Jason settled” in the bedroom he had left twenty-six years before. Essie, tempted, fell, and, listening outside the door, heard him recounting to his wife a wonderful story of having lost his memory for a quarter of a century. But one thing tormented the brain of the slattern Essie. She could not understand how Emma seemed to know the whole story and to put in a word now and then correcting him.

At the sound of Emma’s footsteps approaching the door, Essie turned and, fleeing, hid in the hall closet, from which she risked her whole future by opening the door a little way to have a look at the fascinating Mr. Downes. Her heart thumped wildly under her cotton blouse at the proximity of so romantic a figure.

15

It seemed that something in the spirit of the irrepressible Jason Downes took possession of the house, for Emma turned almost gay, and at times betrayed signs of an ancient coquetry (almost buried beneath so many hardening years) in an actual tendency to bridle. For the first time since Jason had slipped quietly out of the back door, the sallow dining-room was enlivened by the odors, the sounds, the air of banqueting: a dinner was held that very night to celebrate the prodigal’s return. Elmer came, goaded by an overpowering curiosity, and Mabelle, separated for once from Jimmy, her round, blue eyes dilated with excitement and colored by that faintly bawdy look which so disturbed Emma. And Philip was there, of course, and Naomi, paler than usual, dressed in a badly fitting new foulard dress, which she and Mabelle had “run up at home” in the hope of pleasing Philip. The dress had been saved for an “occasion.” They had worked over it for ten days in profound secrecy, keeping it to dazzle Philip. It was thick about the waist, and did not hang properly in the back, and it made her look all lumpy in the wrong places. In case Philip did not notice it, Mabelle was to say to him, “You haven’t spoken about Naomi’s pretty new dress. She made it all herself—with her own hands.” They had carefully rehearsed the little plot born of Mabelle’s romantic brain.

But when Naomi arrived at the slate-colored house, she took Mabelle quickly into a corner and said, “Don’t speak of the dress to him.” And when Mabelle asked, “Why not?” she only answered, “You can do it later, but not to-night. I can’t explain why just now.”

She couldn’t explain to Mabelle that she was ashamed of the dress, nor why she was ashamed of it. She couldn’t say that as she stood on the stairs of the stable and saw a handsome woman, in a plain black dress, with her knees crossed, and furs thrown back over her fine shoulders, that the pride of the poor little foulard dress had turned to ashes. She couldn’t explain how she had become suddenly sick at the understanding that she must seem dowdy and ridiculous, standing there, all red and hot and disheveled, staring at them, and wanting all the time to turn and run, anywhere, on and on, without stopping. She couldn’t explain how the sight of the other woman had made the foulard dress seem poor and frowzy, even when she put on the coral beads left her by her mother, and pinned on the little gold fleur-de-lys watch her father had given her.

When she first arrived, she kept on her coat, pretending that the house was cold, but Emma said, “It’s nonsense, Naomi. The house is warm enough,” and the irrepressible Mabelle echoed, “That’s what I say, Emma. She ought to take it off and show her pretty new dress.”

Naomi had looked quickly about her, but Philip hadn’t been listening. He was standing with Uncle Elmer beside his father, who was in high spirits, talking and talking. He wouldn’t notice the dress if only she could keep people from speaking of it.

She hadn’t spoken of Lily Shane to Philip. All the way back to the flat by the railroad they had talked of nothing but his father and the poor bits of information she had been able to wring from the excited Essie; and when they arrived it was to find Mabelle waiting breathlessly to discuss it with them. She had been already to the slate-colored house and seen him with her own eyes. She didn’t stay long (she said) because she felt as if she were intruding on honeymooners. Did they know that he had lost his memory by a fall on the boat going out to China, and that it had only come back to him when he had a fall six months ago out of the mow on his ranch in Australia? Yes, it was Australia he had been to all this time....

She went on and on. “Think of it,” she said. “The excitement of welcoming home a husband you hadn’t seen in twenty-six years ... like a return from the dead. I don’t wonder your Ma is beside herself.”

Naomi heard it all, dimly, as if all Mabelle’s chatter came to her from a great distance. She should have been excited, but she couldn’t be, with something that was like a dull pain in her body. She could only keep seeing Lily Shane, who made her feel tiny and miserable and ridiculous—Lily Shane, whom Philip said he didn’t even know, and had never spoken to. Yet he knew her well enough to be making a picture of her. He never thought of making a picture of his own wife.

She felt sick, for it was the first time she had ever seen herself. She seemed to see at a great distance a pale, thin, freckled woman, with sandy hair, dressed in funny clothes.

And then she would hear Mabelle saying through a fog, “Your Ma wants you to come right up to supper. You can get Mrs. Stimson—the druggist’s wife—to sit with the twins.”

Mabelle hurried off presently, and Mrs. Stimson came in duly to sit with the twins. She gave up the evening at her euchre club because the excitement of sitting up with the grandchildren of a man who had returned after being thought dead for twenty-six years was not to be overlooked. She would hear all the story at first hand when Philip and Naomi returned, before any one else in the Town had heard it. She could say, “I sat with the twins so that Philip and Naomi could go to supper with Mr. Downes himself. I heard the whole thing from them.”

As they went up the hill to the slate-colored house, Naomi said nothing, and so they walked in silence. She had begun to understand a little Philip’s queer moods, and she knew now that he was nervous and irritable. She had watched him so closely of late that she had become aware of a queer sense of strain which once she had passed over unnoticed. She had learned not to speak when Philip was like that. And as they climbed the hill, the silence, the strain, seemed to become unbearable. It was Philip who broke it by crying out suddenly, “I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking I lied to you about Lily Shane. Well, I didn’t. Before God, I never spoke to her until to-day, and I wouldn’t have, even then, but she came to my room without my asking her.”

For a moment, she wanted to lie down in the snow and, burying her face in it, cry and cry. She managed to say, “I wasn’t even thinking of her. Honestly I wasn’t, Philip. And I believe you.”

“If that’s so, why do you sulk and not say anything?”

“I wasn’t sulking. I only thought you didn’t want to talk just now.”

“I hate it when you act like a martyr.” This time she was silent, and he added, “I suppose all women do it ... or most women ... it’s what Ma does when she wants to get her way. I hate it.”

She thought, “He said ‘most women’ because he meant all women but Lily Shane.” But she was silent. They did not speak again until they reached the slate-colored house.

It wasn’t really Naomi who lay at the bottom of his irritation, but the thought of his father. The return troubled him. Why should he have come now after twenty-six years? It was, he thought, almost indecent and unfair, in a way, to his mother. He tried, when he was not talking to Naomi, to imagine what he must be like—a man who Emma said had gone out to China to make money for his wife and child, a man who adored her and worshipped his son. He was troubled, because the moral image created by his mother seemed not to fit the enlarged, physical portrait in the parlor. In these last years he had come to learn a lot about the world and about people, and one of the things he had learned was that people are like their faces. His mother was like her large, rather coarse and energetic face; Naomi was like her pale, weak one; and Lily Shane and Mary and Uncle Elmer and even Krylenko and McTavish were like theirs. It was impossible to escape your own face. His father, he thought, couldn’t escape that face that hung in the parlor.

When the door opened and he stepped into the parlor, he saw that his father hadn’t escaped his face. He felt, with a sudden sensation of sickness, that his father was even worse than his face. It was the same, only a little older, and the outlines had grown somehow dim and vague from weakness and self-indulgence. Why, he thought again, did he ever come back?

But his mother was happy again. Any one could see that.

And then his father turned and looked at him. For a moment he stared, astonished by something in the face of his son, something which he himself could not perhaps define, but something which, with all the sharp instincts of a sensual nature he recognized as strange, which had little to do with either himself or Emma. And then, perhaps because the astonishment had upset him, the meeting fell flat. The exuberance flowed out of Jason Downes. It was almost as if he were afraid of his son—this son who, unlike either himself or Emma, was capable of tragedy and suffering. His eyes turned aside from the burning eyes of his son.

“Well, Philip,” he said, with a wild effort at hilarity, “here’s your Pa ... back again.”

Philip shook hands with him, and then a silence fell between them.

But it was Jason Downes who dominated the family gathering. Philip, silent, watched his father’s spirits mounting. It seemed to him that Jason had set himself deliberately to triumph over his dour, forbidding brother-in-law, and to impress his own son. It was as if he felt that his son had a poor opinion of him, and meant to prove that he was wrong in his judgment.

He told the whole story of the voyage out, of his fall down a companionway, and the strange darkness that followed. Once more he bowed his head and exhibited the scar.

“But,” said the skeptical Elmer sourly, “you always had that scar, Jason. You got it falling on the ice at the front gate.”

“Oh, no. The one before was only a small one. The funny thing was that I struck my head in exactly the same place. Wasn’t that queer? And then when I fell out of the mow I hit it a third time. That’s what the doctors in Sydney said made it so serious.” For a moment, conscious that the embroidering had begun, Emma looked troubled and uneasy.

And Mabelle, with a look of profound speculation, asked, “And what if you hit it a fourth time? Would that make you lose your memory about Australia?”

Jason coughed and looked at her sharply, and then said, “Well, no one could say about that. If it happened again, it would probably kill me.”

“Well,” said Mabelle, “I must say I never heard a more interesting story ... I never read as interesting a one in any of the magazines ... not even in the Ladies’ Home Journal.”

For a moment Philip wanted to laugh at Mabelle’s question, but it wasn’t a natural desire to laugh: it sprang from a blend of anger and hysterics. He loathed the whole party, with Mabelle and her half-witted questions, his mother with all her character gone in the silly blind admiration for her husband, Uncle Elmer and his nasty, mean questions, and Naomi, silent, and looking as if she were going to cry. (If only she wouldn’t sulk and play the martyr!) And Mabelle’s half-witted questions were worse than Uncle Elmer’s cynical remarks, for they made him see suddenly that his father was lying. He was creating a whole story that wasn’t true, and he was enjoying himself immensely. If it was a lie, if he had deliberately deserted his wife and child, why had he come back now?

Jason went on and on, talking, talking, talking. He told of his ranch of eighteen hundred acres and of the thousands of sheep he owned and of the sixty herders employed to take care of them. He described the long drouths that sometimes afflicted them, and told a great deal about Melbourne and Sydney.

“Your Pa,” he said, addressing Philip, “is an important man out there.” And the implication was, “You don’t think much of him, but you ought to see him in Australia.”

But Philip was silent, and thought, “He’s probably lying about that, too,” and, as the conversation went on, he thought, “He’s never said anything about women out there. He’s never spoken about that side of his life, and he’s not the kind to leave women alone.”

“And I suppose you’ll be wanting to take Emma back to Australia,” said Uncle Elmer, regarding Jason over his steel-rimmed spectacles.

“No ... I won’t be doing that. After all, her life is here, ain’t it? I shall have to go back from time to time to look after my affairs, but....”

“Don’t speak of that now,” Emma interrupted, “when you’ve only just arrived.”

“But we have to face these things,” said Jason.

Suddenly Emma turned away from the table to the doorway where Essie, in terror of interrupting the party, yet fascinated still by the spell of Jason’s narrative, stood waiting. She was standing, as she always stood, on the sides of her shoes.

“What is it, Essie? What are you standing there for?”

“There’s a man come to see Mr. Downes.”

“What does he want?”

“He’s from the newspaper.”

“Tell him to come back to-morrow.”

But Jason had overheard. He rose with the napkin still tucked into the fawn-colored vest. “No, Essie.... Tell him I’ll speak to him now.”

“But, Jason....”

“Yes, Em.... I might as well get it over.”

There was no holding him now; but Emma succeeded in thrusting forward a word of advice.

“Remember, Jason, what the newspapers are like. Don’t tell them too much.”

A shadow crossed her face, and Philip thought suddenly, “Ma knows he’s lying too, and she’s afraid he’ll overdo it.” And then a more fantastic thought occurred to him—that she knew for a good reason that he was lying, that perhaps she had planned the lie to cover up an earlier one.

“I must say it’s all very remarkable ... how Jason’s affairs have turned out,” said Elmer. “I never would have thought it.”

“You never believed in him,” said Emma, with an air of triumph, “and now you see.”

To Philip the whole room, the table, the people about it, the figure of the slattern Essie standing in the doorway, all their petty boasting and piety and lying, became suddenly vulgar and loathsome. And then, almost at once, he became ashamed of himself for being ashamed, for they were his people. He had no others. It was a subtle, sickening sort of torture.

16

Emma was herself forced to go in at last and send away the newspaper man, for Jason would have kept him there the rest of the night, telling a story which became more and more embroidered with each rash recounting. And when, at last, the reporter had gone, the others came in and sat about while Jason continued his talk. But the evening died slowly, perhaps because of Elmer’s suspicions, or Naomi’s curious depression, or Philip’s own disgust and low spirits. Jason found himself talking presently against a curious, foreboding silence, of which he took no notice. Only Emma and Mabelle were still listening.

It was Elmer who at last broke up the party, pushing the rotund and breathless Mabelle before him. In the door Mabelle turned, and, shaking her head a little coquettishly, said, “Well, good-night, Jason. Good-night, Emma. I feel like I was saying ‘good-night’ to a honeymoon couple.” And the bawdy look came into her eyes. “There’ll never be any second honeymoon for Elmer and me. We’ve got our family now and that’s all done.”

Still tittering, she was dragged off by her husband. When she had gone, Jason said, “Mabelle is a cute one, ain’t she, and a funny one too, to be married to a mausoleum like Elmer.”

“Now, Jason, it’s all patched up between you and Elmer. There’s no use beginning all over again.”

Naomi and Philip had put on their wraps, and were standing by the door, when Jason suddenly slapped his son on the back. “We’ve got to get better acquainted, son. You’ll like your Pa when you know him better. Nobody can resist him.” He winked at Emma, who turned crimson. “Ain’t it so, Em. Least of all, the ladies.” And then to Philip again, “I’ll come and see you in the morning.”

Philip turned quickly. “No, I’ll come and fetch you myself. You wouldn’t find the way.”

“I want to see the twins the first thing.”

“I’ll come for you.”

He had resolved that his father was not to come to the stable. He saw that Emma hadn’t even told his father that he wasn’t living with his wife. The stable had suddenly become to him a kind of temple, a place dedicated to that part of him which had escaped. There were things there which his father wouldn’t understand, and could only defile. The stable belonged to him alone. It was apart from all the others—his father, his mother, Naomi, Uncle Elmer and Aunt Mabelle.

Emma was standing before Naomi, holding her coat open, so that she might examine the dress underneath. She was saying, “You must come up some afternoon, Naomi, and I’ll help you make the dress right. It hangs all wrong at the back, and it’s all bunchy around the armholes. You could make it all right, but, as it is, it’s ... it’s sort of funny-looking.”

All the way back to the Flats neither of them spoke at all: Philip, because there was a black anger and rebellion burning in him, and Naomi, because if she had tried to speak, she would have wept. She felt as though she were dead, as if in a world made up of Philip and his father and Emma she no longer had any existence. She was only a burden who annoyed them all. And the dress ... it was only sort of “funny-looking.”

He left Naomi at the door of the flat with an abrupt “good-night.” It was after midnight, and the moon was rising behind the hill crowned by Shane’s Castle, throwing a blue light on the mist that hung above the Flats. In the far distance the mist was all rosy with the light from four new furnaces that had begun once more to work. The strike was slipping slowly into defeat, and he understood that it meant nothing to him any longer. He had almost forgotten Krylenko.

As he passed through the rusted gates of the park, there drifted toward him from among the trunks of the dead trees, a faint, pungent odor that was hauntingly familiar and, as he climbed the drive between the dead trees, it grew stronger and stronger, until at last he recognized, in a sudden flash of memory which brought back all the hot panorama of the lake and the forest at Megambo, that it was the smell of gunpowder, the smell that clung to his rifle when he had stood there by the barricade beside Lady Millicent killing those poor niggers. It was a faint, ghostly smell that sometimes died away altogether and sometimes came in strong waves on a warm breeze filled with the dampness of the melting snow.

At the top of the hill, the big house lay dead and blind, without a sign of life, and, as he turned the corner, he saw that near the stable lay the remnants of a fire which had burnt to a heap of embers. His foot touched something that was wet and slippery. He looked down to discover a great stain of black on the snow. For a moment he stared at the stain, fascinated, and suddenly he knew what it was. It was a great stain of blood.

In the distance, among the trees, he discerned a light, and after a moment he discovered a little group of men ... three or four ... carrying a lantern, which they held high from time to time, as if searching for something. And then, all at once, as he moved forward again, he almost stepped upon a woman who lay in the snow at the entrance to the rotting arbor covered with the vines of the dying wistaria. She lay face down with one arm above her head in a posture that filled him for a moment with a sense of having lived through this same experience before, of having seen this same woman lying face down ... dead ... for she was unmistakably dead. He knelt beside her, and, turning the body on its side, he remembered suddenly. She lay like the black virgin they had found dead across the path in the tall grass at Megambo ... the one they had left to the leopards.

Trembling, he peered at the white face in the moonlight. The woman was young, and across one side of the face there was a little trickle of blood that came from a hole in the temple. She was dressed in rags, and her feet were wrapped in rolls of sacking. She was the wife or daughter of some striker. It occurred to him suddenly that there was something pitifully lonely in the sight of the body left there, forgotten, by the embers in the dead park; it had the strangest effect upon him. He rose and tried to call to the little group of searchers, but no sound came from his throat, and he began suddenly to cry. Leaning against one of the pillars of the arbor, he waited until his body had ceased to tremble. It was a strange, confused feeling, as if the whole spectacle of humanity were suddenly revealed in all its pathos, its meanness, its grandeur, and its cruelty. It was a brilliant flash of understanding, but it passed almost at once, leaving him weak and sick. And then, after a moment, he found his voice again, and shouted. The little party halted, and looked about, and he shouted a second time. Then they came toward him, and he saw that two of them carried shotguns and that one of them was McTavish.

The woman was dead. They picked her up and laid her carefully on one of the blackened marble benches of the garden, and McTavish told him what had happened. In the Town they had forbidden the strikers to hold meetings, hoping thus to break the strike, but the Shanes, Irene and Lily (for the old woman was dead), had sent word to Krylenko that they might meet in the dead park. And so the remnant of those who had held out in the face of cold and starvation had come here to listen to Krylenko harangue them from a barrel by the light of a great fire before the stables. There had been shouting and disorder, and then some one inside the Mill barrier—one of the hooligans (they hadn’t yet discovered who did it) turned a machinegun on the mob around the fire. It had only lasted an instant—the sharp, vicious, staccato sound, but it had taken its toll.

“It’s a dirty business,” concluded McTavish in disgust. He wasn’t jolly to-night. All the old, cynical good-humor had gone out of him, as if he, too, had seen what Philip saw in that sudden flash as he leaned against the decaying arbor.

They took a shutter from the windows of the stable and, placing the body of the girl upon it, set off down the hill between the dead walls of the pine-trees. For a long time Philip stood in the soiled, trampled snow, looking after them, until a turn in the drive hid the lantern from view behind the pine-trees.

17

The room above the stable was in darkness, but as he came up out of the staircase he saw that there was a woman sitting by the window, silhouetted against the moonlight beyond. He thought, “It must be Lily Shane, but why is she here at this hour of the night?” And then a low, familiar voice came out of the darkness, “It’s only me, Philip ... Mary.” She spoke as if he must have known she was there, waiting for him.

He struck a match quickly and lighted the kerosene lamp, at which she rose and came over to him. By the flickering, yellow light he saw that she had been crying.

“It’s been horrible, Philip. I saw it all from the window while I was waiting for you.”

“I know ... we just found a dead woman in the snow.”

He was possessed by a curious feeling of numbness, in which Mary seemed to share, as if the horror of what had taken place outside wiped out all the strangeness of their meeting thus. Death, it seemed, had brushed by them so closely that it had swept away all but those things which lay at the foundation of existence—the fact that they loved each other, that they were together now, and that nothing else was of any importance. They were, too, like people stunned by horror. They sat by the stove, Philip in silence, while Mary told him what she had seen. For a long time it did not even appear strange to him that she should be there in his room at two o’clock in the morning.

He heard her saying, “Who was the woman they killed?”

“I don’t know. She looked Italian.”

There was a long silence and at last it was Mary, the practical Mary, who spoke. “You must wonder why I came here, Philip ... after ... after not seeing you at all for all this time.”

He looked at her slowly, as if half-asleep. “I don’t know. I hadn’t even thought of it, Mary ... anything seems possible to-night, anything seems possible in this queer park.” And then, stirring himself, he reached across the table and touched her hand. She did not draw it away, and the touch gave him the strangest sense of a fathomless intimacy which went back and back into their childhood, into the days when they had played together in the tree-house. She had belonged to him always, only he had been stupid never to have understood it. He could have spoken out once long ago. If only he, the real Philip, had been born a little sooner, they would both have been saved.

And then, suddenly, he knew why she had come, and he was frightened.

He said, “You heard about my father?”

She started a little, and said, “No.”

“He came back to-night. It was awful, Mary. If he’d only stayed away! If he’d never have come back....”

So he told her the whole story, even to his suspicion that his father was a liar, and had deserted him and his mother twenty-six years before. He told her of the long agony of the reunion, describing his father in detail. And at the end, he said, “You see why I wish he’d never come back. You do see, don’t you, Mary ... if he’d stayed away, I’d never have thought of him at all, or at least only as my mother thought of him. But he isn’t like that at all. I don’t see how she can take him back ... how she can bear to have him about.”

She wanted to cry out, “Don’t you see, Philip? Don’t you see the kind of woman she is? If you don’t see, nothing can save you. She’s worse than he is, because he’s harmless.” But she only said quietly, “Perhaps she’s in love with him. If that’s true, it explains anything.”

“Maybe it’s that. She must be in love with him.”

Mary thought, “Oh, Philip! If you’d only forget all the things that don’t matter and just live, you’d be so much happier!” She wanted him to be happy more than anything in the world. She would, she knew, do anything at all to make him happy.

Presently she said, “She came to see me this afternoon, Philip ... your mother. That’s why I’m here now. She said horrible things ... that weren’t true at all. She said ... she said ... that I’d been living with you all along, and she’d just found out about it. She said that I came here to meet you in the stable. She’s hated me always ... just because I’ve always been fond of you. She said I’d tried to steal you from her.”

For a moment he simply sat very still, staring at her. She felt his hand grow cold and relax its grasp. At last he whispered, “She said that? She said such things to you?”

“Yes ... I ran away from her in the end. It was the only thing I could do.”

Then all at once he fell on his knees and laid his head in her lap. She heard him saying, “There’s nothing I can say, Mary. I didn’t think she’d do a thing like that ... and now I know, I know what kind of a woman she is. Oh, I’m so tired, Mary ... you don’t know how tired I am!”

She began to stroke his dark hair, and the sudden thought came to her with horror that in her desire for vengeance upon Emma Downes, it was not Emma she had hurt, but Philip.

He said, “You don’t know what it is, Mary,—for months now ... for years even, I’ve been finding out bit by bit ... to have something gone that you’ve always believed in, to have some one you loved destroyed bit by bit, in spite of anything you can do. I tried and tried, but it was no good. And now ... I can’t hold out any more. I can’t do it ... I hate her ... but I can never let her know it. I can never hurt her ... because she really loves me, and it’s true what she says ... that she did everything for me. She fed and clothed me herself with her own hands.”

Again Mary wanted to cry out, “She doesn’t love you. She doesn’t love any one but herself!” and again she kept silent.

“And now it’s true ... what she said ... you’ve stolen me away from her, Mary. She’s made it so. I’m through now ... I can’t go on trying any more.”

Still stroking his head, she thought, “He’s like a little boy. He’s never grown up at all.” And she said, “I was so angry, Philip, that I came here. I didn’t care what happened; I only thought, ‘If she thinks that’s the truth, it might as well be, because she’ll tell about it as the truth.’ I didn’t care any longer for anything but myself and you.”

His head stirred, and he looked up at her, seizing her hands. “Is that true, Mary?” He kissed her hand suddenly.

“It’s true ... or why else should I be here, at this hour?” He was hopeless, she thought: he didn’t live for a moment in reality.

He hadn’t even thought it queer of her to be sitting there in his room long after midnight with his head on her knees. And suddenly she thought again, “If I’m his mistress, I can save him from her altogether. Nothing else can break it off forever.”

He was kissing her hands, and the kisses seemed to burn her. He was saying, “Mary, I’ve loved you always, always ... since the first time I saw you, but I only knew it when it was too late.”

“It isn’t too late, Philip. It isn’t too late.”

He was silent for a time, but she knew what he was thinking. He wasn’t strong enough to take life into his own hands and bend it to his own will, or perhaps it wasn’t a lack of strength, but only a colossal confusion that kept him caught and lost in an immense and hopeless tangle. Until to-night she hadn’t herself been strong enough to act, but now a kind of intoxicating recklessness had seized her—the sober, sensible Mary Conyngham. She meant to-night to take him and comfort him, to make them both, for a little time, happy. To-morrow didn’t matter. It would have been better if there were no to-morrow, if they could never wake at all.

It was Philip who spoke first. After a long silence, he said in a whisper, “I can’t do it, Mary ... I can’t. It isn’t only myself that matters. It’s you and Naomi too. It isn’t her fault any more than mine.”

For a moment she wished wickedly that he had been a little more like John Conyngham, and then almost at once she saw that it was his decency, the very agony of his struggle, that made her love him so profoundly. And she was afraid that he would think her wicked and brazen and fleshly. It was a thing she couldn’t explain to him.

There were no words rich enough, strong enough, to make him understand what it was that had brought her here. She had thought it all out, sitting for hours there by the window, in the light of the rising moon. She had felt life rushing past her. She was growing old with the passing of each second. She had seen a man killed, and afterwards Philip had himself come upon the body of a dead woman lying in the snow. Nothing mattered, save that they come together. What happened to her was of no consequence. Some terrible force, stronger than either of them, had meant them for each other since the beginning, and to resist it, to fight against it unnaturally as Philip was doing, seemed to her all at once a black and wicked sin.

He freed himself suddenly and stood up. “I can’t do it, Mary. I’ll go away.... You can spend the night here and leave in the morning. No one in the Town will know you haven’t spent the night at Shane’s Castle.”

“Where will you go?”

“I’ll go to the tents. I’ll be all right.”

She suddenly put her hand over her eyes, and, in a low voice, asked, “And ... what’s to come after, Philip?”

“I don’t know ... I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“We can’t go on ... I can’t....”

“No ... I’d rather be dead.”

Suddenly, with a sob, she fell forward on the table, burying her face in her hands. “You belong to your mother still, Philip ... you can’t shake off the hard, wicked things she’s taught you. Oh, God! If she’d only died ... we’d have been married to each other!”

She began to cry softly, and, at the sound, he stopped the mechanical business of buttoning his coat, and then, almost as if he were speaking to himself, he said, “Damn them all! We’ve a right to our happiness. They can’t take it from us. They can’t....”

He raised her face from the table and kissed it again and again with a kind of wild, rude passion that astonished her, until she lost herself completely in its power. Suddenly he ceased, and, looking at her, said, “It doesn’t matter if to-morrow never comes. I love you, Mary ... I love you. That’s all that matters.”

They were happy then, for in love and in death all things are wiped out. There, in the midst of the dead and frozen park, she set him free for a little time.

18

The morning came quickly in a cold gray haze, for the furnaces, starting to work one by one as the strike collapsed, had begun again to cover the Flats with a canopy of smoke. It was Mary who went first, going by the back drive, which led past the railway-station. And with her departure the whole world turned dark. While she had been there with him, he was happy with the sense of security that is born of companionship in adventure, but as her figure faded presently into the smoke and mist that veiled the deserted houses of the Flats, the enchantment of the night gave way to a cold, painful sense of actuality. The whole night had been, as some nights are in the course of lives that move passionately, unreal and charged with strange, intangible currents of fire and ice. During that brief hour or two when he had slept, years seemed to have passed. The figure of his father had become so remote that he no longer seemed cheap and revolting, but only shallow and pitiful. Even the memory of McTavish and the two men with the lantern standing over the dead woman in the snow was dim now and unreal.

It was only the sight of the trampled, dirty snow, the black spot where the fire had been and the pool of blood at the turn of the drive that made him know how near had been all these things which had happened during the night. And the park was no longer beautiful and haunted in the moonlight, but only a dreary expanse of land filled with dead trees and decaying arbors. The old doubts began slowly to torment him once more—the feeling of terror lest Naomi should ever discover what had happened, and the knowledge that he had betrayed her. There was, too, an odd new fear that he might become such a man as his father. It was born in that cold, gray light, of a sudden knowledge that deep inside him lay sleeping all the weaknesses, all the sensuality, of such a man. After what had happened in the night, he saw suddenly that he might come like his father to live in a shallow world that shut out all else. He was afraid suddenly, and ashamed, for he had been guilty of a sin which his father must have committed a hundred times.

Yet he had, too, an odd new sense of peace, a soothing, physical, animal sort of peace, that seemed to have had its beginnings months ago, in the moments of delirium when he had wanted to live only because he could not die without knowing such an experience as had come to him in the night. It was, he supposed, Nature herself who had demanded this of him. And now she had rewarded him with this sense of completeness. Nature, he thought, had meant his children to be Mary’s children, too; and now that couldn’t be ... unless ... unless Naomi died.

It was a wicked thought that kept stealing back upon him. It lay in hiding at the back of his mind, even in the last precious moments before Mary had left, when she stood beside the stove making the coffee. He had thought again and again, “If only Naomi died ... we could be like this forever.” Watching her, he had thought, despite all his will to the contrary, of what love had been with Naomi and what with Mary. And he had told himself that it wasn’t fair to think such things, because he had never loved Naomi: at such moments he had almost hated her. Yet she had loved him, and was ashamed of her love, so that she made all their life together a sordid misery. And Mary, who had been without shame, had surrounded her love with a proud and reckless glory. Yet, in the end, it was Mary who hid, who stole away through the black houses of the Flats as if she had done a shameful thing, and it was Naomi who bore his children. For a moment he almost hated the two helpless little creatures he had come so lately to love, because a part of them was also a part of Naomi.

As he stood by the window, all wretched and tormented, he saw coming across the trampled snow the battered figure of Hennery. He was coming from the house, and his bent old figure seemed more feeble and ancient than it had ever been before. He entered the stable, and Philip heard him coming painfully up the stairs. At the sight of Philip, he started suddenly, and said, “You scared me, Mr. Downes ... my nerves is all gone. I ain’t the same since last night.” He took off his hat and began fumbling in his pockets. “I got a letter for you ... that strike feller left it for you ... that ... I doan’ know his name, but the feller that made all the trouble.”

He brought forth a piece of pale mauve paper that must have belonged to Lily Shane, but was soiled now from contact with Hennery’s pocket.

“He was in the house all night,” said Hennery, “a-hiding there, I guess, from the police, and he’s gone now.”

Then he was silent while Philip opened the note and read in the powerful, sprawling hand of Krylenko:

“I’ve had to clear out. If they caught me now, they’d frame something and send me up. And I’m not through fighting yet. The strike’s bust, and there’s no good in staying. But I’m coming back. I’ll write you from where I go.

“Krylenko.”

He read it again and then he heard Hennery saying, “It was a turrible night, Mr. Downes ... I guess it was one of those nights when all kinds of slimy things are out walkin’. They’re up and gone too ... both of them ... the girls, Miss Lily and Miss Irene. And they ain’t comin’ back, so Miss Lily says. She went away, before it was light, on the New York flier. Oh, it was a turrible night, Mr. Downes ... I’ve seen things happenin’ here for forty years, but nothin’ like last night ... nothin’ ever.”

He began to moan and call on the Lord, and Philip remembered suddenly that the half-finished drawing of Lily Shane had disappeared. She had carried it off then, without a word. And slowly she again began to take possession of his imagination. For a moment he tried to picture her house in Paris where his drawing of her would be hung. She had gone away without giving him another thought.

Hennery was saying over and over again, “It was a turrible night ... something must-a happened in the house too. The Devil sure was on the rampage.”

He stood there, staring out of the window, suffering from a curious, sick feeling of having been deserted. “By what? By whom?” he asked himself. “Not by Lily Shane, surely, on whom I had no claims ... whom I barely knew.” Yet it was Lily Shane who had deserted him. It was as if she had closed a door behind her, shutting him back into the world of Elmer and his mother and Jason Downes. The thing he had glimpsed for a moment was only an illusion....

19

When Hennery had gone off muttering to himself, Philip put on his coat and went out, for the room had become suddenly unendurable to him. He did not know why, but all at once he hated it, this room where he had been happy for the first time since he was a child. It turned suddenly cold and desolate and hauntingly empty. Running down the stairs, he hurried across the soiled snow, avoiding the dark stain by the decaying arbor. He went by that same instinct which always drove him when he was unhappy towards the furnaces and the engines, and at Hennessey’s corner he turned toward the district where the tents stood. They presented an odd, bedraggled appearance now, still housing the remnant of workers who had fought to the end, all that little army which had met the night before in the park of Shane’s Castle. Here and there a deserted tent had collapsed in the dirty snow. Piles of rubbish and filth cluttered the muddy field on every side. Men, women and children stood in little groups, frightened and helpless and bedraggled, all the spirit gone out of them. There was no more work for them now. Wherever they went, no mill would take them in. They had no homes, no money, no food....

Lost among them, he came presently to feel less lonely, for it was here that he belonged—in this army of outcasts—a sort of pariah in the world that should have been his own.

At the door of one of the tents, he recognized Sokoleff. The Ukranian had let his beard grow and he held a child of two in his arms—a child with great hollow eyes and blue lips. Sokoleff, who was always drunk and laughing, was sober now, with a look of misery in his eyes. Philip shook his free hand in silence, and then said, “You heard about Krylenko?”

“No, I ain’t heard nothin’. I’ve been waitin’ for him. I gotta tell him a piece of bad news.”

“He’s gone away.”

“Where’s he gone?”

Philip told him, and, after a silence, Sokoleff said, “I suppose he had to beat it. I suppose he had to ... but what are we gonna do ... the ones that’s left. He’s the only one with a brain. The rest of us ain’t good for nothin’. We ain’t even got money to get drunk on.”

“He won’t forget you.”

“Oh, it’s all right for him. He ain’t got nobody ... no children or a wife. He ain’t even got a girl ... now.”

For a moment the single word “now,” added carelessly after a pause, meant nothing to Philip, and then suddenly a terrible suspicion took possession of him. He looked at Sokoleff. “What d’you mean ... now?”

“Ain’t you heard it?”

“What?”

“It was his girl, Giulia ... that was killed last night.”

Philip felt sick. In a low voice he asked, “And he didn’t know it?”

“I was to tell him, but nobody’s seen him. I’m damned glad he’s went away now. I won’t have the goddamned dirty job. He’ll be crazy ... crazy as hell.”

And then Philip saw her again as he had seen her the night before, lying face down in the snow ... Krylenko’s Giulia.

“She oughtn’t to have went up there,” Sokoleff was saying. “But she was nuts on him ... she thought that he was the best guy on earth, and she wanted to hear his speech....” The bearded Slovak spat into the snow. “I guess that was the last thing she ever heard. She musta died happy.... That’s better than livin’ like this.”

And Krylenko had been hiding in Shane’s Castle all night while Giulia lay dead in the snow outside.

The sick baby began to cry, and Sokoleff stroked its bare head with a calloused paw covered by black hair.

All at once Philip was happy again; even in the midst of all the misery about him, he was gloriously, selfishly happy, because he knew that, whatever happened, he had known what Krylenko had lost now forever. He thought suddenly, “The jungle at Megambo was less cruel and savage than this world about me.”

20

To Jason Downes the tragedy in the park of Shane’s Castle had only one significance—that it tarnished all the glory of his astonishing return. When the papers appeared in the morning, the first pages were filled with the news of “the riot precipitated by strikers last night.” It recounted the death of a Pole and of Giulia Rizzo, and announced triumphantly that the strike was broken at last. And far back, among the advertisements of Peruna and Lydia Pinkham’s Compound, there appeared a brief paragraph or two announcing the return of Jason Downes, and touching upon the remarkable story of his accident and consequent loss of memory. There were, doubtless, people who never saw it at all.

But he made the most of his return, walking the round of all the cigar-stores and poker-rooms which he had haunted in his youth. He even went to Hennessey’s saloon, beginning to thrive again on the money of the strike-breakers. But he found no great triumph, for he discovered only one or two men who had ever known him and to the others he was only Emma Downes’ husband, whom they barely noticed in the excitement of discussing the riots of the night before. Even his dudishness had dated during those long twenty-six years: he must have heard the titters that went up from poolroom loafers at the sight of the faun-colored vest, the waxed mustaches and the tan derby. He was pushed aside at bars and thrust into the corner in the poolrooms.

Half in desperation, he went at last to find an audience in the group of old men who sat all day about the stove of McTavish’s undertaking-parlors. They were old: they would remember who he was. But even there the clamor of the tragedy drowned his tale. He found the place filled with Italians—the father and the seven orphaned brothers and sisters of Giulia Rizzo. The father wept and wrung his hands. The older children joined him, and the four youngest huddled dumbly in a corner. It was Jason’s own son, Philip, who was trying to quiet them. He nodded to his father, gave him a sudden glance of contempt, and then disappeared with McTavish into the back room where the undertaker had prepared Giulia for her last rest. For a moment Jason hung about hopefully, and then, confused and depressed by the ungoverned emotions of the Italians, he slipped out of the door, and up the street toward the Peerless Restaurant. He was like a bedraggled bantam rooster which had lost its proud tail-feathers, but as he approached the restaurant he grew a bit more jaunty: there was always Em who thought him wonderful....

Behind the partition of the undertaking-rooms, Philip and McTavish stood looking down at Giulia. The blood had been washed away and her face was white like marble against the dark coil of her hair. She was clothed in a dress of black silk.

“It was her best dress,” said McTavish. “The old man brought it up here this morning.”

Philip asked, “Are they going to bury her in the Potters Field? Old Rizzo hasn’t got a cent, with all these children to feed.”

“No, I’ve arranged that. I fixed it up with the priest. She had to be buried in consecrated ground ... and ... and I bought enough for her. I ain’t got any family, so I might as well spend my money on something.”

21

Philip saw his father at the restaurant, but there was little conversation between them, and Emma kept talking about the riot of the night before, observing that, “now that the police had tried something besides coddling a lot of dirty foreigners, the strike was over in a hurry.”

At this remark, Philip rose quietly and went out without another word to either of them. At home he found the druggist’s wife sitting with the twins. Naomi, she said, was out. She had gone to see Mabelle. Mrs. Stimson wanted more details of his father’s return, and also news of what had happened at Shane’s Castle. After answering a dozen questions, he went away quickly.

At four o’clock his father came and saw the twins, diddling them both on his feet until they cried and Mrs. Stimson said, with the air of a snapping-turtle, “I’m going to leave them with you. Naomi ought to have been home two hours ago, and I’ve got a household of my own to look after.” (Even for her poor Jason appeared to have lost his fascination.)

At seven when Philip came in to sit with the twins while Naomi went to choir practice, he found little Naomi crying and his father asleep in the Morris-chair by the gas stove. Jason had removed his collar and wrapped himself in a blanket. With him, sleeping was simply a way of filling in time between the high spots in existence: he slept when he was bored, and he slept when he was forced to wait.

Holding the baby against him, and patting its back softly, Philip approached his father and touched him with the toe of his shoe. “Pa!” he said. “Pa! Wake up!”

Jason awakened with all the catlike reluctance of a sensual nature, stretching himself and yawning and closing his eyes. He would have fallen asleep a second time but for the insistence of Philip’s toe, the desperate crying of the child, and Philip’s voice saying, “Wake up! Wake up!” There was something in the very prodding of the toe which indicated a contempt or at least a lack of respect. Jason noticed it and scowled.

“I just fell asleep for a minute,” he said. “It couldn’t have been long.” But all the cocksureness had turned into an air of groveling apology.

“Where’s Naomi?”

“She went off to Mabelle’s.” He took a pair of cigars from the yellow waistcoat and asked, “Have a cigar?”

“No. Not now.” Philip continued to pat the baby’s fat back. Suddenly he felt desperate, suffocated and helpless. The cry of the child hurt him.

He said, “She’s been at Mabelle’s all day.”

“I do believe she said she’d be back after choir practice.” He lighted the cigar and regarded the end of it thoughtfully. Philip began to walk up and down, and presently his father said, without looking at him, “You ain’t living with Naomi, are you? I mean here in this house? You ain’t sleeping with her?”

“No ... I’m not.”

“I thought so. Your Ma was trying to make me believe you was.” He cocked his head on one side. “But I smelled a rat ... I smelled a rat. I knew something was wrong.”

Philip continued his promenade in silence.

“How’d you ever come to hook up with Naomi?”

“Because I wanted to ... I suppose.”

Jason considered the answer thoughtfully. “No, I don’t believe you did. I ain’t very bright, but I know some things. No man in his right mind would hook up to anything as pious as Naomi....” He saw that Philip’s head tossed back and his jaw hardened, as if he were going to speak. “Now, don’t get mad at your Pa ... your poor old Pa ... I know you don’t think much of ’im, but he’s kind-a proud of you, just the same. And he don’t blame you for not living with Naomi. Why, the thought of it makes me kind-a seasick.”

Again a silence filled by little Naomi’s heartbroken crying.

“Why, she ought to be home now looking after her children instead of gadding about with preachers and such. Your Ma was always pious, too, but she was a good housekeeper. She never allowed religion to interfere with her bein’ practical.”

Philip, distracted, unhappy, conscience-stricken, and a little frightened at Naomi’s queer avoidance of him, was aware, too, that his father was saying one by one things he’d thought himself a hundred times. It occurred to him that Jason wasn’t perhaps as empty and cheap as he seemed. It was almost as if an affection were being born out of Jason’s hopeless efforts toward an understanding. If only little Naomi would stop squalling....

His father was saying, “No, I’m proud of you, my boy. D’you know why?”

“No.”

“Because of the way you stand up to your Ma. It takes a strong man to do that, unless you learn the trick. I’ve learned the trick. I just let her slide off now like water off a duck’s back. I just say, ‘Yes, yes,’ to her and then do as I damned please. Oh, I learned a lot since I last saw her ... a hell of a lot. There’s a lotta women like her ... especially American women—that don’t know their place.”

The baby stopped screaming, sobbed for a moment, and then began again.

“It wasn’t her piousness that drove me away. I could have managed that. It was her way of meddlin’.”

Philip stopped short and turned, looking at his father. “Then you were running away from us when you fell and hit your head?”

“I wasn’t runnin’ away from you.”

Philip stood in front of the chair. “And you didn’t lose your memory at all, did you?”

Jason looked up at him with an expression of astonishment. “No ... of course not. D’you mean to say she never told you the truth ... even you ... my own son?”

“No ... I guess she was trying to protect you ... and made me believe my father wasn’t the kind to run away.” (The cries of the baby had begun to beat upon his brain like the steel hammers of the Mill.)

“Protect me, hell! It was to protect herself. She didn’t want the Town to think that any man would desert her. Oh, I know your Ma, my boy. And it would have took a hero or a nincompoop to have stuck with her in those days.” He knocked the ash from his cigar, and shook his head sadly. “But I oughtn’t to have run away on your account. If I’d ’a’ stuck it out, you wouldn’t have got mixed up in the missionary business or with Naomi either. You wouldn’t be walkin’ up and down with that squallin’ brat—at any rate, it wouldn’t be Naomi’s brat. I guess the missionary business was her way of gettin’ even with me through you.” He shook his head again. “Your Ma’s a queer woman. She’s got as much energy as a steam engine, but she never knows where she’s goin’, and she always thinks she’s the only one with any sense. And my, ain’t she hard ... and unforgivin’ ... hard as a cocoanut!”

“She forgave you and took you back.”

“But she’s been aching to do that for years. That’s the kind of thing she likes.” His chest swelled under the yellow vest. “Besides, I always had a kind of an idea that she preferred me to any other man she’s ever seen. Your Ma’s a passionate woman, Philip. She’s kind of ashamed of it, but deep down she’s a passionate woman. If she’d had me about all these years she wouldn’t have been so obnoxious, I guess.”

The baby had ceased crying now, and, thrusting its soft head against the curve of Philip’s throat, was lying very still. The touch of the downy little ball against his skin filled him with pity and a sudden, warm happiness. The poor little thing was trusting him, reaching out in its helpless way. He didn’t even mind the things that his father was saying of his mother. He scarcely heard them....

“I thought,” said Jason, “that we’d cooked up that story about my memory for the Town and for old pie-faced Elmer. I thought she’d tell you the truth, but I guess she don’t care much for the truth if it ain’t pleasant.”

Philip continued to pat little Naomi, more and more gently, as she began to fall asleep. In a low voice he asked, “You’re going to stay now that you’ve come back, aren’t you?”

“No, I gotta go back to Australia.”

Philip looked at his father sharply. “You aren’t going back to stay, are you?”

“I gotta look after my property, haven’t I?”

“Why did you ever come back at all?”

Jason considered the question. “I suppose it was curiosity ... I wanted to see my own son, and well ... I wanted to see what had happened to your Ma after all these years, and then it is sort of fun to be a returned prodigal. Nothing has happened to your Ma. She’s just the same. She accused me of bein’ drunk this morning when I’d only had a glass. She carried on something awful.”

“Have you told her you’re going back to stay?”

“No ... I’ve just told her I’m going back.” He looked at Philip suddenly. “I suppose you think I’m lyin’ about all that property in Australia. Well, I ain’t. I’ll send you pictures of it when I get back ... I ought to have brought them. I can’t guess why I didn’t.”

He rose and put on his coat. “I’d better be movin’ on now, or she’ll be sayin’ I’ve been hangin’ around bars. Have you eaten yet?”

“Yes ... at the railroad lunch counter.”

“That’s a hell of a life for a married man.”

He stood for a moment looking at little Naomi, who lay asleep on Philip’s shoulder. Then, shyly, he put out his finger and touched the downy head gently. “They’re fine babies,” he said. “I wouldn’t have thought a poor creature like Naomi could have had ’em.”

Philip laid the child gently beside her brother and stood looking down at them.

“Philip,” his father began. Philip turned, and, as if the burning gaze of his son’s eyes extinguished his desire to speak, Jason looked away quickly, and said, “Well, good-night.” He turned shyly, and Philip, aware that he was trying to pierce through the wall that separated them, felt suddenly sorry for him, and said, “Yes, Pa. What was it you meant to say?”

Jason coughed and then with an effort said, “Don’t be too unhappy ... and if there’s somebody else ... I mean another girl ... why, don’t torture yourself too much about it. Your Ma has made you like that.... But she’s got queer ideas. We ain’t alive very long, you know, and there ain’t any reason why we should make our brief spell miserable.”

Philip didn’t answer him. He was looking down again at the children, silent, with the old, queer, pinched look about the eyes, as if he were ill again. He saw suddenly that his father wasn’t such a fool, after all, and he was human. He was standing there with his hat in his two hands, looking childish and subdued and very shy.

Philip heard him saying, with another nervous cough, “Well, good-night, Philip.”

“Good-night.”

The door closed and Philip sank down wearily into a chair, resting his head on the edge of the crib. Presently he fell asleep thus.

22

On that night the singing at choir practice reached a peak of frenzy. While Philip sat sleeping beside the crib, Naomi was pounding her heart out on the stained celluloid keys of the tinny piano in the Infants’ Classroom. She played wildly, with a kind of shameless abandon, as if she wanted to pour out her whole story of justification; and the others, taking fire from her spirit, sang as they had never sung before.

During the afternoon, the old Naomi—the stubborn, sure Naomi of Megambo—had come to life again in some mysterious fashion. She even put on the new foulard dress in a gesture of defiance to show them—Philip and his mother—that, however “funny-looking” it might be, she was proud of it. And then neither of them had seen her wearing it, Philip because she was avoiding him, and Emma because chance had not brought them together. She had gone up to Mabelle’s bent upon telling her that she had come to the end of her endurance. She had meant to ask Mabelle’s advice, because Mabelle was very shrewd about such matters.

And then when she found herself seated opposite Mabelle she discovered that she couldn’t bring herself to say what she meant to say. She couldn’t humble her pride sufficiently to tell even Mabelle how Philip treated her. She had finally gone home and then returned a second time, but it was no use. She couldn’t speak of it: she was too proud. And she knew, too, that whatever happened she must protect Philip. It wasn’t, she told herself, as if he were himself, as he had been at Megambo. He was sick. He really wasn’t responsible. She cried when she thought how she loved him now; if he would only notice her, she would let him trample her body in the dust. Mabelle’s near-sighted blue eyes noted nothing. She went on rocking and rocking, talking incessantly of clothes and food and a soothing syrup that would make little Naomi sleep better at night.

During the day she had formed a dozen wild projects. She would go back to Megambo. She would return to her father, who was seventy now, and would welcome her help. She would run off to a cousin who lived in Tennessee. She would join another cousin who was an Evangelist in Texas: she could play the piano and lead the singing for him. In any of these places she would find again the glory she had known as Naomi Potts, “youngest missionary of God”; she wouldn’t any longer be a nobody, unwanted, always pushed aside and treated as of no consequence.

But always there were the twins to be considered. How could she run off and forget them? And if she did run away, Emma and perhaps even Philip would use it as a chance to rid themselves of her forever. She fancied that she saw now how Emma had used her, willing all the while to cast her off when she was no longer of any service. She told herself again and again, as if she could not bring herself to believe it, that she loved the twins—that she loved them despite her aching back and the hours she was kept awake by their crying. But she remembered that she had never been tired at Megambo: no amount of work had tired her. She hadn’t wanted the twins: she’d only gone to Philip because Mabelle and Emma told her that she must and because Mabelle said that men liked children, and that going to Philip would give her a hold over him. And now ... see what had come of it! Philip scarcely noticed her. Before she lived with him, it hadn’t mattered to her, but now—now she always carried a weight about inside her. Her heart leaped if he took the least notice of her.

No, she saw it all clearly. She must run away. She couldn’t go on, chained down like a slave. But if she ran away, she’d lose Philip for ever, and if she stayed, he might come back to her. The children belonged to both of them. They were a bond you could never break, the proof that once, for a little time, he belonged to her. She saw that he, too, was chained after a fashion. He belonged to her in a way he belonged to no other woman. In the sight of the Lord any other woman would always be a strumpet and a whore.

At last, as it was growing dark, she found herself sitting on a bench in the park before the new monument to General Sherman. It was raining and her coat was soaked and her shoes wet through. The rain ran in little trickles from her worn black hat. It was as if she had wakened suddenly from a dream. She wasn’t certain how she came to be sitting on the wet bench with the heavy rain melting the snow all about her. She thought, “I must have been crazy for a time. I can’t go on like this. I’ve got to talk to some one. I’ve got to ... I’ve got to!” She began to cry, and then she thought, “I’ll speak to the Reverend Castor to-night after choir practice. He’ll help me and he’s a good man. He’ll never tell any one. He’s always been so kind. It was silly of me to think things about him. I was silly to be afraid of him. I’ll talk to him. I’ve got to talk to some one. He’ll understand.”

When the practice was finished, the Reverend Castor came out of the study to bid the members good-night. In the dim light of the hallway, as Naomi passed him, he looked at her and smiled. She saw that his hands were trembling in a way that had come over him lately, and the smile warmed her, but at the same time weakened her. There was a comfort and a kindliness in it that made her want to cry.

Once inside the study, she found that the drawer of the cabinet was jammed again, as it had been on that first night. While she tugged at it, she heard him outside the door saying good-night one by one to the choir. Putting down the music, she began again to struggle with the drawer, and then suddenly, as if the effort was the last she could make, she collapsed on the floor and began to weep.

She heard the door open and she heard the Reverend Castor’s deep, warm voice saying, “Why, Naomi, what’s the matter?”

She answered him, without looking up. “It’s the drawer,” she said. “It’s stuck again ... and I’m ... I’m so tired.”

He went over to the cabinet and this time he was forced to struggle with it.

“It’s really too heavy for you, my dear girl ... I’ll fix it myself in the morning.” He replaced the music and when he attempted to close the drawer again it stuck fast. “Now it won’t close at all. But I can fix it. I’m handy about such things.”

His hands were trembling, and he looked white and tired. He talked with the air of a man desperately hiding pits of silence. When he turned, Naomi still sat on the floor, her body bent forward. Her worn, rain-soaked hat had fallen forward a little, and she was sobbing. He sat down in the great stuffed leather chair. It was very low, so that he was almost on a level with her.

“My poor child,” he asked, “what is it? Is it something I can help?”

“I don’t know. I wanted to talk to some one. I can’t go on. I can’t ... I can’t.”

He laid his big hand on her shoulder with a gentleness that seemed scarcely real, and, at the touch, she looked up at him, dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief that had been soaked with tears hours earlier. As she looked at him, some old instinct, born of long experience with unhappy women, took possession of him. He said, “Why, you’ve got a new dress on, Naomi. It’s very pretty. Did you make it yourself?”

For a second a look almost of happiness came into her face. “Why, yes,” she said. “Mabelle helped me ... but I made most of it myself.”

His other hand touched her shoulder. “Here,” he said, “lean back against my knee and tell me everything that’s making you unhappy....” When she hesitated, he said, “Try to think of me as your father, my child. I’m old enough to be your father ... and I don’t want to see you unhappy.”

She leaned against his knee with a sudden feeling of weak collapse. It was the first time any one had been kind to her for so long, and, strangely enough, she wasn’t afraid of him any longer. The old uneasiness seemed to have died away.

“Tell me, my child.”

The damp handkerchief lay crushed into a tiny ball in her red, chapped hand. For a long time she didn’t speak, and he waited patiently until she found words. At last she said, “I don’t know how to begin. I don’t know myself what’s happened to me ... I don’t know. Sometimes I think I must be black with sin or going crazy ... sometimes I can’t think any more, and I don’t know what I’m doing.... It was like that to-day ... all day.... I’ve been going about like a crazy woman.”

And then, slowly, she began, in a confused, incoherent fashion, to tell him the whole story of her misery from the very beginning at Megambo when the Englishwoman had suddenly appeared out of the forest. It all seemed to begin then, she said, and it had gone on and on ever since, growing worse and worse. She hadn’t any friends—at least none save Mabelle; and the others didn’t want her to see Mabelle. Besides, Mabelle didn’t seem to help: whatever she advised only made matters worse.

The Reverend Castor interrupted her. “But I’m your friend, Naomi.... I’ve always been your friend. You could have come to me long ago.”

“But you’re a preacher,” she said. “And that’s not the same thing.”

“But I’m a man, too, Naomi ... a human being.”

And then she even told him about Emma while he interrupted her from time to time by saying, “Can it be?” and, “It hardly seems possible—a woman like Emma Downes, who has always been one of the pillars, the foundation-stones, of our church! How much goes on of which we poor blind creatures know nothing.”

And Naomi said, “I know. No one will ever believe me. They’ll all believe that I’m nothing and that she’s a good, brave woman. I can’t fight her, Reverend Castor. I can’t ... and sometimes I think she tries to poison him against me.”

The trembling hand came to rest once more on her shoulder. There was a long silence, and presently he said, in a low voice, “I know, my child ... I know. I’ve suffered, too ... for fifteen years.”

She had begun to sob again. “And now there are other women ... more than one, I’m sure. I pray to God for his soul. I pray and pray to God to return him to me ... my Philip, who was a good man and believed in God. He’s changed now. I don’t know him any more. To-night I don’t think I love him. I’ve come to the end of everything.”

He began to pat her shoulder, gently, as if he were comforting a child, and for a long time, they stayed thus in silence. At last he said, “I’ve suffered, too, Naomi ... for years and years.... It began almost as soon as I was married, and it’s never stopped for an hour, for a moment since. It gets worse and worse with each year.” Suddenly he covered his face with his hands and groaned. “I pray to God for strength to go on living. I have need of God’s help to go on at all. I, too, need some one to talk to.” His hands dropped from his face, and he placed one arm about her thin, narrow shoulders. She did not draw away. Still sobbing, she let her whole weight rest against him. She was so tired, and she felt so ill. A strange, gusty and terrifying happiness took possession of the tired, nerve-racked man. Just to touch a woman thus, to have a woman kind to him, to have a woman who would trust him, was a pleasure almost too keen to be borne. For fifteen acid years he had hungered for a moment, a single moment, like this. He did not speak, conscious, it seemed, that to breathe might suddenly shatter this fragile, pathetic sense of peace.

Naomi had closed her eyes, as if she had fallen asleep from her long exhaustion; but she wasn’t sleeping, for presently her pale lips moved a little, and she said in a whisper, “There’s nothing for me to do but run away or kill myself ... and then I’ll be out of the way.”

He did not tell her at once, without hesitation, that she was contemplating a great sin. He merely kept silent, and, after a time, he murmured, “My poor, poor child ... my tired child,” and then fell once more into silence. They must have remained thus for nearly an hour. Naomi even appeared to fall asleep, and then, starting suddenly, she cried out. His arm ached, but he did not move. He was, it seemed, past such a small discomfort as an aching arm. And he was struggling, struggling passionately, with a terrible temptation, conscious all the while that each minute added to the bitterness of the reproaches that awaited him on opening the parsonage door. It was long after eleven o’clock, and he should have returned ages ago. He thought, “I can’t go home now. I can never go home again. I can never open that door again. I would rather die here now. One more time might drive me mad ... I mightn’t know what I was doing ... I might....”

The free hand again closed over his eyes, as if to shut out the horrible thing that had occurred to him. Naomi had opened her eyes and was looking up at him. For a second he thought, “Has she seen what was in them?”

Her lips moved again. “I don’t care what happens to me any longer.”

Suddenly, without knowing what he was doing, he bent down and took her in his arms, “Naomi ... Naomi ... do you mean that? Answer me, do you mean that?”

She closed her eyes wearily. “I don’t care what happens to me.”

He held her more tightly, the odd, gusty pleasure sweeping over him in terrifying waves. “Naomi ... will you ... will you go away ... now ... at once, and with me?”

“You can do with me what you want, if you’ll only be kind to me.”

“We’ve a right to be happy. We’ve suffered enough.” She did not answer him, and he said, “God will understand. He’s merciful. We’ve had our hell here on earth, Naomi ... Naomi ... listen to me! Will you go now ... at once?” A curious, half-mad excitement colored his voice. “I’ve got money. I’ve been putting it aside for a long time, because I’ve thought for a long time I might want to go away.... I’ve been saving it, a dime and a quarter here and there where I could squeeze it. I’ve got more than two hundred dollars. I thought that sometime I’d have to run away. But I meant to go away alone ... I never knew ... I never knew.” He began abruptly to cry, the tears pouring down the lined, tired face. “We’ll go somewhere far away ... to South America, or the South Sea Islands, where nobody will know us. And we’ll be free there, and happy. We’ve a right to a little happiness. Oh, Naomi, we’ll be happy.”

She appeared not to have heard him. She lay in a kind of stupor, until, raising her body gently, he stood up and lifted her easily into the big leather chair, where she lay watching him, her eyes half-closed, her mouth set in a straight, hard line, touched with bitterness.

The Reverend Castor moved quickly, with a strange vigor and decision. The trembling had gone suddenly from his hands. His whole body grew taut and less weary, as if he had become suddenly young. He had the air of a man possessed, as if every fiber, every muscle, every cell, were crying out, “It’s not too late! It’s not too late! There is still time to live!” He approached the desk, and, unlocking the drawer, began taking out money—a thin roll of bills, and then an endless number of coins that tinkled and clattered as they slid into his pockets. There must have been pounds of metal in dimes and nickels and quarters. He filled his vest pocket with cheap cigars from a box on the desk, and then, turning, went over to Naomi, and, raising her from the chair, smoothed her hair and put her hat straight, with his own hands. Then he kissed her chastely on the brow, and she, leaning against him, murmured, “Take me wherever you like. I’m so tired.”

For a moment they stood thus, and presently he began to repeat in his low, rich, moving voice, The Song of Songs.

“For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone. The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land....”

The words had upon her a strange effect of exaltation, the same that had come over her when she sat by the piano, carried away by her emotions. She wasn’t Naomi any longer. Naomi seemed to have died. She was a gaudy Queen, and Solomon in all his glory was her lover. She seemed enveloped by light out of which the rich, vibrant voice was saying, “Until the day break, and the shadows flee away, turn, my beloved, and be thou like a roe or a young hart upon the mountains of Bether.”

A little while after, as the clock on the firehouse struck midnight, the door of the study closed, and two figures hurried away into the pouring rain. They were a tired, middle-aged preacher and a bedraggled woman, in a queer, homemade dress of figured foulard, and a soaked coat and hat; but there was a light in their eyes which seemed to illumine the darkness and turn aside the rain.

23

Philip wakened slowly, conscious of being stiff and sore from having slept in a cramped position, and thinking, “It must be late. Naomi will be home soon.” And then, looking up at the clock, he saw that it was after one. He rose and went over to it, listening for the tick to make certain that it was working properly. He looked at his own watch. It, too, showed five minutes past one. He listened for a moment to the sound of the rain beating upon the tin roof and then he went into the other two rooms. They were empty, and, suddenly, he was frightened.

Giving a final look at the twins, he seized his hat, and, hurrying down the steps, roused the long-suffering Mrs. Stimson and told her that Naomi hadn’t yet come home. He begged her to leave her door open, so that she might hear the twins if they began to scream, and without waiting to hear her complaints he rushed out into the rain.

It fell in ropes, melting the snow and running off down the hill in torrents. To-morrow, he knew dimly, there would be a flood in the Flats. The water would rise and fill the stinking cellars of the houses. Those few families who lived in tents must already be soaked with the cold downpour. The streets were deserted, and the shops and houses black and dark. Once he caught the distant glint of light on the wet black slicker of a policeman. Save for this, he seemed to be alone in a town of the dead.

From a long way off he saw the light in the church study, and the sight of it warmed him with quick certainty that Naomi must still be there. Some urgent thing, he told himself, had arisen at choir practice. He ran down the street and through the churchyard, and at the door of the study he knocked violently. No one answered. The place was empty. He opened the door. A drawer of the cabinet stood half-open with a pile of music thrust into it carelessly. A drawer of the desk was open and empty. The gas still flickered in the corner. Passing through the study, he went into the church itself. It was dark, save for a dim flare that made the outlines of the windows silhouettes of gray set in black. The empty church frightened him. He shouted, “Naomi! Naomi!” and, waiting, heard only an echo that grew fainter and fainter ... “Naomi!... Naomi!... Naomi!...” until it died away into cold stillness. Again he shouted, and again the mocking, receding echo answered him.... “Naomi!... Naomi!... Naomi!...” His own voice, trembling with terror, came back to him out of the darkness: “Naomi!... Naomi!... Naomi!”

He thought, “She’s not here, but she might be at the parsonage. In any case, Reverend Castor will know something.” And then, “But why did he go away leaving the gas lighted and the study unlocked?” He turned back and, running, went through the dark church and the lighted study out into the rain.

There was a light still burning in the parsonage, and as he turned into the path he saw that a figure, framed against the light, stood in the upper window. At first he thought, “It’s Reverend Castor,” and then almost at once, “No ... it’s his wife. She’s waiting for him to come home.”

He knocked loudly at the door with a kind of desperate haste, for a terrible suspicion had begun to take form. Whatever had happened to Naomi, every moment was precious: it might save her from some terrible act that would wreck all her life and the Reverend Castor’s as well. He knocked again, and then tried the door. It was locked, and he heard an acid voice calling out, “I’m coming. I’m coming. For Heaven’s sake, don’t break down the door!”

The key turned, and he found himself facing a figure in a gray flannel dressing-gown, dimly outlined by the slight flicker of gas. He could barely distinguish the features—thin, white and pinched ... the features of a woman, the Reverend Castor’s wife.

“Who are you ... coming at this hour of the night to bang on people’s doors?” It was a thin, grating voice. As his eyes grew accustomed to the light, he saw a face of incredible repulsion. It was a mean face, like that of a malicious witch.

“I’m Philip Downes. I’m trying to find my wife. She didn’t come home from choir practice.”

A look of evil satisfaction suddenly shadowed the woman’s face. “She wasn’t the only one that didn’t come back. Like as not they’re still there, carrying on in the church. I guess it wouldn’t be the first time.”

He didn’t care what she was saying, though the sound of her voice and the look in her cold blue eyes made him want to strangle her.

“They aren’t there. I’ve just come from the church.”

He fancied that he heard her chuckle wickedly, but he couldn’t be certain. He heard her saying, “Then he’s done it. I always knew it would happen.”

He seized her by the shoulders. “Done what? What do you mean?”

“Let go of me, young man! Why, he’s run off with your wife, you fool! I always knew he’d do it some day. Oh, I knew him ... Samuel Castor ... I haven’t been married to him for fifteen years for nothing!”

He wanted to shake her again, to make her talk. “If you knew, why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because it might have been any woman. It wasn’t just your wife. I wasn’t sure who it would be.” She began to laugh again, a high, cackling laugh. “I told him he’d do it. I told him so every night. I knew it was going to happen.” She seemed to find delight in her horrible triumph.

“Where have they gone?”

“How do I know where they’ve gone? He’s gone to hell for sure now, where he can’t torment me any more. He’s left me—a poor invalid ... without a cent or any one to look after me. God knows what’ll become of me now. But he’s done it. I always told him he would. He’s a fine man of God! He’s left a poor invalid wife ... penniless and sick.”

There was a kind of wild delight in her voice and manner, as if she had been trying all these years to destroy him and had at last succeeded. She seemed to receive this last calamity as the final crown of her martyrdom. She was happy. To Philip it seemed suddenly that by wishing it, by thinking of nothing else for fifteen years, she had made the thing happen—just as it was Emma who had made happen the thing she wanted to believe—that Mary had stolen him from her.

He waited no longer. He ran past the malicious figure in the greasy dressing-gown, out again into the rain. He heard her saying, “He didn’t even think of my hot-water bottle ... the scoundrel ...” and then the horrible voice was drowned by the sound of the downpour.

Without quite knowing how he got there, he found himself, soaked and shivering, inside the baggage-room at the railway station. Everything else was closed, but in the shadows among the gaudy, battered trunks of some theatrical company, the baggageman dozed quietly. He was shaken into consciousness to find a madman standing before him, white and trembling, and dripping with water.

“Tell me,” Philip asked, “did any one leave the Town on the one o’clock?”

The man looked at him sleepily, and growled something about being wakened so roughly.

“Tell me. I’ve got to know!”

He scratched his head. “Why, yes. I do mind somebody gettin’ on the one o’clock. Come to think of it, it was what’s-his-name, the preacher.”

“Reverend Castor?”

“Yes ... that’s the one ... the big fellow.”

“Was he alone?”

“I dunno.... He was alone for all I know. I didn’t see no one else.”

Philip left him, and, outside, stood for a moment in the shelter of the platform shed, peering into the distance where the gleaming wet rails disappeared into the dimness of fog and jewel-like signal lights. And all at once he hated the Flats, the Mills, the whole Town, and then he laughed savagely: even his beloved locomotives had betrayed him by carrying Naomi off into the darkness.

There was nothing to do now. What was done was done. He was glad he hadn’t gone to the police to find her. If they didn’t know, it would keep the thing out of the papers for a little time, and the two of them might come back. There was only that crazy old woman in the parsonage who need be feared; it was impossible to imagine what she might do. He hadn’t really thought of her until now, and, as he walked through the rain, up the hill again, to his mother’s house, her horrid image kept returning to him as she stood in her greasy dressing-gown screaming at him in triumph, “I knew it would happen some day. I always told him he’d do it!”

He thought, “I never knew it was as bad as that. No one knew.” It seemed to him that God would forgive a man any sin who must have suffered as the Reverend Castor.

He was no longer conscious of the downpour, for he was already as wet as if he had jumped into the brook, and as he walked, all the deadly sickness of reaction began to sweep over him. He was tired suddenly, so tired that he could have lain down in the streaming gutter in peace; the whole thing seemed suddenly to lose all its quality of the extraordinary. In his weariness it seemed quite a usual experience that a man should be searching the Town for a wife who had run away with the preacher. It was as if the thing hadn’t happened to himself, but as if he saw it from a great distance, or had heard it told him as a story. To-morrow (he thought), or the next day, they would be telling it everywhere in the Town, in every cigar-store and poolroom, about the stove at McTavish’s undertaking parlors. They would hear of it even in Hennessey’s saloon. All at once a sudden flash of memory returned to him—of Hennessey standing above him, saying, “Run along home to your Ma like a good little boy. Tell her not to let her little tin Jesus come back to Hennessey’s place, if she don’t want him messed up too much to be a good missionary ... I don’t want to be mixed up with that hell-cat.”

In that queer mood of slackness, he was certain now of only one thing—that he could stay no longer in the same Town where Naomi and the Reverend Castor had lived, where Giulia Rizzo had been killed, where that pathetic uprising of workmen asking justice had been beaten down. He couldn’t stay any longer in the same place with his own father. He wanted to go away, to the other side of the earth. Any place, even the savage, naked jungle at Megambo was less cruel than this black and monstrous Town.

At the slate-colored house he hammered on the door for twenty minutes without getting any answer, and at last he went to the side of the house and tossed stones against the window behind which his mother and father were passing what Mabelle called “a second honeymoon.” After a moment a head appeared at the window, and his mother’s voice asked, “Who’s there? For God’s sake, what’s the matter?”

“It’s Philip ... let me in!”

She opened the door to him in her outing-flannel gown and a flowered wrapper which he had never seen her wear before. It was, he supposed, a best wrapper which she had kept against the homecoming she had awaited for years. Her head was covered coquettishly by a pink boudoir cap trimmed with lace. As he closed the door behind him, she said, “For God’s sake, Philip. What’s the matter? Have you gone crazy?”

He smiled at her, but it was a horrible smile, twisted and bitter, and born of old memories come alive, and of a disgust at the sight of the flowered wrapper and the coquettish lace cap. “No, I’m not crazy this time—though I’ve a right to be. It’s about Naomi ... she’s run away....”

“What do you mean?”

“And she hasn’t gone alone. She’s run away with the Reverend Castor.”

“Philip! You are crazy. It’s not true!”

“I’m telling you the truth. I know.”

She sat down suddenly on the stairs, holding to the rail for support. “Oh, my God! Oh, my God! What have I done to deserve such a thing? When will God bring me to the end of my trials?”

He made no move to comfort her. He simply stood watching, until presently she asked, “How do you know? There must be a mistake ... it’s not true.”

Then he told her bit by bit the whole story, coldly and with an odd, cruel satisfaction, so that no doubt remained; and for the first time in his memory he saw her wilt and collapse.

“You see, Ma, there can’t be any doubt. They’ve gone off together.”

Suddenly she seemed to make a great effort. She sat up again and said bitterly, “I always thought something like this would happen. She was always flighty ... I discovered that when she lived here. She wasn’t any good as a wife or as a mother. She wouldn’t nurse her own children. No ... I think, maybe, you’re well rid of her ... the brazen little slut.”

“Don’t say that, Ma. Whatever has happened is our fault. We drove her to it.” His words were gentle enough; it was his voice that was hard as flint.

“What do you mean? How can you accuse me?”

“We treated her like dirt ... and it wasn’t her fault. In some ways she’s better than either of us.”

She looked at him suddenly. “You’re not planning to take her back if she comes running home with her tail between her legs?”

“I don’t know ... I have a feeling that she’ll never come back.”

“Leaving her children without a thought!”

“I don’t suppose she left them without a thought ... but sometimes a person can be so unhappy that he only wants to die. I know ... I’ve been like that. Besides, she never wanted the children any more than I wanted them.”

“How can you say such a wicked thing!”

His face looked thin and pinched and white. The water, all unnoticed, had formed a pool about his feet on the immaculate carpet of Emma’s hall. He was shaking with chill. He was like a dead man come up out of the sea. And deep inside him a small voice was born, which kept saying to him, “It’s that ridiculous woman in a flowered wrapper and pink cap who lies at the bottom of all this misery.” It was a tiny voice, but, like the voice that the Reverend Castor had tried to still by repeating Psalms, it would not die. It kept returning.

“It’s not wicked. It’s only the truth ... and it’s only the truth I care about to-night. I don’t give a damn for anything else in the world ... not for what people think, or about what they say. They can all go to hell for all I care.” His face was white and expressionless, like the face of a man already dead. It was the voice that was terrible.

“You needn’t swear, Philip.” She showed signs of weeping. “And I never thought my boy would turn against his own mother—not for any woman in the world.”

“Now don’t begin that. I’m not your boy any longer. I’ve got to grow up sometime. I’m not turning against you. I’m just sick to death of the whole mess. I’m through with the whole thing.”

She wiped her eyes with a corner of the ridiculous flowered wrapper, and the sight made him want to laugh. The tiny voice grew more clamorous.

She was saying, “I won’t wake your Pa and tell him. He’s no good at a time like this.” (Philip thought, “I don’t know. He might do better than any of us.”) “And I’ll dress and come down to the twins. And you ought to get on some dry clothes.” She rose, turned all at once into a woman of action. “I’ll take care of the twins.”

“No,” he said abruptly. “I can do that.”

“You don’t know about their bottles.”

“I do know ... I’ve done them on the nights Naomi went to choir practice. I don’t want you to come ... I want to be alone with them.”

“Philip ... I’m your mother.... It’s my place....”

“I want to be alone with them....”

He looked so wild that she seized his shoulders and said, “You’re not thinking anything foolish, are you?”

“I don’t know what I’m thinking. I can’t bear to think of her running off like that. I can’t bear to think of how we treated her.... If you mean that I’m thinking of killing myself, I’m not ... I can’t do that. I’ve got to think of little Philip and Naomi. If it wasn’t for them ... I might do anything.”

Suddenly in a wild hysteria, she put her arms about him, crying out, “Philip! Philip! My boy! Don’t say such things—it’s not you who’s talking. It’s some one else ... it’s a stranger ... somebody I never knew ... somebody I didn’t bear out of my own body.” She shook him passionately. “Philip! Philip! Wake up! Be your old self ... my son. Do you hear me, darling? You do love me still. Tell me what’s in your heart ... what the voice of your real self is saying.”

In the violence of her action, the pink lace cap slipped back on her head, exposing a neat row of curl-papers, festoons and garlands (thought Philip in disgust) of their second honeymoon. He didn’t resist her. He simply remained cold and frozen, one cold, thin hand thrust into his pocket for warmth. Then suddenly the hand touched something which roused a sudden train of memory, and when at last she freed him, he drew out a pair of worn gloves.

“I think I’ll go home now,” he said in the same frozen voice. “Before I go, I must give you these. Mary Conyngham sent them to you. I think you left them at her house when you went to call.” It was as if he said to her, “It’s true ... what you thought about Mary and me. It’s true ... now.”

She took the gloves with a queer, mechanical gesture, and without another word he turned and went out, closing the door. When he had gone, she sat down on the steps again and began to weep, crying out, “Oh, God! Oh, God! What have I done to deserve such trouble! Oh, God! Have pity on me! Bring my son back to me!”

Suddenly, in a kind of frenzy, she began to tear the gloves to bits, as if they were the very body of Mary Conyngham. In the midst of her wild sobbing, a voice came out of the dark at the top of the stairs, “For Heaven’s sake, Em, what are you carrying on about now?”

It was Jason standing in his nightshirt, his bare legs exposed to the knees. “Come on back to bed. It’s cold as Jehu up here.”

By the time Philip reached the Flats, the rain had begun to abate a little, and the sky beyond the Mills and Shane’s Castle to turn a pale, cold gray with the beginning of dawn. The twins were awake and crying loudly. Poking up the fire in the kitchen range, he prepared the bottles and so quieted them before taking off his soaked clothing. The old feeling of being soiled had come over him again, more strongly even than on the day in Hennessey’s saloon, and when he had undressed and rubbed warmth back into his body, he drew hot water from the kitchen range, and, standing in a washtub by the side of the cribs where he could restore the bottles when they fell from the feeble grasp of the twins, he scrubbed himself vigorously from head to foot, as if thus he might drive away that sordid feeling of uncleanness.

At last he got into the bed beside the cribs—the bed which he had never shared with Naomi, and to which it was not likely that she would ever return. He had barely slept at all in more than two days, but it was impossible to sleep now. His mind was alive, seething, burning with activity like those cauldrons of white-hot metal in the Mills; yet he experienced a kind of troubled peace, for he had come to the end of one trouble. He knew that with his mother it was all finished. In the moment he had given her the gloves, he knew that he didn’t love her any more, that he no longer felt grateful to her for all that she had done for him. There was only a deadness where these emotions should have been. It was all over and finished: it would be better now if he never saw her again.

And the twins ... they must never go to her; whatever happened, she must never do to them what she had done to him. He would protect them from her, somehow, even if he died.

The day that followed was one of waiting for some sign, some hint, some bit of knowledge as to the whereabouts of Naomi and the Reverend Castor. Like the day after a sudden death in a household, it had no relation to ordinary days. It was rather like a day suspended without reality in time and space. Philip went about like a dead man. His father came and sat with him for a time, silent and subdued, and strangely unlike his old exuberant self.

It was Emma alone who seemed to rise above the calamity. “It is,” she said, “a time for activity. We must face things. We mustn’t give in.”

She went herself to call upon the editors of the two newspapers and by some force of threats and tears she induced them to keep silence regarding the affair until some fact was definitely known. It was a triumph for her, since neither editor had any affection for her, and one at least hated her. From the newspaper offices she went at once to call upon the invalid in the parsonage. She found the miserable woman “prostrated,” and in the care of Miss Simpkins, head of the Missionary Society. Before five minutes had passed, she understood that she had arrived too late. Miss Simpkins had been told the whole story, and in turn had communicated it, beyond all doubt, to a whole circle of hungry women. The invalid was still in the same state of triumph. It seemed to Emma that she saw no disgrace in the affair, but only a sort of glory and justification. It was as if she said, “People will notice my misery at last. They’ll pay some attention to me. They’ll give up pitying him and pity me for a time.” It was impossible to argue with her. When Emma left, she said to herself savagely, “The old devil has got what was coming to her. She deserved it.”

Once a trickle of the scandal had leaked out, there was no stopping it: the news swept the Town as the swollen waters of the brook flooded the pestilential Flats. It reached Mary Conyngham late in the afternoon. For a time she was both stunned and frightened, as if the thing were a retribution visited with horrible speed upon herself and Philip. And then, quickly, she thought, “I must not lose my head. I’ve got to think of Philip. I’ve got to help him.” She fancied him haunted by remorse and self-reproaches, creating in his fantastic way all manner of self-tortures. One of them at least must keep his head, and she was certain that the one wouldn’t be Philip. And she was seized with a sudden terror that the calamity might shut him off from her forever: it was not impossible with a man like Philip who was always tormenting himself about troubles which did not exist. She found to her astonishment that she herself felt neither any pangs of conscience nor any remorse. What she had done, she had done willingly, and with a clear head: if there had ever been any doubts they were over and done with before she had gone to the stable.

She dared not, she knew, go and see him, and thus deliver herself into the hands of his mother; for she knew well enough that Emma would be waiting, watching for just such a chance. She would want to say to Philip, “You see, it’s the judgment of God upon you for your behavior with Mary Conyngham.” For a second there came to Mary a faint wish that she had never turned Emma’s accusation into truth, but it died quickly. She knew that nothing could ever destroy the memory of what had happened on the night of the slaughter in the dead park.

She decided at last to write to him, and late that night, after she had torn up a dozen attempts (because writing to a man like Philip under such circumstances was a dangerous business) she finished a note and sent it off to him. She wrote: “My Darling ... I can’t come to you now. You know why it is impossible. And I want to be with you. It is killing me to sit here alone. If you want to meet me anywhere, send word. I’d go to hell itself to help you. You mustn’t torment yourself. You mustn’t imagine things. At a time like this, you must keep your head. For God’s sake, remember what we are to each other, and that nothing else in the world makes any difference. I love you, my boy. I love you ... Mary.”

Then she addressed the note, and, as a safeguard against Emma, printed “Personal” in large letters on the outside of the envelope. It was too late to find any one to deliver the note and the post-office was closed. At last she put on a hat and coat and went herself to leave it under the door of the drugstore, where the druggist would be certain to deliver it in the morning. When she came home again, she lay down in the solitude of the old Victorian parlor, and before long fell asleep. It was two o’clock when she wakened, frightened, and shivering with cold.

Mr. Stimson, the druggist, found the letter in the morning, and laid it aside until he had swept out the store. Then he had breakfast and when a Pole with a cut on the side of his head came in to have it bandaged, he quite forgot the letter. It was only after ten o’clock when a boy came bringing a telegram for Philip that he remembered it suddenly. The note and the telegram were delivered together.

The telegram was brief. A man and woman believed to be Samuel Castor and Mrs. Philip Downes were found dead by suicide in a Pittsburgh boarding-house. Would Mr. Downes wire instructions, or come himself. It was signed, “H. G. Miller, Coroner.”

24

The rooming-house stood in one of the side streets in the dubious quarter that lay between the river wharfs and the business district—a region of Pittsburgh once inhabited by middle-class families, and now fallen a little over the edge of respectability. It was one of a row of houses all exactly alike, built of brick, with limestone stoops, and all blackened long ago by the soot of mills and furnaces. Number Twenty-nine was distinguished from the others only by the fact that the stoop seemed to have been scrubbed not too long ago, and that beside the sign “Rooms to Let to Respectable Parties,” there was another card emblazoned with a gilt cross and bearing an inscription that was not legible from the sidewalk. Philip and McTavish, peering at the house, noticed it, and, turning in at the little path, were able to make out the words. The card was stained and yellow with age, and beneath the cross they read, “JESUS SAID, ‘COME UNTO ME.’”

For a moment, McTavish gave Philip an oblique, searching look, and then pressed the bell. There was a long wait, followed by the sound of closing doors, and then a tired little woman, with her hair in a screw at the back of her head, stood before them, drying her hands on a soiled apron.

Philip only stared at her, lost in the odd, dazed silence that had settled over him from the moment the telegram had come. He seemed incapable of speech, like a little child in the care of McTavish. It was the fat undertaker who lifted his hat and said, “This is Mr. Downes, and I’m the undertaker.” He coughed suddenly, “The Coroner told us that ... they had left some things in the room.”

The little woman asked them in, and then began suddenly to cry. “I’ve never had such a thing happen to me before ... and now I’m ruined!”

McTavish bade her be quiet, but she went on and on hysterically. In all the tragedy, she could, it seemed, see only her own misfortune.

“You can tell me about it when we’re upstairs,” said McTavish, patting her arm with the air of a bachelor unused to the sight of a woman’s tears, and upset by them. “Mr. Downes will wait down here.”

Then Philip spoke suddenly for the first time. “No ... I’m going with you. I want to hear the whole thing. I’ve ... I’ve got to know.”

There was a smell of cabbage and onions in the hallway. As McTavish closed the door, the whole place was lost in gloomy shadows. The tired woman, still sobbing, and blowing her nose on the soiled apron, said, “It’s upstairs.”

They followed her up two flights of stairs to a room at the back. It was in complete darkness, as if the two bodies were still there, and as she raised the window-shade there came into view a whole vista of dreary backyards littered with rubbish and filled with lines of newly washed clothing. The gray light revealed a small room, scarcely a dozen feet square, with a cheap pine table, a wash-bowl, pitcher and slop-jar, two chairs and a narrow iron bed. On the walls hung a bad print of the Sermon on the Mount and a cheaply illuminated text, “Come unto Me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden.” The bed was untouched, save for two small depressions at the side away from the wall.

Near the door there were little rolls of torn newspaper—the paper (Philip thought, with a sudden feeling of sickness) with which they had stuffed the cracks of the door to imprison the smell of gas. A newspaper and a Bible lay on the table beside the wash-bowl.

“I left everything just as it was,” said the woman; “just as the Coroner ordered.”

Those two depressions on the side of the bed suddenly took on a terrible fascination for Philip. It was as if they were filled by the forms of two kneeling figures who were praying.

“Here’s the bag they brought,” said the woman. She bent down and opened it. “You see it was empty. If I’d known that ... but how was I to know?” It was a cheap bag made of paper and painted to imitate leather. It stood in a corner, mute, reproachful, empty.

Philip was staring at it in silence, and McTavish said again, “Maybe you’d better go downstairs and wait.”

For a moment there was no answer, and then Philip replied, “No, I mean to stay. I’ve got to hear it.”

The woman began to tell her story. They had come to the rooming-house about nine o’clock in the evening. “I remember the hour because Hazel—that’s the girl that helps me with the house—had finished the dishes and was going to meet a friend.” She had one room empty, and she was only too glad to rent it, especially to a clergyman. Oh, he had told her who he was. He told her he was the Reverend Castor and that the woman with him was his wife. They were, he said, on their way east, and came to the rooming-house because he had heard Mr. Elmer Niman speak of it once as a cheap, clean, respectable place to stay at when you came to Pittsburgh. “You see,” she explained, “I’m very careful who I take in. Usually Methodists and Baptists. They recommend each other, and that way I do a pretty good business, and it’s always sure to be respectable.” She sighed and said, “It wasn’t my fault this time. I never thought a preacher would do such a thing, and being recommended, too, by Mr. Elmer Niman.”

They went, she said, right up to their room, and, about half-past ten, when Hazel came back, she heard voices singing hymns. “They weren’t singing very loud ... sort of low and soft, so as not to disturb the other roomers. So I thought it was a kind of evening worship they went through every night, and I didn’t say anything. But one of my other roomers came to me and complained. I was pretty near undressed, but I put on a wrapper and went up to tell them they’d have to be quiet, as other people wanted to sleep. They were singing, Ancient of Days, and they stopped right away. They didn’t even say anything.”

The woman blew her nose again on her apron, sighed, and went on. “So I went to sleep, and about one o’clock my husband came in. He’s so crippled with rheumatism he can’t work much and he’d been to a meeting of the Odd Fellows. It must have been about one o’clock when he waked me up, and after he’d gotten into bed and turned out the light, I told him that I’d rented the empty room. And he said, ‘Who to?’ and I told him a Reverend Castor and his wife. He sat up in bed, and said, ‘His wife!’ as if he didn’t believe me, and I said, ‘Yes, his wife!’ And then Henry got out of bed and lit the gas, and went over to his coat and took out a newspaper. I thought it was kind-a funny. He opened it, and looked at it, and said, ‘That ain’t his wife at all. It’s a woman who sings in his choir. The scoundrel, to come to a respectable house like this!’ And then he showed me the newspaper, and there it all was about a preacher in Milford who’d run away with a choir singer. And there was his name and everything. You’d have thought he’d have had the sense to take some other name if he was going to do a thing like that.”

McTavish looked at her quietly. “I don’t think he’d ever think of a thing like that. He was a good man. He was innocent.”

The woman sniffed. “I don’t know about that. But it seems to me a good man wouldn’t be trapsin’ around with another man’s wife.”

The look in McTavish’s eyes turned a little harder. When he spoke, his voice was stern. “I know what I mean. He was a good man. He had a hellion for a wife. She deserved what she got and worse.”

Something in the quality of his voice seemed to irritate the woman, for she began to whine. “Well, you needn’t insult me. I was brought up a good Christian Methodist, and I’m a regular churchgoer, and I know good from bad.”

McTavish turned away in disgust. “All right! All right! Go on with your story.”

“Well,” said the woman, “Henry—that’s my husband—said, ‘You must turn them out right away. We can’t have the house defiled by adulterers!’” Her small green eyes turned a glare of defiance at McTavish. “That’s what they were—adulterers.”

“Yes,” said McTavish wearily. “There’s no denying that. But go on.”

“So I got up, and went to their room and knocked. I smelled gas in the hall and thought it was funny. And then I knocked again and nobody answered. And then I got scared and called Henry. He was for sending for somebody to help break down the door, and then I turned the knob and it was open. They hadn’t even locked it. It just pushed open, easy-like. The room was full of gas, and you couldn’t go in or strike a match and you couldn’t see anything. But we left the door open, and Henry went to get the police. And after a time I went to open the window, and when I pulled up the window-shade and the light from the furnaces came in, I saw ’em both a-lyin’ there. He was sort of slumped down beside the bed and she was half on the bed a-lyin’ on her face. They’d both died a-prayin’.”

The thin, dreary voice died away into silence. McTavish looked at Philip. He was sitting on one of the stiff pine chairs, his head sunk on his chest, his fingers unrolling mechanically bit by bit the pieces of newspaper with which the door had been stuffed. Automatically he unrolled them, examined them and smoothed them out, putting them in neat piles at his feet. They were stained with tears that had fallen silently while he listened. And then, suddenly, he found what he had been looking for. He handed it to McTavish without a word, without even raising his head.

It was a scrap torn hastily to stuff the door, but in the midst of it appeared in glaring headlines:

“PREACHER ELOPES
WITH MISSIONARY
Romance begins at choir
practice. Woman a
former Evangelist”

The editors had kept their word to Emma, but the story had leaked out into the cities nearby.

McTavish read it in silence, and turned to the woman. Philip did not even hear what they were saying. He was thinking of poor Naomi lying dead, fallen forward on the bed where she had been praying. It was poor Naomi who had made that ghastly depression in the gray-white counterpane. He saw what had happened. He saw them coming in, tired and frightened, to this sordid room, terrified by what they had done in a moment of insanity. He saw them sitting there in silence, Naomi crying because she always cried when she was frightened. And perhaps he had taken the newspaper out of his pocket and laid it on the table and as it fell open, there was the headline staring at them. They must have seen, then, that they were trapped, that they could neither go on nor turn back. In their world of preachers and Evangelists and prayer there was no place for them. And presently they must have noticed the print of the Sermon on the Mount, and at last the framed text—“Come unto Me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden....” They must have seen the text written in letters of fire, inviting them, commanding them—“Come unto Me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden....” It must have seemed the only way out. And then they had sung hymns until the harpy had knocked at the door and bade them be silent.

The depression in the bed kept tormenting him. The two figures kneeling there, praying, praying for forgiveness, until one of them slumped down, unconscious, and the other was left alone, still praying.... Which one of them had gone first? He hoped it was Naomi, for she would be so frightened at being left alone. For the one who was left alone, those last moments must have seemed hours. And Naomi must have been frightened. She was destroying herself—a sin which once she had told him was the unforgivable.

He saw then that the faith which had given her strength in that far-off unreal world at Megambo must have been failing her for a long time. It must have died before ever she set out on the mad journey that ended in this wretched room. Or she must have been mad. And then, all at once, the memory of her figure kneeling in the dust of the Mission enclosure rose up and smote him. He saw her again, her face all illumined with a queer, unearthly light. She had been ready then to die by the bullets of the painted niggers. She should have died then, happy in the knowledge of her sacrifice. He had saved her life—he and that queer Englishwoman—only that she might die thus, praying alone, lost, forgotten....

She should have died at Megambo—a martyr.

Suddenly he heard the voice of the tired little woman, “And here is her hand-bag.” She held it out to McTavish, a poor morsel of leather, all hardened and discolored by the rain. “That’s how we found her address. It was written on a card.”

McTavish opened it mechanically, and turned it upside-down. A few coins rattled out. He counted them ... eighty-five cents. The woman opened a drawer of the table. “And here is his.” The worn wallet contained a great amount of silver and ninety odd dollars in bills. They had meant to start life again with ninety odd dollars.

“They must have been mad,” said McTavish. He touched Philip’s shoulder. “Come ... we’d better go.”

Philip rose in silence, and McTavish turned toward the Bible that lay open on the table. “Was that theirs?” he asked.

“No, that’s mine. I keep Bibles in all my rooms.”

McTavish turned toward the door, and she said, “The bag ... ain’t you going to take the bag?”

McTavish turned toward Philip.

“No,” said Philip. “You may keep it.”

The woman frowned. “I don’t want it. I don’t want any of their things left in my house. I’ve suffered enough. They ruined me. I don’t want my house polluted.”

McTavish started to speak, and then thought better of it. He simply took up the bag and followed Philip. They went down the two flights of odorous stairs and out of the door. The policeman who had accompanied them was waiting on the sidewalk. As the door closed, they heard the woman sobbing and calling after them that she, an honest, God-fearing woman, had been ruined.

In silence they turned their backs on the dingy house, with the sign, “Rooms to Let to Respectable Parties,” and the emblazoned text, “JESUS SAID, ‘COME UNTO ME....’”

Half-way down the block, McTavish said, “You mustn’t think about it, Philip. You mustn’t brood. You had nothing to do with it.”

“How can I help thinking about it?” He could only see them kneeling there by the bed praying until the end, innocent save that they had tried to escape from a life which circumstance or fate had made too cruel for them to bear. They had died without ever knowing the happiness which had come to him and Mary. He saw bitterly that there was not even any great dignity in their death, but only a pathos. They had not even known a poor tattered remnant of human happiness. They had simply run away, fleeing from something they could not understand toward something that was unknown.

“How can I ever think of anything else?”

25

The Reverend Castor was buried from his own house, and Naomi from the flat over the drugstore. Emma had proposed that the services should be held in the slate-colored house, but Philip refused. It seemed wrong that Naomi should enter it again, even in death. He would not even allow any mourners save the family. His mother and father were there, Jason in a curious state of depression, more than ever like a bedraggled bantam rooster, and Mabelle bringing both Ethel and little Jimmy, who kept asking in loud whispers where Cousin Naomi had gone, and why he wasn’t supposed to speak of her. Mabelle herself repeated over and over again, “I can’t believe it. She was so cheerful, though she did seem a bit nervous and fidgety that last day. She came twice to see me. I suppose she wanted to tell me something,” and, “What strikes me as funny is that nobody ever suspected it. There wasn’t any talk about them at all. It was like a flash out of the blue.” It was impossible to silence her tongue. Even during the service she whispered to Jason, “Don’t she look pure and sweet? You just can’t believe that things like this happen. Life is a funny thing, I always say. It was just like a flash out of the blue.”

And “pie-faced” Elmer was there too, all in dingy black. He read the service, looking like the Jewish god of vengeance. He only spoke once or twice in a ghoulish whisper, but his eyes were eloquent. They said, “You see the wages of sin ...” and, “This is what comes of Philip abandoning God.”

Once the service was interrupted when little Philip, wakened by the singing of Crossing the Bar by the hired quartet, stirred in his crib and began to cry.

Naomi was buried in the dress of figured foulard. Mabelle observed that in the coffin it looked all right. Naomi, she said, looked so young and so natural.

26

The Mills began once more to pound and roar. The flames of the furnaces again filled all the night sky with a rosy glow. The last miserable remnants of the strikers drifted away and the tent village disappeared, leaving only a vacant lot, grassless and muddy with the turn of winter. The strike and the slaughter in the park of Shane’s Castle, even the tragedy of Naomi and the Reverend Castor, were at last worn to shreds as subjects of conversation. Life moved on, as if all these things counted for nothing, as if the Shanes, and Krylenko, poor Giulia Rizzo, Naomi and the Reverend Castor, had never existed. In the church, Elmer Niman read the services until a suitable preacher was found. The bereft and invalid Mrs. Castor disappeared in the obscurity of some Indiana village, where she went to live with a poverty-stricken cousin.

As for Philip, he stayed on in the flat, hiring an old negress, whom McTavish knew, to care for the twins. A sort of enchantment seemed to have taken possession of him, which robbed him even of his desire to go away. Emma came nearly every day to question old Molly about the children, to make suggestions and to run her finger across tables in search of dust. She did not propose that he return to the slate-colored house, for she seemed now to be afraid of him, with the fear one has of drunkards or maniacs—a fear which had its origin in the moment he had taken the worn gloves from his pocket and given them to her. There was, too, a wisdom in the fear, a wisdom which had come to her from Jason on that same night, after she had returned to the marital bed.

For Jason had said to her, when she had grown calm, “Em, you never learn anything. If you lived to be a hundred, you’d still be making a mess of things.”

And she had cried out, “How can you say such a thing to me ... after all I’ve suffered ... after all I’ve done? It’s you who’ve made a mess of your life.”

“My life ain’t such a mess as you might think,” he had replied darkly. “But let me tell you, if you don’t want to lose that boy altogether, you’ll let him alone. He ain’t no ordinary town boy, Em. He’s different. I’ve found that out. I don’t know how we produced ’im. But if you don’t want to lose him, you’ll let him alone.”

She didn’t want to lose him. There were times when she hardened her heart toward him, thinking he was ungrateful and hard to allow a hussy like Mary Conyngham to stand between him and his mother; and again she would think of him as her little boy, her Philip, for whom she would work her fingers to the bone. But she was hurt by the way he looked at her, coldly, out of hard blue eyes, as if she were only a stranger to him. She felt him slipping, slipping from her, and at times she grew cold with fear. She “let him alone,” but she could not overlook her duty toward him and his children. They were, after all, her grandchildren, and a man like Philip wasn’t capable of bringing them up properly, especially since he had lost his faith. And with a mother like theirs, who had such bad blood, they would need special care and training ... she resolved not to speak of it for the moment, but, later on, when they were a little older....

But it was Mabelle who was the most regular visitor at the flat. She came with a passion for always being in the center of things; she clung to the tragedy, and came every day to break in upon Philip’s brooding solitude, to chatter on and on, whether he listened or not. She brought little Jimmy’s old toys for the twins, and she dandled them on her knee as if they were her own. There were times when Philip suspected her of being driven by a relentless curiosity to discover more of what had happened on the terrible day, but he endured her; he even began to have an affection for her, because she was so stupid and good-natured.

She was sitting there one morning, playing with little Philip and little Naomi, when she said suddenly, “You know I often think that all that trouble in the park at Shane’s Castle ... killing all those people ... had something to do with Naomi’s being so upset. You see, when she heard that morning about the people being killed there, she got worried about you. She was nearly crazy for fear that something had happened to you, and she went herself to the stable to find you, and when she didn’t find you there she was sort of crazy afterward. She came up and talked to me in a crazy way until she heard from your Pa that he’d seen you at McTavish’s. When I think of it now, I see that she was sort of unbalanced and queer, though I didn’t notice it at the time.”

Philip, barely listening to her, took little notice of what she was saying, for he had come long ago to allow her to rattle on and on without heeding her; it was only a little while afterward that it had any significance for him. It was as if what she had said touched some hidden part of his brain. When she had gone, and he began indifferently to think of it, it seemed to him that he remembered every word exactly as she had spoken it. The words were burned into his mind. “She was nearly crazy for fear something had happened to you, and she went herself to the stable to find you.”

When Mabelle had gone, he could think of nothing else.

Since the morning after the slaughter in the park, he had never returned to the stable. The place which he had once thought of as belonging to himself alone was spoiled now: it had been invaded by Lily Shane and poor Naomi, and even by Mary ... even by Mary. There were times when he resented her having come there, and times, too, when his remorse over Naomi made him feel that Mary had come deliberately, to tempt him, that what they had done was not a beautiful, but a wicked thing, which would torment him until he died. The place was spoiled for him, since it had come in a ghastly way to stand as a symbol of all those things which he believed had driven Naomi into madness.

But he knew, too, that he must return one day to the stable. It was filled with his belongings, the sketches pinned to the walls, the unfinished canvas of the Flats at night on which the paint must long since have caked and turned hard. (He knew now that it would never be finished, for he could never bring himself to sit there again by the window, alone, watching the mists stealing over the Mills.) After Mabelle had gone, he kept thinking that Naomi was the last one to enter the place. It was as if her spirit would be there awaiting him.

And then all at once there came to him a sudden terrifying memory: he had gone away that morning leaving behind unwashed the dishes he and Mary had used at breakfast. He had sent Mary away, promising to wash them himself, and then, troubled by the remorse of the gray dawn, had gone off, meaning to do it when he returned. They were still lying there—the two plates, the two coffee-cups, the very loaf of bread, turned hard and dry, and nibbled by the mice. And Naomi had gone there, “crazy for fear something had happened” to him. She had seen the remnants of that breakfast. In all the uproar and confusion he had forgotten.... She had known then; she must have known before she ran away....

For a moment he thought, “I must be careful, or I shall go crazy. It must feel like this to lose one’s mind.” He thought, “It was I who did it. I drove her away. I killed her myself. She thought that I was lying to her all along. I wasn’t lying. I wasn’t lying. I was telling her the truth.... It would have been the truth, even now, to the end, if Mary hadn’t come then. She must have been crazy. Both of us must have been crazy.”

And then, after a time, he thought, “I’ve got to be calm. I’ve got to think this thing out.” There wasn’t, after all, any reason why there shouldn’t have been two plates and two cups. Any one might have been having breakfast with him ... any man, Krylenko, or even McTavish. Oh, it was all right. There couldn’t have been anything wrong in that.

And then he thought bitterly, “But if it had been Krylenko, Naomi wouldn’t have believed it. She’d be sure it was a woman. She’d think it was Lily Shane ... Lily Shane, who wouldn’t have looked at me. She was jealous of Lily Shane.”

None of it was any good—none of this self-deception. It wasn’t a man who had had breakfast with him. It was a woman—Mary Conyngham, only Naomi had believed it was Lily Shane. Thank God! It wasn’t the same as if he and Mary together had driven her away to death in that horrible rooming-house. He’d never have to think of that after he and Mary were married. Naomi had believed the woman was Lily Shane.

Suddenly he pressed his hands to his eyes, so savagely that for a moment he was blinded. “I’m a fool. It’s just the same, even if she did think that it was some other woman.”

The stable began to acquire for him a horrid fascination, so powerful that he could no longer stay away from it. He had to return, to see the place with his eyes, to see the tell-tale cups and plates. Perhaps (he thought) some miracle had happened. Old Hennery might have removed them after he left, or perhaps he had himself washed them and put them away in the harness-closet without remembering it. Such a thing could happen.... In all the tragedy, all the confusion, the ecstasy of those few hours, he might have done it, without knowing what he did. Or afterwards, in all the stress of what had happened, he might have forgotten. Such things had been known to occur, he told himself, such lapses in the working of a brain. There were, after all, moments of late when he was not certain of what was happening—whether he was alive or dead, or whether Naomi had really killed herself, praying by the side of that wretched bed....

But immediately he said, “I’m a fool. I’m like my father. I’m not thinking of what did happen, but what I wish had happened. It’s like his story of losing his memory.”

When the old negress Molly returned from marketing, he gave her the twins and went off like a madman to the stable. He traversed the area of the Mills, passed Hennessey’s place, and entered the dead park, but when he came to the stable, it took all his courage to enter.

He climbed the creaking stairs with his eyes closed, groping his way until he stood at the top. Then he opened them and looked about.

The place had a wrecked and desolate look. The dust and the soot of the Mills, filtering in through the decaying windows, covered everything. At some time during the storm the roof had begun to leak, and the water, running down the walls, had ruined a dozen sketches and soaked the blankets on the bed, and in the middle of the room on the table stood the coffee-pot, the dried loaf of bread gnawed by the mice, the soiled cups and plates, and a saucer with rancid butter on it.

There wasn’t any doubt of it—the things were there, just as they had been left by him and Mary.

He sat down weakly in one of the chairs by the table, and lighted a cigarette. Suddenly he leaned back with his eyes closed. He didn’t care any longer. He was tired. He had come (he thought) to the end of things, and nothing any longer made any difference—neither his mother, nor his father, nor Naomi, nor even Mary. He wanted only to be alone forever, to go off into some wilderness where there was no human creature to cause him pain. He wanted to be a coward and run away. In solitude, he might regain once more that stupid faith which had once given him security. It wasn’t that he’d ever again be glad to be alive: it was only when you believed you could make God responsible in a way for everything. Whatever happened, it was the Will of God. He hadn’t been alive: it was only when he had turned his back on God that he had begun to understand what it meant to be alive. And now that, too, was past: he saw now that he wasn’t strong enough to live by himself. He was, after all, a coward, without the courage of a person like Mary. She had, he saw, no need of a God to lean upon. No, he wasn’t even like his father, whom no tragedy had the power to touch. He was like her—like his mother. He needed God as an excuse. She was safe: nothing could touch her, nothing could ever change her. She always had God to hold responsible....

The forgotten cigarette, burning low, scorched his fingers, and, dropping it, he stepped on it mechanically, and, rising from the chair, saw suddenly a woman’s handkerchief lying on the table among the dishes. It lay there, folded neatly, beneath a covering of dust and soot. He thought, “It must have been Naomi’s. She must have dropped it here.” The thing exerted an evil fascination over him. He wanted to go away, but he couldn’t go, until he knew whose handkerchief it was. It couldn’t have been Lily Shane’s, for he or Mary would have noticed it. It couldn’t have been Mary’s: for she wouldn’t have gone away from the table with it lying there, neat and unused, in full sight on the table. It must have belonged to Naomi. He wanted to go away without even looking, but he had not the strength. It lay there tormenting him. He would never have any peace if he went away in ignorance.

At last his hand, as if it moved of its own will, reached out and picked it up. It left behind a small square free of dust on the surface of the table. It was a tiny handkerchief, frail and feminine, and in the corner it was marked with initials. They were ... M.C. There wasn’t the slightest doubt.... M.C.... M.C.... Mary Conyngham.

He saw then what must have happened—that Mary had dropped it somewhere in the room, and Naomi, searching for some clue, had found it and left it lying behind on the table. It was Naomi’s hand that had placed it there on the table, Naomi’s hand that had last touched it.

Naomi had known who the woman was. In the next moment he had, in some unaccountable way, a curiously clear vision of an iron bed with a small depression where some one had knelt to pray.

After a long time, he rose, and, leaving the handkerchief on the table, went down the stairs once more. He never returned again to the room above the stable.

27

While Philip sat in the dust and soot of the dead stable, his father waited for him at the flat. He danced the twins for a time on his knee, and set them crowing by giving a variety of imitations of birds and animals which he had learned in Australia, but, after a time, the old spirit flagged. He wasn’t the same gay, blithe creature that Emma found awaiting her in the darkened drawing-room. Even the waxed mustaches seemed to droop a little with weariness. For Jason was growing old in body, and he knew it. “My sciatica,” he said, “will not let me alone.”

“For an active, nervous man like me,” he had told Emma only that morning, “there ain’t much left when his body begins to get old.”

Even his return home had been in a way a failure. He began now to think he ought never to have come back. Emma was the only one pleased by his return. “You’d have thought,” he told himself, “that she’d have forgotten me long ago and taken to thinking about other things.” It was pretty fine to have a big, handsome woman like Emma give you all her devotion. Yes, she was glad enough to see him, but there was his boy, Philip, whom he hardly knew. He’d never get to know Philip: he couldn’t understand a boy like that. And this Naomi business. It was too bad, and of course it was a scandal, but still that didn’t make any difference in the way you enjoyed living. The truth was that Philip ought to be kind-a glad to be rid of her. It wasn’t a thing he could help, and he’d behaved all right. If there was another woman, Philip had kept it all quiet. There wasn’t any scandal. And now, if he wanted to marry her, he could—if she wasn’t married too. No, he couldn’t understand Philip. Emma had done something to him.

The return was a failure. He hadn’t even had any glory out of it, except on that first night when he’d had his triumph over pie-faced Elmer; but who wanted a triumph over a thing like Elmer? No, he’d been forgotten, first in the excitement of the riot when they’d killed a couple of dirty foreigners, and then by Naomi running off and killing herself with a preacher. Em wouldn’t let him say that preachers were a bad lot but he had his ideas, all the same. The Town had forgotten all about him—him, a man who lost his memory, and who had been thought dead for twenty-six years. Of course he hadn’t quite lost his memory, but he might have lost it....

And then he was homesick. The Town wasn’t home to him any more. It was no more his real home than Philip was his real son, or Emma his real wife.

He was thinking all these things, mechanically rolling a ball back and forth to the twins, when Philip came in. At first Jason didn’t notice him, and when he did look up, the drawn, white look on the face of his strange son frightened him. He tried to jest, in a wild effort to drive away that sense of depression.

“Well, here I am,” he said brightly. “Back again like a bad penny.” Philip didn’t answer him, and he said, “I just ran in to say I’m going home day after to-morrow.”

“Home?” asked Philip, with a look of bewilderment.

“Yes ... home to Australy.”

“Oh.” Then the boy pulled himself together with an effort. “But I thought this was your home.”

“No ... not really. You see, I’ve lived out there most of my life. And this darned Town has changed so, it don’t seem the same any longer. It’s all full of new people ... and foreigners. Most of ’em have never heard of me.”

“What’ll Ma think?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t told her, but she knows I had to go back some day. She’ll think I’m comin’ back. She’ll have that to look forward to.”

“You’re not coming back ... ever?”

“It ain’t likely. They say an animal wants to go home when he’s dying. Well, that’s me. I want to go home.”

“But you’re not dying.”

“No, but I ain’t as young as I once was. I don’t want there to be no mistake.” He appeared to grow even more dejected. “If I’m out there, I’ll know where I am. It’s no place for a man like me here in this Town. Why, there ain’t room to breathe any more.” He took a cigar out of his yellow waistcoat pocket and offered it to Philip, who refused it instinctively, and then accepted it, moved by the pathetic effort at friendliness. The little man wanted to tell him something; he wanted to treat him as a son, to create suddenly a bond that had never existed. He held a match for the cigar and then lighted his own. “It’s like this, Philip,” he said. “I’ve been thinking it over. You don’t want to stay in this Town any more?”

“No.”

“It’s no place for a fella like you any more than it is for one like me. We’ve got to have room to breathe and think. I often think that. It’s a nasty place, this Town—no room for a fella to do as he wants ... always somebody a-watchin’ of ’im.”

Philip scarcely heard what he was saying, but he did notice the return of the haunting, half-comic accent. It was the first time that he had ever seen his father grave, the first time a serious thought had ever pierced the gay, shiny surface. And suddenly he felt a queer affection for the little man. Jason was making so great an effort that his face had turned red as a turkey-cock’s.

“It’s like this, Philip.... Why don’t you come away with me to Australia? It’s a fine life, and I’m rich out there.” He waited for a moment, and when Philip didn’t answer, he said, “You could begin all over again—like a new person. I know you could, because I did it myself ... I started all over.” Again he waited. “There’s nothing to keep you, is there? No woman?”

He always thought of women first—his father. Philip turned slowly. “Yes ... there is.”

“Does she count as much as that?”

“Yes.”

“You could marry her and take her along, couldn’t you? She ain’t a married woman, is she?”

“No.”

“She’d be likely to go with you?”

“Yes, she’d go anywhere I chose, I guess.”

“She must be the right sort.”

There was a pause, and Jason struck suddenly at the thing that had been hanging over both of them like a shadow. “Out there, you’d be where your Ma couldn’t put her nose in.”

“Oh, I’m going away.... I’m not going to stay here.”

Jason suddenly brightened. “Then come along with me. I’d even wait till you could get away. We ought to get better acquainted, Philip, and you’d like it out there.” He laid a hand suddenly on Philip’s arm. “I’ll tell you something, if you promise not to tell your Ma ... at least not till I’m gone.”

He looked searchingly at Philip, who asked, “What is it?”

“You mustn’t tell. You’ve got to promise.”

“No, I won’t tell.”

“You’ve got brothers and sisters out in Australia!”

Jason looked at him with an air of expectancy, but Philip only looked puzzled.

“What on earth do you mean by that, Pa?”

“You wouldn’t be alone out there. You see I’ve got a family there too.... You’d have brothers and sisters there.”

“But you’re married to Ma.”

“That’s all right. I ain’t a bigamist. I’ve just never been married to Dora—that’s my other wife. She knows about Em. I told her everything. I guess she always liked me so much that not being married didn’t matter.”

The little man put his head on one side. At the thought of Dora his depression seemed to vanish. As for Philip, he simply stared, failing to live up to such an announcement. It neither surprised nor shocked him, for the whole thing seemed completely unreal, as if he were holding the fantastic conversation in a dream. It was the other thing that was real—the sight of the room in disarray with Mary’s handkerchief laid on the table by the hand of Naomi ... the memory of the sordid bed with the depression in the gray coverlet.

“You don’t seem surprised,” said his father.

“No.... No.... Nothing surprises me any more. I suppose if you wanted to have a family out there, it was all right. You can’t expect a man to stop living.” (He was right then: his father had had a woman out there.)

“But you see, Philip, they’re your brothers and sisters ... your father’s children.”

Philip made an effort. “How many of them are there?”

Jason’s yellow waistcoat swelled with pride. “Three boys and two girls,” he said. “Nobody can say I haven’t done my part in helping the world along. All strapping big ones too. The youngest ... Emma ... is thirteen.”

“Emma!”

“Yes. I called her after your Ma. I always liked the name, and I always liked your Ma too, when she’s not having tantrums.”

Suddenly Philip wanted to laugh. The desire arose from a strange mixture of pain and mirth. It was ridiculous.

“The others are Jason, Henry, Hector and Bernice. It was Dora who named the others. Dora’s a wonderful woman ... like your Ma in a way, only Dora understands me.”

There was a long, sudden silence, in which Philip thought, “If I’d only done as he did, everything would have been all right. He’s happy and he’s been free ... always. I was weak and cowardly. I didn’t do one thing or the other, and now there’s no way out.”

“You see what I mean,” said Jason. “You’d have a home out there, and a family too. You wouldn’t be going alone into a new country.” He looked at his son wistfully. “You’d better come with me ... woman or no woman.”

“No, Pa ... I can’t. I’ve got to marry the woman, and I want to go to a new country ... alone.” His face was gray and drawn suddenly. “I’ve got to do it ... it’s the only thing.”

“You’d better think it over, Philip.”

“I’ve thought it over ... I’ve been doing nothing else.”

His father took up the tan derby. “And you won’t tell your Ma, will you?”

“I won’t tell her ... ever. You needn’t worry.”

“You can tell her when I’m gone ... I don’t want to face her, that’s all.”

Jason went out, all depressed once more. Philip wasn’t his boy at all. Emma had done something to him.

When he had gone, Philip sat down and began to laugh. He felt sick inside, and bruised. “Oh, my God! And I’ve got three brothers and two sisters in Australia! And that’s where he got the accent. He got it from Dora!”

28

That night he sat with Mary in the Victorian drawing-room, planning their future. It was the first time he had ever entered the house, and he found the quiet, feminine sense of order in the big room soothing and pleasant, just as Emma had found it melancholy and depressing. But he hadn’t come to her to be comforted and petted, as he had always done before: he was a different Philip, pathetic, and yet hard, kindly, yet cold in a way, and aloof. He did not speak of the stable, nor even of Naomi, and Mary, watching him, thought, “Perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps after all he’s been sensible and put all that behind him,” and then, in the next moment, she saw him close his eyes suddenly. She knew what he was seeing ... that room in the boarding-house where Naomi had died. “They ought never to have let him go there,” she thought. “If any of them had any common sense, they wouldn’t have let him do it.” But she knew, too, that no one could have stopped him. He had gone because he saw it as his duty, a kind of penance: he was the sort who would never spare himself anything....

And, reaching over, she touched his hand, but there was no response. After a time, he said, “It’s all right, Mary. It’s just a headache. I’ve been having them lately.”

They couldn’t marry and stay there in the Town with every eye watching them, waiting for some bit of scandal: but Philip seemed obsessed with the idea that they must be married at once. At first she thought it might be because he wanted her so much, and then she saw that it was for some other reason, which she could not discover.

She asked him why they must hurry, and he said, “Don’t you want to be married? Don’t you care any longer?”

“Of course I do, Philip. You ought to know that.”

“Besides, I can’t bear staying here any longer.”

But even that, she felt, wasn’t the real reason. She did not press him, and together they planned what they were to do. The lease on Mary’s house was finished in a month, and she could go away with her sister-in-law, Rachel, and the two children, to Kentucky, where a sister of her mother’s lived. And then, quietly, Philip could send the twins there, and come himself. He would bring old Molly to help care for them.

“Rachel loves children,” said Mary, “and she’ll never be separated from mine. She’d like two more in the household.” (Only she wished they weren’t Naomi’s children ... they would always be reminding him of Naomi. It seemed impossible to be rid of Naomi. The shadow of her was always there, coming between them.)

After a long silence, she said suddenly, “You do want to marry me, don’t you, Philip?”

As he answered, it seemed to him that he came back from a great distance. “Marry you? Marry you? Why, of course I do. What have you been thinking of? What have I just been saying?”

“I don’t want it to be because you think you have to ... because of that night at the stable.”

“No ... no ... of course not. I want to marry you. I couldn’t think of not doing it. Where did you get such an idea?”

“I don’t know ... only you’re so queer. It’s as if I didn’t make any difference any more ... as if you could do without me.”

For a moment he turned cross. “That’s nonsense! And you know it. I can’t help being like this ... I’ll be better later on.”

“I don’t know.”

But he did not try to convince her. He simply sat staring into the shadows of the old room and at last he said, “And then when everything is settled, I want to go back to Africa ... to Megambo.”

“You can’t do that, Philip ... you mustn’t. It would be like killing yourself. You can’t go back where there’s fever.” She wanted to cry out wildly, desperately, against the vague, dark force, which she felt closing in about her.

“That’s all nonsense,” he said. “Doctors don’t know everything. I shan’t get the fever. I’ve got to go back. I want to go back there to paint ... I’ve got to go back.”

“You hated the place. You told me so.”

“And you said once that I really liked it. You told me that some day I’d go back. Do you remember the day we were walking ... a few days after I came home? You were right. I’ve got to go back. I’m like that queer Englishwoman.”

“You won’t go ... leaving me alone.”

“It wouldn’t be for long ... a year, maybe.”

She did not answer him at once. “A year,” she thought. “A year! But that’s long enough. Too long. Anything could happen in a year. He might....” Looking at him as he lay back in the old horsehair sofa, he became unbearably precious to her. She seemed to see him for the first time—the thin, drawn, tormented face, the dark skin, the high cheekbones, the thin lips, even the tired eyelids. He didn’t know she was watching him. He wasn’t perhaps even thinking of her. He looked young, like a boy ... the way he had been long ago at twenty, when he was still hypnotized by Emma. She thought, “I can’t lose him now just when we’ve a chance of being happy. I can’t. I can’t. He’s mine ... my Philip.” He was free now of his mother, but he was still a captive.

She took his hand and pressed it against her cheek. “Philip, my Philip,” she said. Opening his eyes, he looked at her for a moment lazily, and then smiled. It was the old shy smile she had seen on that solitary walk into the country. And then he said slowly what Naomi had once said—“I’m tired, Mary dear, that’s all....” She drew his head to her shoulder and began stroking it slowly. She thought, “It’s odd. My grandmother would turn in her grave if she knew. Or maybe she’d understand. He’s been mine always, since the beginning. I mean to keep him.”

And yet she knew that he was in that very moment escaping her. She knew again the terrifying sensation of fighting some dark and shadowy thing which she could neither see nor feel nor touch.

“Philip,” she said softly. “Philip.”

“Yes.”

“I’m going with you to Africa.”

A little pause, and then—“You’d hate it there. You’d be miserable.”

She saw suddenly that he had wanted to go alone, to hide himself away. She was hurt and she thought, “I can’t let him do it. I’ve got to fight to save us both.”

Aloud she said, “I wouldn’t mind anything, Philip, but I’ve got to go with you. That’s all I care about.”

“There’s the children.”

“I’ve thought of that. I’ve thought of everything. We can leave them with Rachel and old Molly.” She would make the trip a lark, a holiday. She would care for him every moment, and even see that he took the proper drugs. She would fight the fever herself. Nothing could touch him if she were there to protect him. She could put her own body and soul between him and death.

“You’re sure you want to go, Mary?”

“Of course I’m sure. It’s the only thing I want ... never to be separated from you again. Nothing else makes any difference.”

But this time she did not ask him whether he really wanted her. He smiled at her again. “A poor, weak fool like me doesn’t deserve such a woman.”

She kissed him, thinking, “Yes, my dear, you’re poor and weak, and a bit of a fool, but it doesn’t make any difference. Maybe that’s only why I love you so much that it breaks my heart.”

For a moment, it seemed to her that he again belonged to her, body and soul, as he had belonged to her on that terrible, beautiful night in the stable. She knew now. She understood that strange, sad happiness that always seemed to envelop the wicked Lily Shane.

29

When he told Emma the next day that he meant to marry Mary Conyngham, she turned suddenly white about the lips, and for once she was silent for a time before speaking. She must have seen that she had lost him forever, that she had lost even her grandchildren; but she had never yet surrendered weakly and she did not surrender now. She held her tongue, moved perhaps by the memory of Jason’s, “You never learn anything, Em. You’d better leave the boy alone, if you ever expect to see him again.”

She only said, “You might have waited a respectable time, so people wouldn’t talk. Why, Naomi’s hardly cold in her grave. You certainly don’t owe her much, but....”

“No one need know. We’re going away. We’ll keep it a secret if you like.”

She softened a little. “Why couldn’t you wait a little time?” (Mary might die or he might grow tired of her, if he would only wait.)

He looked at her steadily. “I’ve waited too long already, years too long.”

“And now that your Pa’s going back to Australia for a time, I’ll be alone ... I won’t have anybody. It’s hard when you’re beginning to be old to find your life hasn’t come to anything ... all the struggle gone for nothing.”

He saw that she was beginning to “work herself up” in the old fashion that she always used as a last resort. He knew the signs, and he didn’t care any longer. She couldn’t touch him that way. The trick had worn itself out, and he saw her with a strange, cruel clarity. One thing, however, did soften him ... “now that your Pa is going back to Australia for a time....” She didn’t know that she would never see Jason again.

“I’ll come sometimes to visit you,” he said. “You won’t lose me.”

“But it’s not the same, Philip. When a girl marries, she still belongs to her mother, but when a boy marries, he is lost forever.”

“But, Ma, I was married before.”

“But that didn’t count. Naomi didn’t make any difference. She was always a sort of poor thing.”

PART FOUR
THE JUNGLE