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.”