And as the fumes of the alcohol filled his brain, the impulse to wash himself grew stronger and stronger. He came to feel vaguely that there were other things beside the soot and sweat that he wanted to wash away, and slowly he knew what it was. He wanted to wash away with cold water the memory of the night before, the fantastic memory of what had happened with Naomi.
Finke and Sokoleff had forgotten him. The one had gone off to stand by the bar talking red revolution, and the other was shouting wildly to stop “that Gott-damned piano.” The room seemed to expand and then contract, growing vast and cavernous like the Mill shed and then pressing in upon him, squeezing the horrible noise tight against his ear-drums. He felt sick and filled with disgust. Suddenly he knew that he was drunk and he knew that he hadn’t meant to be. It had happened without his knowing it. He was drunk, and last night he had slept with a harlot. Oh, he knew now. It sickened him. It might just as well have been a harlot, one of those women out of Hennessey’s shuttered houses. It would have been better, because he wouldn’t have to go back to a woman like that: he’d never see her again. And he wouldn’t have that queer little knot, like a cramp in a weary muscle, that was almost hatred for Naomi.
The drunker he got, the clearer it all seemed. And then suddenly his tired brain gave way. He fell forward and buried his face in his hands. He knew now and he began to weep drunkenly. He knew now, because he had learned in a strange way during the darkness of the slate-colored house. He knew why it was that he had had to see Mary Conyngham; he knew why he had walked with her into the open country. He was in love with Mary Conyngham; he had been in love with her ever since he could remember. And it was Naomi who shared his bed.
Disgust enveloped him in physical sickness, and the old desire to wash himself in cold water returned passionately. What Krylenko had said was true. “You ain’t like these two—just a couple of hogs.” Krylenko knew with that shining look in his blue eyes. Krylenko had his Giulia, and he, Philip, had nothing ... less than nothing, for he had bound himself in a terrible, sickening fashion to Naomi. It was all horrible. He was drunk and he wanted suddenly to die.
Some one touched his shoulder, and he raised his head. It was Hennessey, looking down at him out of the cold blue eyes.
“Look here,” he said. “You’re drunk enough. Get out of here and go home. Your Ma is Emma Downes, and I don’t want to get mixed up with a hell-cat like her.”
For a second Philip was blinded by rage. He wanted to kill Hennessey for the insult to his mother. He tried to get up, but he only knocked his glass on the floor, and then fell down beside it. He tried again to rise, and then Hennessey, cursing, bent over and picked him up as if he’d been a child, and carried him, plowing through the heat and confusion, out the swinging doors. In the open air, he placed him on his feet, holding him upright for a moment till he got a sense of his balance. Then, giving him a little push, he said, “There now. Run along home to your Ma like a good little boy. Tell her not to let her little tin Jesus come back again to Hennessey’s place if she don’t want him messed up too much to be a good missionary.”
14
In the slate-colored house, the Minerva Circle was seated on the collapsible chairs from McTavish’s, listening to a paper by Mrs. Wilbert Phipps on her visit to the Mammoth Caves of Kentucky. To overcome the boredom, some thought about their children and their husbands, or even the hired girl, filling in the time until the dreary reading was over, and they might fall back again into gossip and recipes and children’s ailments. It was the price they paid for the honor which came to each of them every eighteen months of standing before the Minerva Circle and reading a paper to which no one listened.
The folding-doors between the parlor and the sitting-room had been opened and those leading from the parlor to the hall were closed. Upstairs Naomi lay in bed with her hair still in steel curlers: she was too ill to come down. She had wept hysterically all the night and most of the morning. When Emma had tried to comfort her with vague, soothing words about matrimony, nothing had made any difference. It was only Aunt Mabelle’s visit, colored by great chunks of wisdom and frankness drawn from her own experience and conferences with many other married ladies upon a subject which she always found absorbing, that reduced Naomi at length to a calmer state of mind. And Mabelle was sitting by her now, nursing the baby, and pouring forth details of her own history, in an effort to forestall fresh outbursts.