The Way of the Strong

by Ridgwell Cullum

His thoughts drifted on to Phyllis. She had not understood when he told her. How could she? She was clean, she was wholesome, she was born in wedlock. She—but he turned impatiently from the drift of his thoughts. He could never go back to her. She, like his mother, was a part of that life which was over and done with. He belonged to another world now. The underworld.

The underworld. But why—why should he live on, part of a world he hated and loathed? Why should he permit the cruel injustice of such a fate? There was a way to defeat this ruthless enemy. Why not adopt it? Why live? He had no desire to do so. He had the means at his disposal. He had money with which to procure a gun. Why go to Toronto at all? Why show his shaven head to the world, an object for that hateful, pointing finger?

For a while the idea pleased him. It was such a simple remedy for all his sufferings. He had passed out of Phyllis's life, so why risk the finger of scorn being pointed at her through the fact of his existence. And his mother. His gentle mother. He caught his breath. The finger of scorn would never be a burden to her. She was not like others. Her memory still retained the faintest sheen of light amid his darkness. He knew, even in those dark moments, that his self-inflicted death would utterly destroy her life. No. He was condemned to this under——

He remembered his unopened letter, and drew it from his pocket. He had not looked at it before. It had never occurred to him that he had any connection still with a world beyond the gray stone prison walls.

Now he looked at the envelope, and felt the hot blood of shame sweep up to his tired brain as he saw that it bore his mother's handwriting. He opened it reluctantly enough.

Folded carefully inside a number of sheets of closely written paper was a large sum of money. He took it out and examined it. There were five thousand dollars. Most of it was in bills of large denomination, but on the top, with careful forethought, there were half a dozen which ran from ten dollars down to one dollar bills. He understood, and the careful attention only left him the more pained.

With these was a smaller envelope. It was addressed in Phyllis's well-known hand. This, with the money, he bestowed in an inner pocket and proceeded to read his mother's letter first.

But the pathos of it, the breaking heart, which was sufficiently apparent in every line of that long story she had to tell, passed him utterly by, and left him unmoved. Just now he had no sympathy for anything or anybody in the world but himself, and it would have needed the heart of a Puritan to have blamed him. Yet his reading was not without interest in spite of the hardness of his mood.

It was a long, long story that Monica had to tell him, and it was full of that detail, rambling detail, inspired by the knowledge that she no longer had anything to conceal, the knowledge that the truth could be indulged in, in a manner that had been so long denied her. From the very outset she told him the real facts of his birth, and it was with something approaching regret that he learned that she, Monica, was not his mother. Somehow the shame of his birth, as it had reflected upon her, was forgotten. Somehow the stigma seemed to belong to him solely.

In her story she carried him through the old, old days of their life together, reminding him of trials and struggles never before fully explained. Tribulations which pointed for him her devotion and loyalty to the dead and the living.