“O the Golden, Glowing Morning!Stars above and Stars adorning!”
“O the Golden, Glowing Morning!Stars above and Stars adorning!”
“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 thesheets 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 ReverendCastor 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, “Itreallywouldn’t open for me. Itreallywouldn’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, thatwaswhat I call a real choir practice. We’ve always needed some one like you, Naomi, to put spirit intothem. 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.
Thesuspicion 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, allsorts 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 therealPhilip, 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 sufferingalone 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 wouldsave 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. Shewouldact, no matter what it cost her. Shewouldsave 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 theflames 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 heisthe 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. “Iwasleaving 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 onewhom 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 madedemands 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. Shehadto 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.
Philiphad 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 theLabor 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 theGovernor 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 evenasked 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 hehadseen 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, “Ididlook 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’vegotto 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 nightnot 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 himfor 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 andglamour 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. Hehadto 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 shehad 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.”
Itwas 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 opena 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 morningwhen 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? TheUnited States Governmentitself?” 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. “Ididget 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 thatmighthappen.” 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, Imighthave 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 thatmightbe true. Such thingshadhappened. She could trust him, too, to make the tale a convincing one: the only danger lay in the possibility of his doing ittoowell. 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 gethome.” 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 theLabor 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 himrecounting 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.
Itseemed 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 wasthick 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 peoplearelike 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 theLadies’ 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 charactergone 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 fatherwaslying. He was creating a whole story that wasn’t true, and he was enjoying himself immensely. If itwasa 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....”