Hewas sitting one afternoon in Krylenko’s room working on a view of the Flats which included the oilycreek, a row of battered houses, and a glimpse of furnaces. For two days he had worked on it, and out of the lines and color there began to emerge something which he recognized with a faint sense of excitement as the thing he had been searching for. It grew slowly with each stroke of the brush, a quality which he could not have described, but something which he felt passionately. He was beginning a little to succeed, to do something which he would want to show, not to the world, but to ... to ... Mary Conyngham. He would send it to her as a gift, without a word. Certainly she wouldn’t mind that. She would understand it as she understood all else. As he worked, his passion for painting and his love for Mary Conyngham became in a strange fashion blended and inextricable. It was as if he were talking to her with the line and color, telling her all the choked, overpowering, hot emotions that were kindled when he thought of her.
Presently, as the light began to fail, he put down his brushes, and, taking up his worn coat and hat, he closed the door to return to the slate-colored house. In that sudden exultation, even the prospect of encountering Naomi did not depress him. Feeling his way along the greasy hallway smelling of boiled cabbage and onions, he descended the stairs and stepped into the street. It was that hour between daylight and darkness, when sharp contours lose their hard angles, and ugliness fades mysteriously into beauty—the hour in the Flats when all the world changed magically from the squalor of daylight into the glowing splendor of the night.
Outside, the street was alive with dirty, underfed children. There seemed to be myriads of them, alldrawn like moths out of the darkness towards the spots of light beneath each street-lamp. A great, ugly Ukranian sat on the steps rocking gently and playing a Little Russian song on a wheezy concertina.
For a moment, while Philip stood in the shadow of the doorway, looking down the long vista of the hot, overcrowded street, he felt again the old, poignant sense of the richness, the color that was born simply out of being allowed to live. And then suddenly he became aware of a familiar presence close at hand, of a voice heard in the twilight above the clamor of children, which made him feel suddenly ill.
Before the doorway of the next house he could see the dim figure of Irene Shane, a pale gray figure which seemed at times almost a ghost. The other woman he could not see in the hard reality, but he saw with all the painful clearness of an image called up by the sound of her soft voice. It was Mary Conyngham calling on some sick baby. He listened, hiding in the shadow, while a Polish woman talked to her in broken English. Then suddenly she turned away and with Irene Shane passed so near to the doorway that he could have touched her.
She was gone, quickly, lost in the crowd. He hadn’t run after her and cried out what was in his heart, because he was afraid. His whole body was shaking; and he burned with a fire that was at once agony and delight, for the thing that had happened with Naomi made this other pain the more real and terrible.
For ten minutes he sat on the step of Krylenko’s boarding-house, his head in his hands. When at last he rose to climb the hill, all the sense of exhilaration had flowed away, leaving him limp and exhausted. Forweeks he had worked twelve hours a day in the Mills, painted while there was still daylight, and slept the little time that remained; and now he knew suddenly that he was horribly tired. His body that was so hard and supple seemed to have grown soft and heavy, his legs were like sacks of potatoes. Near the top of the hill, before the undertaking parlor of McTavish, he felt so ill that he had suddenly to sit down. And while he sat there he understood, with a cold horror, what had happened to him. It was the Megambo fever coming back. The street began to lose its colors, and fade into shadows of yellow before his eyes.
Behind him the door opened, and he heard a booming voice asking, “Anything the matter, Philip? You look sick.”
Philip told McTavish what it was, and felt a feeble desire to laugh at the thought of being succored by the undertaker.
“I know,” said McTavish. “It used to come back on me in the same way. I got a touch of it in Nicaragua, when I was a boy.” Here he halted long enough to grunt, for he had bent down and was lifting Philip in his corpulent embrace bodily from the steps. He chuckled, “I was a wild ’un then. It’s only since I got so damned fat that the fever left me.”
He put Philip in one of the chairs before the stove. There was no fire in it now, but the door was left open for the old rips to spit into the ashes.
“You look sick—yellow as paint.”
Philip tried to grin and began to shiver.
“It’s nothing. I’ve often felt like this.” The memory of the old fever took possession of him, setting his teeth on edge at the thought of the chill-hot horrorsand all the phantasmagoria of jungle life which it invoked. Out of the terror of sickness, one thought remained clear—that perhaps this was the best way out of everything, to die here in the chair and let McTavish prepare what remained of him for the grave. He wouldn’t then be a nuisance to any one, and Naomi, free, could go back to Megambo.
McTavish was pouring whisky down his throat, saying, “That’ll make you stop shaking.” And slowly warmth began to steal back. He felt dizzy, but a little stronger.
“I’ll take you home,” said McTavish, standing off and looking at him. “You know a fellow like you oughtn’t to be working in the Mills. Why, man, you’re thin as a fence-rail. I’ve been watching you when you went past—getting thinner and thinner every day. And you’re beginning to look like an old man. A fellow of your age ought to be getting drunk and giving the girls a time. I wish to God I was twenty-six again.”
He finished with a great booming laugh, which was meant to be reassuring, but which Philip, even through the haze of illness, knew was meant to hide his alarm. He gave Philip another drink, and asked suddenly, “What’s the matter with you, anyway? There’s something wrong. Why, any fool can see that.” Philip didn’t answer him, and he added, “You don’t mean to go back to Africa. That’s it, ain’t it? I guessed that long ago, in spite of everything your Ma had to say. Well, if you was to go back like this, it’d be the end of you, and I propose telling your Ma so. I knew her well enough when she was a girl, though we don’t hold much with one another now.”
Philip suddenly felt too ill to speak to any one, to explain anything. McTavish had lifted him up and was carrying him toward the door, “Why you don’t weigh no more than a woman—and a little woman at that.”
He felt himself being lifted into McTavish’s buggy. The fat man kept one arm about him, and with the other drove the horses, which on occasions pulled his hearse. At length, after what seemed to Philip hours, they drew up before the slate-colored house.
It was Emma herself who opened the door. McTavish, the debaucher of young men, she saw, had got Philip drunk, and was delivering him to her like a corpse.
“What does this mean?” she asked.
Philip managed to say feebly, “I haven’t been drinking.”
McTavish, still carrying him, forced his way past her into the hall. “Where do you want to put him? You’ve got a pretty sick boy here, and the sooner you know it the better.”
They carried him upstairs and laid him on his and Naomi’s bed. Naomi was in the room, and Mabelle was with her, and as they entered, she got up with a wild flutter of alarm, while McTavish explained. Philip asked for water, which Naomi went to fetch, and McTavish led Emma with him into the hall.
Downstairs, they faced each other—two middle-aged people, born to be enemies by every facet of their characters; yet, oddly enough, McTavish had once been a suitor for Emma’s hand in those far-off days when Emma had chosen such a hopeless mate as Jason Downes. “Sometimes, drawing deep out of his own experience, the philosophic McTavish had wondered howon earth he had ever fallen in love with Emma, or how she had come to be in turn the abject slave of such an amiable scamp as Downes. It made no sense, that thing which got hold of you, brain and body, in such a tyrannical fashion. (He was thinking all this again, as he stood facing the ruffled Emma beneath the cold glow of the green Moorish light.)
“Look here, Em,” he was saying, “that boy has got to have a little peace. You let him alone for a time.”
“What do you mean? What does a man like you, John McTavish, know about such things?”
The fat undertaker saw in a swift flash that the invincible Emma was not only ruffled, but frightened.
“Well, you know what I mean. The boy ain’t like you. That’s where you’ve always made a mistake, Em ... in thinking everybody is like yourself. He’s a bundle of nerves—that boy—and sensitive. Anybody with half an eye can see it.”
“I ought to know my boy.” She began to grow dramatic. “My own flesh ... that I gave birth to ... I ought to know what’s good for him, without having to be told.”
McTavish remained calm, save for an odd wave of hatred for this woman he had desired thirty years ago. “That’s all right. You ought to know, Em, but you don’t. You’d better let him alone ... or you’ll be losing him ... too.”
The last word he uttered after a little pause, as if intentionally he meant to imply things about the disappearance and death of Mr. Downes. She started to speak, and then, thinking better of it, checked herself, buttoned her lips tightly, and opened the front door with an ominous air.
“No, I ain’t going till I’ve finished,” he was saying. “I know you, Em. I’ve known you a long time, and I’m telling you that if you love that boy you’ll stop tormenting him ... you’ll do it for your own good. If he gets well, I think I’ll take a hand myself.”
He went through the door, but Emma remained there, looking after the fat, solid form until it climbed into the buggy, and drove off, the vehicle swaying and rocking beneath the weight of his three hundred odd pounds. She was frightened, for she felt the earth slipping away from under her feet as it had done once before, a long time ago. The whole affair was slipping away, out of her control. It was like finding herself suddenly in quicksand.
Upstairs in the darkened room, Aunt Mabelle, left alone with Philip, pulled her rocking-chair to the side of the bed. She had news, she thought, which would cheer him, perhaps even make him feel better.
“Philip,” she said softly. “Philip.” He turned his head, and she continued, “Philip, I’ve got good news for you. Are you listening?”
Philip nodded weakly.
“Naomi is going to have a little baby ... a little baby. Think of that!”
She waited, and Philip said nothing. He did not even move.
“Aren’t you glad, Philip? Think of it ... a little baby.”
He whispered, “Yes ... of course ... I’m glad,” and turned his face into the pillow once more.
Aunt Mabelle, excited by her news, went on, “You won’t have to wait long, because she’s already about four months along. She didn’t want to talk about it.She wasn’t even sure what was the matter, but I dragged it out of her. I thought she was looking kind of peaked.”
Then the door opened, and Emma and Naomi came in together. Naomi crossed to the bed, and, bending over Philip, said, “Here’s the water, Philip.” He stirred and she put her arm under his head while he drank. It seemed to him that all his body was alive with fire.
When he had finished, Naomi did an extraordinary thing. She flung herself down and burying her head against his thin chest, she began to sob wildly, crying out, shamelessly before Emma and Mabelle, “You mustn’t be sick, Philip. You mustn’t die ... I couldn’t live without you now. You’re all I’ve got.... No ... no ... you mustn’t die.” She clung to him with terrifying and shameless passion. “I couldn’t live without you ... I couldn’t ... I couldn’t ... I’ll never ... leave you.” Her long, pale hair came unfastened and fell about her shoulders, covering them both. “I’ll never leave you. I’ll do whatever you want.”
It was Emma who seized her by force and dragged her off him; Emma who, shaking her, said in a voice that was horrible in its hatred, “You fool! Do you want to make him worse? Do you want to kill him?”
And Naomi cried out, “He’s mine now. He’s mine! You tried to poison him against me. You can’t take him away from me any more. He belongs to me!”
It was horrible, but to Philip the scene had no reality; it came to him through the haze of his fever, as if it had been only an interlude of delirium.
When Naomi grew a little more calm, Aunt Mabelle said to her in a whisper, “I told him.”
Naomi, still sobbing, asked, “Was he glad?”
“As pleased as Punch,” said Aunt Mabelle. “It always pleases a man. It makes him feel big.”
On the bed Philip lay shivering and burning. The room appeared to swell to an enormous size and then slowly to contract again till it was no bigger than a coffin. After a time, it seemed to him that he was already dead and that the three women who moved about the room, undressing him, fussing with the window-curtain, talking and sobbing, were simply three black figures preparing him for the grave. A faint haze of peace settled slowly over him. He would be able to rest now. He would never see them again. He was free.
Itwas not, after all, the old Megambo fever, but typhoid which had been lurking for months in the filth of the Flats. Irene Shane knew of it and Mary Conyngham and one or two doctors who were decent enough to take cases for which there was little chance either of pay or glory. It was typhoid that had brought Mary and Irene to talk to the Polish woman in the doorway next to Krylenko’s boarding-house. Typhoid was a word that existed in an aura of terror; a disease which might strike any of the Hill people. So long as it happened in the Flats (and the fever lurked there winter and summer) it did not matter. But with Philip it struck at the people on the hills. The news spread quickly. There was another case and then another and another. The newspapers began to talk of it and suddenly the Town learned that there were sixty casesin the Flats and that eleven Hunkies and Dagoes were already dead.
When Emma first heard that the illness was typhoid, she snorted and said, “Of course! What could you expect? He got it working in the Flats among those Hunkies and Dagoes. They throw all their slops right into the streets. They ought to be shut off and a wall placed around them. They always have typhoid down there. Some day they’ll have a real epidemic and then people will wake up to what it means—bringing such animals into a good clean country!”
The doctors, summoned by Emma in her terror, told her that Philip’s case was doubly serious because he had already had fever twice in Megambo and because his whole body was thin and sick. He fell into a state of stupor and remained thus. He seemed to have no resistance.
For days terror racked Emma and Naomi. Each of them prayed, secretly and passionately, begging God to spare the life of the man who became suddenly the only possession in the world which they cherished. And out of their fight there was born a kind of hostility which made their earlier distrust of each other fade into oblivion. There were hours and days when they scarcely addressed each other, when it seemed that the slightest disagreement might hurl them into open warfare. Mabelle was always in the house, moving about, comforting Naomi and exasperating Emma by her sloppy ways.
Indeed, the perpetual sight of Mabelle and her squalid overfed brat in her neat house filled Emma with a distaste to be equaled only by such a calamity as the discovery of vermin in one of her beds. But shefound herself suddenly delivered into Mabelle’s hands; for Mabelle was the only person who could “do anything with” Naomi. If Emma approached her, she grew tense and hysterical. And it was, of course, impossible to think of ridding herself of both: you couldn’t turn from your home the woman who was to be the mother of your grandchild.
Mabelle she hated, too, for her passionate and morbid absorption in the subjects of love and childbirth; she seemed to Emma to stand as a symbol of obscenity, who must as such have tortured her brother Elmer. She was a symbol of all that side of life which Emma had succeeded in putting out of her mind for so many years.
But there was one other person who had the power of calming Naomi. This was the Reverend Castor, who, since Naomi’s condition prevented her from appearing in the choir, came himself two or three times a week to comfort her and inquire after her husband. Except for Mabelle, he seemed to be Naomi’s only friend.
“He is,” she told Emma, “a very sympathetic man, and he reminds me of my father. He is just the same build and bald in the same way.”
The Reverend Castor had a beautiful voice, low and mellow and filled with rich inflections which Mrs. Wilbert Phipps had once spoken of as an “Æolian harp.” He could have had, people said, a great success as an Evangelist, but he was so devoted to his bedridden wife that he would not leave her, even for such a career. The church, they said, was indeed fortunate to keep him, even though it was at the price of his own misfortune. Words of condolence and courage spokenin the rich voice had a strange power of rousing the emotions. Once or twice Emma had come upon him sitting in the twilight of the parlor talking to Naomi of illness and faith, of death and fortitude, in so moving a fashion that the tears came into her eyes and a lump into her throat. And he was a good man—a saint. One felt it while talking to him. He was a man who believed, and had devoted his whole life to the care of a sick wife.
Sometimes Mabelle lingered long after the hour when she should have been in her kitchen preparing supper for Elmer. There were in the Reverend Castor’s voice intimations of things which she had never found in her own chilly husband.
As Naomi’s time drew nearer, the conversation of Mabelle grew proportionately more and more obstetrical.
They compared symptoms and Mabelle’s talk was constantly sprinkled with such remarks as, “When I was carrying Jimmy,” or, “When Ethel was under way.” She even gave it as her opinion that Naomi, from the symptoms, might be having twins.
She appeared to have a strange, demoralizing effect upon Naomi, for the girl came presently to spend all the day in a wrapper, never bothering to dress when she rose. And Emma discovered that for days at a time she did not even trouble to take off the metal bands which she used for curling her long, straight hair. The two of them sat all day long in rocking-chairs while little Jimmy, who was beginning to walk a little, crept from one piece of furniture to another. He had already ruined one corner of the Brussels carpet in the parlor.
Meanwhile, in the great walnut bed Philip lay moredead than alive. There were long periods when he recognized no one and simply lay as if made of stone, white, transparent, with a thin, pinched look about the temples. The lines seemed to have faded from his face, giving him a pathetic, boyish look. The only life lingered in the great dark eyes which in his fever were larger and more burning than ever. The doctors who came and went sometimes shook their heads and expressed belief that if the patient could be got to show any interest in the life about him there was hope. But he appeared to have no desire to recover. Even in those moments when his wife gave way and, weeping, had to be taken from the room, he only stared at her without speaking.
Failing to take into account the terrible vitality which came to him from Emma and the toughness of that father whom none of them had ever seen, they marveled that he could go on living at all. Yet week after week passed when he grew no better or worse. None of them knew, of course, about Mary Conyngham and how the thought of her sometimes came to him and filled him with a fierce desire to live. When his sick brain cleared for a little while, he knew with a strange certainty that he could not die leaving her behind, because in some way life would be left incomplete. It was a thought which troubled him, as he was troubled when he could not get a picture to come right because he was not yet a good painter.
And then one day Emma’s own doctor took her aside in the hall and said, “There’s one thing you must understand, Mrs. Downes. No matter how much your son wants to return to Africa, you mustn’t let him go. If he gets well and tries to go back, it will be the endof him. I know he’ll want to go back, but it’ll be suicide to send him where there’s fever.”
When the doctor had gone, Emma put on her hat and jacket and went for a walk. It was a thing she never did, for there were no moments in her busy life to be wasted simply in walking; but there seemed no other way to find solitude in a world filled with Naomi and Mabelle, little Jimmy and the trained nurse. She had to be alone, to think things out.
She saw clearly enough that, whatever happened, there was now no chance of Philip’s going back to Africa and the knowledge filled her with a blank, inexplicable feeling of frustration. But after she had grown more calm, she began to feel more like herself and thus more able to cope with her troubles.
Philip could not go back, and he was to have a child. But if he could not go back to duty, neither, she saw, must he be allowed to return to the Flats. The one, surely, was just as dangerous as the other, and the Mills carried with them a sense of failure and disgrace. No, up to now she had been patient in the belief that he would return to his senses; but the time for patience had passed.
The old feeling of her own strength and righteousness began to return to her in great surging waves of confidence.
John McTavish! What did he know of her husband’s weakness? Or Philip’s weakness? How could he know that both of them were the sort who had to be guided? John McTavish! (She snorted at the thought.) A waster, a vulgar man, about whom gathered the riffraff of the Town. What had he ever done for the good of any one?
She had a sudden desire to see Moses Slade. Somehow she felt he’d understand her problem and approve her strong attitude. There was a man who did things. A distinguished man! A man who’d made his mark! Not a good-for-nothing like John McTavish.
The old possibility of marrying Moses Slade kept stealing back over her. Through pride and a faint sense of being a woman rejected, she tried not to think of it, but it was no good trying to put it out of her mind because it was always stealing back upon her unawares. Perhaps if she sent him a postcard, a pretty view of the new park, it would serve to remind him of her without being, properly speaking, a piece of forwardness. The temptation kept pricking her. It would be splendid to be the wife of a Congressman, and it would solve the difficulty of Philip. She could turn over the restaurant to him and Naomi.
Nearly two hours passed before she returned to the house, but in that time all life seemed to have become subdued and conquered once more. It had all been worked out. She sat down at once and wrote a perfectly impersonal message to Congressman Slade on the back of a picture postcard of the new monument to General Tecumseh Sherman that adorned dubiously the new park. On the way to the restaurant she posted it. As she left the house she heard Naomi sobbing alone in the corner of the darkened parlor, and a great wave of contempt swept over her for people who were not strong enough to manage their own lives.
On the same night the Reverend Castor led his congregation, or a fraction of it, in addressing to the Lord words of supplication and entreaty on behalf of “their brother Philip Downes, who lay at the point ofdeath.” He begged that Philip, who had sacrificed his health, might be spared “to carry on the noble work among the black and sinful children of the great African continent.”
As he prayed, with arms extended and face upturned to heaven, the fine nose, the shapely dome of his head and imposing expanse of his chest, took on a classic, moving dignity. As the sonorous voice, trembling with emotion, rolled over the heads of his flock more than one woman felt herself slipping dimly into the grip of strange disturbing emotions.
He prayed longer than usual, painting for the Lord a moving and luxurious picture of the trials suffered by His servant; in Old Testament phrases he finished by calling the attention of God to the suffering of Naomi, who sat at home, ill herself, praying for the life of the husband she loved with such noble and selfless devotion.
When he had finished, there were tears in all eyes, and Emma, seated near the back, was sobbing in a warm mist of suffering and glory. In some way his eloquence had purified them all. It was as if each one of them had passed with Philip through the flame of suffering. They felt purged and clean and full of noble thoughts, almost ready at last to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
The sound of “Amens!” trembled in the air and before it had died away completely, Miss Swarmish, an old maid with a mustache, struck out several loud chords on the tinny piano and in her booming voice led them in singing,Throw out the Life Line!They sang with militant enthusiasm, their voices echoing in the vast, damp basement of the church. It was an oblique glorification of Philip, the renegade, who lay unconscious in the slate-colored house. It was as if they, too, were forcing him back.
When they had finished the orgy of music and the Benediction was spoken, the usual stir was silenced suddenly by Emma’s rich voice. She had risen to her feet at the back of the room and was standing with her hands clasped on the back of the chair before her.
“Brothers and sisters,” she was saying, in a voice rich with emotion, “I know that all of you feel for me in the illness of my son. I have felt for some time that I should speak to you about him” (here, overcome by feeling, she coughed and hesitated) “to make an answer to the talk that has come to my ear from time to time. I feel that to-night—to-night is the time—the occasion ordained by God. I have very little to say. You know that his health has been wrecked forever by his work among our ignorant, sinful brothers in Africa. He is lying at the point of death. Your prayers have touched me to the depths of my heart, and if it is God’s will, surely they will help towards his recovery.” (Here she hesitated once more.) “People wondered why he came back. It was because his health was ruined. People wondered why he went into the Flats to work. It was because he wanted to know the life there. He has been through a great spiritual struggle. He fell ill because he was tormented by the wish to go back to his post, to those ignorant black men who live in darkness. If he recovers ...” (her voice broke suddenly) “if he recovers ... he can never go back. The doctors have told me that it would be nothing short of suicide. He has given his health, perhaps his life, in carrying forward our great purpose of sending the light to heathen.”
She hesitated for a moment as if she meant to say more, and then sat down abruptly, too overcome for speech. For a moment there was silence, and then one by one women began to gather about her, sobbing, to offer comfort. It was a touching scene, in which Emma managed to control herself after a time. Surrounding her, they moved out of the church in a sort of phalanx. Two or three of them even followed her a little way down the street. But it was her brother, Elmer, who accompanied her home. In his stiff, cold way he proposed to let bygones be bygones.
“At a time like this,” he said, “it’s not right for a brother and sister to quarrel.” And then, after an awkward silence, “I’ve no doubt that when Philip is well again, he’ll come to his senses and behave himself.”
He stopped at the slate-colored house for Aunt Mabelle, who had come over to sit with Naomi, and before they left, all of them, even Naomi, seemed to have changed in some way, to have grown more cheerful, as if the Heavenly joy of the prayer-meeting still clung like perfume to their very garments. Things, they all felt, were beginning to work themselves out.
Whenhe had closed the roll-top desk in his study and locked the door after him, the Reverend Castor turned his steps toward the parsonage, still lost in the exalted mood which, descending miraculously upon the congregation, had risen to a climax in the noble words of Mrs. Downes. There was a lump in his throat when he thought of the goodness of women like her. She’d had a hard life, bringing up her boy, feeding and clothing him, and finding time, nevertheless, to care for his soul and give herself to church work. It was women like her who helped you to keep your faith, no matter what discouragements arose.
For a moment, a suspicion of disloyalty colored his meditations and he thought, “If I had only been blessed with a wife like Emma Downes!”
But quickly he stifled the thought, for such wickedness came to him far too often, especially in the moments when he relaxed and allowed his mind to go its own way. The thing seemed always to be lying in wait, like a crouching animal stealing upon him unawares. “If only I’d had some other woman for a wife!” The thing had grown bolder and more frequent as the years piled up. He would be fifty years old in another month. It kept pressing in upon him like the pain of an aching tooth. Soon he’d be too old to care. And he would die, having missed something which other men knew. He was growing older every day, every minute, every second ... older, older, older.
In a sudden terror, he began to repeat one of the Psalms in order to clear his mind and put to rout the grinning, malicious thought. He said the Psalm over three times, and then found that God had sent him strength. Walking the dark, silent street, he told himself that there were others far worse off than he. There was poor Naomi Downes with the husband she worshipped dying hourly, day and night, in the very house with her. She, too, had courage, though she wasn’t as strong as her mother-in-law. She wasn’t perhaps as fine a character as Emma, but there was something more appealing about her, a weakness and a youth that touched your pity. It was terrible to seea young girl like that with her husband dying and a baby coming on. He remembered that he must go again to-morrow and pray with her. It was odd (he thought) how little prayer seemed to comfort her—a girl like that who was a missionary and the daughter of missionaries. He must have a talk with her and try to help her.... She seemed to be losing her great faith....
He was on the front porch of the parsonage now, turning his key in the lock, and something of the wild emotion of the prayer-meeting still clung to him. It had been a glorious success. He was still thinking of Naomi as he closed the door, and heard a whining voice from the top of the stairs.
“Is that you, Samuel?”
He waited for a moment and then answered, “Yes, my dear.”
“What kept you so late? I’ve been frightened to death. The house was full of noises and I heard some one walking about in the parlor.”
“We prayed for Philip Downes,” he said, turning out the light.
The whining voice from above-stairs took on an acid edge. “And you never thought about your poor suffering wife at home all alone. I suppose it never occurs to you to pray forme!”
He stood in the darkness, waiting, unwilling to climb the stairs until her complaints had worn themselves out. The voice again: “Samuel, are you there?”
“Yes, Annie.”
“Why don’t you answer me? Isn’t it enough to have to lie here helpless and miserable?”
“I was turning out the light.”
“Well, I want the hot-water bottle. You’ll have to heat water. And make it hot, not just lukewarm. It’s worse again. It’s never been so bad.”
As he went off to the kitchen, fragments of her plaints followed him: “I should think you’d have remembered about the hot-water bottle!” And, “If you’d had such pain as mine for fifteen years....”
Yes, fifteen years!
For fifteen years it had been like this. The old wicked thought came stealing back into his mind. If only he had a wife like Emma Downes or her daughter-in-law, Naomi ... some one young like Naomi. He was growing older, older, older....
He began again to repeat the Psalm, saying it aloud while he waited by the stove for the kettle to boil.
Inthe Flats the number of deaths began to mount one by one with the passing of each day. When disease appeared in any of the black, decaying houses, it had its way, taking now a child, now a wife, now a husband, for bodies that were overworked and undernourished had small chance of life in a region where the very air stank and the only stream was simply an open sewer. Doctors came and went, sometimes too carelessly, for there was small chance of pay, and to the people on the Hill the life of a worker was worth little. The creatures of the Flats were somehow only a sort of mechanical animal which produced and produced and went on producing.
The churches went on sending missionaries and money to the most remote corners of the earth; the clergymen prayed for the safety of their own flocks, while their congregations sat frightened and resentful, believing that somehow the people in the Flats had caused the catastrophe. It could not be (they reasoned) that God would send such a calamity upon a Town so God-fearing.
Irene Shane and Mary Conyngham closed their school because there was no longer any time to teach when people were ill and dying to right and left. Mary sat night after night at the beds of the dying. She saw one of Finke’s thirteen children die and then another and another. She listened to his cursing and drunken talk of revolution, and all the while she knew bitterly enough that those of the family who remained would be happier because they would have more to eat.
The Mills went on pounding and pounding; they were building new furnaces and new sheds. There seemed no end to it. It did not matter if people in the Flats died like flies, because there were always more where they came from—hordes of men and women and children who came filled with glorified hopes to this new country.
One day Mary read in the papers that the man who owned the Mills, himself a German immigrant, had built himself a marble palace on Fifth Avenue and would now divide his time between Pittsburgh and New York. He was becoming a gentleman: he had engaged an expert, a cultivated man of taste, to fill his New York house with pictures brought from Europe. The TownGazetteprinted an editorial drawing a moral from the career of the great magnate. See what could be done in this great land of God-given opportunity! A man who had begun as an immigrant. But it said nothingof the foundations on which the marble palace rested. It appeared to have arisen miraculously with the aid and sanction of God, innocent of all connection with the stinking Flats.
Mary, watching the spectacle about her, felt her heart turning to stone. If she was to be saved from bitterness, it would only be, she believed, through the touching faith of the ignorant wretches about her. She came to feel a sympathy for the cursing of a man like Finke: she herself even wanted at times to curse. She understood the sullen drunkenness of men like Sokoleff. What else was there for them to do? Something—perhaps a sense of dull misery, perhaps a terror of death—had slowly softened their resentment toward herself and Irene Shane. Once they had been looked upon as intruders come down from the Hills to poke about in filthy hallways and backyards filled with piles of rubbish and rows of privies. But it was no longer possible to doubt them. The two women, gently bred and fastidious, slept night after night at the school in the midst of the Flats. They sat up night after night by the beds of the dying.
There were times when Mary wondered why Irene Shane poured out all her strength in succoring these wretched people. She sensed deep in Irene a strange kind of unearthly mysticism which made her seem at times stubborn and irritable. It was a mysticism strangely akin to that groping hunger which had always tormented Philip. The likeness came to her suddenly one night as she sat by the bed of one of Finke’s dying children. It seemed to her a strange and inexplicable likeness in people so different. Yet it was true—they were both concerned with shadowy problems offaith and service to God which never troubled the more practical Mary. And Irene, she fancied, was prey to a sense of atonement, as if she must in some way answer to God for the wickedness of a father long dead and a sister who was, as the Town phrased it, “not all she should have been.” There was, too, that hard, bitter old woman who lay dying and never left Shane’s Castle—old Julia Shane, the queen ant of all the swarming hive.
As for herself, Mary knew well enough why she had come to work in the Flats: she had come in order to bury herself in some task so mountainous and hopeless that it would help her to forget the aching hurt made by John Conyngham’s behavior with Mamie Rhodes. It required a cure far more vigorous even than a house and two children to make her forget a thing like that.
She had been, people said, a fool to put up with such behavior. But what was she to do? There were the children and there was her own devotion to John Conyngham, a thing which he had thrown carelessly aside. It wasn’t even as if you suffered in secret: in the Town a thing like that couldn’t be kept a secret. The very newsboys knew of it. She had found a sort of salvation in working with Irene Shane. People said she was crazy, a woman with two small children, to go about working among Hunkies and Dagoes; but she took good care of her children, too, and she supplied the people in the Flats with what no amount of such mystical devotion as Irene Shane could supply: she had a sound practical head.
She was an odd girl (she thought) when you came to consider it, with a kind of curse on her. She had tohave some one to whom she could give herself up completely, pouring out all the soul in a fantastic devotion. John Conyngham had tired of it, perhaps (she sometimes thought) because he was a cold, hard, sensual man who had no need for such a thing. A woman like Mamie Rhodes (she thought bitterly) suited him better. If she had been married to Philip, who needed it so pathetically....
In the long nights of vigil, she thought round and round in circles, over the same paths again and again.... And before many nights had passed she found herself coming back always to the thing she knew and tried constantly to forget ... that it had been Philip whom she loved always, since those very first days in the tree-house. It seemed to her that at twenty-eight her life, save for her children, was already at an end. She was a widow with only memories of an unhappy married life behind her and nothing to hope for in the future. Philip was married and, so Krylenko told her, about to have a child of his own. She didn’t even know whether he even thought of her. And yet, she told herself, fiercely,she did know. He had belonged to her always, and she knew it more than ever while they had sat on the bridge, during that solitary walk into the open country.
Philip washers, and he was such a fool that he would never know it. He was always lost in mooning about things that didn’t matter.Shecould save him: she could set straight his muddles and moonings. He needed some one who thought less of God and more of making a good pie and keeping his socks darned.
She herself had never thought much about God save when her children were born and her husband died, andeven then she had been only brushed by a consciousness of some vast and overwhelming personal force. Life, even with its pain, seemed a satisfactory affair: there was always so much to be done, and it wasn’t God that Philip needed but pies and socks and a woman who believed in him.
She knew every day whether he was better or worse and she found herself, for the first time in all her life, praying to God to spare his life. She didn’t know whether there was a God or whether He would listen to one who only petitioned when she was in need, but she prayed none the less, believing that if there was any God, He would understand why it was she turned to Him. If He did not understand, she told herself rebelliously, then He was not worthy of existing as God.
She did not go to the slate-colored house, though she did ask for news on one occasion when she met Emma in the street. She understood that Emma had resented her friendship for Philip, even when they were children, and so avoided seeming to show any great interest. But she heard, nevertheless, sometimes from Krylenko who had even gone to the door to inquire, and sometimes from the doctor, but most of the time it was McTavish who kept her informed.
McTavish was the only person whom she suspected of guessing her secret.
After she had stopped day after day at his undertaking-parlors, he looked at her sharply one day out of his humorous little blue eyes, and said, “If Philip gets better, we’ve got to help him.” Then he hesitated for a moment and added, “Those two women are very bad for him.”
He was, she understood, feeling his way. When sheagreed, by not protesting, he went on, “You ought to have married him, Mary, when you had a chance.”
“I never had a chance.”
“I thought perhaps you had.... I understand. She began her dirty work too soon.”
Mary knew well enough whom he meant by “she.” It struck her that he seemed to hate Emma Downes with an extraordinary intensity.
“Still it may work out yet,” he said. “Sometimes things like that are a little better for waiting.”
She did not answer him, but spoke about the weather, and thanked him and said good-by, but she felt a sudden warmth take possession of all her body. “Still it may work out yet.” He never spoke of it again, but when she came in on her way up the hill, he always looked at her in the same eloquent fashion. It was odd, too, that the look seemed to comfort her: it made her feel less alone.
It was from Krylenko that she first heard news of the catastrophe that was coming: he told her and Irene Shane, perhaps because he had confidence in them, but more, perhaps, because he knew that in the end they were the only ones beyond the borders of the Flats to whom he might look for sympathy. The news frightened her at first because there had never been any strike in the Town and because she knew that there was certain to be violence and suffering and perhaps even death. She understood that the spirit which moved the big Ukranian was an eternal force of the temper which had made bloodshed and revolution since the beginning of time. It shone in his blue eyes—the light of fanaticism for a cause. The thing, he said, had been brewing for a long time: any one with half an intelligence could haveseen it coming. And Mary knew more than most, for she knew of the hasty, secret meetings in the room over Hennessey’s saloon with men who came into the Town and out again like shadows. She watched the curious light in Krylenko’s eyes in turn kindle a light in the pale eyes of an unecstatic old maid like Irene Shane. She felt the thing spreading all about her like a fire in the thick underbrush of a forest. It seemed to increase as the plague of typhoid began to abate. In some mysterious way it even penetrated the secure world settled upon the Seven Hills.
She had, too, a trembling sense of treason toward those whom the Town would have called her own people—but her heart leaped on the day when Krylenko told her that Philip, too, was on their side. He was, the Ukranian said, a member of the new Union: they had celebrated his joining months ago at Hennessey’s saloon. It made Philip seem nearer to her, as if he belonged not at all to the two women who guarded him. Krylenko told her on the day when every one was certain that Philip was dying, and it served to soften the numb pain which seemed to blind her to all else in the world.
In the afternoon of the same day, Irene Shane said to her, “My mother is dying, and I’ve cabled to my sister, Lily, to come home.”
WhenMoses Slade was not in Washington, he always went on Sundays to the Baptist Church which stood just across the street from Emma’s house of worship. It was not that he was a religious man, forhe had enough to do without thinking about God. The service bored him and during the sermon he passed the time by turning his active mind toward subjects more earthly and practical, such as the speech he was to make next week at Caledonia, or what answer he would have for the Democratic attack upon his vote against the Farmers’ Relief Bill. (How could they understand that what was good for farmers was bad for industry?) In the beginning, he had fallen into the habit of going to church because most of his votes came from churchgoing people: he went in the same spirit which led him to join sixteen fraternal organizations. But he had gone for so long now that he no longer had any doubts that he was a religious, God-fearing man. (In Washington it did not matter: he could sit at home on Sunday mornings in old clothes drinking his whisky with his feet up on a chair while he read farm papers and racing news.)
Of all the citizens of the Seven Hills, he alone appeared in the streets on Sunday mornings clad in a Prince Albert and a top-hat. Any other citizen in such a fancy-dress costume would have been an object of ridicule, but it was quite proper that he—the Honorable Moses Slade, Congressman—should be thus garbed. He carried it off beautifully; indeed, there was something grand and awe-inspiring in the spectacle of the big man with thick, flowing hair and an enormous front, standing on the steps of the First Baptist Church, speaking to fathers and mothers and patting miserable children imprisoned in stiff Sunday clothes.
On one hot September Sunday he was standing thus (having just patted the last wretched child) when the doors of the church opposite began to yield up itsdead. Among the first to descend the Indiana limestone steps appeared the large, handsome figure of Emma, dressed entirely in dark clothing. Moses Slade noticed her at once, for it was impossible not to notice such a magnetic personage, and he fancied that she might go away without even knowing he was there. (He would never learn, of course, that she had hurried out almost before the last echo of Reverend Castor’s Benediction had died away, because she knew that the Baptist Church was always over a little before her own.)
In that first glance, something happened to him which afterward made him feel silly, but at the moment had no such effect. A voice appeared to say, “I can’t wait any longer,” and excusing himself, he hurried, but with an air of dignity, down the steps of his church, and, crossing the street in full view of the now mingling congregations, raised his glistening top-hat, and said, “Good-morning, Mrs. Downes.”
Emma turned with a faint air of surprise, but with only the weakest of smiles (for was she not in sorrow?) “Why, Mr. Slade, I didn’t know you were back.”
“May I walk a way with you?”
“Of course, it would be a pleasure.”
Together they went off beneath the yellowing maples, the eyes of two congregations (to Emma’s delight) fastened on them. One voice at least, that of the soured Miss Abercrombie, was raised in criticism. “There’s no fool,” she observed acidly, “like an old one.”
When they had gone a little way beyond the reach of prying eyes and ears, Moses Slade became faintly personal in his conversation.
“I appreciated your sending me that postcard,” he said.
“Well, I thought you’d like to see the new monument to General Sherman. I knew it was unveiled while you were away, and seeing that you took so much interest in it....” Her voice died away with a note of sadness. The personal touch had filled them both with a sense of constraint, and in silence he helped her across the street, seizing her elbow as if it were a pump-handle.
Safely on the opposite side, he said, “I was sorry to hear of the illness of your son. I hope he’s better by now.”
Emma sighed. “No ... he’s not much better. You see, he gave up his health in Africa working among the natives.” She sighed again. “I doubt if he’ll ever be well again. He’s such a good boy, too.”
“Yes, I always heard that.”
“Of course, he may not live. We have to face things, Mr. Slade. If God sees fit to take him, who am I to be bitter and complain? But it isn’t easy ... to have your only son....” She began to cry, and it occurred to Moses Slade that she seemed to crumple and grow softly feminine in a way he had not thought possible in a woman of such character. He had never had any children of his own. He felt that she needed comforting, but for once words seemed of no use to him—the words which always flowed from him in an easy torrent.
“You’ll forgive me, Mr. Slade, if I give way ... but it’s gone on for weeks now. Sometimes I wonder that the poor boy has any strength left.”
“I understand, Mrs. Downes,” he said, in a strange, soft voice.
“I always believe in facing things,” she repeated. “There’s no good in pretending.” She was a little better now and dabbing her eyes with her handkerchief. Fortunately, no one had passed them: no one had witnessed the spectacle of Emma Downes in tears, walking with Congressman Slade.
Before the slate-colored house, they halted, and Mr. Slade asked, “Would you mind if I came in? I’d like to hear how the boy is.”
She left him in the parlor, sitting beneath the enlarged portrait of the late Mr. Downes, while she went off up the stairs to ask after Philip. Naomi and Mabelle were there talking, because Naomi no longer went out on account of her appearance, and Mabelle, who always went to sleep in church, avoided it whenever possible. Emma did not speak to them, but hurried past their door to the room where Philip lay white and still, looking thin and transparent, like a sick little boy.
Downstairs, in the darkened parlor, Moses Slade disposed his weight on the green plush, and, leaning on his stick, waited. His mind seemed to be in utter confusion, his brain all befogged. Nothing was very clear to him. He regarded the portrait of Emma’s husband, remembering slowly that he had seen Downes years ago, and held a very poor opinion of him. He had been a clever enough fellow, but he never seemed to know where he was going. Emma (he had begun already with a satisfactory feeling of warmth to think of her thus) was probably well rid of him. She had made a brave struggle of it. A fine woman! Look how she behaved about this boy! She believed in facing things. Well, that was a fine, brave quality. He, too, believed infacing things. He couldn’t let her go on alone like this. And he began to think of reason after reason why he should marry Emma Downes.
She was gone a long while, and presently he found his gaze wandering back to the portrait. The dead husband seemed to gaze at him with an air of mockery, as if he thought the whole affair was funny. Moses Slade turned in his chair a little, so that he did not look directly at the wooden portrait.
And then he fell to thinking of Philip. What was the boy like? Did he resemble his father or his mother? Had he any character? Certainly his behavior, as far as you could learn, had been queer and mysterious. He might be a liability, yes, a distinct liability, one which was always making trouble. Perhaps he (Moses Slade) ought to go a little more slowly. Of course the boy might die, and that would leave everything clear, with Emma to console. (He yearned impatiently to console her.) It was a wicked thought; but, of course, he wasn’t actuallyhopingthat the boy would die. He was only facing things squarely, considering the problem from every point of view as a statesman should.
Again he caught the portrait smirking at him, and then the door opened, and Emma came in. She had been crying again. He stood up quickly and the old voice said, “I can’t wait any longer.” He took her hand gently with a touch which he meant to be interpreted as a sympathetic prelude to something more profound. She didn’t resist.
“Well?” he asked.
Emma sank down on the sofa. “I don’t know. They thought he’d be betterto-day, and ... and, he isn’t.”
“You mustn’t cry—you mustn’t,” he said in a husky voice.
“I don’t know,” she kept repeating. “I don’t know what I’m to do. I’m so tired.”
He sat down beside her, thankful suddenly that the room was dark, for in the darkness courtship was always easier, especially after middle-age. He now took her hand in both his. There was a long silence in which she gained control of herself, and she did not withdraw her hand nor resist in any way.
“Mrs. Downes,” he said presently in a husky voice. “Emma ... Mrs. Downes ... I have something to ask you. I’m a sober, middle-aged man, and I’ve thought it over for a long time.” He cleared his throat and gave her hand a gentle pressure. “I want you to marry me.”
She had known all along that it was coming. Indeed, it was almost like being a girl once more to see Moses Slade, man-like, working his way with the grace of an elephant toward the point; but now it came with the shock of surprise. She couldn’t answer him at once for the choke in her throat. For weeks she had borne so much, known such waves of sorrow, that something of her unflagging spirit was broken. She thought, “At last, I am to have my reward for years of hard work. God is rewarding me for all my suffering.”
She began to cry again, and Moses Slade asked quickly, “You aren’t going to refuse—with all I can give you....”
“No,” she sobbed, and, leaning forward a little, as if for support, placed her free hand upon his fat knee. “No ... I’m not going to refuse... only I can’t quite believe it.... I’ve had such a hard time. I’d begun to think that I should never have a reward.”
Suddenly he leaned over and took her awkwardly in his arms. She felt the heavy metal of his gold watch-chain pressing into her bare arm, and then she heard footsteps descending the stairs in the hallway. It was Mabelle going home at last. She was certain to open the door, because Mabelle couldn’t pass a closed door without finding out what was going on behind it.
“Wait!” said Emma, sitting up very straight. “You’d better sit on the other chair.”
Understanding what it was she meant, he rose and went back to the green plush. The steps continued, and then, miraculously, instead of halting, they went past the door and out into the street.
The spell was broken, and Moses Slade suddenly felt that he had made a fool of himself, as if he had been duped by an adventuress.
“It’s Mabelle,” said Emma, who had ceased weeping. “My brother Elmer’s wife. She has such a snoopy disposition, I thought we’d better not be found ... found ... well, you understand.” She blew her nose. “You’ve made me happy ... you don’t know what it’s like to think that I won’t have to go on any more ... alone ... old age is all right, if you’re not alone....”
“Yes, I understand that!” He was a little upset that she treated the affair as if they were an elderly pair marrying for the sake of company in adjoining rocking-chairs. That wasn’t at all the way he had looked upon it. In fact, he had been rather proud at the thought of the youthful fervor which had driven him to cross the street a little while before. By some malicious ill-fortune, Mabelle’s footsteps had cut shortthe declaration at the very moment when he had been ready to act in such a way as to establish the whole tone of their future relationship.
“Yes, I understand that,” he repeated, “but there’s no use talking about old age. Why, we’re young—Emma—I suppose I can call you Emma?”
She blushed. “Why, yes, of course.”
“You wouldn’t mind if I called you just Em? That was my mother’s name, and I always liked it.”
“No, don’t call me Em. It’s a name I hate—not on account of your mother, of course ... Moses.”
She couldn’t think why she objected to the name: she had been called Em all her life, but somehow it was connected with the vague far-off memory of the romantic Jason Downes. He had called her Em, and it seemed wrong to let this elderly, fleshy man use the same name. It seemed vaguely sacrilegious to put this second marriage on the same basis as the first. She hadlovedJason Downes. She knew it just now more passionately than she had ever known it.
“You understand,” she said, laying one hand gently on his.
“Yes, of course, Emma.”
They were standing now, awkwardly waiting for something, and Moses Slade again suddenly took her in his arms. He pinched her arm, ever so gently—just a little pinch; and then he began at once to make a fool of himself again.
“When shall it be?” he asked. “We must fix a date.”
She hesitated for a moment. “Don’t ask me now. I’m all confused and I’ve had so much to worry me. We mustn’t be hasty and undignified—a man in your position can’t afford to be.”
“We can be married quietly ... any time. No one would know how long I’d been courting you.” Then he suddenly became romantic. “The truth is that I’ve wanted to marry you ever since that day you came to see me. So it’s been a long time, you see.”
For a moment she was silent and thoughtful. At last she said, “There’s one thing we ought to consider, Moses. I don’t know about such things, but you’ll know, being a lawyer. It’s about my first husband. You see they never found his body out there in China. They only know he disappeared and must have been killed by bandits. Now what I mean is this ... he mightn’t be dead at all. He might have lost his mind or his memory. And if he turned up....”
Moses Slade looked at her sharply. “Youdowant to marry me, don’t you, Em ... I mean Emma.... You’re not trying to get out of it?”
“Of course I want to marry you. I only mentioned this because I believe in facing things.”
“How long has he been gone?”
“It’s twenty-four years this January. I remember it well. It was snowing that night, just after the January thaw....”
He checked what would have been a long story by saying, “Twenty-four years ... all alone without a husband. You’re a brave little woman, Emma.” He made a clicking sound with his tongue, and looked at her fondly. “Well, that’s a long time ... long enough for him to be considered dead under law. But we’ll have him declared dead by law and then we won’t have to worry.”
Emma was staring at the floor with a curious fixedlook in her eyes. At last she said, “Do you think that would be right? He might still be alive. He might come back.”
Moses Slade grew blustering, as if he were actually jealous of that shadow of the man who kept looking down at him with an air of sardonic amusement.
“It won’t make any difference if we declare him dead. Besides, he hasn’t got any right to you if heisalive.”
It wasn’t that she was simply afraid he might return; the source of her alarm went much deeper than that. She felt that she couldn’t trust herself if he did return; but of course she couldn’t explain that to Moses.
“It wasn’t quite that,” she murmured, and, conscious that the remark didn’t make sense, she asked quickly, “How long ought it to take?”
“A couple of months.”
“We could be married after that?”
“Yes, as soon as possible.”
Moses Slade took her hand again. “You’ve made me a happy man, Emma. You won’t regret it.” He picked up his hat. “I’d like to call to-night. Maybe you’d go to evening service with me?”
“No, I think we’d better not let any one know about it till it’s settled.”
“Maybe you’re right. Well, I’ll come to the restaurant to-morrow for lunch.”
He kissed her again, a bit too ardently, she felt, to be quite pleasant, and they went into the hall. At the same moment the figure of Naomi appeared, descending the stairs heavily. She was clad only in a nightgown and a loose kimono of flowered stuff. Her hair, stillin curl-papers, lay concealed beneath a kind of mob-cap of bright green satin, trimmed with soiled lace. It was impossible to avoid her.
“Naomi,” said Emma, in a voice of acid, “this is Mr. Slade—Moses, my daughter-in-law, Naomi.”
Naomi said, “Pleased to meet you.” Moses Slade bowed, went through the door, and the meeting was over.
When the door closed, Emma stood for a moment with the knob in her hand. Naomi was watching her with a look of immense interest and curiosity strangely like the look that came so often into the eyes of Mabelle when curiosity about the subjects of love and childbirth became too strong for her feeble control.
“Is that Mr. Slade ... the Congressman?” asked Naomi.
“Yes, it is.” There was something in Naomi’s look that maddened her, something that was questioning, shameless, offensive, and even accusing.
“What made him come to see us?”
Emma controlled herself. She felt lately that it was all she could bear always to have Naomi in the house.
“He came to ask about Philip.”
“I didn’t know that he knew Philip.”
“He didn’t, but he’s an old friend of mine.” The lie slipped easily from her tongue.
“Philip’s better,” Naomi answered. “He opened his eyes and looked at me. I think he knew me.”
“Did he speak?”
“No, he just closed them again without saying anything.”
Emma moved away from the door as Naomi turnedinto the dining-room. “Naomi,” she called suddenly, “is the Reverend Castor coming this afternoon?”
“Yes ... he said he was.”
“Surely you’re going to put on some clothes before he comes?”
“I was going to fix my hair.”
“You must put on some clothes. I won’t have you going about the house all day looking like this—half dressed and untidy. You’re a sight! What will a man like Mr. Slade think—a man who is used to Washington where there’s good society.”
Naomi stared at her for a moment with an unaccustomed look of defiance in her pale eyes. (Emma thought, “Mabelle has been making her into a slattern like herself.”)
“Well, in my condition, clothes aren’t very comfortable. I think in my condition I might have some consideration.”
Emma began to breathe heavily. “That has nothing to do with it. When I was in your condition I dressed and went about my work every day. I wore corsets right up to the end.”
“Well, I’m not strong like you.... The doctor told me....”
Emma broke in upon her. “The doctor didn’t tell you to go about looking like a slattern all day! I wish you’d tell Mabelle for me that I’d like to come home just once without finding her here.”
The fierce tension could not endure. When it broke sharply, Naomi sat down and began to cry. “Now you want to take her away from me,” she sobbed. “I’ve given up everything to please you and Philip ... everything. I even gave up going back to Megambo,where the Lord meant me to be. And now I haven’t got anything left ... and you all hate me. Yes, you do. And Philip does too sometimes.... He hates me.... You wanted me to marry him, and now see what’s come of it. I’m even in this condition because you wanted me to be.” She began to cry more and more wildly. “I’ll run out into the street. I’ll kill myself. I’ll run away, and then maybe you’ll be happy. I won’t burden you any longer.”
Emma was shaking her now, violently, with all the shame and fury she felt at Moses’ encounter with this slatternly daughter-in-law, and all the contempt she felt for a creature so poor spirited.
“You’ll do no such thing, you little fool! You’ll brace up and behave like a woman with some sense!”
But it was no good. Naomi was simply having one of her seizures. She grew more hysterical, crying out, “You’d like to be rid of me ... both of you. You both hate me.... Oh, I know ... I know ... I’m nothing now ... nothing to anybody in the world! I’m just in your way.”
Emma, biting her lip, left her abruptly, closing the door behind with ferocious violence. If she had not gone at once, she felt that she would have laid hands on Naomi.
Moses Slade, bound toward his own house, walked slowly, lost once more in a disturbing cloud of doubts. With Emma out of sight, the ardent lover yielded place to the calculating politician. He suffered, he did not know why, from a feeling of having been duped. The sight of Naomi so untidy and ill-kempt troubled him. He hadn’t known about the child. The girl mustbe at least seven months gone, and he hadn’t known it. Of course (he thought) you couldn’t have expected Emma voluntarily to mention a subject so indelicate. Nevertheless, he felt that she should have conveyed the knowledge to him in some discreet fashion. Even if the boy did die, the situation would be just as bad, or worse. If he left a widow and a child.... He felt suddenly as if in some way Emma herself had tricked him, as if she herself were having a child, and had tricked him into marrying her to protect herself....
In a kind of anguish he regretted again that he had been so impetuous in his proposal to the widow Barnes that he had shocked her into refusal.Shewasn’t so fine-looking a woman as Emma, but she was free, without encumbrances or responsibilities, without a child. Of course, Emma would never know that in the midst of his courtship he had been diverted by the prospect of Mrs. Barnes. She would never know what had been the reason for the months of silence....