“Don’t speak of that now,” Emma interrupted, “when you’ve only just arrived.”
“But we have to face these things,” said Jason.
Suddenly Emma turned away from the table to the doorway where Essie, in terror of interrupting the party, yet fascinated still by the spell of Jason’s narrative, stood waiting. She was standing, as she always stood, on the sides of her shoes.
“What is it, Essie? What are you standing there for?”
“There’s a man come to see Mr. Downes.”
“What does he want?”
“He’s from the newspaper.”
“Tell him to come back to-morrow.”
But Jason had overheard. He rose with the napkin still tucked into the fawn-colored vest. “No, Essie.... Tell him I’ll speak to him now.”
“But, Jason....”
“Yes, Em.... I might as well get it over.”
There was no holding him now; but Emma succeeded in thrusting forward a word of advice.
“Remember, Jason, what the newspapers are like. Don’t tell them too much.”
A shadow crossed her face, and Philip thought suddenly, “Ma knows he’s lying too, and she’s afraid he’ll overdo it.” And then a more fantastic thought occurred to him—that she knew for a good reason that he was lying, that perhaps she had planned the lie to cover up an earlier one.
“I must say it’s all very remarkable ... how Jason’s affairs have turned out,” said Elmer. “I never would have thought it.”
“You never believed in him,” said Emma, with an air of triumph, “and now you see.”
To Philip the whole room, the table, the people aboutit, the figure of the slattern Essie standing in the doorway, all their petty boasting and piety and lying, became suddenly vulgar and loathsome. And then, almost at once, he became ashamed of himself for being ashamed, for they werehispeople. He had no others. It was a subtle, sickening sort of torture.
Emmawas herself forced to go in at last and send away the newspaper man, for Jason would have kept him there the rest of the night, telling a story which became more and more embroidered with each rash recounting. And when, at last, the reporter had gone, the others came in and sat about while Jason continued his talk. But the evening died slowly, perhaps because of Elmer’s suspicions, or Naomi’s curious depression, or Philip’s own disgust and low spirits. Jason found himself talking presently against a curious, foreboding silence, of which he took no notice. Only Emma and Mabelle were still listening.
It was Elmer who at last broke up the party, pushing the rotund and breathless Mabelle before him. In the door Mabelle turned, and, shaking her head a little coquettishly, said, “Well, good-night, Jason. Good-night, Emma. I feel like I was saying ‘good-night’ to a honeymoon couple.” And the bawdy look came into her eyes. “There’ll never be any second honeymoon for Elmer and me. We’ve got our family now and that’s all done.”
Still tittering, she was dragged off by her husband. When she had gone, Jason said, “Mabelle is a cute one,ain’t she, and a funny one too, to be married to a mausoleum like Elmer.”
“Now, Jason, it’s all patched up between you and Elmer. There’s no use beginning all over again.”
Naomi and Philip had put on their wraps, and were standing by the door, when Jason suddenly slapped his son on the back. “We’ve got to get better acquainted, son. You’ll like your Pa when you know him better. Nobody can resist him.” He winked at Emma, who turned crimson. “Ain’t it so, Em. Least of all, the ladies.” And then to Philip again, “I’ll come and see you in the morning.”
Philip turned quickly. “No, I’ll come and fetch you myself. You wouldn’t find the way.”
“I want to see the twins the first thing.”
“I’ll come for you.”
He had resolved that his father was not to come to the stable. He saw that Emma hadn’t even told his father that he wasn’t living with his wife. The stable had suddenly become to him a kind of temple, a place dedicated to that part of him which had escaped. There were things there which his father wouldn’t understand, and could only defile. The stable belonged to him alone. It was apart from all the others—his father, his mother, Naomi, Uncle Elmer and Aunt Mabelle.
Emma was standing before Naomi, holding her coat open, so that she might examine the dress underneath. She was saying, “You must come up some afternoon, Naomi, and I’ll help you make the dress right. It hangs all wrong at the back, and it’s all bunchy around the armholes. You couldmake it all right, but, as it is, it’s ... it’s sort of funny-looking.”
All the way back to the Flats neither of them spoke at all: Philip, because there was a black anger and rebellion burning in him, and Naomi, because if she had tried to speak, she would have wept. She felt as though she were dead, as if in a world made up of Philip and his father and Emma she no longer had any existence. She was only a burden who annoyed them all. And the dress ... it was only sort of “funny-looking.”
He left Naomi at the door of the flat with an abrupt “good-night.” It was after midnight, and the moon was rising behind the hill crowned by Shane’s Castle, throwing a blue light on the mist that hung above the Flats. In the far distance the mist was all rosy with the light from four new furnaces that had begun once more to work. The strike was slipping slowly into defeat, and he understood that it meant nothing to him any longer. He had almost forgotten Krylenko.
As he passed through the rusted gates of the park, there drifted toward him from among the trunks of the dead trees, a faint, pungent odor that was hauntingly familiar and, as he climbed the drive between the dead trees, it grew stronger and stronger, until at last he recognized, in a sudden flash of memory which brought back all the hot panorama of the lake and the forest at Megambo, that it was the smell of gunpowder, the smell that clung to his rifle when he had stood there by the barricade beside Lady Millicent killing those poor niggers. It was a faint, ghostly smell that sometimes died away altogether and sometimes came in strong waves on a warm breeze filled with the dampness of the melting snow.
At the top of the hill, the big house lay dead and blind, without a sign of life, and, as he turned thecorner, he saw that near the stable lay the remnants of a fire which had burnt to a heap of embers. His foot touched something that was wet and slippery. He looked down to discover a great stain of black on the snow. For a moment he stared at the stain, fascinated, and suddenly he knew what it was. It was a great stain of blood.
In the distance, among the trees, he discerned a light, and after a moment he discovered a little group of men ... three or four ... carrying a lantern, which they held high from time to time, as if searching for something. And then, all at once, as he moved forward again, he almost stepped upon a woman who lay in the snow at the entrance to the rotting arbor covered with the vines of the dying wistaria. She lay face down with one arm above her head in a posture that filled him for a moment with a sense of having lived through this same experience before, of having seen this same woman lying face down ... dead ... for she was unmistakably dead. He knelt beside her, and, turning the body on its side, he remembered suddenly. She lay like the black virgin they had found dead across the path in the tall grass at Megambo ... the one they had left to the leopards.
Trembling, he peered at the white face in the moonlight. The woman was young, and across one side of the face there was a little trickle of blood that came from a hole in the temple. She was dressed in rags, and her feet were wrapped in rolls of sacking. She was the wife or daughter of some striker. It occurred to him suddenly that there was something pitifully lonely in the sight of the body left there, forgotten, by the embers in the dead park; it had the strangest effectupon him. He rose and tried to call to the little group of searchers, but no sound came from his throat, and he began suddenly to cry. Leaning against one of the pillars of the arbor, he waited until his body had ceased to tremble. It was a strange, confused feeling, as if the whole spectacle of humanity were suddenly revealed in all its pathos, its meanness, its grandeur, and its cruelty. It was a brilliant flash of understanding, but it passed almost at once, leaving him weak and sick. And then, after a moment, he found his voice again, and shouted. The little party halted, and looked about, and he shouted a second time. Then they came toward him, and he saw that two of them carried shotguns and that one of them was McTavish.
The woman was dead. They picked her up and laid her carefully on one of the blackened marble benches of the garden, and McTavish told him what had happened. In the Town they had forbidden the strikers to hold meetings, hoping thus to break the strike, but the Shanes, Irene and Lily (for the old woman was dead), had sent word to Krylenko that they might meet in the dead park. And so the remnant of those who had held out in the face of cold and starvation had come here to listen to Krylenko harangue them from a barrel by the light of a great fire before the stables. There had been shouting and disorder, and then some one inside the Mill barrier—one of the hooligans (they hadn’t yet discovered who did it) turned a machinegun on the mob around the fire. It had only lasted an instant—the sharp, vicious, staccato sound, but it had taken its toll.
“It’s a dirty business,” concluded McTavish in disgust. He wasn’t jolly to-night. All the old, cynicalgood-humor had gone out of him, as if he, too, had seen what Philip saw in that sudden flash as he leaned against the decaying arbor.
They took a shutter from the windows of the stable and, placing the body of the girl upon it, set off down the hill between the dead walls of the pine-trees. For a long time Philip stood in the soiled, trampled snow, looking after them, until a turn in the drive hid the lantern from view behind the pine-trees.
Theroom above the stable was in darkness, but as he came up out of the staircase he saw that there was a woman sitting by the window, silhouetted against the moonlight beyond. He thought, “It must be Lily Shane, but why is she here at this hour of the night?” And then a low, familiar voice came out of the darkness, “It’s only me, Philip ... Mary.” She spoke as if he must have known she was there, waiting for him.
He struck a match quickly and lighted the kerosene lamp, at which she rose and came over to him. By the flickering, yellow light he saw that she had been crying.
“It’s been horrible, Philip. I saw it all from the window while I was waiting for you.”
“I know ... we just found a dead woman in the snow.”
He was possessed by a curious feeling of numbness, in which Mary seemed to share, as if the horror of what had taken place outside wiped out all the strangeness of their meeting thus. Death, it seemed, had brushed by them so closely that it had swept away all but thosethings which lay at the foundation of existence—the fact that they loved each other, that they were together now, and that nothing else was of any importance. They were, too, like people stunned by horror. They sat by the stove, Philip in silence, while Mary told him what she had seen. For a long time it did not even appear strange to him that she should be there in his room at two o’clock in the morning.
He heard her saying, “Who was the woman they killed?”
“I don’t know. She looked Italian.”
There was a long silence and at last it was Mary, the practical Mary, who spoke. “You must wonder why I came here, Philip ... after ... after not seeing you at all for all this time.”
He looked at her slowly, as if half-asleep. “I don’t know. I hadn’t even thought of it, Mary ... anything seems possible to-night, anything seems possible in this queer park.” And then, stirring himself, he reached across the table and touched her hand. She did not draw it away, and the touch gave him the strangest sense of a fathomless intimacy which went back and back into their childhood, into the days when they had played together in the tree-house. She had belonged to him always, only he had been stupid never to have understood it. He could have spoken out once long ago. If only he, therealPhilip, had been born a little sooner, they would both have been saved.
And then, suddenly, he knew why she had come, and he was frightened.
He said, “You heard about my father?”
She started a little, and said, “No.”
“He came back to-night. It was awful, Mary. Ifhe’d only stayed away! If he’d never have come back....”
So he told her the whole story, even to his suspicion that his father was a liar, and had deserted him and his mother twenty-six years before. He told her of the long agony of the reunion, describing his father in detail. And at the end, he said, “You see why I wish he’d never come back. Youdosee, don’t you, Mary ... if he’d stayed away, I’d never have thought of him at all, or at least only as my mother thought of him. But he isn’t like that at all. I don’t see how she can take him back ... how she can bear to have him about.”
She wanted to cry out, “Don’t you see, Philip? Don’t you see the kind of woman she is? If you don’t see, nothing can save you. She’s worse than he is, because he’s harmless.” But she only said quietly, “Perhaps she’s in love with him. If that’s true, it explains anything.”
“Maybe it’s that. She must be in love with him.”
Mary thought, “Oh, Philip! If you’d only forget all the things that don’t matter and just live, you’d be so much happier!” She wanted him to be happy more than anything in the world. She would, she knew, do anything at all to make him happy.
Presently she said, “She came to see me this afternoon, Philip ... your mother. That’s why I’m here now. She said horrible things ... that weren’t true at all. She said ... she said ... that I’d been living with you all along, and she’d just found out about it. She said that I camehere to meet you in the stable. She’s hated me always ... just because I’ve always been fond of you. She said I’d tried to steal you from her.”
For a moment he simply sat very still, staring at her. She felt his hand grow cold and relax its grasp. At last he whispered, “She said that? She said such things to you?”
“Yes ... I ran away from her in the end. It was the only thing I could do.”
Then all at once he fell on his knees and laid his head in her lap. She heard him saying, “There’s nothing I can say, Mary. I didn’t think she’d do a thing like that ... and now I know, I know what kind of a woman she is. Oh, I’m so tired, Mary ... you don’t know how tired I am!”
She began to stroke his dark hair, and the sudden thought came to her with horror that in her desire for vengeance upon Emma Downes, it was not Emma she had hurt, but Philip.
He said, “You don’t know what it is, Mary,—for months now ... for years even, I’ve been finding out bit by bit ... to have something gone that you’ve always believed in, to have some one you loved destroyed bit by bit, in spite of anything you can do. I tried and tried, but it was no good. And now ... I can’t hold out any more. I can’t do it ... I hate her ... but I can never let her know it. I can never hurt her ... because she really loves me, and it’s true what she says ... that she did everything for me. She fed and clothed me herself with her own hands.”
Again Mary wanted to cry out, “She doesn’t love you. She doesn’t love any one but herself!” and again she kept silent.
“And now it’s true ... what she said ... you’ve stolen me away from her, Mary. She’s made it so. I’m through now ... I can’t go on trying any more.”
Still stroking his head, she thought, “He’s like a little boy. He’s never grown up at all.” And she said, “I was so angry, Philip, that I came here. I didn’t care what happened; I only thought, ‘If she thinks that’s the truth, it might as well be, because she’ll tell about it as the truth.’ I didn’t care any longer for anything but myself and you.”
His head stirred, and he looked up at her, seizing her hands. “Is that true, Mary?” He kissed her hand suddenly.
“It’s true ... or why else should I be here, at this hour?” He was hopeless, she thought: he didn’t live for a moment in reality.
He hadn’t even thought it queer of her to be sitting there in his room long after midnight with his head on her knees. And suddenly she thought again, “If I’m his mistress, I can save him from her altogether. Nothing else can break it off forever.”
He was kissing her hands, and the kisses seemed to burn her. He was saying, “Mary, I’ve loved you always, always ... since the first time I saw you, but I only knew it when it was too late.”
“It isn’t too late, Philip. It isn’t too late.”
He was silent for a time, but she knew what he was thinking. He wasn’t strong enough to take life into his own hands and bend it to his own will, or perhaps it wasn’t a lack of strength, but only a colossal confusion that kept him caught and lost in an immense and hopeless tangle. Until to-night she hadn’t herself been strong enough to act, but now a kind ofintoxicating recklessness had seized her—the sober, sensible Mary Conyngham. She meant to-night to take him and comfort him, to make them both, for a little time, happy. To-morrow didn’t matter. It would have been better if there were no to-morrow, if they could never wake at all.
It was Philip who spoke first. After a long silence, he said in a whisper, “I can’t do it, Mary ... I can’t. It isn’t only myself that matters. It’s you and Naomi too. It isn’t her fault any more than mine.”
For a moment she wished wickedly that he had been a little more like John Conyngham, and then almost at once she saw that it was his decency, the very agony of his struggle, that made her love him so profoundly. And she was afraid that he would think her wicked and brazen and fleshly. It was a thing she couldn’t explain to him.
There were no words rich enough, strong enough, to make him understand what it was that had brought her here. She had thought it all out, sitting for hours there by the window, in the light of the rising moon. She had felt life rushing past her. She was growing old with the passing of each second. She had seen a man killed, and afterwards Philip had himself come upon the body of a dead woman lying in the snow. Nothing mattered, save that they come together. What happened to her was of no consequence. Some terrible force, stronger than either of them, had meant them for each other since the beginning, and to resist it, to fight against it unnaturally as Philip was doing, seemed to her all at once a black and wicked sin.
He freed himself suddenly and stood up. “I can’t do it, Mary. I’ll go away.... You can spend the night here and leave in the morning. No one in the Town will know you haven’t spent the night at Shane’s Castle.”
“Where will you go?”
“I’ll go to the tents. I’ll be all right.”
She suddenly put her hand over her eyes, and, in a low voice, asked, “And ... what’s to come after, Philip?”
“I don’t know ... I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“We can’t go on ... I can’t....”
“No ... I’d rather be dead.”
Suddenly, with a sob, she fell forward on the table, burying her face in her hands. “You belong to your mother still, Philip ... you can’t shake off the hard, wicked things she’s taught you. Oh, God! If she’d only died ... we’d have been married to each other!”
She began to cry softly, and, at the sound, he stopped the mechanical business of buttoning his coat, and then, almost as if he were speaking to himself, he said, “Damn them all! We’ve a right to our happiness. They can’t take it from us. They can’t....”
He raised her face from the table and kissed it again and again with a kind of wild, rude passion that astonished her, until she lost herself completely in its power. Suddenly he ceased, and, looking at her, said, “It doesn’t matter if to-morrow never comes. I love you, Mary ... I love you. That’s all that matters.”
They were happy then, for in love and in death all things are wiped out. There, in the midst of the dead and frozen park, she set him free for a little time.
Themorning came quickly in a cold gray haze, for the furnaces, starting to work one by one as the strike collapsed, had begun again to cover the Flats with a canopy of smoke. It was Mary who went first, going by the back drive, which led past the railway-station. And with her departure the whole world turned dark. While she had been there with him, he was happy with the sense of security that is born of companionship in adventure, but as her figure faded presently into the smoke and mist that veiled the deserted houses of the Flats, the enchantment of the night gave way to a cold, painful sense of actuality. The whole night had been, as some nights are in the course of lives that move passionately, unreal and charged with strange, intangible currents of fire and ice. During that brief hour or two when he had slept, years seemed to have passed. The figure of his father had become so remote that he no longer seemed cheap and revolting, but only shallow and pitiful. Even the memory of McTavish and the two men with the lantern standing over the dead woman in the snow was dim now and unreal.
It was only the sight of the trampled, dirty snow, the black spot where the fire had been and the pool of blood at the turn of the drive that made him know how near had been all these things which had happened during the night. And the park was no longer beautiful and haunted in the moonlight, but only a dreary expanse of land filled with dead trees and decaying arbors. The old doubts began slowly to torment him once more—the feeling of terror lest Naomi should ever discoverwhat had happened, and the knowledge that he had betrayed her. There was, too, an odd new fear that he might become such a man as his father. It was born in that cold, gray light, of a sudden knowledge that deep inside him lay sleeping all the weaknesses, all the sensuality, of such a man. After what had happened in the night, he saw suddenly that he might come like his father to live in a shallow world that shut out all else. He was afraid suddenly, and ashamed, for he had been guilty of a sin which his father must have committed a hundred times.
Yet he had, too, an odd new sense of peace, a soothing, physical, animal sort of peace, that seemed to have had its beginnings months ago, in the moments of delirium when he had wanted to live only because he could not die without knowing such an experience as had come to him in the night. It was, he supposed, Nature herself who had demanded this of him. And now she had rewarded him with this sense of completeness. Nature, he thought, had meant his children to be Mary’s children, too; and now that couldn’t be ... unless ... unless Naomi died.
It was a wicked thought that kept stealing back upon him. It lay in hiding at the back of his mind, even in the last precious moments before Mary had left, when she stood beside the stove making the coffee. He had thought again and again, “If only Naomi died ... we could be like this forever.” Watching her, he had thought, despite all his will to the contrary, of what love had been with Naomi and what with Mary. And he had told himself that it wasn’t fair to think such things, because he had never loved Naomi: at suchmoments he had almost hated her. Yet she had loved him, and was ashamed of her love, so that she made all their life together a sordid misery. And Mary, who had been without shame, had surrounded her love with a proud and reckless glory. Yet, in the end, it was Mary who hid, who stole away through the black houses of the Flats as if she had done a shameful thing, and it was Naomi who bore his children. For a moment he almost hated the two helpless little creatures he had come so lately to love, because a part of them was also a part of Naomi.
As he stood by the window, all wretched and tormented, he saw coming across the trampled snow the battered figure of Hennery. He was coming from the house, and his bent old figure seemed more feeble and ancient than it had ever been before. He entered the stable, and Philip heard him coming painfully up the stairs. At the sight of Philip, he started suddenly, and said, “You scared me, Mr. Downes ... my nerves is all gone. I ain’t the same since last night.” He took off his hat and began fumbling in his pockets. “I got a letter for you ... that strike feller left it for you ... that ... I doan’ know his name, but the feller that made all the trouble.”
He brought forth a piece of pale mauve paper that must have belonged to Lily Shane, but was soiled now from contact with Hennery’s pocket.
“He was in the house all night,” said Hennery, “a-hiding there, I guess, from the police, and he’s gone now.”
Then he was silent while Philip opened the note and read in the powerful, sprawling hand of Krylenko:
“I’ve had to clear out. If they caught me now, they’d frame something and send me up. And I’m not through fighting yet. The strike’s bust, and there’s no good in staying. But I’m coming back. I’ll write you from where I go.“Krylenko.”
“I’ve had to clear out. If they caught me now, they’d frame something and send me up. And I’m not through fighting yet. The strike’s bust, and there’s no good in staying. But I’m coming back. I’ll write you from where I go.
“Krylenko.”
He read it again and then he heard Hennery saying, “It was a turrible night, Mr. Downes ... I guess it was one of those nights when all kinds of slimy things are out walkin’. They’re up and gone too ... both of them ... the girls, Miss Lily and Miss Irene. And they ain’t comin’ back, so Miss Lily says. She went away, before it was light, on the New York flier. Oh, it was a turrible night, Mr. Downes ... I’ve seen things happenin’ here for forty years, but nothin’ like last night ... nothin’ ever.”
He began to moan and call on the Lord, and Philip remembered suddenly that the half-finished drawing of Lily Shane had disappeared. She had carried it off then, without a word. And slowly she again began to take possession of his imagination. For a moment he tried to picture her house in Paris where his drawing of her would be hung. She had gone away without giving him another thought.
Hennery was saying over and over again, “It was a turrible night ... something must-a happened in the house too. The Devil sure was on the rampage.”
He stood there, staring out of the window, suffering from a curious, sick feeling of having been deserted. “By what? By whom?” he askedhimself. “Not by Lily Shane, surely, on whom I had no claims ... whom I barely knew.” Yet it was Lily Shane who had deserted him. It was as if she had closed a door behind her, shutting him back into the world of Elmer and his mother and Jason Downes. The thing he had glimpsed for a moment was only an illusion....
WhenHennery had gone off muttering to himself, Philip put on his coat and went out, for the room had become suddenly unendurable to him. He did not know why, but all at once he hated it, this room where he had been happy for the first time since he was a child. It turned suddenly cold and desolate and hauntingly empty. Running down the stairs, he hurried across the soiled snow, avoiding the dark stain by the decaying arbor. He went by that same instinct which always drove him when he was unhappy towards the furnaces and the engines, and at Hennessey’s corner he turned toward the district where the tents stood. They presented an odd, bedraggled appearance now, still housing the remnant of workers who had fought to the end, all that little army which had met the night before in the park of Shane’s Castle. Here and there a deserted tent had collapsed in the dirty snow. Piles of rubbish and filth cluttered the muddy field on every side. Men, women and children stood in little groups, frightened and helpless and bedraggled, all the spirit gone out of them. There was no more work for them now. Wherever they went, no mill would take them in. They had no homes, no money, no food....
Lost among them, he came presently to feel less lonely, for it was here that he belonged—in this armyof outcasts—a sort of pariah in the world that should have been his own.
At the door of one of the tents, he recognized Sokoleff. The Ukranian had let his beard grow and he held a child of two in his arms—a child with great hollow eyes and blue lips. Sokoleff, who was always drunk and laughing, was sober now, with a look of misery in his eyes. Philip shook his free hand in silence, and then said, “You heard about Krylenko?”
“No, I ain’t heard nothin’. I’ve been waitin’ for him. I gotta tell him a piece of bad news.”
“He’s gone away.”
“Where’s he gone?”
Philip told him, and, after a silence, Sokoleff said, “I suppose he had to beat it. I suppose he had to ... but what are we gonna do ... the ones that’s left. He’s the only one with a brain. The rest of us ain’t good for nothin’. We ain’t even got money to get drunk on.”
“He won’t forget you.”
“Oh, it’s all right for him. He ain’t got nobody ... no children or a wife. He ain’t even got a girl ... now.”
For a moment the single word “now,” added carelessly after a pause, meant nothing to Philip, and then suddenly a terrible suspicion took possession of him. He looked at Sokoleff. “What d’you mean ... now?”
“Ain’t you heard it?”
“What?”
“It was his girl, Giulia ... that was killed last night.”
Philip felt sick. In a low voice he asked, “And he didn’t know it?”
“I was to tell him, but nobody’s seen him. I’m damned glad he’s went away now. I won’t have the goddamned dirty job. He’ll be crazy ... crazy as hell.”
And then Philip saw her again as he had seen her the night before, lying face down in the snow ... Krylenko’s Giulia.
“She oughtn’t to have went up there,” Sokoleff was saying. “But she was nuts on him ... she thought that he was the best guy on earth, and she wanted to hear his speech....” The bearded Slovak spat into the snow. “I guess that was the last thing she ever heard. She musta died happy.... That’s better than livin’ like this.”
And Krylenko had been hiding in Shane’s Castle all night while Giulia lay dead in the snow outside.
The sick baby began to cry, and Sokoleff stroked its bare head with a calloused paw covered by black hair.
All at once Philip was happy again; even in the midst of all the misery about him, he was gloriously, selfishly happy, because he knew that, whatever happened, he had known what Krylenko had lost now forever. He thought suddenly, “The jungle at Megambo was less cruel and savage than this world about me.”
ToJason Downes the tragedy in the park of Shane’s Castle had only one significance—that it tarnished all the glory of his astonishing return. When the papers appeared in the morning, the first pages were filledwith the news of “the riot precipitated by strikers last night.” It recounted the death of a Pole and of Giulia Rizzo, and announced triumphantly that the strike was broken at last. And far back, among the advertisements of Peruna and Lydia Pinkham’s Compound, there appeared a brief paragraph or two announcing the return of Jason Downes, and touching upon the remarkable story of his accident and consequent loss of memory. There were, doubtless, people who never saw it at all.
But he made the most of his return, walking the round of all the cigar-stores and poker-rooms which he had haunted in his youth. He even went to Hennessey’s saloon, beginning to thrive again on the money of the strike-breakers. But he found no great triumph, for he discovered only one or two men who had ever known him and to the others he was only Emma Downes’ husband, whom they barely noticed in the excitement of discussing the riots of the night before. Even his dudishness had dated during those long twenty-six years: he must have heard the titters that went up from poolroom loafers at the sight of the faun-colored vest, the waxed mustaches and the tan derby. He was pushed aside at bars and thrust into the corner in the poolrooms.
Half in desperation, he went at last to find an audience in the group of old men who sat all day about the stove of McTavish’s undertaking-parlors. They were old: they would remember who he was. But even there the clamor of the tragedy drowned his tale. He found the place filled with Italians—the father and the seven orphaned brothers and sisters of Giulia Rizzo. The father wept and wrung his hands. The olderchildren joined him, and the four youngest huddled dumbly in a corner. It was Jason’s own son, Philip, who was trying to quiet them. He nodded to his father, gave him a sudden glance of contempt, and then disappeared with McTavish into the back room where the undertaker had prepared Giulia for her last rest. For a moment Jason hung about hopefully, and then, confused and depressed by the ungoverned emotions of the Italians, he slipped out of the door, and up the street toward the Peerless Restaurant. He was like a bedraggled bantam rooster which had lost its proud tail-feathers, but as he approached the restaurant he grew a bit more jaunty: there was always Em who thought him wonderful....
Behind the partition of the undertaking-rooms, Philip and McTavish stood looking down at Giulia. The blood had been washed away and her face was white like marble against the dark coil of her hair. She was clothed in a dress of black silk.
“It was her best dress,” said McTavish. “The old man brought it up here this morning.”
Philip asked, “Are they going to bury her in the Potters Field? Old Rizzo hasn’t got a cent, with all these children to feed.”
“No, I’ve arranged that. I fixed it up with the priest. She had to be buried in consecrated ground ... and ... and I bought enough for her. I ain’t got any family, so I might as well spend my money on something.”
Philipsaw his father at the restaurant, but there was little conversation between them, and Emma kepttalking about the riot of the night before, observing that, “now that the police had tried something besides coddling a lot of dirty foreigners, the strike was over in a hurry.”
At this remark, Philip rose quietly and went out without another word to either of them. At home he found the druggist’s wife sitting with the twins. Naomi, she said, was out. She had gone to see Mabelle. Mrs. Stimson wanted more details of his father’s return, and also news of what had happened at Shane’s Castle. After answering a dozen questions, he went away quickly.
At four o’clock his father came and saw the twins, diddling them both on his feet until they cried and Mrs. Stimson said, with the air of a snapping-turtle, “I’m going to leave them with you. Naomi ought to have been home two hours ago, and I’ve got a household of my own to look after.” (Even for her poor Jason appeared to have lost his fascination.)
At seven when Philip came in to sit with the twins while Naomi went to choir practice, he found little Naomi crying and his father asleep in the Morris-chair by the gas stove. Jason had removed his collar and wrapped himself in a blanket. With him, sleeping was simply a way of filling in time between the high spots in existence: he slept when he was bored, and he slept when he was forced to wait.
Holding the baby against him, and patting its back softly, Philip approached his father and touched him with the toe of his shoe. “Pa!” he said. “Pa! Wake up!”
Jason awakened with all the catlike reluctance of a sensual nature, stretching himself and yawning andclosing his eyes. He would have fallen asleep a second time but for the insistence of Philip’s toe, the desperate crying of the child, and Philip’s voice saying, “Wake up! Wake up!” There was something in the very prodding of the toe which indicated a contempt or at least a lack of respect. Jason noticed it and scowled.
“I just fell asleep for a minute,” he said. “It couldn’t have been long.” But all the cocksureness had turned into an air of groveling apology.
“Where’s Naomi?”
“She went off to Mabelle’s.” He took a pair of cigars from the yellow waistcoat and asked, “Have a cigar?”
“No. Not now.” Philip continued to pat the baby’s fat back. Suddenly he felt desperate, suffocated and helpless. The cry of the child hurt him.
He said, “She’s been at Mabelle’s all day.”
“I do believe she said she’d be back after choir practice.” He lighted the cigar and regarded the end of it thoughtfully. Philip began to walk up and down, and presently his father said, without looking at him, “You ain’t living with Naomi, are you? I mean here in this house? You ain’t sleeping with her?”
“No ... I’m not.”
“I thought so. Your Ma was trying to make me believe you was.” He cocked his head on one side. “But I smelled a rat ... I smelled a rat. I knew something was wrong.”
Philip continued his promenade in silence.
“How’d you ever come to hook up with Naomi?”
“Because I wanted to ... I suppose.”
Jason considered the answer thoughtfully. “No, I don’t believe you did. I ain’t very bright, but I knowsome things. No man in his right mind would hook up to anything as pious as Naomi....” He saw that Philip’s head tossed back and his jaw hardened, as if he were going to speak. “Now, don’t get mad at your Pa ... your poor old Pa ... I know you don’t think much of ’im, but he’s kind-a proud of you, just the same. And he don’t blame you for not living with Naomi. Why, the thought of it makes me kind-a seasick.”
Again a silence filled by little Naomi’s heartbroken crying.
“Why, she ought to be home now looking after her children instead of gadding about with preachers and such. Your Ma was always pious, too, but she was a good housekeeper. She never allowed religion to interfere with her bein’ practical.”
Philip, distracted, unhappy, conscience-stricken, and a little frightened at Naomi’s queer avoidance of him, was aware, too, that his father was saying one by one things he’d thought himself a hundred times. It occurred to him that Jason wasn’t perhaps as empty and cheap as he seemed. It was almost as if an affection were being born out of Jason’s hopeless efforts toward an understanding. If only little Naomi would stop squalling....
His father was saying, “No, I’m proud of you, my boy. D’you know why?”
“No.”
“Because of the way you stand up to your Ma. It takes a strong man to do that, unless you learn the trick. I’ve learned the trick. I just let her slide off now like water off a duck’s back. I just say, ‘Yes, yes,’ to her and then do as I damned please. Oh, Ilearned a lot since I last saw her ... a hell of a lot. There’s a lotta women like her ... especially American women—that don’t know their place.”
The baby stopped screaming, sobbed for a moment, and then began again.
“It wasn’t her piousness that drove me away. I could have managed that. It was her way of meddlin’.”
Philip stopped short and turned, looking at his father. “Then youwererunning away from us when you fell and hit your head?”
“I wasn’t runnin’ away fromyou.”
Philip stood in front of the chair. “And you didn’t lose your memory at all, did you?”
Jason looked up at him with an expression of astonishment. “No ... of course not. D’you mean to say she never told you the truth ... even you ... my own son?”
“No ... I guess she was trying to protect you ... and made me believe my father wasn’t the kind to run away.” (The cries of the baby had begun to beat upon his brain like the steel hammers of the Mill.)
“Protect me, hell! It was to protect herself. She didn’t want the Town to think that any man would desert her. Oh, I know your Ma, my boy. And it would have took a hero or a nincompoop to have stuck with her in those days.” He knocked the ash from his cigar, and shook his head sadly. “But I oughtn’t to have run away on your account. If I’d ’a’ stuck it out, you wouldn’t have got mixed up in the missionary business or with Naomi either. You wouldn’t be walkin’ up and down with that squallin’ brat—at any rate, it wouldn’t be Naomi’s brat. I guess the missionary business was her way of gettin’ even with me through you.” He shook his head again. “Your Ma’s a queer woman. She’s got as much energy as a steam engine, but she never knows where she’s goin’, and she always thinks she’s the only one with any sense. And my, ain’t she hard ... and unforgivin’ ... hard as a cocoanut!”
“She forgave you and took you back.”
“But she’s been aching to do that for years. That’s the kind of thing she likes.” His chest swelled under the yellow vest. “Besides, I always had a kind of an idea that she preferred me to any other man she’s ever seen. Your Ma’s a passionate woman, Philip. She’s kind of ashamed of it, but deep down she’s a passionate woman. If she’d had me about all these years she wouldn’t have been so obnoxious, I guess.”
The baby had ceased crying now, and, thrusting its soft head against the curve of Philip’s throat, was lying very still. The touch of the downy little ball against his skin filled him with pity and a sudden, warm happiness. The poor little thing was trusting him, reaching out in its helpless way. He didn’t even mind the things that his father was saying of his mother. He scarcely heard them....
“I thought,” said Jason, “that we’d cooked up that story about my memory for the Town and for old pie-faced Elmer. I thought she’d tell you the truth, but I guess she don’t care much for the truth if it ain’t pleasant.”
Philip continued to pat little Naomi, more and more gently, as she began to fall asleep. In a low voice he asked, “You’re going to stay now that you’ve come back, aren’t you?”
“No, I gotta go back to Australia.”
Philip looked at his father sharply. “You aren’t going back to stay, are you?”
“I gotta look after my property, haven’t I?”
“Why did you ever come back at all?”
Jason considered the question. “I suppose it was curiosity ... I wanted to see my own son, and well ... I wanted to see what had happened to your Ma after all these years, and then it is sort of fun to be a returned prodigal. Nothing has happened to your Ma. She’s just the same. She accused me of bein’ drunk this morning when I’d only had a glass. She carried on something awful.”
“Have you told her you’re going back to stay?”
“No ... I’ve just told her I’m going back.” He looked at Philip suddenly. “I suppose you think I’m lyin’ about all that property in Australia. Well, I ain’t. I’ll send you pictures of it when I get back ... I ought to have brought them. I can’t guess why I didn’t.”
He rose and put on his coat. “I’d better be movin’ on now, or she’ll be sayin’ I’ve been hangin’ around bars. Have you eaten yet?”
“Yes ... at the railroad lunch counter.”
“That’s a hell of a life for a married man.”
He stood for a moment looking at little Naomi, who lay asleep on Philip’s shoulder. Then, shyly, he put out his finger and touched the downy head gently. “They’re fine babies,” he said. “I wouldn’t have thought a poor creature like Naomi could have had ’em.”
Philip laid the child gently beside her brother and stood looking down at them.
“Philip,” his father began. Philip turned, and, as if the burning gaze of his son’s eyes extinguished his desire to speak, Jason looked away quickly, and said, “Well, good-night.” He turned shyly, and Philip, aware that he was trying to pierce through the wall that separated them, felt suddenly sorry for him, and said, “Yes, Pa. What was it you meant to say?”
Jason coughed and then with an effort said, “Don’t be too unhappy ... and if there’s somebody else ... I mean another girl ... why, don’t torture yourself too much about it. Your Ma has made you like that.... But she’s got queer ideas. We ain’t alive very long, you know, and there ain’t any reason why we should make our brief spell miserable.”
Philip didn’t answer him. He was looking down again at the children, silent, with the old, queer, pinched look about the eyes, as if he were ill again. He saw suddenly that his father wasn’t such a fool, after all, and he was human. He was standing there with his hat in his two hands, looking childish and subdued and very shy.
Philip heard him saying, with another nervous cough, “Well, good-night, Philip.”
“Good-night.”
The door closed and Philip sank down wearily into a chair, resting his head on the edge of the crib. Presently he fell asleep thus.
Onthat night the singing at choir practice reached a peak of frenzy. While Philip sat sleeping beside the crib, Naomi was pounding her heart out on the stainedcelluloid keys of the tinny piano in the Infants’ Classroom. She played wildly, with a kind of shameless abandon, as if she wanted to pour out her whole story of justification; and the others, taking fire from her spirit, sang as they had never sung before.
During the afternoon, the old Naomi—the stubborn, sure Naomi of Megambo—had come to life again in some mysterious fashion. She even put on the new foulard dress in a gesture of defiance to show them—Philip and his mother—that, however “funny-looking” it might be, she was proud of it. And then neither of them had seen her wearing it, Philip because she was avoiding him, and Emma because chance had not brought them together. She had gone up to Mabelle’s bent upon telling her that she had come to the end of her endurance. She had meant to ask Mabelle’s advice, because Mabelle was very shrewd about such matters.
And then when she found herself seated opposite Mabelle she discovered that she couldn’t bring herself to say what she meant to say. She couldn’t humble her pride sufficiently to tell even Mabelle how Philip treated her. She had finally gone home and then returned a second time, but it was no use. She couldn’t speak of it: she was too proud. And she knew, too, that whatever happened she must protect Philip. It wasn’t, she told herself, as if he were himself, as he had been at Megambo. He was sick. He really wasn’t responsible. She cried when she thought how she loved him now; if he would only notice her, she would let him trample her body in the dust. Mabelle’s near-sighted blue eyes noted nothing. She went on rocking and rocking, talking incessantly of clothes and foodand a soothing syrup that would make little Naomi sleep better at night.
During the day she had formed a dozen wild projects. She would go back to Megambo. She would return to her father, who was seventy now, and would welcome her help. She would run off to a cousin who lived in Tennessee. She would join another cousin who was an Evangelist in Texas: she could play the piano and lead the singing for him. In any of these places she would find again the glory she had known as Naomi Potts, “youngest missionary of God”; she wouldn’t any longer be a nobody, unwanted, always pushed aside and treated as of no consequence.
But always there were the twins to be considered. How could she run off and forget them? And if she did run away, Emma and perhaps even Philip would use it as a chance to rid themselves of her forever. She fancied that she saw now how Emma had used her, willing all the while to cast her off when she was no longer of any service. She told herself again and again, as if she could not bring herself to believe it, that she loved the twins—that she loved them despite her aching back and the hours she was kept awake by their crying. But she remembered that she had never been tired at Megambo: no amount of work had tired her. She hadn’t wanted the twins: she’d only gone to Philip because Mabelle and Emma told her that she must and because Mabelle said that men liked children, and that going to Philip would give her a hold over him. And now ... see what had come of it! Philip scarcely noticed her. Before she lived with him, it hadn’t mattered to her, but now—now she always carried a weight about inside her. Her heart leaped if he took the least notice of her.
No, she saw it all clearly. She must run away. She couldn’t go on, chained down like a slave. But if she ran away, she’d lose Philip for ever, and if she stayed, he might come back to her. The children belonged to both of them. They were a bond you could never break, the proof that once, for a little time, he belonged to her. She saw that he, too, was chained after a fashion. He belonged to her in a way he belonged to no other woman. In the sight of the Lord any other woman would always be a strumpet and a whore.
At last, as it was growing dark, she found herself sitting on a bench in the park before the new monument to General Sherman. It was raining and her coat was soaked and her shoes wet through. The rain ran in little trickles from her worn black hat. It was as if she had wakened suddenly from a dream. She wasn’t certain how she came to be sitting on the wet bench with the heavy rain melting the snow all about her. She thought, “I must have been crazy for a time. I can’t go on like this. I’ve got to talk to some one. I’ve got to ... I’ve got to!” She began to cry, and then she thought, “I’ll speak to the Reverend Castor to-night after choir practice. He’ll help me and he’s a good man. He’ll never tell any one. He’s always been so kind. It was silly of me to think things about him. I was silly to be afraid of him. I’ll talk to him. I’ve got to talk to some one. He’ll understand.”
When the practice was finished, the Reverend Castor came out of the study to bid the members good-night. In the dim light of the hallway, as Naomi passed him, he looked at her and smiled. She saw that his handswere trembling in a way that had come over him lately, and the smile warmed her, but at the same time weakened her. There was a comfort and a kindliness in it that made her want to cry.
Once inside the study, she found that the drawer of the cabinet was jammed again, as it had been on that first night. While she tugged at it, she heard him outside the door saying good-night one by one to the choir. Putting down the music, she began again to struggle with the drawer, and then suddenly, as if the effort was the last she could make, she collapsed on the floor and began to weep.
She heard the door open and she heard the Reverend Castor’s deep, warm voice saying, “Why, Naomi, what’s the matter?”
She answered him, without looking up. “It’s the drawer,” she said. “It’s stuck again ... and I’m ... I’m so tired.”
He went over to the cabinet and this time he was forced to struggle with it.
“It’s really too heavy for you, my dear girl ... I’ll fix it myself in the morning.” He replaced the music and when he attempted to close the drawer again it stuck fast. “Now it won’t close at all. But I can fix it. I’m handy about such things.”
His hands were trembling, and he looked white and tired. He talked with the air of a man desperately hiding pits of silence. When he turned, Naomi still sat on the floor, her body bent forward. Her worn, rain-soaked hat had fallen forward a little, and she was sobbing. He sat down in the great stuffed leather chair. It was very low, so that he was almost on a level with her.
“My poor child,” he asked, “what is it? Is it something I can help?”
“I don’t know. I wanted to talk to some one. I can’t go on. I can’t ... I can’t.”
He laid his big hand on her shoulder with a gentleness that seemed scarcely real, and, at the touch, she looked up at him, dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief that had been soaked with tears hours earlier. As she looked at him, some old instinct, born of long experience with unhappy women, took possession of him. He said, “Why, you’ve got a new dress on, Naomi. It’s very pretty. Did you make it yourself?”
For a second a look almost of happiness came into her face. “Why, yes,” she said. “Mabelle helped me ... but I made most of it myself.”
His other hand touched her shoulder. “Here,” he said, “lean back against my knee and tell me everything that’s making you unhappy....” When she hesitated, he said, “Try to think of me as your father, my child. I’m old enough to be your father ... and I don’t want to see you unhappy.”
She leaned against his knee with a sudden feeling of weak collapse. It was the first time any one had been kind to her for so long, and, strangely enough, she wasn’t afraid of him any longer. The old uneasiness seemed to have died away.
“Tell me, my child.”
The damp handkerchief lay crushed into a tiny ball in her red, chapped hand. For a long time she didn’t speak, and he waited patiently until she found words. At last she said, “I don’t know how to begin. I don’t know myself what’s happened to me ... I don’t know. Sometimes I think Imust be black with sin or going crazy ... sometimes I can’t think any more, and I don’t know what I’m doing.... It was like that to-day ... all day.... I’ve been going about like a crazy woman.”
And then, slowly, she began, in a confused, incoherent fashion, to tell him the whole story of her misery from the very beginning at Megambo when the Englishwoman had suddenly appeared out of the forest. It all seemed to begin then, she said, and it had gone on and on ever since, growing worse and worse. She hadn’t any friends—at least none save Mabelle; and the others didn’t want her to see Mabelle. Besides, Mabelle didn’t seem to help: whatever she advised only made matters worse.
The Reverend Castor interrupted her. “But I’m your friend, Naomi.... I’ve always been your friend. You could have come to me long ago.”
“But you’re a preacher,” she said. “And that’s not the same thing.”
“But I’m a man, too, Naomi ... a human being.”
And then she even told him about Emma while he interrupted her from time to time by saying, “Can it be?” and, “It hardly seems possible—a woman like Emma Downes, who has always been one of the pillars, the foundation-stones, of our church! How much goes on of which we poor blind creatures know nothing.”
And Naomi said, “I know. No one will ever believe me. They’ll all believe that I’m nothing and that she’s a good, brave woman. I can’t fight her, Reverend Castor. I can’t ... and sometimes I think she tries to poison him against me.”
The trembling hand came to rest once more on her shoulder. There was a long silence, and presently hesaid, in a low voice, “I know, my child ... I know. I’ve suffered, too ... for fifteen years.”
She had begun to sob again. “And now there are other women ... more than one, I’m sure. I pray to God for his soul. I pray and pray to God to return him to me ... my Philip, who was a good man and believed in God. He’s changed now. I don’t know him any more. To-night I don’t think I love him. I’ve come to the end of everything.”
He began to pat her shoulder, gently, as if he were comforting a child, and for a long time, they stayed thus in silence. At last he said, “I’ve suffered, too, Naomi ... for years and years.... It began almost as soon as I was married, and it’s never stopped for an hour, for a moment since. It gets worse and worse with each year.” Suddenly he covered his face with his hands and groaned. “I pray to God for strength to go on living. I have need of God’s help to go on at all. I, too, need some one to talk to.” His hands dropped from his face, and he placed one arm about her thin, narrow shoulders. She did not draw away. Still sobbing, she let her whole weight rest against him. She was so tired, and she felt so ill. A strange, gusty and terrifying happiness took possession of the tired, nerve-racked man. Just to touch a woman thus, to have a woman kind to him, to have a woman who would trust him, was a pleasure almost too keen to be borne. For fifteen acid years he had hungered for a moment, a single moment, like this. He did not speak, conscious, it seemed, that to breathe might suddenly shatter this fragile, pathetic sense of peace.
Naomi had closed her eyes, as if she had fallenasleep from her long exhaustion; but she wasn’t sleeping, for presently her pale lips moved a little, and she said in a whisper, “There’s nothing for me to do but run away or kill myself ... and then I’ll be out of the way.”
He did not tell her at once, without hesitation, that she was contemplating a great sin. He merely kept silent, and, after a time, he murmured, “My poor, poor child ... my tired child,” and then fell once more into silence. They must have remained thus for nearly an hour. Naomi even appeared to fall asleep, and then, starting suddenly, she cried out. His arm ached, but he did not move. He was, it seemed, past such a small discomfort as an aching arm. And he was struggling, struggling passionately, with a terrible temptation, conscious all the while that each minute added to the bitterness of the reproaches that awaited him on opening the parsonage door. It was long after eleven o’clock, and he should have returned ages ago. He thought, “I can’t go home now. I can never go home again. I can never open that door again. I would rather die here now. One more time might drive me mad ... I mightn’t know what I was doing ... I might....”
The free hand again closed over his eyes, as if to shut out the horrible thing that had occurred to him. Naomi had opened her eyes and was looking up at him. For a second he thought, “Has she seen what was in them?”
Her lips moved again. “I don’t care what happens to me any longer.”
Suddenly, without knowing what he was doing, hebent down and took her in his arms, “Naomi ... Naomi ... do you mean that? Answer me, do you mean that?”
She closed her eyes wearily. “I don’t care what happens to me.”
He held her more tightly, the odd, gusty pleasure sweeping over him in terrifying waves. “Naomi ... will you ... will you go away ... now ... at once, and with me?”
“You can do with me what you want, if you’ll only be kind to me.”
“We’ve a right to be happy. We’ve suffered enough.” She did not answer him, and he said, “God will understand. He’s merciful. We’ve had our hell here on earth, Naomi ... Naomi ... listen to me! Will you go now ... at once?” A curious, half-mad excitement colored his voice. “I’ve got money. I’ve been putting it aside for a long time, because I’ve thought for a long time I might want to go away.... I’ve been saving it, a dime and a quarter here and there where I could squeeze it. I’ve got more than two hundred dollars. I thought that sometime I’d have to run away. But I meant to go away alone ... I never knew ... I never knew.” He began abruptly to cry, the tears pouring down the lined, tired face. “We’ll go somewhere far away ... to South America, or the South Sea Islands, where nobody will know us. And we’ll be free there, and happy. We’ve a right to a little happiness. Oh, Naomi, we’ll be happy.”
She appeared not to have heard him. She lay in a kind of stupor, until, raising her body gently, he stood up and lifted her easily into the big leather chair, where she lay watching him, her eyes half-closed, her mouth set in a straight, hard line, touched with bitterness.
The Reverend Castor moved quickly, with a strange vigor and decision. The trembling had gone suddenly from his hands. His whole body grew taut and less weary, as if he had become suddenly young. He had the air of a man possessed, as if every fiber, every muscle, every cell, were crying out, “It’s not too late! It’s not too late! There is still time to live!” He approached the desk, and, unlocking the drawer, began taking out money—a thin roll of bills, and then an endless number of coins that tinkled and clattered as they slid into his pockets. There must have been pounds of metal in dimes and nickels and quarters. He filled his vest pocket with cheap cigars from a box on the desk, and then, turning, went over to Naomi, and, raising her from the chair, smoothed her hair and put her hat straight, with his own hands. Then he kissed her chastely on the brow, and she, leaning against him, murmured, “Take me wherever you like. I’m so tired.”
For a moment they stood thus, and presently he began to repeat in his low, rich, moving voice,The Song of Songs.
“For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone. The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land....”
The words had upon her a strange effect of exaltation, the same that had come over her when she sat by the piano, carried away by her emotions. She wasn’t Naomi any longer. Naomi seemed to have died. She was a gaudy Queen, and Solomon in all his glory was her lover. She seemed enveloped by light out of which the rich, vibrant voice was saying, “Until the day break, and the shadows flee away, turn, my beloved,and be thou like a roe or a young hart upon the mountains of Bether.”
A little while after, as the clock on the firehouse struck midnight, the door of the study closed, and two figures hurried away into the pouring rain. They were a tired, middle-aged preacher and a bedraggled woman, in a queer, homemade dress of figured foulard, and a soaked coat and hat; but there was a light in their eyes which seemed to illumine the darkness and turn aside the rain.