Philipwakened slowly, conscious of being stiff and sore from having slept in a cramped position, and thinking, “It must be late. Naomi will be home soon.” And then, looking up at the clock, he saw that it was after one. He rose and went over to it, listening for the tick to make certain that it was working properly. He looked at his own watch. It, too, showed five minutes past one. He listened for a moment to the sound of the rain beating upon the tin roof and then he went into the other two rooms. They were empty, and, suddenly, he was frightened.
Giving a final look at the twins, he seized his hat, and, hurrying down the steps, roused the long-suffering Mrs. Stimson and told her that Naomi hadn’t yet come home. He begged her to leave her door open, so that she might hear the twins if they began to scream, and without waiting to hear her complaints he rushed out into the rain.
It fell in ropes, melting the snow and running off down the hill in torrents. To-morrow, he knew dimly, there would be a flood in the Flats. The water wouldrise and fill the stinking cellars of the houses. Those few families who lived in tents must already be soaked with the cold downpour. The streets were deserted, and the shops and houses black and dark. Once he caught the distant glint of light on the wet black slicker of a policeman. Save for this, he seemed to be alone in a town of the dead.
From a long way off he saw the light in the church study, and the sight of it warmed him with quick certainty that Naomi must still be there. Some urgent thing, he told himself, had arisen at choir practice. He ran down the street and through the churchyard, and at the door of the study he knocked violently. No one answered. The place was empty. He opened the door. A drawer of the cabinet stood half-open with a pile of music thrust into it carelessly. A drawer of the desk was open and empty. The gas still flickered in the corner. Passing through the study, he went into the church itself. It was dark, save for a dim flare that made the outlines of the windows silhouettes of gray set in black. The empty church frightened him. He shouted, “Naomi! Naomi!” and, waiting, heard only an echo that grew fainter and fainter ... “Naomi!... Naomi!... Naomi!...” until it died away into cold stillness. Again he shouted, and again the mocking, receding echo answered him.... “Naomi!... Naomi!... Naomi!...” His own voice, trembling with terror, came back to him out of the darkness: “Naomi!... Naomi!... Naomi!”
He thought, “She’s not here, but she might be at the parsonage. In any case, Reverend Castor will know something.” And then, “But why did he goaway leaving the gas lighted and the study unlocked?” He turned back and, running, went through the dark church and the lighted study out into the rain.
There was a light still burning in the parsonage, and as he turned into the path he saw that a figure, framed against the light, stood in the upper window. At first he thought, “It’s Reverend Castor,” and then almost at once, “No ... it’s his wife. She’s waiting for him to come home.”
He knocked loudly at the door with a kind of desperate haste, for a terrible suspicion had begun to take form. Whatever had happened to Naomi, every moment was precious: it might save her from some terrible act that would wreck all her life and the Reverend Castor’s as well. He knocked again, and then tried the door. It was locked, and he heard an acid voice calling out, “I’m coming. I’m coming. For Heaven’s sake, don’t break down the door!”
The key turned, and he found himself facing a figure in a gray flannel dressing-gown, dimly outlined by the slight flicker of gas. He could barely distinguish the features—thin, white and pinched ... the features of a woman, the Reverend Castor’s wife.
“Who are you ... coming at this hour of the night to bang on people’s doors?” It was a thin, grating voice. As his eyes grew accustomed to the light, he saw a face of incredible repulsion. It was a mean face, like that of a malicious witch.
“I’m Philip Downes. I’m trying to find my wife. She didn’t come home from choir practice.”
A look of evil satisfaction suddenly shadowed the woman’s face. “She wasn’t the only one that didn’t come back. Like as not they’re still there, carryingon in the church. I guess it wouldn’t be the first time.”
He didn’t care what she was saying, though the sound of her voice and the look in her cold blue eyes made him want to strangle her.
“They aren’t there. I’ve just come from the church.”
He fancied that he heard her chuckle wickedly, but he couldn’t be certain. He heard her saying, “Then he’s done it. I always knew it would happen.”
He seized her by the shoulders. “Done what? What do you mean?”
“Let go of me, young man! Why, he’s run off with your wife, you fool! I always knew he’d do it some day. Oh, I knew him ... Samuel Castor ... I haven’t been married to him for fifteen years for nothing!”
He wanted to shake her again, to make her talk. “If you knew, why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because it might have been any woman. It wasn’t just your wife. I wasn’t sure who it would be.” She began to laugh again, a high, cackling laugh. “I told him he’d do it. I told him so every night. I knew it was going to happen.” She seemed to find delight in her horrible triumph.
“Where have they gone?”
“How do I know where they’ve gone? He’s gone to hell for sure now, where he can’t torment me any more. He’s left me—a poor invalid ... without a cent or any one to look after me. God knows what’ll become of me now. But he’s done it. I always told him he would. He’s a fine man of God!He’s left a poor invalid wife ... penniless and sick.”
There was a kind of wild delight in her voice and manner, as if she had been trying all these years to destroy him and had at last succeeded. She seemed to receive this last calamity as the final crown of her martyrdom. She was happy. To Philip it seemed suddenly that by wishing it, by thinking of nothing else for fifteen years, she had made the thing happen—just as it was Emma who had made happen the thing she wanted to believe—that Mary had stolen him from her.
He waited no longer. He ran past the malicious figure in the greasy dressing-gown, out again into the rain. He heard her saying, “He didn’t even think of my hot-water bottle ... the scoundrel ...” and then the horrible voice was drowned by the sound of the downpour.
Without quite knowing how he got there, he found himself, soaked and shivering, inside the baggage-room at the railway station. Everything else was closed, but in the shadows among the gaudy, battered trunks of some theatrical company, the baggageman dozed quietly. He was shaken into consciousness to find a madman standing before him, white and trembling, and dripping with water.
“Tell me,” Philip asked, “did any one leave the Town on the one o’clock?”
The man looked at him sleepily, and growled something about being wakened so roughly.
“Tell me. I’ve got to know!”
He scratched his head. “Why, yes. I do mind somebody gettin’ on the one o’clock. Come to think of it, it was what’s-his-name, the preacher.”
“Reverend Castor?”
“Yes ... that’s the one ... the big fellow.”
“Was he alone?”
“I dunno.... He was alone for all I know. I didn’t see no one else.”
Philip left him, and, outside, stood for a moment in the shelter of the platform shed, peering into the distance where the gleaming wet rails disappeared into the dimness of fog and jewel-like signal lights. And all at once he hated the Flats, the Mills, the whole Town, and then he laughed savagely: even his beloved locomotives had betrayed him by carrying Naomi off into the darkness.
There was nothing to do now. What was done was done. He was glad he hadn’t gone to the police to find her. If they didn’t know, it would keep the thing out of the papers for a little time, and the two of them might come back. There was only that crazy old woman in the parsonage who need be feared; it was impossible to imagine what she might do. He hadn’t really thought of her until now, and, as he walked through the rain, up the hill again, to his mother’s house, her horrid image kept returning to him as she stood in her greasy dressing-gown screaming at him in triumph, “I knew it would happen some day. I always told him he’d do it!”
He thought, “I never knew it was as bad as that. No one knew.” It seemed to him that God would forgive a man any sin who must have suffered as the Reverend Castor.
He was no longer conscious of the downpour, for he was already as wet as if he had jumped into the brook, and as he walked, all the deadly sickness of reaction began to sweep over him. He was tired suddenly, sotired that he could have lain down in the streaming gutter in peace; the whole thing seemed suddenly to lose all its quality of the extraordinary. In his weariness it seemed quite a usual experience that a man should be searching the Town for a wife who had run away with the preacher. It was as if the thing hadn’t happened to himself, but as if he saw it from a great distance, or had heard it told him as a story. To-morrow (he thought), or the next day, they would be telling it everywhere in the Town, in every cigar-store and poolroom, about the stove at McTavish’s undertaking parlors. They would hear of it even in Hennessey’s saloon. All at once a sudden flash of memory returned to him—of Hennessey standing above him, saying, “Run along home to your Ma like a good little boy. Tell her not to let her little tin Jesus come back to Hennessey’s place, if she don’t want him messed up too much to be a good missionary ... I don’t want to be mixed up with that hell-cat.”
In that queer mood of slackness, he was certain now of only one thing—that he could stay no longer in the same Town where Naomi and the Reverend Castor had lived, where Giulia Rizzo had been killed, where that pathetic uprising of workmen asking justice had been beaten down. He couldn’t stay any longer in the same place with his own father. He wanted to go away, to the other side of the earth. Any place, even the savage, naked jungle at Megambo was less cruel than this black and monstrous Town.
At the slate-colored house he hammered on the door for twenty minutes without getting any answer, and at last he went to the side of the house and tossed stones against the window behind which his motherand father were passing what Mabelle called “a second honeymoon.” After a moment a head appeared at the window, and his mother’s voice asked, “Who’s there? For God’s sake, what’s the matter?”
“It’s Philip ... let me in!”
She opened the door to him in her outing-flannel gown and a flowered wrapper which he had never seen her wear before. It was, he supposed, a best wrapper which she had kept against the homecoming she had awaited for years. Her head was covered coquettishly by a pink boudoir cap trimmed with lace. As he closed the door behind him, she said, “For God’s sake, Philip. What’s the matter? Have you gone crazy?”
He smiled at her, but it was a horrible smile, twisted and bitter, and born of old memories come alive, and of a disgust at the sight of the flowered wrapper and the coquettish lace cap. “No, I’m not crazy this time—though I’ve a right to be. It’s about Naomi ... she’s run away....”
“What do you mean?”
“And she hasn’t gone alone. She’s run away with the Reverend Castor.”
“Philip! Youarecrazy. It’s not true!”
“I’m telling you the truth. Iknow.”
She sat down suddenly on the stairs, holding to the rail for support. “Oh, my God! Oh, my God! What have I done to deserve such a thing? When will God bring me to the end of my trials?”
He made no move to comfort her. He simply stood watching, until presently she asked, “How do you know? There must be a mistake ... it’s not true.”
Then he told her bit by bit the whole story, coldly and with an odd, cruel satisfaction, so that no doubtremained; and for the first time in his memory he saw her wilt and collapse.
“You see, Ma, there can’t be any doubt. They’ve gone off together.”
Suddenly she seemed to make a great effort. She sat up again and said bitterly, “I always thought something like this would happen. She was always flighty ... I discovered that when she lived here. She wasn’t any good as a wife or as a mother. She wouldn’t nurse her own children. No ... I think, maybe, you’re well rid of her ... the brazen little slut.”
“Don’t say that, Ma. Whatever has happened is our fault. We drove her to it.” His words were gentle enough; it was his voice that was hard as flint.
“What do you mean? How can you accuse me?”
“We treated her like dirt ... and it wasn’t her fault. In some ways she’s better than either of us.”
She looked at him suddenly. “You’re not planning to take her back if she comes running home with her tail between her legs?”
“I don’t know ... I have a feeling that she’ll never come back.”
“Leaving her children without a thought!”
“I don’t suppose she left them without a thought ... but sometimes a person can be so unhappy that he only wants to die. I know ... I’ve been like that. Besides, she never wanted the children any more than I wanted them.”
“How can you say such a wicked thing!”
His face looked thin and pinched and white. The water, all unnoticed, had formed a pool about his feet on the immaculate carpet of Emma’s hall. He wasshaking with chill. He was like a dead man come up out of the sea. And deep inside him a small voice was born, which kept saying to him, “It’s that ridiculous woman in a flowered wrapper and pink cap who lies at the bottom of all this misery.” It was a tiny voice, but, like the voice that the Reverend Castor had tried to still by repeating Psalms, it would not die. It kept returning.
“It’s not wicked. It’s only the truth ... and it’s only the truth I care about to-night. I don’t give a damn for anything else in the world ... not for what people think, or about what they say. They can all go to hell for all I care.” His face was white and expressionless, like the face of a man already dead. It was the voice that was terrible.
“You needn’t swear, Philip.” She showed signs of weeping. “And I never thought my boy would turn against his own mother—not for any woman in the world.”
“Now don’t begin that. I’m not your boy any longer. I’ve got to grow up sometime. I’m not turning against you. I’m just sick to death of the whole mess. I’m through with the whole thing.”
She wiped her eyes with a corner of the ridiculous flowered wrapper, and the sight made him want to laugh. The tiny voice grew more clamorous.
She was saying, “I won’t wake your Pa and tell him. He’s no good at a time like this.” (Philip thought, “I don’t know. He might do better than any of us.”) “And I’ll dress and come down to the twins. And you ought to get on some dry clothes.” She rose, turned all at once into a woman of action. “I’ll take care of the twins.”
“No,” he said abruptly. “I can do that.”
“You don’t know about their bottles.”
“Idoknow ... I’ve done them on the nights Naomi went to choir practice. I don’t want you to come ... I want to be alone with them.”
“Philip ... I’m your mother.... It’s my place....”
“I want to be alone with them....”
He looked so wild that she seized his shoulders and said, “You’re not thinking anything foolish, are you?”
“I don’t know what I’m thinking. I can’t bear to think of her running off like that. I can’t bear to think of how we treated her.... If you mean that I’m thinking of killing myself, I’m not ... I can’t do that. I’ve got to think of little Philip and Naomi. If it wasn’t for them ... I might do anything.”
Suddenly in a wild hysteria, she put her arms about him, crying out, “Philip! Philip! My boy! Don’t say such things—it’s not you who’s talking. It’s some one else ... it’s a stranger ... somebody I never knew ... somebody I didn’t bear out of my own body.” She shook him passionately. “Philip! Philip! Wake up! Be your old self ... my son. Do you hear me, darling? Youdolove me still. Tell me what’s in your heart ... what the voice of your real self is saying.”
In the violence of her action, the pink lace cap slipped back on her head, exposing a neat row of curl-papers, festoons and garlands (thought Philip in disgust) of their second honeymoon. He didn’t resist her. He simply remained cold and frozen, one cold, thin hand thrust into his pocket for warmth. Then suddenly the hand touched something which roused asudden train of memory, and when at last she freed him, he drew out a pair of worn gloves.
“I think I’ll go home now,” he said in the same frozen voice. “Before I go, I must give you these. Mary Conyngham sent them to you. I think you left them at her house when you went to call.” It was as if he said to her, “It’s true ... what you thought about Mary and me. It’s true ... now.”
She took the gloves with a queer, mechanical gesture, and without another word he turned and went out, closing the door. When he had gone, she sat down on the steps again and began to weep, crying out, “Oh, God! Oh, God! What have I done to deserve such trouble! Oh, God! Have pity on me! Bring my son back to me!”
Suddenly, in a kind of frenzy, she began to tear the gloves to bits, as if they were the very body of Mary Conyngham. In the midst of her wild sobbing, a voice came out of the dark at the top of the stairs, “For Heaven’s sake, Em, what are you carrying on about now?”
It was Jason standing in his nightshirt, his bare legs exposed to the knees. “Come on back to bed. It’s cold as Jehu up here.”
By the time Philip reached the Flats, the rain had begun to abate a little, and the sky beyond the Mills and Shane’s Castle to turn a pale, cold gray with the beginning of dawn. The twins were awake and crying loudly. Poking up the fire in the kitchen range, he prepared the bottles and so quieted them before taking off his soaked clothing. The old feeling of being soiled had come over him again, more strongly even than on the day in Hennessey’s saloon, and when he had undressed and rubbed warmth back into his body, he drew hot water from the kitchen range, and, standing in a washtub by the side of the cribs where he could restore the bottles when they fell from the feeble grasp of the twins, he scrubbed himself vigorously from head to foot, as if thus he might drive away that sordid feeling of uncleanness.
At last he got into the bed beside the cribs—the bed which he had never shared with Naomi, and to which it was not likely that she would ever return. He had barely slept at all in more than two days, but it was impossible to sleep now. His mind was alive, seething, burning with activity like those cauldrons of white-hot metal in the Mills; yet he experienced a kind of troubled peace, for he had come to the end of one trouble. He knew that with his mother it was all finished. In the moment he had given her the gloves, he knew that he didn’t love her any more, that he no longer felt grateful to her for all that she had done for him. There was only a deadness where these emotions should have been. It was all over and finished: it would be better now if he never saw her again.
And the twins ... they must never go to her; whatever happened, she must never do to them what she had done to him. He would protect them from her, somehow, even if he died.
The day that followed was one of waiting for some sign, some hint, some bit of knowledge as to the whereabouts of Naomi and the Reverend Castor. Like the day after a sudden death in a household, it had no relation to ordinary days. It was rather like a day suspended without reality in time and space. Philip went about like a dead man. His father came and satwith him for a time, silent and subdued, and strangely unlike his old exuberant self.
It was Emma alone who seemed to rise above the calamity. “It is,” she said, “a time for activity. We must face things. We mustn’t give in.”
She went herself to call upon the editors of the two newspapers and by some force of threats and tears she induced them to keep silence regarding the affair until some fact was definitely known. It was a triumph for her, since neither editor had any affection for her, and one at least hated her. From the newspaper offices she went at once to call upon the invalid in the parsonage. She found the miserable woman “prostrated,” and in the care of Miss Simpkins, head of the Missionary Society. Before five minutes had passed, she understood that she had arrived too late. Miss Simpkins had been told the whole story, and in turn had communicated it, beyond all doubt, to a whole circle of hungry women. The invalid was still in the same state of triumph. It seemed to Emma that she saw no disgrace in the affair, but only a sort of glory and justification. It was as if she said, “People will notice my misery at last. They’ll pay some attention to me. They’ll give up pitying him and pity me for a time.” It was impossible to argue with her. When Emma left, she said to herself savagely, “The old devil has got what was coming to her. She deserved it.”
Once a trickle of the scandal had leaked out, there was no stopping it: the news swept the Town as the swollen waters of the brook flooded the pestilential Flats. It reached Mary Conyngham late in the afternoon. For a time she was both stunned and frightened, as if the thing were a retribution visited withhorrible speed upon herself and Philip. And then, quickly, she thought, “I must not lose my head. I’ve got to think of Philip. I’ve got to help him.” She fancied him haunted by remorse and self-reproaches, creating in his fantastic way all manner of self-tortures. One of them at least must keep his head, and she was certain that the one wouldn’t be Philip. And she was seized with a sudden terror that the calamity might shut him off from her forever: it was not impossible with a man like Philip who was always tormenting himself about troubles which did not exist. She found to her astonishment that she herself felt neither any pangs of conscience nor any remorse. What she had done, she had done willingly, and with a clear head: if there had ever been any doubts they were over and done with before she had gone to the stable.
She dared not, she knew, go and see him, and thus deliver herself into the hands of his mother; for she knew well enough that Emma would be waiting, watching for just such a chance. She would want to say to Philip, “You see, it’s the judgment of God upon you for your behavior with Mary Conyngham.” For a second there came to Mary a faint wish that she had never turned Emma’s accusation into truth, but it died quickly. She knew that nothing could ever destroy the memory of what had happened on the night of the slaughter in the dead park.
She decided at last to write to him, and late that night, after she had torn up a dozen attempts (because writing to a man like Philip under such circumstances was a dangerous business) she finished a note and sent it off to him. She wrote: “My Darling ... I can’t come to you now. You know why it is impossible.And I want to be with you. It is killing me to sit here alone. If you want to meet me anywhere, send word. I’d go to hell itself to help you. You mustn’t torment yourself. You mustn’t imagine things. At a time like this, you must keep your head. For God’s sake, remember what we are to each other, and that nothing else in the world makes any difference. I love you, my boy. I love you ... Mary.”
Then she addressed the note, and, as a safeguard against Emma, printed “Personal” in large letters on the outside of the envelope. It was too late to find any one to deliver the note and the post-office was closed. At last she put on a hat and coat and went herself to leave it under the door of the drugstore, where the druggist would be certain to deliver it in the morning. When she came home again, she lay down in the solitude of the old Victorian parlor, and before long fell asleep. It was two o’clock when she wakened, frightened, and shivering with cold.
Mr. Stimson, the druggist, found the letter in the morning, and laid it aside until he had swept out the store. Then he had breakfast and when a Pole with a cut on the side of his head came in to have it bandaged, he quite forgot the letter. It was only after ten o’clock when a boy came bringing a telegram for Philip that he remembered it suddenly. The note and the telegram were delivered together.
The telegram was brief. A man and woman believed to be Samuel Castor and Mrs. Philip Downes were found dead by suicide in a Pittsburgh boarding-house. Would Mr. Downes wire instructions, or come himself. It was signed, “H. G. Miller, Coroner.”
Therooming-house stood in one of the side streets in the dubious quarter that lay between the river wharfs and the business district—a region of Pittsburgh once inhabited by middle-class families, and now fallen a little over the edge of respectability. It was one of a row of houses all exactly alike, built of brick, with limestone stoops, and all blackened long ago by the soot of mills and furnaces. Number Twenty-nine was distinguished from the others only by the fact that the stoop seemed to have been scrubbed not too long ago, and that beside the sign “Rooms to Let to Respectable Parties,” there was another card emblazoned with a gilt cross and bearing an inscription that was not legible from the sidewalk. Philip and McTavish, peering at the house, noticed it, and, turning in at the little path, were able to make out the words. The card was stained and yellow with age, and beneath the cross they read, “JESUS SAID, ‘COME UNTO ME.’”
For a moment, McTavish gave Philip an oblique, searching look, and then pressed the bell. There was a long wait, followed by the sound of closing doors, and then a tired little woman, with her hair in a screw at the back of her head, stood before them, drying her hands on a soiled apron.
Philip only stared at her, lost in the odd, dazed silence that had settled over him from the moment the telegram had come. He seemed incapable of speech, like a little child in the care of McTavish. It was the fat undertaker who lifted his hat and said, “This is Mr. Downes, andI’m the undertaker.” He coughed suddenly, “The Coroner told us that ... they had left some things in the room.”
The little woman asked them in, and then began suddenly to cry. “I’ve never had such a thing happen to me before ... and now I’m ruined!”
McTavish bade her be quiet, but she went on and on hysterically. In all the tragedy, she could, it seemed, see only her own misfortune.
“You can tell me about it when we’re upstairs,” said McTavish, patting her arm with the air of a bachelor unused to the sight of a woman’s tears, and upset by them. “Mr. Downes will wait down here.”
Then Philip spoke suddenly for the first time. “No ... I’m going with you. I want to hear the whole thing. I’ve ... I’vegotto know.”
There was a smell of cabbage and onions in the hallway. As McTavish closed the door, the whole place was lost in gloomy shadows. The tired woman, still sobbing, and blowing her nose on the soiled apron, said, “It’s upstairs.”
They followed her up two flights of stairs to a room at the back. It was in complete darkness, as if the two bodies were still there, and as she raised the window-shade there came into view a whole vista of dreary backyards littered with rubbish and filled with lines of newly washed clothing. The gray light revealed a small room, scarcely a dozen feet square, with a cheap pine table, a wash-bowl, pitcher and slop-jar, two chairs and a narrow iron bed. On the walls hung a bad print of the Sermon on the Mount and a cheaply illuminated text, “Come unto Me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden.” The bed was untouched, save fortwo small depressions at the side away from the wall.
Near the door there were little rolls of torn newspaper—the paper (Philip thought, with a sudden feeling of sickness) with which they had stuffed the cracks of the door to imprison the smell of gas. A newspaper and a Bible lay on the table beside the wash-bowl.
“I left everything just as it was,” said the woman; “just as the Coroner ordered.”
Those two depressions on the side of the bed suddenly took on a terrible fascination for Philip. It was as if they were filled by the forms of two kneeling figures who were praying.
“Here’s the bag they brought,” said the woman. She bent down and opened it. “You see it was empty. If I’d known that ... but how was I to know?” It was a cheap bag made of paper and painted to imitate leather. It stood in a corner, mute, reproachful, empty.
Philip was staring at it in silence, and McTavish said again, “Maybe you’d better go downstairs and wait.”
For a moment there was no answer, and then Philip replied, “No, I mean to stay. I’ve got to hear it.”
The woman began to tell her story. They had come to the rooming-house about nine o’clock in the evening. “I remember the hour because Hazel—that’s the girl that helps me with the house—had finished the dishes and was going to meet a friend.” She had one room empty, and she was only too glad to rent it, especially to a clergyman. Oh, he had told her who he was. He told her he was the Reverend Castor and that the woman with him was his wife. They were, he said, on their way east, and came to the rooming-house because hehad heard Mr. Elmer Niman speak of it once as a cheap, clean, respectable place to stay at when you came to Pittsburgh. “You see,” she explained, “I’m very careful who I take in. Usually Methodists and Baptists. They recommend each other, and that way I do a pretty good business, and it’s always sure to be respectable.” She sighed and said, “It wasn’t my fault this time. I never thought a preacher would do such a thing, and being recommended, too, by Mr. Elmer Niman.”
They went, she said, right up to their room, and, about half-past ten, when Hazel came back, she heard voices singing hymns. “They weren’t singing very loud ... sort of low and soft, so as not to disturb the other roomers. So I thought it was a kind of evening worship they went through every night, and I didn’t say anything. But one of my other roomers came to me and complained. I was pretty near undressed, but I put on a wrapper and went up to tell them they’d have to be quiet, as other people wanted to sleep. They were singing,Ancient of Days, and they stopped right away. They didn’t even say anything.”
The woman blew her nose again on her apron, sighed, and went on. “So I went to sleep, and about one o’clock my husband came in. He’s so crippled with rheumatism he can’t work much and he’d been to a meeting of the Odd Fellows. It must have been about one o’clock when he waked me up, and after he’d gotten into bed and turned out the light, I told him that I’d rented the empty room. And he said, ‘Who to?’ and I told him a Reverend Castor and his wife. Hesat up in bed, and said, ‘His wife!’ as if he didn’t believe me, and I said, ‘Yes, his wife!’ And then Henry got out of bed and lit the gas, and went over to his coat and took out a newspaper. I thought it was kind-a funny. He opened it, and looked at it, and said, ‘That ain’t his wife at all. It’s a woman who sings in his choir. The scoundrel, to come to a respectable house like this!’ And then he showed me the newspaper, and there it all was about a preacher in Milford who’d run away with a choir singer. And there was his name and everything. You’d have thought he’d have had the sense to take some other name if he was going to do a thing like that.”
McTavish looked at her quietly. “I don’t think he’d ever think of a thing like that. He was a good man. He was innocent.”
The woman sniffed. “I don’t know about that. But it seems to me a good man wouldn’t be trapsin’ around with another man’s wife.”
The look in McTavish’s eyes turned a little harder. When he spoke, his voice was stern. “I know what I mean.He was a good man.He had a hellion for a wife. She deserved what she got and worse.”
Something in the quality of his voice seemed to irritate the woman, for she began to whine. “Well, you needn’t insult me. I was brought up a good Christian Methodist, and I’m a regular churchgoer, and I know good from bad.”
McTavish turned away in disgust. “All right! All right! Go on with your story.”
“Well,” said the woman, “Henry—that’s my husband—said, ‘You must turn them out right away. We can’t have the house defiled by adulterers!’”Hersmall green eyes turned a glare of defiance at McTavish. “That’s what they were—adulterers.”
“Yes,” said McTavish wearily. “There’s no denying that. But go on.”
“So I got up, and went to their room and knocked. I smelled gas in the hall and thought it was funny. And then I knocked again and nobody answered. And then I got scared and called Henry. He was for sending for somebody to help break down the door, and then I turned the knob and it was open. They hadn’t even locked it. It just pushed open, easy-like. The room was full of gas, and you couldn’t go in or strike a match and you couldn’t see anything. But we left the door open, and Henry went to get the police. And after a time I went to open the window, and when I pulled up the window-shade and the light from the furnaces came in, I saw ’em both a-lyin’ there. He was sort of slumped down beside the bed and she was half on the bed a-lyin’ on her face. They’d both died a-prayin’.”
The thin, dreary voice died away into silence. McTavish looked at Philip. He was sitting on one of the stiff pine chairs, his head sunk on his chest, his fingers unrolling mechanically bit by bit the pieces of newspaper with which the door had been stuffed. Automatically he unrolled them, examined them and smoothed them out, putting them in neat piles at his feet. They were stained with tears that had fallen silently while he listened. And then, suddenly, he found what he had been looking for. He handed it to McTavish without a word, without even raising his head.
It was a scrap torn hastily to stuff the door, but in the midst of it appeared in glaring headlines:
“PREACHER ELOPESWITH MISSIONARYRomance begins at choirpractice. Woman aformer Evangelist”
The editors had kept their word to Emma, but the story had leaked out into the cities nearby.
McTavish read it in silence, and turned to the woman. Philip did not even hear what they were saying. He was thinking of poor Naomi lying dead, fallen forward on the bed where she had been praying. It was poor Naomi who had made that ghastly depression in the gray-white counterpane. He saw what had happened. He saw them coming in, tired and frightened, to this sordid room, terrified by what they had done in a moment of insanity. He saw them sitting there in silence, Naomi crying because she always cried when she was frightened. And perhaps he had taken the newspaper out of his pocket and laid it on the table and as it fell open, there was the headline staring at them. They must have seen, then, that they were trapped, that they could neither go on nor turn back. In their world of preachers and Evangelists and prayer there was no place for them. And presently they must have noticed the print of the Sermon on the Mount, and at last the framed text—“Come unto Me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden....” They must have seen the text written in letters of fire, inviting them, commanding them—“Come unto Me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden....” It must have seemed the only way out. And then they had sung hymns untilthe harpy had knocked at the door and bade them be silent.
The depression in the bed kept tormenting him. The two figures kneeling there, praying, praying for forgiveness, until one of them slumped down, unconscious, and the other was left alone, still praying.... Which one of them had gone first? He hoped it was Naomi, for she would be so frightened at being left alone. For the one who was left alone, those last moments must have seemed hours. And Naomi must have been frightened. She was destroying herself—a sin which once she had told him was the unforgivable.
He saw then that the faith which had given her strength in that far-off unreal world at Megambo must have been failing her for a long time. It must have died before ever she set out on the mad journey that ended in this wretched room. Or she must have been mad. And then, all at once, the memory of her figure kneeling in the dust of the Mission enclosure rose up and smote him. He saw her again, her face all illumined with a queer, unearthly light. She had been ready then to die by the bullets of the painted niggers. She should have died then, happy in the knowledge of her sacrifice. He had saved her life—he and that queer Englishwoman—only that she might die thus, praying alone, lost, forgotten....
She should have died at Megambo—a martyr.
Suddenly he heard the voice of the tired little woman, “And here is her hand-bag.” She held it out to McTavish, a poor morsel of leather, all hardened and discolored by the rain. “That’s how we found her address. It was written on a card.”
McTavish opened it mechanically, and turned it upside-down. A few coins rattled out. He counted them ... eighty-five cents. The woman opened a drawer of the table. “And here is his.” The worn wallet contained a great amount of silver and ninety odd dollars in bills. They had meant to start life again with ninety odd dollars.
“They must have been mad,” said McTavish. He touched Philip’s shoulder. “Come ... we’d better go.”
Philip rose in silence, and McTavish turned toward the Bible that lay open on the table. “Was that theirs?” he asked.
“No, that’s mine. I keep Bibles in all my rooms.”
McTavish turned toward the door, and she said, “The bag ... ain’t you going to take the bag?”
McTavish turned toward Philip.
“No,” said Philip. “You may keep it.”
The woman frowned. “I don’t want it. I don’t want any of their things left in my house. I’ve suffered enough. They ruined me. I don’t want my house polluted.”
McTavish started to speak, and then thought better of it. He simply took up the bag and followed Philip. They went down the two flights of odorous stairs and out of the door. The policeman who had accompanied them was waiting on the sidewalk. As the door closed, they heard the woman sobbing and calling after them that she, an honest, God-fearing woman, had been ruined.
In silence they turned their backs on the dingy house, with the sign, “Rooms to Let to Respectable Parties,” and the emblazoned text, “JESUS SAID, ‘COME UNTO ME....’”
Half-way down the block, McTavish said, “You mustn’t think about it, Philip. You mustn’t brood. You had nothing to do with it.”
“How can I help thinking about it?” He could only see them kneeling there by the bed praying until the end, innocent save that they had tried to escape from a life which circumstance or fate had made too cruel for them to bear. They had died without ever knowing the happiness which had come to him and Mary. He saw bitterly that there was not even any great dignity in their death, but only a pathos. They had not even known a poor tattered remnant of human happiness. They had simply run away, fleeing from something they could not understand toward something that was unknown.
“How can I ever think of anything else?”
TheReverend Castor was buried from his own house, and Naomi from the flat over the drugstore. Emma had proposed that the services should be held in the slate-colored house, but Philip refused. It seemed wrong that Naomi should enter it again, even in death. He would not even allow any mourners save the family. His mother and father were there, Jason in a curious state of depression, more than ever like a bedraggled bantam rooster, and Mabelle bringing both Ethel and little Jimmy, who kept asking in loud whispers where Cousin Naomi had gone, and why he wasn’t supposed to speak of her. Mabelle herself repeated over and over again, “I can’t believe it. She was so cheerful, though she did seem a bit nervous and fidgetythat last day. She came twice to see me. I suppose she wanted to tell me something,” and, “What strikes me as funny is that nobody ever suspected it. There wasn’t any talk about them at all. It was like a flash out of the blue.” It was impossible to silence her tongue. Even during the service she whispered to Jason, “Don’t she look pure and sweet? You just can’t believe that things like this happen. Life is a funny thing, I always say. It was just like a flash out of the blue.”
And “pie-faced” Elmer was there too, all in dingy black. He read the service, looking like the Jewish god of vengeance. He only spoke once or twice in a ghoulish whisper, but his eyes were eloquent. They said, “You see the wages of sin ...” and, “This is what comes of Philip abandoning God.”
Once the service was interrupted when little Philip, wakened by the singing ofCrossing the Barby the hired quartet, stirred in his crib and began to cry.
Naomi was buried in the dress of figured foulard. Mabelle observed that in the coffin it looked all right. Naomi, she said, looked so young and so natural.
TheMills began once more to pound and roar. The flames of the furnaces again filled all the night sky with a rosy glow. The last miserable remnants of the strikers drifted away and the tent village disappeared, leaving only a vacant lot, grassless and muddy with the turn of winter. The strike and the slaughter in the park of Shane’s Castle, even the tragedy of Naomi and the Reverend Castor, were at last worn to shreds assubjects of conversation. Life moved on, as if all these things counted for nothing, as if the Shanes, and Krylenko, poor Giulia Rizzo, Naomi and the Reverend Castor, had never existed. In the church, Elmer Niman read the services until a suitable preacher was found. The bereft and invalid Mrs. Castor disappeared in the obscurity of some Indiana village, where she went to live with a poverty-stricken cousin.
As for Philip, he stayed on in the flat, hiring an old negress, whom McTavish knew, to care for the twins. A sort of enchantment seemed to have taken possession of him, which robbed him even of his desire to go away. Emma came nearly every day to question old Molly about the children, to make suggestions and to run her finger across tables in search of dust. She did not propose that he return to the slate-colored house, for she seemed now to be afraid of him, with the fear one has of drunkards or maniacs—a fear which had its origin in the moment he had taken the worn gloves from his pocket and given them to her. There was, too, a wisdom in the fear, a wisdom which had come to her from Jason on that same night, after she had returned to the marital bed.
For Jason had said to her, when she had grown calm, “Em, you never learn anything. If you lived to be a hundred, you’d still be making a mess of things.”
And she had cried out, “How can you say such a thing to me ... after all I’ve suffered ... after all I’ve done? It’s you who’ve made a mess of your life.”
“My life ain’t such a mess as you might think,” he had replied darkly. “But let me tell you, if you don’t want to lose that boy altogether, you’ll let him alone.He ain’t no ordinary town boy, Em. He’s different. I’ve found that out. I don’t know how we produced ’im. But if you don’t want to lose him, you’ll let him alone.”
She didn’t want to lose him. There were times when she hardened her heart toward him, thinking he was ungrateful and hard to allow a hussy like Mary Conyngham to stand between him and his mother; and again she would think of him as her little boy, her Philip, for whom she would work her fingers to the bone. But she was hurt by the way he looked at her, coldly, out of hard blue eyes, as if she were only a stranger to him. She felt him slipping, slipping from her, and at times she grew cold with fear. She “let him alone,” but she could not overlook her duty toward him and his children. They were, after all, her grandchildren, and a man like Philip wasn’t capable of bringing them up properly, especially since he had lost his faith. And with a mother like theirs, who had such bad blood, they would need special care and training ... she resolved not to speak of it for the moment, but, later on, when they were a little older....
But it was Mabelle who was the most regular visitor at the flat. She came with a passion for always being in the center of things; she clung to the tragedy, and came every day to break in upon Philip’s brooding solitude, to chatter on and on, whether he listened or not. She brought little Jimmy’s old toys for the twins, and she dandled them on her knee as if they were her own. There were times when Philip suspected her of being driven by a relentless curiosity to discover more of what had happened on the terrible day, but he endured her; he even began to have an affection forher, because she was so stupid and good-natured.
She was sitting there one morning, playing with little Philip and little Naomi, when she said suddenly, “You know I often think that all that trouble in the park at Shane’s Castle ... killing all those people ... had something to do with Naomi’s being so upset. You see, when she heard that morning about the people being killed there, she got worried about you. She was nearly crazy for fear that something had happened to you, and she went herself to the stable to find you, and when she didn’t find you there she was sort of crazy afterward. She came up and talked to me in a crazy way until she heard from your Pa that he’d seen you at McTavish’s. When I think of it now, I see that she was sort of unbalanced and queer, though I didn’t notice it at the time.”
Philip, barely listening to her, took little notice of what she was saying, for he had come long ago to allow her to rattle on and on without heeding her; it was only a little while afterward that it had any significance for him. It was as if what she had said touched some hidden part of his brain. When she had gone, and he began indifferently to think of it, it seemed to him that he remembered every word exactly as she had spoken it. The words were burned into his mind. “She was nearly crazy for fear something had happened to you, and she went herself to the stable to find you.”
When Mabelle had gone, he could think of nothing else.
Since the morning after the slaughter in the park, he had never returned to the stable. The place which he had once thought of as belonging to himself alone was spoiled now: it had been invaded by Lily Shaneand poor Naomi, and even by Mary ... even by Mary. There were times when he resented her having come there, and times, too, when his remorse over Naomi made him feel that Mary had come deliberately, to tempt him, that what they had done was not a beautiful, but a wicked thing, which would torment him until he died. The place was spoiled for him, since it had come in a ghastly way to stand as a symbol of all those things which he believed had driven Naomi into madness.
But he knew, too, that he must return one day to the stable. It was filled with his belongings, the sketches pinned to the walls, the unfinished canvas of the Flats at night on which the paint must long since have caked and turned hard. (He knew now that it would never be finished, for he could never bring himself to sit there again by the window, alone, watching the mists stealing over the Mills.) After Mabelle had gone, he kept thinking that Naomi was the last one to enter the place. It was as if her spirit would be there awaiting him.
And then all at once there came to him a sudden terrifying memory: he had gone away that morning leaving behind unwashed the dishes he and Mary had used at breakfast. He had sent Mary away, promising to wash them himself, and then, troubled by the remorse of the gray dawn, had gone off, meaning to do it when he returned. They were still lying there—the two plates, the two coffee-cups, the very loaf of bread, turned hard and dry, and nibbled by the mice. And Naomi had gone there, “crazy for fear something had happened” to him. She had seen the remnants of that breakfast. In all the uproar and confusion he had forgotten.... She had known then; she must have known before she ran away....
For a moment he thought, “I must be careful, or I shall go crazy. It must feel like this to lose one’s mind.” He thought, “It was I who did it. I drove her away. I killed her myself. She thought that I was lying to her all along. I wasn’t lying. I wasn’t lying. I was telling her the truth.... It would have been the truth, even now, to the end, if Mary hadn’t come then. She must have been crazy. Both of us must have been crazy.”
And then, after a time, he thought, “I’ve got to be calm. I’ve got to think this thing out.” There wasn’t, after all, any reason why there shouldn’t have been two plates and two cups. Any one might have been having breakfast with him ... any man, Krylenko, or even McTavish. Oh, it was all right. There couldn’t have been anything wrong in that.
And then he thought bitterly, “But if it had been Krylenko, Naomi wouldn’t have believed it. She’d be sure it was a woman. She’d think it was Lily Shane ... Lily Shane, who wouldn’t have looked at me. She was jealous of Lily Shane.”
None of it was any good—none of this self-deception. It wasn’t a man who had had breakfast with him. It was a woman—Mary Conyngham, only Naomi had believed it was Lily Shane. Thank God! It wasn’t the same as if he and Mary together had driven her away to death in that horrible rooming-house. He’d never have to think of that after he and Mary were married. Naomi had believed the woman was Lily Shane.
Suddenly he pressed his hands to his eyes, so savagely that for a moment he was blinded. “I’m a fool. It’s just the same, even if she did think that it was some other woman.”
The stable began to acquire for him a horrid fascination, so powerful that he could no longer stay away from it. Hehadto return, to see the place with his eyes, to see the tell-tale cups and plates. Perhaps (he thought) some miracle had happened. Old Hennery might have removed them after he left, or perhaps he had himself washed them and put them away in the harness-closet without remembering it. Such a thing could happen.... In all the tragedy, all the confusion, the ecstasy of those few hours, he might have done it, without knowing what he did. Or afterwards, in all the stress of what had happened, he might have forgotten. Such things had been known to occur, he told himself, such lapses in the working of a brain. There were, after all, moments of late when he was not certain of what was happening—whether he was alive or dead, or whether Naomi had really killed herself, praying by the side of that wretched bed....
But immediately he said, “I’m a fool. I’m like my father. I’m not thinking of whatdidhappen, but what I wish had happened. It’s like his story of losing his memory.”
When the old negress Molly returned from marketing, he gave her the twins and went off like a madman to the stable. He traversed the area of the Mills, passed Hennessey’s place, and entered the dead park, but when he came to the stable, it took all his courage to enter.
He climbed the creaking stairs with his eyes closed, groping his way until he stood at the top. Then he opened them and looked about.
The place had a wrecked and desolate look. The dust and the soot of the Mills, filtering in through the decaying windows, covered everything. At some time during the storm the roof had begun to leak, and the water, running down the walls, had ruined a dozen sketches and soaked the blankets on the bed, and in the middle of the room on the table stood the coffee-pot, the dried loaf of bread gnawed by the mice, the soiled cups and plates, and a saucer with rancid butter on it.
There wasn’t any doubt of it—the things were there, just as they had been left by him and Mary.
He sat down weakly in one of the chairs by the table, and lighted a cigarette. Suddenly he leaned back with his eyes closed. He didn’t care any longer. He was tired. He had come (he thought) to the end of things, and nothing any longer made any difference—neither his mother, nor his father, nor Naomi, nor even Mary. He wanted only to be alone forever, to go off into some wilderness where there was no human creature to cause him pain. He wanted to be a coward and run away. In solitude, he might regain once more that stupid faith which had once given him security. It wasn’t that he’d ever again be glad to be alive: it was only when you believed you could make God responsible in a way for everything. Whatever happened, it was the Will of God. He hadn’t been alive: it was only when he had turned his back on God that he had begun to understand what it meant to be alive. And now that, too, was past: he saw now that he wasn’t strong enough to live by himself. He was, after all, a coward, without the courage of a person like Mary. She had, he saw, no need of a God to lean upon. No, he wasn’t even likehis father, whom no tragedy had the power to touch. He was like her—like his mother. He needed God as an excuse. She was safe: nothing could touch her, nothing could ever change her. She always had God to hold responsible....
The forgotten cigarette, burning low, scorched his fingers, and, dropping it, he stepped on it mechanically, and, rising from the chair, saw suddenly a woman’s handkerchief lying on the table among the dishes. It lay there, folded neatly, beneath a covering of dust and soot. He thought, “It must have been Naomi’s. She must have dropped it here.” The thing exerted an evil fascination over him. He wanted to go away, but he couldn’t go, until he knew whose handkerchief it was. It couldn’t have been Lily Shane’s, for he or Mary would have noticed it. It couldn’t have been Mary’s: for she wouldn’t have gone away from the table with it lying there, neat and unused, in full sight on the table. It must have belonged to Naomi. He wanted to go away without even looking, but he had not the strength. It lay there tormenting him. He would never have any peace if he went away in ignorance.
At last his hand, as if it moved of its own will, reached out and picked it up. It left behind a small square free of dust on the surface of the table. It was a tiny handkerchief, frail and feminine, and in the corner it was marked with initials. They were ... M.C. There wasn’t the slightest doubt.... M.C.... M.C.... Mary Conyngham.
He saw then what must have happened—that Mary had dropped it somewhere in the room, and Naomi, searching for some clue, had found it and left it lying behind on the table. It was Naomi’s hand that hadplaced it there on the table, Naomi’s hand that had last touched it.
Naomi had known who the woman was. In the next moment he had, in some unaccountable way, a curiously clear vision of an iron bed with a small depression where some one had knelt to pray.
After a long time, he rose, and, leaving the handkerchief on the table, went down the stairs once more. He never returned again to the room above the stable.
WhilePhilip sat in the dust and soot of the dead stable, his father waited for him at the flat. He danced the twins for a time on his knee, and set them crowing by giving a variety of imitations of birds and animals which he had learned in Australia, but, after a time, the old spirit flagged. He wasn’t the same gay, blithe creature that Emma found awaiting her in the darkened drawing-room. Even the waxed mustaches seemed to droop a little with weariness. For Jason was growing old in body, and he knew it. “My sciatica,” he said, “will not let me alone.”
“For an active, nervous man like me,” he had told Emma only that morning, “there ain’t much left when his body begins to get old.”
Even his return home had been in a way a failure. He began now to think he ought never to have come back. Emma was the only one pleased by his return. “You’d have thought,” he told himself, “that she’d have forgotten me long ago and taken to thinking about other things.” It was pretty fine to have a big, handsome woman like Emma give you all her devotion.Yes, she was glad enough to see him, but there was his boy, Philip, whom he hardly knew. He’d never get to know Philip: he couldn’t understand a boy like that. And this Naomi business. It was too bad, and of course it was a scandal, but still that didn’t make any difference in the way you enjoyed living. The truth was that Philip ought to be kind-a glad to be rid of her. It wasn’t a thing he could help, and he’d behaved all right. If therewasanother woman, Philip had kept it all quiet. There wasn’t any scandal. And now, if he wanted to marry her, he could—if she wasn’t married too. No, he couldn’t understand Philip. Emma had done something to him.
The return was a failure. He hadn’t even had any glory out of it, except on that first night when he’d had his triumph over pie-faced Elmer; but who wanted a triumph over a thing like Elmer? No, he’d been forgotten, first in the excitement of the riot when they’d killed a couple of dirty foreigners, and then by Naomi running off and killing herself with a preacher. Em wouldn’t let him say that preachers were a bad lot but he had his ideas, all the same. The Town had forgotten all about him—him, a man who lost his memory, and who had been thought dead for twenty-six years. Of course he hadn’tquitelost his memory, but he might have lost it....
And then he was homesick. The Town wasn’t home to him any more. It was no more hisrealhome than Philip was hisrealson, or Emma hisrealwife.
He was thinking all these things, mechanically rolling a ball back and forth to the twins, when Philip came in. At first Jason didn’t notice him, and when he did look up, the drawn, white look on the face ofhis strange son frightened him. He tried to jest, in a wild effort to drive away that sense of depression.
“Well, here I am,” he said brightly. “Back again like a bad penny.” Philip didn’t answer him, and he said, “I just ran in to say I’m going home day after to-morrow.”
“Home?” asked Philip, with a look of bewilderment.
“Yes ... home to Australy.”
“Oh.” Then the boy pulled himself together with an effort. “But I thought this was your home.”
“No ... not really. You see, I’ve lived out there most of my life. And this darned Town has changed so, it don’t seem the same any longer. It’s all full of new people ... and foreigners. Most of ’em have never heard of me.”
“What’ll Ma think?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t told her, but she knows I had to go back some day. She’ll think I’m comin’ back. She’ll have that to look forward to.”
“You’re not coming back ... ever?”
“It ain’t likely. They say an animal wants to go home when he’s dying. Well, that’s me. I want to go home.”
“But you’re not dying.”
“No, but I ain’t as young as I once was. I don’t want there to be no mistake.” He appeared to grow even more dejected. “If I’m out there, I’ll know where I am. It’s no place for a man like me here in this Town. Why, there ain’t room to breathe any more.” He took a cigar out of his yellow waistcoat pocket and offered it to Philip, who refused it instinctively, and then accepted it, moved by the pathetic effort at friendliness. The little man wanted to tell him something;he wanted to treat him as a son, to create suddenly a bond that had never existed. He held a match for the cigar and then lighted his own. “It’s like this, Philip,” he said. “I’ve been thinking it over. You don’t want to stay in this Town any more?”
“No.”
“It’s no place for a fella like you any more than it is for one like me. We’ve got to have room to breathe and think. I often think that. It’s a nasty place, this Town—no room for a fella to do as he wants ... always somebody a-watchin’ of ’im.”
Philip scarcely heard what he was saying, but he did notice the return of the haunting, half-comic accent. It was the first time that he had ever seen his father grave, the first time a serious thought had ever pierced the gay, shiny surface. And suddenly he felt a queer affection for the little man. Jason was making so great an effort that his face had turned red as a turkey-cock’s.
“It’s like this, Philip.... Why don’t you come away with me to Australia? It’s a fine life, and I’m rich out there.” He waited for a moment, and when Philip didn’t answer, he said, “You could begin all over again—like a new person. I know you could, because I did it myself ... I started all over.” Again he waited. “There’s nothing to keep you, is there? No woman?”
He always thought of women first—his father. Philip turned slowly. “Yes ... there is.”
“Does she count as much as that?”
“Yes.”
“You could marry her and take her along, couldn’t you? She ain’t a married woman, is she?”
“No.”
“She’d be likely to go with you?”
“Yes, she’d go anywhere I chose, I guess.”
“She must be the right sort.”
There was a pause, and Jason struck suddenly at the thing that had been hanging over both of them like a shadow. “Out there, you’d be where your Ma couldn’t put her nose in.”
“Oh, I’m going away.... I’m not going to stay here.”
Jason suddenly brightened. “Then come along with me. I’d even wait till you could get away. We ought to get better acquainted, Philip, and you’d like it out there.” He laid a hand suddenly on Philip’s arm. “I’ll tell you something, if you promise not to tell your Ma ... at least not till I’m gone.”
He looked searchingly at Philip, who asked, “What is it?”
“You mustn’t tell. You’ve got to promise.”
“No, I won’t tell.”
“You’ve got brothers and sisters out in Australia!”
Jason looked at him with an air of expectancy, but Philip only looked puzzled.
“What on earth do you mean by that, Pa?”
“You wouldn’t be alone out there. You see I’ve got a family there too.... You’d have brothers and sisters there.”
“But you’re married to Ma.”
“That’s all right. I ain’t a bigamist. I’ve just never been married to Dora—that’s my other wife. She knows about Em. I told her everything. I guess she always liked me so much that not being married didn’t matter.”
The little man put his head on one side. At the thought of Dora his depression seemed to vanish. As for Philip, he simply stared, failing to live up to such an announcement. It neither surprised nor shocked him, for the whole thing seemed completely unreal, as if he were holding the fantastic conversation in a dream. It was the other thing that was real—the sight of the room in disarray with Mary’s handkerchief laid on the table by the hand of Naomi ... the memory of the sordid bed with the depression in the gray coverlet.
“You don’t seem surprised,” said his father.
“No.... No.... Nothing surprises me any more. I suppose if you wanted to have a family out there, it was all right. You can’t expect a man to stop living.” (He was right then: his father had had a woman out there.)
“But you see, Philip, they’re your brothers and sisters ... your father’s children.”
Philip made an effort. “How many of them are there?”
Jason’s yellow waistcoat swelled with pride. “Three boys and two girls,” he said. “Nobody can say I haven’t done my part in helping the world along. All strapping big ones too. The youngest ... Emma ... is thirteen.”
“Emma!”
“Yes. I called her after your Ma. I always liked the name, and I always liked your Ma too, when she’s not having tantrums.”
Suddenly Philip wanted to laugh. The desire arose from a strange mixture of pain and mirth. It was ridiculous.
“The others are Jason, Henry, Hector and Bernice.It was Dora who named the others. Dora’s a wonderful woman ... like your Ma in a way, only Dora understands me.”
There was a long, sudden silence, in which Philip thought, “If I’d only done as he did, everything would have been all right. He’s happy and he’s been free ... always. I was weak and cowardly. I didn’t do one thing or the other, and now there’s no way out.”
“You see what I mean,” said Jason. “You’d have a home out there, and a family too. You wouldn’t be going alone into a new country.” He looked at his son wistfully. “You’d better come with me ... woman or no woman.”
“No, Pa ... I can’t. I’ve got to marry the woman, and I want to go to a new country ... alone.” His face was gray and drawn suddenly. “I’ve got to do it ... it’s the only thing.”
“You’d better think it over, Philip.”
“I’ve thought it over ... I’ve been doing nothing else.”
His father took up the tan derby. “And you won’t tell your Ma, will you?”
“I won’t tell her ... ever. You needn’t worry.”
“You can tell her when I’m gone ... I don’t want to face her, that’s all.”
Jason went out, all depressed once more. Philip wasn’t his boy at all. Emma had done something to him.
When he had gone, Philip sat down and began to laugh. He felt sick inside, and bruised. “Oh, my God! And I’ve got three brothers and two sisters in Australia! And that’s where he got the accent. He got it from Dora!”