He had been happiest in moments when, escaping from his mother and the slate-colored house, he had gone off to wander through the fields beyond the Town or along the railway tracks among the locomotives. It was the great engines which he liked best, monsters that breathed fire and smoke, or sat still and silent in the cavernous roundhouse, waiting patiently to have bolts tightened, or leaks soldered, so that they might go on with their work. They did not frighten him as they might have frightened some children: they seemed ferocious but friendly, like great ungainly dogs. They terrified him less than Uncle Elmer or the preacher, Mr. Temple. (Mr. Temple was gone now and another younger, more flowery man named Castor had taken his place.)
By some miracle he had been able to keep his secret from his mother and continued, even when he was grown, to wander about for hours among the clanging wheels and screaming whistles during his holidays from the theological seminary. Some childish cunning had made him understand that she must never know of these strange expeditions, lest she forbid them. She was always so terrified lest something happen to him.
In all his childhood he could remember having had only two friends—one of them, McTavish, the undertaker, was kept as much a secret as the friendly locomotives had been; for Philip, even as a child, understood that there was something about the fat, jovial man which Emma detested with a wild, unreasonable fury.
The other was the black-haired, blue-eyed, tomboyishMary Watts, who lived a dozen blocks away in a more fashionable part of Town where each house had its big stables and its negro coachmen and stable boys. She was older than he by nearly two years, and much stronger: she detested girls as poor weak things who liked starched skirts and dickies of white duck that were instruments of torture to any one who liked climbing and snowball fights. So she had recruited Philip to play on the tin roof of the carriage shed and build the house high up in the branches of the crabapple tree. He always felt sorry for her because she had no mother, but he saw, too, with a childish clarity, that it was an advantage to be able to do exactly as you pleased, and build the tree-house as high in the air as you liked, far up among the shiny little red apples where it made you thrillingly sick to look over the edge.
But this friendship was throttled suddenly on the day (it was Philip’s twelfth birthday) they went to play in the hay-loft. They had been digging in the fragrant hay and building tunnels, and feeling suddenly tired and hot, they lay down side by side, near the open door. In the heat, Philip, feeling drowsy, closed his eyes and listened to the whirring of the pigeons that haunted the old stable, happy, contented and pleased in a warm, vague way to be lying there beside his friend Mary, when suddenly he heard his mother’s hearty voice, and, opening his eyes, saw her standing at the top of the stairs. He could see that she was angry. She said, “Philip, come home at once—and you, Mary, go right in to your aunt. You ought to be ashamed of yourself!”
She swept him off without another word and at home she shut him in the storeroom, where she talked to him for an hour. She told him he had done a shameful thing, that boys who behaved like that got a disease and turned black. She said that he was never to go again to Mary Watts’ house or even to speak to her. She told him that because he had no father she must be both father and mother to him, and that she must be able to trust him in the hours when she was forced to be at the bakery earning money to feed and clothe them both.
When she had finished, Philip was trembling, though he did not cry, because men didn’t behave like babies. He told her he was sorry and promised never to speak to Mary Watts again.
And then she locked him in for an hour to ponder what she had said. He didn’t know what it was he had done: he only felt shameful and dirty in a way he had never felt before, and terrified by a fear of turning black like those nigger boys who lived in the filthy houses along the creek by the Mills.
When Emma came back to release him from the storeroom prison, she forgave him and, taking him in her arms, kissed and fondled him for a long time, saying, “And when you’re a big boy and grown up, your mother will always be your girl, won’t she?”
She seemed so pleasant and so happy, it was almost worth the blind pain to be able to repent and make promises. But he never had the fun of playing again with Mary Watts. He went back to his beloved engines. Sometimes he played ball, and he played well when he chose, for he was a smallish, muscular boy, all nerves, who was good at games; but they never interested him. It was as if he wanted always tobe alone. He had had friends, but the friendships had ended quickly, as if he had come to the bottom of them too soon. As a little boy there was always an odd, quizzical, affectionate look in his eye, and there were times when, dreaming, he would wander away into mazes of thought with a perpetual air of searching for something. He, himself, never knew what it was.
And then at seventeen, taciturn, lonely and confused, he had stumbled upon God. The rest was easy for Emma, especially when Naomi came unexpectedly into their lives. Sometimes, in bitter moments, she had thought of Philip as a symbol of vengeance upon his errant father: she had kept him pure and uncontaminated by the world. She had made of him a model for all the world to observe.
When, on the morning after his return, Philip went out of the door of the slate-colored house, and down the walk through the drifted snow, he knew suddenly that he was more lonely, more aimless than he had ever been. The blizzard was over, and the sky lay cold and gray above the curtain of everlasting smoke. At the gate he hesitated for a moment, wondering which way he would turn; and then abruptly he knew that it made no difference; there was no one that he wanted to see, no one with whom he could talk. He knew that in the house behind him there were two women who thought it shameful for him to be seen at all in the streets. They had even hoped, no doubt, that he would not show himself so soon. Even people who knew the story Emma had told of illness and wounds and a holiday,would think that he ought to have stuck at his post and fought it out there.
People, he knew—at least the people of their sort who were church-goers—were like that: they were willing to pile glory upon visiting missionaries, but they gave money grudgingly and expected missionaries to stick to their tasks. The money they gave warmed their hearts with a wicked Roman Catholic sense of comforts bought in Heaven. They would think he ought not to have returned until he had earned a proper holiday. For himself he did not care, especially since he knew he was far more wicked than they imagined, but with his mother and Naomi it was different. At the sight of Naomi, sitting pale and miserable across the table from him at breakfast, he had been stricken suddenly with one of those odd twinges of pity which sometimes delivered him into her hands, bound and helpless. When he thought of it now—how near he had been to yielding—he was frightened. Such odd, small things could turn a whole life upon a new path.
He closed the gate and turned towards the left, without thinking why he had chosen that direction until he found himself turning down the long hill to the Flats. He was going towards his beloved locomotives exactly as he had done a dozen years earlier when he could think of no one he wanted to see in all the Town; and suddenly he was almost happy, as if he were a boy of twelve once more, and not a man of twenty-six who had lost more than ten precious years of life.
It struck him, as he waded through heaps of snow already blackened by soot, that the Town had changed: it was not, in some subtle way, the same place. Where once it had seemed a dull, ugly Town, friendly becauseit was so familiar, it now seemed rather exciting and lively, and even thrilling. It was so alive, so busy, so filled with energy. As he descended the hill the impression grew in intensity. The pounding of the Mills, the leaping red flames above the furnace chimneys, the rumbling, half-muffled clamor of the great locomotives—all these things gave him a sudden, tremendous feeling of life. He saw for the first time, though he had passed them a thousand times in his life, those long rows of black houses where the mill-workers lived huddled together in squalor. He saw one or two sickly geraniums behind the glass, a crimson featherbed hung from a window, a line of bright clothes all dancing frozen and stiff as dead men in the cold wind.
For a moment he halted on the bridge that crossed Toby’s Run and, standing there, he watched the great cranes at work lifting, with a weird animal intelligence, their tons of metal, picking up a burden in one place and setting it down in another. The air smelled of hot metal and the pungent tang of coal-smoke. Beneath him the stream, no longer water, but a flowing mass of oil and acids and corrosion, moved smoothly along: in a stream so polluted even ice could not freeze along the banks. Beyond the mills and piled low on the top of its patrician hill the mass of Shane’s Castle showed itself against the leaden sky. It had been red brick once, but long ago it had turned black. There were only dead trees in the park surrounding it.
It all stood out sharp and clear—the houses, the river, the furnaces, the great engines, the lonely, quiet homes on the hills; and suddenly he knew what it was that made the difference. The Town seemed a new, strange place because of that queer thing which hadhappened to him at Megambo. The scales had fallen from his eyes. He remembered how suddenly he had seen the lake, the forest, the birds, in a new way, as if outlined by light; and that odd, sensual feeling of strength, of vigor, of life, overwhelmed him again, as it had done while he stood naked in the moonlight listening to the ominous drums. For a moment he fancied that he heard them once more, but it was only the pounding of the Mills. It was new to him after having been away for so long; the sound hadn’t yet come to be a part of the silence which one did not hear because it was always there.
As he turned away he caught a glimpse of a pale, tall figure all in gray turning a corner down one of the sodden streets of the mill-workers. After a moment he recognized it slowly: it was Irene Shane, the daughter of Old Julia—the daughter who had given all her life and her money to work among the poor of the Flats. He remembered her then—she was the one who had started a club-house and a school where the foreigners, the Hunkies and Dagoes, might learn to speak English and their wives might learn to save the babies who died like flies. She carried it on herself, with only the aid of a Russian mill-hand, because people in the Town wouldn’t give money. He remembered his mother’s having mentioned it in a letter. “The Church was against it,” she wrote, “because it took time and money away from foreign missions.”
He looked after the thin figure until it disappeared into one of the houses, and then turned away. As he walked he found himself thinking of Mary Watts. His mother had written that Mary Watts had something to do with the club-house, until she married the newsuperintendent of the mills. He must ask his mother what had become of Mary Watts. Of course, she was Mary Conyngham now.... It was odd, but she was the only person in the Town that he wanted to see. At last he had thought of some one.
On his way up the hill once more, he passed, near the establishment of McTavish, the undertaker, the tall, powerful, middle-aged figure of the Reverend Castor bound upon some errand. He was a rather handsome man, a little pompous but with a kind face, who was quite bald and wore the hair which the Lord had spared him very long and wound about his head, in a way calculated to conceal his baldness. People said he was a good man, and a fiery preacher with a wife who had been a complaining invalid for fifteen years and rarely left her bed. Philip scarcely knew him, though it was he who had married himself and Naomi and blessed them when they left for Africa. The clergyman did not see him now and Philip slipped by unnoticed.
From behind the glass of the Funeral Parlor, he knew that McTavish and his cronies had seen him. They sat in there hugging the stove, a group of middle-aged and elderly men who played checkers or rummy and gossiped all day. It was a great place for news, since most deaths were reported at once to the fat, good-natured McTavish. Every one was buried by McTavish; he was the one who laid the hill-ants to rest deep in the gravel of the seventh of these glacial hills. McTavish never went to church and the big iron stove was known, even on Sunday, as the nucleus of a band of shocking atheists and mockers. McTavish seemed to understand at once whether the one he hadcome to bury was loved or whether it was simply a relative from whom you were likely to inherit. He was a bachelor who had no life save that which centered about the iron stove; yet he knew the Town in a way that no one else knew it because he was always near to the root of all things.
Philip knew that the group about the stove were saying, “There goes Emma Downes’ boy who went to Africa for a missionary. He was always a queer one—not a bit like Emma.”
And then they would launch into talk about the old story of Jason Downes and his fantastic disappearance into the depths of China, where he had escaped in the end the last ministrations of McTavish. They knew everything, those old men. Each one was a walking history of the Town.
Philip, half a block off now, began to feel that sense of life which somehow sustained them. He began to feel people, ambitions, jealousies, loves and hatreds, stirring all about him in a strange, complicated maze.
Naomi was waiting for him, dressed to go out. She had put on a thick blue veil because, Philip suspected, she did not want to be recognized.
“Your Ma wants us to eat at the restaurant,” she said, and together they set out in silence.
Miraculously they met no one on the way, and once inside the big, white, clean restaurant, Emma led them to the table where, shielded by a screen from draughts, she always ate. The restaurant began to fill with customers—clerks, lawyers, mill-employees, shopkeepers, farmers and their wives in from the country for the day—all lured by the excellent food supplied by Emma. After a time the tables were all filled and people stoodwaiting their turn. It was marvelous, the success of Emma. Dishes clattered, orders were shouted, the cash-register clanked and banged unceasingly. She was proud of the place and happy there: it was clear that she could not imagine living away from such a hubbub and din.
While they were eating the stewed dried corn which she gave her customers in place of the usual insipid canned variety, she asked, “What did you do this morning, Philip?”
“I went for a walk.”
“Where?”
“In the Flats.”
“You might have chosen a handsomer part of the Town. You might have gone out to see the new Park.”
He didn’t tell her about the locomotives. Once he had kept it a secret because she would have forbidden him to return to them. Now, he kept his secret for some other reason: he did not know quite what it was. He only knew that Emma and Naomi must not know of it. It would only make them believe that he was completely crazy.
Presently, when they had reached the squash pie, he asked, “What’s become of Mary Watts?” And at the same moment he felt himself blushing horribly, for in some way the memory of the imprisonment in the storeroom returned to claim him unawares, and make him feel a shameful little boy unable to look his mother in the eye. Only he understood now: he knew what lay beneath the ancient, veiled accusations....
“Oh, she’s had a sad time,” said Emma. “You know she married the superintendent of the Mills—John Conyngham—a man fifteen years older than she was,and every one thought it was a good match. But he died—three weeks ago—while you were on the ocean, leaving her with two small children. They’ve some money, but not very much. The Watts house was sold when old Watts died—to pay his debts. She’s living with Conyngham’s sister, who’s quite well off. They’re in the old Stuart house in Park Avenue. Old Stuart lost all his money hanging on to too much land, so they bought the house off him. I guess Conyngham wasn’t a very good husband—I used to see his bicycle sitting in front of Mamie Rhodes’ house. There couldn’t have been much good in that—men like Mamie Rhodes too well.”
She knew it all, the story in all its details, even to Mamie Rhodes, at whose name women in the Town were wont to bristle. No oneknewanything about Mamie: it was just that she was much too young for her years, and did something to men—nobody knew just what it was—that made her very popular.
“And what was he like?” asked Philip.
“Conyngham,” said Emma, “John Conyngham? He was handsome, but I never liked his looks. I’d never trust a man that looked like that.”
What she meant was that there was something about John Conyngham that reminded her of the derelict Mr. Downes, and that the sight of him had always disturbed her in a terrifying way. She couldn’t bear to look at him.
“He died of pneumonia,” she said above the clatter of the dishes and the prosperous banging of the cash-register. “They say he caught it coming home in the rain from Mamie Rhodes’ on Thanksgiving night.”
Philip listened and the dull red still burned underthe dark skin. He was aware that the two women were watching him, secretly, as they might watch a man who was a little unbalanced: they had been doing so without cessation since his return. They were a little like two purring cats watching prey all innocent of their intentions.
Itwas impossible, of course, for the three of them to continue playing the game of hide-and-seek, pretending that Philip and Naomi had not returned or that Philip was too ill to go out; it was impossible for Naomi to go about forever disguised by a thick veil. Even Emma’s eternal policy of allowing things to work themselves out appeared after a month to be productive of no result, for Philip’s “mental condition” showed no signs of improvement. He remained, rocklike, in his determination, while the two women watched, stricken with uneasy fears because the Philip whom they had once known so well that they could anticipate and control his every impulse, now seemed a creature filled with vague and mysterious moods and ideas that lay quite beyond the borders of their understanding.
Their watching became at times unbearable to him, for it gave him the suffocating sense of being a maniac who was not to be trusted alone. He took to spending more and more time away from the house, either walking the country roads or wandering through the black Flats where he was safe from encountering any one or anything, save the gray figure of Irene Shane, going her tireless rounds. Once he had a glimpse of the old lady herself—Irene’s mother—riding bywrapped in sables on the last ride she was ever to take.
A sense of waiting, more definite, more intense, than the tension of the long day at Megambo, settled over the slate-colored house. It was broken on the fourth Sunday after Philip’s return when the three of them lunched, as usual on boiled mutton, at Uncle Elmer’s. It was a gloomy lunch, tainted by the sense of Philip’s sin. The gloom enveloped all of them, save Aunt Mabelle and her ten-year-old daughter, Ethel, who showed already signs of resembling her mother in feebleness of character and inertia of mind. The room was, through a lack of windows, dark, and under the fog of smoke that enveloped the Town it became even more cavernous and dreary; but Elmer Niman never permitted his wife to waste gas in illumination. One groped for food in the dark, while Elmer talked of the low pressure occasioned by the sad waste of gas in the Town.
The break came only after considerable preparation on the part of Emma. She said, quite casually, “I saw Reverend Castor yesterday. He came into the restaurant to see me.”
“He’s not looking as well,” put in Aunt Mabelle. “It must be a strain to have an invalid wife. It’s not natural for a man to live like that.”
Elmer interrupted her, feeling perhaps that she was bound toward one of those physiological observations which she sometimes uttered blandly and to the consternation of all her world.
“He is a good man. We are fortunate in having him.”
“God will reward him for his patience,” observed Emma.
“I talked to him day before yesterday,” said Naomi. “I think I may go to sing in the choir while we are on our holiday.”
Vaguely Philip began to sense the existence of a plot, conceived and carried out with the express purpose of forcing him to do something he had no desire to do. It seemed to him that they had rehearsed the affair.
“There is an empty place on the alto side,” observed Emma. “They could use a good strong voice like yours.”
“Of course,” said Naomi, “it’s so long since I’ve sung—not since I used to lead the singing at the revival meetings.”
“And Philip—he used to sing.”
“He never does now. He wouldn’t help me teach the natives at Megambo.”
Philip, listening, fancied that he caught a sympathetic glance from Aunt Mabelle. She was silly and stupid, but sometimes it seemed to him that she had flashes of uncanny intuition: she had, after all, had great experience with the tactics of Elmer and his sister. She sat opposite Philip, eating far too much, lost in cowlike tranquillity. She was still bearing patiently the burden which by some error in calculation had been expected hourly for more than a month. Only yesterday she had said, “I expect little Jimmy will have all his teeth and be two years old when he is born!”—a remark that was followed by an awkward silence. Married to another man she would undoubtedly have had ten or fifteen children, for she was born to such a rôle.
“That’s how I met Elmer,” she said brightly, “singing in the choir. I used to sing alto, and he sang bass. He sat right behind me and his foot....”
“Mabelle!” said Elmer.
She veered aside from the history of a courtship which always engaged her with a passionate interest. “Well, I’ve always noticed that lots of things begin in church choirs. There was that Bunsen woman who ran off with....”
Emma trod upon her, once more throttling her flow of reminiscences.
“That’s right, Naomi,” she said, “it’ll help pass the time while you’re waiting.” And then, polishing her spoon with her napkin (an action which she always performed ostentatiously as an implication upon the character of Mabelle’s housekeeping) she said, “By the way, he’s planned a Sunday night service which is to be given over entirely to you and Naomi—Philip. Think of that. It’s quite an honor.” (She would sit well down in front that night where she could breathe in all the glory.) “I told him, of course, that you’d be delighted to do it.”
“Yes,” said Naomi, “he spoke to me about it. We’ll tell our experiences.” The prospect of so much glory kindled a light in the pale eyes—the light of memories of revival meetings when she had been the great moving force.
Then Philip spoke for the first time. “I won’t do it—I’m through with all that.”
There was a horrible silence, broken only by the clatter of a fork dropped by little Ethel on her plate.
“What do you mean?”
“I told you all that before. I thought you musthave understood by now. I can’t go on saying it forever.”
“But, Philip ... you can’t refuse a good man like the Reverend Castor. You can’t when he’s been so kind. He always prayed for you and Naomi every Sunday, publicly, as if you were our special missionaries.”
There was only silence from Philip. The dark jaw had hardened suddenly.
“When we were all looking forward to it so much,” added Emma.
Then suddenly there came to him a faint suspicion—shadowy and somewhat shameful—of what it was all about. They were looking forward to an orgy of public notice and glory, to sitting bathed in the reflected light while he talked about Africa to a congregation of faithful admirers. He even suspected that this was the reason they were so determined to ship him back to Africa. They would find glory in his sufferings. He was angry suddenly, even hostile.
“You can tell him I won’t do it.”
“But, Philip, you must tell him yourself.”
“I don’t want to see him.”
Here Uncle Elmer took a hand, using the familiar tactics. “Of course, I can understand that—Philip’s not wanting to see him.” He grimaced suddenly at Emma to let him manage it. “I’ll speak to Reverend Castor myself. I’ll explain about Philip’s condition.”
For a second Philip grew hot with anger; he even pushed back his chair from the table as if to rise and leave. It was, oddly enough, Aunt Mabelle who restrained him. He fancied he caught a sudden twinkle in her round eyes, and the anger subsided.
Another painful silence followed, in which Rose, the negro maid-of-all-work, placed the Floating Island violently before Aunt Mabelle to be served. The room grew darker and darker, and presently Uncle Elmer said, “I suppose, Philip, if you intend to stay here you’ll be looking for some sort of work. It will mean, of course, starting life all over again.”
“Yes.”
“Of course you could teach—a young man with a good education like yours. It cost your mother a lot of work and trouble to educate you.”
“Yes.”
“But if you can’t get such work right away, I could make a place in the factory for you. Of course,” and here Uncle Elmer smiled his most condescending smile, “of course, with your kind of training you wouldn’t be much good at first. You’d have to learn the business from the ground up. You could begin in the shipping department.”
It was the first time any of them had admitted even a chance of his not returning to Africa; but they did not mean to yield, for Emma said, “That perhaps would help him over this nervous trouble.”
And then Philip shattered everything with an unexpected announcement. It was as if a bomb had exploded in the dust and shadows beneath the table.
“I’ve already got a job,” said Philip. “I’m going to work to-night at midnight.”
“To-night—at midnight?” asked Emma. “What on earth do you mean?”
“I’m going to work in the Mills. I’ve got a job.”
“The Mills! You’re crazy. What do you mean—the Mills?”
“I mean the Mills,” said Philip, looking at his plate. “It’s all been settled.”
Suddenly Naomi began to cry, at first silently, and then more and more noisily, as if all the dammed emotions of months had given way. Emma rose to comfort her, and Aunt Mabelle, murmuring, “Oh, dear! Oh, dear!” helplessly pushed the water-pitcher across the table. Little Ethel, conscious of the strain of the whole meal, and frightened by the outburst of hysterics, began to cry too, so that Aunt Mabelle became occupied in comforting her.
Philip, able to stand it no longer, rose and, flinging back his chair, said, “Damn!” in a loud voice, and walked out of the house. His swearing moved Naomi to new outbursts. She began to cry about the Englishwoman—the source of all her troubles.
It was all horrible, and it was the last time that Philip ever entered his uncle’s house.
When he returned late that night he found them all waiting for him in the parlor, ready to attack once more, but they accomplished nothing. He went upstairs and changed his clothes. When he came down, he was dressed for the Mills in an old pair of trousers, an old coat and a flannel shirt. Aunt Mabelle, round and sloppy, was standing in the ghoulish light of the green lamp. The others were all seated in the parlor gloomily, as if brooding over the problem of a daughter gone astray.
From the shadows, Aunt Mabelle seized his arm, “Is it true? Is Naomi going to have a little baby?”
Philip looked at her with a sudden astonishment. “No,” he said savagely. “Who gave you such an idea?”
Aunt Mabelle seemed to shrink into herself, all softness and apology. “I didn’t know ... I just couldn’t understand a woman carrying on like that if she wasn’t.”
Itwas more than an hour before the midnight shift began at the Mills, and during that hour Philip walked, sometimes running, along the empty streets, through the falling snow, all unconscious of the cold. He was for a time like a madman living in an unreal world, where all values were confused, all emotions fantastic and without base: in his tired brain everything was confused—his love for his mother, his hatred for his uncle, his pity for Naomi, and his resentment at all three of them for the thing they were trying to do. He wanted to run away where he might never see any of them again, yet to run away seemed to him a cowardly thing which solved nothing. Besides, if he ran away, he would never see Mary Conyngham, and Mary had in some odd fashion become fixed in his mind, an unescapable part of the whole confusion. Hemustsee Mary Conyngham, sometime, in some way.
He was afraid to stay, depressed by the feeling that whenever he returned to the house, he was certain to find them there—waiting, watching him. Why, a man could be driven to insanity by people like that who treated him always as if he were mad.
But worst of all, he had no longer any faith in God: there was nothing of that miraculous essence which seemed to take from one’s shoulders all the burden of doubt and responsibility. He couldn’t say any longer, “I will leave it to God. He will devise a way.Whatever happens, He will be right. I must accept His way.” He knew, sharply, completely, for the first time, that a faith must be born in himself, that he had taken up his own life to mold in his own fashion: there was no longer that easy refuge in a God, Who would arrange everything. If he had trusted to God now he would have been on his way to Africa, disposed of, not by God, but by the hands of his mother and Naomi and Uncle Elmer.
He could be a coward and weak no longer.
After he had gone a long way he found himself on a height that seemed strange to him, in that part of the Town which lay just above the Flats. It was not strange, of course, for he had stood on the same spot a hundred times before. It was strange only because he was in an odd fashion a new person, born again, a different Philip from the one who had stood there as a boy.
The sight that lay spread out below him suddenly brought a kind of peace: he stopped running, and grew calm and, watching it, he succumbed slowly to its spell. By night, the hard, angular lines of that smoky world melted into a blue mystery, pierced and spotted here and there by lights—the great blue-white lights of the arc-lights in the Mill yards, the leaping scarlet flames that crowned the black furnaces, the yellow lights plumed with steam of the great locomotives moving backward and forward like shuttles weaving a vast carpet with the little signal-lights, red and yellow and mauve and green, set like jewels in a complicated design. In the darkness the grim blacks and grays took on color. Color and light lay reflected from the canopy of smoke and steam that hung above the wholespectacle. Piercing the glow of light, rose the black columns of the chimneys and furnaces.
Above it all rose the endless sound of pounding, like the distant booming of a gigantic surf, pierced now and again by the raucous, barbaric squeals of a locomotive.
Halted and given poise by the sight, he stood for a long time looking down into the very center of the roaring hive, forgetting himself suddenly and all his fantastic troubles; and slowly an odd thing happened to him. He felt strong: he wasn’t any longer puzzled and afraid. It was as if there lay in the turbulent scene some intoxicating sense of power which took the place of his missing faith. The spectacle beneath him became alive with a tremendous sense of vitality and force that he had not found in all his mystical groping toward God. This thing that lay below him was real, he knew, real in a solid, earthly fashion, created by men in the face of hostile Nature, free of any weak dependence upon a Power which at best had only a doubtful existence. Yet the awful power of this world created by the feeble hand of man was in an odd fashion like the power of the lake, the forest, the sounds of life on the hill at Megambo.
Hazily there came to him the feeling that here lay his salvation, and presently he was overcome by an intense desire to plunge deep into the very midst of the whirling maelstrom of noise and heat and light and power.
Hurrying, he descended the hill, crossing the little river of oil and corruption, passing a great open space covered with cinders, beneath the white glare of lights hanging high above him, until he came at last to a high fence and a gate where he explained who he was andshowed his card. He had an odd feeling that he should have said simply, “I have come here to save myself,” as if the Italian gatekeeper would have known what he meant.
Inside this barrier the sound of pounding grew more and more violent. He went past one cavernous shed and another and another until he came to the one marked with a gigantic number in white paint—17. The yard, the shed, all the world about him was swarming with men—big, raw-boned men with high cheekbones, little, swarthy men, black men, men with flat, Kalmuck noses, some going towards the sheds, some moving away from them. Those who moved homeward were so black with sweat and soot that one could not tell which were negroes and which were white.
Stepping through a doorway, he found himself in a vast cavern echoing with sound, that reached up and up until its height became lost in smoke and shadows. High up, near the top, great cranes with white lights like piercing eyes, and tiny, black figures like ants climbing over them, moved ceaselessly back and forth, picking up tons of metal and putting it down again with a tremendous clatter. Here and there along the sides stood furnaces out of which men were drawing from time to time great piles of metal all rosy-white with heat. Flames leaped out of the ovens, licking the sides and casting fantastic shadows over the powerful, half-naked figures of the workers. The gigantic sound of hammering reverberated through the black cavern.
After a moment Philip addressed a thin, swarthy man with burning eyes. “Where is Krylenko?” he asked. But the man understood no English. “Krylenko,” he repeated, shouting, above the din, “Krylenko.”
The thin man grinned. “Oh, Krylenko,” and, pointing, indicated the figure of a powerful, blond man, who stood leaning on a crowbar before an oven a little way off. He was, like the others, naked to the waist, and his white skin was already streaked with soot and sweat. When he turned, Philip saw that he was young, younger even than himself, and that his eyes were blue beneath a great mop of hair so yellow that it had the appearance of having been bleached. The eyes were intelligent.
In English with only a shadow of an accent he told Philip to strip off his coat and shirt and take up a crowbar. In a moment he was standing there with the others, indistinguishable among so many workers. He was half-naked, as he had been beside the fire at Megambo, and the same voluptuous sense of power swept through him. It was oddly terrifying, this cavern filled with flame and smoke and sweating men. It was oddly like the jungle.
Behindhim in the slate-colored house Aunt Mabelle waited, yawning and wishing for bed, while Elmer and Emma and Naomi sat in silence, pondering whether their battle had been completely lost. They sat in silence, and Naomi sometimes dried her red-rimmed eyes and sobbed, because there was nothing to say, nothing to do. It was all so much worse than they had expected. With Philip living, as one might have said, in hiding, life could still be endured, and onecould go on pretending, pretending, pretending, that he was merely ill, and one day would go back to Megambo to the glory and justification of them all. No one of them really believed any longer in the pretense of Philip’s illness. Tacitly they would pretend to believe it because it was a good weapon: they would not even admit their doubts to each other. But from the moment he sprang up from Uncle Elmer’s table they knew that he was quite in his right mind, and knew exactly what he meant to do. He was in his right mind, but he was a strange, unmanageable Philip.
And now he had disgraced them in a new and shameful way by going to work, not in an office over columns of figures, or even into a polite business such as Uncle Elmer’s pump works, but by plunging straight into the Flats, into the Mills to work with the Hunkies and Dagoes. It was a thing no American had ever done. It was almost as if he had committed theft or murder.
After they had sat thus for more than hour, always beneath the larky gaze of the “late” Mr. Downes, Uncle Elmer rose at last and making himself very thin and stiff as a poker, he said, “Well, Em, I’ve decided one thing. If Philip doesn’t come to his senses within two weeks, I’m through with him forever. You can tell him that—tell him I give him just two weeks, not an hour more—and then I’m through with him. After that I never want to see him again, or hear his name spoken. And when he gets into trouble from his wicked ways, tell him not to come to me for help.”
He expected a response of some sort from his sister, but there was only silence, while she sat grimly regarding the carpet. It seemed that he felt a suddenneed for an answer, even though he must strike at her unchivalrously upon a wound which he must have believed cured long ago.
“You see,” he said, “all this comes of making a marriage long ago that I was against. I knew what I was talking about when I warned you against Jason Downes.”
For a moment she did not answer him, but when she spoke it was to upset him, horribly, by one of those caprices to which women are prey. It may have been because of the strain of the day, but it was more probable that there still was left the embers of her old, inexplicable passion for the worthless Mr. Downes, embers fanned into flame by the return of Philip.
She said, “Very well, Elmer. I’ll tell him, but you can consider everything over between you and me, too. I don’t want to see you again. If you can’t speak to Philip, you needn’t speak to me either. I should never have told you. You haven’t done anything at all but make things worse.”
For a time he only stared at her out of round eyes that were like blue marbles. “Well!” he said, coughing. “Well! I’ve done my duty. Don’t say that I haven’t.”
“A lot of good it’s done,” said Emma with bitterness, “a lot of good....”
She seemed, the indomitable Emma, very near to tears. In her corner Naomi snuffled so that they would take some notice of her.
He had meant to make his exit with a cold dignity, and a sense of injury, but Aunt Mabelle stood across his path. Unable any longer to keep up the battle against sleep, she was dozing peacefully in her rocking-chair, unconscious even of the scene that had takenplace. She had to be prodded and spoken to sharply, and at last she wakened slowly to profuse apologies, and a walk home with a husband who never addressed her.
Her child was born the following day. Early in the evening before Elmer came home from the factory, she came to see Naomi, to discover what had happened on the night before, during her nap. (She had a way of “running in” on Naomi. They liked each other.) While she was talking the pain began, and Naomi went at once to fetch a cab. It arrived quickly, and Mabelle bustled into it, was driven home at top speed. But haste was of no use; she was carried upstairs by the cab driver and the butcher’s boy, and before the doctor arrived the child was born. Naomi had never seen anything like it: the whole business took less time than with the native women at Megambo.
“I’m like that,” Mabelle told her; “it only takes a minute.”
The child was small and rather puny, to have been born of such an amiable mountain as Mabelle. It was a boy, and they called him James after his grandfather.
Emma called on her sister-in-law and sent broths and jellies from the restaurant, but she did not speak to her brother.
She told the news to Philip when he wakened to go to work, and he looked at the floor for a long time before he said, in a low voice, “Yes—that’s fine. He wanted a boy, didn’t he?”
Something in his eye as he turned away made Emma lay a hand on his arm.
“Philip,” she said in a low voice, “if you’rereallynever going back to Africa, I meanreallynot going back—you might have a child of your own.”
“Yes,” he answered, “I might.”
That was all he said, but Emma in all her bluntness had divined the thought that came to him so quickly. He wanted a child with all the hunger of a deeply emotional nature; what she did not divine was that he did not want a child with Naomi for the mother. He couldn’t bear to think of it, and he went to work that night sick at heart, plunging into the work like a man leaping from an unbearable heat into a deep pool of cool water. In that fiercely masculine world, he found pleasure in the soreness of his muscles, in the very knowledge that he would, when the day was finished, fall into a deep slumber, wearied to death, to find a world in which would be no troubles.
Naomi, too, had suffered in her own complaining fashion. After a life passed in a fierce activity, the empty days began to hang upon her spirits like leaden weights. As far back as she could remember her life had been a part, as the daughter and then the wife of a missionary, of a struggle against heat and disease and ignorance, her soul always warmed by the knowledge that she was doing God’s work, that the pain and discomforts of the body were as nothing in comparison to the ecstasies of the soul. Save for a few weeks, she had never known life in the civilized world, and now in the midst of it there seemed to be no place for her. She tried dusting and cleaning the slate-colored house (there was no cooking to do, forthey ate always at the restaurant), but there was no satisfaction in it. She came in a few days to hate it. She tried making garments to be shipped to the missions, long nightgowns with which to clothe the nakedness of savages, but her fingers were clumsy, and she found herself as indifferent a seamstress as she was a housekeeper. The tomblike silence of the house depressed her, and in these first weeks she dreaded going out, lest she should meet women who would ask after her plans. After a time she found herself seated like Aunt Mabelle for hours at a time, staring out of the windows at the passers-by.
After the scene at Uncle Elmer’s there seemed for a time no solution of their troubles. She plunged into choir singing, where her loud, flat voice filled a much-needed place; and she went without Philip to talk at the Sunday Evening Service of her experiences in Africa. Emma was there and Uncle Elmer, treating the congregation to the spectacle of a brother and sister who occupied the same pew without speaking to each other. But somehow everything was changed, and different from those glorious days so short a time before when the sound of her voice had moved whole congregations to a frantic fervor. The assembly-room now showed great gaps of empty seats, like missing teeth, along the sides and at the back. Naomi wasn’t any longer a great attraction as “the youngest missionary of the Lord in darkest Africa”: she was a woman now, a missionary like any other missionary. And there were, too, strange rumors circulating through the flock of the quarrel between Emma and her brother and other rumors that Naomi and Philip weren’t really missionaries at all any longer, but hadboth deserted the cause forever. There were a hundred petty bits of gossip, all magnified and sped on their way by friends of Emma who resented the reflected glory in which she bathed herself.
No, something had gone wrong, and the whole affair seemed stale and flat, even the little reception afterward. Emma, of course, stood with the Reverend Castor and Naomi, while members of the congregation filed past. Some congratulated Naomi on her work and wished her fresh successes; one or two asked questions which interested them specially—“was it true that a nigger king had as many as eighty wives?” and, “did they actually eat each other, and if so how was the cooking done?” Emma was always there, beaming with pride, and answering questions before Naomi had time to speak. The Reverend Castor from time to time took Naomi’s hand in his and patted it quite publicly, as if she were a child who had recited her first piece without forgetting a line. He kept saying, between fatherly pats, “Yes, the Lord has brought our little girl safely home once more. He has spared her for more work.”
But it was a failure: it had none of the zest of those earlier meetings, none of the hysterics and the wild singing ofThrow Out the Life LineandThe Ninety and Nine, and other hymns that acted as powerful purges to the emotions. The occasion was dampened, too, by the curiosity of various old ladies regarding the absence of Philip; they kept asking question upon question, which Emma, with much practice, learned to parry skilfully. “He didn’t feel well enough to make the effort. You see, the fever clings on—that’s the worst part of it.”
For she was squeezing the last drop of triumph before the débâcle; and of course she always believed in the depths of her soul that Philipwouldgo back to Africa some day. She meant, in the end, to accomplish it as she had already accomplished the things she desired—all save the recovery of Mr. Downes.
But it was Naomi who suffered most, for behind the mild and timid exterior there lurked an ironclad egotism which demanded much of the world. It demanded more attention and enthusiasm than had been her share at the Sunday Evening Service; it demanded respect and, curiously enough, evidence of affection (it was this last rather pitiful hunger that drew her close to Aunt Mabelle). She understood well enough that Emma had no affection: what capacity for love Emma possessed was all directed toward Philip. And before many weeks had passed Naomi knew bitterly that although she lived in the same house with her husband and his mother she really occupied no more of a place in it than Essie, the poor-house slavey. But Aunt Mabelle was kind to her, and would come and sit for hours rocking and gossiping, occasions when the only interruption was the periodic cry of the pallid baby, which Mabelle stifled at once by opening the straining bombazine of her bosom and releasing the fountain of life.
This last was a spectacle which Naomi came to regard with a faint and squeamish distaste. She grew to have a passionate dislike for the pallid infant that lay gorged with milk in Mabelle’s ample lap. Even the frank and open manner of the black women had never accustomed her to the exposé in which Mabelle indulged with such an air of satisfied pride.
“I’ve always had plenty of milk,” Mabelle would say, as she settled back comfortably. “The doctors say I’ve enough for any three normal children.”
Naomi, indeed, had spent half her life in an effort to conceal black nudity in yards of cheap calico.
But deeper than any of these flurried emotions lay the shadowy knowledge that the pallid child was in a way a reproach to herself, and a vague symbol of all the distasteful things that lay before her, for she felt that sooner or later the tangle would end in bringing her to the state of a wife in reality, of facing even perhaps the business which Mabelle managed with such proud composure. In the midst of the wilderness at Megambo she was still safe, protected by the fantastic sense of honor that lay in Philip; but here in this complicated world of which she knew nothing, when each day she felt her security, her fame, her glory, slipping from under her feet, the thing drew constantly nearer and nearer. If she could not force Philip to return, the day would come when with all her glory and prestige faded and bedraggled, she would no longer be a missionary, but only Philip’s wife.
There were moments when, on the verge of hysteria, she thought of leaving them all and going back alone to Africa; but when the moments passed, she found herself strangely weak and incapable of action. For a strange and frightening thing had begun to happen. At Megambo when Philip had always been gentle and submissive, it was herself who dominated and planned. They were comrades in the work of the Lord, and Philip rarely reached the point of being irritable. In those days he had meant no more to her than the clumsy Swanson. Save that he was tied to her bylaw, he might have been only another worker in the mission. And now it was changed somehow; and Philip ignored her. There were whole days when he never spoke to her at all—days and nights spent in working in the black Mills and sleeping like a dead man to recover from the profound weariness that attacked him.
This new Philip frightened her in a way she had never been frightened before. She found herself, without thinking, doing little things to please him, even to attract his notice. There were still moments when, wrapping herself in the shroud of martyrdom, she flung herself, the apotheosis of injured womanhood, before him to be trampled upon; but they were not profitable moments, for they no longer had any effect upon him; and so, slowly they came to be abandoned, since it seemed silly thus to abase herself only to find that she had no audience. It frightened her, for it seemed that she was losing slowly all control of a life which had once been so neatly and thoroughly organized. She wanted desperately to regain her ancient hold over him, and in the lonely moments when Mabelle was not there she sometimes awakened in horror to find herself sitting before the gigantic walnut mirror letting down the masses of her long, straight, reddish hair, trying it in new ways, attempting to discover in what position her face seemed prettiest. And then, filled with disgust at her own wickedness, she would fling herself on the walnut bed and burst into a passion of tears and prayer, to arise at last strangely calm and comforted. Surely God would not abandon her—Naomi Potts, who had given all her life to God. Sometimes she fancied that she, instead of Philip, was the one whose brainwas weak; for no sane woman could do the things she had done.
Slowly, imperceptibly, the curious power of the Mills had begun to make itself felt. It was as if Philip, returning from the Flats at noon each day, brought with him, clinging to his very clothes, traces of the fascination which they held for him. It was not that she herself felt any of the fascination, for she regarded the Mills with a growing hatred: it was only that they fixed upon Philip himself some new and tantalizing quality. She liked to see him come home at noon, hard and unshaven, blackened by soot and sweat. Sitting in her rocking-chair by the window, the sight of him as he swung along, his head bowed a little, filled her with odd flutterings of pleasant emotion. She felt at times that strange weakness which so often attacked Emma unawares—of wanting to yield and spoil him by caresses and attention. She had strange desires to fling herself down and let him trample upon her, not in the old, dramatic sense, but in a new way, which seemed to warm her whole body.
This new Philip, hard and thin, returning from the Mills with his flannel shirt open upon his bare chest, disgusted and fascinated her. And then when the knob turned and the door opened, all the little speeches she had planned, all the little friendly gestures, seemed to wither and die before his polite coldness.
He would say, “I’ll wash up and we can go right away to eat,” or “Tell Essie to bring some hot water.”
There was nothing more than that. Sometimes it seemed to her that he treated her as a servant whom he scarcely knew.
It came, at length, to the point when she spoke of it, timidly and with hot blushes, to Aunt Mabelle. She said she wanted to be kind to Philip, she wanted to be friendly with him, but somehow she couldn’t. He was so changed and cold and hard. If she could only get him back to Africa everything would be all right: they had been happy there, at least she had been, and as for Philip, he didn’t seem any happier now that he was doing what he wanted to do. He never seemed happy anywhere, not since the day they had arrived at Megambo.
Mabelle, rocking little Jimmy, listened with the passionate interest of a woman who found such a conversation fascinating. She led Naomi deeper and deeper into the mire and at last, when she had considered all the facts, she said, “Well, Naomi, it’s my opinion that you ought to have a child. Philip would like a baby. He’s that kind. I know them when I see them. Now, my Elmer hates children. They get in his way and I think they make him feel foolish and awkward, God alone knows why. But Philip’s different. He ought to have a lot of children. He’d love ’em, and it would be a tie between you.”
Naomi raised the old difficulty. “But if we go back to Africa—we can’t take a little baby there.”
“Well, you’d have to work that out, of course. Em would take care of it. She’d find time somehow. She can do anything she sets her mind to.” Naomi, it seemed, wouldn’t meet her eye and Aunt Mabelle pushed on, with the tact and grace of a walrus. “Did you ever see a doctor to find out why you hadn’t had one? A doctor can help sometimes.”
Naomi was suddenly pale and shaking. Withoutlooking at Mabelle she said in a low voice, “I don’t have to see the doctor to find out why.”
Mabelle’s rocking-chair paused in its monotonous bobbing. “You don’t mean to say you’ve been doing sinful things to prevent it—you, Naomi Downes, a missionary!”
Naomi, wringing her hands, said, “No, I don’t know what you mean. I haven’t been doing sinful things.... I ... we couldn’t have had a baby ... we’ve—we’ve never lived together.”
The rocking-chair still remained quiescent, a posed symbol of Mabelle’s shocked astonishment. “Well, I don’t know what you mean. But it seems sinful to me if a man and wife don’t live together. What does the Bible say? Take unto yourself a wife and multiply. Look at all the begats.”
Naomi burst out, “We meant to ... some day. Only we couldn’t out there in Africa.”
“Well, you ought to have taken a chance.” Mabelle seemed outraged and angry for the first time in all Naomi’s friendship with her, and it was only after a long time that the rocking-chair began once more its unending motion. The baby, startled by a sudden cessation of the soothing motion, set up a cry and Mabelle, loosening ten of the twenty-one buttons that held together her straining basque, quieted it at once.
“What do you expect?” asked Mabelle rhetorically. “What do you expect? A man isn’t going on courting forever for nothing—especially after he’s married to a woman. He’ll get tired after a while. Philip’s a man like any other man. He’s not going on forever like this. He isn’t that kind. Any woman can tell in a glance—and he’s the kind that can wrap a womanaround his thumb.” Then, being a woman whose whole philosophy was based upon her own experience, she said, “Why, even my Elmer wouldn’t stand it, like as not. He’s not much at things like that and he’s always ashamed of himself afterwards. I guess it was a kind of duty with him—still he’s a man.” And turning back again to the subject at hand, she asked, “Did you ever know about Philip’s father? Why, that man was like a rabbit. You’d better look out or you’ll lose him altogether.”
It was the longest single speech Mabelle had made in years, and after it she sat rocking herself for a long time in profound meditation. Naomi cried a little and dried her eyes, and the baby fell back into a state of coma. The chair creaked and creaked. At last Mabelle got up heavily, deposited the sleeping child on the sofa, and put on her jacket and hat.
“Take my advice, Naomi,” she said. “It can’t go on like this. If you don’t want to lose him, you’ll do what I say. I’m a good judge of men and Philip is worth keeping. He’s better than his Ma, Pa, Uncle Elmer, or any of ’em. I wish I was married to such a man.”
Emmain these days found relief in a vast activity. The restaurant business kept growing and growing until at last she secured a long lease on the shoe store next door and undertook the necessary alterations. She was in and out of the place a score of times a day, watching the carpenters, the plumbers and the painters, quarreling with the contractor and insisting that pipes should be placed where it was impossibleto place them and pillars spaced so that there would be a permanent danger of the roof falling in upon her customers.
She was active, too, in her church work and contributed half a wagon load of cakes and pies to the annual June church fair. The Minerva Circle met at her house and Naomi was introduced to those members whom she did not know already, and so launched in a series of sewing parties which she attended in a kind of misery because on account of Philip she could not answer honestly the persistent questions of her new women “friends.” And Emma kept up as well her fervent activities as President of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, carrying war into the enemy’s country, trying to drive whisky from a country of mills and furnaces where every other corner was occupied by a saloon. She even called upon Moses Slade, Congressman of the district, and lately become a widower, in his great boxlike house set back among the trees on Park Avenue. It was an odd call which began with open hostility when she urged him to wear a white ribbon and declare himself at once on the side of God and Purity.
But Slade, being a politician, felt that Fortune had not yet sided with God and Purity, and declined the honor with a great flow of eloquence for which he was famed. There was much talk of his being chosen to represent the majority of the people, and as yet the majority seemed unfortunately (“the human race is naturally wicked and must be educated to goodness—we must not forget that, Mrs. Downes”) still on the side of gin.
He was a man of fifty, with a great stomach andmassive feet and hands, who had a round, flat face and a broad, flat nose, with odd little shifty eyes. He was bald in front, but what remained of the once luxuriant black locks was now worn, loose and free, bobbed in a style which women came, shockingly, to adopt years afterward.
He received Emma in his study, a room with red walls, set round with mastodon furniture in mahogany and red leather. In the beginning he was taken aback by the vigor and power of Emma’s handsome figure.
She said to him, “The day will come, Mr. Slade, when you will have to vote on the side of purity if you wish to survive—you and all your fellow-members.”
And he replied, “That, Mrs. Downes, is what I am waiting for—a sign from the people. You may tell your members that my heart is with them but that I must not lose my head. A sign is all I’m waiting for, Mrs. Downes—only a sign.”
Emma, feeling that she had gained at least half a victory, turned the conversation to other things. They discussed the Republican chances at the coming election, and the lateness of the summer, the question, as it was called, of “smoke abatement” and, of course, the amazing growth and prosperity of the Town. They found presently that they saw eye to eye on every subject, for Emma was in her own way a born politician. Congressman Slade observed that since the death of his wife (here a deep sigh interrupted his observation) life had not been the same. To lose a woman after thirty years! Well, it made a gap that could never be filled, or at least, it was extremely unlikely that it would be filled. And now his housekeeper had left, leaving him helpless.
Emma, in her turn, sighed and murmured a few words of condolence. She knew what it was to be alone in the world. Hadn’t she been alone for more than twenty years? Ever since Mr. Downes, going to China to make a fortune for himself and his son, had been killed there. They hadn’t even found his body, so that she hadn’t even the consolation of visiting his grave. That, of course, was a great deal. Congressman Slade ought to be thankful that he had his wife’s grave. It helped. In a way, it made the thing definite. It was not like the torturing hope in which she had lived for twenty years.... Yes, more than twenty years, hoping all the while that he might not be really dead. Oh, she understood. She sympathized.
“But as to the housekeeper, Mr. Slade, don’t let that trouble you. Come and take your meals at the restaurant. I’d be delighted to have you. It would be an honor to have you eat there.”
“I’ll take up your offer,” he said, slapping his knee almost jovially. “I’ve heard how excellent it is. But, of course, I’ll pay for it. I couldn’t think of it otherwise.”
For a moment, there appeared in the manner of Emma the faintest hint of an ancient coquetry, long forgotten and grown a little stale. It was a mere shadow, something that lurked in the suspicious bobbing of the black ostrich plumes in her hat.
“Oh, don’t think of that,” she said. “It would be a pleasure—an honor.”
She rose and shook his hand. “Good-by, Mr. Slade, and thank you for letting me waste so much of your time.”
“It was a pleasure, madam, a pleasure,” and going to the door, he bowed her out of his widowed house.
When she had gone, Moses Slade returned to his study and before going back to his work he sat for a long time lost in thought. The shadow of a smile encircled the rather hard, virtuous lips. He smiled because he was thinking of Emma, of her fine figure and healthy, rosy face, of the curve of the full bosom, and the hips from which her dress flowed away like the waters of a fountain.
From the very moment of Minnie’s death—indeed, even long before, during the dragging, heavy-footed years of her invalidism—he had been thinking, with a deep sense of guilt, of a second marriage. The guilt had faded away by now, for Minnie had been in her grave for two summers and he could turn his thoughts in such a direction, freely and with a clear conscience. After all, he was a fine, vigorous man, in his prime. People talked about fifty-five as old age—a time when a man should begin to think of other things; but people didn’t know until theywerefifty-five. He had talked like that himself once a long while ago. And now, look at him, as good a man as ever he was, and better, when it came to brains and head. Why, with all the experience he had had....
As he sat there, talking to himself, his earnestness became so great that his lips began to move, forming the words as if he were holding a conversation, even arguing, with another Moses Slade, who sat just across from him in the monstrous chair on the opposite sideof the desk. He must, he felt, convince that other Moses Slade.
He went on talking. Look at Mrs. Downes! What a fine woman! With such noble—(yes, noble was the only word)—such noble curves and such a fine, high color. She, too, was in her prime, a fine figure of a woman, handsomer now than she had been as a skinny young thing of eighteen. There was a woman who would make a wife for a man like himself. And she had sense, too, running a business with such success. She’d be a great help to a man in politics.
He began prodding his memory about her. He remembered the story of her long widowhood, of Mr. Downes’ mysterious death. Yes, and he even remembered Downes himself, a whipper-snapper, who was no good, and had a devastating way with women. (Memories of a hot-blooded youth began to rise and torment him.) Well, she was better off without him, a no-good fellow like that. And what a brave fight she’d made! She was a fine woman. She had a son, too, a son who was a missionary, and—and—Why, come to think of it, hadn’t the son given it up and come home? That didn’t sound so good, but you could keep the son out of the way.
The truth was that Moses Slade really wanted a skinny young thing of twenty, but a Congressman who wrote “Honorable” before his name couldn’t afford to make a fool of himself. He couldn’t afford to marry a silly young thing, or ever get “mixed up” with a woman. A man of fifty-five who kept wanting to pinch arms and hips had to be careful. If he could only pinch, just one pinch, some one like—well, some one as plump as Mrs. Downes, he’d feel like a boy again.He felt that youth would flow back again into him through the very tips of the pinching fingers. It wasn’t much—just wanting to pinch a girl. Why did people make such a fuss about it?
He almost convinced himself that a full-blown rose like Emma Downes was far better than a skinny young thing. There was, too, of course, the Widow Barnes, who lived next door, still in her prime, and with a large fortune as well.
He took up the Congressional Record, and tried to lose himself in its mountains and valleys of bombast and boredom, but in a little while the book lay unnoticed on his heavy thighs and he was arguing with the other Moses Slade across the desk.
Suddenly, as if he had been roused from a deep sleep, he again found himself talking aloud. “Well,” he thought, “something has got to be done about this.”