PART THREE THE STABLE (continued 3)

He freed himself suddenly and stood up. “I can’t do it, Mary. I’ll go away.... You can spend the night here and leave in the morning. No one in the Town will know you haven’t spent the night at Shane’s Castle.”

“Where will you go?”

“I’ll go to the tents. I’ll be all right.”

She suddenly put her hand over her eyes, and, in a low voice, asked, “And ... what’s to come after, Philip?”

“I don’t know ... I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“We can’t go on ... I can’t....”

“No ... I’d rather be dead.”

Suddenly, with a sob, she fell forward on the table, burying her face in her hands. “You belong to your mother still, Philip ... you can’t shake off the hard, wicked things she’s taught you. Oh, God! If she’d only died ... we’d have been married to each other!”

She began to cry softly, and, at the sound, he stopped the mechanical business of buttoning his coat, and then, almost as if he were speaking to himself, he said, “Damn them all! We’ve a right to our happiness. They can’t take it from us. They can’t....”

He raised her face from the table and kissed it again and again with a kind of wild, rude passion that astonished her, until she lost herself completely in its power. Suddenly he ceased, and, looking at her, said, “It doesn’t matter if to-morrow never comes. I love you, Mary ... I love you. That’s all that matters.”

They were happy then, for in love and in death all things are wiped out. There, in the midst of the dead and frozen park, she set him free for a little time.

18

The morning came quickly in a cold gray haze, for the furnaces, starting to work one by one as the strike collapsed, had begun again to cover the Flats with a canopy of smoke. It was Mary who went first, going by the back drive, which led past the railway-station. And with her departure the whole world turned dark. While she had been there with him, he was happy with the sense of security that is born of companionship in adventure, but as her figure faded presently into the smoke and mist that veiled the deserted houses of the Flats, the enchantment of the night gave way to a cold, painful sense of actuality. The whole night had been, as some nights are in the course of lives that move passionately, unreal and charged with strange, intangible currents of fire and ice. During that brief hour or two when he had slept, years seemed to have passed. The figure of his father had become so remote that he no longer seemed cheap and revolting, but only shallow and pitiful. Even the memory of McTavish and the two men with the lantern standing over the dead woman in the snow was dim now and unreal.

It was only the sight of the trampled, dirty snow, the black spot where the fire had been and the pool of blood at the turn of the drive that made him know how near had been all these things which had happened during the night. And the park was no longer beautiful and haunted in the moonlight, but only a dreary expanse of land filled with dead trees and decaying arbors. The old doubts began slowly to torment him once more—the feeling of terror lest Naomi should ever discover what had happened, and the knowledge that he had betrayed her. There was, too, an odd new fear that he might become such a man as his father. It was born in that cold, gray light, of a sudden knowledge that deep inside him lay sleeping all the weaknesses, all the sensuality, of such a man. After what had happened in the night, he saw suddenly that he might come like his father to live in a shallow world that shut out all else. He was afraid suddenly, and ashamed, for he had been guilty of a sin which his father must have committed a hundred times.

Yet he had, too, an odd new sense of peace, a soothing, physical, animal sort of peace, that seemed to have had its beginnings months ago, in the moments of delirium when he had wanted to live only because he could not die without knowing such an experience as had come to him in the night. It was, he supposed, Nature herself who had demanded this of him. And now she had rewarded him with this sense of completeness. Nature, he thought, had meant his children to be Mary’s children, too; and now that couldn’t be ... unless ... unless Naomi died.

It was a wicked thought that kept stealing back upon him. It lay in hiding at the back of his mind, even in the last precious moments before Mary had left, when she stood beside the stove making the coffee. He had thought again and again, “If only Naomi died ... we could be like this forever.” Watching her, he had thought, despite all his will to the contrary, of what love had been with Naomi and what with Mary. And he had told himself that it wasn’t fair to think such things, because he had never loved Naomi: at such moments he had almost hated her. Yet she had loved him, and was ashamed of her love, so that she made all their life together a sordid misery. And Mary, who had been without shame, had surrounded her love with a proud and reckless glory. Yet, in the end, it was Mary who hid, who stole away through the black houses of the Flats as if she had done a shameful thing, and it was Naomi who bore his children. For a moment he almost hated the two helpless little creatures he had come so lately to love, because a part of them was also a part of Naomi.

As he stood by the window, all wretched and tormented, he saw coming across the trampled snow the battered figure of Hennery. He was coming from the house, and his bent old figure seemed more feeble and ancient than it had ever been before. He entered the stable, and Philip heard him coming painfully up the stairs. At the sight of Philip, he started suddenly, and said, “You scared me, Mr. Downes ... my nerves is all gone. I ain’t the same since last night.” He took off his hat and began fumbling in his pockets. “I got a letter for you ... that strike feller left it for you ... that ... I doan’ know his name, but the feller that made all the trouble.”

He brought forth a piece of pale mauve paper that must have belonged to Lily Shane, but was soiled now from contact with Hennery’s pocket.

“He was in the house all night,” said Hennery, “a-hiding there, I guess, from the police, and he’s gone now.”

Then he was silent while Philip opened the note and read in the powerful, sprawling hand of Krylenko:

“I’ve had to clear out. If they caught me now, they’d frame something and send me up. And I’m not through fighting yet. The strike’s bust, and there’s no good in staying. But I’m coming back. I’ll write you from where I go.

“Krylenko.”

He read it again and then he heard Hennery saying, “It was a turrible night, Mr. Downes ... I guess it was one of those nights when all kinds of slimy things are out walkin’. They’re up and gone too ... both of them ... the girls, Miss Lily and Miss Irene. And they ain’t comin’ back, so Miss Lily says. She went away, before it was light, on the New York flier. Oh, it was a turrible night, Mr. Downes ... I’ve seen things happenin’ here for forty years, but nothin’ like last night ... nothin’ ever.”

He began to moan and call on the Lord, and Philip remembered suddenly that the half-finished drawing of Lily Shane had disappeared. She had carried it off then, without a word. And slowly she again began to take possession of his imagination. For a moment he tried to picture her house in Paris where his drawing of her would be hung. She had gone away without giving him another thought.

Hennery was saying over and over again, “It was a turrible night ... something must-a happened in the house too. The Devil sure was on the rampage.”

He stood there, staring out of the window, suffering from a curious, sick feeling of having been deserted. “By what? By whom?” he asked himself. “Not by Lily Shane, surely, on whom I had no claims ... whom I barely knew.” Yet it was Lily Shane who had deserted him. It was as if she had closed a door behind her, shutting him back into the world of Elmer and his mother and Jason Downes. The thing he had glimpsed for a moment was only an illusion....

19

When Hennery had gone off muttering to himself, Philip put on his coat and went out, for the room had become suddenly unendurable to him. He did not know why, but all at once he hated it, this room where he had been happy for the first time since he was a child. It turned suddenly cold and desolate and hauntingly empty. Running down the stairs, he hurried across the soiled snow, avoiding the dark stain by the decaying arbor. He went by that same instinct which always drove him when he was unhappy towards the furnaces and the engines, and at Hennessey’s corner he turned toward the district where the tents stood. They presented an odd, bedraggled appearance now, still housing the remnant of workers who had fought to the end, all that little army which had met the night before in the park of Shane’s Castle. Here and there a deserted tent had collapsed in the dirty snow. Piles of rubbish and filth cluttered the muddy field on every side. Men, women and children stood in little groups, frightened and helpless and bedraggled, all the spirit gone out of them. There was no more work for them now. Wherever they went, no mill would take them in. They had no homes, no money, no food....

Lost among them, he came presently to feel less lonely, for it was here that he belonged—in this army of outcasts—a sort of pariah in the world that should have been his own.

At the door of one of the tents, he recognized Sokoleff. The Ukranian had let his beard grow and he held a child of two in his arms—a child with great hollow eyes and blue lips. Sokoleff, who was always drunk and laughing, was sober now, with a look of misery in his eyes. Philip shook his free hand in silence, and then said, “You heard about Krylenko?”

“No, I ain’t heard nothin’. I’ve been waitin’ for him. I gotta tell him a piece of bad news.”

“He’s gone away.”

“Where’s he gone?”

Philip told him, and, after a silence, Sokoleff said, “I suppose he had to beat it. I suppose he had to ... but what are we gonna do ... the ones that’s left. He’s the only one with a brain. The rest of us ain’t good for nothin’. We ain’t even got money to get drunk on.”

“He won’t forget you.”

“Oh, it’s all right for him. He ain’t got nobody ... no children or a wife. He ain’t even got a girl ... now.”

For a moment the single word “now,” added carelessly after a pause, meant nothing to Philip, and then suddenly a terrible suspicion took possession of him. He looked at Sokoleff. “What d’you mean ... now?”

“Ain’t you heard it?”

“What?”

“It was his girl, Giulia ... that was killed last night.”

Philip felt sick. In a low voice he asked, “And he didn’t know it?”

“I was to tell him, but nobody’s seen him. I’m damned glad he’s went away now. I won’t have the goddamned dirty job. He’ll be crazy ... crazy as hell.”

And then Philip saw her again as he had seen her the night before, lying face down in the snow ... Krylenko’s Giulia.

“She oughtn’t to have went up there,” Sokoleff was saying. “But she was nuts on him ... she thought that he was the best guy on earth, and she wanted to hear his speech....” The bearded Slovak spat into the snow. “I guess that was the last thing she ever heard. She musta died happy.... That’s better than livin’ like this.”

And Krylenko had been hiding in Shane’s Castle all night while Giulia lay dead in the snow outside.

The sick baby began to cry, and Sokoleff stroked its bare head with a calloused paw covered by black hair.

All at once Philip was happy again; even in the midst of all the misery about him, he was gloriously, selfishly happy, because he knew that, whatever happened, he had known what Krylenko had lost now forever. He thought suddenly, “The jungle at Megambo was less cruel and savage than this world about me.”

20

To Jason Downes the tragedy in the park of Shane’s Castle had only one significance—that it tarnished all the glory of his astonishing return. When the papers appeared in the morning, the first pages were filled with the news of “the riot precipitated by strikers last night.” It recounted the death of a Pole and of Giulia Rizzo, and announced triumphantly that the strike was broken at last. And far back, among the advertisements of Peruna and Lydia Pinkham’s Compound, there appeared a brief paragraph or two announcing the return of Jason Downes, and touching upon the remarkable story of his accident and consequent loss of memory. There were, doubtless, people who never saw it at all.

But he made the most of his return, walking the round of all the cigar-stores and poker-rooms which he had haunted in his youth. He even went to Hennessey’s saloon, beginning to thrive again on the money of the strike-breakers. But he found no great triumph, for he discovered only one or two men who had ever known him and to the others he was only Emma Downes’ husband, whom they barely noticed in the excitement of discussing the riots of the night before. Even his dudishness had dated during those long twenty-six years: he must have heard the titters that went up from poolroom loafers at the sight of the faun-colored vest, the waxed mustaches and the tan derby. He was pushed aside at bars and thrust into the corner in the poolrooms.

Half in desperation, he went at last to find an audience in the group of old men who sat all day about the stove of McTavish’s undertaking-parlors. They were old: they would remember who he was. But even there the clamor of the tragedy drowned his tale. He found the place filled with Italians—the father and the seven orphaned brothers and sisters of Giulia Rizzo. The father wept and wrung his hands. The older children joined him, and the four youngest huddled dumbly in a corner. It was Jason’s own son, Philip, who was trying to quiet them. He nodded to his father, gave him a sudden glance of contempt, and then disappeared with McTavish into the back room where the undertaker had prepared Giulia for her last rest. For a moment Jason hung about hopefully, and then, confused and depressed by the ungoverned emotions of the Italians, he slipped out of the door, and up the street toward the Peerless Restaurant. He was like a bedraggled bantam rooster which had lost its proud tail-feathers, but as he approached the restaurant he grew a bit more jaunty: there was always Em who thought him wonderful....

Behind the partition of the undertaking-rooms, Philip and McTavish stood looking down at Giulia. The blood had been washed away and her face was white like marble against the dark coil of her hair. She was clothed in a dress of black silk.

“It was her best dress,” said McTavish. “The old man brought it up here this morning.”

Philip asked, “Are they going to bury her in the Potters Field? Old Rizzo hasn’t got a cent, with all these children to feed.”

“No, I’ve arranged that. I fixed it up with the priest. She had to be buried in consecrated ground ... and ... and I bought enough for her. I ain’t got any family, so I might as well spend my money on something.”

21

Philip saw his father at the restaurant, but there was little conversation between them, and Emma kept talking about the riot of the night before, observing that, “now that the police had tried something besides coddling a lot of dirty foreigners, the strike was over in a hurry.”

At this remark, Philip rose quietly and went out without another word to either of them. At home he found the druggist’s wife sitting with the twins. Naomi, she said, was out. She had gone to see Mabelle. Mrs. Stimson wanted more details of his father’s return, and also news of what had happened at Shane’s Castle. After answering a dozen questions, he went away quickly.

At four o’clock his father came and saw the twins, diddling them both on his feet until they cried and Mrs. Stimson said, with the air of a snapping-turtle, “I’m going to leave them with you. Naomi ought to have been home two hours ago, and I’ve got a household of my own to look after.” (Even for her poor Jason appeared to have lost his fascination.)

At seven when Philip came in to sit with the twins while Naomi went to choir practice, he found little Naomi crying and his father asleep in the Morris-chair by the gas stove. Jason had removed his collar and wrapped himself in a blanket. With him, sleeping was simply a way of filling in time between the high spots in existence: he slept when he was bored, and he slept when he was forced to wait.

Holding the baby against him, and patting its back softly, Philip approached his father and touched him with the toe of his shoe. “Pa!” he said. “Pa! Wake up!”

Jason awakened with all the catlike reluctance of a sensual nature, stretching himself and yawning and closing his eyes. He would have fallen asleep a second time but for the insistence of Philip’s toe, the desperate crying of the child, and Philip’s voice saying, “Wake up! Wake up!” There was something in the very prodding of the toe which indicated a contempt or at least a lack of respect. Jason noticed it and scowled.

“I just fell asleep for a minute,” he said. “It couldn’t have been long.” But all the cocksureness had turned into an air of groveling apology.

“Where’s Naomi?”

“She went off to Mabelle’s.” He took a pair of cigars from the yellow waistcoat and asked, “Have a cigar?”

“No. Not now.” Philip continued to pat the baby’s fat back. Suddenly he felt desperate, suffocated and helpless. The cry of the child hurt him.

He said, “She’s been at Mabelle’s all day.”

“I do believe she said she’d be back after choir practice.” He lighted the cigar and regarded the end of it thoughtfully. Philip began to walk up and down, and presently his father said, without looking at him, “You ain’t living with Naomi, are you? I mean here in this house? You ain’t sleeping with her?”

“No ... I’m not.”

“I thought so. Your Ma was trying to make me believe you was.” He cocked his head on one side. “But I smelled a rat ... I smelled a rat. I knew something was wrong.”

Philip continued his promenade in silence.

“How’d you ever come to hook up with Naomi?”

“Because I wanted to ... I suppose.”

Jason considered the answer thoughtfully. “No, I don’t believe you did. I ain’t very bright, but I know some things. No man in his right mind would hook up to anything as pious as Naomi....” He saw that Philip’s head tossed back and his jaw hardened, as if he were going to speak. “Now, don’t get mad at your Pa ... your poor old Pa ... I know you don’t think much of ’im, but he’s kind-a proud of you, just the same. And he don’t blame you for not living with Naomi. Why, the thought of it makes me kind-a seasick.”

Again a silence filled by little Naomi’s heartbroken crying.

“Why, she ought to be home now looking after her children instead of gadding about with preachers and such. Your Ma was always pious, too, but she was a good housekeeper. She never allowed religion to interfere with her bein’ practical.”

Philip, distracted, unhappy, conscience-stricken, and a little frightened at Naomi’s queer avoidance of him, was aware, too, that his father was saying one by one things he’d thought himself a hundred times. It occurred to him that Jason wasn’t perhaps as empty and cheap as he seemed. It was almost as if an affection were being born out of Jason’s hopeless efforts toward an understanding. If only little Naomi would stop squalling....

His father was saying, “No, I’m proud of you, my boy. D’you know why?”

“No.”

“Because of the way you stand up to your Ma. It takes a strong man to do that, unless you learn the trick. I’ve learned the trick. I just let her slide off now like water off a duck’s back. I just say, ‘Yes, yes,’ to her and then do as I damned please. Oh, I learned a lot since I last saw her ... a hell of a lot. There’s a lotta women like her ... especially American women—that don’t know their place.”

The baby stopped screaming, sobbed for a moment, and then began again.

“It wasn’t her piousness that drove me away. I could have managed that. It was her way of meddlin’.”

Philip stopped short and turned, looking at his father. “Then you were running away from us when you fell and hit your head?”

“I wasn’t runnin’ away from you.”

Philip stood in front of the chair. “And you didn’t lose your memory at all, did you?”

Jason looked up at him with an expression of astonishment. “No ... of course not. D’you mean to say she never told you the truth ... even you ... my own son?”

“No ... I guess she was trying to protect you ... and made me believe my father wasn’t the kind to run away.” (The cries of the baby had begun to beat upon his brain like the steel hammers of the Mill.)

“Protect me, hell! It was to protect herself. She didn’t want the Town to think that any man would desert her. Oh, I know your Ma, my boy. And it would have took a hero or a nincompoop to have stuck with her in those days.” He knocked the ash from his cigar, and shook his head sadly. “But I oughtn’t to have run away on your account. If I’d ’a’ stuck it out, you wouldn’t have got mixed up in the missionary business or with Naomi either. You wouldn’t be walkin’ up and down with that squallin’ brat—at any rate, it wouldn’t be Naomi’s brat. I guess the missionary business was her way of gettin’ even with me through you.” He shook his head again. “Your Ma’s a queer woman. She’s got as much energy as a steam engine, but she never knows where she’s goin’, and she always thinks she’s the only one with any sense. And my, ain’t she hard ... and unforgivin’ ... hard as a cocoanut!”

“She forgave you and took you back.”

“But she’s been aching to do that for years. That’s the kind of thing she likes.” His chest swelled under the yellow vest. “Besides, I always had a kind of an idea that she preferred me to any other man she’s ever seen. Your Ma’s a passionate woman, Philip. She’s kind of ashamed of it, but deep down she’s a passionate woman. If she’d had me about all these years she wouldn’t have been so obnoxious, I guess.”

The baby had ceased crying now, and, thrusting its soft head against the curve of Philip’s throat, was lying very still. The touch of the downy little ball against his skin filled him with pity and a sudden, warm happiness. The poor little thing was trusting him, reaching out in its helpless way. He didn’t even mind the things that his father was saying of his mother. He scarcely heard them....

“I thought,” said Jason, “that we’d cooked up that story about my memory for the Town and for old pie-faced Elmer. I thought she’d tell you the truth, but I guess she don’t care much for the truth if it ain’t pleasant.”

Philip continued to pat little Naomi, more and more gently, as she began to fall asleep. In a low voice he asked, “You’re going to stay now that you’ve come back, aren’t you?”

“No, I gotta go back to Australia.”

Philip looked at his father sharply. “You aren’t going back to stay, are you?”

“I gotta look after my property, haven’t I?”

“Why did you ever come back at all?”

Jason considered the question. “I suppose it was curiosity ... I wanted to see my own son, and well ... I wanted to see what had happened to your Ma after all these years, and then it is sort of fun to be a returned prodigal. Nothing has happened to your Ma. She’s just the same. She accused me of bein’ drunk this morning when I’d only had a glass. She carried on something awful.”

“Have you told her you’re going back to stay?”

“No ... I’ve just told her I’m going back.” He looked at Philip suddenly. “I suppose you think I’m lyin’ about all that property in Australia. Well, I ain’t. I’ll send you pictures of it when I get back ... I ought to have brought them. I can’t guess why I didn’t.”

He rose and put on his coat. “I’d better be movin’ on now, or she’ll be sayin’ I’ve been hangin’ around bars. Have you eaten yet?”

“Yes ... at the railroad lunch counter.”

“That’s a hell of a life for a married man.”

He stood for a moment looking at little Naomi, who lay asleep on Philip’s shoulder. Then, shyly, he put out his finger and touched the downy head gently. “They’re fine babies,” he said. “I wouldn’t have thought a poor creature like Naomi could have had ’em.”

Philip laid the child gently beside her brother and stood looking down at them.

“Philip,” his father began. Philip turned, and, as if the burning gaze of his son’s eyes extinguished his desire to speak, Jason looked away quickly, and said, “Well, good-night.” He turned shyly, and Philip, aware that he was trying to pierce through the wall that separated them, felt suddenly sorry for him, and said, “Yes, Pa. What was it you meant to say?”

Jason coughed and then with an effort said, “Don’t be too unhappy ... and if there’s somebody else ... I mean another girl ... why, don’t torture yourself too much about it. Your Ma has made you like that.... But she’s got queer ideas. We ain’t alive very long, you know, and there ain’t any reason why we should make our brief spell miserable.”

Philip didn’t answer him. He was looking down again at the children, silent, with the old, queer, pinched look about the eyes, as if he were ill again. He saw suddenly that his father wasn’t such a fool, after all, and he was human. He was standing there with his hat in his two hands, looking childish and subdued and very shy.

Philip heard him saying, with another nervous cough, “Well, good-night, Philip.”

“Good-night.”

The door closed and Philip sank down wearily into a chair, resting his head on the edge of the crib. Presently he fell asleep thus.

22

On that night the singing at choir practice reached a peak of frenzy. While Philip sat sleeping beside the crib, Naomi was pounding her heart out on the stained celluloid keys of the tinny piano in the Infants’ Classroom. She played wildly, with a kind of shameless abandon, as if she wanted to pour out her whole story of justification; and the others, taking fire from her spirit, sang as they had never sung before.

During the afternoon, the old Naomi—the stubborn, sure Naomi of Megambo—had come to life again in some mysterious fashion. She even put on the new foulard dress in a gesture of defiance to show them—Philip and his mother—that, however “funny-looking” it might be, she was proud of it. And then neither of them had seen her wearing it, Philip because she was avoiding him, and Emma because chance had not brought them together. She had gone up to Mabelle’s bent upon telling her that she had come to the end of her endurance. She had meant to ask Mabelle’s advice, because Mabelle was very shrewd about such matters.

And then when she found herself seated opposite Mabelle she discovered that she couldn’t bring herself to say what she meant to say. She couldn’t humble her pride sufficiently to tell even Mabelle how Philip treated her. She had finally gone home and then returned a second time, but it was no use. She couldn’t speak of it: she was too proud. And she knew, too, that whatever happened she must protect Philip. It wasn’t, she told herself, as if he were himself, as he had been at Megambo. He was sick. He really wasn’t responsible. She cried when she thought how she loved him now; if he would only notice her, she would let him trample her body in the dust. Mabelle’s near-sighted blue eyes noted nothing. She went on rocking and rocking, talking incessantly of clothes and food and a soothing syrup that would make little Naomi sleep better at night.

During the day she had formed a dozen wild projects. She would go back to Megambo. She would return to her father, who was seventy now, and would welcome her help. She would run off to a cousin who lived in Tennessee. She would join another cousin who was an Evangelist in Texas: she could play the piano and lead the singing for him. In any of these places she would find again the glory she had known as Naomi Potts, “youngest missionary of God”; she wouldn’t any longer be a nobody, unwanted, always pushed aside and treated as of no consequence.

But always there were the twins to be considered. How could she run off and forget them? And if she did run away, Emma and perhaps even Philip would use it as a chance to rid themselves of her forever. She fancied that she saw now how Emma had used her, willing all the while to cast her off when she was no longer of any service. She told herself again and again, as if she could not bring herself to believe it, that she loved the twins—that she loved them despite her aching back and the hours she was kept awake by their crying. But she remembered that she had never been tired at Megambo: no amount of work had tired her. She hadn’t wanted the twins: she’d only gone to Philip because Mabelle and Emma told her that she must and because Mabelle said that men liked children, and that going to Philip would give her a hold over him. And now ... see what had come of it! Philip scarcely noticed her. Before she lived with him, it hadn’t mattered to her, but now—now she always carried a weight about inside her. Her heart leaped if he took the least notice of her.

No, she saw it all clearly. She must run away. She couldn’t go on, chained down like a slave. But if she ran away, she’d lose Philip for ever, and if she stayed, he might come back to her. The children belonged to both of them. They were a bond you could never break, the proof that once, for a little time, he belonged to her. She saw that he, too, was chained after a fashion. He belonged to her in a way he belonged to no other woman. In the sight of the Lord any other woman would always be a strumpet and a whore.

At last, as it was growing dark, she found herself sitting on a bench in the park before the new monument to General Sherman. It was raining and her coat was soaked and her shoes wet through. The rain ran in little trickles from her worn black hat. It was as if she had wakened suddenly from a dream. She wasn’t certain how she came to be sitting on the wet bench with the heavy rain melting the snow all about her. She thought, “I must have been crazy for a time. I can’t go on like this. I’ve got to talk to some one. I’ve got to ... I’ve got to!” She began to cry, and then she thought, “I’ll speak to the Reverend Castor to-night after choir practice. He’ll help me and he’s a good man. He’ll never tell any one. He’s always been so kind. It was silly of me to think things about him. I was silly to be afraid of him. I’ll talk to him. I’ve got to talk to some one. He’ll understand.”

When the practice was finished, the Reverend Castor came out of the study to bid the members good-night. In the dim light of the hallway, as Naomi passed him, he looked at her and smiled. She saw that his hands were trembling in a way that had come over him lately, and the smile warmed her, but at the same time weakened her. There was a comfort and a kindliness in it that made her want to cry.

Once inside the study, she found that the drawer of the cabinet was jammed again, as it had been on that first night. While she tugged at it, she heard him outside the door saying good-night one by one to the choir. Putting down the music, she began again to struggle with the drawer, and then suddenly, as if the effort was the last she could make, she collapsed on the floor and began to weep.

She heard the door open and she heard the Reverend Castor’s deep, warm voice saying, “Why, Naomi, what’s the matter?”

She answered him, without looking up. “It’s the drawer,” she said. “It’s stuck again ... and I’m ... I’m so tired.”

He went over to the cabinet and this time he was forced to struggle with it.

“It’s really too heavy for you, my dear girl ... I’ll fix it myself in the morning.” He replaced the music and when he attempted to close the drawer again it stuck fast. “Now it won’t close at all. But I can fix it. I’m handy about such things.”

His hands were trembling, and he looked white and tired. He talked with the air of a man desperately hiding pits of silence. When he turned, Naomi still sat on the floor, her body bent forward. Her worn, rain-soaked hat had fallen forward a little, and she was sobbing. He sat down in the great stuffed leather chair. It was very low, so that he was almost on a level with her.

“My poor child,” he asked, “what is it? Is it something I can help?”

“I don’t know. I wanted to talk to some one. I can’t go on. I can’t ... I can’t.”

He laid his big hand on her shoulder with a gentleness that seemed scarcely real, and, at the touch, she looked up at him, dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief that had been soaked with tears hours earlier. As she looked at him, some old instinct, born of long experience with unhappy women, took possession of him. He said, “Why, you’ve got a new dress on, Naomi. It’s very pretty. Did you make it yourself?”

For a second a look almost of happiness came into her face. “Why, yes,” she said. “Mabelle helped me ... but I made most of it myself.”

His other hand touched her shoulder. “Here,” he said, “lean back against my knee and tell me everything that’s making you unhappy....” When she hesitated, he said, “Try to think of me as your father, my child. I’m old enough to be your father ... and I don’t want to see you unhappy.”

She leaned against his knee with a sudden feeling of weak collapse. It was the first time any one had been kind to her for so long, and, strangely enough, she wasn’t afraid of him any longer. The old uneasiness seemed to have died away.

“Tell me, my child.”

The damp handkerchief lay crushed into a tiny ball in her red, chapped hand. For a long time she didn’t speak, and he waited patiently until she found words. At last she said, “I don’t know how to begin. I don’t know myself what’s happened to me ... I don’t know. Sometimes I think I must be black with sin or going crazy ... sometimes I can’t think any more, and I don’t know what I’m doing.... It was like that to-day ... all day.... I’ve been going about like a crazy woman.”

And then, slowly, she began, in a confused, incoherent fashion, to tell him the whole story of her misery from the very beginning at Megambo when the Englishwoman had suddenly appeared out of the forest. It all seemed to begin then, she said, and it had gone on and on ever since, growing worse and worse. She hadn’t any friends—at least none save Mabelle; and the others didn’t want her to see Mabelle. Besides, Mabelle didn’t seem to help: whatever she advised only made matters worse.

The Reverend Castor interrupted her. “But I’m your friend, Naomi.... I’ve always been your friend. You could have come to me long ago.”

“But you’re a preacher,” she said. “And that’s not the same thing.”

“But I’m a man, too, Naomi ... a human being.”

And then she even told him about Emma while he interrupted her from time to time by saying, “Can it be?” and, “It hardly seems possible—a woman like Emma Downes, who has always been one of the pillars, the foundation-stones, of our church! How much goes on of which we poor blind creatures know nothing.”

And Naomi said, “I know. No one will ever believe me. They’ll all believe that I’m nothing and that she’s a good, brave woman. I can’t fight her, Reverend Castor. I can’t ... and sometimes I think she tries to poison him against me.”

The trembling hand came to rest once more on her shoulder. There was a long silence, and presently he said, in a low voice, “I know, my child ... I know. I’ve suffered, too ... for fifteen years.”

She had begun to sob again. “And now there are other women ... more than one, I’m sure. I pray to God for his soul. I pray and pray to God to return him to me ... my Philip, who was a good man and believed in God. He’s changed now. I don’t know him any more. To-night I don’t think I love him. I’ve come to the end of everything.”

He began to pat her shoulder, gently, as if he were comforting a child, and for a long time, they stayed thus in silence. At last he said, “I’ve suffered, too, Naomi ... for years and years.... It began almost as soon as I was married, and it’s never stopped for an hour, for a moment since. It gets worse and worse with each year.” Suddenly he covered his face with his hands and groaned. “I pray to God for strength to go on living. I have need of God’s help to go on at all. I, too, need some one to talk to.” His hands dropped from his face, and he placed one arm about her thin, narrow shoulders. She did not draw away. Still sobbing, she let her whole weight rest against him. She was so tired, and she felt so ill. A strange, gusty and terrifying happiness took possession of the tired, nerve-racked man. Just to touch a woman thus, to have a woman kind to him, to have a woman who would trust him, was a pleasure almost too keen to be borne. For fifteen acid years he had hungered for a moment, a single moment, like this. He did not speak, conscious, it seemed, that to breathe might suddenly shatter this fragile, pathetic sense of peace.

Naomi had closed her eyes, as if she had fallen asleep from her long exhaustion; but she wasn’t sleeping, for presently her pale lips moved a little, and she said in a whisper, “There’s nothing for me to do but run away or kill myself ... and then I’ll be out of the way.”

He did not tell her at once, without hesitation, that she was contemplating a great sin. He merely kept silent, and, after a time, he murmured, “My poor, poor child ... my tired child,” and then fell once more into silence. They must have remained thus for nearly an hour. Naomi even appeared to fall asleep, and then, starting suddenly, she cried out. His arm ached, but he did not move. He was, it seemed, past such a small discomfort as an aching arm. And he was struggling, struggling passionately, with a terrible temptation, conscious all the while that each minute added to the bitterness of the reproaches that awaited him on opening the parsonage door. It was long after eleven o’clock, and he should have returned ages ago. He thought, “I can’t go home now. I can never go home again. I can never open that door again. I would rather die here now. One more time might drive me mad ... I mightn’t know what I was doing ... I might....”

The free hand again closed over his eyes, as if to shut out the horrible thing that had occurred to him. Naomi had opened her eyes and was looking up at him. For a second he thought, “Has she seen what was in them?”

Her lips moved again. “I don’t care what happens to me any longer.”

Suddenly, without knowing what he was doing, he bent down and took her in his arms, “Naomi ... Naomi ... do you mean that? Answer me, do you mean that?”

She closed her eyes wearily. “I don’t care what happens to me.”

He held her more tightly, the odd, gusty pleasure sweeping over him in terrifying waves. “Naomi ... will you ... will you go away ... now ... at once, and with me?”

“You can do with me what you want, if you’ll only be kind to me.”

“We’ve a right to be happy. We’ve suffered enough.” She did not answer him, and he said, “God will understand. He’s merciful. We’ve had our hell here on earth, Naomi ... Naomi ... listen to me! Will you go now ... at once?” A curious, half-mad excitement colored his voice. “I’ve got money. I’ve been putting it aside for a long time, because I’ve thought for a long time I might want to go away.... I’ve been saving it, a dime and a quarter here and there where I could squeeze it. I’ve got more than two hundred dollars. I thought that sometime I’d have to run away. But I meant to go away alone ... I never knew ... I never knew.” He began abruptly to cry, the tears pouring down the lined, tired face. “We’ll go somewhere far away ... to South America, or the South Sea Islands, where nobody will know us. And we’ll be free there, and happy. We’ve a right to a little happiness. Oh, Naomi, we’ll be happy.”

She appeared not to have heard him. She lay in a kind of stupor, until, raising her body gently, he stood up and lifted her easily into the big leather chair, where she lay watching him, her eyes half-closed, her mouth set in a straight, hard line, touched with bitterness.

The Reverend Castor moved quickly, with a strange vigor and decision. The trembling had gone suddenly from his hands. His whole body grew taut and less weary, as if he had become suddenly young. He had the air of a man possessed, as if every fiber, every muscle, every cell, were crying out, “It’s not too late! It’s not too late! There is still time to live!” He approached the desk, and, unlocking the drawer, began taking out money—a thin roll of bills, and then an endless number of coins that tinkled and clattered as they slid into his pockets. There must have been pounds of metal in dimes and nickels and quarters. He filled his vest pocket with cheap cigars from a box on the desk, and then, turning, went over to Naomi, and, raising her from the chair, smoothed her hair and put her hat straight, with his own hands. Then he kissed her chastely on the brow, and she, leaning against him, murmured, “Take me wherever you like. I’m so tired.”

For a moment they stood thus, and presently he began to repeat in his low, rich, moving voice, The Song of Songs.

“For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone. The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land....”

The words had upon her a strange effect of exaltation, the same that had come over her when she sat by the piano, carried away by her emotions. She wasn’t Naomi any longer. Naomi seemed to have died. She was a gaudy Queen, and Solomon in all his glory was her lover. She seemed enveloped by light out of which the rich, vibrant voice was saying, “Until the day break, and the shadows flee away, turn, my beloved, and be thou like a roe or a young hart upon the mountains of Bether.”

A little while after, as the clock on the firehouse struck midnight, the door of the study closed, and two figures hurried away into the pouring rain. They were a tired, middle-aged preacher and a bedraggled woman, in a queer, homemade dress of figured foulard, and a soaked coat and hat; but there was a light in their eyes which seemed to illumine the darkness and turn aside the rain.

23

Philip wakened 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 would rise 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 go away 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, carrying on 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, so tired 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 mother and 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! You are crazy. It’s not true!”

“I’m telling you the truth. I know.”

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 doubt remained; 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 was shaking 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.”

“I do know ... 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? You do love 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 a sudden 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 sat with 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 with horrible 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.”

24

The rooming-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, and I’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’ve got to 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 for two 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 he had 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. He sat 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!’” Her small 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 ELOPES WITH MISSIONARY Romance begins at choir practice. Woman a former 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 until the 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?”

25

The Reverend 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 fidgety that 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 of Crossing the Bar by 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.

26

The Mills 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 as subjects 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....