Chapter XIV: Part THREE: The Stable (5)

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.