Chapter XV: Part THREE: The Stable (6)

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....

But it was Mabelle who was the most regular visitor at the flat. She came with a passion for always being in the center of things; she clung to the tragedy, and came every day to break in upon Philip’s brooding solitude, to chatter on and on, whether he listened or not. She brought little Jimmy’s old toys for the twins, and she dandled them on her knee as if they were her own. There were times when Philip suspected her of being driven by a relentless curiosity to discover more of what had happened on the terrible day, but he endured her; he even began to have an affection for her, because she was so stupid and good-natured.

She was sitting there one morning, playing with little Philip and little Naomi, when she said suddenly, “You know I often think that all that trouble in the park at Shane’s Castle ... killing all those people ... had something to do with Naomi’s being so upset. You see, when she heard that morning about the people being killed there, she got worried about you. She was nearly crazy for fear that something had happened to you, and she went herself to the stable to find you, and when she didn’t find you there she was sort of crazy afterward. She came up and talked to me in a crazy way until she heard from your Pa that he’d seen you at McTavish’s. When I think of it now, I see that she was sort of unbalanced and queer, though I didn’t notice it at the time.”

Philip, barely listening to her, took little notice of what she was saying, for he had come long ago to allow her to rattle on and on without heeding her; it was only a little while afterward that it had any significance for him. It was as if what she had said touched some hidden part of his brain. When she had gone, and he began indifferently to think of it, it seemed to him that he remembered every word exactly as she had spoken it. The words were burned into his mind. “_She was nearly crazy for fear something had happened to you, and she went herself to the stable to find you._”

When Mabelle had gone, he could think of nothing else.

Since the morning after the slaughter in the park, he had never returned to the stable. The place which he had once thought of as belonging to himself alone was spoiled now: it had been invaded by Lily Shane and poor Naomi, and even by Mary ... even by Mary. There were times when he resented her having come there, and times, too, when his remorse over Naomi made him feel that Mary had come deliberately, to tempt him, that what they had done was not a beautiful, but a wicked thing, which would torment him until he died. The place was spoiled for him, since it had come in a ghastly way to stand as a symbol of all those things which he believed had driven Naomi into madness.

But he knew, too, that he must return one day to the stable. It was filled with his belongings, the sketches pinned to the walls, the unfinished canvas of the Flats at night on which the paint must long since have caked and turned hard. (He knew now that it would never be finished, for he could never bring himself to sit there again by the window, alone, watching the mists stealing over the Mills.) After Mabelle had gone, he kept thinking that Naomi was the last one to enter the place. It was as if her spirit would be there awaiting him.

And then all at once there came to him a sudden terrifying memory: he had gone away that morning leaving behind unwashed the dishes he and Mary had used at breakfast. He had sent Mary away, promising to wash them himself, and then, troubled by the remorse of the gray dawn, had gone off, meaning to do it when he returned. They were still lying there--the two plates, the two coffee-cups, the very loaf of bread, turned hard and dry, and nibbled by the mice. And Naomi had gone there, “crazy for fear something had happened” to him. She had seen the remnants of that breakfast. In all the uproar and confusion he had forgotten.... She had known then; she must have known before she ran away....

For a moment he thought, “I must be careful, or I shall go crazy. It must feel like this to lose one’s mind.” He thought, “It was I who did it. I drove her away. I killed her myself. She thought that I was lying to her all along. I wasn’t lying. I wasn’t lying. I was telling her the truth.... It would have been the truth, even now, to the end, if Mary hadn’t come then. She must have been crazy. Both of us must have been crazy.”

And then, after a time, he thought, “I’ve got to be calm. I’ve got to think this thing out.” There wasn’t, after all, any reason why there shouldn’t have been two plates and two cups. Any one might have been having breakfast with him ... any man, Krylenko, or even McTavish. Oh, it was all right. There couldn’t have been anything wrong in that.

And then he thought bitterly, “But if it had been Krylenko, Naomi wouldn’t have believed it. She’d be sure it was a woman. She’d think it was Lily Shane ... Lily Shane, who wouldn’t have looked at me. She was jealous of Lily Shane.”

None of it was any good--none of this self-deception. It wasn’t a man who had had breakfast with him. It was a woman--Mary Conyngham, only Naomi had believed it was Lily Shane. Thank God! It wasn’t the same as if he and Mary together had driven her away to death in that horrible rooming-house. He’d never have to think of that after he and Mary were married. Naomi had believed the woman was Lily Shane.

Suddenly he pressed his hands to his eyes, so savagely that for a moment he was blinded. “I’m a fool. It’s just the same, even if she did think that it was some other woman.”

The stable began to acquire for him a horrid fascination, so powerful that he could no longer stay away from it. He _had_ to return, to see the place with his eyes, to see the tell-tale cups and plates. Perhaps (he thought) some miracle had happened. Old Hennery might have removed them after he left, or perhaps he had himself washed them and put them away in the harness-closet without remembering it. Such a thing could happen.... In all the tragedy, all the confusion, the ecstasy of those few hours, he might have done it, without knowing what he did. Or afterwards, in all the stress of what had happened, he might have forgotten. Such things had been known to occur, he told himself, such lapses in the working of a brain. There were, after all, moments of late when he was not certain of what was happening--whether he was alive or dead, or whether Naomi had really killed herself, praying by the side of that wretched bed....

But immediately he said, “I’m a fool. I’m like my father. I’m not thinking of what _did_ happen, but what I wish had happened. It’s like his story of losing his memory.”

When the old negress Molly returned from marketing, he gave her the twins and went off like a madman to the stable. He traversed the area of the Mills, passed Hennessey’s place, and entered the dead park, but when he came to the stable, it took all his courage to enter.

He climbed the creaking stairs with his eyes closed, groping his way until he stood at the top. Then he opened them and looked about.

The place had a wrecked and desolate look. The dust and the soot of the Mills, filtering in through the decaying windows, covered everything. At some time during the storm the roof had begun to leak, and the water, running down the walls, had ruined a dozen sketches and soaked the blankets on the bed, and in the middle of the room on the table stood the coffee-pot, the dried loaf of bread gnawed by the mice, the soiled cups and plates, and a saucer with rancid butter on it.

There wasn’t any doubt of it--the things were there, just as they had been left by him and Mary.

He sat down weakly in one of the chairs by the table, and lighted a cigarette. Suddenly he leaned back with his eyes closed. He didn’t care any longer. He was tired. He had come (he thought) to the end of things, and nothing any longer made any difference--neither his mother, nor his father, nor Naomi, nor even Mary. He wanted only to be alone forever, to go off into some wilderness where there was no human creature to cause him pain. He wanted to be a coward and run away. In solitude, he might regain once more that stupid faith which had once given him security. It wasn’t that he’d ever again be glad to be alive: it was only when you believed you could make God responsible in a way for everything. Whatever happened, it was the Will of God. He hadn’t been alive: it was only when he had turned his back on God that he had begun to understand what it meant to be alive. And now that, too, was past: he saw now that he wasn’t strong enough to live by himself. He was, after all, a coward, without the courage of a person like Mary. She had, he saw, no need of a God to lean upon. No, he wasn’t even like his father, whom no tragedy had the power to touch. He was like her--like his mother. He needed God as an excuse. She was safe: nothing could touch her, nothing could ever change her. She always had God to hold responsible....

The forgotten cigarette, burning low, scorched his fingers, and, dropping it, he stepped on it mechanically, and, rising from the chair, saw suddenly a woman’s handkerchief lying on the table among the dishes. It lay there, folded neatly, beneath a covering of dust and soot. He thought, “It must have been Naomi’s. She must have dropped it here.” The thing exerted an evil fascination over him. He wanted to go away, but he couldn’t go, until he knew whose handkerchief it was. It couldn’t have been Lily Shane’s, for he or Mary would have noticed it. It couldn’t have been Mary’s: for she wouldn’t have gone away from the table with it lying there, neat and unused, in full sight on the table. It must have belonged to Naomi. He wanted to go away without even looking, but he had not the strength. It lay there tormenting him. He would never have any peace if he went away in ignorance.

At last his hand, as if it moved of its own will, reached out and picked it up. It left behind a small square free of dust on the surface of the table. It was a tiny handkerchief, frail and feminine, and in the corner it was marked with initials. They were ... M.C. There wasn’t the slightest doubt.... M.C.... M.C.... Mary Conyngham.

He saw then what must have happened--that Mary had dropped it somewhere in the room, and Naomi, searching for some clue, had found it and left it lying behind on the table. It was Naomi’s hand that had placed it there on the table, Naomi’s hand that had last touched it.

Naomi had known who the woman was. In the next moment he had, in some unaccountable way, a curiously clear vision of an iron bed with a small depression where some one had knelt to pray.

After a long time, he rose, and, leaving the handkerchief on the table, went down the stairs once more. He never returned again to the room above the stable.

27

While Philip sat in the dust and soot of the dead stable, his father waited for him at the flat. He danced the twins for a time on his knee, and set them crowing by giving a variety of imitations of birds and animals which he had learned in Australia, but, after a time, the old spirit flagged. He wasn’t the same gay, blithe creature that Emma found awaiting her in the darkened drawing-room. Even the waxed mustaches seemed to droop a little with weariness. For Jason was growing old in body, and he knew it. “My sciatica,” he said, “will not let me alone.”

“For an active, nervous man like me,” he had told Emma only that morning, “there ain’t much left when his body begins to get old.”

Even his return home had been in a way a failure. He began now to think he ought never to have come back. Emma was the only one pleased by his return. “You’d have thought,” he told himself, “that she’d have forgotten me long ago and taken to thinking about other things.” It was pretty fine to have a big, handsome woman like Emma give you all her devotion. Yes, she was glad enough to see him, but there was his boy, Philip, whom he hardly knew. He’d never get to know Philip: he couldn’t understand a boy like that. And this Naomi business. It was too bad, and of course it was a scandal, but still that didn’t make any difference in the way you enjoyed living. The truth was that Philip ought to be kind-a glad to be rid of her. It wasn’t a thing he could help, and he’d behaved all right. If there _was_ another woman, Philip had kept it all quiet. There wasn’t any scandal. And now, if he wanted to marry her, he could--if she wasn’t married too. No, he couldn’t understand Philip. Emma had done something to him.

The return was a failure. He hadn’t even had any glory out of it, except on that first night when he’d had his triumph over pie-faced Elmer; but who wanted a triumph over a thing like Elmer? No, he’d been forgotten, first in the excitement of the riot when they’d killed a couple of dirty foreigners, and then by Naomi running off and killing herself with a preacher. Em wouldn’t let him say that preachers were a bad lot but he had his ideas, all the same. The Town had forgotten all about him--him, a man who lost his memory, and who had been thought dead for twenty-six years. Of course he hadn’t _quite_ lost his memory, but he might have lost it....

And then he was homesick. The Town wasn’t home to him any more. It was no more his _real_ home than Philip was his _real_ son, or Emma his _real_ wife.

He was thinking all these things, mechanically rolling a ball back and forth to the twins, when Philip came in. At first Jason didn’t notice him, and when he did look up, the drawn, white look on the face of his strange son frightened him. He tried to jest, in a wild effort to drive away that sense of depression.

“Well, here I am,” he said brightly. “Back again like a bad penny.” Philip didn’t answer him, and he said, “I just ran in to say I’m going home day after to-morrow.”

“Home?” asked Philip, with a look of bewilderment.

“Yes ... home to Australy.”

“Oh.” Then the boy pulled himself together with an effort. “But I thought this was your home.”

“No ... not really. You see, I’ve lived out there most of my life. And this darned Town has changed so, it don’t seem the same any longer. It’s all full of new people ... and foreigners. Most of ’em have never heard of me.”

“What’ll Ma think?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t told her, but she knows I had to go back some day. She’ll think I’m comin’ back. She’ll have that to look forward to.”

“You’re not coming back ... ever?”

“It ain’t likely. They say an animal wants to go home when he’s dying. Well, that’s me. I want to go home.”

“But you’re not dying.”

“No, but I ain’t as young as I once was. I don’t want there to be no mistake.” He appeared to grow even more dejected. “If I’m out there, I’ll know where I am. It’s no place for a man like me here in this Town. Why, there ain’t room to breathe any more.” He took a cigar out of his yellow waistcoat pocket and offered it to Philip, who refused it instinctively, and then accepted it, moved by the pathetic effort at friendliness. The little man wanted to tell him something; he wanted to treat him as a son, to create suddenly a bond that had never existed. He held a match for the cigar and then lighted his own. “It’s like this, Philip,” he said. “I’ve been thinking it over. You don’t want to stay in this Town any more?”

“No.”

“It’s no place for a fella like you any more than it is for one like me. We’ve got to have room to breathe and think. I often think that. It’s a nasty place, this Town--no room for a fella to do as he wants ... always somebody a-watchin’ of ’im.”

Philip scarcely heard what he was saying, but he did notice the return of the haunting, half-comic accent. It was the first time that he had ever seen his father grave, the first time a serious thought had ever pierced the gay, shiny surface. And suddenly he felt a queer affection for the little man. Jason was making so great an effort that his face had turned red as a turkey-cock’s.

“It’s like this, Philip.... Why don’t you come away with me to Australia? It’s a fine life, and I’m rich out there.” He waited for a moment, and when Philip didn’t answer, he said, “You could begin all over again--like a new person. I know you could, because I did it myself ... I started all over.” Again he waited. “There’s nothing to keep you, is there? No woman?”

He always thought of women first--his father. Philip turned slowly. “Yes ... there is.”

“Does she count as much as that?”

“Yes.”

“You could marry her and take her along, couldn’t you? She ain’t a married woman, is she?”

“No.”

“She’d be likely to go with you?”

“Yes, she’d go anywhere I chose, I guess.”

“She must be the right sort.”

There was a pause, and Jason struck suddenly at the thing that had been hanging over both of them like a shadow. “Out there, you’d be where your Ma couldn’t put her nose in.”

“Oh, I’m going away.... I’m not going to stay here.”

Jason suddenly brightened. “Then come along with me. I’d even wait till you could get away. We ought to get better acquainted, Philip, and you’d like it out there.” He laid a hand suddenly on Philip’s arm. “I’ll tell you something, if you promise not to tell your Ma ... at least not till I’m gone.”

He looked searchingly at Philip, who asked, “What is it?”

“You mustn’t tell. You’ve got to promise.”

“No, I won’t tell.”

“You’ve got brothers and sisters out in Australia!”

Jason looked at him with an air of expectancy, but Philip only looked puzzled.

“What on earth do you mean by that, Pa?”

“You wouldn’t be alone out there. You see I’ve got a family there too.... You’d have brothers and sisters there.”

“But you’re married to Ma.”

“That’s all right. I ain’t a bigamist. I’ve just never been married to Dora--that’s my other wife. She knows about Em. I told her everything. I guess she always liked me so much that not being married didn’t matter.”

The little man put his head on one side. At the thought of Dora his depression seemed to vanish. As for Philip, he simply stared, failing to live up to such an announcement. It neither surprised nor shocked him, for the whole thing seemed completely unreal, as if he were holding the fantastic conversation in a dream. It was the other thing that was real--the sight of the room in disarray with Mary’s handkerchief laid on the table by the hand of Naomi ... the memory of the sordid bed with the depression in the gray coverlet.

“You don’t seem surprised,” said his father.

“No.... No.... Nothing surprises me any more. I suppose if you wanted to have a family out there, it was all right. You can’t expect a man to stop living.” (He was right then: his father had had a woman out there.)

“But you see, Philip, they’re your brothers and sisters ... your father’s children.”

Philip made an effort. “How many of them are there?”

Jason’s yellow waistcoat swelled with pride. “Three boys and two girls,” he said. “Nobody can say I haven’t done my part in helping the world along. All strapping big ones too. The youngest ... Emma ... is thirteen.”

“Emma!”

“Yes. I called her after your Ma. I always liked the name, and I always liked your Ma too, when she’s not having tantrums.”

Suddenly Philip wanted to laugh. The desire arose from a strange mixture of pain and mirth. It was ridiculous.

“The others are Jason, Henry, Hector and Bernice. It was Dora who named the others. Dora’s a wonderful woman ... like your Ma in a way, only Dora understands me.”

There was a long, sudden silence, in which Philip thought, “If I’d only done as he did, everything would have been all right. He’s happy and he’s been free ... always. I was weak and cowardly. I didn’t do one thing or the other, and now there’s no way out.”

“You see what I mean,” said Jason. “You’d have a home out there, and a family too. You wouldn’t be going alone into a new country.” He looked at his son wistfully. “You’d better come with me ... woman or no woman.”

“No, Pa ... I can’t. I’ve got to marry the woman, and I want to go to a new country ... alone.” His face was gray and drawn suddenly. “I’ve got to do it ... it’s the only thing.”

“You’d better think it over, Philip.”

“I’ve thought it over ... I’ve been doing nothing else.”

His father took up the tan derby. “And you won’t tell your Ma, will you?”

“I won’t tell her ... ever. You needn’t worry.”

“You can tell her when I’m gone ... I don’t want to face her, that’s all.”

Jason went out, all depressed once more. Philip wasn’t his boy at all. Emma had done something to him.

When he had gone, Philip sat down and began to laugh. He felt sick inside, and bruised. “Oh, my God! And I’ve got three brothers and two sisters in Australia! And that’s where he got the accent. He got it from Dora!”

28

That night he sat with Mary in the Victorian drawing-room, planning their future. It was the first time he had ever entered the house, and he found the quiet, feminine sense of order in the big room soothing and pleasant, just as Emma had found it melancholy and depressing. But he hadn’t come to her to be comforted and petted, as he had always done before: he was a different Philip, pathetic, and yet hard, kindly, yet cold in a way, and aloof. He did not speak of the stable, nor even of Naomi, and Mary, watching him, thought, “Perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps after all he’s been sensible and put all that behind him,” and then, in the next moment, she saw him close his eyes suddenly. She knew what he was seeing ... that room in the boarding-house where Naomi had died. “They ought never to have let him go there,” she thought. “If any of them had any common sense, they wouldn’t have let him do it.” But she knew, too, that no one could have stopped him. He had gone because he saw it as his duty, a kind of penance: he was the sort who would never spare himself anything....

And, reaching over, she touched his hand, but there was no response. After a time, he said, “It’s all right, Mary. It’s just a headache. I’ve been having them lately.”

They couldn’t marry and stay there in the Town with every eye watching them, waiting for some bit of scandal: but Philip seemed obsessed with the idea that they must be married at once. At first she thought it might be because he wanted her so much, and then she saw that it was for some other reason, which she could not discover.

She asked him why they must hurry, and he said, “Don’t you want to be married? Don’t you care any longer?”

“Of course I do, Philip. You ought to know that.”

“Besides, I can’t bear staying here any longer.”

But even that, she felt, wasn’t the real reason. She did not press him, and together they planned what they were to do. The lease on Mary’s house was finished in a month, and she could go away with her sister-in-law, Rachel, and the two children, to Kentucky, where a sister of her mother’s lived. And then, quietly, Philip could send the twins there, and come himself. He would bring old Molly to help care for them.

“Rachel loves children,” said Mary, “and she’ll never be separated from mine. She’d like two more in the household.” (Only she wished they weren’t Naomi’s children ... they would always be reminding him of Naomi. It seemed impossible to be rid of Naomi. The shadow of her was always there, coming between them.)

After a long silence, she said suddenly, “You _do_ want to marry me, don’t you, Philip?”

As he answered, it seemed to him that he came back from a great distance. “Marry you? Marry you? Why, of course I do. What have you been thinking of? What have I just been saying?”

“I don’t want it to be because you think you have to ... because of that night at the stable.”

“No ... no ... of course not. I want to marry you. I couldn’t think of _not_ doing it. Where did you get such an idea?”

“I don’t know ... only you’re so queer. It’s as if I didn’t make any difference any more ... as if you could do without me.”

For a moment he turned cross. “That’s nonsense! And you know it. I can’t help being like this ... I’ll be better later on.”

“I don’t know.”

But he did not try to convince her. He simply sat staring into the shadows of the old room and at last he said, “And then when everything is settled, I want to go back to Africa ... to Megambo.”

“You can’t do that, Philip ... you mustn’t. It would be like killing yourself. You can’t go back where there’s fever.” She wanted to cry out wildly, desperately, against the vague, dark force, which she felt closing in about her.

“That’s all nonsense,” he said. “Doctors don’t know everything. I shan’t get the fever. I’ve got to go back. I want to go back there to paint ... I’ve _got_ to go back.”

“You hated the place. You told me so.”

“And you said once that I really liked it. You told me that some day I’d go back. Do you remember the day we were walking ... a few days after I came home? You were right. I’ve got to go back. I’m like that queer Englishwoman.”

“You won’t go ... leaving me alone.”

“It wouldn’t be for long ... a year, maybe.”

She did not answer him at once. “A year,” she thought. “A year! But that’s long enough. Too long. Anything could happen in a year. He might....” Looking at him as he lay back in the old horsehair sofa, he became unbearably precious to her. She seemed to see him for the first time--the thin, drawn, tormented face, the dark skin, the high cheekbones, the thin lips, even the tired eyelids. He didn’t know she was watching him. He wasn’t perhaps even thinking of her. He looked young, like a boy ... the way he had been long ago at twenty, when he was still hypnotized by Emma. She thought, “I can’t lose him now just when we’ve a chance of being happy. I can’t. I can’t. He’s mine ... my Philip.” He was free now of his mother, but he was still a captive.

She took his hand and pressed it against her cheek. “Philip, my Philip,” she said. Opening his eyes, he looked at her for a moment lazily, and then smiled. It was the old shy smile she had seen on that solitary walk into the country. And then he said slowly what Naomi had once said--“I’m tired, Mary dear, that’s all....” She drew his head to her shoulder and began stroking it slowly. She thought, “It’s odd. My grandmother would turn in her grave if she knew. Or maybe she’d understand. He’s been mine always, since the beginning. I mean to keep him.”

And yet she knew that he was in that very moment escaping her. She knew again the terrifying sensation of fighting some dark and shadowy thing which she could neither see nor feel nor touch.

“Philip,” she said softly. “Philip.”

“Yes.”

“I’m going with you to Africa.”

A little pause, and then--“You’d hate it there. You’d be miserable.”

She saw suddenly that he had wanted to go alone, to hide himself away. She was hurt and she thought, “I can’t let him do it. I’ve got to fight to save us both.”

Aloud she said, “I wouldn’t mind anything, Philip, but I’ve got to go with you. That’s all I care about.”

“There’s the children.”

“I’ve thought of that. I’ve thought of everything. We can leave them with Rachel and old Molly.” She would make the trip a lark, a holiday. She would care for him every moment, and even see that he took the proper drugs. She would fight the fever herself. Nothing could touch him if she were there to protect him. She could put her own body and soul between him and death.

“You’re sure you want to go, Mary?”

“Of course I’m sure. It’s the only thing I want ... never to be separated from you again. Nothing else makes any difference.”

But this time she did not ask him whether he really wanted her. He smiled at her again. “A poor, weak fool like me doesn’t deserve such a woman.”

She kissed him, thinking, “Yes, my dear, you’re poor and weak, and a bit of a fool, but it doesn’t make any difference. Maybe that’s only why I love you so much that it breaks my heart.”

For a moment, it seemed to her that he again belonged to her, body and soul, as he had belonged to her on that terrible, beautiful night in the stable. She knew now. She understood that strange, sad happiness that always seemed to envelop the wicked Lily Shane.

29

When he told Emma the next day that he meant to marry Mary Conyngham, she turned suddenly white about the lips, and for once she was silent for a time before speaking. She must have seen that she had lost him forever, that she had lost even her grandchildren; but she had never yet surrendered weakly and she did not surrender now. She held her tongue, moved perhaps by the memory of Jason’s, “You never learn anything, Em. You’d better leave the boy alone, if you ever expect to see him again.”

She only said, “You might have waited a respectable time, so people wouldn’t talk. Why, Naomi’s hardly cold in her grave. You certainly don’t owe her much, but....”

“No one need know. We’re going away. We’ll keep it a secret if you like.”

She softened a little. “Why couldn’t you wait a little time?” (Mary might die or he might grow tired of her, if he would only wait.)

He looked at her steadily. “I’ve waited too long already, years too long.”

“And now that your Pa’s going back to Australia for a time, I’ll be alone ... I won’t have anybody. It’s hard when you’re beginning to be old to find your life hasn’t come to anything ... all the struggle gone for nothing.”

He saw that she was beginning to “work herself up” in the old fashion that she always used as a last resort. He knew the signs, and he didn’t care any longer. She couldn’t touch him that way. The trick had worn itself out, and he saw her with a strange, cruel clarity. One thing, however, did soften him ... “now that your Pa is going back to Australia for a time....” She didn’t know that she would never see Jason again.

“I’ll come sometimes to visit you,” he said. “You won’t lose me.”