clothes on, lying on the bed looking at the wall.
“He’s been in his room all day,” the landlady said downstairs. “I guess
he don’t feel well. I said to him: ‘Mr. Andreson, you ought to go out
and take a walk on a nice fall day like this,’ but he didn’t feel like
it.”
“He doesn’t want to go out.”
“I’m sorry he don’t feel well,” the woman said. “He’s an awfully nice
man. He was in the ring, you know.”
“I know it.”
“You’d never know it except from the way his face is,” the woman said.
They stood talking just inside the street door. “He’s just as gentle.”
“Well, good-night, Mrs. Hirsch,” Nick said.
“I’m not Mrs. Hirsch,” the woman said. “She owns the place. I just look
after it for her. I’m Mrs. Bell.”
“Well, good-night, Mrs. Bell,” Nick said.
“Good-night,” the woman said.
Nick walked up the dark street to the corner under the arc light, and
then along the car tracks to Henry’s eating house. George was inside,
back of the counter.
“Did you see Ole?”
“Yes,” said Nick. “He’s in his room and he won’t go out.”
The cook opened the door from the kitchen when he heard Nick’s voice.
“I don’t even listen to it,” he said, and shut the door.
“Did you tell him about it?” George asked.
“Sure. I told him, but he knows what it’s all about.”
“What’s he going to do?”
“Nothing.”
“They’ll kill him.”
“I guess they will.”
“He must have got mixed up in something in Chicago.”
“I guess so,” said Nick.
“It’s a hell of a thing.”
“It’s an awful thing,” Nick said.
They did not say anything. George reached down for a towel and wiped
the counter.
“I wonder what he did?” Nick said.
“Double-crossed somebody. That’s what they kill them for.”
“I’m going to get out of this town,” Nick said.
“Yes,” said George. “That’s a good thing to do.”
“I can’t stand to think about him waiting in the room and knowing he’s
going to get it. It’s too damned awful.”
“Well,” said George, “you better not think about it.”
THE SCARLET WOMAN
BY LOUIS BROMFIELD
From _McClure’s_
I can see her now as she used to come down the steps of her narrow
house between the printer’s office and the little shop of Rinehart,
the German cobbler--little, rickety steps, never in too good repair,
especially as she grew older and the cost of everything increased
and that mysterious money of hers seemed to go less and less far in
the business of meeting the necessities of life. It was a house but
one room wide, of wood painted a dun colour; the most ordinary and
commonplace of houses which a stranger would not even have noticed--yet
until yesterday, when they pulled it down, a house invested with a
terrific glamour and importance. It was a house of which no one spoke;
a house which the Town, in its passionate desire to forget (which was
really only a hypocrisy), raised into such importance that one thought
of it when one forgot the monuments which had been raised to the
leading citizens of the community: to the bankers, to the merchants,
to the politicians who had made it (as people said with a curious and
non-committal tone which might have meant anything at all) “what it was
to-day.” One remembered it even when one forgot the shaft of granite
raised in the public square to remind the Town that John Shadwell had
been one of its leading citizens.
I can see her now--Vergie Winters--an old woman past eighty, coming
painfully down those rickety steps, surrounded always by that wall of
solitude which appeared to shut out all the world. Old Vergie Winters,
whose dark eyes at eighty carried a look of tranquil, defiant victory.
Vergie Winters, of whose house no one spoke; whose door had been stoned
by boys who knew nothing of her story but sensed dimly that she was
the great pariah of the Town. Old Vergie Winters went on and on, long
after John Shadwell was in his grave, refusing to give way, living
there on the main street of the Town as if she were alone in the vast
solitude of a desert. Sometimes she spoke to Rinehart, the cobbler,
and sometimes to her neighbour on the other side; and of course in the
shops they were forced to sell her things, though in one or two places
they had even turned her away--and she had gone without a word, never
trying to force her way anywhere.
It all began almost a century ago, before the Civil War, when one day
in April Vergie Winters, tall and dark, with great, burning dark eyes
set in a cool, pale face, opened the door of her father’s house to John
Shadwell, tall and handsome and blond, the youngest lawyer in the Town.
It happened so long ago that it seems now to have no more reality than
a legend, especially when one remembers Vergie only as an immensely
old woman coming painfully down her narrow, crooked steps. But it
happened; it must have happened to have made of Vergie Winters so great
a character in all the community. It must have been the rare sort of
love which comes like a stroke of lightning.
He would have married Vergie Winters, they said (the old ones who
remembered the beginnings of Vergie’s story and passed it on to their
children and grandchildren) but there was already a girl to whom John
Shadwell was betrothed, and in the background a powerful father, and
John Shadwell’s career--which Vergie Winters, being only the daughter
of a Swiss immigrant farmer, could do nothing to aid.
Long afterward, the Town said, “Look at her! You can see what a drag
she would have been on him, with her queer, silent ways. A pity, too,
for she was a beautiful girl. A pity she was always bad!”
But they never thought, of course, that if things had been different,
Vergie Winters might not have been queer and silent; and now, looking
back, one can see that they were quite wrong. It was not Vergie Winters
who was a drag on his career. It was the other woman, John Shadwell’s
wife, who turned into a strange, whining, melancholy invalid before
they had been married two years. And what could John Shadwell do?
Desert her? It was not possible. And in the way of such invalids she
lived for more than forty years, forty dreary years, complaining,
hypochondriac, nagging. She outlived even her husband, a great,
vigorous, handsome man, who treated her patiently and with gentlemanly
respect.
“It was a pity about John Shadwell’s wife,” people said. “And she was
such a lady, too.”
And Vergie Winters? She did not break her heart. She did not marry
some stupid lout and give up her life to a dull unhappiness. She did
not wither away into spinsterhood. She loved John Shadwell, who knows
how passionately, how deeply, in the profound depths of that curious,
remote soul of hers? She left her parents (“to set herself up in
dressmaking and millinery,” so she said), and took a narrow wooden
house on Main Street, where she put up a card in the window and sold
hats to the women of the Town. And before two years had passed it was
to this narrow house that John Shadwell came, secretly--it must have
been with an amazing secrecy, for no one even suspected the visits
for more than three years. She made no effort to be more friendly
with people about her than was required by the simple routine of her
trade. She lived placidly, with a strange, rich contentment, inside the
walls of the narrow little house. One met her sometimes, usually after
darkness had fallen, walking with her slow, dignified step along the
streets of the Town. But she was alone ... always alone.
Only once in all those sixty years was she ever known to leave the
house overnight, and that was once, three years after John Shadwell
was married, when she went away for a few months, “to visit her aunt
in Camden.” It was not long after she returned that John Shadwell,
“whose poor wife could never have any children,” adopted a girl baby.
His wife, it was said, made no protest so long as the child had a good
nurse and did not worry her. She was “so miserable, always ailing. She
would give anything in the world for the health some women had.”
“You couldn’t blame her,” said the Town, “for feeling like that. They
say she never has a moment’s good, wholesome sleep.”
John Shadwell went to the Legislature, the youngest man in the state to
hold such an office; and when the time for reelection came the fight
was bitter, and into it some enemy thrust the name of Vergie Winters.
So the story spread, and so the name of Vergie Winters went the way of
most smalltown milliners. Millinery was a “fast” business and Vergie
Winters was a “fast” woman. A committee called upon her and asked her
to leave the Town. And John Shadwell did nothing. If he came to her
defense, he was ruined at the very beginning of that precious career.
So Vergie gave him up, but she did not leave the Town. In the little
parlour with the hats in the window she received the committee, and
in that calm, aloof way she told them that they could not force her
to leave. They could not prove that she had broken any law. She was a
free citizen. She even looked at them out of the depths of those dark,
candid eyes, and lied.
“John Shadwell,” she said, “is nothing to me. If he has come here once
or twice, it is only because he is my lawyer.”
She must protect John Shadwell.
And so she sent them away baffled, even perhaps a little intimidated
... a committee of red-faced, self-righteous townsmen who had known,
some of them at least, far worse women than Vergie Winters.
But her trade dwindled. Women no longer came to her for hats, unless
they were the shady ladies of the streets. And Vergie Winters never
turned them away, perhaps because she needed desperately their trade,
perhaps because it never occurred to her, in that terrible solitude to
which she had dedicated her life, ever to judge them. They came and
sometimes they stayed to talk. A few of them were run out of town, but
new ones always took their places. They always went to Vergie Winters
for their bonnets.
“She is such a lady. She has such a fine air,” they said. And, “It’s so
restful sitting there in her cool parlour.”
But their trade did her no good. “It only goes to show,” said the Town.
It was really the beginning of her colossal solitude. She did not go
away. She did not flee from the threats that sometimes came to her. She
was sure of herself. She would not surrender. And she could wait. She
effaced herself from the life of John Shadwell. And when the Town began
putting two and two together, she was even forced to give up walking
through the twilight in the direction of John Shadwell’s house, where
from the opposite side of the street she could watch with a furtive eye
the little girl who played on the lawn about the iron dogs and deer.
She never went out except to buy the few things she needed to eat, and
for her trade. It was about this time that a shop run by a Presbyterian
elder refused to sell her a spool of thread with which to sew the
bright roses on the hats of the ladies of the streets. She did not make
a scene; she did not even complain. She went quietly from the shop and
never again passed through its doors.
But there were always the gay ladies. They came and went; but there
were always some in the town, so it must have had some need for them.
They could not live without money, yet they always had it, though they
toiled not nor spun, to pay Vergie Winters for their hats. Some died;
one or two were murdered in saloon brawls, but Vergie Winters never
turned them away. They were her only friends. One wonders what secrets,
what confidences they brought to Vergie Winters, sitting there in her
narrow little house. One wonders what a dark history of the Town’s
citizens went into the grave when Vergie Winters was carried down those
narrow, rickety steps for the last time. But she said nothing. She
simply waited.
At last what she hoped--what she must have known--would happen, came to
pass. One cold night while Vergie Winters sat sewing on the gay hats a
key turned in the lock, and John Shadwell came back to her. He came in
the face of scandal, of ruin, because he could not help himself. It had
begun in a flash of lightning when Vergie Winters opened the door of
her father’s house to let him in, and now John Shadwell found that it
went on and on and on.... There was no stifling it.
Who can picture that return? Who can imagine the sudden upleaping in
the calm, withdrawn soul of Vergie Winters--who had such faith in this
love that she sacrificed all her life to it?
And so for years John Shadwell came, on the occasions when he was not
in Washington, to see Vergie Winters in the narrow wooden house. She
kept on with her precarious trade, for she would never while he lived
accept any money from him. Besides, she could not, for his sake, afford
to arouse suspicions. For herself it did not matter; she could not be
worse off.
Thus Vergie Winters and John Shadwell passed into middle age, and there
came a time when he no longer sought election but instead became a
power behind the throne, a man who shaped the careers of other men. He
held power in the palm of his hand and no longer depended on votes. He
grew careless, and one night he was seen by a Negro stable boy turning
his key in the back door of Vergie Winters’s house.
After that there were women who crossed the street in order to avoid
passing the window with the gay bonnets; and children, hearing
their parents whisper as they drove by on a summer evening, came to
understand dimly that some evil monster lay hidden behind the neat
fringed curtains. Once, while John Shadwell was away in Washington,
boys stoned the house and broke all the windows; but Vergie Winters
said nothing. In the morning a Slovak glazier, who was new to the Town
and had never heard of its Scarlet Woman, came and repaired the damage;
and after he had gone she was seen coming down the narrow steps, in
that terrible pool of solitude, as if nothing at all had happened. So
far as any one knew, she never spoke of the affair to John Shadwell.
She wanted to save him, it seemed, even from such petty annoyances.
And then as the years passed she sometimes saw from her window--the
only safe spot from which she might peep--the figure of John Shadwell’s
adopted daughter, grown now into a girl of twenty. A thousand times
she must have watched the girl, always in company with John Shadwell’s
sister, a large, bony spinster, as the pair came out of the shop on
the corner and crossed the street in order that a girl so young and
innocent might not have to pass the house of Vergie Winters.
Thus she sat in the narrow, dun-coloured house, working at the gay
bonnets, on the afternoon that John Shadwell’s adopted daughter was
married to a son of the Presbyterian elder who refused to sell Vergie
Winters a spool of thread. Perhaps on that afternoon she had a visit
from one of the ladies of the street, who sat talking to her (she was
such a lady) while the girl in her bridal dress walked down the aisle
of the brick Presbyterian church--with no mother sitting in the pew on
the right because John Shadwell’s wife had been too much upset by the
preparations for the wedding.
And one is certain that on the same night, when the festivities were
ended, the figure of a middle-aged man followed the shadows of the
alley behind Vergie Winters’s house, and let himself in with a key he
had carried for more than twenty years. And one can hear him telling
Vergie Winters who was at the wedding, and that there never was a
prettier bride, and what music they played, and what there was at the
wedding breakfast; and assuring her, as he touched her hand gently,
that the bit of lace she had given him had been used in the bridal
dress. He had told them he bought it himself.
Then, slowly, the town came to accept the state of affairs as a
permanent scandal. One seldom spoke of it any longer. One simply knew
that Vergie Winters and John Shadwell had been living together for
years. He was rich, he was important, he was a power in politics; and
now that his career no longer mattered, he had grown indifferent and a
little defiant. So far as John Shadwell was concerned, he was a leading
citizen nearly seventy years old, the grandfather of children by his
adopted daughter.
But with Vergie Winters? She still went her solitary way, making her
few bonnets, now a little old-fashioned and _démodé_ for all her
sedulous reading of the fashion papers. (One can see her, slightly
grayed, putting on her spectacles and peering closely at the pages.)
And still, as she sat behind the lace curtains at her window, she
saw the figure of John Shadwell’s daughter, remote and upright and a
little buxom, crossing the street and going down the opposite side;
only instead of being led by John Shadwell’s spinster sister she was
leading her own children now. And night after night the figure of John
Shadwell, no longer an ardent lover but an old man, following the
shadows of the alley (less and less furtively as he grew older) to turn
the worn key in the lock and sit there all through the evening with
Vergie Winters. What did they do? What did they say to each other in
those long winter evenings?
And at last, one night, John Shadwell’s wife, peevish and fretful
in her tight-closed bedroom smelling of medicines, sent for him at
midnight to read to her, only to be told that he had not come in. Again
at two o’clock, and again at three--still he had not come in. Even when
the gray light filtered through the elms on to the iron dogs and deer,
he had not come back. They knew then that he would never return; for
he lay dead in Vergie Winters’s narrow, dun-coloured house, behind
the lace curtains and the gay bonnets. He had belonged to her always,
and in that silent, powerful way of hers she had known it from the
beginning. In the end he came to Vergie Winters to die....
It made great trouble and embarrassment, and they were forced to wait
until midnight of the following day before they were able to take John
Shadwell’s body from the house of Vergie Winters. And when they did
take it, it went out of the same door that had opened so many times at
the touch of the worn key, and along the shadows of the alley through
which he had passed in life so many times. But even then they were not
able to keep the affair a secret. The Town came to know it, and so
shut out the last glimmer of tolerance for Vergie Winters. It was no
longer a half-secret. It was a scandal which cast darkness upon the
name of one of the men who had made the Town (as people said with a
curious and non-committal tone which might have meant anything at all)
“what it was to-day.” The crime was Vergie Winters’s. But she could not
have cared very much.... Vergie Winters, sitting there in her terrible
solitude behind the lace curtains, while the procession passed her
house--first, the band playing “The Dead March from Saul,” and then
the cabs containing John Shadwell’s daughter, her husband, and John
Shadwell’s grandchildren, and then one by one the cabs carrying the
leading citizens.
The next morning she came down the steps as she had always done, in the
same clothes, with the same air of abysmal indifference. She had not
betrayed him during life, and in death she would give no sign; and she
must have known that on that morning every eye she passed was turned
upon her with a piercing gaze, “to see how she took it.”
For twenty years longer, Vergie Winters lived in the narrow wooden
house, growing poorer and poorer with the passing years. She saw the
children of John Shadwell’s adopted daughter grow into men and women
and have children of their own. But the scandal had grown stale now,
though the legend persisted, and only a few must have remembered hazily
that the old woman who sat behind the curtains was a great-grandmother.
Until one morning the howling of the cat roused Rinehart, the German
cobbler, who broke into the house and found Vergie Winters dead. And
when they carried her down the rickety steps on her last journey she
went alone, without a band to play “The Dead March from Saul,” and
without a procession of carriages to follow her into that far corner
of the cemetery (remote from the fine burial ground of the Shadwells)
where they laid her to rest.
* * * * *
Yesterday they pulled down Vergie Winters’s house. There is no monument
to her memory save the tiny stone at the head of her grave, paid for
with the money saved out of what she earned by making bonnets for the
gay ladies of the Town. But Vergie Winters is not dead. When one passes
the gaping hole where the little house once stood, one thinks of Vergie
Winters. When one passes the granite shaft raised to John Shadwell,
one thinks of Vergie Winters. When one sees a Shadwell grandchild or
a Shadwell great-grandchild, one thinks of Vergie Winters. For now
that time has begun a little to soften the Town, the memory of Vergie
Winters has been kept fresh and green with a strange aroma of vague,
indefinable romance. When the names of those who crossed the street to
avoid her narrow house are forgotten, the name of Vergie Winters will
live. Why? Who can say? Was it because the Town never knew a woman
called upon to show a faith so deep, a sacrifice so great, a devotion
so overwhelming?
I can see her still, an old woman of eighty, hobbling painfully down
the rickety steps of her house, with that curious, proud look upon
her worn old face, and in the sharp old eyes another look which said,
“Vergie Winters was right! John Shadwell belonged to her, from the very
beginning!”
JUKES
BY BILL ADAMS
From _Adventure_
A boarding master’s boat was alongside by the fore rigging. The
boarding master and his crimp were bringing off the crew; helping the
drunken sailors over the bulwarks, and shoving or dragging them into
the forecastle.
Alf Jukes came over the bulwarks last. He came without assistance. He
was drunk, as were all his fellows, but his drunkenness took a turn
different from theirs. As he jumped to the deck he saw the ship’s mate
by the mainmast.
His attitude revengeful and defiant, Alf Jukes strode up to the mate.
He stood face to face with him and cursed him.
The mate paid no attention at all to Alf Jukes. He had heard the same
thing, had seen the same thing, too many times from such men as Jukes.
He looked at Jukes as unconcernedly as if he looked at a coil of rope
or a barrel of tallow.
As the mate turned disinterestedly away, Jukes addressed himself to
the ship. Scornfully scanning her from boom to taffrail, from deck to
mastheads, from yardarm to yardarm, he cursed her. As if exasperated by
her silence, as if maddened by her dignity, he raised his voice higher
and higher. Like the mate, the ship paid no heed to him. The wind in
her rigging whispered of clean things.
Alf Jukes lifted his eyes to the serene and cloudless sky. Craning his
neck, seeming to tiptoe a little, hands clenched and arms upraised, he
shouted curses. No answer came from the sky.
Jukes ceased his cursing and walked to the forecastle, in which his
comrades were now gathered. Having put the last senseless seaman
aboard, having collected from the skipper the price prearranged for
them, having pocketed a month’s advance pay for each one of them, the
boarding master with his crimp was already well on the way ashore. The
tug was alongside the ship. The ship’s mate leaned on the bulwark and
talked with the tugboat men.
Presently the skipper appeared and spoke to the mate, who walked
forward and called the sailors from the forecastle.
Alf Jukes came last from the forecastle. Like all his comrades, he
reeked of cheap and abominable liquor, but, unlike them, he walked
erect and steadily, a fierce remonstrance in his step and bearing.
They staggered, cursed, or grumbled listlessly. Some were tall, some
short; some wide, some narrow; some bearded, others not. They were of
many nations. Some wore dungarees, others shoddy cloth; one, a pair of
trousers made of ship’s canvas; his upper body covered by a threadbare
oilskin jacket. Some wore old cloth caps; one, a battered sun-downer;
another a dented derby.
Jukes towered above his comrades. His curly brown head and bony feet
were bare. His worn dungaree shirt was unbuttoned. His neatly patched
dungaree trousers were gathered by a broad brass-buckled belt. His
forearms, hands, and throat were rugged. His breast showed white
through his unbuttoned shirt. It looked cold, like marble.
Alone of all the crew, Jukes did not look besotted. The stamp of
the sea was on him as on them. But the shore had stamped him less.
He scowled toward the shore as he followed his comrades from the
forecastle.