He looked at them, quite unconscious of the turmoil he had wakened in
them. Lydia was ready to sound the top note of revolt. Her thoughts were
running a definite remonstrance: "Write the life of another man when you
should be getting your evidence together and proving your own innocence
and the injustice of the law?" Anne was quite ready to believe there
must be a cogent reason for writing the life of his fellow criminal, but
she wished it were not so. She, too, from long habit of thought, wanted
Jeffrey to attend to his own life now he had a chance. The colonel, she
knew, through waiting and hoping, had fallen into an attitude of mind as
wistful and expectant as hers and Lydia's. The fighting qualities, it
seemed, had been ground out of him. The fostering ones had grown
disproportionately, and sometimes, she was sure, they made him ache, in
a dull way, with ruth for everybody.
"Did the man ask you to write his life?" he inquired.
"No," said Jeffrey. "I asked him if I could. He agreed to it. Said I
might use his name. He's no family to squirm under it."
"You feel he was unjustly sentenced," the colonel concluded.
"Oh, no. He doesn't either. He mighty well deserved what he got. Been
better perhaps if he'd got more. What I had in mind was to tell how a
man came to be a robber."
Lydia winced at the word. Jeffrey had been commonly called a defaulter,
and she was imperfectly reconciled to that: certainly not to a branding
more ruthless still.
"I've watched him a good deal," said Jeffrey. "We've had some talk
together. I can see how he did what he did, and how he'd do it again.
It'll be a study in criminology."
"When does he--come out?" Anne hesitated over this. She hardly knew a
term without offence.
"Next year."
"But," said she, "you wouldn't want to publish a book about him and have
him live it down?"
"Why shouldn't I?" asked Jeffrey, turning on her. "He's willing."
"He can't be willing," Lydia broke in. "It's frightful."
"Well, he is," said Jeffrey. "There's nothing you could do to him he'd
mind, if it gave him good advertising."
"What does he want to do," asked the colonel, "when he comes out?"
"Get into the game again. Make big money. And if it's necessary, steal
it. Not that he wants to bunco. He's had his dose. He's learned it isn't
safe. But he'd make some dashing _coup_; he couldn't help it. Maybe he'd
get nabbed."
"What a horrid person!" said Lydia. "How can you have anything to do
with him?"
"Why, he's interesting," said Jeffrey, in a way she found brutal. "He's
a criminal. He's got outside."
"Outside what?" she persisted.
"Law. And he wouldn't particularly want to get back, except that it
pays. But I'm not concerned with what he does when he gets back. I want
to show how it seemed to him outside and how he got there. He's more
picturesque than I am, or I'd take myself."
Blessed Anne, who had no grasp, she thought, of abstract values, but
knew how to make a man able for his work, met the situation quietly.
"You could have the blue chamber, couldn't he, Farvie? and do your
writing there."
Lydia flashed her a reproachful glance. She would have scattered his
papers and spilled the ink, rather than have him do a deed like that. If
he did it, it was not with her good-will. Jeff had drawn his frown the
tighter.
"I don't know whether I can do it," he said. "A man has got to know how
to write."
"You wrote some remarkable things for the _Nestor_," said the colonel,
now hesitating. It had been one of the rules he and the girls had
concocted for the treatment of a returning prisoner, never to refer to
stone walls and iron bars. But surely, he felt, Jeff needed
encouragement.
Jeff was ruthless.
"That was all rot," he said.
"What was?" Lydia darted at him. "Didn't you mean what you said?"
"It was idiotic for the papers to take it up," said Jeff. "They got it
all wrong. 'There's a man,' they said, 'in the Federal Prison, Jeffrey
Blake, the defaulter. Very talented. Has revolutionised the _Nestor_,
the prison organ. Let him out, pardon him, simply because he can
write.'"
"As I understand," said his father, "you did get the name of the paper
changed."
"Well, now," said Jeff, appealingly, in a candid way, "what kind of name
was that for a prison paper? _Nestor!_ 'Who was Nestor?' says the man
that's been held up in the midst of his wine-swilling and money-getting.
Wise old man, he remembers. First-class preacher. Turn on the tap and
he'll give you a maxim. 'Gee!' says he, 'I don't want advice. I know
how I got here, and if I ever get out, I'll see to it I don't get in
again.'"
Lydia found this talk exceedingly diverting. She disapproved of it. She
had wanted Jeff to appear a dashing, large-eyed, entirely innocent young
man, his mouth, full of axioms, prepared to be the stay of Farvie's
gentle years. But this rude torrent of perverse philosophy bore her
along and she liked it, particularly because she felt she should
presently contradict and show how much better she knew herself. Anne,
too, evidently had an unlawful interest in it, and wanted him to keep on
talking. She took that transparent way of furthering the flow by asking
a question she could answer herself.
"You called it _Prison Talk_, didn't you?"
"Yes," said Jeff. "They called it _Prison Talk."_
"And all our newspapers copied your articles," said Anne, artfully
guiding him forward, "the ones you called 'The New Republic.'"
"What d'they want to copy them for?" asked Jeff. "It was a fool thing to
do. I'd simply written the letters to the men, to ask 'em if they didn't
think the very devil of prison life was that we were outside. Not
because we were inside, shut up in a jug. You could bear to be in a jug,
if that was all. But you've got to have ties. You've got to have laws
and the whole framework that's been built up from the cave man. Or
you're desperate, don't you see? You're all alone. And a man will do a
great deal not to be alone. If there's nothing for you to do but learn a
trade, and be preached at by _Nestor_, and say to yourself, 'I'm
outside'--why there's the devil in it."
He was trying to convince them as he had previously convinced others,
those others who had lived with him under the penal law. He looked at
Anne much as if she were a State or Federal Board and incidentally at
Lydia, as if he would say:
"Here's a very young and insignificant criminal. We'll return to her
presently. But she, too, is going to be convinced."
"And I don't say a man hasn't got to be infernally miserable when he's
working out his sentence. He has. I don't want you to let up on him.
Only I don't want him to get punky, so he isn't fit to come back when
his term is over. I don't believe it's going to do much for him merely
to keep the laws he's been chucked under, against his will, though he's
got to keep 'em, or they'll know the reason why."
Lydia wondered who They were. She thought They might be brutal wardens
and assembled before her, in a terrifying battalion, the strait-jackets
and tortures she'd found in some of the older English novels.
"So I said to the men: 'We've got to govern ourselves. We haven't got a
damned word'"--really abashed he looked at Anne--"I beg your pardon. 'We
haven't got a word to say in this government we're under; but say we
have. Say the only thing we can do is to give no trouble, fine
ourselves, punish ourselves if we do. The worst thing that can happen to
us,' I said, 'is to hate law. Well, the best law we've got is prison
law. It's the only law that's going to touch us now. Let's love it as if
it were our mother. And if it isn't tough enough, let's make it tougher.
Let's vote on it, and publish our votes in this paper.'"
"I was surprised," said his father, "that so much plain speaking was
allowed."
"Advertising! Of course they allowed us," said Jeff. "It advertised us
outside. Advertised the place. Officials got popular. Inside conduct
went up a hundred per cent, just as it would in school. Men are only
boys. As soon as the fellows got it into their heads we were trying to
work out a republic in a jail, they were possessed by it. I wish you
could see the letters that were sent in to the paper. You couldn't
publish 'em, some of 'em. Too illiterate. But they showed you what was
inside the fellows. Sometimes they were as smug as a prayer-meeting."
"Did this man write?" Lydia asked scornfully, with a distaste she didn't
propose to lessen. "The one you're going to do the book about?"
"Oh, he's a crook," said Jeff indifferently. "Crook all through. If we'd
been trying to build up a monarchy instead of a republic he'd have
hatched up a scheme for looting the crown jewels. Or if we'd been
founding a true and only church, he'd have suggested a trick for melting
the communion plate."
"And you want to write his life!" said Lydia's look.
But Jeff cared nothing about her look. He was, with a retrospective eye,
regarding the work he had been doing, work that had perhaps saved his
reason as well as bought his freedom. Now he was spreading it out and
letting them consider it, not for praise, but because he trusted them.
He felt a few rivets giving in the case he had hardened about himself
for so long a time. He thought he had got very hard indeed, and was even
willing to invite a knock or two, to test his induration. But there was
something curiously softening in this little group sitting in the shade
of the pleasant room while the sunshine outside played upon growing
leaves. He was conscious, wonderingly, that they all loved him very
much. His father's letters had told him that. It seemed simple and
natural, too, that these young women, who were not his sisters and who
gave him, in his rough habit of life, a curious pain with their delicacy
and softness--it seemed natural enough that they should, in a way not
understood, belong to him. He had got gradually accustomed to it, from
their growing up in his father's house from little girls to girls
dancing themselves into public favour, and then, again, he had been
living "outside" where ordinary conventions did not obtain. He had got
used to many things in his solitary thoughts that were never tested by
other minds in familiar intercourse. The two girls belonged there among
accepted things. He looked up suddenly at his father, and asked the
question they had least of all expected to hear:
"Where's Esther?"
The two girls made a movement to go, but he glanced at them frowningly,
as if they mustn't break up the talk at this moment, and they hesitated,
hand in hand.
"She's living here," said the colonel, "with her grandmother."
"Has that old harpy been over lately?"
"Madame Beattie?"
"Yes."
"Not to my knowledge."
Anne and Lydia exchanged looks. Madame Beattie was a familiar name to
them, but they had never heard she was a harpy.
"Was she Esther's aunt?" Lydia inquired, really to give the talk a jog.
She was accustomed to shake up her watch when it hesitated.
"Great-aunt," said Jeffrey. "Step-sister to Esther's grandmother. She
must be sixty-five where grandmother's a good ten years older."
"She sang," said the colonel, forgetting, as he often did, they seemed
so young, that everybody in America must at least have heard tradition
of Madame Beattie's voice. "She lived abroad."
"She had a ripping voice," said Jeff. "When she was young, of course.
That wasn't all. There was something about her that took them. But she
lost her voice, and she married Beattie, and he died. Then she came back
here and hunted up Esther."
His face settled into lines of sombre thought, puzzled thought, it
seemed to Anne. But to Lydia it looked as if this kidnapping of Madame
Beattie from the past and thrusting her into the present discussion was
only a pretext for talking about Esther. Of course, she knew, he was
wildly anxious to enter upon the subject, and there might be pain enough
in it to keep him from approaching it suddenly. Esther might be a
burning coal. Madame Beattie was the safe holder he caught up to keep
his fingers from it. But he sounded now as if he were either much
absorbed in Madame Beattie or very wily in his hiding behind her.
"I've often wondered if she came back. I've thought she might easily
have settled on Esther and sucked her dry. No news of her?"
"No news," said the colonel. "It's years since she's been here. Not
since--then."
"No," said Jeff. There was a new line of bitter amusement near his
mouth. "I know the date of her going, to a dot. The day I was arrested
she put for New York. Next week she sailed for Italy." But if Lydia was
going to feel more of her hot reversals in the face of his calling plain
names, she found him cutting them short with another question: "Seen
Esther?"
"No," said the colonel.
A red spot had sprung into his cheek. He looked harassed. Lydia sprang
into the arena, to save him, and because she was the one who had the
latest news.
"I have," she said. "I've seen her."
She knew what grave surprise was in the colonel's face. But no such
thing appeared in Jeff's. He only turned to her as if she were the next
to be interrogated.
"How does she look?" he asked.
The complete vision of her stretched at ease eating fruit out of a
silver dish, as if she had arranged herself to rouse the most violent
emotions in a little seething sister, stirred Lydia to the centre. But
not for a million dollars, she reflected, in a comparison clung to
faithfully, would she tell how beautiful Esther appeared to even the
hostile eye.
"She looked," said she coldly, "perfectly well."
"Where d'you see her?" Jeff asked.
"I went over," said Lydia. Her colour was now high. She looked as if you
might select some rare martyrdom for her--quartering or gridironing
according to the oldest recipes--and you couldn't make her tell less
than the truth, because only the truth would contribute to the downfall
of Esther. "I went in without ringing, because Farvie'd been before and
they wouldn't let him in."
"Lydia!" the colonel called remindingly.
"I found her reading--and eating." Lydia hadn't known she could be so
hateful. Still she was telling the exact truth. "We talked a few minutes
and I came away."
"Did she--" at last suddenly and painfully thrown out of his nonchalant
run of talk, he stopped.
"She's a horrid woman," said Lydia, crimson with her own daring, and got
up and ran out of the room.
Anne looked appealingly at Jeff, in a way of begging him to remember how
young Lydia was, and perhaps how spoiled. But he wasn't disturbed. He
only said to his father in a perfectly practical way:
"Women never did like her, you know."
So Anne got up and went out, thinking it was the moment for him and his
father to pace along together on this road of masculine understanding.
She found Lydia by the dining-room window, savagely drying her cheeks.
Lydia looked as if she had cried hard and scrubbed the tears off and
cried again, there was such wilful havoc in the pink smoothness of her
face.
"Isn't he hateful?" she asked Anne, with an incredulous spite in her
voice. "How could anybody that belonged to Farvie be so rough? I can't
endure him, can you?"
Anne looked distressed. When there were disagreements and cross-purposes
they made her almost ill. She would go about with a physical nausea upon
her, wishing the world could be kind.
"But he's only just--free," she said.
They were still making a great deal of that word, she and Lydia. It
seemed the top of earthly fortune to be free, and abysmal misery to have
missed it.
"I can't help it," said Lydia. "What does he want to act so for? Why
does he talk about such places, as if anybody could be in them?"
"Prisons?"
"Yes. And talking about going West as if Farvie hadn't just lived to get
him back. And about her as if she wasn't any different from what he
expected and you couldn't ask her to be anything else."
"But she's his wife," said Anne gently. "I suppose he loves her. Let's
hope he does."
"You can, if you want to," said Lydia, with a wet handkerchief making
another renovating attack on her face. "I sha'n't. She's a horrid
woman."
They parted then, for their household deeds, but all through the morning
Lydia had a fire of curiosity burning in her to know what Jeff was
doing. He ought, she knew, to be sitting by Farvie, keeping him company,
in a passionate way, to make up for the years. The years seemed
sometimes like a colossal mistake in nature that everybody had got to
make up for--make up to everybody else. Certainly she and Anne and
Farvie had got to make up to the innocent Jeff. And equally they had all
got to make up to Farvie. But going once noiselessly through the hall,
she glanced in and saw the colonel sitting alone by the window, Mary
Nellen's Virgil in his hand. He was well back from the glass, and Lydia
guessed that it was because he wanted to command the orchard and not
himself be seen. She ran up to her own room and also looked. There he
was, Jeff, striding round in the shadow of the brick wall, walking like
a man with so many laps to do before night. Sometimes he squared his
shoulders and walked hard, but as if he knew he was going to get
there--the mysterious place for which he was bound. Sometimes his
shoulders sagged, and he had to drive himself. Lydia felt, in her
throat, the aching misery of youth and wondered if she had got to cry
again, and if this hateful, wholly unsatisfactory creature was going to
keep her crying. As she watched, he stopped, and then crossed the
orchard green directly toward her. She stood still, looking down on him
fascinated, her breath trembling, as if he might glance up and ask her
what business she had staring down there, spying on him while he did
those mysterious laps he was condemned to, to make up perhaps for the
steps he had not taken on free ground in all the years.
"Got a spade?" she heard him call.
"Yes." It was Anne's voice. "Here it is."
"Why, it's new," Lydia heard him say.
He was under her window now, and she could not see him without putting
her head over the sill.
"Yes," said Anne. "I went down town and bought it."
Anne's voice sounded particularly satisfied. Lydia knew that tone. It
said Anne had been able to accomplish some fit and clever deed, to
please. It was as if a fountain, bubbling over, had said, "Have I given
you a drink, you dog, you horse, you woman with the bundle and the
child? Marvellous lucky I must be. I'll bubble some more."
Jeff himself might have understood that in Anne, for he said:
"I bet you brought it home in your hand."
"No takers," said Anne. "I bet I did."
"That heavy spade?"
"It wasn't heavy."
"You thought I'd be spading to keep from growing dotty. Good girl. Give
it here."
"But, Jeff!" Anne's voice flew after him as he went. Lydia felt herself
grow hot, knowing Anne had taken the big first step that had looked so
impossible when they saw him. She had called him Jeff. "Jeff, where are
you going to spade?"
"Up," said Jeff. "I don't care where. You always spade up, don't you?"
In a minute Lydia saw Anne, with the sun on her brown hair, the colonel,
and Jeff with the shining spade like a new sort of war weapon, going
forth to spade "up". Evidently Anne intended to have no spading at
random in a fair green orchard. She was one of the conservers of the
earth, a thrifty housewife who would have all things well done. They
looked happily intent, the three, going out to their breaking ground.
Lydia felt the tempest in her going down, and she wished she were with
them. But her temper shut her out. She felt like a little cloud driven
by some capricious wind to darken the face of earth, and not by her own
willingness.
She went down to the noon dinner quite chastened, with the expression
Anne knew, of having had a temper and got over it. The three looked as
if they had had a beautiful time, Lydia thought humbly. The colour was
in their faces. Farvie talked of seed catalogues, and it became evident
that Jeff was spading up the old vegetable garden on the orchard's edge.
Anne had a soft pink in her cheeks. They had all, it appeared, begun a
pleasant game.
Lydia kept a good deal to herself that day. She accepted a task from
Anne of looking over table linen and lining drawers with white paper.
Mary Nellen was excused from work, and sat at upper windows making a hum
of study like good little translating bees. Anne went back and forth
from china closet to piles of dishes left ready washed by Mary Nellen,
and the colonel, in the library, drowsed off the morning's work. Lydia
had a sense of peaceful tasks and tranquil pauses. Her own pulses had
quieted with the declining sun, and it seemed as if they might all be
settling into a slow-moving ease of life at last.
"Where is he?" suddenly she said to Anne, in the midst of their weaving
the household rhythm.
"Jeff?" asked Anne, not stopping. "He's spading in the garden."
"Don't you want to go out?" asked Lydia. She felt as if they had on
their hands, not a liberated prisoner, but a prisoner still bound by
their fond expectations of him. He must be beguiled, distracted from the
memory of his broken fetters.
"No," said Anne. "He'll be tired enough to sleep to-night."
"Didn't he sleep last night?" Lydia asked, that old ache beginning again
in her.
"I shouldn't think so," said Anne. "But he's well tired now".
And it was Lydia that night at ten who heard long breaths from the
little room when she went softly up the back stairs to speak to Mary
Nellen. There was a light on his table. The door was open. He sat, his
back to her, his arms on the table, his head on his arms. She heard the
long labouring breaths of a creature who could have sobbed if he had not
kept a heavy hand on himself. They were, Lydia thought, like the breaths
of a dear dog she had known who used to put his nose to the crack of the
shut door and sigh into it, "Please let me in." It seemed to her acutely
sensitive mind, prepared like a chemical film to take every impression
Jeff could cast, as if he were lying prone at the door of the cruel
beauty and breathing, "Please let me in." She wanted to put her hands on
the bowed head and comfort him. Now she knew how Anne felt, Anne, the
little mother heart, who dragged up compassion from the earth and
brought it down from the sky for unfriended creatures. And yet all the
solace Lydia had to offer was a bitter one. She would only have said:
"Don't cry for her. She isn't worth it. She's a hateful woman."