Lemuel Doret walked slowly home from the prayer meeting with his being
vibrating to the triumphant beat of the last hymn. It was a good hymn,
filled with promised joy for every one who conquered sin. The long
twilight of early summer showed the surrounding fields still bright
green, but the more distant hills were vague, the sky was remote and
faintly blue, and shadows thickened under the heavy maples that covered
the single street of Nantbrook. The small frame dwellings of the village
were higher than the precarious sidewalk; flights of steps mounted to
the narrow porches; and though Lemuel Doret realized that his neighbors
were sitting outside he did not look up, and no voices called down
arresting his deliberate progress.
An instant bitterness, tightening his thin metallic lips and narrowing a
cold fixed gaze, destroyed the harmony of the assured salvation. Lemuel
Doret silently cursed the pinched stupidity of the country clods. The
slow helpless fools! If instead of muttering in groups one of the men
would face him with the local hypocrisy he'd sink a heel in his jaw. The
bitterness expanded into a hatred like the gleam on a knife blade;
his hands, spare and hard, grew rigid with the desire to choke a thick
throat.
Then the rage sank before a swift self-horror, an overwhelming
conviction of his relapse into unutterable sin. He stopped and in a
spiritual agony, forgetful of his surroundings, half lifted quivering
arms to the dim sky: “O Christ, lean down from the throne and hold me
steady.”
He stood for a moment while a monotonous chatter on a porch above
dropped to a curious stillness. It seemed to him that his whisper was
heard and immediately answered; anyhow peace slowly enveloped him
once more, the melody of hope was again uppermost in his mind. He went
forward, procuring a cigarette from a mended ragged pocket.
His house, reached by a short steep path and sagging steps, was dark;
at first he saw no one, then the creak of a rocking-chair in the open
doorway indicated Bella, his wife.
“Give me a cigarette,” she demanded, her penetrating voice dissatisfied.
“You know I don't want you to smoke anywhere you can be seen,” he
answered. “Since we've come here to live we have to mind the customs.
The women'll never take to you smoking cigarettes.”
“Ah, hell, what do I care! We came here, but it ain't living. It makes
me sick, and you make me sick I Can't you sing and pray in the city as
well as among these hicks?”
“I'm afraid of it,” he said, brief and somber. “And I don't want
Flavilla brought up with any of the gang we knew. Where is she?”
“I sent her to bed. She fussed round till she got me nervous.”
“Did she feel good?”
“If she didn't a smack would have cured her.”
He passed Bella, rocking sharply, into the dank interior.
On the right was the bare room where he had his dilapidated barber's
chair and shelf with a few mugs, brushes and other scant necessities.
There had been no customers to-day nor yesterday; still, it was the
middle of the week and what trade there was generally concentrated on
Saturday. Beyond he went upstairs to Flavilla's bed. She was awake,
twisting about in a fragmentary nightgown, dark against the disordered
sheet.
“It's dreadful hot,” she complained shortly; “my head's hot too. The
window won't go up.”
Lemuel Doret crossed the narrow bare floor and dragged the sash open;
then he moved his daughter while he smoothed the bed and freshened a
harsh pillow. She whimpered.
“You're too big to cry without any reason,” he informed her, leaving to
fetch a glass of water from the tap in the kitchen.
Usually she responded to his intimations of her increasing age and
wisdom, but to-night she was listless. She turned away from him, her
arms flung above her head and wispy hair veiling her damp cheek.
“Keep still, can't you?” and he gathered her hair into a clumsy plait.
The darkness about him seeped within, into his hope and courage and
resolution; all that he had determined to do seemed impossibly removed.
The whole world resembled Nantbrook--a place of universal condemnation,
forgiving nothing. He felt a certainty that even the few dollars he had
honestly earned would now be stopped.
The air grew clearer and deeper in color, and stars brightened. Lemuel
Doret wondered about God. There was no doubt of His power and glory or
of the final triumph of heaven established and earth, sin, destroyed.
wickedness was equally plain; it was the ways of the righteous that
bewildered him--the conduct of the righteous and, in the face of his
supreme recognition, the extreme difficulty of providing life for
Flavilla--and Bella.
He consciously added his wife's name. Somehow his daughter was the sole
objective measure of his determination to build up, however late, a home
here and in eternity.
It was not unreasonable, in view of the past, to suppose that he had no
chance of succeeding. Yet religion was explicit upon that particular; it
was founded on the very hopes of sinners, on redemption. But he could do
nothing without an opportunity to make the small living they required;
if the men of Nantbrook, of the world, wouldn't come to him to be
barbered, and if he had no money to go anywhere else to begin again,
he was helpless. Everything was conspiring to thrust him back into the
city, of which he had confessed his fear, back----
He rose and stood above the child's thin exposed body--suddenly frozen
into a deathlike sleep--chilled with a vision, a premonition, the
insidious possibility of surrender. He saw, too, that it was a solitary
struggle; even his devotion to Flavilla, shut in the single space of
his own heart, helped to isolate him in what resembled a surrounding
blackness rent with blinding flashes of lightning.
The morning sun showed him spare, with a curious appearance of being
both wasted and grimly strong; he moved with an alert, a watchful ease,
catlike and silent; and his face was pallid with gray shadows. He stood
in trousers and undershirt, suspenders hanging down, before the small
dim mirror in the room where he had the barber chair, pasting his hair
down with an odorous brilliantine. This was his intention, but he saw
with sharp discomfort that bristling strands defied his every effort.
The hot edge of anger cut at him, but, singing, he dissipated it:
“_Why should I feel discouraged?
Why should the shadows fall?
Why should my heart be lonely,
And long for heaven_----”
He broke off at the thought of Flavilla, still in bed, her head, if
anything, hotter than last night. Lemuel Doret wished again that he had
not allowed Bella to call their child by that unsanctified name.
Before the birth they had seen a vaudeville, and Bella, fascinated by a
golden-and-white creature playing a white accordion that bore her
name in ornamental letters, had insisted on calling her daughter,
too, Flavilla. In spite of the hymn, dejection fastened on him as he
remembered this and a great deal more about his wife.
If she could only be brought to see the light their marriage and
life might still be crowned with triumph. But Bella, pointing out the
resulting poverty of his own conviction and struggle, said freely that
she had no confidence in promises; she demanded fulfillment now. She
regarded him as more than a little affected in the brain. Yet there had
been no deep change in him--from the very first he had felt a growing
uneasiness at the spectacle of the world and the flesh. The throb of
the Salvation Army drum at the end of an alley, the echo of the fervent
exhortations and holy songs, had always filled him with a surging
emotion like homesickness.
Two impulses, he recognized, held a relentless warfare within him; he
pictured them as Christ and Satan; but the first would overthrow all
else. “Glory!” he cried mechanically aloud. He put down the hairbrush
and inspected the razors on their shelf. The bright morning light
flashed along the rubbed fine blades; they were beautiful, flawless,
without a trace of defilement. He felt the satin smoothness of the steel
with an actual thrill of pleasure; his eyes narrowed until they were
like the glittering points of knives; he held the razor firmly and
easily, with a sinewy poised wrist.
Finally, his suspenders in position over a collarless striped shirt, he
moved out to the bare sharp descent before his house and poured water
onto the roots of a struggling lilac bush. Its leaves were now coated
with dust; but the week before it had borne an actual cluster of scented
blossom; and he was still in the wonder of the lavender fragrance on the
meager starved stem.
The beat of hoofs approached, and he turned, seeing Doctor Frazee in his
yellow cart.
“Oh, doctor!” he called instinctively.
The other stopped, a man with a lean face, heavy curved nose and
penetrating gaze behind large spectacles. He was in reality a
veterinary, but Lemuel Doret, out of a profound caution, had discovered
him to be above the narrow scope of local prejudice.
“I wish you'd look at Flavilla,” Doret continued.
The doctor hesitated, and then turned shortly in at the sidewalk.
“It will hurt no one if I do that.” Above Flavilla's flushed face, a
tentative finger on her wrist, Frazee's expression grew serious. “I'll
tell you this,” he asserted; “she's sick. You had better call Markley
to-day. And until he comes don't give her any solids. You can see she's
in a fever.”
“Can't you tend her? I'd put more on you than any fresh young hospital
stiff.”
“Certainly not,” he responded.
When the latter had gone Lemuel Doret found his wife in the kitchen. She
wore a pale-blue wrapper with a soiled scrap of coarse lace at her full
throat, her hair was gathered into a disorderly knot, and already there
was a dab of paint on either cheek. She had been pretty when he married
her, pretty and full of an engaging sparkle, a ready wit; but the charm
had gone, the wit had hardened into a habit of sarcasm. They had been
married twelve years, and in itself, everything considered, that was
remarkable and held a great deal in her favor. She had been faithful. It
was only lately, in Nantbrook, that her dissatisfaction had materialized
in vague restless hints.
“Frazee says Flavilla is sick,” he told her. “He thinks we ought to get
Markley.”
She made a gesture of skepticism. “All those doctors send you to each
other,” she proclaimed. “Like as not he'll get half for doing it.”
“She don't look right.”
Bella's voice and attitude grew exasperated. “Of course you know all
about children; you've been where you could study on them. And of course
I have no sense; a woman's not the person to say when her child is sick
or well. Have a doctor if you can pay one, and buy a lot of medicine
too. There's some calomel upstairs, but that's no good. I'd like to know
where you have all the money! God knows I need a little, to put inside
me and out.”
“It's right scarce,” he admitted, resolutely ignoring her tone. “Perhaps
Flavilla will be better later in the day; I'll wait.”
He spoke without conviction, denying the impulse to have her cared for
at once, in an effort to content and still Bella. However, he failed in
both of these aims. Her voice swept into a shrill complaint and abuse
of Nantbrook--a place, she asserted, of one dead street, without even a
passing trolley car to watch. She had no intention of being buried here
for the rest of her life. Turning to a cigarette and yesterday's paper
she drooped into a sulky shape of fat and slovenly blue wrapper beside
the neglected dishes of their insufficient breakfast.
He went through the empty house to the front again, where at least the
sun was warm and bright. The air held a faint dry fragrance that came
from the haymaking of the deep country in which Nantbrook lay. Lemuel
Doret could see the hotel at a crossing on the left, a small gray block
of stone with a flat portico, a heavy gilt beer sign and whitewashed
sheds beyond. The barkeeper stood at a door, a huge girth circled by
a soiled apron; nearer a bundle of brooms and glittering stacked paint
cans marked the local store. It was, he was forced to admit, far
from gay; but he found a great contentment in the sunny peace, in the
limitless space of the unenclosed sky; the air, the fields, the birds in
the trees were free.
As he stood frowning in thought he saw the figure of a strange man
walking over the road; Lemuel knew that he was strange by the formality
of the clothes. He wore a hard straw hat, collar and diamond-pinned tie,
and a suit with a waistcoat. At first Doret's interest was perfunctory,
but as the other drew nearer his inspection changed to a painful
absorption. Suddenly his attitude grew tense; he had the appearance of
a man gazing at an enthralling but dangerous spectacle, such--for
example--as a wall that might topple over, crushing anything human
within its sweep.
The object of this scrutiny had a pale countenance with a carefully
clipped mustache, baggy eyes and a blue-shaved heavy jaw. An indefinable
suggestion of haste sat on a progress not unduly hurried. But as he
caught sight of Lemuel Doret he walked more and more slowly, returning
his fixed attention. When the two men were opposite each other, only a
few feet apart, he almost stopped. For a moment their sharpened visions
met, parried, and then the stranger moved on. He made a few steps,
hesitated, then directly returned.
“Come inside,” he said in a slightly hoarse voice.
“It suits me here,” Doret replied.
The other regarded him steadily. “I've made no mistake,” he asserted. “I
could almost say how long you were up for, and a few other little things
too. I don't know what you're doing in this dump, but here we both are.”
He waited for nothing more, ascending quickly to the hall. The two made
their way into the improvised barber shop.
“You've got me wrong,” Doret still insisted.
“Who is it, Lem?” Bella demanded at the door.
As she spoke an expression of geniality overspread her face, daubed with
paint and discontent.
“Why, I'll tell you--I'm June Bowman.”
“That don't mean anything to us,” Lemuel continued. “The best thing you
can do is keep right on going.”
“Not that Fourth Ward stew?” Bella asked eagerly.
He nodded.
“Lem's kind of died on his feet,” she explained in a palpable excuse of
her husband's ignorance; “he don't read the papers nor nothing. But of
course I've heard of you, Mr. Bowman. We're glad to see you.”
“Keep right along,” Lemuel Doret repeated. His face was dark and his
mouth hardly more than a pinched line.
“Now, who are you?” Bowman inquired.
“I'll tell you,” Bella put in, “since his manners have gone with
everything else. This is Snow Doret. If you know the live men that name
will be familiar to you.”
“I seem to remember it,” he admitted.
“If Snow went in the city it's Lemuel here,” Doret told him. His anger
seethed like a kettle beginning to boil.
“Well, if Snow ever went I guess I'm in right. The truth is I got to
lay off for a little, and this seems first-rate. I can explain it in a
couple of words: Things went bad----”
“Wasn't it the election?” Bella asked politely.
“In a way,” he answered with a bow. “You're all right. A certain party,
you see, was making some funny cracks--a reform dope; and he got in
other certain parties' light, see? Word was sent round, and when a
friend and me come on him some talk was passed and this public nuisance
got something. It was all regular and paid for----”
“I read about it,” Bella interrupted. “He died in the ambulance.”
“Then I was slipped the news that they were going to elect me the pretty
boy, and I had to make a break. Only temporary, till things are fixed.
Thus you see me scattered with hayseed. I was walking through for a lift
to Lancaster, where there are some good fellows; but when I saw Snow
here taking the air I knew there was one nearer.”
“Lemuel; and I'm no good fellow.”
“That's the truth,” his wife added thinly. “Here is the only one in this
house.” She touched her abundant self.
“Then I can put up?”
“No,” Lemuel Doret told him. “This is a house of God's.”
Bella laughed in a rising hysterical key.
“Listen to him,” she gasped; “listen to Snow Doret. It's no wonder you
might have forgotten him,” she proclaimed; “he's been in the pen for ten
and a half years with a bunch off for good conduct. But fifteen years
ago--say! He went in for knifing a drug store keeper who held out on a
'coke' deal. If this here's a house of God's I'd like to know what he
called the one he had then. I couldn't tell you half of what went on,
not half, with fixing drinks and frame-ups and skirts. Why, he run a hop
joint with the Chinese and took a noseful of snow at every other breath.
That was after his gambling room broke up--it got too raw even for the
police. It was brandy with him, too, and there ain't a gutter in his
district he didn't lay in. The drug store man wasn't the first he cut
neither.”
She stopped from sheer lack of breath.
Curiously all that filled Lemuel Doret's mind was the thought of the
glory of God. Everything Bella said was true; but in the might of the
Savior it was less than nothing. He had descended into the pit and
brought him, Snow, up, filling his ears with the sweet hymns of
redemption, the promise of Paradise for the thieves and murderers who
acknowledged His splendor and fought His fight. This marvelous charity,
the cleansing hope for his blackened soul, swept over him in a warm rush
of humble praise and unutterable gratitude. Nothing of the Lord's was
lost: “His eye is on the sparrow.”
“Certainly, lay off your coat,” Bella was urging; “it's fierce hot. Lem
can rush a can of beer from the hotel. Even he wouldn't go to turn out
one of the crowd in a hard fix. I'm awful glad you saw him.”
With June Bowman in his house, engaged in verbal agreements with Bella
and spreading comfortably on a chair, Lemuel was powerless. AH his
instinct pressed him to send the other on, to refuse--in the commonest
self-preservation--shelter. But both the laws of his old life and the
commands of the new were against this act of simple precaution. Bowman
eyed him with a shrewd appraisement.
“A clever fellow,” he said, nodding; “admire you for coming out here for
a while. Well, how about the suds?”
He produced a thick roll of yellow-backed currency and detached a small
bill. “I'll finance this campaign.”
Lemuel Doret was confused by the rapidity with which the discredited
past was re-created by Bowman's mere presence. He was at the point of
refusing to fetch the beer when he saw that there was no explanation
possible; they would regard him as merely crabbed, and Bella would
indulge her habit of shrill abuse. It wasn't the drink itself that
disturbed him but the old position of “rushing the can”--a symbol of
so much that he had left forever. Forever; he repeated the word with a
silent bitter force. The feel of the kettle in his hand, the thin
odor of the beer and slopping foam, seemed to him evidences of acute
degeneration; he was oppressed by a mounting dejection. God seemed very
far away.
His wife was talking while Bowman listened with an air of sympathetic
wisdom.
“It wasn't so bad then,” she said; “I was kind of glad to get away, and
Lem was certain everything would open right out. But he's awful hard to
do with; he wouldn't take a dollar from parties who had every right to
stake him good, and borrowed five from no more than a stranger to buy
that secondhand barber chair. What he needed was chloroform to separate
these farmers from their dimes and whiskers.” Bowman laughed loudly, and
a corresponding color invaded Bella. “Of course no one knew Lem had done
time, then. They wouldn't have either, but for the Law and Order. Oh,
dear me, no, your child ain't none of your own; they lend it to you like
and then sneak up whenever the idea takes them, to see if it's getting
a Turkish bath. I guess the people on the street wondered who was our
swell automobile friend till they found out.”
“I suppose,” Bowman put in, “they all came round and offered you the
helping hand, wanted to see you happy and successful.”
She laughed. “Them?” she demanded. “Them? The man that owns this
house said that if he'd known, Lem would never had it; they don't want
convicts in this town. This is a moral burg. That's more than the women
said to me though--the starved buzzards; if they've spoke a word to me
since I never heard it.” Her voice rose in sharp mimicry: “You, Katie,
come right up on the porch, child! Don't you know--! See, I'm going by.”
“I could have warned you of all that,” June Bowman asserted; “for the
reason they're narrow, don't know anything about living or affairs;
hypocritical too; long on churchgoing----”
Doret regarded him solemnly. How blind he was, a mound of corruptible
flesh! He put the beer down and turned abruptly away, going up to
Flavilla. She seemed better; her face was white but most of the fever
had gone. He listened to her harsh breathing with the conviction that
she had caught a cold; and immediately after he was back from the store
with a bottle of cherry pectoral. She liked the sweet taste of the thick
bright-pink sirup and was soon quiet. Lemuel sniffed the mouth of the
bottle suspiciously. It was doped, he finally decided, but not enough
to hurt her; tasting it, a momentary desire for stinging liquor ran like
fire through his nerves. He laughed at it, crushing and throwing aside
the longing with a sense of contempt and triumph.
He could hear occasionally Bowman's smooth periods and his wife's eager
enjoyment of the discourse. His sense of worldly loneliness deepened;
Flavilla seemed far away. All life was inexplicable--yes, and
profitless, ending in weariness and death. The hunger for perfection,
for God, that had been a constant part of his existence, the longing for
peace and security, were almost unbearable. He had had a long struggle;
the devil was deeply rooted in him. He could laugh at the broken tyranny
of drugs and drink, but the passion for fine steel cutting edges
was different, and twisted into every fiber. The rage that even yet
threatened to flood him, sweeping away his painfully erected integrity,
was different too. These things had made him a murderer.
“... not the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”
He had a sudden muddled vision of another world, a world where sturdy
men gave him their hands and in reality fulfilled June Bowman's mocking
words. There the houses, the streets of his youth would have been
impossible. Ah, he was thinking of another kind of heaven; it was a hop
dream.
There was a stir below and he heard the clatter of plates. Dinner was in
preparation. “Lem!” his wife called. “Mr. Bowman wants you to go to the
butcher's.”
“Call me June,” he put in; adding: “Sure, Lem; the butcher's; we want
a tenderloin, cut thick. You can't get any pep on greens; we ain't
cattle.”
Doret felt that he would have been infinitely happier with his own thin
fare. In a manner he got comfort from a pinch of hunger; somehow the
physical deprivation gave him a sense of purification. The other man,
purple with the meat and beer, shook out a cigarette from a paper pack.
“Always smoke caporal halves,” he proclaimed.
The blue vapor from the three burning cigarettes rose and mingled.
Bella was quiet, reflective; Bowman sat with half-shut speculative eyes;
Lemuel Doret was again lost in visions.
“How long are you taking the milk cure?” Bowman asked.
Lemuel made no reply, but his wife smiled bitterly.
“I had an idea,” the other continued; “but it's a little soon to spring
anything. And I don't know but you might prefer it here.”
“Try me,” Bella proclaimed; “that's all I want!”
Doret still said nothing of his determination to conquer life in
Nantbrook. A swift impulse seized him to take June Bowman by the collar
and fling him into the street.
“Just try me!” Bella repeated.
He would be helpless in his, Doret's, hands. It was hard enough to be
upright without an insinuating crook in the place. There was a heavy
movement of feet in the front of the house, and he went out to meet a
customer.
Sliding the sensitive razor blade over a young tanned cheek he pondered
moodily on the undesirable fact of June Bowman.
Returning from this exercise of his trade he saw Bella descending the
stair with a plate.
“With all your going on over Flavilla,” she told him, “it never came to
you that she'd like a piece of steak.”
“But Doctor Frazee told us nothing solid. I took her up two eggs in the
morning.”
“Yes, and you'd had two dollars to pay as well if I hadn't showed you
different. Flavilla's probably as well as any of us. I wish you would
fix yourself a little, Lem. I'm tired of having you about the house in
your suspenders.”
He viewed her silently. Bella had on a dress he had never seen before,
thin red-spotted yellow silk drawn tightly over a pronounced figure, a
red girdle, and high-heeled patent-leather slippers.
“If you're going to look like this,” he admitted, “I'll have to get a
move on.”
When they were first in Nantbrook she had worn a denim apron, and that,
too, with all the other differences had seemed to express their new
life; but now in yellow silk she was back in the old. Lemuel Doret
studied his wife with secret doubt; more than the dress had changed.
She seemed younger; rather she was adopting a younger manner. In the
presence of June Bowman it intensified.
“That idea I spoke about,” the latter advanced: “I've been sizing
you up, the both of you, and you look good. Well, I've got hold of
a concession on the Atlantic Boardwalk and the necessary cash is in
sight.” He turned to Lemuel. “How would you like to run a bowling game?
It's on the square and would give you a lead into something bigger.
You're wise; why, you might turn into a shore magnate, with Bella here
dressed up in stones.”
Doret shook his head. “Treasure on earth,” he thought; “moth and rust.”
But it would be hopeless to attempt any explanation. “No,” he said;
“we'll play it out here.”
“We will?” Bella echoed him. “Indeed! We will?” Now the emphasis was
sharply on the first word. “What's going to keep me?”
“You're my wife,” he replied simply; “we have a child.”
“Times have changed, Snow,” Bowman interrupted. “You ought to read the
papers. This is ladies' day. The old harem stuff don't go no longer.
They are emancipated.”
“Lemuel,” Doret insisted, a narrowed hard gaze on the other man; “Lemuel
Doret.”
“He thinks nobody'll remember,” his wife explained. “Lem's redeemed.”
“Your name's what you say,” Bowman agreed, “but remember this--you can't
throw any scare into me. I'm no Fauntleroy, neither. Behave.”
The anger seethed again beneath Lemuel's restraint. It began to be
particular, personal, focused on Bowman; and joined to it was a petty
dislike for the details of the man's appearance, the jaunty bearing and
conspicuous necktie, the gloss of youth over the unmistakable signs of
degeneration, the fatty pouches of his eyes and loose throat.
“I wouldn't bother with scaring you,” he told him. “Why should I? You've
got no kick. I took you in, didn't I? And all I said was my name. Snow
Doret's dead; he died in prison; and this Lemuel's all different----”
“I've heard about that too,” Bowman returned; “but somehow I don't take
stock in these miracles.”
“If you ever see me looking like I might be Snow, go quiet,” Lemuel
advised. “That's all.”
With clenched hands he abruptly departed. The cords of his neck were
swollen and rigid; there was a haze before his eyes. He went up to the
refuge of his daughter's room. She was lying still, breathing thickly,
with a finger print of scarlet on each cheek.
She was so thin, so wasted, the bed and room so stripped of every
comfort, that he dropped forward on his knees, his arms outflung across
her body in an inarticulate prayer for faith, for strength and patience.
It was not much he wanted--only food for one child and help for a woman,
and a grip on the devil tearing at him in the form of hatred.
He got only a temporary relief, for when he went down Bella and June
Bowman were whispering together; he passed the door with his silent
tread and saw their heads close. Bella was actually pretty.
An astonishing possibility occurred to him--perhaps Bella would go away
with Bowman. An unbidden deep relief at such a prospect invaded him; how
happy he could be with Flavilla. They would get a smaller house, which
Flavilla would soon learn to keep for him; they would go to church and
prayer meeting together, her soprano voice and his bass joined in the
praise of the Lord, of the Almighty who raised the dead and his Son, who
took the thief to glory.
This speculation was overcome by a troubled mind; both his innate pride
in his wife as an institution of his honor, the feeling that he would
uphold it at any cost, and his Christianity interrupted the vision of
release. He must not let her stumble, and he would see that June Bowman
didn't interfere in his home. More beer made its appearance, and the
other man grew louder, boastful. He exhibited the roll of money--that
was nothing, four times that much could be had from the same source. He
was a spender, too, and treated all his friends liberally. Lemuel was
to see if there was any wine in the damned jumping-off place; and when
would they all go to Atlantic?
“Never,” Doret repeated.
Bowman laughed skeptically.
The rage stirred and increased, blinding Lemuel Doret's heart, stinging
his eyes. Bella, watching him, became quieter, and she gave June--she
called him June--a warning pressure of her fingers. Her husband saw it
with indifference; everything small was lost in the hot tide enveloping
him. His hands twitched, but there was no other outward sign of his
tumult. He smoked his cigarettes with extreme deliberation.
It was evening again, and they were sitting on the narrow porch. The
west was a serene lake of fading light against which the trees made dark
blots of foliage. Nantbrook seemed unreal, a place of thin shadow, the
future unsubstantial as well; only the past was actual in Lemuel Doret's
mind--the gray cold prison, the city at night, locked rooms filled with
smoke and lurid lights, avaricious voices in the mechanical sentences of
gambling, agonized tones begging for a shot, just a shot, of an addicted
drug, a girl crying.
He tried to sing a measure of praise beneath his breath but the tune and
words evaded him. He glanced furtively at Bowman's complacent bulk, the
flushed face turned fatuously to Bella. Under the other's left arm his
coat was drawn smoothly on a cushion of fat.
Later Lemuel stopped at Flavilla's bed, and though she was composed he
was vaguely alarmed at what seemed to him an unreal rigidity. She was
not asleep, but sunk in a stupor with a glimmer of vision and an elusive
pulse. He should not have listened to Bella but had a doctor as Frazee
had advised. It appeared now that--with all Flavilla held for him--he
had been strangely neglectful. At the same time he was conscious of
the steady increase of his hatred for Bowman. This was natural, he told
himself; Bowman in a way was the past--all that he, Doret, had put out
of his life. At least he had believed that accomplished, yet here it
was back again, alive and threatening; drinking beer in his rooms,
whispering to his wife, putting the thought of Flavilla from his head.
In the morning even Bella admitted that Flavilla might be sick and a
doctor necessary. He took one look at his daughter's burning face, heard
the shrill labor of her breathing, and hurried downstairs with a set
face. He was standing with Bella in the hall when June Bowman descended.
“Flavilla ain't right,” she told him.
The latter promptly exhibited the wad of money. “Whatever you need,” he
said.
“Put it away,” Lemuel replied shortly. “I don't want any of that for
Flavilla.”
Bowman studied him. Doret made no effort to mask his bitterness, and the
other whistled faintly. Bella laughed, turning from her husband.
“He's cracked,” she declared; “you'll get no decency off him. A body
would think I had been in jail and him looking out for her all those ten
years and more. I can say thank you, though; we'll need your help, and
glad.”
“Put it away,” Lemuel Doret repeated. He was more than ever catlike,
alert, bent slightly forward with tense fingers.
Bowman was unperturbed. “I told you about this flash stuff,” he
observed. “Nobody's forcing money on you. Get the bend out of you and
give me a shave. That'll start you on the pills.”
Lemuel Doret mechanically followed him into the rude barber shop; he was
fascinated by the idea of laying the razor across Bowman's throat.
The latter extended himself in the chair and Doret slowly, thoroughly,
covered his lower face with lather, through which the blade drew with a
clean smooth rip. A fever burned in the standing man's brain, he fought
constantly against a stiffening of his employed fingers--a swift turn,
a cutting twist. Subconsciously he called noiselessly upon the God that
had sustained him and, divided between apprehension and the increasing
lust to kill, his lips held the form in which they had pronounced that
impressive name. He had the sensation of battling against a terrific
wind, a remorseless force beating him to submission. His body ached from
the violence of the struggle to keep his hand steadily, evenly, busied,
following in a delicate sweep the cords of June Bowman's neck, the
jugulars.
The other looked up at him and grinned confidently. “Little children,”
he said, “love one another.”
Lemuel stopped, the razor suspended in air; there was a din in his
ears, his vision blurred, his grip tightened on the bone handle. A sweat
started out on his brow and he found himself dabbing June Bowman's face
with a wet cold towel.
“Witch hazel?” he asked mechanically.
Suddenly he was so tired that his legs seemed incapable of support.
He wiped the razor blade and put it away with a lax nerveless hand.
He realized that he had been again at the point of murder. He had been
saved by the narrowest margin in the world. For a moment the fact that
he had been saved absorbed him, and then the imminent danger of his
position, his weakness, filled him with the sense of failure, a
heavy feeling of hopelessness. His prayers and singing, his plans for
redemption, for a godly life, had threatened to end at the first assault
of evil.
He temporarily overcame his dejection at the memory of Flavilla. Doctor
Markley lived in a larger town than Nantbrook, a dozen miles beyond the
fields and green hills, and he must get him by telephone. Then there was
the problem of payment. The doctor, he knew, would expect his fee, two
dollars, immediately from such an applicant as himself; and he had less
than a dollar. He explained something of this over the wire, adding that
if Markley would see Flavilla at the end of the day the money would be
forthcoming. That, the crisp, disembodied tone replied, was impossible;
he must call in the middle of the morning, but no difficulty would be
made about his bill; Doret could send the amount to him promptly.
He hurried back to the house with this information, and found Bella
seated in the kitchen, the inevitable cigarette throwing up its ribbon
of smoke from her fingers, and June Bowman at her shoulder. Lemuel
ignored the latter.
“The doctor'll be here at about eleven,” he announced. “Mind you listen
to all he says and get Flavilla into a clean nightgown and sheets.”
“What's the matter with your tending to her?” Bella demanded.
“I won't be here; not till night. I'm going to put up hay with one of
the farmers. I hear they're in a hurry and offering good money.”
Bella's expression was strange. She laughed in a forced way.
“We got to hand it to you,” Bowman admitted genially; “you're there. I
guess I'd starve before ever it would come to me to fork hay.”
Lemuel's wife added nothing; her lips twisted into a fixed smile at once
defiant and almost tremulous. Well, he was late now; he couldn't linger
to inquire into Bella's moods. Yet at the door he hesitated again to
impress on her the importance of attending the doctor's every word.
It seemed to him an hour later that he was burning up in a dry
intolerable haze of sun and hay. He awkwardly balanced heavy ragged
forkfuls, heaving them onto the mounting stack of the wagon in a paste
of sweat and dust. His eyes were filmed and his throat dry. He struggled
on in the soft unaccustomed tyranny of the grass, the glare of sun, with
his mind set on the close of day. He thought of cool shadows, of city
streets wet at night, and a swift plunge into a river where it swept
about the thrust of a wharf. He wondered what Doctor Markley would say
about Flavilla; probably the child wasn't seriously sick.
The day drew apparently into a tormenting eternity; the physical effort
he welcomed; it seemed to exhaust that devil in him which had so
nearly betrayed and ruined him forever in the morning; but the shifting
slippery hay, the fiery dust, the incandescent blaze created an inferno
in the midst of which his mind whirled with monotonous giddy images and
half-meaningless phrases spoken and re-spoken. Yet the sun was not, as
he had begun to suppose, still in the sky; it sank toward the horizon,
the violet shadows slipped out from the western hills, and Lemuel
finished his toil in a swimming gold mist. It was two miles to
Nantbrook, and disregarding his aching muscles he hurried over the
gray undulating road. The people of the village were gathered on their
commanding porches, the barkeeper at the hotel bulked in his doorway.
The lower part of Lemuel's own house was closed; no one appeared as he
mounted the insecure steps.
“Bella!” he cried in an overwhelming anxiety before he reached the hall.
There was no reply. He paused inside and called again. His voice echoed
about the bare walls; he heard a dripping from the kitchen sink; nothing
more.
“I'd better go up,” he said aloud with a curious tightening of his
throat. He progressed evenly up the stairs; suddenly a great weight
seemed to bow his shoulders; the illusion was so vivid that he actually
staggered; he was incapable of breaking from his measured progress. He
turned directly into Flavilla's room. She was there--he saw her at
once. But Bella hadn't put a fresh nightgown on her, and the sheets were
disordered and unchanged.
Lemuel took a step forward; then he stopped. “The fever's gone,” he
vainly told the dread freezing about his heart at a stilled white face.
“Yes,” he repeated with numb lips; “it's gone.”
He approached the bed and standing over it and the meager body he cursed
softly and wonderingly. The light was failing and it veiled the sharp
lines of the dead child's countenance. For a moment his gaze strayed
about the room and he felt a swift sorrow at its ugliness. He had wanted
pretty things, pictures and a bright carpet and ribbons, for Flavilla.
Then he was conscious of a tearing rage, but now he was unmindful of it,
impervious to its assault in the fixed necessity of the present.