them only Uncle Elmer’s idea of “Biblical”? “I mean it is something
that’s happened to my spirit--deep inside me.”
How could he explain what had happened to him as he lay in the rushes
watching the procession of black girls? Or what had happened as he stood
half-naked by the dying fire listening to the drums beating against the
dome of the night? How could he explain when he did not know himself?
Yet it was an experience of the spirit. It had happened to his soul.
He kept repeating to himself, “I won’t--I won’t. They can’t make me.” He
saw his mother watching him with sad eyes, and he had to look away in
order not to weaken and surrender.
Then Naomi’s flat voice, “I’ve prayed--I’ve pled with him. I never cease
to pray.” She had begun to weep.
Philip’s jaw, lean from illness and dark from want of shaving, set with
a sudden click. His mother saw it, with a sudden sickening feeling that
the enlarged photograph above his head had come to life. She knew that
jaw. She knew what it meant when it clicked in that sudden fashion.
“It’s no use talking about it--I won’t go back--not if I burn in Hell.”
Uncle Elmer interrupted him, all the smoothness gone suddenly from his
voice. “Which you will as sure as there’s a God above!”
The thin, yellow, middle-aged man was transformed suddenly into the
likeness of one of the more disagreeable Prophets of the Old Testament.
He was cruel, savage, intolerant. Emma Downes knew the signs; she saw
that Elmer was losing his temper and beginning to roll about in the
righteousness that made him hard and cruel. If he went on against that
set, swarthy jaw of Philip, only disaster could come of it. They would
lose everything.
“We’d all better go to bed; it’s late and we’re all worn out--Philip and
Naomi most of all. There’s no hurry about deciding. When Philip’s well
again--”
They meant to postpone the struggle, but not to abandon it. They bade
each other good-night and Aunt Mabelle, rising from her rocking-chair
with difficulty, smiled and insisted on kissing Philip, who submitted
sullenly. Secretly she was pleased with him as she was always pleased
when she saw some one get the better of Elmer.
As the door closed beneath the horrid glare of the green-glass gas-jet,
Uncle Elmer turned.
“And what will you do, Philip, if you don’t go back? You’ll have to
start life all over again.”
“I don’t know,” Philip answered dully. But he did know, almost, without
knowing it. He knew deep down within the very marrow of his bones.
There was only one thing he wanted to do. It was a fierce desire that
had been born as he lay beneath the acacia-tree watching the procession
of singing women.
3
When Uncle Elmer and Aunt Mabelle, walking very carefully on account of
Aunt Mabelle’s “condition,” had gone down the path into the flying snow,
Emma said, “We’ll all go to bed now. You’re to have the spare-room,
Philip, Naomi will sleep with me.”
“No, I can’t sleep yet. I’m going to sit up a while.”
“Then put out the gas when you come to bed. It gets low toward morning
and sometimes goes out by itself.”
Naomi went off without a word, still enveloped in the aura of silent and
insinuating injury, and Philip flung himself down on the floor before
the gas-log, as he had always done as a boy, lying on his stomach, with
the friendly smell of dust and carpet in his nostrils, while he pored
over a book. Only to-night he didn’t read: he simply lay on his back
staring at the ceiling or at the enlarged photograph of his father,
wondering what sort of man he had been and whether, if he were alive
now, he would have helped his son or ranged himself with the others.
There was a look in the eye which must have baffled a man like Uncle
Elmer.
Upstairs, directly overhead, Naomi and Emma prepared for bed in silence.
Only once did either of them speak. It happened when Emma burst out with
admiration as Naomi let down the heavy mass of dull reddish hair. They
both undressed prudishly, slipping on their outing-flannel nightgowns
before removing their underwear, and hastily, because the room was
filled with damp chill air. Emma lent her daughter-in-law one of her
nightgowns, for Naomi had no use for outing-flannel in East Africa, and
possessed only a sort of shapeless trousseau of patterned calico. The
borrowed garment gave her the air of a woman drowning in an ocean of
cotton-flannel.
After the gas was extinguished, they both knelt down and prayed
earnestly, and toward the same end--that the Lord might open Philip’s
eyes once more and lead him back to his duty.
The moment the blankets were drawn about their chins, they began to talk
of it, at first warily, feeling their way toward each other until it
became certain that they both wanted the same thing, passionately and
without division of purpose. Naomi told her mother-in-law the whole
story--how she had worked over him, how she had even made the
inarticulate Swanson summon courage to speak, how she had prayed both
privately and in public, as it were, before Philip’s eyes. And nothing
had been of any use. She thought perhaps the wound had injured his brain
in some way, for certainly he was not the same Philip she had married;
but once when she had suggested such a thing to him, he had only
attacked her savagely, saying, “I’m just as sane as you are--wanting to
go back to those dirty niggers.”
“Dirty niggers,” Naomi said, was an expression that he had undoubtedly
picked up from the Englishwoman. She always spoke of the natives thus,
or even in terms of profanity. She smoked cigars. She used a whip on her
bearers. In fact, Naomi believed that perhaps she was the Devil himself
come to ruin Philip and in the end to drag him off to Hell.
“I would have gone back without Philip,” she said, “but I couldn’t go
alone with Swanson, and I felt that the Lord meant me to cleave to
Philip and reclaim him. That would be a greater victory than the other.”
Emma patted her daughter-in-law’s thin hand. “That’s right, my dear.
He’ll go back in the end, and a wife ought to cleave to her husband.”
But there was in the gesture something of hostility, as there had been
in her touching Philip a little while before. It was as if she said,
“All the same, while he’s here, he belongs to me.”
And then Emma, listening, said, “Sh! There he comes now up the stairs.”
They both fell silent, as if conscious that he must not know they lay
there in the darkness plotting (not plotting, that was a word which held
evil implications) but planning his future, arranging what would be best
for him body and soul--a thing, they knew, which he could not decide in
his present distracted state of mind. They both fell silent, listening,
listening, listening to the approaching tread of his feet as they
climbed the creaking stairs, now at the turn, now in the upper hall, now
passing their door. He had passed it now and they heard him turning the
white china knob of the door into the dismal spare-room.
He would think they were both asleep long ago.
They talked for a while longer, until Naomi, worn by the wretched
journey in a day-coach and lulled by the warmth with which the great
vigorous body of Emma invested the walnut bed, fell asleep, her mouth a
little open, for there had never been a surgeon anywhere near her
father’s mission to remove her adenoids. But she did not sleep until
Emma had learned beyond all doubt that in this matter Naomi was
completely on her side; and that there was no possibility of children to
complicate matters. Naomi was still a virgin, and somehow, in some way,
that was a condition which might be made use of in the battle. She was
not certain of the manner, but she felt the value of Naomi’s virginity
as a pawn.
Nor did she fall asleep at once. She suffered from a vague, undefined
sense of alarm, which she had not known in more than twenty years of
life wherein men played no rôle. She had not suffered thus since the
disappearance of her husband. He seemed to have returned to her now with
the return of her son. Philip, she saw, was a child no longer, but a
man, with a little gray already in his black hair, terrifyingly like his
father in appearance.
It was more, too, than appearance, for he had upon her the same effect
that his father had had before him--of making her feel a strange desire
to humor, to coddle him, to go down on her knees and do his bidding. He
was that sort of man. Even Naomi seemed at moments to succumb to the
queer, unconscious power. Lying there in the darkness Emma determined
resolutely to resist this disarming glamour, for she had lost his father
by not resisting it. She must make the resistance for her own and for
Philip’s good, though it would have been a warmer and more pleasant,
even a voluptuous feeling to have yielded to him at once.
One thing, she saw, was clear--that Philip did not mean to run away as
his father had done. He had returned to fight it out, with his dark jaw
set stubbornly, because there was in him something of herself, which
his father had lacked, something which, though she could not define it,
filled her with uneasiness. She, the invincible Emma, was a little
frightened by her own son.
And it touched her that he seemed so old, more, at times, like a man of
forty than a boy of twenty-six: his face was lined, and his mouth
touched by bitterness. He was no longer her little boy, so soft and
good-looking, with that odd, blurred haze of faith in his blue eyes. He
had a face now and the fact disturbed her, she could not tell why. He
had been a little boy, and then, all at once, a man, with nothing in
between.
At last--even after Philip, lying tormented in the spare bedroom, had
fallen asleep, she dropped into an uneasy slumber, filled with vague
alarms and excursions in which she seemed to have, from time to time,
odd disturbing glimpses of a Philip she had never known, who seemed to
be neither boy nor man, but something in between, remarkably like his
worthless scamp of a father, who lived always to the full.
4
The Town stood built like Rome upon Seven Hills, which were great
monuments of earth and stone left by the last great glacier, and on
these seven hills and in the valleys which surrounded them a whole city,
created within the space of less than a century, had raised houses and
shops, monstrous furnaces spouting flame and smoke and cavernous sheds
black and vast as the haunts of legendary monsters, where all day and
night iron and steel drawn from the hot bellies of the furnaces was
beaten into rails and girders, so that other towns like it might spring
into existence almost overnight. The Mills and furnaces could not, it
seemed, work fast enough, so there were always new ones building,
spreading out and out, along the borders of the railroad which touched
the Atlantic Ocean on one side and the Pacific on the other.
It was not a pretty town. The sun rarely rose unobscured by clouds of
hanging black smoke: the air was never still day or night from the
vibrations of that gigantic beating and pounding. There was no house nor
building unstained by long streaks made by the soot which fell like
black manna from the skies. But it was a rich town, fabulously rich and
busy as an ant-hill overturned carelessly by the foot of man. People
were always crawling in and out of the Mills, up the long hill to the
Main Street that was bordered by hundreds of little shops which sold
cheap clothing and furniture, swarming over the bright steel threads of
the railroads and through the streets in the dark region known as the
Flats, which was given over to the slave ants brought in from foreign
countries to work day and night without light or air. On the hills, at a
little distance, dwelt those who in a way subsisted upon the work of the
slave ants--all the little merchants, the lawyers, the bankers who were
rich because the world about them was rich, because the little world was
a hive of activity where men and women were born, and toiled, and lived
and died endlessly. For them it was not a struggle to exist. It was
scarcely possible not to succeed.
It had made even Emma Downes rich in a small way. The money seemed
forever pouring out, rolling off: one had only to find a clear spot and
stand there waiting to catch what rolled towards it.
On the seven hills the ants had their social life, divided into caste
upon caste. In the Flats the slave ants had no existence at all. They
seldom climbed the hills. One never saw them. But on the hills there
were ants of all sorts, and odd reasons determined why they were what
they were: sometimes it was money, sometimes ambition, sometimes
clothes, sometimes the part of the ant-hill which they occupied,
sometimes the temple in which they worshiped. They fussed over these
things and scurried about a great deal in their agitation.
At the bottom of the heap were the slave ants who had no existence and
at the top was an old woman who occupied a whole hill to herself and was
content to live there surrounded on all sides by the black, dark mills
and the workers. She was a sort of queen ant, for she was a
disagreeable, scornful old woman, and she made no effort. She was
immensely rich and lived somberly in a grand manner unknown elsewhere in
the Town; but it was, too, more than this. She was scornful and she
inspired awe. Her name was Julia Shane. She had been born a queen ant.
Emma Downes did not know her. It is true that she had seen the old woman
often enough in a mulberry victoria drawn by high-stepping black horses,
as she passed the Peerless Restaurant; she had seen her sitting very
straight and grim, dressed in mauve and black, or wrapped comfortably in
sables. Sometimes her daughters rode with her--the one who was religious
and worked among the people of the Flats, and the one who lived in Paris
and was said to be fast.
There were reasons, of course, why they did not know each other--antlike
reasons. Emma lived in the wrong part of the Town. She was the sister of
Elmer Niman, who was a pious man with a reputation for being a sharp
dealer. Emma and Elmer cared nothing for the things on which the old
woman spent insanely great sums of money, such things as pictures and
carpets and chairs. To Emma, a chair was a chair; the fancier it was,
the prettier and more tasteful it must be. And Emma went to a church
that was attended by none of the fashionable ants, and the old woman
went to no church at all. Emma was President of the Woman’s Christian
Temperance Union, which the old lady considered not only as great
nonsense, but as an impertinent effort to fly in the face of Nature.
Emma had a missionary son, and to Julia Shane missionaries were usually
self-righteous meddlers. (The old lady had never even heard of Naomi
Potts, “the youngest missionary of the Lord in darkest Africa.”) There
was reason upon reason why they never met. Emma thought her a wicked old
thing, who ought to be reformed, and Julia Shane didn’t know that Emma
existed.
It was immensely complicated--that antlike world.
For Philip it was no more complicated now than it had been in his
childhood, when he had gone his own shy, solitary way. He had been
lonely as a child, with the loneliness which all children know at
moments when they are bruised and hurt: only with him it seemed always
to have been so. It may have been the domination, even the very
presence, of a woman so insensitive and crushing as Emma Downes that
bruised and hurt him ceaselessly and without consciousness of relief.
It was worse, too, when she was your mother and you adored her.
He had been happiest in moments when, escaping from his mother and the
slate-colored house, he had gone off to wander through the fields beyond
the Town or along the railway tracks among the locomotives. It was the
great engines which he liked best, monsters that breathed fire and
smoke, or sat still and silent in the cavernous roundhouse, waiting
patiently to have bolts tightened, or leaks soldered, so that they might
go on with their work. They did not frighten him as they might have
frightened some children: they seemed ferocious but friendly, like great
ungainly dogs. They terrified him less than Uncle Elmer or the preacher,
Mr. Temple. (Mr. Temple was gone now and another younger, more flowery
man named Castor had taken his place.)
By some miracle he had been able to keep his secret from his mother and
continued, even when he was grown, to wander about for hours among the
clanging wheels and screaming whistles during his holidays from the
theological seminary. Some childish cunning had made him understand that
she must never know of these strange expeditions, lest she forbid them.
She was always so terrified lest something happen to him.
In all his childhood he could remember having had only two friends--one
of them, McTavish, the undertaker, was kept as much a secret as the
friendly locomotives had been; for Philip, even as a child, understood
that there was something about the fat, jovial man which Emma detested
with a wild, unreasonable fury.
The other was the black-haired, blue-eyed, tomboyish Mary Watts, who
lived a dozen blocks away in a more fashionable part of Town where each
house had its big stables and its negro coachmen and stable boys. She
was older than he by nearly two years, and much stronger: she detested
girls as poor weak things who liked starched skirts and dickies of white
duck that were instruments of torture to any one who liked climbing and
snowball fights. So she had recruited Philip to play on the tin roof of
the carriage shed and build the house high up in the branches of the
crabapple tree. He always felt sorry for her because she had no mother,
but he saw, too, with a childish clarity, that it was an advantage to be
able to do exactly as you pleased, and build the tree-house as high in
the air as you liked, far up among the shiny little red apples where it
made you thrillingly sick to look over the edge.
But this friendship was throttled suddenly on the day (it was Philip’s
twelfth birthday) they went to play in the hay-loft. They had been
digging in the fragrant hay and building tunnels, and feeling suddenly
tired and hot, they lay down side by side, near the open door. In the
heat, Philip, feeling drowsy, closed his eyes and listened to the
whirring of the pigeons that haunted the old stable, happy, contented
and pleased in a warm, vague way to be lying there beside his friend
Mary, when suddenly he heard his mother’s hearty voice, and, opening his
eyes, saw her standing at the top of the stairs. He could see that she
was angry. She said, “Philip, come home at once--and you, Mary, go right
in to your aunt. You ought to be ashamed of yourself!”
She swept him off without another word and at home she shut him in the
storeroom, where she talked to him for an hour. She told him he had done
a shameful thing, that boys who behaved like that got a disease and
turned black. She said that he was never to go again to Mary Watts’
house or even to speak to her. She told him that because he had no
father she must be both father and mother to him, and that she must be
able to trust him in the hours when she was forced to be at the bakery
earning money to feed and clothe them both.
When she had finished, Philip was trembling, though he did not cry,
because men didn’t behave like babies. He told her he was sorry and
promised never to speak to Mary Watts again.
And then she locked him in for an hour to ponder what she had said. He
didn’t know what it was he had done: he only felt shameful and dirty in
a way he had never felt before, and terrified by a fear of turning black
like those nigger boys who lived in the filthy houses along the creek by
the Mills.
When Emma came back to release him from the storeroom prison, she
forgave him and, taking him in her arms, kissed and fondled him for a
long time, saying, “And when you’re a big boy and grown up, your mother
will always be your girl, won’t she?”
She seemed so pleasant and so happy, it was almost worth the blind pain
to be able to repent and make promises. But he never had the fun of
playing again with Mary Watts. He went back to his beloved engines.
Sometimes he played ball, and he played well when he chose, for he was a
smallish, muscular boy, all nerves, who was good at games; but they
never interested him. It was as if he wanted always to be alone. He had
had friends, but the friendships had ended quickly, as if he had come to
the bottom of them too soon. As a little boy there was always an odd,
quizzical, affectionate look in his eye, and there were times when,
dreaming, he would wander away into mazes of thought with a perpetual
air of searching for something. He, himself, never knew what it was.
And then at seventeen, taciturn, lonely and confused, he had stumbled
upon God. The rest was easy for Emma, especially when Naomi came
unexpectedly into their lives. Sometimes, in bitter moments, she had
thought of Philip as a symbol of vengeance upon his errant father: she
had kept him pure and uncontaminated by the world. She had made of him a
model for all the world to observe.
5
When, on the morning after his return, Philip went out of the door of
the slate-colored house, and down the walk through the drifted snow, he
knew suddenly that he was more lonely, more aimless than he had ever
been. The blizzard was over, and the sky lay cold and gray above the
curtain of everlasting smoke. At the gate he hesitated for a moment,
wondering which way he would turn; and then abruptly he knew that it
made no difference; there was no one that he wanted to see, no one with
whom he could talk. He knew that in the house behind him there were two
women who thought it shameful for him to be seen at all in the streets.
They had even hoped, no doubt, that he would not show himself so soon.
Even people who knew the story Emma had told of illness and wounds and a
holiday, would think that he ought to have stuck at his post and fought
it out there.
People, he knew--at least the people of their sort who were
church-goers--were like that: they were willing to pile glory upon
visiting missionaries, but they gave money grudgingly and expected
missionaries to stick to their tasks. The money they gave warmed their
hearts with a wicked Roman Catholic sense of comforts bought in Heaven.
They would think he ought not to have returned until he had earned a
proper holiday. For himself he did not care, especially since he knew he
was far more wicked than they imagined, but with his mother and Naomi it
was different. At the sight of Naomi, sitting pale and miserable across
the table from him at breakfast, he had been stricken suddenly with one
of those odd twinges of pity which sometimes delivered him into her
hands, bound and helpless. When he thought of it now--how near he had
been to yielding--he was frightened. Such odd, small things could turn a
whole life upon a new path.
He closed the gate and turned towards the left, without thinking why he
had chosen that direction until he found himself turning down the long
hill to the Flats. He was going towards his beloved locomotives exactly
as he had done a dozen years earlier when he could think of no one he
wanted to see in all the Town; and suddenly he was almost happy, as if
he were a boy of twelve once more, and not a man of twenty-six who had
lost more than ten precious years of life.
It struck him, as he waded through heaps of snow already blackened by
soot, that the Town had changed: it was not, in some subtle way, the
same place. Where once it had seemed a dull, ugly Town, friendly
because it was so familiar, it now seemed rather exciting and lively,
and even thrilling. It was so alive, so busy, so filled with energy. As
he descended the hill the impression grew in intensity. The pounding of
the Mills, the leaping red flames above the furnace chimneys, the
rumbling, half-muffled clamor of the great locomotives--all these things
gave him a sudden, tremendous feeling of life. He saw for the first
time, though he had passed them a thousand times in his life, those long
rows of black houses where the mill-workers lived huddled together in
squalor. He saw one or two sickly geraniums behind the glass, a crimson
featherbed hung from a window, a line of bright clothes all dancing
frozen and stiff as dead men in the cold wind.