the insult to his mother. He tried to get up, but he only knocked his
glass on the floor, and then fell down beside it. He tried again to
rise, and then Hennessey, cursing, bent over and picked him up as if
he’d been a child, and carried him, plowing through the heat and
confusion, out the swinging doors. In the open air, he placed him on his
feet, holding him upright for a moment till he got a sense of his
balance. Then, giving him a little push, he said, “There now. Run along
home to your Ma like a good little boy. Tell her not to let her little
tin Jesus come back again to Hennessey’s place if she don’t want him
messed up too much to be a good missionary.”
14
In the slate-colored house, the Minerva Circle was seated on the
collapsible chairs from McTavish’s, listening to a paper by Mrs. Wilbert
Phipps on her visit to the Mammoth Caves of Kentucky. To overcome the
boredom, some thought about their children and their husbands, or even
the hired girl, filling in the time until the dreary reading was over,
and they might fall back again into gossip and recipes and children’s
ailments. It was the price they paid for the honor which came to each of
them every eighteen months of standing before the Minerva Circle and
reading a paper to which no one listened.
The folding-doors between the parlor and the sitting-room had been
opened and those leading from the parlor to the hall were closed.
Upstairs Naomi lay in bed with her hair still in steel curlers: she was
too ill to come down. She had wept hysterically all the night and most
of the morning. When Emma had tried to comfort her with vague, soothing
words about matrimony, nothing had made any difference. It was only Aunt
Mabelle’s visit, colored by great chunks of wisdom and frankness drawn
from her own experience and conferences with many other married ladies
upon a subject which she always found absorbing, that reduced Naomi at
length to a calmer state of mind. And Mabelle was sitting by her now,
nursing the baby, and pouring forth details of her own history, in an
effort to forestall fresh outbursts.
Downstairs, in the dining-room and kitchen, Emma bustled about, scolding
the slattern Essie, and thinking that it was just like Naomi to have
chosen such a busy and awkward occasion for following her advice. So
Emma had to look after all the refreshments herself. She was putting out
the plates of fruit salad on the dining-room table, when she heard the
knob of the front door turn. Pausing in her work, she saw the door open,
gently and carefully, as Philip entered. His foot caught on the carpet,
he tripped and fell.
In the next moment she knew. He was drunk. He couldn’t get to his feet.
Behind the closed doors of the parlor the thin, refined voice of Mrs.
Wilbert Phipps was saying, “And then the guide caught some fish in a net
and showed them to us. They proved most interesting, as they were quite
without eyes, and therefore blind. It seems that living so long in the
darkness the eyes shriveled up in succeeding generations until they
disappeared. I remember saying to Wilbert: ‘Think of it! These fish are
quite blind!’”
Philip, struggling to his feet, heard the word “blind.” “Yes, I was
blind too. But I’m not any longer. Naomi made a man of me. She made a
man of me.”
He laughed wildly, and Emma, clapping a hand over his mouth, put her arm
about his shoulders and guided him up the stairs. She helped to undress
him and put him to bed. She knew all the little knacks of doing it: she
had learned long ago by caring for his father.
He didn’t speak to her again, and buried his face in the pillow, biting
into it with his strong, even teeth.
Belowstairs, Mrs. Wilbert Phipps was finishing her paper. “And so,” she
was saying in the flat voice she adopted for such occasions, “that was
the visit that Mr. Phipps and I made to the Mammoth Cave. It was most
interesting and not expensive. I advise you ladies all to make it at the
earliest opportunity. We can never know enough of the geographical
marvels of this, the greatest, freest and most noble nation under the
protection of God.”
Emma got down just in time. She congratulated Mrs. Phipps on the
fascination of her paper, and regretted being able to hear only a little
of it, but what she heard made her want to hear more: it was so
fascinating. She did not say that the only part she heard was a sentence
or two dealing with blind fishes.
It was Aunt Mabelle who “brought Naomi round.” She had that quality of
soft, insensitive people which, if allowed to expose itself long enough,
becomes in the end irresistible. Aunt Mabelle was in her way a
philosopher, possessing indeed even the physical laziness which gives
birth to reflection. She was neither happy nor unhappy, but lived in a
state of strange, cowlike contentment, which knew neither heights nor
depressions. She was surprised at nothing, and through her long
rocking-chair contemplation upon life and love, birth and death, she had
shared the confidences of so many women that such behavior as Naomi’s
did not strike her as remarkable, but only to be listed in the vast
category of human folly.
“Don’t think you’re remarkable or different,” she told Naomi. “You’re
just like any other woman.”
It was Aunt Mabelle who led Naomi into the routine of matrimony as a
tried and experienced working elephant leads another, freshly captured,
into the routine of piling teak logs and pushing carts. She made it all
seem the most natural thing in the world.
But it was only after a week of hiding and of sudden outbursts of tears
that Naomi returned to Philip--a new and uncomplaining Naomi curiously
broken and acquiescent. Aunt Mabelle noticed the difference with the
little round blue eyes that seemed too stupid and sleepy to notice
anything; she saw that something very odd had happened to Naomi: nothing
that was very odd in her (Mabelle’s) experience in such cases, but odd
only because it had happened to Naomi. It was as if she had found
suddenly some reason for existence in a world where before she had no
place, as if she enjoyed this newly discovered marital relationship.
Emma, too, noticed the difference--that Naomi began to take an interest
in her appearance, and even went so far as to buy some ribbons and bits
of lace which she sewed awkwardly on her somber woolen dresses. Her
anemic cheeks at moments even showed the shadow of color. She went
almost briskly to her choir rehearsals and made a feeble attempt at
resuming her manufacture of calico mother-hubbards.
It was, thought Emma, working itself out. She was not one to discuss
such things, and yet she knew that Naomi had followed her advice. Why,
Naomi was almost like a bride. She was certain in the end to gain a hold
over Philip, for he was not the sort whose eye wandered: he never looked
at another woman. He wasn’t like his father. Emma told herself these
things twenty times a day. (And she knew things which she would never
admit knowing.) If things went well, he was certain to come round in the
end, for there was nothing like a wife and family to bring a man to his
senses. When he was older and perhaps Bishop of East Africa, and the
youngest bishop of the church, he would thank his mother for all her
strength of will. He would look back and understand then how right she
had been at the time when, for a moment, his foot had strayed from the
path. Then God would bring her her just reward.
There was one thing she did not understand--the intoxication of Philip.
At first she succumbed to righteous fury, filled with a wild desire to
punish him by shutting him in the storeroom as she had done when he was
a little boy. All the night after she had helped him up the stairs, she
lay awake, pondering what she should do. The thing had frightened her in
a fashion she did not understand: it was an event which seemed to thrust
upward out of the shadowy depths of heritage, imperiling all her
carefully made plans. It gave her for the first time a sense of awe for
her son, because it opened vistas of behavior of which she did not
believe him, a boy so carefully brought up, capable. It was this fear
which led her into paths of caution, and prevented her from pouring out
a torrent of reproach. When a week passed and then another without any
repetition of the disgraceful episode, she settled back into her old
sense of confident security. Philip was her boy, after all. She could
trust him. And fortunately no one had seen him drunk; no one knew.
But it troubled her that he never spoke of it. His silence hurt her.
Always he had told her everything, shared all his secrets and plans with
her, and now he shut her out of everything. He was polite and kind to
herself and to Naomi, but he never told them anything.
Still, he seemed to be less restless now, even if he was more silent. He
was beginning, she thought, to soften a little. In the end, when it was
all settled and he had returned to the arms of the Lord, she could
perhaps sell her restaurant business and give herself over completely to
missionary work and her clubs.
It wasn’t that she had given up the idea of matrimony; it was only that
she had laid it aside for the moment, since Moses Slade had said nothing
in the least definite. He had been encouraging, and very friendly; he
had taken her at her word and come to have his meals at the restaurant.
On the occasion of his third visit, she said, “Perhaps you’d rather eat
in my corner? A man like you, who is so prominent, is always stared at
so.”
So he had come to take his meals in the corner behind the screen,
arriving after one, so that he never interfered with the family lunch of
Philip, Naomi and herself. Sometimes she sat with him while he ate great
plates of meat and potatoes and huge slices of pies. He was a vigorous
man and an enormous eater. They talked usually of politics, and she
thought more than once, “Of course, some people might think such a
marriage undignified, but it wouldn’t matter, because of all the
influence I’d have. As the wife of a Congressman in Washington, I’d be a
power for good.”
They returned sometimes to the subject of their widowhood and
loneliness, and once he seemed almost on the verge of speaking, when she
was called to the telephone to speak to Mrs. Wilbert Phipps about her
paper.
After a time she again urged him not to pay for his meals. It would be a
pleasure, she said, to have such a distinguished man as her guest. One
meal more or less meant nothing in the ocean of her prosperity. But he
was wily and insisted that he could not impose upon her generosity. And
then one morning she received from him a letter, saying that he had been
called back to Washington suddenly, and would not be able to see her
before leaving. He said nothing of marriage; it was a very polite, but a
very cautious letter. And Emma resolved to put him out of her mind, and
never again to ask him to have his meals at the Peerless Restaurant.
15
When Philip awoke to the sound of the alarm-clock on the night that
followed the scene in the hall, he was quite sober again, though his
head ached horribly. He was alone in the darkness and suffered from a
wretched feeling of shame. It was as if he had plunged into some pit of
filth which still clung to him, despite all the washing in the world. It
was a conviction of shame, almost of sin, stronger than he had known
since, as a little boy, he had listened to one of Emma’s terrifying
lectures upon purity and the future life. It concerned what had happened
on the night before in this very room, it concerned Hennessey’s saloon,
and the memory of Hennessey’s hard voice, “Go on home to your Ma!” and
the vague memory of something which had happened in the hall while a
voice said something about blindness. He wakened in the exact position
in which he had fallen asleep, with his face half-buried in the pillows.
He was dirty and unshaven. Slowly he remembered the events of the day
before, one by one, but, fitting them together, he could not see how
they had brought him here, soiled and filled with a sense of horror.
While he dressed, he tried to fathom what it was that had caused a
collapse so sudden and complete, and it seemed to him that it all had
very little to do with the chain of things that had happened yesterday;
it lay deeper than that. It went back and back into the past. There were
moments when it seemed to him that he had been moving towards this night
ever since he had been born. It was as if he had no power because he did
not even know what it was.
At the Mills, Sokoleff and Finke and Krylenko were already by the oven.
They greeted him, as they always did, without comment. Of his
drunkenness they said nothing, Sokoleff and Finke perhaps because they
were themselves too drunk to have noticed it. He had arrived, sober and
ashamed, with the fear that they would use it as an excuse of coarse
jokes. And now they did not even remember. For them a thing like that
was part of the day’s business, just as rabbit-like love and its various
counterfeits were things which one took for granted.
He didn’t talk to them, even while they all sat eating their lunches. It
was as if something had robbed him of the very power of speech. And he
felt that they were more remote now and strange than they had ever been,
even on the first night he had come there to work by the glowing ovens.
Only Krylenko seemed to understand anything at all. He laughed, and
said, “You feel pretty bad after yesterday. Well ... you’ll sweat it
out. You get over it quick like that. You can drink like a hog but you
sweat it all out right away.”
He grinned feebly and said nothing, but he remembered what Krylenko had
said, “You ain’t like those other fellows.” It was true: he wasn’t like
them, and at the moment he wanted to be like them more than all else on
earth. It seemed to him that salvation lay in drinking like a hog and
living like a rabbit. He couldn’t do it, because something walled him in
and shut him away from that fierce turbulent current of life which he
felt all about him and could never enter. It was the old hunger, more
clear now and understandable, which had driven him to the Mills, seizing
him on the night he stood on the Hill looking down upon the miraculous
beauty of the Flats at night.
He knew now that he wasn’t even free. Naomi hadn’t freed him after all,
and his celebration had been all for nothing, a bitter joke. He was
still the same, only with a strange sense of having been soiled. Weary
and sick and disgusted, he felt suddenly like a little child who wanted
comforting, only it never occurred to him now to turn to his mother as
he had once done. Something had happened, some mysterious snapping of
the bonds which bound them together. He found himself wishing with a
passionate feeling of self-reproach that he might not see her again. It
was partly shame and partly because his love for her had vanished in
some inexplicable fashion. It struck him with horror that he had no love
any longer either for her or for Naomi. The one he respected because he
owed her so much: she was so much stronger and more valiant than
himself. The other he pitied because he understood through pitying
himself that she, too, must be miserable.
He worked on in silence passionately, straining in every muscle, shoving
and pushing the hot steel, until the patches of soot in the sides of the
shed began to turn gray with the light of dawn. The sweat that streamed
down his body seemed in some way to purify his soul, and at last he grew
so weary that all his troubles seemed to lose themselves in the terrible
heat and clamor of the pounding hammers.
Only one thing remained in his weary mind, and that was a fierce desire
to see Mary Conyngham. If he saw her, he would have peace, because she
would understand. She seemed to him like a cool lake into which he could
plunge, bathing his whole soul, and his body too, for he understood now
what love could be if the woman was Mary Conyngham. _Naomi had made a
man of him._ ...
But it was impossible ever to see her again, because he had nothing to
offer her. He belonged now to Naomi, beyond all doubt. Naomi was his
wife, she might even be the mother of his child. What could he offer to
Mary Conyngham?
For Emma had done her work well. Her son _was_ a decent sort, and not at
all like his father.
In the weeks that followed he did not see Mary Conyngham. As if she had
understood what happened during that walk into the open country, she
sent him the paints she had bought, with a little note asking him to
take them as a present from her on his return from Africa. She sent them
to him at the Mills by the hand of Krylenko, and so put an end to the
shameful hope that he would see her when she returned. It was marvelous
how well she understood, and yet the very knowledge of her understanding
made it all the more unbearable, for it was as if she said, “I know
what has happened,” and tragically, in the voice that seemed so much
sadder than it had once been, “There’s nothing to be done.”
He kept the box of paints and brushes at Krylenko’s boarding-house where
he came to be regarded with a kind of awe by the Ukranians as an odd
mixture of artist and lunatic. Without thinking why, he kept the whole
affair a secret from Naomi and his mother. He told them that the
afternoons when he worked, painting and rubbing out, painting and
rubbing out, among the rows of dirty houses, were spent in walking or
doing extra work at the Mills. It became slowly a sort of passion into
which he poured his whole existence. It was only in those hours when he
worked horribly to put on bits of canvas and wood that strange, smoky
glamour which he found in the Flats, that he was able to forget Mary
Conyngham and the dull sordid sense of uneasiness which enveloped all
his existence in the slate-colored house. No one save Krylenko saw
anything he painted, and Krylenko liked it all, good, bad and
indifferent, with all the overwhelming vitality of his friendly nature.
(He had come in a way to treat Philip as a child under his special
protection.) Sometimes he puzzled his head over the great messes of
black and gray and blue, but he saw, oddly enough, what Philip was
driving at.
“Yes,” he’d say, rubbing his nose with his huge hands. “It’s like that
... that’s the way it _feels_. That’s what you’re after, ain’t it?”
He never went again to Hennessey’s saloon, although the memory of
Hennessey’s epithet clung and rankled in his brain. “I don’t want to get
mixed up with that hell-cat.” He could, he thought, go and shoot
Hennessey, but no good would come of it; nothing would be accomplished,
and life would only become more horrible and complicated. He couldn’t
fight Hennessey, for the Irishman could break him across his knee. Once,
a long while ago, when he was a boy, he would have flung himself at
Hennessey, kicking and biting and punching, to avenge the insult to his
mother, but all that seemed to belong vaguely to another life which no
longer had anything to do with him. The epithet festered in his brain
because there were times when it led to horrible doubts about his
mother--that perhaps she wasn’t, after all, so good and noble and
self-sacrificing. It gave him a sudden, terrifying glimpse of what she
must seem to others outside that circle in which she moved and had her
whole existence. But that was only because they didn’t know her as he
knew her ... for the good woman she was. At moments he even felt a
fierce resentment toward her because she stood somehow between him and
that rich savor of life which he felt all about him. If she had not
existed he could have gone to Hennessey’s place as much as he liked,
drinking as much as he pleased. He could have come nearer to Sokoleff
and Finke and even Krylenko.
She must be a powerful woman when a man like Hennessey feared her....
Hennessey, he thought sometimes, who was like some beast out of that
other cruel jungle at Megambo.
As he lost himself more and more deeply in the effort to catch in color
the weird fascination of the world about him, the anguish of the life at
Megambo began to fade into the shadows of the existence which had
belonged to that other Philip, who began to seem so strange and
distant. Sometimes, the sight of his mother returning from church, or
the sound of Naomi pounding the tinny piano and singing revival hymns in
her loud voice (as if she were trying to recapture some of her past
glory), brought to his mind a sharp picture of the other Philip, pale
and shy and silent, dressed always in dark clothes--a Philip who
worshipped a mother who was never wrong and respected a wife who had no
fear of the jungle; and the picture gave him an odd flash of pity, as if
the image had been that of some stranger. His life now wasn’t exactly
happy, but it was better than the life of that other Philip, for now he
stood with his feet fairly planted on the ground; it was an existence
that was real, in which he was aware of a sinfulness that was really a
temptation toward sin. He wasn’t tortured any longer by battling with
shadows. There were times when he was forced to laugh (a trifle
bitterly) at the memory of a Philip who had suffered at his own doubts
and agonies over the awful prospect of turning his back upon the church.
It was finished, but no one would believe him, no one, except Mary
Conyngham.
He came to accept the attentions of Naomi, for he could not see what
else there was to do, and after a time it became a relationship which he
managed to fit into the scheme of things as he went to work seven days a
week and ate three meals a day; but there was no joy in it, save that
obscure satisfaction which came of knowing that like other men he had a
woman who belonged to him.
They never spoke of it to each other: it was a thing which happened
silently in the night, as if they both were ashamed, and afterward
Philip still had the strange feeling that in some way he had been
soiled. It was, after all, exactly such a relationship as he might have
had with any of the women in Franklin Street. If it was different, it
was only because Naomi was in love with him, and this love of hers
sometimes frightened him, because it made him more than ever her
prisoner. There sometimes came into her eyes that same look of shining
rapture that he had seen there in the days when she was giving her life
to God at Megambo. You could see it in the way she watched him. Yet the
word love had never been spoken between them, and the possibility of
children had never been uttered.
It was as if all her adoration of God had been turned upon Philip.
Presently he began to drink, taking a glass on his way to work, and
another on his way home, but he did not go to drink with any of the men
from his own furnace. He did not go to Hennessey’s; he went to a saloon
where the back room was filled with Polish girls and no one had ever
heard of Emma. The whisky made him feel jolly and forget the
slate-colored house. He got there the feeling that he was himself,
Philip Downes, for the first time in his life, as if at last he had been
completely born. No one in the place had ever heard of the other Philip.
It was only an illusion which came to him while the alcohol had
possession of his brain, and so he came to drink more and more regularly
because it made him happy. With a glass or two he was able to forget the
life he shared with Naomi.
16
He was sitting one afternoon in Krylenko’s room working on a view of the
Flats which included the oily creek, a row of battered houses, and a
glimpse of furnaces. For two days he had worked on it, and out of the
lines and color there began to emerge something which he recognized with
a faint sense of excitement as the thing he had been searching for. It
grew slowly with each stroke of the brush, a quality which he could not
have described, but something which he felt passionately. He was
beginning a little to succeed, to do something which he would want to
show, not to the world, but to ... to ... Mary Conyngham. He would send
it to her as a gift, without a word. Certainly she wouldn’t mind that.
She would understand it as she understood all else. As he worked, his
passion for painting and his love for Mary Conyngham became in a strange
fashion blended and inextricable. It was as if he were talking to her
with the line and color, telling her all the choked, overpowering, hot
emotions that were kindled when he thought of her.