the usual stir was silenced suddenly by Emma’s rich voice. She had risen
to her feet at the back of the room and was standing with her hands
clasped on the back of the chair before her.
“Brothers and sisters,” she was saying, in a voice rich with emotion, “I
know that all of you feel for me in the illness of my son. I have felt
for some time that I should speak to you about him” (here, overcome by
feeling, she coughed and hesitated) “to make an answer to the talk that
has come to my ear from time to time. I feel that to-night--to-night is
the time--the occasion ordained by God. I have very little to say. You
know that his health has been wrecked forever by his work among our
ignorant, sinful brothers in Africa. He is lying at the point of death.
Your prayers have touched me to the depths of my heart, and if it is
God’s will, surely they will help towards his recovery.” (Here she
hesitated once more.) “People wondered why he came back. It was because
his health was ruined. People wondered why he went into the Flats to
work. It was because he wanted to know the life there. He has been
through a great spiritual struggle. He fell ill because he was tormented
by the wish to go back to his post, to those ignorant black men who live
in darkness. If he recovers ...” (her voice broke suddenly) “if he
recovers ... he can never go back. The doctors have told me that it
would be nothing short of suicide. He has given his health, perhaps his
life, in carrying forward our great purpose of sending the light to
heathen.”
She hesitated for a moment as if she meant to say more, and then sat
down abruptly, too overcome for speech. For a moment there was silence,
and then one by one women began to gather about her, sobbing, to offer
comfort. It was a touching scene, in which Emma managed to control
herself after a time. Surrounding her, they moved out of the church in a
sort of phalanx. Two or three of them even followed her a little way
down the street. But it was her brother, Elmer, who accompanied her
home. In his stiff, cold way he proposed to let bygones be bygones.
“At a time like this,” he said, “it’s not right for a brother and sister
to quarrel.” And then, after an awkward silence, “I’ve no doubt that
when Philip is well again, he’ll come to his senses and behave himself.”
He stopped at the slate-colored house for Aunt Mabelle, who had come
over to sit with Naomi, and before they left, all of them, even Naomi,
seemed to have changed in some way, to have grown more cheerful, as if
the Heavenly joy of the prayer-meeting still clung like perfume to their
very garments. Things, they all felt, were beginning to work themselves
out.
18
When he had closed the roll-top desk in his study and locked the door
after him, the Reverend Castor turned his steps toward the parsonage,
still lost in the exalted mood which, descending miraculously upon the
congregation, had risen to a climax in the noble words of Mrs. Downes.
There was a lump in his throat when he thought of the goodness of women
like her. She’d had a hard life, bringing up her boy, feeding and
clothing him, and finding time, nevertheless, to care for his soul and
give herself to church work. It was women like her who helped you to
keep your faith, no matter what discouragements arose.
For a moment, a suspicion of disloyalty colored his meditations and he
thought, “If I had only been blessed with a wife like Emma Downes!”
But quickly he stifled the thought, for such wickedness came to him far
too often, especially in the moments when he relaxed and allowed his
mind to go its own way. The thing seemed always to be lying in wait,
like a crouching animal stealing upon him unawares. “If only I’d had
some other woman for a wife!” The thing had grown bolder and more
frequent as the years piled up. He would be fifty years old in another
month. It kept pressing in upon him like the pain of an aching tooth.
Soon he’d be too old to care. And he would die, having missed something
which other men knew. He was growing older every day, every minute,
every second ... older, older, older.
In a sudden terror, he began to repeat one of the Psalms in order to
clear his mind and put to rout the grinning, malicious thought. He said
the Psalm over three times, and then found that God had sent him
strength. Walking the dark, silent street, he told himself that there
were others far worse off than he. There was poor Naomi Downes with the
husband she worshipped dying hourly, day and night, in the very house
with her. She, too, had courage, though she wasn’t as strong as her
mother-in-law. She wasn’t perhaps as fine a character as Emma, but there
was something more appealing about her, a weakness and a youth that
touched your pity. It was terrible to see a young girl like that with
her husband dying and a baby coming on. He remembered that he must go
again to-morrow and pray with her. It was odd (he thought) how little
prayer seemed to comfort her--a girl like that who was a missionary and
the daughter of missionaries. He must have a talk with her and try to
help her.... She seemed to be losing her great faith....
He was on the front porch of the parsonage now, turning his key in the
lock, and something of the wild emotion of the prayer-meeting still
clung to him. It had been a glorious success. He was still thinking of
Naomi as he closed the door, and heard a whining voice from the top of
the stairs.
“Is that you, Samuel?”
He waited for a moment and then answered, “Yes, my dear.”
“What kept you so late? I’ve been frightened to death. The house was
full of noises and I heard some one walking about in the parlor.”
“We prayed for Philip Downes,” he said, turning out the light.
The whining voice from above-stairs took on an acid edge. “And you never
thought about your poor suffering wife at home all alone. I suppose it
never occurs to you to pray for _me_!”
He stood in the darkness, waiting, unwilling to climb the stairs until
her complaints had worn themselves out. The voice again: “Samuel, are
you there?”
“Yes, Annie.”
“Why don’t you answer me? Isn’t it enough to have to lie here helpless
and miserable?”
“I was turning out the light.”
“Well, I want the hot-water bottle. You’ll have to heat water. And make
it hot, not just lukewarm. It’s worse again. It’s never been so bad.”
As he went off to the kitchen, fragments of her plaints followed him: “I
should think you’d have remembered about the hot-water bottle!” And, “If
you’d had such pain as mine for fifteen years....”
Yes, fifteen years!
For fifteen years it had been like this. The old wicked thought came
stealing back into his mind. If only he had a wife like Emma Downes or
her daughter-in-law, Naomi ... some one young like Naomi. He was growing
older, older, older....
He began again to repeat the Psalm, saying it aloud while he waited by
the stove for the kettle to boil.
19
In the Flats the number of deaths began to mount one by one with the
passing of each day. When disease appeared in any of the black, decaying
houses, it had its way, taking now a child, now a wife, now a husband,
for bodies that were overworked and undernourished had small chance of
life in a region where the very air stank and the only stream was simply
an open sewer. Doctors came and went, sometimes too carelessly, for
there was small chance of pay, and to the people on the Hill the life of
a worker was worth little. The creatures of the Flats were somehow only
a sort of mechanical animal which produced and produced and went on
producing.
The churches went on sending missionaries and money to the most remote
corners of the earth; the clergymen prayed for the safety of their own
flocks, while their congregations sat frightened and resentful,
believing that somehow the people in the Flats had caused the
catastrophe. It could not be (they reasoned) that God would send such a
calamity upon a Town so God-fearing.
Irene Shane and Mary Conyngham closed their school because there was no
longer any time to teach when people were ill and dying to right and
left. Mary sat night after night at the beds of the dying. She saw one
of Finke’s thirteen children die and then another and another. She
listened to his cursing and drunken talk of revolution, and all the
while she knew bitterly enough that those of the family who remained
would be happier because they would have more to eat.
The Mills went on pounding and pounding; they were building new furnaces
and new sheds. There seemed no end to it. It did not matter if people in
the Flats died like flies, because there were always more where they
came from--hordes of men and women and children who came filled with
glorified hopes to this new country.
One day Mary read in the papers that the man who owned the Mills,
himself a German immigrant, had built himself a marble palace on Fifth
Avenue and would now divide his time between Pittsburgh and New York. He
was becoming a gentleman: he had engaged an expert, a cultivated man of
taste, to fill his New York house with pictures brought from Europe. The
Town _Gazette_ printed an editorial drawing a moral from the career of
the great magnate. See what could be done in this great land of
God-given opportunity! A man who had begun as an immigrant. But it said
nothing of the foundations on which the marble palace rested. It
appeared to have arisen miraculously with the aid and sanction of God,
innocent of all connection with the stinking Flats.
Mary, watching the spectacle about her, felt her heart turning to stone.
If she was to be saved from bitterness, it would only be, she believed,
through the touching faith of the ignorant wretches about her. She came
to feel a sympathy for the cursing of a man like Finke: she herself even
wanted at times to curse. She understood the sullen drunkenness of men
like Sokoleff. What else was there for them to do? Something--perhaps a
sense of dull misery, perhaps a terror of death--had slowly softened
their resentment toward herself and Irene Shane. Once they had been
looked upon as intruders come down from the Hills to poke about in
filthy hallways and backyards filled with piles of rubbish and rows of
privies. But it was no longer possible to doubt them. The two women,
gently bred and fastidious, slept night after night at the school in the
midst of the Flats. They sat up night after night by the beds of the
dying.
There were times when Mary wondered why Irene Shane poured out all her
strength in succoring these wretched people. She sensed deep in Irene a
strange kind of unearthly mysticism which made her seem at times
stubborn and irritable. It was a mysticism strangely akin to that
groping hunger which had always tormented Philip. The likeness came to
her suddenly one night as she sat by the bed of one of Finke’s dying
children. It seemed to her a strange and inexplicable likeness in people
so different. Yet it was true--they were both concerned with shadowy
problems of faith and service to God which never troubled the more
practical Mary. And Irene, she fancied, was prey to a sense of
atonement, as if she must in some way answer to God for the wickedness
of a father long dead and a sister who was, as the Town phrased it, “not
all she should have been.” There was, too, that hard, bitter old woman
who lay dying and never left Shane’s Castle--old Julia Shane, the queen
ant of all the swarming hive.
As for herself, Mary knew well enough why she had come to work in the
Flats: she had come in order to bury herself in some task so mountainous
and hopeless that it would help her to forget the aching hurt made by
John Conyngham’s behavior with Mamie Rhodes. It required a cure far more
vigorous even than a house and two children to make her forget a thing
like that.
She had been, people said, a fool to put up with such behavior. But what
was she to do? There were the children and there was her own devotion to
John Conyngham, a thing which he had thrown carelessly aside. It wasn’t
even as if you suffered in secret: in the Town a thing like that
couldn’t be kept a secret. The very newsboys knew of it. She had found a
sort of salvation in working with Irene Shane. People said she was
crazy, a woman with two small children, to go about working among
Hunkies and Dagoes; but she took good care of her children, too, and she
supplied the people in the Flats with what no amount of such mystical
devotion as Irene Shane could supply: she had a sound practical head.
She was an odd girl (she thought) when you came to consider it, with a
kind of curse on her. She had to have some one to whom she could give
herself up completely, pouring out all the soul in a fantastic devotion.
John Conyngham had tired of it, perhaps (she sometimes thought) because
he was a cold, hard, sensual man who had no need for such a thing. A
woman like Mamie Rhodes (she thought bitterly) suited him better. If she
had been married to Philip, who needed it so pathetically....
In the long nights of vigil, she thought round and round in circles,
over the same paths again and again.... And before many nights had
passed she found herself coming back always to the thing she knew and
tried constantly to forget ... that it had been Philip whom she loved
always, since those very first days in the tree-house. It seemed to her
that at twenty-eight her life, save for her children, was already at an
end. She was a widow with only memories of an unhappy married life
behind her and nothing to hope for in the future. Philip was married
and, so Krylenko told her, about to have a child of his own. She didn’t
even know whether he even thought of her. And yet, she told herself,
fiercely, _she did know_. He had belonged to her always, and she knew it
more than ever while they had sat on the bridge, during that solitary
walk into the open country.
Philip was _hers_, and he was such a fool that he would never know it.
He was always lost in mooning about things that didn’t matter. _She_
could save him: she could set straight his muddles and moonings. He
needed some one who thought less of God and more of making a good pie
and keeping his socks darned.
She herself had never thought much about God save when her children were
born and her husband died, and even then she had been only brushed by a
consciousness of some vast and overwhelming personal force. Life, even
with its pain, seemed a satisfactory affair: there was always so much to
be done, and it wasn’t God that Philip needed but pies and socks and a
woman who believed in him.
She knew every day whether he was better or worse and she found herself,
for the first time in all her life, praying to God to spare his life.
She didn’t know whether there was a God or whether He would listen to
one who only petitioned when she was in need, but she prayed none the
less, believing that if there was any God, He would understand why it
was she turned to Him. If He did not understand, she told herself
rebelliously, then He was not worthy of existing as God.
She did not go to the slate-colored house, though she did ask for news
on one occasion when she met Emma in the street. She understood that
Emma had resented her friendship for Philip, even when they were
children, and so avoided seeming to show any great interest. But she
heard, nevertheless, sometimes from Krylenko who had even gone to the
door to inquire, and sometimes from the doctor, but most of the time it
was McTavish who kept her informed.
McTavish was the only person whom she suspected of guessing her secret.
After she had stopped day after day at his undertaking-parlors, he
looked at her sharply one day out of his humorous little blue eyes, and
said, “If Philip gets better, we’ve got to help him.” Then he hesitated
for a moment and added, “Those two women are very bad for him.”
He was, she understood, feeling his way. When she agreed, by not
protesting, he went on, “You ought to have married him, Mary, when you
had a chance.”
“I never had a chance.”
“I thought perhaps you had.... I understand. She began her dirty work
too soon.”
Mary knew well enough whom he meant by “she.” It struck her that he
seemed to hate Emma Downes with an extraordinary intensity.
“Still it may work out yet,” he said. “Sometimes things like that are a
little better for waiting.”
She did not answer him, but spoke about the weather, and thanked him and
said good-by, but she felt a sudden warmth take possession of all her
body. “_Still it may work out yet._” He never spoke of it again, but
when she came in on her way up the hill, he always looked at her in the
same eloquent fashion. It was odd, too, that the look seemed to comfort
her: it made her feel less alone.
It was from Krylenko that she first heard news of the catastrophe that
was coming: he told her and Irene Shane, perhaps because he had
confidence in them, but more, perhaps, because he knew that in the end
they were the only ones beyond the borders of the Flats to whom he might
look for sympathy. The news frightened her at first because there had
never been any strike in the Town and because she knew that there was
certain to be violence and suffering and perhaps even death. She
understood that the spirit which moved the big Ukranian was an eternal
force of the temper which had made bloodshed and revolution since the
beginning of time. It shone in his blue eyes--the light of fanaticism
for a cause. The thing, he said, had been brewing for a long time: any
one with half an intelligence could have seen it coming. And Mary knew
more than most, for she knew of the hasty, secret meetings in the room
over Hennessey’s saloon with men who came into the Town and out again
like shadows. She watched the curious light in Krylenko’s eyes in turn
kindle a light in the pale eyes of an unecstatic old maid like Irene
Shane. She felt the thing spreading all about her like a fire in the
thick underbrush of a forest. It seemed to increase as the plague of
typhoid began to abate. In some mysterious way it even penetrated the
secure world settled upon the Seven Hills.
She had, too, a trembling sense of treason toward those whom the Town
would have called her own people--but her heart leaped on the day when
Krylenko told her that Philip, too, was on their side. He was, the
Ukranian said, a member of the new Union: they had celebrated his
joining months ago at Hennessey’s saloon. It made Philip seem nearer to
her, as if he belonged not at all to the two women who guarded him.
Krylenko told her on the day when every one was certain that Philip was
dying, and it served to soften the numb pain which seemed to blind her
to all else in the world.
In the afternoon of the same day, Irene Shane said to her, “My mother is
dying, and I’ve cabled to my sister, Lily, to come home.”
20
When Moses Slade was not in Washington, he always went on Sundays to the
Baptist Church which stood just across the street from Emma’s house of
worship. It was not that he was a religious man, for he had enough to
do without thinking about God. The service bored him and during the
sermon he passed the time by turning his active mind toward subjects
more earthly and practical, such as the speech he was to make next week
at Caledonia, or what answer he would have for the Democratic attack
upon his vote against the Farmers’ Relief Bill. (How could they
understand that what was good for farmers was bad for industry?) In the
beginning, he had fallen into the habit of going to church because most
of his votes came from churchgoing people: he went in the same spirit
which led him to join sixteen fraternal organizations. But he had gone
for so long now that he no longer had any doubts that he was a
religious, God-fearing man. (In Washington it did not matter: he could
sit at home on Sunday mornings in old clothes drinking his whisky with
his feet up on a chair while he read farm papers and racing news.)
Of all the citizens of the Seven Hills, he alone appeared in the streets
on Sunday mornings clad in a Prince Albert and a top-hat. Any other
citizen in such a fancy-dress costume would have been an object of
ridicule, but it was quite proper that he--the Honorable Moses Slade,
Congressman--should be thus garbed. He carried it off beautifully;
indeed, there was something grand and awe-inspiring in the spectacle of
the big man with thick, flowing hair and an enormous front, standing on
the steps of the First Baptist Church, speaking to fathers and mothers
and patting miserable children imprisoned in stiff Sunday clothes.
On one hot September Sunday he was standing thus (having just patted the
last wretched child) when the doors of the church opposite began to
yield up its dead. Among the first to descend the Indiana limestone
steps appeared the large, handsome figure of Emma, dressed entirely in
dark clothing. Moses Slade noticed her at once, for it was impossible
not to notice such a magnetic personage, and he fancied that she might
go away without even knowing he was there. (He would never learn, of
course, that she had hurried out almost before the last echo of Reverend
Castor’s Benediction had died away, because she knew that the Baptist
Church was always over a little before her own.)
In that first glance, something happened to him which afterward made him
feel silly, but at the moment had no such effect. A voice appeared to
say, “I can’t wait any longer,” and excusing himself, he hurried, but
with an air of dignity, down the steps of his church, and, crossing the
street in full view of the now mingling congregations, raised his
glistening top-hat, and said, “Good-morning, Mrs. Downes.”
Emma turned with a faint air of surprise, but with only the weakest of
smiles (for was she not in sorrow?) “Why, Mr. Slade, I didn’t know you
were back.”
“May I walk a way with you?”
“Of course, it would be a pleasure.”
Together they went off beneath the yellowing maples, the eyes of two
congregations (to Emma’s delight) fastened on them. One voice at least,
that of the soured Miss Abercrombie, was raised in criticism. “There’s
no fool,” she observed acidly, “like an old one.”
When they had gone a little way beyond the reach of prying eyes and
ears, Moses Slade became faintly personal in his conversation.
“I appreciated your sending me that postcard,” he said.
“Well, I thought you’d like to see the new monument to General Sherman.
I knew it was unveiled while you were away, and seeing that you took so
much interest in it....” Her voice died away with a note of sadness. The
personal touch had filled them both with a sense of constraint, and in
silence he helped her across the street, seizing her elbow as if it were
a pump-handle.
Safely on the opposite side, he said, “I was sorry to hear of the
illness of your son. I hope he’s better by now.”
Emma sighed. “No ... he’s not much better. You see, he gave up his
health in Africa working among the natives.” She sighed again. “I doubt
if he’ll ever be well again. He’s such a good boy, too.”
“Yes, I always heard that.”
“Of course, he may not live. We have to face things, Mr. Slade. If God
sees fit to take him, who am I to be bitter and complain? But it isn’t
easy ... to have your only son....” She began to cry, and it occurred to
Moses Slade that she seemed to crumple and grow softly feminine in a way
he had not thought possible in a woman of such character. He had never
had any children of his own. He felt that she needed comforting, but for
once words seemed of no use to him--the words which always flowed from
him in an easy torrent.
“You’ll forgive me, Mr. Slade, if I give way ... but it’s gone on for
weeks now. Sometimes I wonder that the poor boy has any strength left.”
“I understand, Mrs. Downes,” he said, in a strange, soft voice.
“I always believe in facing things,” she repeated. “There’s no good in
pretending.” She was a little better now and dabbing her eyes with her
handkerchief. Fortunately, no one had passed them: no one had witnessed
the spectacle of Emma Downes in tears, walking with Congressman Slade.
Before the slate-colored house, they halted, and Mr. Slade asked, “Would
you mind if I came in? I’d like to hear how the boy is.”
She left him in the parlor, sitting beneath the enlarged portrait of the
late Mr. Downes, while she went off up the stairs to ask after Philip.
Naomi and Mabelle were there talking, because Naomi no longer went out
on account of her appearance, and Mabelle, who always went to sleep in
church, avoided it whenever possible. Emma did not speak to them, but
hurried past their door to the room where Philip lay white and still,
looking thin and transparent, like a sick little boy.