another--women who asked advice upon every subject from thieving hired
girls to erring husbands. There were times when he felt he could not
endure listening to one more woman talk endlessly about herself. It
wearied him so that he wanted to flee suddenly, leaving them all,
together with the hand-shaking and the very church itself, behind him
forever. Sometimes he had strange dreams, while he was awake, and with
his eyes wide open, of fleeing to some outlandish place like those
marvelous islands in the South Seas where there were none of these
things. And then to calm his soul, he would tell himself cynically that
even in those islands there were women.
He led her to his study, which he had been driven to establish at the
back of the church, since there was no peace in the parsonage from the
complaining voice above-stairs. There the two of them sat down. It
occurred to Emma that he looked very white and tired, that there were
new lines on his face. He couldn’t be an old man. He wasn’t much older
than herself, yet he was beginning to look old. It was, she supposed,
the life he led at home. A clergyman, of all people, needed an
understanding, unselfish wife.
“And now,” he was saying, “I’m always pleased to help, however I can in
my humble way.”
He was a good man, who never sought to evade his duty, however tired he
was. He wanted, honestly, to help her.
She began to tell him, constructing an approach to the fact itself by
explaining what a lonely, hard life she had had since the death of her
husband in China. She touched upon the Christian way in which she had
brought up her boy, and now (she said) that he was a grown man and
married and would soon have a parish of his own (since he could not
return to Africa) she would be left quite alone. She wanted the rest
which she had earned, and the companionship for which she would no doubt
hunger in her old age. These were the reasons why she had accepted the
offer of Moses Slade. Yet she was troubled.
She leaned back in her chair and sighed. What did he think? Could he
help her to decide?
The study was a gloomy room, lighted in the day-time by a single sooty
Gothic window and at night by a single jet of gas. There was a roll-top
desk, a long heavy table, a cabinet where the choir music was kept, and
two or three sagging, weary leather chairs. Before he answered her, the
tired eyes of the Reverend Castor rested for a time on the meager
furniture as if he had lost himself in deep thought. She waited. This
attitude was, however, merely professional, and wholly misleading. He
was not in deep thought. He was merely thinking, “She doesn’t want
advice. She only wants to talk about herself. Whatever I say will make
no difference. She means to marry him, no matter what happens.”
But because this was his work he spoke at last, setting forth one by one
all the arguments she had repeated to herself earlier in the day,
concluding with the remark, “The reasons on the other side you have put
very well yourself.”
Emma stirred in the springless leather chair. “Then what do you advise?”
“Mrs. Downes, it is a matter that no one can decide but yourself. Pray
God to help you, and do what you think is right.”
He was troubled, and, in a vague way, disturbed and unhappy, because in
the back of his mind the worm of envy was at work, gnawing, gnawing,
gnawing--a sinful worm that gave him no peace. Moses Slade was free to
marry again, and he had chosen Emma Downes. He had thought of Emma
Downes for himself, in case ... (the wicked thought returned to him
again like a shadow crossing his path) ... in case Annie’s illness
carried her off at last. It seemed to him that all the world was going
past him, while he remained behind, chained to a complaining invalid.
Emma rose, and, after he had turned the gas out and locked the door,
they went out together. It was a clear, quiet night, when for once there
seemed to be no soot in the air, and the stars seemed very close. For a
moment they both stood listening, and at last Emma said, “Am I right, or
am I growing deaf? Do the Mills sound very far away to-night ... sort of
weak?”
He listened, and then said, “Yes, it’s queer. They sound almost faint.”
There was another silence. And Emma gave a low, groaning sound. “Maybe
that’s it ... maybe they’ve gone out on strike.”
“There’ll be trouble,” said the Reverend Castor. “It makes me kind of
sick to think of it.”
They bade each other good-night, and went their ways, the Reverend
Castor hurrying along, because he was more than an hour late. He knew
that when he arrived she would be out of her bed, standing at the upper
window looking for him, her mind charged with the bitter reproaches she
had thought out to fling at him, torturing sarcasms dealing with what
had kept him so long in the study. She had an obsession that he meant to
be unfaithful to her; she never ceased to hint and imply the most odious
things. She was always accusing him of disgraceful things about
women....
As he came nearer and nearer to the parsonage, he was seized by a
terrible temptation to turn away, to disappear, never to enter the doors
of his home again. But a man of God, he knew, couldn’t do a thing like
that. And now God--even God--seemed to be deserting him. He couldn’t
drive these awful thoughts from his mind. He began desperately to repeat
his Psalm.
Turning past the hedge, he saw that there was a light in the upper
window, and against the lace curtains the silhouette of a waiting
figure, peering out eagerly.
When Emma entered the house, she discovered that all the lights were on,
that Philip had been forgotten, and that his nurse and Mabelle were with
Naomi, who was being forced to walk up and down. Mabelle sat giving
advice and saying repeatedly that she never had such trouble even with
her first baby. In a little while, the doctor came, and seven hours
later Mabelle’s predictions were vindicated, for Naomi gave birth at
last to twins, a boy and a girl. At about the same hour the last echo of
the pounding at the Mills died away into silence, and the last fire in
the blast-furnace died into ashes. In the room next to Naomi’s, Philip
opened his eyes, called for a drink of water, and for the first time in
four months knew that his head was clear and that his body was not
burning or shaking. It was an extraordinary thing, the nurse observed,
as if his children coming into the world had called him back to life.
He came back to consciousness out of a strange country peopled with
creatures that might have haunted a Gothic nightmare, creatures who
seemed as confused and unreal as the fantastic world on which they
moved. Sometimes his mother was present, moving about, oddly enough,
against the background of the jungle at Megambo, moving about among the
niggers, converting them in wholesale lots. At times she would disappear
suddenly, to return almost at once, driving before her with Lady
Millicent Wimbrooke’s rawhide whip whole troops of natives, dressed
completely, even to bonnets and shoes, like the people one saw in Main
Street. And then she would feed them at the Peerless Restaurant, which
seemed to have been set up intact on the borders of the gloomy forest.
Once Lady Wimbrooke appeared herself with her portable-bath and rifle,
and shooting about her carelessly, she drove all of them, including
Emma, out of the restaurant into Main Street, which appeared
miraculously to have sprung up just outside the door. Once outside, he
discovered that all of them--Emma herself and the niggers, were walking
stark naked in the car-tracks in the middle of the street. He, himself,
seemed to be carrying a banner at the head of the parade on which was
written in fiery letters, “Let God look out for himself. We will do the
same.” And at the corner he found Mary Conyngham waiting to keep a
tryst, and neither he nor she seemed to take any notice of the fact that
he was as naked as the day he was born.
And Naomi was there, too, always in the background, only she was not the
Naomi he knew, but a large woman with a soft, powerful body, like
Swanson’s, above which her pale face peered out comically from beneath a
sun-bonnet woven of reeds. Once or twice he had mistaken her for Swanson
playing a joke on him.
At other times he seemed to be back in the Mills, or in Hennessey’s
saloon, where Emma entered presently and broke all the mirrors; and then
all of them were suddenly squeezed out of the doors to find themselves
in the jungle, which appeared to have sprung up all about them,
impenetrable save for a single path in which was stuck a cast-iron
guide-post, reading, “To the Mills.” The air was filled with the sound
of distant thunder, but he could not make out whether it was the distant
sound of tom-toms, or the pounding of monstrous steel hammers. Oddly
enough, it seemed quite natural, as if the trees, the jungle and the
Mills belonged thus together.
And Mary Conyngham was always there. It seemed that she was married to
him, and that they had somewhere a family of children which he had never
seen and could not find.
Once he witnessed a horrible sight. He saw Emma pursuing the black
virgin who had long ago been eaten by the leopards. The virgin, naked,
save for her ornaments of copper wire, ran to the lake, and across the
water, skimming the surface like a kingfisher of ebony, and, as Emma
gave chase, she sank like a stone, disappearing beneath the brassy
surface without a sound.
For a long time after he returned to life, memories of the dead,
nightmarish world clung to him like wisps of the haze that sometimes
veiled the lake at Megambo in the wet season. He did not know how long
he had been ill, and at times it seemed to him that he had died and was
not living at all. His body felt light as air, but when he tried to
raise it, it failed him, slipping back in a miserable weakness. And
then, bit by bit, as the memories of the delirium faded into space, the
hard, barren world about him began to take shape ... the starched lace
curtains at the windows, which Emma kept clean despite all the soot, the
worn rocking-chair, the table at the side of the bed crowded with
medicines, and, finally, the strange figure of the nurse. And then he
understood that Naomi must be somewhere near at hand, and his mother. He
had a vague feeling that they must have become old now, and gray, after
all the years he had been ill.
It was Emma whom he saw first, and recognized. She came into the
darkened room, and stood silently by the side of the bed until he,
conscious that there was some one near him, opened his eyes, and said in
a weak voice, “Is that you, Ma?”
Without answering him, she fell on her knees beside the bed and took his
head in her hands, kissing him passionately again and again on his
forehead. She wept and said over and over again, “Philip, my boy! The
Lord has given me back my boy!”
There was something frightening in the wildness of her emotion. The
nurse, hearing her weeping, came in to warn her that she must be calm,
and Philip said weakly, “It’s all right. I understand. She’s always been
like that.”
Once it would never have occurred to him to speak thus, as if he were
detached from her and stood quite apart, protecting her. Protecting
Emma! Something had happened to him during that long night of four
months’ delirium.
When his mother had gained control of herself once more, she sat down by
the side of the bed, and, taking his hand, she held it clasped
passionately in hers, while she sat looking at him, without once
speaking. For some reason, he could not look at her, perhaps because in
the intensity of her emotion she was asking from him a response which he
could not give. He was ashamed, but it was impossible to pretend.
Instead of any longer seeming almost a part of her, he was detached now
in a strange, definite fashion. In his weakness, it seemed to him that
he was seeing her for the first time and he was ashamed and sorry for
her. He knew that before long she, too, would understand that there was
a difference, that in some way their relationship had been broken
forever. The old Philip was dead, and the new one suddenly pitied her
from a great distance, as he pitied Naomi. It was as if the weakness
gave him a clairvoyance, a second sight, which illuminated all the
confusion of mind that had preceded the long night.
Lying there, with his eyes closed, her passionate cry, “Philip, my boy!”
burned itself into his brain. He was, he knew, unworthy of that
consuming love she had for him.
After a long time he heard her asking, “Philip, are you awake?”
“Yes, Ma.” But he did not open his eyes.
“I have some good news that will delight you.”
What could it be? Perhaps she had arranged his return to Megambo. She
would think that was good news.
“It’s about Naomi. You’re a father now, Philip ... twice a father,
Philip. You’ve two children. They were twins.”
The knot of perplexity which had been tormenting his brain suddenly
cleared away. Of course! That was what he couldn’t remember about Naomi.
She had been going to have a baby, and now she had had two. Still he did
not open his eyes. It was more impossible now than ever. He did not
answer her, and presently Emma asked, “You heard what I said, Philip?”
“Yes, Ma.”
“You’re glad, aren’t you?”
He answered her weakly, “Of course ... why, of course, I’m glad.”
Again there was a long silence. He was ashamed again, because he had
been forced to lie, ashamed because he wasn’t proud, and happy. His
mother sat there trying to raise his spirits, and each thing she said
only drove them lower. In that curious clarity of mind which seemed to
possess his soul, he knew with a kind of horror that he had wanted to
waken alone, free, in a new country, where he would never again see
Naomi, or his mother, or the lace curtains, or the familiar, worn
rocking-chair. That, he saw now, was why he had wanted to die. And now
he was back again, tied to them more closely than ever.
At last he said in a low voice, “It was like Naomi, wasn’t it ... to
have twins?”
“What do you mean?”
He hesitated a moment, and then said, “I don’t know ... I’m tired ... I
don’t know.”
Again a silence. Deep inside him something kept urging him to break
through all this web which seemed to be closing tighter and tighter
around him. The last thought he could remember before slipping into the
nightmare returned to him now, and, without knowing why, he uttered it,
“There won’t be any more children.”
“Why?” asked Emma. “What are you trying to say?”
“Because I don’t mean to live with Naomi ever again. It’s a wicked thing
that I’ve done.”
She began to stroke his forehead, continuing for a long time before she
spoke. She was having suddenly to face things--things which she had
always known, and pretended not to know. At last she said, “Why is it a
wicked thing to live with your lawful wife?”
The world began to whiz dizzily about his head. Odd flashes of light
passed before his closed eyes. It seemed to him that he must speak the
truth, if he were ever to open them again without shame.
“Because she’s not really my wife ... she’s just like any woman, any
stranger ... I never loved her at all. I can’t go on ... living like
that. Can’t you see how wicked it is?”
Emma was caught in her own web, by the very holy principles she
upheld--that it was wrong to marry some one you did not love. It was
this same thing which disturbed her peace of mind about Moses Slade.
“You loved her once, Philip, or you wouldn’t have married her.”
“No, I didn’t know anything then, Ma.” The color of pain entered his
voice. “Can’t you see, Ma? I wasn’t alive then. I never loved her, and
now it’s worse than that.”
The stroking of his forehead suddenly ceased. “I don’t know what you’re
talking about, Philip.... We’d better not go on now. You’re tired and
ill. Everything will be different when you are well again.”
For a second time there came to him a blinding flash of revelation. He
saw that she had always been like that: she had always pushed things
aside to let them work themselves out. An awful doubt dawned upon him
that she was not always right, that sometimes she had made a muddle of
everything. A feeling of dizziness swept over him.
“But it will break her heart, Philip,” she was saying. “She worships
you.... It will break her heart.”
Through a giddy haze he managed to say, “No ... I’m so tired.... Let’s
not talk any more.” He felt the nightmare stealing back again, and
presently he was for some strange reason back at Megambo, sitting under
the acacia-tree, and through the hot air came the sound of voices
singing, in a minor key:
“_Go down to the water, little monkey,_
_To the life of lives, the beginning of all things._”
He thought wildly, “I’ve got to get free. I must run.... I must run.”
Emma, holding his hand, felt the fever slipping back. She heard him
saying, “Go down to the water, little monkey,” which clearly made no
sense, and suddenly she sprang up and called Miss Bull, the nurse.
“It’s odd,” said Miss Bull, white and frightened, “when he was so much
better. Did anything happen to upset him?”
“No,” said Emma. “Nothing. We barely talked at all.”
The nurse sent Essie for the doctor, reproaching herself all the while
for having allowed Emma to stay so long a time by the bed. But it was
almost impossible to refuse when a woman like Mrs. Downes said, “Surely
seeing his mother won’t upset him. Why, Miss Bull, we’ve always been
wonderful companions--my boy and I. He never had a father, you see. I
was both mother and father to him.” Miss Bull knew what a gallant fight
she’d made, for every one in the Town knew it. A widow, left alone, to
bring up her boy. You couldn’t be cruel enough to stop her from seeing
her own son.
When the doctor came and left again, shaking his head, Emma was
frightened, but her fright disappeared once more as the fever receded
again toward morning, and when at last she fell asleep, she was
thinking, “He doesn’t belong to her, after all. He’s never belonged to
her. He’s still my Philip.” There was in the knowledge a sense of
passionate triumph and joy, which wiped out all else--her doubts about
Moses Slade, her worry over Philip’s future, even the sudden, cold
terror that gripped her as she felt the fever stealing back into his
thin, transparent hand. He didn’t belong to Naomi. Why, he almost hated
her. He was still her boy.... And she had defeated Naomi.
In the darkness the tears dampened the pillow. God had not, after all,
forsaken her.
PART THREE
THE STABLE
1
At the back of the great Shane house there clustered a little group of
buildings arranged in plantation style. There were a laundry, a kennel,
an office and a stable with a double row of box-stalls. The whole was
overgrown with dying vines and was connected with the big white-trimmed
brick house by a sort of gallery, roofed but open on the sides. The
buildings were empty now, since the old woman had taken to her canopied
bed, save for the pair of fat old horses who never went out any more and
now stood fat and sleek, groomed carefully each day by the old negro who
acted as groom and general factotum. One daughter had given up her life
to the poor and the other to the great world and no one cared any longer
if the hinges rusted on the stable doors and the great wrought-iron
gates sagged at the entrance to the park. Ghosts haunted the place--the
ghost of the wicked old John Shane who had built the Castle, the ghosts
of all the great who had stayed at the Castle in the glamorous days
before the coming of the black Mills. Old Julia Shane lay dying, aloof,
proud, rich and scornful. Nobody cared....
When the strike came the whole park fell into a state of siege, walled
in on the one side by the Mills and on the other by the filthy houses of
the steelworkers. The warfare raged just outside its borders. Sometimes
in the night a shot sounded in the darkness. But neither side invaded
the territory: it remained in some mysterious way neutral and sacred, as
if the lingering spirit of the old woman who lay dying in the
smoke-blackened house held the world at bay. The doctor came twice
daily, making his way bravely through the black district of the strike;
once each day, the old nigger Hennery went timorously across the
Halstead Street bridge to fetch food. Irene Shane and sometimes Hattie
Tolliver, a cousin who came to “take hold,” went in and out. Otherwise
the place lay deserted and in solitude, waiting.
Early in December, when the first blackened snow lay among the dead
trees of the park, Irene Shane and Mary Conyngham visited the stables.
It was the first time Irene had gone there since she was a young girl
and kept a pony called Istar. To Mary Conyngham it was a strange place
never before visited. They were accompanied by the old nigger Hennery.
Above the stalls of the fat horses there was a room once occupied by a
coachman, which now lay empty save for a table, two or three chairs, an
iron stove and a bed. At each end of the room there was a big window
partly covered by the vines that overran the whole building. It was here
that the two women and the old negro came.
Irene, dressed in her shabby gray clothes, opened the door of the
harness-closet, looked inside, and then regarded the room with a
sweeping glance. “This ought to serve, very well,” she said.
Mary was pleased. “It’s perfect, I should think.”
“Put those newspapers in the stove, Hennery, and light them,” said
Irene. “He can’t work here unless there’s some means of heat.”
The papers went up in a burst of flame. The stove worked perfectly.
The two women looked at each other. “Will you tell him, then?” asked
Mary.
“Yes ... Krylenko will tell him. I don’t know him at all.”
Suddenly Mary kissed the older woman on the cheek. It was an odd,
grotesque gesture, which failed of all response. It was like kissing a
piece of marble to kiss a woman like Irene Shane.
“Thank you, Irene,” she said.
Irene ignored the speech, and turned to the old negro. “Clean the room
out, Hennery. There’s a Mr. Downes coming here to paint now and then.”
“What? Pitchers?” asked Hennery.
“Yes, pictures. He’s to come and go as he likes. You needn’t worry about
him.”
They left him raising clouds of dust with a worn stable-broom. It did
not strike him that there was anything extraordinary in the arrangement.
He had come to Shane’s Castle a buck nigger of eighteen, when John Shane
was a bachelor. He was sixty-five now. Anything, he knew, might happen
at Shane’s Castle. Life there possessed a sort of subterranean
excitement.
As he swept he kept thinking that Miss Lily was already on her way home
from Paris, coming to see her Mammy die. She hadn’t been home in seven
years. When Miss Lily came home, everything was changed. All the
excitement seemed to rise above the surface, and all life changed and
became a tingling, splendiferous affair. Even the presence of death in
the Castle couldn’t dampen the effect of Miss Lily.
2
With that first fall of snow the fever began to lose a little its hold
upon the twice-stricken community. As it waned the new terror came to
take its place--a terror that, like the fever, rose out of the black of
the Flats.