following Tuesday Naomi and the twins moved into the three rooms above
the drugstore in Front Street. Emma stayed home from the restaurant all
day, going and coming to and from the newly established household. She
did and thought of everything, so that Naomi in the end gave up, and,
sitting on the imitation-tapestry davenport, simply watched her
mother-in-law arrange the new household. Mabelle was there, too, with
little Jimmy, in the way most of the time, or making suggestions which
Emma ignored. She was a creature whose feelings were not easily hurt and
all Emma’s bitter remarks seemed to have left no trace. When they had
left Naomi with the three rooms in order, she even walked home with
Emma, dragging the tired and whining Jimmy behind her.
As she hurried through the darkness after Emma’s tall, robust form, she
panted, “Well, things might go better now. I always think young people
ought to start out in a house of their own.”
“Yes,” said Emma, certain from the remark that Naomi hadn’t told Mabelle
the whole truth.
“It’s funny what a change has come over Philip. He’s much nicer than he
used to be.”
“What on earth do you mean by that, Mabelle?”
Here Jimmy set up a yell--“I don’t wanna walk! I wanna be carried!”
“All right, dear, only you mustn’t cry. Little men don’t cry.”
“Well, I do. I’m tired. I don’t wanna walk!”
“All right, dear.” She bent down and picked up the child. He continued
to whine, but at least their progress was not retarded.
“If he were my child, Mabelle,” said Emma, “I’d just leave him sitting
on the curb till he got good and ready to walk. I never had any trouble
with Philip. He’s always been _obedient_ and respectful.”
“But Jimmy’s delicate, and I’d rather carry him than have him whine.”
“He’s whining in any case,” said Emma, acidly.
Mabelle was puffing now beneath her burden and the long steps of Emma.
But she managed to say, “What I mean about Philip is ... that he’s more
masterful now. He’s a man. He’s the kind of a man that women have a
right to be afraid of.”
Emma snorted. “Don’t talk such rot, Mabelle. If you’d read less trash.”
“It’s funny about him taking up with the Shanes.”
Naomi _had_ told her, then, about the stable. And Mabelle was a sieve:
whatever you told her poured right on through. “He hasn’t taken up with
the Shanes. He’s simply using their stable to work in. That’s not the
same thing. Why, he barely knows them--except that half-crazy old maid,
Irene. And he doesn’t know the others at all.”
“Then it must be that Mary Conyngham. She’s friends with them.”
“Mary Conyngham!” repeated Emma. “Mary Conyngham! Why, he hasn’t seen
her in years!” But the shock of the name turned her suddenly thoughtful,
so that she walked at a slower pace, mercifully for Mabelle.
“Well, he _might_ have seen her,” persisted Mabelle. “She’s mixed up
with Irene Shane’s school for the Dagoes and Hunkies. They all belong to
the same crowd ... all thinking they can make something out of a lot of
bums.” For a moment she was so completely winded that she could not
speak. When she recovered her breath, she said, “I remembered the other
night that they’d been sweet on each other once.”
Still Emma walked furiously in silence, and presently Mabelle said, “Of
course, I didn’t say anything about her to Naomi. She might be upset
just now.”
“No,” said Emma, “and don’t say anything to her about it or to any one
else. It’s nonsense.”
“Well, I didn’t know. I was just interested in Philip, and Naomi, and in
his queer behavior, and I always find that when a man goes off his head
like that, there’s a woman about somewhere.”
“I forbid you, Mabelle, to speak of it to any one.” She halted and took
Mabelle by the shoulder. “You understand? That’s the way silly talk gets
started.”
Mabelle was silent as they resumed their way, but presently she said,
“That Lily Shane ... she’s come home to see the old woman die.”
“They’re a bad lot, all of ’em,” said Emma, “and I guess she’s the
Jezebel of the lot.”
“I hate to see a good boy like Philip getting mixed up with people like
that.”
“He’s not getting mixed up, I tell you.”
“What am I to tell people about him, Em, if they ask me?”
“Tell them that he’s going to be an artist. You might say, too, that he
has a fine talent, and later he’s going to New York to study.”
She had thought it all out. There was only one method--“to take the bull
by the horns.” If Philip wasn’t one day to be a bishop, he might be a
great artist and paint great religious pictures like the man who did
the Sistine Madonna or the Flight into Egypt.
The voice of Jimmy interrupted her thoughts. “Aren’t we nearly home? I’m
hungry!”
“Yes, dearie. That’s your house right there.... See the one with the red
light in the window?”
“I don’t like Aunt Em. I wish she’d go away.”
“Shh! Jimmy! Shh! He’s tired, Em, that’s all--the poor little thing.”
They reached the house with the red light in the window, and bade each
other good-night.
“Remember what I said,” was Emma’s final word.
After she left the gate, only one thought occupied the mind of Emma, the
thought that it was Mary Conyngham who had stolen Philip from them
both--from herself and Naomi. “Mary Conyngham, of course,” she told
herself. “What a fool I’ve been not to think of her before! It _would_
be like her and her superior ways. The Watts always thought nobody good
enough for ’em but the Shanes--that bawdy old woman and her two
daughters--one a lunatic and the other a harlot. Yes, Mary Conyngham
could carry on to her heart’s content there in the Flats, and no one
would know of it. The Shanes would only help her. Shane’s Castle had
been like a bawdy-house in the days when old John Shane was still
living.”
She was in a savage humor, born partly of her irritation at Naomi’s
helplessness, and partly of disgust at Mabelle’s feeble-minded chatter;
and now she had found an object on which to pin it. It was Mary
Conyngham who lay at the root of everything: it explained why Mary had
stopped her that day to ask about Philip.
“Mabelle,” she thought, “is a dangerous woman, going about and saying
things like that when she _knows_ nothing.”
Mabelle was a constructive gossip. Having nothing to keep her occupied,
she sat about all day thinking up things, putting two and two together,
pinning odd pieces of stories together to construct a whole, but she
_did_ have (thought Emma) an uncanny way of scenting out scandal; her
only fault was that she sometimes told the story before in fact it had
happened. She came upon a scrap, the merest suspicion of some dubious
story, and presently after days of morbid brooding it reappeared,
trimmed and garnished to perfection, with such an air of reality about
it that if it wasn’t true, it might easily have been.
It was the uncanny faculty of Mabelle’s that really troubled Emma. Her
suspicion of Mary Conyngham frightened her even while it gave her
satisfaction. It occurred to her that Philip was now quite beyond
control, as his father had sometimes been. Anything might happen. She
dared not think of it. For a moment she felt the quick shadow of
foreboding, of some tragedy that lay ahead, beyond the power of anything
to prevent.
She shook it off quickly, thinking, “That is nonsense. I can still bring
Philip to his senses.”
Inside the house, she prepared her own supper, and spent an hour in
clearing up her own house, putting from sight every trace of Naomi.
At nine o’clock Moses Slade came to call. He was in a furious temper. He
brought with him a labor periodical, called _The Beacon_.
“It was marked,” he said, “and sent to me through the mail.”
Opening it, he showed her the desecration of his most admired editorial.
It was a fragment of the local newspaper, stained and torn, which read,
“ ...sacred rights of property must be protected against the attacks of
men little better than brutes, etc., etc.,” and signed in large black
letters MOSES SLADE. On the face of the printing some irreverent hand
had made a series of drawings in pencil--a Croat woman feeding her three
small children with coffee out of a clumsy tin cup, a gigantic, bearded
Slovak and his wizened, tubercular wife, a baby wrapped in the remains
of a ragged pair of overalls, a thin, shivering girl with the face of a
Madonna. The whole had been photographed and reproduced.
Underneath them was a line which read, “These are the brutes of the
Honorable Moses Slade who have endangered our most sacred institutions
and destroyed our God-given prosperity.” And beside it was a caricature
of Slade himself, gross, overdressed, with flowing locks and a leering
expression, beneath which was written: “Puzzle--find the beast on these
two pages.”
He banged the table with his hamlike fist. “By God, I’ll find out who
did it, and make him pay for his impudence! I’m not a force in this Town
for nothing!”
Emma turned faintly pale, but she only said, “It’s shameful, I think,
Moses, but what can you expect from such people? They have no respect
for our institutions ... our excellent Congressmen.”
But she knew well enough who had made the drawing.
9
In the flat in Front Street, Philip put the last chair in place, washed
his face and hands at the sink in the kitchen, and went in to look at
the sleeping twins. They lay side by side, fat, rosy, healthy children,
such as women like Naomi or Mabelle were certain to bear. He was alone
in the room, and, after a time, he bent down and touched the fine, soft
dark hair that covered their small, round heads. They were like him, and
so, he supposed, like his father, with eyes that one day would be the
same clear blue. It struck him suddenly that there was something
ruthless in the operation of Nature which took no account of all the
structure of habits and laws of man. It took no account of the fact that
he had never loved Naomi, or that neither of them had really wanted
these children. Nature had wanted children, and it did not matter how
they were created, so long as the act of creation occurred. All man’s
ideas of love, of lawful wedlock, of sentimentality, had nothing to do
with it. And it was impossible to imagine stronger, healthier children.
He fell to stroking the soft head of the little girl, and, slowly, in
her sleep, she stirred and, groping with a fat, pink hand, found one of
his fingers, and clutched it tightly. Something in the touch of the
soft, plump hand melted him suddenly. She was so soft, so helpless,
reaching out trustfully. And for the first time he felt a sudden quick
pride and delight. These were _his_ children; he knew that he loved
them, despite everything, Naomi and his mother and all the trouble he
had been through. They were _his_ to care for and protect and set on
their way in life. That was a wonderful thing. When he thought of it, he
was frightened; and yet (he reflected) he would perhaps understand far
better than most fathers how to help them. He had learned, he thought,
bitterly, by his own blundering.
The little girl still clung tightly to his finger, and presently he
found himself smiling, without knowing it. He was, oddly enough,
suddenly happy, and conscious that no matter what fate befell him, it
was good to be alive. He wasn’t sorry any longer that he had helped to
bring into existence these two fat, funny little morsels of life. He
almost laughed, and then, bending down, he kissed first one and then the
other on the tops of their round, dark little heads. They were his: he
was a father. And it had happened without his wanting it, almost without
his understanding how it had happened.
He was still bending over them when the door opened and, with a sense of
falling spirits, he heard Naomi come in. Ever since that horrible day in
his mother’s parlor, she had made an effort to dress completely and
neatly, but somehow it was impossible for her to accomplish it entirely.
Little wisps of sandy hair fell down over the back of her high tight
collar. Her white petticoat, showing itself an inch or two below her
skirts, dragged on the floor. There was a smudge of the dust left behind
by the dental salesman’s wife on one side of her face. She might set
herself in order a dozen times a day, but always, in some mysterious
way, she was in disarray. At Megambo, it hadn’t made any difference: in
a place like that such things were lost in the whole cataclysm of
disorder. But here in a civilized place, it was different. It was as if
Naomi could not cope with the problems of decent living.
At the sound of the opening door, Philip straightened up quickly, as if
ashamed to be found thus, caressing his children. But Naomi had seen
him, and smiled--an odd, twisted, pitiful smile, which was like a knife
turned in his flesh, for behind it lay a whole regiment of ghosts, of
implications. It was as if he saw suddenly what happiness there might be
in life, if he himself had been different, if Naomi had been a different
woman, if he had only been able to love her. He couldn’t change: he saw
again how ruthless a thing Nature could be. Some one had meddled with
her plans, and so the misery resulted. It was not that he thought these
things: the whole impression happened far more quickly than any process
of thought. It was a sudden, pitiful flash of illumination. What hurt
him most was the faint hint of bitterness in her smile, a hint almost of
mockery, a shadow which had crossed her pale, freckled face without her
knowing it. But until now, he hadn’t thought her capable of suffering in
that way.
It frightened him by making him feel weak and yielding.
Perhaps if she had been a more clever woman, she could in that moment
have changed the whole course of his life. Long afterward when he
thought of the scene (and it always remained one of his clearest
memories of her) he saw that it _could_ have been done. But then he saw
that if she had been a more clever woman he might have loved her in the
beginning.
She came over and stood by his side. “What are we to call them, Philip?
We’ve never even spoken of it.” She said it in a flat voice, as if they
had been puppies or kittens, and not children--_his_ children--at all.
“I don’t know.”
“I’ve been thinking about the girl. Your mother would like to call her
Emma, but I’d like it if you’d call her Naomi.”
He knew before she had finished what she had meant to say, and he knew,
too, that he hated both names. To go on for the rest of his life, even
as an old man, calling his child “Emma” or “Naomi”....
“She’s your child, too, Naomi. You have a choice in the matter.”
“I wanted you to be pleased.” There was a humbleness in her voice which
made him feel ill.
“And the boy--have you thought of him?”
“I want to call him Philip, of course.”
(No, he couldn’t do that: it was like wishing them bad luck.)
“No, I hate the name of Philip. You can call the girl Naomi. You bore
her, and you’ve more of a right to name her than Ma has. But--no, we
won’t call the boy Philip. We’ll think of something else.”
“I’d like to have her called Naomi ... and then you’d think of me
sometimes, Philip.”
He looked at her sharply. “But I do think of you. Why should you say
that?”
“Oh, I don’t know ... just in case anything happened to me. That’s why
I’d like to call him Philip.”
“No ... no ... any other name.”
He took up his hat. “What are you going to do with the twins on Sundays
and choir practice nights?”
“I don’t know. I’d thought of asking Mabelle to stay with them ... but
she lives such a long way off. Maybe I’d just better give it up.”
“No, you mustn’t do that. I’ll come and stay with them. I’d like to.”
“You don’t mind my leading the choir, Philip?”
“No, of course not.”
“Because I want you to be pleased. I want it to be a new start now, here
in this new house.”
He didn’t answer, and after an awkward pause, she said, “I wouldn’t go
at all, but I think Reverend Castor needs me. He’s got so many worries.
Yesterday when I was talking to him, he began all at once to cry ... not
out loud, but the tears just came into his eyes. His wife’s an awful
woman. He’s been telling me about her. And now that Mrs. Timpkins has
moved away, there’s no one to take the choir who knows anything about
music.”
“Of course, go by all means.”
He was glad for two reasons, because he knew she liked the importance of
leading the choir, and because he would have these evenings alone with
the children--_his_ children--who had been born in reality as he stood
looking down at them a moment before.
“Good-night, Naomi,” he said abruptly.
“Philip....”
“Yes.”
“Philip, you won’t stay?”
“No, Naomi.... It wouldn’t look right.”
There was a pause.
“Sometimes you’re like your mother, Philip.”
He went out and in his agitation found himself halfway down the flimsy
pine stairway before he remembered his overcoat. When he returned and
opened the door of the little flat, he heard the sound of sobbing, a
horrible choked sound, coming from the bedroom. She had not made a
scene. She had not wept until he was gone, for she was trying to please
him.
10
It was a clear night, and very cold, when the moonlight painted the snow
and the black houses of the Flats with a luminous blue light. As he
walked, the hard-packed snow creaked and whined beneath his heels. The
stars, for all their brilliance, seemed infinitely remote. As he walked,
a little cloud of frozen breath trailed behind him.
By the railroad-tracks and in the narrow streets that bordered them, the
Flats were empty. The houses stood silent and black. The fires, the
little piles of household goods, were gone now, and with them the
miserable, shivering women and children. At Hennessey’s corner there was
the usual blaze of light, the jagged clamor of the mechanical piano, and
the sound of drunken voices behind the swinging-doors. The lights, the
sounds, hurt him in an inexplicable fashion, filling him with an acute
and painful sense of loneliness.
It was an emotion which changed, as he entered the park, to one of vague
fear. Inside the rusted gates the park lay frozen and solitary in the
brilliant moonlight. The deep shadows were blue along the drive, black
where the outline of a dead tree fell across the snow. The bits of
statuary--the Venus of Cnidos, the Apollo Belvedere, the cast-iron
Cupid--all had little caps and collars of frozen snow. The windows of
the big house lay shuttered and dark, save for a room in the corner
where little bars of yellow light filtered out. It was perhaps the room
where Lily Shane sat waiting for her mother to die.
As he turned the corner on the stable side, there came to him all at
once a feeling that he was not alone in the park. There were other
creatures there, too, not human perhaps, but the ghosts of all the men
and women who had been there in the gaudy days of the Castle when the
trees were still alive, and the garden neatly kept, and the stable
filled with horses. There had always been a mystery about the place, and
for him, who had never seen the place while it was alive, it was a
mystery enveloped in a romantic glamour. He understood suddenly how
people are able to invest a place with the character of their own
existence. It was the wicked old John Shane, dead so long that he had
become a legend, and his dying widow, who owned this silent frozen park
filled with dead trees.... It would still be theirs and theirs alone
long after they had turned to dust, until at last the house was pulled
down and the park buried beneath clamorous steel sheds and roaring
furnaces. And even then ... as long as there remained alive one person
who remembered them, the place would be known as Shane’s Hill, where
once the Castle stood. It was an odd sort of immortality....
He saw, too, that the slate-colored house was like his mother: she had
stamped it forever as her own, and that the huts at Megambo were oddly
like Naomi, who had been so happy in them. And he saw suddenly why he
had hated both places and how in a way they explained both his mother
and Naomi, and the power they both possessed of making him wretched.
This cold park and the silent house, peopled by creatures that were
dead, seemed a dark and sinister place, yet it had, too, a sense of
splendor, of barren grandeur, that for more than half a century had
dominated the Town. It existed still in the very midst of the clamorous
Mills.
The stable was silent, save for the sound of the fat horses tramping in
their stalls, and in his room overhead the stove still burned, filling
the room with warmth. It was a plain enough room, empty save for the
iron cot where he slept, a table, two chairs and his painting materials.
Yet for him a pleasant place. He had for the first time in all his life
a sense of coming home. It was his; and it suited him with its barren
emptiness. It was like the cell of a monk, bare and cold, and free of
everything which might distract from a contemplation of the great
mystery.
He did not trouble to light the kerosene lamp. The cold moonlight
flooded in through the window, casting in black filigrees on the bare
floor the shadow of the drooping vines that fell across the panes.
Against the walls and ceiling the flames in the belly of the stove cast
another pattern, different, outlined of warm and glowing light.
For a long time he stood there, his hands clasped behind him, looking
out of the window, seized once more by the enchantment of the beauty
with which the night invested all the expanse of the Flats. Far off,
under the shadow of one of the seven hills, the flames of the furnaces
in the Jupiter plant raised an arc of glowing light. He saw in his
imagination all the spectacle that existed there--the bodies of the
black men, the dancing shadows cast by the glaring lights, the angry
hiss and bubble of boiling white-hot metal. He could smell the curious,
pungent odor of burning coke. He saw the movement, the unearthly
splendor, the immense energy that filled the whole scene.
Just beneath the hill, the sheds and furnaces lay in black shadows.
There were fires there, built by the Mill guards, that burned like the
red eyes of giants asleep in the velvety darkness. There was the sudden
wild screech of an express locomotive, and a long serpent-like monster,
lighted from within like a firefly, rushed through the darkness.
He was glad suddenly to be alone, for the solitude brought him a strange
peace like the peace that had come to him at times when he went alone at
dawn along the borders of the lake at Megambo. It was the peace of
complete aloofness, of detachment from all that troubled him--a
mysterious exaltation like death perhaps, in which no one could share.
No, not even Mary Conyngham.... Mary Conyngham.... He found himself
repeating the name idly in his brain. Now, in this moment of solitude,
even Mary Conyngham did not trouble him. It was as if he were free
suddenly of his body and existed only as a spirit.
Presently, he put his hand across his eyes, pressing them with a kind of
anguish. He knew that he believed again; he knew that he had always
believed. He had never lost his faith. It was only that until now he had
followed a bogus God. It was only that he didn’t believe in that harsh,
commonplace, ugly God of Naomi and Emma and the Reverend Castor. It was
a different sort of God--One who was concerned with a kind of beauty and
splendor which they did not know ... the beauty of all that scene
outspread below him, of that savage energy which cast a distant glow
against the sky; it was the beauty of those two children, his children,
called into existence because He willed it, the sinister beauty of the
park and of people like old John Shane and his widow who lived on even
after they were dead and dying, the beauty even of that coffee-shed
filled with shivering women and children, and the fires in the street.
He was the God, too, of those black women pouring the water of the
burning lake over the belly of an obscene idol--a God concerned with the
whole glowing tragic spectacle of living.
Presently his hands dropped to his side once more, and, looking out of
the window, he saw that the park was no longer empty. There was some one
there--a woman--walking up and down in the moonlight. She was wrapped in
furs and she was no ghost, for in the cold air, the moonlight and the
frost of her breath made a little halo about her uncovered head. She was
walking round and round the ruined dead English garden, which must have
had its own ghosts of larkspurs and foxgloves and lavender and mint and
primulas--all the ghosts of flowers long dead, killed by the soot of the
Mills.
And then all at once, he divined who the woman must be. She was Lily
Shane, walking in the moonlight.
She turned at last, and, going carelessly through the deep snow,
returned to the big, darkened house.