at once, but when she raised her head, it was to say, with a curious,
tense quietness, “No ... if you want the truth, Mrs. Downes, I don’t
think you know Philip at all. I think that’s really what’s the matter.
You’ve never known him.”
Emma found herself suddenly choked and speechless. “Do you know what
you’re saying? I’ve never had any one say such a thing to me before ...
_me_, his own mother! Why, do you know what we’ve been to each other ...
Philip and me?” She plunged into a long recital of their intimacy, of
the beautiful relationship that had always existed between them, of the
sacrifices she had made. It went on and on, and Mary, listening,
thought, “That’s how she talks to him. That’s why he can’t get free of
her.” Suddenly she hated Emma. And then she heard Emma saying, in a cold
voice, “Of course, I suppose in one way you do know him better than I
do--in one way.”
“What are you trying to say?”
“You know what I mean. You ought to know ... you ... you ... who have
stolen him away from me and from his own wife.”
Mary’s fingers dug suddenly into the horsehair of her chair. She felt a
sudden primitive desire to fling herself upon Emma, to pull her hair, to
choke her. The old tomboyish spirit, dead for so long, seemed suddenly
to breathe and stir with life. She thought quickly, “I mustn’t. I
mustn’t. It’s what she’d like me to do--to put myself on a level with
herself. And I mustn’t, for Philip’s sake. It’s all bad enough as it
is.” She grew suddenly rigid with the effort of controlling herself. She
managed to say in a quiet voice, “I think you’re talking nonsense. I
think you’re a little crazy.”
“Crazy, am I? That’s a nice thing to say!”
“I have talked to Philip just once since he came home, and that was on
the day I met you in the street. I didn’t try to find him. He came to
me.”
“Do you expect me to believe that?”
“It’s the truth. Beyond that I don’t care what you believe.”
“I want you to leave him alone.”
Suddenly Mary stood up. “I _was_ leaving him alone. I meant never to see
him, but I won’t leave him alone any longer. He would have been mine
except for you. He’s belonged to me always and he needs me to protect
him. No, I won’t leave him alone any longer.”
All at once she began to cry, and turning, she ran from the room and up
the stairs. Emma, left behind on the horsehair sofa, felt suddenly
foolish and outwitted. She was certain that Mary meant not to come back,
but she remained in the cool, quiet room for a long time, as if her
dignity demanded such an action. And at last, baffled and filled with a
sense of flatness, she rose and walked out of the house.
The whole visit had been a failure, for it hadn’t come properly to a
climax. It was ended before it began. But she had (she felt) done her
best, all that a mother could do to save her only son. She had laid
herself open to insult.... A block from Mary’s house she discovered that
in her agitation she had forgotten her gloves. She halted abruptly, and
then resumed her way. They didn’t matter. They were old gloves, anyway.
She couldn’t bring herself to go back and enter that depressing house
again.
Upstairs in the room where the two children were asleep in their cribs,
Mary lay on the bed and wept. Until this moment her love had seemed a
far-off, distant thing, to be cherished sadly and romantically as
hopeless, but now, all at once, it had become unbearably real. She saw
Philip in a new way, as some one whom she might touch and care for with
all the tenderness that had been wasted upon John Conyngham. She saw him
as a lonely man who wanted one thing above all else from a woman, and
that was understanding; and it was tenderness that she wanted to give
him more than all else on earth. In the midst of her grief and fury, she
meant to have him for her own. It seemed to her suddenly that it was
only possible to free him from that terrible woman by sacrificing
herself. If she gave herself--soul and body and heart--to Philip, she
could save him. “He is mine,” she kept sobbing, half-aloud. “He is mine
... my own dear Philip.” Why (she asked herself) should she care at all
for gossip, for the sacrifice of her own pride, for all the tangle that
was certain to follow? He needed her, though she doubted whether the
fact had ever occurred to him, and she needed him, and it had been so
ever since they were children, and would be so when they were old. All
at once she felt a sudden terror of growing old. She seemed to feel the
years rushing by her. She knew that she could not go on thus until she
died.
And after a little while, when her sobbing had quieted a little, she
began to see the thing more coldly. She saw even that Philip was
fantastic and hopeless, trying to escape as much from himself as from
his mother and from Naomi. She saw even that he was impossible. She
doubted whether there was in him the chance of happiness. Yet none of it
made any difference, for those were the very reasons perhaps why she
loved him. They were the reasons too, perhaps, why at least three
women--his mother, his wife and herself--had found themselves in a
hopeless tangle over him. It was simply that without knowing it he made
demands upon them from which they could not escape. He had even touched
Irene Shane in whose cold life men played no part. Mary loved him, she
saw now, without reason, without restraint, and she knew that because
she loved him she must save him from his own weakness and lead him out
of his hopeless muddle into the light.
Because she was a sensible woman, the sudden resolution brought her a
certain peace. She coldly took account of all the things that might
follow her decision, and knew that she was decided to face them. She
_had_ to help him. It was the only thing that mattered.
As she stirred and sat up on the edge of the bed, the youngest child
moved and opened its eyes, and Mary, in a sudden burst of joy, went over
and kissed it. Bending down, she said, “Your mother, Connie, is a wicked
woman.” The child laughed, and she laughed too, for there was a sudden
peace and delight in her heart.
13
Philip had spent the morning of that same day among the tents where the
strikers lived in the melting snow. He had made sketches, a fragment
here, a fragment there--tiny glimpses that were in their own way more
eloquent than the lifting of the whole curtain. They were a weekly
affair now, done regularly on a fragment of some denunciating speech or
editorial. They appeared weekly in the _Labor Journal_. Now he chose an
editorial in which the Chairman of the Board of Mill Directors made a
speech filled with references to Christ and appeals to end the strike
and return to an era of Peace on Earth; now it was an address from the
Governor of the State--a timid man, a bit of a fool, and destined one
day to be President of the Nation. Moses Slade suffered twice more, for
his pompous bombastic speeches made irresistible subjects for burlesque.
But, as the weeks passed, Philip found himself less and less interested
in making propaganda for the workers, and more and more concerned with
the purity of his line. The room above the stable came to be papered in
sketches made on bits of newsprint or fragments of butchers’ brown
paper. A frenzy of work took possession of him, and for whole days at a
time he never left the place, even to see his children. There were even
times when he forgot the very existence of Mary Conyngham. But he did go
faithfully twice a week to stay with the twins so that Naomi might go to
choir practice. It was, he knew, the only pleasure which lay in his
power to give her.
The importance of the thing appeared to make her happy, and to diminish
the aching sense of strain that was never absent when they were
together. She began, little by little, to grow used to a husband whose
only activities were those of a nursemaid, but she still tried
pathetically to please him. She made a heroic effort to dress neatly and
keep the house in order (although there were times when he spent his
whole visit to the twins in putting closets in order and gathering the
soiled clothing into piles), and she never spoke any more of his coming
back to her. The only fault seemed to be a jealousy which she could not
conquer.
She kept asking him questions, disguised in a pitiful air of casualness,
about what the Shanes’ house was like, and whether he thought Lily Shane
as beautiful a woman as she was supposed to be. Once she even asked
about Mary Conyngham. He always answered her in the same fashion--that
he had never been inside the Shanes’ house, and did not know Lily Shane,
and had spoken to Mary Conyngham but once since he had come home.
Sometimes he fancied that it was more than mere jealousy that prompted
her questions: he thought, too, there was something in them of wistful
curiosity about a world filled with people she would never know. She
still had the power of rousing a pity which weakened him like an
illness.
He did tell her at last that he _had_ seen Lily Shane three or four
times walking in the park, once in the moonlight, and that he thought
she was a beautiful woman; but he never told her how the figure of Lily
Shane was inextricably a part of that strange illuminating vision that
came to him as he stood by the vine-clad window. It was, he believed,
the sort of thing no one would understand, not even Mary. Naomi would
only think him crazy and go at once to tell his mother. They would begin
all over again humoring him as a madman or a child. No, he did not know
Lily Shane, and yet he did know her, in a strange, unearthly, mystical
fashion, as if she stood as a symbol of all that strange, sensuous world
of which he had had a single illuminating intuition as he stood by the
window. It was a world in which all life was lived on a different plane,
in which tragedies occurred and people were happy and unhappy, but it
was a world in which success and happiness and tragedy and sorrow were
touched by grandeur. There was in it nothing sordid or petty, for there
were in it no people like Uncle Elmer and Naomi and Mabelle. One could
enter it if one knew how to live. That, he saw, was a thing he must
learn--how to live, to free himself of all that nastiness and
intolerance and pettiness of which he had suddenly become aware. He had
to escape from all those things which the old Philip, the one who was
dead, had accepted, in the blindness of a faith in a nasty God, as the
ultimate in living.
This new Philip, prey to a sickening awareness, had been working all the
morning in the Flats and ate with Krylenko at the tent where the
homeless strikers were fed soup and coffee and bread, and, on returning
to the stable, he lay down on the iron bed and fell asleep. He did not
know how long he lay there, but he was awakened presently by a curious
feeling, half a dream, that some one had come into the room with him.
Lying quietly, still half-lost in a mist of sleep, he became slowly
aware that some one was walking softly about beyond the screen. Rising,
he pushed it aside and, stepping out, saw who it was. Standing in the
shadow near the window, peering at the drawings, was Lily Shane,
hatless, with her honey-colored hair done in a knot at the back of her
neck, her furs thrown back over her shoulders. At the sound of his step,
she turned slowly and said, “Oh! I thought there was no one here. I
thought I was alone.”
It was a soft voice, gentle and musical, exactly the right voice for
such a figure and face. At the sound of it, he was aware suddenly that
he must appear ridiculous--coatless, with his hair all rumpled. It was
the first time he had ever spoken to such a woman, and something in her
manner--the complete calm and assurance, the quiet, almost insolent lack
of any apology, made him feel a gawky little boy.
“I ... I was asleep,” he said, desperately patting down his hair.
She smiled. “I didn’t look behind the screen. Hennery told me you hadn’t
come in.” But there was a contradiction behind the smile, a ghost of a
voice which said, “I _did_ look behind the screen. I knew you were
there.”
And suddenly, for the first time, Philip was stricken by an awful
speculation as to how he looked when asleep. He knew that he was
blushing. He said, “It doesn’t matter. It’s your stable, after all.”
“I didn’t mean to disturb you. I’ve stayed longer than I meant to ...
but--you see ...”--she made a gesture toward the drawings--“I found all
these more fascinating than I expected. I knew about you. My sister told
me ... but I didn’t find what I expected. They’re so much better.... You
see, it’s always the same. I couldn’t believe it of the Town. Can any
good thing come out of Nazareth?”
He began to tremble a little. He’d never shown them to any one save
Krylenko, who only wanted pictures for propaganda and liked everything,
good and bad. And now some one who lived in a great world such as he
could scarcely imagine, thought they were good. Suddenly all the
worries, the troubles, slipping from him, left him shy and childlike.
“I don’t know whether they’re good or bad,” he said, “only ... only I’ve
_got_ to do them.”
She was standing before the painting of the Flats seen from the window,
over which he had struggled for days. She smiled again, looking at him.
“It’s a bit messy ... but it’s got something in it of truth. I’ve seen
it like that. It was like that one moonlight night not so long ago. I
was walking in the garden ... late ... after midnight. I noticed it.”
She sat down in one of the chairs by the stove. “May I stay and talk a
moment?”
“Of course.”
“Sit down too,” she said.
Then he remembered that he was still without a coat, and, seizing it
quickly, he put it on and sat down. His mind was all on fire, like a
pile of tinder caught by a spark. He had never seen anything like this
woman before. She wasn’t what a woman who had led such a life should
have been. She wasn’t hard, or vulgar, or coarse, as he had been taught
to believe. She must have been nearly forty years old, and yet she was
fresh as the morning. And in her beauty, her voice, her manner, there
was an odd quality of excitement which changed the very surface of
everything about her. Her very presence seemed to make possible anything
in the world.
She was saying, “What do you mean to do about it?”
“About what?”
She made a gesture to include the drawings. “All this.”
It seemed to him for the first time that he had never thought of what he
meant to do about it. He had just worked, passionately, because he had
to work. He hadn’t thought of the future at all.
“I don’t know ... I want to work until I can find what I know is here
... I mean in the Mills and in the Flats. And then ... some day ... I
... I want to go back to Africa.... I’ve been to Africa, you know. I was
a missionary once.” He thought that from the summit of her worldliness
she might laugh at him for being a missionary; but she didn’t laugh.
She clasped her hands about her knee, and he saw suddenly that they were
very beautiful hands, white and ringless, against the soft, golden
sables. He wanted to seize a pencil and draw them.
She didn’t laugh at him. She only said, “Tell me about that ... about
Africa ... I mean.”
And slowly he found himself telling the whole story, passionately, as he
had never told it before, even to Mary Conyngham. He seemed to find in
it things which he hadn’t seen before, strange lights and shadows. He
told it from beginning to end, and when he had finished, she said,
looking into the fire, without smiling, “Yes, I understand all that.
I’ve never been religious or mystical, but I’ve always had my sister
Irene. I’ve seen it with her. You see I’m what they call a bad lot.
You’ve probably heard of me. I’m only thankful I’m alive and I try to
enjoy myself in the only world I’m sure of.”
He went on, “You see, when I’ve learned more, I want to go back and
paint that country. It had a fascination for me. I guess I’m like that
Englishwoman ... Lady Millicent ... the one I told you about. She said
there were some people who couldn’t resist it.”
When he finished, he saw that all his awe of her had vanished. He knew
her better than any one in the world, for she had a miraculous way of
understanding him, even those things which he did not say. The desire
for the jungle and the hot lake swept over him in a turbulent wave. He
wanted to go at once, without waiting. He was thirsty for a sight of the
reedy marshes. The procession of black women moved somehow across the
back of the room beyond Lily Shane. He was hot all at once, and thirsty
for the water they carried up the slope to the parched ground.
She understood what he was trying to tell her ... she had caught a
magnificence, a splendor, that was not to be put into words. He wasn’t
afraid any more, or shy. It was as if she existed in an aura of
contagious lawlessness.
She took out a cigarette from a lacquered box. “Do you mind if I smoke?”
“No.”
“I didn’t know....”
He watched her curiously. There lay in the soft curve of her body, in
the long slim leg crossed over the other, in the curve of the fur thrown
back across her shoulders, in the poise of her arm, all the perfection
of some composition designed and executed by a great artist. It was a
kind of perfection he had never dreamed of, something which had arisen
mysteriously during years out of the curious charm of her own
personality. It was, too, a completeness born of the fearlessness which
he had sensed for a moment by the window. Suddenly he thought, “Some day
I shall be of that world. I shall succeed and become great. And Mary,
too, will share it.”
He had almost forgotten Mary, but it was only, he told himself
shamefully, because she had been there with him all the while. It was
almost as if she were a part of himself: whatever happened to him must
happen also to her. It was not that he had fallen in love with this
stranger, or even that he desired her: the emotion was something far
beyond all that, a sort of dazzled bewilderment shot through with
streaks of hope and glamour which brought near to him that world in
which people were really alive.
Suddenly he summoned all his courage. He said, blushing under his dark
skin, “I want to draw you. I want to make a picture of you.”
She moved a little and smiled.
“No,” he said, quickly. “Like that. Don’t move.”
He wanted to capture the grace and elegance of the pose, so that he
might have it always, as a little fragment, caught and held, of this
thing which he knew to exist, beyond his reach. She sat quietly. “Yes,
of course ... only it’s almost dark now....”
He seized a pencil and a bit of paper, working swiftly, as he had done
at the soup-kitchen. He must hurry (he thought) or she would be gone
again back to Paris. She appeared presently to have forgotten him, and
sat, with the remnant of the cigarette hanging from her long white
fingers, while she stared into the fire. There was a curious sense of
repose in the whole body, and a queer sadness too. She might have been
quite alone. He had the feeling that she had forgotten his existence.
He worked nervously, with long, sure strokes, and with each one he knew
that he was succeeding. In the end he would fix her thus forever on a
fragment of paper. And then suddenly he heard some one enter the stable
below, and, fumbling with the door, open it and hurry up the steps. He
went on, pressed by the fear that if he were disturbed now the thing
would never be finished. He _had_ to have it. It would be a kind of
fetish to keep off despair.
It was Lily Shane who moved first, stirred perhaps by a sense of being
watched. As she moved, Philip turned too, and there, half-way up the
stairs where she had halted at sight of them, stood Naomi, staring.
She was breathless, and beneath a carelessly pinned hat, from which
wisps of hair escaped, her face showed red and shining as a midsummer
day. For one dreadful moment the three remained silent, staring at each
other. Lily Shane stared with a kind of bored indifference, but there
was in Naomi’s eyes a hurt look of bewilderment. Suddenly she turned
back, as if she meant to go away again without speaking to either of
them. Philip knew the expression at once. She had looked thus on the day
that Lady Millicent appeared out of the forest with the Arab marching
before her. It was the look of one who was shut out from something she
could not understand, which frightened her by its strangeness.
It was Lily Shane who moved first. The burnt cigarette dropped from her
fingers; and she stamped on it. The action appeared to stir Naomi into
life.
“Philip,” she said. “I came to tell you that your Pa has come home.”
14
It was Emma herself who saw him first. Returning flustered and upset
from the call upon Mary Conyngham, she entered the slate-colored house
closing the door stormily behind her. She would have passed the darkened
parlor (where since Naomi’s departure the shades were always kept drawn
to protect the carpet), but, as she explained it afterward, she “felt”
that there was some one in the room. Peering into the darkness, she
heard a faint sound of snoring, and, as her eyes grew accustomed to the
darkness, she discerned the figure of a man lying on her best sofa, with
his feet resting on the arm. He was sleeping with his mouth open a
little way beneath a black mustache, waxed and curled with the care of a
dandy.
As she stood there in the midst of the room, the figure in the shadows
took form slowly, and suddenly she knew it ... the dapper, small body,
dressed so dudishly, the yellow waistcoat with its enormous gold
watch-chain, and cluster of seals. She knew, with a sudden pang, even
the small, well-shaped hand, uncalloused by any toil, that lay
peacefully at rest on the Brussels carpet. For a second she thought,
“I’ve gone suddenly crazy from all the trouble I’ve had. What I’m seeing
can’t be true.”
It took a great deal of courage for her to move toward the sofa, for it
meant moving in an instant, not simply across the Brussels carpet, but
across the desert of twenty-six years. It meant giving up Moses Slade
and all that resplendent future which had been taking form in her mind
only a moment before. It was like waking the dead from the shadows of
the tomblike parlor.
She did not lack courage, Emma; or perhaps it was not courage, but the
headlong thrust of an immense vitality which now possessed her. She went
over to the sofa and said, “Jason! Jason Downes!” He did not stir, and
suddenly the strange thought came to her that he might be dead. The
wicked idea threw her into an immense confusion, for she did not know
whether she preferred the unstable companionship of the fascinating
Jason to the bright future that would be hers as the wife of Moses.
Then, all at once, she saw that the gaudy watch-chain was moving up and
down slowly as he breathed, and she was smitten abruptly by memories
twenty-six years old of morning after morning when she had wakened,
full of energy, to find Jason lying beside her sleeping in the same
profound, conscienceless slumber.
“Jason!” she said again. “Jason Downes!” And this time there was a
curious tenderness in her voice that was almost a sob.
He did not stir, and she touched his shoulder. He moved slowly, and
then, opening his eyes, sat up and put his feet on the floor. He
awakened lazily, and for a moment he simply sat staring at her, looking
as neat and dapper as if he had just finished an elaborate toilet. Again
memory smote Emma. He had always been like this: he had always wakened
in the mornings, looking fresh and neat, with every hair in place. It
was that hair-oil he persisted in using. Now that he’d come home, she
would have to get antimacassars to protect the furniture against Jason’s
oily head.
Suddenly he grinned and said, “Why! Hello! It’s you, Em.” It wasn’t a
sheepish grin, but a smile of cocky assurance, such as was frozen
forever upon the face of the enlarged portrait.
“Jason ... Jason! Oh, my God! Jason!” She collapsed suddenly and fell
into the mahogany-veneer rocker. It was a strange Emma, less strange
perhaps to Jason Downes than she would have been to the world outside,
for suddenly she had become all soft and collapsed and feminine. All
those twenty-six years had rolled away, leaving her helpless.
As if he had left the house only that morning, he sat on the arm of the
chair and kissed her. He patted her hands and said, “You mustn’t cry
like that, Em. I can’t bear to hear you. It breaks me all up.”
“If you knew how long I’d waited!” she sobbed. “Why didn’t you even
write? Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?”
He seemed a little proud of himself. “I wanted it to be a surprise.”