comforting her while she wept and wept. “A surprise,” she echoed. “A
surprise ... after twenty-six years....” After a time she grew more
calm, and suddenly she began to laugh. She kept saying at little
intervals, “If you knew how I’ve waited!”
“I’m rich now, Emma,” he said with the shadow of a swagger. “I’ve done
well out there.”
“Out where ... Jason?”
“Out in Australia ... where I went.”
“You were in Australia?” He wasn’t in China at all, then. The story was
so old that she had come to believe it, and with a sudden shock of
horror she saw that they would now have to face the ancient lie. He
hadn’t been in China, and he hadn’t been killed by bandits. Here he was
back again, and you couldn’t keep a man like Jason shut up forever in
the house. The Town would see him. She began once more to cry.
“There, there, Em!” he said, patting her hand again, almost amorously.
“Don’t take it so hard. You’re glad I did come back, ain’t you?”
“I don’t know ... I don’t know. You don’t deserve anything ... even
tears ... after treating a wife the way you’ve treated me. Don’t think
I’m crying because I’m glad you’re back. It’s not that. I ought to turn
you out. I’d do it, too, if I was an ordinary woman.”
She saw then that she still had to manage everything, including Jason.
She saw that he was as useless as he had always been. She would have to
“take hold.” The feminine softness melted away, and, sitting up, she
blew her nose and said, “It’s like this, Jason. When you went away, I
said you’d gone to China on business. And when you didn’t come back, I
said I hadn’t had any letters from you and something must be wrong. You
see I pretended I heard from you regularly because ... I wanted to
protect you and because I was ashamed. I didn’t want people to think
you’d deserted me after everybody had warned me against you. And so
Elmer....”
“And how’s he?” said Jason. “Cold boiled mutton, I call ’im.”
“Wait till I finish my story, Jason. Try to keep your mind on what I’m
saying. And so Elmer set the Government to investigating....”
“They were looking for me? The _United States Government_ itself?” There
was in his voice and manner a sudden note of gratification at his
importance.
“Yes ... they hunted all over China.”
Jason was grinning now. “It’s lucky they was looking in China, because I
was in Australia all the time.”
“And they said you must have been killed by bandits ... so I put on
black and set out to support myself and Philip.”
“Why didn’t old pious Elmer help you out? I wouldn’t have gone away,
except that I knew ’e was rich enough to look out for you.”
“Elmer’s tight, and besides I didn’t want him to be pitying me and
saying, ‘I told you so’ every time I asked him for a cent.”
“And Philip? You haven’t told me about him yet.”
“We’ll come to him. We’ve got to settle this other thing first. You see,
Jason, we’ve got to do something about that lie I told ... it wasn’t
really a lie because I told it for your sake and Philip’s--to protect
you both.”
“Yes, it is kind-a awkward.” He sat for a moment, trying to bring his
volatile mind into profitable operation. At last he said, “You oughtn’t
to have told that lie, Em.”
“I told you why I told it. God will understand me if no one else will.”
“Now, Em, don’t begin on that line.... It was always the line I couldn’t
stand.... You ain’t no bleedin’ martyr.”
She looked at him with a sudden suspicion. “Jason, where did you pick up
this queer talk ... all the queer words you’ve been using?”
“Australia, I guess ... living out among the cockneys out there.” He
rose suddenly. “Em, I can’t sit any more in this dark. I can’t think in
a tomb.” He went over and drew up the window-shades. As the fading
winter light filled the room, he looked around him. “Why, it ain’t
changed at all! Just the same ... wedding parlor suite and everything.”
His glance fell on the wall above the fireplace. “And you still got my
picture, Em. That was good of you.”
She showed signs of sobbing again. “It’s all I had....”
He was looking at the picture with a hypnotic fascination. “It’s funny,
I ain’t changed much. You’d never think that picture was taken
twenty-six years ago.” He took out a pocket mirror and began comparing
his features with those in the enlarged photograph. What he said was
true enough. Time had left no marks on the smooth, good-looking face,
nor even on a mind that was like a shining, darting minnow. He was as
slim and dapper as ever. The hair was much thinner, but it was still
dark, and with the aid of grease and shrewd manipulation you couldn’t
tell that he was really bald. Emma, watching him, had an awful suspicion
that it was dyed as well; and the elegant mustaches too. She would be
certain to discover, now that he had come back to share the same room
and bed. She had a sudden, awful fear that she must look much older than
he.
“I’m a little bald,” he said ruefully, “but nothing very much.”
“Jason,” she said sternly. “Jason ... we’ve got to settle this thing ...
now ... before we do anything else. Did any one see you?”
“No, I don’t think so.” He replaced the pocket mirror with a mild, comic
air of alarm at the old note of authority in her voice.
“You must think of something ... you’re better at such things than I
am.” He had, she remembered, the proper kind of an imagination. She knew
from experience how it had worked long ago when he had given her excuses
for his behavior.
He looked at her with an absurd air of helplessness. “What can we say? I
suppose you could say I lost my memory ... that I got hit on the head.”
Suddenly a great light burst upon the empty face. “I _did_ get a fall on
the steamer going out. I fell down a stairway and for three days I
didn’t know a thing. A fall like that might easily make you lose your
memory.... A thing like that _might_ happen.” As if the possibilities
of such a tale had suddenly dawned upon him, his face became illumined
with that look which must come at times into the faces of great creative
artists. He said, “Yes, I _might_ have lost my memory, not knowing who I
was, or where I came from, and then, after twenty-six years, I got
another fall ... how?... well out of the mow on my ranch in Australia,
and when I came to, I remembered everything--that I had a wife in
America. It’s true--it might happen. I’ve read of such things.”
Listening to him, Emma felt the story seemed too preposterous, and yet
she knew that only heroic measures could save the situation. The bolder
the tale, the better. It was, as he said, a story that _might_ be true.
Such things _had_ happened. She could trust him, too, to make the tale a
convincing one: the only danger lay in the possibility of his doing it
_too_ well. It occurred to her in the midst of her desperate planning
that it was strange what wild, incredible things had happened in her
life ... a life devoted always to hard work and Christian living.
Jason’s glittering mind had been working rapidly. He was saying, “You
see, there’s the scar and everything.” He bent down, exposing the bald
spot that was the only sign of his decay. “You see, there it is--the
scar.”
She looked at him scornfully, for the crisis of her emotion had passed
now, and she was beginning to feel herself once more. “Now, Jason,” she
said, “I haven’t forgotten where that scar came from. You’ve always had
it. You got it in Hennessey’s saloon.”
For a second the dash went out of him. “Now, Em, you’re not going to
begin on that, the minute I get home.” And then quickly his imagination
set to work again, and with an air of brightness, as if the solution he
had thought of vindicated him completely, he said, “Besides I wasn’t
bald in those days and nobody ever saw the scar. And the funny thing is
that it was on that exact spot that I fell on the boat. It enlarged the
scar.” He looked at her in the way he had always done when he meant to
turn her mind into more amiable channels. “Now, isn’t that queer? It
enlarged the scar.”
It was clear that she meant not to be diverted from the business at
hand. “I suppose that’s as good a story as any. We’ve got to have a
story of some kind. But you must stick to it, Jason, and don’t make it
too good. That’s what you always do ... make it too good.” (Hadn’t she,
years ago, trapped him time after time in a lie, because he could not
resist a too elaborate pattern of embroidery?)
She said, “But there’s one thing I’ve got to do right away, and that is
send word to Naomi to tell Philip.”
“Who’s Naomi?”
“She’s Philip’s wife.”
“He’s married?”
“He’s been married for five years.”
He made a clucking sound. “We’re getting on, Em.”
“And there’s more than that. You’re a grandfather.”
The smooth face wrinkled into a rueful expression. “It’s hard to think
of myself as a grandfather. How old is the child, or the children?”
“They’re twins.”
He chuckled. “He did a good job, Philip.”
“Now, Jason....”
“All right, but how old are they?”
“Four months ... nearly five.”
“I must say that Philip took ’is time about it. Married five years....
Well, we didn’t waste any time, did we, Em.”
“Jason!”
She hated him when he was vulgar. She decided not to go into the reasons
why Philip and Naomi had been married four years without children,
because it was a thing which Jason wouldn’t understand--sacrificing the
chance of children to devote yourself to God. There was nothing
spiritual about Jason. It was one of his countless faults.
“But who did ’e marry, Em? You haven’t told me.”
“Her name was Naomi Potts. You wouldn’t know who she was. Her people
were missionaries, and she was a missionary too.”
“Oh, my God!”
“I won’t have you blaspheming.”
“And what’s Philip like?”
“He was a missionary too.... He was three years in Africa ... until his
health broke.”
“Oh, my God!” He grew suddenly thoughtful, moved perhaps by the
suspicion that she had succeeded in doing to his son what she had failed
to do to him.
She was at the door now. “I won’t listen to you talking like that any
longer.” She turned in the doorway. “Don’t go out till I come back. You
mustn’t be seen till we’ve worked this thing out. I’ve got to send word
to them all.”
When she had gone, he picked up his hat, took a cigar from his vest
pocket and lighted it. In the hallway, he shouted at her, “Are we still
using the same room, Em? I’ll just move in my things and wash up a bit.”
In the sitting-room Emma sat down and wrote three notes--one to Naomi,
one to Mabelle, and the third to Moses Slade. With a trembling hand she
wrote to him, “God has sent Jason, my husband, back to me. He came
to-day. It is His will that we are not to marry. Your heartbroken Emma.”
She summoned the slattern Essie, and, giving her instructions of a
violence calculated to impress Essie’s feeble mind, she bade her deliver
the three notes, Mr. Slade’s first of all. But once outside the sight of
Emma, the hired girl had her own ideas of the order in which she meant
to deliver them, and so the note to Moses Slade arrived last. But it
made no difference, as the Honorable Mr. Slade, bearing a copy of the
_Labor Journal_, was at the same moment on his way to Emma’s to break
off the engagement, for he had discovered the author of the libelous
drawings. The latest one was signed boldly with the name, “Philip
Downes.” He never arrived at Emma’s house, for on his way he heard in
Smollett’s Cigar Store that Jason Downes had returned, and so he saved
himself the trouble of an unpleasant interview. For Essie, in the moment
after the returned prodigal had made known to her his identity, had put
on a cast-off hat of Emma’s and set out at once to spread the exciting
news through the Town.
When she returned at last from delivering the three notes, Emma was
“getting Jason settled” in the bedroom he had left twenty-six years
before. Essie, tempted, fell, and, listening outside the door, heard
him recounting to his wife a wonderful story of having lost his memory
for a quarter of a century. But one thing tormented the brain of the
slattern Essie. She could not understand how Emma seemed to know the
whole story and to put in a word now and then correcting him.
At the sound of Emma’s footsteps approaching the door, Essie turned and,
fleeing, hid in the hall closet, from which she risked her whole future
by opening the door a little way to have a look at the fascinating Mr.
Downes. Her heart thumped wildly under her cotton blouse at the
proximity of so romantic a figure.
15
It seemed that something in the spirit of the irrepressible Jason Downes
took possession of the house, for Emma turned almost gay, and at times
betrayed signs of an ancient coquetry (almost buried beneath so many
hardening years) in an actual tendency to bridle. For the first time
since Jason had slipped quietly out of the back door, the sallow
dining-room was enlivened by the odors, the sounds, the air of
banqueting: a dinner was held that very night to celebrate the
prodigal’s return. Elmer came, goaded by an overpowering curiosity, and
Mabelle, separated for once from Jimmy, her round, blue eyes dilated
with excitement and colored by that faintly bawdy look which so
disturbed Emma. And Philip was there, of course, and Naomi, paler than
usual, dressed in a badly fitting new foulard dress, which she and
Mabelle had “run up at home” in the hope of pleasing Philip. The dress
had been saved for an “occasion.” They had worked over it for ten days
in profound secrecy, keeping it to dazzle Philip. It was thick about
the waist, and did not hang properly in the back, and it made her look
all lumpy in the wrong places. In case Philip did not notice it, Mabelle
was to say to him, “You haven’t spoken about Naomi’s pretty new dress.
She made it all herself--with her own hands.” They had carefully
rehearsed the little plot born of Mabelle’s romantic brain.
But when Naomi arrived at the slate-colored house, she took Mabelle
quickly into a corner and said, “Don’t speak of the dress to him.” And
when Mabelle asked, “Why not?” she only answered, “You can do it later,
but not to-night. I can’t explain why just now.”
She couldn’t explain to Mabelle that she was ashamed of the dress, nor
why she was ashamed of it. She couldn’t say that as she stood on the
stairs of the stable and saw a handsome woman, in a plain black dress,
with her knees crossed, and furs thrown back over her fine shoulders,
that the pride of the poor little foulard dress had turned to ashes. She
couldn’t explain how she had become suddenly sick at the understanding
that she must seem dowdy and ridiculous, standing there, all red and hot
and disheveled, staring at them, and wanting all the time to turn and
run, anywhere, on and on, without stopping. She couldn’t explain how the
sight of the other woman had made the foulard dress seem poor and
frowzy, even when she put on the coral beads left her by her mother, and
pinned on the little gold fleur-de-lys watch her father had given her.
When she first arrived, she kept on her coat, pretending that the house
was cold, but Emma said, “It’s nonsense, Naomi. The house is warm
enough,” and the irrepressible Mabelle echoed, “That’s what I say,
Emma. She ought to take it off and show her pretty new dress.”
Naomi had looked quickly about her, but Philip hadn’t been listening. He
was standing with Uncle Elmer beside his father, who was in high
spirits, talking and talking. He wouldn’t notice the dress if only she
could keep people from speaking of it.
She hadn’t spoken of Lily Shane to Philip. All the way back to the flat
by the railroad they had talked of nothing but his father and the poor
bits of information she had been able to wring from the excited Essie;
and when they arrived it was to find Mabelle waiting breathlessly to
discuss it with them. She had been already to the slate-colored house
and seen him with her own eyes. She didn’t stay long (she said) because
she felt as if she were intruding on honeymooners. Did they know that he
had lost his memory by a fall on the boat going out to China, and that
it had only come back to him when he had a fall six months ago out of
the mow on his ranch in Australia? Yes, it was Australia he had been to
all this time....
She went on and on. “Think of it,” she said. “The excitement of
welcoming home a husband you hadn’t seen in twenty-six years ... like a
return from the dead. I don’t wonder your Ma is beside herself.”
Naomi heard it all, dimly, as if all Mabelle’s chatter came to her from
a great distance. She should have been excited, but she couldn’t be,
with something that was like a dull pain in her body. She could only
keep seeing Lily Shane, who made her feel tiny and miserable and
ridiculous--Lily Shane, whom Philip said he didn’t even know, and had
never spoken to. Yet he knew her well enough to be making a picture of
her. He never thought of making a picture of his own wife.
She felt sick, for it was the first time she had ever seen herself. She
seemed to see at a great distance a pale, thin, freckled woman, with
sandy hair, dressed in funny clothes.
And then she would hear Mabelle saying through a fog, “Your Ma wants you
to come right up to supper. You can get Mrs. Stimson--the druggist’s
wife--to sit with the twins.”
Mabelle hurried off presently, and Mrs. Stimson came in duly to sit with
the twins. She gave up the evening at her euchre club because the
excitement of sitting up with the grandchildren of a man who had
returned after being thought dead for twenty-six years was not to be
overlooked. She would hear all the story at first hand when Philip and
Naomi returned, before any one else in the Town had heard it. She could
say, “I sat with the twins so that Philip and Naomi could go to supper
with Mr. Downes himself. I heard the whole thing from them.”
As they went up the hill to the slate-colored house, Naomi said nothing,
and so they walked in silence. She had begun to understand a little
Philip’s queer moods, and she knew now that he was nervous and
irritable. She had watched him so closely of late that she had become
aware of a queer sense of strain which once she had passed over
unnoticed. She had learned not to speak when Philip was like that. And
as they climbed the hill, the silence, the strain, seemed to become
unbearable. It was Philip who broke it by crying out suddenly, “I know
what you’re thinking. You’re thinking I lied to you about Lily Shane.
Well, I didn’t. Before God, I never spoke to her until to-day, and I
wouldn’t have, even then, but she came to my room without my asking
her.”
For a moment, she wanted to lie down in the snow and, burying her face
in it, cry and cry. She managed to say, “I wasn’t even thinking of her.
Honestly I wasn’t, Philip. And I believe you.”
“If that’s so, why do you sulk and not say anything?”
“I wasn’t sulking. I only thought you didn’t want to talk just now.”
“I hate it when you act like a martyr.” This time she was silent, and he
added, “I suppose all women do it ... or most women ... it’s what Ma
does when she wants to get her way. I hate it.”
She thought, “He said ‘most women’ because he meant all women but Lily
Shane.” But she was silent. They did not speak again until they reached
the slate-colored house.
It wasn’t really Naomi who lay at the bottom of his irritation, but the
thought of his father. The return troubled him. Why should he have come
now after twenty-six years? It was, he thought, almost indecent and
unfair, in a way, to his mother. He tried, when he was not talking to
Naomi, to imagine what he must be like--a man who Emma said had gone out
to China to make money for his wife and child, a man who adored her and
worshipped his son. He was troubled, because the moral image created by
his mother seemed not to fit the enlarged, physical portrait in the
parlor. In these last years he had come to learn a lot about the world
and about people, and one of the things he had learned was that people
_are_ like their faces. His mother was like her large, rather coarse and
energetic face; Naomi was like her pale, weak one; and Lily Shane and
Mary and Uncle Elmer and even Krylenko and McTavish were like theirs. It
was impossible to escape your own face. His father, he thought, couldn’t
escape that face that hung in the parlor.
When the door opened and he stepped into the parlor, he saw that his
father hadn’t escaped his face. He felt, with a sudden sensation of
sickness, that his father was even worse than his face. It was the same,
only a little older, and the outlines had grown somehow dim and vague
from weakness and self-indulgence. Why, he thought again, did he ever
come back?
But his mother was happy again. Any one could see that.
And then his father turned and looked at him. For a moment he stared,
astonished by something in the face of his son, something which he
himself could not perhaps define, but something which, with all the
sharp instincts of a sensual nature he recognized as strange, which had
little to do with either himself or Emma. And then, perhaps because the
astonishment had upset him, the meeting fell flat. The exuberance flowed
out of Jason Downes. It was almost as if he were afraid of his son--this
son who, unlike either himself or Emma, was capable of tragedy and
suffering. His eyes turned aside from the burning eyes of his son.
“Well, Philip,” he said, with a wild effort at hilarity, “here’s your Pa
... back again.”
Philip shook hands with him, and then a silence fell between them.
But it was Jason Downes who dominated the family gathering. Philip,
silent, watched his father’s spirits mounting. It seemed to him that
Jason had set himself deliberately to triumph over his dour, forbidding
brother-in-law, and to impress his own son. It was as if he felt that
his son had a poor opinion of him, and meant to prove that he was wrong
in his judgment.
He told the whole story of the voyage out, of his fall down a
companionway, and the strange darkness that followed. Once more he bowed
his head and exhibited the scar.
“But,” said the skeptical Elmer sourly, “you always had that scar,
Jason. You got it falling on the ice at the front gate.”
“Oh, no. The one before was only a small one. The funny thing was that I
struck my head in exactly the same place. Wasn’t that queer? And then
when I fell out of the mow I hit it a third time. That’s what the
doctors in Sydney said made it so serious.” For a moment, conscious that
the embroidering had begun, Emma looked troubled and uneasy.
And Mabelle, with a look of profound speculation, asked, “And what if
you hit it a fourth time? Would that make you lose your memory about
Australia?”
Jason coughed and looked at her sharply, and then said, “Well, no one
could say about that. If it happened again, it would probably kill me.”
“Well,” said Mabelle, “I must say I never heard a more interesting story
... I never read as interesting a one in any of the magazines ... not
even in the _Ladies’ Home Journal_.”
For a moment Philip wanted to laugh at Mabelle’s question, but it wasn’t
a natural desire to laugh: it sprang from a blend of anger and
hysterics. He loathed the whole party, with Mabelle and her half-witted
questions, his mother with all her character gone in the silly blind
admiration for her husband, Uncle Elmer and his nasty, mean questions,
and Naomi, silent, and looking as if she were going to cry. (If only she
wouldn’t sulk and play the martyr!) And Mabelle’s half-witted questions
were worse than Uncle Elmer’s cynical remarks, for they made him see
suddenly that his father _was_ lying. He was creating a whole story that
wasn’t true, and he was enjoying himself immensely. If it _was_ a lie,
if he had deliberately deserted his wife and child, why had he come back
now?
Jason went on and on, talking, talking, talking. He told of his ranch of
eighteen hundred acres and of the thousands of sheep he owned and of the
sixty herders employed to take care of them. He described the long
drouths that sometimes afflicted them, and told a great deal about
Melbourne and Sydney.
“Your Pa,” he said, addressing Philip, “is an important man out there.”
And the implication was, “You don’t think much of him, but you ought to
see him in Australia.”
But Philip was silent, and thought, “He’s probably lying about that,
too,” and, as the conversation went on, he thought, “He’s never said
anything about women out there. He’s never spoken about that side of his
life, and he’s not the kind to leave women alone.”
“And I suppose you’ll be wanting to take Emma back to Australia,” said
Uncle Elmer, regarding Jason over his steel-rimmed spectacles.
“No ... I won’t be doing that. After all, her life is here, ain’t it? I
shall have to go back from time to time to look after my affairs,
but....”