arrived.”
“But we have to face these things,” said Jason.
Suddenly Emma turned away from the table to the doorway where Essie, in
terror of interrupting the party, yet fascinated still by the spell of
Jason’s narrative, stood waiting. She was standing, as she always stood,
on the sides of her shoes.
“What is it, Essie? What are you standing there for?”
“There’s a man come to see Mr. Downes.”
“What does he want?”
“He’s from the newspaper.”
“Tell him to come back to-morrow.”
But Jason had overheard. He rose with the napkin still tucked into the
fawn-colored vest. “No, Essie.... Tell him I’ll speak to him now.”
“But, Jason....”
“Yes, Em.... I might as well get it over.”
There was no holding him now; but Emma succeeded in thrusting forward a
word of advice.
“Remember, Jason, what the newspapers are like. Don’t tell them too
much.”
A shadow crossed her face, and Philip thought suddenly, “Ma knows he’s
lying too, and she’s afraid he’ll overdo it.” And then a more fantastic
thought occurred to him--that she knew for a good reason that he was
lying, that perhaps she had planned the lie to cover up an earlier one.
“I must say it’s all very remarkable ... how Jason’s affairs have turned
out,” said Elmer. “I never would have thought it.”
“You never believed in him,” said Emma, with an air of triumph, “and now
you see.”
To Philip the whole room, the table, the people about it, the figure of
the slattern Essie standing in the doorway, all their petty boasting and
piety and lying, became suddenly vulgar and loathsome. And then, almost
at once, he became ashamed of himself for being ashamed, for they were
_his_ people. He had no others. It was a subtle, sickening sort of
torture.
16
Emma was herself forced to go in at last and send away the newspaper
man, for Jason would have kept him there the rest of the night, telling
a story which became more and more embroidered with each rash
recounting. And when, at last, the reporter had gone, the others came in
and sat about while Jason continued his talk. But the evening died
slowly, perhaps because of Elmer’s suspicions, or Naomi’s curious
depression, or Philip’s own disgust and low spirits. Jason found himself
talking presently against a curious, foreboding silence, of which he
took no notice. Only Emma and Mabelle were still listening.
It was Elmer who at last broke up the party, pushing the rotund and
breathless Mabelle before him. In the door Mabelle turned, and, shaking
her head a little coquettishly, said, “Well, good-night, Jason.
Good-night, Emma. I feel like I was saying ‘good-night’ to a honeymoon
couple.” And the bawdy look came into her eyes. “There’ll never be any
second honeymoon for Elmer and me. We’ve got our family now and that’s
all done.”
Still tittering, she was dragged off by her husband. When she had gone,
Jason said, “Mabelle is a cute one, ain’t she, and a funny one too, to
be married to a mausoleum like Elmer.”
“Now, Jason, it’s all patched up between you and Elmer. There’s no use
beginning all over again.”
Naomi and Philip had put on their wraps, and were standing by the door,
when Jason suddenly slapped his son on the back. “We’ve got to get
better acquainted, son. You’ll like your Pa when you know him better.
Nobody can resist him.” He winked at Emma, who turned crimson. “Ain’t it
so, Em. Least of all, the ladies.” And then to Philip again, “I’ll come
and see you in the morning.”
Philip turned quickly. “No, I’ll come and fetch you myself. You wouldn’t
find the way.”
“I want to see the twins the first thing.”
“I’ll come for you.”
He had resolved that his father was not to come to the stable. He saw
that Emma hadn’t even told his father that he wasn’t living with his
wife. The stable had suddenly become to him a kind of temple, a place
dedicated to that part of him which had escaped. There were things there
which his father wouldn’t understand, and could only defile. The stable
belonged to him alone. It was apart from all the others--his father, his
mother, Naomi, Uncle Elmer and Aunt Mabelle.
Emma was standing before Naomi, holding her coat open, so that she might
examine the dress underneath. She was saying, “You must come up some
afternoon, Naomi, and I’ll help you make the dress right. It hangs all
wrong at the back, and it’s all bunchy around the armholes. You could
make it all right, but, as it is, it’s ... it’s sort of funny-looking.”
All the way back to the Flats neither of them spoke at all: Philip,
because there was a black anger and rebellion burning in him, and Naomi,
because if she had tried to speak, she would have wept. She felt as
though she were dead, as if in a world made up of Philip and his father
and Emma she no longer had any existence. She was only a burden who
annoyed them all. And the dress ... it was only sort of “funny-looking.”
He left Naomi at the door of the flat with an abrupt “good-night.” It
was after midnight, and the moon was rising behind the hill crowned by
Shane’s Castle, throwing a blue light on the mist that hung above the
Flats. In the far distance the mist was all rosy with the light from
four new furnaces that had begun once more to work. The strike was
slipping slowly into defeat, and he understood that it meant nothing to
him any longer. He had almost forgotten Krylenko.
As he passed through the rusted gates of the park, there drifted toward
him from among the trunks of the dead trees, a faint, pungent odor that
was hauntingly familiar and, as he climbed the drive between the dead
trees, it grew stronger and stronger, until at last he recognized, in a
sudden flash of memory which brought back all the hot panorama of the
lake and the forest at Megambo, that it was the smell of gunpowder, the
smell that clung to his rifle when he had stood there by the barricade
beside Lady Millicent killing those poor niggers. It was a faint,
ghostly smell that sometimes died away altogether and sometimes came in
strong waves on a warm breeze filled with the dampness of the melting
snow.
At the top of the hill, the big house lay dead and blind, without a sign
of life, and, as he turned the corner, he saw that near the stable lay
the remnants of a fire which had burnt to a heap of embers. His foot
touched something that was wet and slippery. He looked down to discover
a great stain of black on the snow. For a moment he stared at the stain,
fascinated, and suddenly he knew what it was. It was a great stain of
blood.
In the distance, among the trees, he discerned a light, and after a
moment he discovered a little group of men ... three or four ...
carrying a lantern, which they held high from time to time, as if
searching for something. And then, all at once, as he moved forward
again, he almost stepped upon a woman who lay in the snow at the
entrance to the rotting arbor covered with the vines of the dying
wistaria. She lay face down with one arm above her head in a posture
that filled him for a moment with a sense of having lived through this
same experience before, of having seen this same woman lying face down
... dead ... for she was unmistakably dead. He knelt beside her, and,
turning the body on its side, he remembered suddenly. She lay like the
black virgin they had found dead across the path in the tall grass at
Megambo ... the one they had left to the leopards.
Trembling, he peered at the white face in the moonlight. The woman was
young, and across one side of the face there was a little trickle of
blood that came from a hole in the temple. She was dressed in rags, and
her feet were wrapped in rolls of sacking. She was the wife or daughter
of some striker. It occurred to him suddenly that there was something
pitifully lonely in the sight of the body left there, forgotten, by the
embers in the dead park; it had the strangest effect upon him. He rose
and tried to call to the little group of searchers, but no sound came
from his throat, and he began suddenly to cry. Leaning against one of
the pillars of the arbor, he waited until his body had ceased to
tremble. It was a strange, confused feeling, as if the whole spectacle
of humanity were suddenly revealed in all its pathos, its meanness, its
grandeur, and its cruelty. It was a brilliant flash of understanding,
but it passed almost at once, leaving him weak and sick. And then, after
a moment, he found his voice again, and shouted. The little party
halted, and looked about, and he shouted a second time. Then they came
toward him, and he saw that two of them carried shotguns and that one of
them was McTavish.
The woman was dead. They picked her up and laid her carefully on one of
the blackened marble benches of the garden, and McTavish told him what
had happened. In the Town they had forbidden the strikers to hold
meetings, hoping thus to break the strike, but the Shanes, Irene and
Lily (for the old woman was dead), had sent word to Krylenko that they
might meet in the dead park. And so the remnant of those who had held
out in the face of cold and starvation had come here to listen to
Krylenko harangue them from a barrel by the light of a great fire before
the stables. There had been shouting and disorder, and then some one
inside the Mill barrier--one of the hooligans (they hadn’t yet
discovered who did it) turned a machinegun on the mob around the fire.
It had only lasted an instant--the sharp, vicious, staccato sound, but
it had taken its toll.
“It’s a dirty business,” concluded McTavish in disgust. He wasn’t jolly
to-night. All the old, cynical good-humor had gone out of him, as if
he, too, had seen what Philip saw in that sudden flash as he leaned
against the decaying arbor.
They took a shutter from the windows of the stable and, placing the body
of the girl upon it, set off down the hill between the dead walls of the
pine-trees. For a long time Philip stood in the soiled, trampled snow,
looking after them, until a turn in the drive hid the lantern from view
behind the pine-trees.
17
The room above the stable was in darkness, but as he came up out of the
staircase he saw that there was a woman sitting by the window,
silhouetted against the moonlight beyond. He thought, “It must be Lily
Shane, but why is she here at this hour of the night?” And then a low,
familiar voice came out of the darkness, “It’s only me, Philip ...
Mary.” She spoke as if he must have known she was there, waiting for
him.
He struck a match quickly and lighted the kerosene lamp, at which she
rose and came over to him. By the flickering, yellow light he saw that
she had been crying.
“It’s been horrible, Philip. I saw it all from the window while I was
waiting for you.”
“I know ... we just found a dead woman in the snow.”
He was possessed by a curious feeling of numbness, in which Mary seemed
to share, as if the horror of what had taken place outside wiped out all
the strangeness of their meeting thus. Death, it seemed, had brushed by
them so closely that it had swept away all but those things which lay
at the foundation of existence--the fact that they loved each other,
that they were together now, and that nothing else was of any
importance. They were, too, like people stunned by horror. They sat by
the stove, Philip in silence, while Mary told him what she had seen. For
a long time it did not even appear strange to him that she should be
there in his room at two o’clock in the morning.
He heard her saying, “Who was the woman they killed?”
“I don’t know. She looked Italian.”
There was a long silence and at last it was Mary, the practical Mary,
who spoke. “You must wonder why I came here, Philip ... after ... after
not seeing you at all for all this time.”
He looked at her slowly, as if half-asleep. “I don’t know. I hadn’t even
thought of it, Mary ... anything seems possible to-night, anything seems
possible in this queer park.” And then, stirring himself, he reached
across the table and touched her hand. She did not draw it away, and the
touch gave him the strangest sense of a fathomless intimacy which went
back and back into their childhood, into the days when they had played
together in the tree-house. She had belonged to him always, only he had
been stupid never to have understood it. He could have spoken out once
long ago. If only he, the _real_ Philip, had been born a little sooner,
they would both have been saved.
And then, suddenly, he knew why she had come, and he was frightened.
He said, “You heard about my father?”
She started a little, and said, “No.”
“He came back to-night. It was awful, Mary. If he’d only stayed away!
If he’d never have come back....”
So he told her the whole story, even to his suspicion that his father
was a liar, and had deserted him and his mother twenty-six years before.
He told her of the long agony of the reunion, describing his father in
detail. And at the end, he said, “You see why I wish he’d never come
back. You _do_ see, don’t you, Mary ... if he’d stayed away, I’d never
have thought of him at all, or at least only as my mother thought of
him. But he isn’t like that at all. I don’t see how she can take him
back ... how she can bear to have him about.”
She wanted to cry out, “Don’t you see, Philip? Don’t you see the kind of
woman she is? If you don’t see, nothing can save you. She’s worse than
he is, because he’s harmless.” But she only said quietly, “Perhaps she’s
in love with him. If that’s true, it explains anything.”
“Maybe it’s that. She must be in love with him.”
Mary thought, “Oh, Philip! If you’d only forget all the things that
don’t matter and just live, you’d be so much happier!” She wanted him to
be happy more than anything in the world. She would, she knew, do
anything at all to make him happy.
Presently she said, “She came to see me this afternoon, Philip ... your
mother. That’s why I’m here now. She said horrible things ... that
weren’t true at all. She said ... she said ... that I’d been living with
you all along, and she’d just found out about it. She said that I came
here to meet you in the stable. She’s hated me always ... just because
I’ve always been fond of you. She said I’d tried to steal you from her.”
For a moment he simply sat very still, staring at her. She felt his hand
grow cold and relax its grasp. At last he whispered, “She said that? She
said such things to you?”
“Yes ... I ran away from her in the end. It was the only thing I could
do.”
Then all at once he fell on his knees and laid his head in her lap. She
heard him saying, “There’s nothing I can say, Mary. I didn’t think she’d
do a thing like that ... and now I know, I know what kind of a woman she
is. Oh, I’m so tired, Mary ... you don’t know how tired I am!”
She began to stroke his dark hair, and the sudden thought came to her
with horror that in her desire for vengeance upon Emma Downes, it was
not Emma she had hurt, but Philip.
He said, “You don’t know what it is, Mary,--for months now ... for years
even, I’ve been finding out bit by bit ... to have something gone that
you’ve always believed in, to have some one you loved destroyed bit by
bit, in spite of anything you can do. I tried and tried, but it was no
good. And now ... I can’t hold out any more. I can’t do it ... I hate
her ... but I can never let her know it. I can never hurt her ...
because she really loves me, and it’s true what she says ... that she
did everything for me. She fed and clothed me herself with her own
hands.”
Again Mary wanted to cry out, “She doesn’t love you. She doesn’t love
any one but herself!” and again she kept silent.
“And now it’s true ... what she said ... you’ve stolen me away from her,
Mary. She’s made it so. I’m through now ... I can’t go on trying any
more.”
Still stroking his head, she thought, “He’s like a little boy. He’s
never grown up at all.” And she said, “I was so angry, Philip, that I
came here. I didn’t care what happened; I only thought, ‘If she thinks
that’s the truth, it might as well be, because she’ll tell about it as
the truth.’ I didn’t care any longer for anything but myself and you.”
His head stirred, and he looked up at her, seizing her hands. “Is that
true, Mary?” He kissed her hand suddenly.
“It’s true ... or why else should I be here, at this hour?” He was
hopeless, she thought: he didn’t live for a moment in reality.
He hadn’t even thought it queer of her to be sitting there in his room
long after midnight with his head on her knees. And suddenly she thought
again, “If I’m his mistress, I can save him from her altogether. Nothing
else can break it off forever.”
He was kissing her hands, and the kisses seemed to burn her. He was
saying, “Mary, I’ve loved you always, always ... since the first time I
saw you, but I only knew it when it was too late.”
“It isn’t too late, Philip. It isn’t too late.”
He was silent for a time, but she knew what he was thinking. He wasn’t
strong enough to take life into his own hands and bend it to his own
will, or perhaps it wasn’t a lack of strength, but only a colossal
confusion that kept him caught and lost in an immense and hopeless
tangle. Until to-night she hadn’t herself been strong enough to act, but
now a kind of intoxicating recklessness had seized her--the sober,
sensible Mary Conyngham. She meant to-night to take him and comfort him,
to make them both, for a little time, happy. To-morrow didn’t matter. It
would have been better if there were no to-morrow, if they could never
wake at all.
It was Philip who spoke first. After a long silence, he said in a
whisper, “I can’t do it, Mary ... I can’t. It isn’t only myself that
matters. It’s you and Naomi too. It isn’t her fault any more than mine.”
For a moment she wished wickedly that he had been a little more like
John Conyngham, and then almost at once she saw that it was his decency,
the very agony of his struggle, that made her love him so profoundly.
And she was afraid that he would think her wicked and brazen and
fleshly. It was a thing she couldn’t explain to him.
There were no words rich enough, strong enough, to make him understand
what it was that had brought her here. She had thought it all out,
sitting for hours there by the window, in the light of the rising moon.
She had felt life rushing past her. She was growing old with the passing
of each second. She had seen a man killed, and afterwards Philip had
himself come upon the body of a dead woman lying in the snow. Nothing
mattered, save that they come together. What happened to her was of no
consequence. Some terrible force, stronger than either of them, had
meant them for each other since the beginning, and to resist it, to
fight against it unnaturally as Philip was doing, seemed to her all at
once a black and wicked sin.
He freed himself suddenly and stood up. “I can’t do it, Mary. I’ll go
away.... You can spend the night here and leave in the morning. No one
in the Town will know you haven’t spent the night at Shane’s Castle.”
“Where will you go?”
“I’ll go to the tents. I’ll be all right.”
She suddenly put her hand over her eyes, and, in a low voice, asked,
“And ... what’s to come after, Philip?”
“I don’t know ... I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“We can’t go on ... I can’t....”
“No ... I’d rather be dead.”
Suddenly, with a sob, she fell forward on the table, burying her face in
her hands. “You belong to your mother still, Philip ... you can’t shake
off the hard, wicked things she’s taught you. Oh, God! If she’d only
died ... we’d have been married to each other!”
She began to cry softly, and, at the sound, he stopped the mechanical
business of buttoning his coat, and then, almost as if he were speaking
to himself, he said, “Damn them all! We’ve a right to our happiness.
They can’t take it from us. They can’t....”
He raised her face from the table and kissed it again and again with a
kind of wild, rude passion that astonished her, until she lost herself
completely in its power. Suddenly he ceased, and, looking at her, said,
“It doesn’t matter if to-morrow never comes. I love you, Mary ... I love
you. That’s all that matters.”
They were happy then, for in love and in death all things are wiped out.
There, in the midst of the dead and frozen park, she set him free for a
little time.
18
The morning came quickly in a cold gray haze, for the furnaces, starting
to work one by one as the strike collapsed, had begun again to cover the
Flats with a canopy of smoke. It was Mary who went first, going by the
back drive, which led past the railway-station. And with her departure
the whole world turned dark. While she had been there with him, he was
happy with the sense of security that is born of companionship in
adventure, but as her figure faded presently into the smoke and mist
that veiled the deserted houses of the Flats, the enchantment of the
night gave way to a cold, painful sense of actuality. The whole night
had been, as some nights are in the course of lives that move
passionately, unreal and charged with strange, intangible currents of
fire and ice. During that brief hour or two when he had slept, years
seemed to have passed. The figure of his father had become so remote
that he no longer seemed cheap and revolting, but only shallow and
pitiful. Even the memory of McTavish and the two men with the lantern
standing over the dead woman in the snow was dim now and unreal.
It was only the sight of the trampled, dirty snow, the black spot where
the fire had been and the pool of blood at the turn of the drive that
made him know how near had been all these things which had happened
during the night. And the park was no longer beautiful and haunted in
the moonlight, but only a dreary expanse of land filled with dead trees
and decaying arbors. The old doubts began slowly to torment him once
more--the feeling of terror lest Naomi should ever discover what had
happened, and the knowledge that he had betrayed her. There was, too, an
odd new fear that he might become such a man as his father. It was born
in that cold, gray light, of a sudden knowledge that deep inside him lay
sleeping all the weaknesses, all the sensuality, of such a man. After
what had happened in the night, he saw suddenly that he might come like
his father to live in a shallow world that shut out all else. He was
afraid suddenly, and ashamed, for he had been guilty of a sin which his
father must have committed a hundred times.
Yet he had, too, an odd new sense of peace, a soothing, physical, animal
sort of peace, that seemed to have had its beginnings months ago, in the
moments of delirium when he had wanted to live only because he could not
die without knowing such an experience as had come to him in the night.
It was, he supposed, Nature herself who had demanded this of him. And
now she had rewarded him with this sense of completeness. Nature, he
thought, had meant his children to be Mary’s children, too; and now that
couldn’t be ... unless ... unless Naomi died.
It was a wicked thought that kept stealing back upon him. It lay in
hiding at the back of his mind, even in the last precious moments before
Mary had left, when she stood beside the stove making the coffee. He had
thought again and again, “If only Naomi died ... we could be like this
forever.” Watching her, he had thought, despite all his will to the
contrary, of what love had been with Naomi and what with Mary. And he
had told himself that it wasn’t fair to think such things, because he
had never loved Naomi: at such moments he had almost hated her. Yet she
had loved him, and was ashamed of her love, so that she made all their
life together a sordid misery. And Mary, who had been without shame, had
surrounded her love with a proud and reckless glory. Yet, in the end, it
was Mary who hid, who stole away through the black houses of the Flats
as if she had done a shameful thing, and it was Naomi who bore his
children. For a moment he almost hated the two helpless little creatures
he had come so lately to love, because a part of them was also a part of
Naomi.
As he stood by the window, all wretched and tormented, he saw coming
across the trampled snow the battered figure of Hennery. He was coming
from the house, and his bent old figure seemed more feeble and ancient
than it had ever been before. He entered the stable, and Philip heard
him coming painfully up the stairs. At the sight of Philip, he started
suddenly, and said, “You scared me, Mr. Downes ... my nerves is all
gone. I ain’t the same since last night.” He took off his hat and began
fumbling in his pockets. “I got a letter for you ... that strike feller
left it for you ... that ... I doan’ know his name, but the feller that
made all the trouble.”
He brought forth a piece of pale mauve paper that must have belonged to
Lily Shane, but was soiled now from contact with Hennery’s pocket.