study to bid the members good-night. In the dim light of the hallway, as
Naomi passed him, he looked at her and smiled. She saw that his hands
were trembling in a way that had come over him lately, and the smile
warmed her, but at the same time weakened her. There was a comfort and a
kindliness in it that made her want to cry.
Once inside the study, she found that the drawer of the cabinet was
jammed again, as it had been on that first night. While she tugged at
it, she heard him outside the door saying good-night one by one to the
choir. Putting down the music, she began again to struggle with the
drawer, and then suddenly, as if the effort was the last she could make,
she collapsed on the floor and began to weep.
She heard the door open and she heard the Reverend Castor’s deep, warm
voice saying, “Why, Naomi, what’s the matter?”
She answered him, without looking up. “It’s the drawer,” she said. “It’s
stuck again ... and I’m ... I’m so tired.”
He went over to the cabinet and this time he was forced to struggle with
it.
“It’s really too heavy for you, my dear girl ... I’ll fix it myself in
the morning.” He replaced the music and when he attempted to close the
drawer again it stuck fast. “Now it won’t close at all. But I can fix
it. I’m handy about such things.”
His hands were trembling, and he looked white and tired. He talked with
the air of a man desperately hiding pits of silence. When he turned,
Naomi still sat on the floor, her body bent forward. Her worn,
rain-soaked hat had fallen forward a little, and she was sobbing. He sat
down in the great stuffed leather chair. It was very low, so that he was
almost on a level with her.
“My poor child,” he asked, “what is it? Is it something I can help?”
“I don’t know. I wanted to talk to some one. I can’t go on. I can’t ...
I can’t.”
He laid his big hand on her shoulder with a gentleness that seemed
scarcely real, and, at the touch, she looked up at him, dabbing her eyes
with a handkerchief that had been soaked with tears hours earlier. As
she looked at him, some old instinct, born of long experience with
unhappy women, took possession of him. He said, “Why, you’ve got a new
dress on, Naomi. It’s very pretty. Did you make it yourself?”
For a second a look almost of happiness came into her face. “Why, yes,”
she said. “Mabelle helped me ... but I made most of it myself.”
His other hand touched her shoulder. “Here,” he said, “lean back against
my knee and tell me everything that’s making you unhappy....” When she
hesitated, he said, “Try to think of me as your father, my child. I’m
old enough to be your father ... and I don’t want to see you unhappy.”
She leaned against his knee with a sudden feeling of weak collapse. It
was the first time any one had been kind to her for so long, and,
strangely enough, she wasn’t afraid of him any longer. The old
uneasiness seemed to have died away.
“Tell me, my child.”
The damp handkerchief lay crushed into a tiny ball in her red, chapped
hand. For a long time she didn’t speak, and he waited patiently until
she found words. At last she said, “I don’t know how to begin. I don’t
know myself what’s happened to me ... I don’t know. Sometimes I think I
must be black with sin or going crazy ... sometimes I can’t think any
more, and I don’t know what I’m doing.... It was like that to-day ...
all day.... I’ve been going about like a crazy woman.”
And then, slowly, she began, in a confused, incoherent fashion, to tell
him the whole story of her misery from the very beginning at Megambo
when the Englishwoman had suddenly appeared out of the forest. It all
seemed to begin then, she said, and it had gone on and on ever since,
growing worse and worse. She hadn’t any friends--at least none save
Mabelle; and the others didn’t want her to see Mabelle. Besides, Mabelle
didn’t seem to help: whatever she advised only made matters worse.
The Reverend Castor interrupted her. “But I’m your friend, Naomi....
I’ve always been your friend. You could have come to me long ago.”
“But you’re a preacher,” she said. “And that’s not the same thing.”
“But I’m a man, too, Naomi ... a human being.”
And then she even told him about Emma while he interrupted her from time
to time by saying, “Can it be?” and, “It hardly seems possible--a woman
like Emma Downes, who has always been one of the pillars, the
foundation-stones, of our church! How much goes on of which we poor
blind creatures know nothing.”
And Naomi said, “I know. No one will ever believe me. They’ll all
believe that I’m nothing and that she’s a good, brave woman. I can’t
fight her, Reverend Castor. I can’t ... and sometimes I think she tries
to poison him against me.”
The trembling hand came to rest once more on her shoulder. There was a
long silence, and presently he said, in a low voice, “I know, my child
... I know. I’ve suffered, too ... for fifteen years.”
She had begun to sob again. “And now there are other women ... more than
one, I’m sure. I pray to God for his soul. I pray and pray to God to
return him to me ... my Philip, who was a good man and believed in God.
He’s changed now. I don’t know him any more. To-night I don’t think I
love him. I’ve come to the end of everything.”
He began to pat her shoulder, gently, as if he were comforting a child,
and for a long time, they stayed thus in silence. At last he said, “I’ve
suffered, too, Naomi ... for years and years.... It began almost as soon
as I was married, and it’s never stopped for an hour, for a moment
since. It gets worse and worse with each year.” Suddenly he covered his
face with his hands and groaned. “I pray to God for strength to go on
living. I have need of God’s help to go on at all. I, too, need some one
to talk to.” His hands dropped from his face, and he placed one arm
about her thin, narrow shoulders. She did not draw away. Still sobbing,
she let her whole weight rest against him. She was so tired, and she
felt so ill. A strange, gusty and terrifying happiness took possession
of the tired, nerve-racked man. Just to touch a woman thus, to have a
woman kind to him, to have a woman who would trust him, was a pleasure
almost too keen to be borne. For fifteen acid years he had hungered for
a moment, a single moment, like this. He did not speak, conscious, it
seemed, that to breathe might suddenly shatter this fragile, pathetic
sense of peace.
Naomi had closed her eyes, as if she had fallen asleep from her long
exhaustion; but she wasn’t sleeping, for presently her pale lips moved a
little, and she said in a whisper, “There’s nothing for me to do but run
away or kill myself ... and then I’ll be out of the way.”
He did not tell her at once, without hesitation, that she was
contemplating a great sin. He merely kept silent, and, after a time, he
murmured, “My poor, poor child ... my tired child,” and then fell once
more into silence. They must have remained thus for nearly an hour.
Naomi even appeared to fall asleep, and then, starting suddenly, she
cried out. His arm ached, but he did not move. He was, it seemed, past
such a small discomfort as an aching arm. And he was struggling,
struggling passionately, with a terrible temptation, conscious all the
while that each minute added to the bitterness of the reproaches that
awaited him on opening the parsonage door. It was long after eleven
o’clock, and he should have returned ages ago. He thought, “I can’t go
home now. I can never go home again. I can never open that door again. I
would rather die here now. One more time might drive me mad ... I
mightn’t know what I was doing ... I might....”
The free hand again closed over his eyes, as if to shut out the horrible
thing that had occurred to him. Naomi had opened her eyes and was
looking up at him. For a second he thought, “Has she seen what was in
them?”
Her lips moved again. “I don’t care what happens to me any longer.”
Suddenly, without knowing what he was doing, he bent down and took her
in his arms, “Naomi ... Naomi ... do you mean that? Answer me, do you
mean that?”
She closed her eyes wearily. “I don’t care what happens to me.”
He held her more tightly, the odd, gusty pleasure sweeping over him in
terrifying waves. “Naomi ... will you ... will you go away ... now ...
at once, and with me?”
“You can do with me what you want, if you’ll only be kind to me.”
“We’ve a right to be happy. We’ve suffered enough.” She did not answer
him, and he said, “God will understand. He’s merciful. We’ve had our
hell here on earth, Naomi ... Naomi ... listen to me! Will you go now
... at once?” A curious, half-mad excitement colored his voice. “I’ve
got money. I’ve been putting it aside for a long time, because I’ve
thought for a long time I might want to go away.... I’ve been saving it,
a dime and a quarter here and there where I could squeeze it. I’ve got
more than two hundred dollars. I thought that sometime I’d have to run
away. But I meant to go away alone ... I never knew ... I never knew.”
He began abruptly to cry, the tears pouring down the lined, tired face.
“We’ll go somewhere far away ... to South America, or the South Sea
Islands, where nobody will know us. And we’ll be free there, and happy.
We’ve a right to a little happiness. Oh, Naomi, we’ll be happy.”
She appeared not to have heard him. She lay in a kind of stupor, until,
raising her body gently, he stood up and lifted her easily into the big
leather chair, where she lay watching him, her eyes half-closed, her
mouth set in a straight, hard line, touched with bitterness.
The Reverend Castor moved quickly, with a strange vigor and decision.
The trembling had gone suddenly from his hands. His whole body grew taut
and less weary, as if he had become suddenly young. He had the air of a
man possessed, as if every fiber, every muscle, every cell, were crying
out, “It’s not too late! It’s not too late! There is still time to
live!” He approached the desk, and, unlocking the drawer, began taking
out money--a thin roll of bills, and then an endless number of coins
that tinkled and clattered as they slid into his pockets. There must
have been pounds of metal in dimes and nickels and quarters. He filled
his vest pocket with cheap cigars from a box on the desk, and then,
turning, went over to Naomi, and, raising her from the chair, smoothed
her hair and put her hat straight, with his own hands. Then he kissed
her chastely on the brow, and she, leaning against him, murmured, “Take
me wherever you like. I’m so tired.”
For a moment they stood thus, and presently he began to repeat in his
low, rich, moving voice, _The Song of Songs_.
“_For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone. The flowers
appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the
voice of the turtle is heard in our land...._”
The words had upon her a strange effect of exaltation, the same that had
come over her when she sat by the piano, carried away by her emotions.
She wasn’t Naomi any longer. Naomi seemed to have died. She was a gaudy
Queen, and Solomon in all his glory was her lover. She seemed enveloped
by light out of which the rich, vibrant voice was saying, “_Until the
day break, and the shadows flee away, turn, my beloved, and be thou
like a roe or a young hart upon the mountains of Bether._”
A little while after, as the clock on the firehouse struck midnight, the
door of the study closed, and two figures hurried away into the pouring
rain. They were a tired, middle-aged preacher and a bedraggled woman, in
a queer, homemade dress of figured foulard, and a soaked coat and hat;
but there was a light in their eyes which seemed to illumine the
darkness and turn aside the rain.
23
Philip wakened slowly, conscious of being stiff and sore from having
slept in a cramped position, and thinking, “It must be late. Naomi will
be home soon.” And then, looking up at the clock, he saw that it was
after one. He rose and went over to it, listening for the tick to make
certain that it was working properly. He looked at his own watch. It,
too, showed five minutes past one. He listened for a moment to the sound
of the rain beating upon the tin roof and then he went into the other
two rooms. They were empty, and, suddenly, he was frightened.
Giving a final look at the twins, he seized his hat, and, hurrying down
the steps, roused the long-suffering Mrs. Stimson and told her that
Naomi hadn’t yet come home. He begged her to leave her door open, so
that she might hear the twins if they began to scream, and without
waiting to hear her complaints he rushed out into the rain.
It fell in ropes, melting the snow and running off down the hill in
torrents. To-morrow, he knew dimly, there would be a flood in the Flats.
The water would rise and fill the stinking cellars of the houses. Those
few families who lived in tents must already be soaked with the cold
downpour. The streets were deserted, and the shops and houses black and
dark. Once he caught the distant glint of light on the wet black slicker
of a policeman. Save for this, he seemed to be alone in a town of the
dead.
From a long way off he saw the light in the church study, and the sight
of it warmed him with quick certainty that Naomi must still be there.
Some urgent thing, he told himself, had arisen at choir practice. He ran
down the street and through the churchyard, and at the door of the study
he knocked violently. No one answered. The place was empty. He opened
the door. A drawer of the cabinet stood half-open with a pile of music
thrust into it carelessly. A drawer of the desk was open and empty. The
gas still flickered in the corner. Passing through the study, he went
into the church itself. It was dark, save for a dim flare that made the
outlines of the windows silhouettes of gray set in black. The empty
church frightened him. He shouted, “Naomi! Naomi!” and, waiting, heard
only an echo that grew fainter and fainter ... “Naomi!... Naomi!...
Naomi!...” until it died away into cold stillness. Again he shouted, and
again the mocking, receding echo answered him.... “Naomi!... Naomi!...
Naomi!...” His own voice, trembling with terror, came back to him out of
the darkness: “Naomi!... Naomi!... Naomi!”
He thought, “She’s not here, but she might be at the parsonage. In any
case, Reverend Castor will know something.” And then, “But why did he
go away leaving the gas lighted and the study unlocked?” He turned back
and, running, went through the dark church and the lighted study out
into the rain.
There was a light still burning in the parsonage, and as he turned into
the path he saw that a figure, framed against the light, stood in the
upper window. At first he thought, “It’s Reverend Castor,” and then
almost at once, “No ... it’s his wife. She’s waiting for him to come
home.”
He knocked loudly at the door with a kind of desperate haste, for a
terrible suspicion had begun to take form. Whatever had happened to
Naomi, every moment was precious: it might save her from some terrible
act that would wreck all her life and the Reverend Castor’s as well. He
knocked again, and then tried the door. It was locked, and he heard an
acid voice calling out, “I’m coming. I’m coming. For Heaven’s sake,
don’t break down the door!”
The key turned, and he found himself facing a figure in a gray flannel
dressing-gown, dimly outlined by the slight flicker of gas. He could
barely distinguish the features--thin, white and pinched ... the
features of a woman, the Reverend Castor’s wife.
“Who are you ... coming at this hour of the night to bang on people’s
doors?” It was a thin, grating voice. As his eyes grew accustomed to the
light, he saw a face of incredible repulsion. It was a mean face, like
that of a malicious witch.
“I’m Philip Downes. I’m trying to find my wife. She didn’t come home
from choir practice.”
A look of evil satisfaction suddenly shadowed the woman’s face. “She
wasn’t the only one that didn’t come back. Like as not they’re still
there, carrying on in the church. I guess it wouldn’t be the first
time.”
He didn’t care what she was saying, though the sound of her voice and
the look in her cold blue eyes made him want to strangle her.
“They aren’t there. I’ve just come from the church.”
He fancied that he heard her chuckle wickedly, but he couldn’t be
certain. He heard her saying, “Then he’s done it. I always knew it would
happen.”
He seized her by the shoulders. “Done what? What do you mean?”
“Let go of me, young man! Why, he’s run off with your wife, you fool! I
always knew he’d do it some day. Oh, I knew him ... Samuel Castor ... I
haven’t been married to him for fifteen years for nothing!”
He wanted to shake her again, to make her talk. “If you knew, why didn’t
you tell me?”
“Because it might have been any woman. It wasn’t just your wife. I
wasn’t sure who it would be.” She began to laugh again, a high, cackling
laugh. “I told him he’d do it. I told him so every night. I knew it was
going to happen.” She seemed to find delight in her horrible triumph.
“Where have they gone?”
“How do I know where they’ve gone? He’s gone to hell for sure now, where
he can’t torment me any more. He’s left me--a poor invalid ... without a
cent or any one to look after me. God knows what’ll become of me now.
But he’s done it. I always told him he would. He’s a fine man of God!
He’s left a poor invalid wife ... penniless and sick.”
There was a kind of wild delight in her voice and manner, as if she had
been trying all these years to destroy him and had at last succeeded.
She seemed to receive this last calamity as the final crown of her
martyrdom. She was happy. To Philip it seemed suddenly that by wishing
it, by thinking of nothing else for fifteen years, she had made the
thing happen--just as it was Emma who had made happen the thing she
wanted to believe--that Mary had stolen him from her.
He waited no longer. He ran past the malicious figure in the greasy
dressing-gown, out again into the rain. He heard her saying, “He didn’t
even think of my hot-water bottle ... the scoundrel ...” and then the
horrible voice was drowned by the sound of the downpour.
Without quite knowing how he got there, he found himself, soaked and
shivering, inside the baggage-room at the railway station. Everything
else was closed, but in the shadows among the gaudy, battered trunks of
some theatrical company, the baggageman dozed quietly. He was shaken
into consciousness to find a madman standing before him, white and
trembling, and dripping with water.
“Tell me,” Philip asked, “did any one leave the Town on the one
o’clock?”
The man looked at him sleepily, and growled something about being
wakened so roughly.
“Tell me. I’ve got to know!”
He scratched his head. “Why, yes. I do mind somebody gettin’ on the one
o’clock. Come to think of it, it was what’s-his-name, the preacher.”
“Reverend Castor?”
“Yes ... that’s the one ... the big fellow.”
“Was he alone?”
“I dunno.... He was alone for all I know. I didn’t see no one else.”
Philip left him, and, outside, stood for a moment in the shelter of the
platform shed, peering into the distance where the gleaming wet rails
disappeared into the dimness of fog and jewel-like signal lights. And
all at once he hated the Flats, the Mills, the whole Town, and then he
laughed savagely: even his beloved locomotives had betrayed him by
carrying Naomi off into the darkness.
There was nothing to do now. What was done was done. He was glad he
hadn’t gone to the police to find her. If they didn’t know, it would
keep the thing out of the papers for a little time, and the two of them
might come back. There was only that crazy old woman in the parsonage
who need be feared; it was impossible to imagine what she might do. He
hadn’t really thought of her until now, and, as he walked through the
rain, up the hill again, to his mother’s house, her horrid image kept
returning to him as she stood in her greasy dressing-gown screaming at
him in triumph, “I knew it would happen some day. I always told him he’d
do it!”
He thought, “I never knew it was as bad as that. No one knew.” It seemed
to him that God would forgive a man any sin who must have suffered as
the Reverend Castor.
He was no longer conscious of the downpour, for he was already as wet as
if he had jumped into the brook, and as he walked, all the deadly
sickness of reaction began to sweep over him. He was tired suddenly, so
tired that he could have lain down in the streaming gutter in peace; the
whole thing seemed suddenly to lose all its quality of the
extraordinary. In his weariness it seemed quite a usual experience that
a man should be searching the Town for a wife who had run away with the
preacher. It was as if the thing hadn’t happened to himself, but as if
he saw it from a great distance, or had heard it told him as a story.
To-morrow (he thought), or the next day, they would be telling it
everywhere in the Town, in every cigar-store and poolroom, about the
stove at McTavish’s undertaking parlors. They would hear of it even in
Hennessey’s saloon. All at once a sudden flash of memory returned to
him--of Hennessey standing above him, saying, “Run along home to your Ma
like a good little boy. Tell her not to let her little tin Jesus come
back to Hennessey’s place, if she don’t want him messed up too much to
be a good missionary ... I don’t want to be mixed up with that
hell-cat.”
In that queer mood of slackness, he was certain now of only one
thing--that he could stay no longer in the same Town where Naomi and the
Reverend Castor had lived, where Giulia Rizzo had been killed, where
that pathetic uprising of workmen asking justice had been beaten down.
He couldn’t stay any longer in the same place with his own father. He
wanted to go away, to the other side of the earth. Any place, even the
savage, naked jungle at Megambo was less cruel than this black and
monstrous Town.
At the slate-colored house he hammered on the door for twenty minutes
without getting any answer, and at last he went to the side of the house
and tossed stones against the window behind which his mother and father
were passing what Mabelle called “a second honeymoon.” After a moment a
head appeared at the window, and his mother’s voice asked, “Who’s there?
For God’s sake, what’s the matter?”
“It’s Philip ... let me in!”
She opened the door to him in her outing-flannel gown and a flowered
wrapper which he had never seen her wear before. It was, he supposed, a
best wrapper which she had kept against the homecoming she had awaited
for years. Her head was covered coquettishly by a pink boudoir cap
trimmed with lace. As he closed the door behind him, she said, “For
God’s sake, Philip. What’s the matter? Have you gone crazy?”
He smiled at her, but it was a horrible smile, twisted and bitter, and
born of old memories come alive, and of a disgust at the sight of the
flowered wrapper and the coquettish lace cap. “No, I’m not crazy this
time--though I’ve a right to be. It’s about Naomi ... she’s run
away....”
“What do you mean?”
“And she hasn’t gone alone. She’s run away with the Reverend Castor.”
“Philip! You _are_ crazy. It’s not true!”
“I’m telling you the truth. I _know_.”
She sat down suddenly on the stairs, holding to the rail for support.
“Oh, my God! Oh, my God! What have I done to deserve such a thing? When
will God bring me to the end of my trials?”
He made no move to comfort her. He simply stood watching, until
presently she asked, “How do you know? There must be a mistake ... it’s
not true.”
Then he told her bit by bit the whole story, coldly and with an odd,
cruel satisfaction, so that no doubt remained; and for the first time
in his memory he saw her wilt and collapse.
“You see, Ma, there can’t be any doubt. They’ve gone off together.”
Suddenly she seemed to make a great effort. She sat up again and said
bitterly, “I always thought something like this would happen. She was
always flighty ... I discovered that when she lived here. She wasn’t any
good as a wife or as a mother. She wouldn’t nurse her own children. No
... I think, maybe, you’re well rid of her ... the brazen little slut.”
“Don’t say that, Ma. Whatever has happened is our fault. We drove her to
it.” His words were gentle enough; it was his voice that was hard as
flint.
“What do you mean? How can you accuse me?”
“We treated her like dirt ... and it wasn’t her fault. In some ways
she’s better than either of us.”
She looked at him suddenly. “You’re not planning to take her back if she
comes running home with her tail between her legs?”
“I don’t know ... I have a feeling that she’ll never come back.”
“Leaving her children without a thought!”
“I don’t suppose she left them without a thought ... but sometimes a
person can be so unhappy that he only wants to die. I know ... I’ve been
like that. Besides, she never wanted the children any more than I wanted
them.”
“How can you say such a wicked thing!”