had formed a pool about his feet on the immaculate carpet of Emma’s
hall. He was shaking with chill. He was like a dead man come up out of
the sea. And deep inside him a small voice was born, which kept saying
to him, “It’s that ridiculous woman in a flowered wrapper and pink cap
who lies at the bottom of all this misery.” It was a tiny voice, but,
like the voice that the Reverend Castor had tried to still by repeating
Psalms, it would not die. It kept returning.
“It’s not wicked. It’s only the truth ... and it’s only the truth I care
about to-night. I don’t give a damn for anything else in the world ...
not for what people think, or about what they say. They can all go to
hell for all I care.” His face was white and expressionless, like the
face of a man already dead. It was the voice that was terrible.
“You needn’t swear, Philip.” She showed signs of weeping. “And I never
thought my boy would turn against his own mother--not for any woman in
the world.”
“Now don’t begin that. I’m not your boy any longer. I’ve got to grow up
sometime. I’m not turning against you. I’m just sick to death of the
whole mess. I’m through with the whole thing.”
She wiped her eyes with a corner of the ridiculous flowered wrapper, and
the sight made him want to laugh. The tiny voice grew more clamorous.
She was saying, “I won’t wake your Pa and tell him. He’s no good at a
time like this.” (Philip thought, “I don’t know. He might do better than
any of us.”) “And I’ll dress and come down to the twins. And you ought
to get on some dry clothes.” She rose, turned all at once into a woman
of action. “I’ll take care of the twins.”
“No,” he said abruptly. “I can do that.”
“You don’t know about their bottles.”
“I _do_ know ... I’ve done them on the nights Naomi went to choir
practice. I don’t want you to come ... I want to be alone with them.”
“Philip ... I’m your mother.... It’s my place....”
“I want to be alone with them....”
He looked so wild that she seized his shoulders and said, “You’re not
thinking anything foolish, are you?”
“I don’t know what I’m thinking. I can’t bear to think of her running
off like that. I can’t bear to think of how we treated her.... If you
mean that I’m thinking of killing myself, I’m not ... I can’t do that.
I’ve got to think of little Philip and Naomi. If it wasn’t for them ...
I might do anything.”
Suddenly in a wild hysteria, she put her arms about him, crying out,
“Philip! Philip! My boy! Don’t say such things--it’s not you who’s
talking. It’s some one else ... it’s a stranger ... somebody I never
knew ... somebody I didn’t bear out of my own body.” She shook him
passionately. “Philip! Philip! Wake up! Be your old self ... my son. Do
you hear me, darling? You _do_ love me still. Tell me what’s in your
heart ... what the voice of your real self is saying.”
In the violence of her action, the pink lace cap slipped back on her
head, exposing a neat row of curl-papers, festoons and garlands (thought
Philip in disgust) of their second honeymoon. He didn’t resist her. He
simply remained cold and frozen, one cold, thin hand thrust into his
pocket for warmth. Then suddenly the hand touched something which roused
a sudden train of memory, and when at last she freed him, he drew out a
pair of worn gloves.
“I think I’ll go home now,” he said in the same frozen voice. “Before I
go, I must give you these. Mary Conyngham sent them to you. I think you
left them at her house when you went to call.” It was as if he said to
her, “It’s true ... what you thought about Mary and me. It’s true ...
now.”
She took the gloves with a queer, mechanical gesture, and without
another word he turned and went out, closing the door. When he had gone,
she sat down on the steps again and began to weep, crying out, “Oh, God!
Oh, God! What have I done to deserve such trouble! Oh, God! Have pity on
me! Bring my son back to me!”
Suddenly, in a kind of frenzy, she began to tear the gloves to bits, as
if they were the very body of Mary Conyngham. In the midst of her wild
sobbing, a voice came out of the dark at the top of the stairs, “For
Heaven’s sake, Em, what are you carrying on about now?”
It was Jason standing in his nightshirt, his bare legs exposed to the
knees. “Come on back to bed. It’s cold as Jehu up here.”
* * * * *
By the time Philip reached the Flats, the rain had begun to abate a
little, and the sky beyond the Mills and Shane’s Castle to turn a pale,
cold gray with the beginning of dawn. The twins were awake and crying
loudly. Poking up the fire in the kitchen range, he prepared the bottles
and so quieted them before taking off his soaked clothing. The old
feeling of being soiled had come over him again, more strongly even than
on the day in Hennessey’s saloon, and when he had undressed and rubbed
warmth back into his body, he drew hot water from the kitchen range,
and, standing in a washtub by the side of the cribs where he could
restore the bottles when they fell from the feeble grasp of the twins,
he scrubbed himself vigorously from head to foot, as if thus he might
drive away that sordid feeling of uncleanness.
At last he got into the bed beside the cribs--the bed which he had never
shared with Naomi, and to which it was not likely that she would ever
return. He had barely slept at all in more than two days, but it was
impossible to sleep now. His mind was alive, seething, burning with
activity like those cauldrons of white-hot metal in the Mills; yet he
experienced a kind of troubled peace, for he had come to the end of one
trouble. He knew that with his mother it was all finished. In the moment
he had given her the gloves, he knew that he didn’t love her any more,
that he no longer felt grateful to her for all that she had done for
him. There was only a deadness where these emotions should have been. It
was all over and finished: it would be better now if he never saw her
again.
And the twins ... they must never go to her; whatever happened, she must
never do to them what she had done to him. He would protect them from
her, somehow, even if he died.
The day that followed was one of waiting for some sign, some hint, some
bit of knowledge as to the whereabouts of Naomi and the Reverend Castor.
Like the day after a sudden death in a household, it had no relation to
ordinary days. It was rather like a day suspended without reality in
time and space. Philip went about like a dead man. His father came and
sat with him for a time, silent and subdued, and strangely unlike his
old exuberant self.
It was Emma alone who seemed to rise above the calamity. “It is,” she
said, “a time for activity. We must face things. We mustn’t give in.”
She went herself to call upon the editors of the two newspapers and by
some force of threats and tears she induced them to keep silence
regarding the affair until some fact was definitely known. It was a
triumph for her, since neither editor had any affection for her, and one
at least hated her. From the newspaper offices she went at once to call
upon the invalid in the parsonage. She found the miserable woman
“prostrated,” and in the care of Miss Simpkins, head of the Missionary
Society. Before five minutes had passed, she understood that she had
arrived too late. Miss Simpkins had been told the whole story, and in
turn had communicated it, beyond all doubt, to a whole circle of hungry
women. The invalid was still in the same state of triumph. It seemed to
Emma that she saw no disgrace in the affair, but only a sort of glory
and justification. It was as if she said, “People will notice my misery
at last. They’ll pay some attention to me. They’ll give up pitying him
and pity me for a time.” It was impossible to argue with her. When Emma
left, she said to herself savagely, “The old devil has got what was
coming to her. She deserved it.”
Once a trickle of the scandal had leaked out, there was no stopping it:
the news swept the Town as the swollen waters of the brook flooded the
pestilential Flats. It reached Mary Conyngham late in the afternoon. For
a time she was both stunned and frightened, as if the thing were a
retribution visited with horrible speed upon herself and Philip. And
then, quickly, she thought, “I must not lose my head. I’ve got to think
of Philip. I’ve got to help him.” She fancied him haunted by remorse and
self-reproaches, creating in his fantastic way all manner of
self-tortures. One of them at least must keep his head, and she was
certain that the one wouldn’t be Philip. And she was seized with a
sudden terror that the calamity might shut him off from her forever: it
was not impossible with a man like Philip who was always tormenting
himself about troubles which did not exist. She found to her
astonishment that she herself felt neither any pangs of conscience nor
any remorse. What she had done, she had done willingly, and with a clear
head: if there had ever been any doubts they were over and done with
before she had gone to the stable.
She dared not, she knew, go and see him, and thus deliver herself into
the hands of his mother; for she knew well enough that Emma would be
waiting, watching for just such a chance. She would want to say to
Philip, “You see, it’s the judgment of God upon you for your behavior
with Mary Conyngham.” For a second there came to Mary a faint wish that
she had never turned Emma’s accusation into truth, but it died quickly.
She knew that nothing could ever destroy the memory of what had happened
on the night of the slaughter in the dead park.
She decided at last to write to him, and late that night, after she had
torn up a dozen attempts (because writing to a man like Philip under
such circumstances was a dangerous business) she finished a note and
sent it off to him. She wrote: “My Darling ... I can’t come to you now.
You know why it is impossible. And I want to be with you. It is killing
me to sit here alone. If you want to meet me anywhere, send word. I’d go
to hell itself to help you. You mustn’t torment yourself. You mustn’t
imagine things. At a time like this, you must keep your head. For God’s
sake, remember what we are to each other, and that nothing else in the
world makes any difference. I love you, my boy. I love you ... Mary.”
Then she addressed the note, and, as a safeguard against Emma, printed
“_Personal_” in large letters on the outside of the envelope. It was too
late to find any one to deliver the note and the post-office was closed.
At last she put on a hat and coat and went herself to leave it under the
door of the drugstore, where the druggist would be certain to deliver it
in the morning. When she came home again, she lay down in the solitude
of the old Victorian parlor, and before long fell asleep. It was two
o’clock when she wakened, frightened, and shivering with cold.
Mr. Stimson, the druggist, found the letter in the morning, and laid it
aside until he had swept out the store. Then he had breakfast and when a
Pole with a cut on the side of his head came in to have it bandaged, he
quite forgot the letter. It was only after ten o’clock when a boy came
bringing a telegram for Philip that he remembered it suddenly. The note
and the telegram were delivered together.
The telegram was brief. A man and woman believed to be Samuel Castor and
Mrs. Philip Downes were found dead by suicide in a Pittsburgh
boarding-house. Would Mr. Downes wire instructions, or come himself. It
was signed, “H. G. Miller, Coroner.”
24
The rooming-house stood in one of the side streets in the dubious
quarter that lay between the river wharfs and the business district--a
region of Pittsburgh once inhabited by middle-class families, and now
fallen a little over the edge of respectability. It was one of a row of
houses all exactly alike, built of brick, with limestone stoops, and all
blackened long ago by the soot of mills and furnaces. Number Twenty-nine
was distinguished from the others only by the fact that the stoop seemed
to have been scrubbed not too long ago, and that beside the sign “Rooms
to Let to Respectable Parties,” there was another card emblazoned with a
gilt cross and bearing an inscription that was not legible from the
sidewalk. Philip and McTavish, peering at the house, noticed it, and,
turning in at the little path, were able to make out the words. The card
was stained and yellow with age, and beneath the cross they read, “JESUS
SAID, ‘COME UNTO ME.’”
For a moment, McTavish gave Philip an oblique, searching look, and then
pressed the bell. There was a long wait, followed by the sound of
closing doors, and then a tired little woman, with her hair in a screw
at the back of her head, stood before them, drying her hands on a soiled
apron.
Philip only stared at her, lost in the odd, dazed silence that had
settled over him from the moment the telegram had come. He seemed
incapable of speech, like a little child in the care of McTavish. It was
the fat undertaker who lifted his hat and said, “This is Mr. Downes, and
I’m the undertaker.” He coughed suddenly, “The Coroner told us that ...
they had left some things in the room.”
The little woman asked them in, and then began suddenly to cry. “I’ve
never had such a thing happen to me before ... and now I’m ruined!”
McTavish bade her be quiet, but she went on and on hysterically. In all
the tragedy, she could, it seemed, see only her own misfortune.
“You can tell me about it when we’re upstairs,” said McTavish, patting
her arm with the air of a bachelor unused to the sight of a woman’s
tears, and upset by them. “Mr. Downes will wait down here.”
Then Philip spoke suddenly for the first time. “No ... I’m going with
you. I want to hear the whole thing. I’ve ... I’ve _got_ to know.”
There was a smell of cabbage and onions in the hallway. As McTavish
closed the door, the whole place was lost in gloomy shadows. The tired
woman, still sobbing, and blowing her nose on the soiled apron, said,
“It’s upstairs.”
They followed her up two flights of stairs to a room at the back. It was
in complete darkness, as if the two bodies were still there, and as she
raised the window-shade there came into view a whole vista of dreary
backyards littered with rubbish and filled with lines of newly washed
clothing. The gray light revealed a small room, scarcely a dozen feet
square, with a cheap pine table, a wash-bowl, pitcher and slop-jar, two
chairs and a narrow iron bed. On the walls hung a bad print of the
Sermon on the Mount and a cheaply illuminated text, “Come unto Me, all
ye that labor and are heavy laden.” The bed was untouched, save for two
small depressions at the side away from the wall.
Near the door there were little rolls of torn newspaper--the paper
(Philip thought, with a sudden feeling of sickness) with which they had
stuffed the cracks of the door to imprison the smell of gas. A newspaper
and a Bible lay on the table beside the wash-bowl.
“I left everything just as it was,” said the woman; “just as the Coroner
ordered.”
Those two depressions on the side of the bed suddenly took on a terrible
fascination for Philip. It was as if they were filled by the forms of
two kneeling figures who were praying.
“Here’s the bag they brought,” said the woman. She bent down and opened
it. “You see it was empty. If I’d known that ... but how was I to know?”
It was a cheap bag made of paper and painted to imitate leather. It
stood in a corner, mute, reproachful, empty.
Philip was staring at it in silence, and McTavish said again, “Maybe
you’d better go downstairs and wait.”
For a moment there was no answer, and then Philip replied, “No, I mean
to stay. I’ve got to hear it.”
The woman began to tell her story. They had come to the rooming-house
about nine o’clock in the evening. “I remember the hour because
Hazel--that’s the girl that helps me with the house--had finished the
dishes and was going to meet a friend.” She had one room empty, and she
was only too glad to rent it, especially to a clergyman. Oh, he had told
her who he was. He told her he was the Reverend Castor and that the
woman with him was his wife. They were, he said, on their way east, and
came to the rooming-house because he had heard Mr. Elmer Niman speak of
it once as a cheap, clean, respectable place to stay at when you came to
Pittsburgh. “You see,” she explained, “I’m very careful who I take in.
Usually Methodists and Baptists. They recommend each other, and that way
I do a pretty good business, and it’s always sure to be respectable.”
She sighed and said, “It wasn’t my fault this time. I never thought a
preacher would do such a thing, and being recommended, too, by Mr. Elmer
Niman.”
They went, she said, right up to their room, and, about half-past ten,
when Hazel came back, she heard voices singing hymns. “They weren’t
singing very loud ... sort of low and soft, so as not to disturb the
other roomers. So I thought it was a kind of evening worship they went
through every night, and I didn’t say anything. But one of my other
roomers came to me and complained. I was pretty near undressed, but I
put on a wrapper and went up to tell them they’d have to be quiet, as
other people wanted to sleep. They were singing, _Ancient of Days_, and
they stopped right away. They didn’t even say anything.”
The woman blew her nose again on her apron, sighed, and went on. “So I
went to sleep, and about one o’clock my husband came in. He’s so
crippled with rheumatism he can’t work much and he’d been to a meeting
of the Odd Fellows. It must have been about one o’clock when he waked me
up, and after he’d gotten into bed and turned out the light, I told him
that I’d rented the empty room. And he said, ‘Who to?’ and I told him a
Reverend Castor and his wife. He sat up in bed, and said, ‘His wife!’
as if he didn’t believe me, and I said, ‘Yes, his wife!’ And then Henry
got out of bed and lit the gas, and went over to his coat and took out a
newspaper. I thought it was kind-a funny. He opened it, and looked at
it, and said, ‘That ain’t his wife at all. It’s a woman who sings in his
choir. The scoundrel, to come to a respectable house like this!’ And
then he showed me the newspaper, and there it all was about a preacher
in Milford who’d run away with a choir singer. And there was his name
and everything. You’d have thought he’d have had the sense to take some
other name if he was going to do a thing like that.”
McTavish looked at her quietly. “I don’t think he’d ever think of a
thing like that. He was a good man. He was innocent.”
The woman sniffed. “I don’t know about that. But it seems to me a good
man wouldn’t be trapsin’ around with another man’s wife.”
The look in McTavish’s eyes turned a little harder. When he spoke, his
voice was stern. “I know what I mean. _He was a good man._ He had a
hellion for a wife. She deserved what she got and worse.”
Something in the quality of his voice seemed to irritate the woman, for
she began to whine. “Well, you needn’t insult me. I was brought up a
good Christian Methodist, and I’m a regular churchgoer, and I know good
from bad.”
McTavish turned away in disgust. “All right! All right! Go on with your
story.”
“Well,” said the woman, “Henry--that’s my husband--said, ‘You must turn
them out right away. We can’t have the house defiled by adulterers!’”
Her small green eyes turned a glare of defiance at McTavish. “That’s
what they were--adulterers.”
“Yes,” said McTavish wearily. “There’s no denying that. But go on.”
“So I got up, and went to their room and knocked. I smelled gas in the
hall and thought it was funny. And then I knocked again and nobody
answered. And then I got scared and called Henry. He was for sending for
somebody to help break down the door, and then I turned the knob and it
was open. They hadn’t even locked it. It just pushed open, easy-like.
The room was full of gas, and you couldn’t go in or strike a match and
you couldn’t see anything. But we left the door open, and Henry went to
get the police. And after a time I went to open the window, and when I
pulled up the window-shade and the light from the furnaces came in, I
saw ’em both a-lyin’ there. He was sort of slumped down beside the bed
and she was half on the bed a-lyin’ on her face. They’d both died
a-prayin’.”
The thin, dreary voice died away into silence. McTavish looked at
Philip. He was sitting on one of the stiff pine chairs, his head sunk on
his chest, his fingers unrolling mechanically bit by bit the pieces of
newspaper with which the door had been stuffed. Automatically he
unrolled them, examined them and smoothed them out, putting them in neat
piles at his feet. They were stained with tears that had fallen silently
while he listened. And then, suddenly, he found what he had been looking
for. He handed it to McTavish without a word, without even raising his
head.
It was a scrap torn hastily to stuff the door, but in the midst of it
appeared in glaring headlines:
“PREACHER ELOPES
WITH MISSIONARY
_Romance begins at choir
practice. Woman a
former Evangelist_”
The editors had kept their word to Emma, but the story had leaked out
into the cities nearby.
McTavish read it in silence, and turned to the woman. Philip did not
even hear what they were saying. He was thinking of poor Naomi lying
dead, fallen forward on the bed where she had been praying. It was poor
Naomi who had made that ghastly depression in the gray-white
counterpane. He saw what had happened. He saw them coming in, tired and
frightened, to this sordid room, terrified by what they had done in a
moment of insanity. He saw them sitting there in silence, Naomi crying
because she always cried when she was frightened. And perhaps he had
taken the newspaper out of his pocket and laid it on the table and as it
fell open, there was the headline staring at them. They must have seen,
then, that they were trapped, that they could neither go on nor turn
back. In their world of preachers and Evangelists and prayer there was
no place for them. And presently they must have noticed the print of the
Sermon on the Mount, and at last the framed text--“Come unto Me, all ye
that labor and are heavy laden....” They must have seen the text written
in letters of fire, inviting them, commanding them--“Come unto Me, all
ye that labor and are heavy laden....” It must have seemed the only way
out. And then they had sung hymns until the harpy had knocked at the
door and bade them be silent.
The depression in the bed kept tormenting him. The two figures kneeling
there, praying, praying for forgiveness, until one of them slumped down,
unconscious, and the other was left alone, still praying.... Which one
of them had gone first? He hoped it was Naomi, for she would be so
frightened at being left alone. For the one who was left alone, those
last moments must have seemed hours. And Naomi must have been
frightened. She was destroying herself--a sin which once she had told
him was the unforgivable.
He saw then that the faith which had given her strength in that far-off
unreal world at Megambo must have been failing her for a long time. It
must have died before ever she set out on the mad journey that ended in
this wretched room. Or she must have been mad. And then, all at once,
the memory of her figure kneeling in the dust of the Mission enclosure
rose up and smote him. He saw her again, her face all illumined with a
queer, unearthly light. She had been ready then to die by the bullets of
the painted niggers. She should have died then, happy in the knowledge
of her sacrifice. He had saved her life--he and that queer
Englishwoman--only that she might die thus, praying alone, lost,
forgotten....
She should have died at Megambo--a martyr.
Suddenly he heard the voice of the tired little woman, “And here is her
hand-bag.” She held it out to McTavish, a poor morsel of leather, all
hardened and discolored by the rain. “That’s how we found her address.
It was written on a card.”
McTavish opened it mechanically, and turned it upside-down. A few coins
rattled out. He counted them ... eighty-five cents. The woman opened a
drawer of the table. “And here is his.” The worn wallet contained a
great amount of silver and ninety odd dollars in bills. They had meant
to start life again with ninety odd dollars.
“They must have been mad,” said McTavish. He touched Philip’s shoulder.
“Come ... we’d better go.”
Philip rose in silence, and McTavish turned toward the Bible that lay
open on the table. “Was that theirs?” he asked.
“No, that’s mine. I keep Bibles in all my rooms.”
McTavish turned toward the door, and she said, “The bag ... ain’t you
going to take the bag?”
McTavish turned toward Philip.
“No,” said Philip. “You may keep it.”
The woman frowned. “I don’t want it. I don’t want any of their things
left in my house. I’ve suffered enough. They ruined me. I don’t want my
house polluted.”