up the bag and followed Philip. They went down the two flights of
odorous stairs and out of the door. The policeman who had accompanied
them was waiting on the sidewalk. As the door closed, they heard the
woman sobbing and calling after them that she, an honest, God-fearing
woman, had been ruined.
In silence they turned their backs on the dingy house, with the sign,
“Rooms to Let to Respectable Parties,” and the emblazoned text, “JESUS
SAID, ‘COME UNTO ME....’”
Half-way down the block, McTavish said, “You mustn’t think about it,
Philip. You mustn’t brood. You had nothing to do with it.”
“How can I help thinking about it?” He could only see them kneeling
there by the bed praying until the end, innocent save that they had
tried to escape from a life which circumstance or fate had made too
cruel for them to bear. They had died without ever knowing the happiness
which had come to him and Mary. He saw bitterly that there was not even
any great dignity in their death, but only a pathos. They had not even
known a poor tattered remnant of human happiness. They had simply run
away, fleeing from something they could not understand toward something
that was unknown.
“How can I ever think of anything else?”
25
The Reverend Castor was buried from his own house, and Naomi from the
flat over the drugstore. Emma had proposed that the services should be
held in the slate-colored house, but Philip refused. It seemed wrong
that Naomi should enter it again, even in death. He would not even allow
any mourners save the family. His mother and father were there, Jason in
a curious state of depression, more than ever like a bedraggled bantam
rooster, and Mabelle bringing both Ethel and little Jimmy, who kept
asking in loud whispers where Cousin Naomi had gone, and why he wasn’t
supposed to speak of her. Mabelle herself repeated over and over again,
“I can’t believe it. She was so cheerful, though she did seem a bit
nervous and fidgety that last day. She came twice to see me. I suppose
she wanted to tell me something,” and, “What strikes me as funny is that
nobody ever suspected it. There wasn’t any talk about them at all. It
was like a flash out of the blue.” It was impossible to silence her
tongue. Even during the service she whispered to Jason, “Don’t she look
pure and sweet? You just can’t believe that things like this happen.
Life is a funny thing, I always say. It was just like a flash out of the
blue.”
And “pie-faced” Elmer was there too, all in dingy black. He read the
service, looking like the Jewish god of vengeance. He only spoke once or
twice in a ghoulish whisper, but his eyes were eloquent. They said, “You
see the wages of sin ...” and, “This is what comes of Philip abandoning
God.”
Once the service was interrupted when little Philip, wakened by the
singing of _Crossing the Bar_ by the hired quartet, stirred in his crib
and began to cry.
Naomi was buried in the dress of figured foulard. Mabelle observed that
in the coffin it looked all right. Naomi, she said, looked so young and
so natural.
26
The Mills began once more to pound and roar. The flames of the furnaces
again filled all the night sky with a rosy glow. The last miserable
remnants of the strikers drifted away and the tent village disappeared,
leaving only a vacant lot, grassless and muddy with the turn of winter.
The strike and the slaughter in the park of Shane’s Castle, even the
tragedy of Naomi and the Reverend Castor, were at last worn to shreds
as subjects of conversation. Life moved on, as if all these things
counted for nothing, as if the Shanes, and Krylenko, poor Giulia Rizzo,
Naomi and the Reverend Castor, had never existed. In the church, Elmer
Niman read the services until a suitable preacher was found. The bereft
and invalid Mrs. Castor disappeared in the obscurity of some Indiana
village, where she went to live with a poverty-stricken cousin.
As for Philip, he stayed on in the flat, hiring an old negress, whom
McTavish knew, to care for the twins. A sort of enchantment seemed to
have taken possession of him, which robbed him even of his desire to go
away. Emma came nearly every day to question old Molly about the
children, to make suggestions and to run her finger across tables in
search of dust. She did not propose that he return to the slate-colored
house, for she seemed now to be afraid of him, with the fear one has of
drunkards or maniacs--a fear which had its origin in the moment he had
taken the worn gloves from his pocket and given them to her. There was,
too, a wisdom in the fear, a wisdom which had come to her from Jason on
that same night, after she had returned to the marital bed.
For Jason had said to her, when she had grown calm, “Em, you never learn
anything. If you lived to be a hundred, you’d still be making a mess of
things.”
And she had cried out, “How can you say such a thing to me ... after all
I’ve suffered ... after all I’ve done? It’s you who’ve made a mess of
your life.”
“My life ain’t such a mess as you might think,” he had replied darkly.
“But let me tell you, if you don’t want to lose that boy altogether,
you’ll let him alone. He ain’t no ordinary town boy, Em. He’s
different. I’ve found that out. I don’t know how we produced ’im. But if
you don’t want to lose him, you’ll let him alone.”
She didn’t want to lose him. There were times when she hardened her
heart toward him, thinking he was ungrateful and hard to allow a hussy
like Mary Conyngham to stand between him and his mother; and again she
would think of him as her little boy, her Philip, for whom she would
work her fingers to the bone. But she was hurt by the way he looked at
her, coldly, out of hard blue eyes, as if she were only a stranger to
him. She felt him slipping, slipping from her, and at times she grew
cold with fear. She “let him alone,” but she could not overlook her duty
toward him and his children. They were, after all, her grandchildren,
and a man like Philip wasn’t capable of bringing them up properly,
especially since he had lost his faith. And with a mother like theirs,
who had such bad blood, they would need special care and training ...
she resolved not to speak of it for the moment, but, later on, when they
were a little older....
But it was Mabelle who was the most regular visitor at the flat. She
came with a passion for always being in the center of things; she clung
to the tragedy, and came every day to break in upon Philip’s brooding
solitude, to chatter on and on, whether he listened or not. She brought
little Jimmy’s old toys for the twins, and she dandled them on her knee
as if they were her own. There were times when Philip suspected her of
being driven by a relentless curiosity to discover more of what had
happened on the terrible day, but he endured her; he even began to have
an affection for her, because she was so stupid and good-natured.
She was sitting there one morning, playing with little Philip and little
Naomi, when she said suddenly, “You know I often think that all that
trouble in the park at Shane’s Castle ... killing all those people ...
had something to do with Naomi’s being so upset. You see, when she heard
that morning about the people being killed there, she got worried about
you. She was nearly crazy for fear that something had happened to you,
and she went herself to the stable to find you, and when she didn’t find
you there she was sort of crazy afterward. She came up and talked to me
in a crazy way until she heard from your Pa that he’d seen you at
McTavish’s. When I think of it now, I see that she was sort of
unbalanced and queer, though I didn’t notice it at the time.”
Philip, barely listening to her, took little notice of what she was
saying, for he had come long ago to allow her to rattle on and on
without heeding her; it was only a little while afterward that it had
any significance for him. It was as if what she had said touched some
hidden part of his brain. When she had gone, and he began indifferently
to think of it, it seemed to him that he remembered every word exactly
as she had spoken it. The words were burned into his mind. “_She was
nearly crazy for fear something had happened to you, and she went
herself to the stable to find you._”
When Mabelle had gone, he could think of nothing else.
Since the morning after the slaughter in the park, he had never returned
to the stable. The place which he had once thought of as belonging to
himself alone was spoiled now: it had been invaded by Lily Shane and
poor Naomi, and even by Mary ... even by Mary. There were times when he
resented her having come there, and times, too, when his remorse over
Naomi made him feel that Mary had come deliberately, to tempt him, that
what they had done was not a beautiful, but a wicked thing, which would
torment him until he died. The place was spoiled for him, since it had
come in a ghastly way to stand as a symbol of all those things which he
believed had driven Naomi into madness.
But he knew, too, that he must return one day to the stable. It was
filled with his belongings, the sketches pinned to the walls, the
unfinished canvas of the Flats at night on which the paint must long
since have caked and turned hard. (He knew now that it would never be
finished, for he could never bring himself to sit there again by the
window, alone, watching the mists stealing over the Mills.) After
Mabelle had gone, he kept thinking that Naomi was the last one to enter
the place. It was as if her spirit would be there awaiting him.
And then all at once there came to him a sudden terrifying memory: he
had gone away that morning leaving behind unwashed the dishes he and
Mary had used at breakfast. He had sent Mary away, promising to wash
them himself, and then, troubled by the remorse of the gray dawn, had
gone off, meaning to do it when he returned. They were still lying
there--the two plates, the two coffee-cups, the very loaf of bread,
turned hard and dry, and nibbled by the mice. And Naomi had gone there,
“crazy for fear something had happened” to him. She had seen the
remnants of that breakfast. In all the uproar and confusion he had
forgotten.... She had known then; she must have known before she ran
away....
For a moment he thought, “I must be careful, or I shall go crazy. It
must feel like this to lose one’s mind.” He thought, “It was I who did
it. I drove her away. I killed her myself. She thought that I was lying
to her all along. I wasn’t lying. I wasn’t lying. I was telling her the
truth.... It would have been the truth, even now, to the end, if Mary
hadn’t come then. She must have been crazy. Both of us must have been
crazy.”
And then, after a time, he thought, “I’ve got to be calm. I’ve got to
think this thing out.” There wasn’t, after all, any reason why there
shouldn’t have been two plates and two cups. Any one might have been
having breakfast with him ... any man, Krylenko, or even McTavish. Oh,
it was all right. There couldn’t have been anything wrong in that.
And then he thought bitterly, “But if it had been Krylenko, Naomi
wouldn’t have believed it. She’d be sure it was a woman. She’d think it
was Lily Shane ... Lily Shane, who wouldn’t have looked at me. She was
jealous of Lily Shane.”
None of it was any good--none of this self-deception. It wasn’t a man
who had had breakfast with him. It was a woman--Mary Conyngham, only
Naomi had believed it was Lily Shane. Thank God! It wasn’t the same as
if he and Mary together had driven her away to death in that horrible
rooming-house. He’d never have to think of that after he and Mary were
married. Naomi had believed the woman was Lily Shane.
Suddenly he pressed his hands to his eyes, so savagely that for a moment
he was blinded. “I’m a fool. It’s just the same, even if she did think
that it was some other woman.”
The stable began to acquire for him a horrid fascination, so powerful
that he could no longer stay away from it. He _had_ to return, to see
the place with his eyes, to see the tell-tale cups and plates. Perhaps
(he thought) some miracle had happened. Old Hennery might have removed
them after he left, or perhaps he had himself washed them and put them
away in the harness-closet without remembering it. Such a thing could
happen.... In all the tragedy, all the confusion, the ecstasy of those
few hours, he might have done it, without knowing what he did. Or
afterwards, in all the stress of what had happened, he might have
forgotten. Such things had been known to occur, he told himself, such
lapses in the working of a brain. There were, after all, moments of late
when he was not certain of what was happening--whether he was alive or
dead, or whether Naomi had really killed herself, praying by the side of
that wretched bed....
But immediately he said, “I’m a fool. I’m like my father. I’m not
thinking of what _did_ happen, but what I wish had happened. It’s like
his story of losing his memory.”
When the old negress Molly returned from marketing, he gave her the
twins and went off like a madman to the stable. He traversed the area of
the Mills, passed Hennessey’s place, and entered the dead park, but when
he came to the stable, it took all his courage to enter.
He climbed the creaking stairs with his eyes closed, groping his way
until he stood at the top. Then he opened them and looked about.
The place had a wrecked and desolate look. The dust and the soot of the
Mills, filtering in through the decaying windows, covered everything. At
some time during the storm the roof had begun to leak, and the water,
running down the walls, had ruined a dozen sketches and soaked the
blankets on the bed, and in the middle of the room on the table stood
the coffee-pot, the dried loaf of bread gnawed by the mice, the soiled
cups and plates, and a saucer with rancid butter on it.
There wasn’t any doubt of it--the things were there, just as they had
been left by him and Mary.
He sat down weakly in one of the chairs by the table, and lighted a
cigarette. Suddenly he leaned back with his eyes closed. He didn’t care
any longer. He was tired. He had come (he thought) to the end of things,
and nothing any longer made any difference--neither his mother, nor his
father, nor Naomi, nor even Mary. He wanted only to be alone forever, to
go off into some wilderness where there was no human creature to cause
him pain. He wanted to be a coward and run away. In solitude, he might
regain once more that stupid faith which had once given him security. It
wasn’t that he’d ever again be glad to be alive: it was only when you
believed you could make God responsible in a way for everything.
Whatever happened, it was the Will of God. He hadn’t been alive: it was
only when he had turned his back on God that he had begun to understand
what it meant to be alive. And now that, too, was past: he saw now that
he wasn’t strong enough to live by himself. He was, after all, a coward,
without the courage of a person like Mary. She had, he saw, no need of a
God to lean upon. No, he wasn’t even like his father, whom no tragedy
had the power to touch. He was like her--like his mother. He needed God
as an excuse. She was safe: nothing could touch her, nothing could ever
change her. She always had God to hold responsible....
The forgotten cigarette, burning low, scorched his fingers, and,
dropping it, he stepped on it mechanically, and, rising from the chair,
saw suddenly a woman’s handkerchief lying on the table among the dishes.
It lay there, folded neatly, beneath a covering of dust and soot. He
thought, “It must have been Naomi’s. She must have dropped it here.” The
thing exerted an evil fascination over him. He wanted to go away, but he
couldn’t go, until he knew whose handkerchief it was. It couldn’t have
been Lily Shane’s, for he or Mary would have noticed it. It couldn’t
have been Mary’s: for she wouldn’t have gone away from the table with it
lying there, neat and unused, in full sight on the table. It must have
belonged to Naomi. He wanted to go away without even looking, but he had
not the strength. It lay there tormenting him. He would never have any
peace if he went away in ignorance.
At last his hand, as if it moved of its own will, reached out and picked
it up. It left behind a small square free of dust on the surface of the
table. It was a tiny handkerchief, frail and feminine, and in the corner
it was marked with initials. They were ... M.C. There wasn’t the
slightest doubt.... M.C.... M.C.... Mary Conyngham.
He saw then what must have happened--that Mary had dropped it somewhere
in the room, and Naomi, searching for some clue, had found it and left
it lying behind on the table. It was Naomi’s hand that had placed it
there on the table, Naomi’s hand that had last touched it.
Naomi had known who the woman was. In the next moment he had, in some
unaccountable way, a curiously clear vision of an iron bed with a small
depression where some one had knelt to pray.
After a long time, he rose, and, leaving the handkerchief on the table,
went down the stairs once more. He never returned again to the room
above the stable.
27
While Philip sat in the dust and soot of the dead stable, his father
waited for him at the flat. He danced the twins for a time on his knee,
and set them crowing by giving a variety of imitations of birds and
animals which he had learned in Australia, but, after a time, the old
spirit flagged. He wasn’t the same gay, blithe creature that Emma found
awaiting her in the darkened drawing-room. Even the waxed mustaches
seemed to droop a little with weariness. For Jason was growing old in
body, and he knew it. “My sciatica,” he said, “will not let me alone.”
“For an active, nervous man like me,” he had told Emma only that
morning, “there ain’t much left when his body begins to get old.”
Even his return home had been in a way a failure. He began now to think
he ought never to have come back. Emma was the only one pleased by his
return. “You’d have thought,” he told himself, “that she’d have
forgotten me long ago and taken to thinking about other things.” It was
pretty fine to have a big, handsome woman like Emma give you all her
devotion. Yes, she was glad enough to see him, but there was his boy,
Philip, whom he hardly knew. He’d never get to know Philip: he couldn’t
understand a boy like that. And this Naomi business. It was too bad, and
of course it was a scandal, but still that didn’t make any difference in
the way you enjoyed living. The truth was that Philip ought to be kind-a
glad to be rid of her. It wasn’t a thing he could help, and he’d behaved
all right. If there _was_ another woman, Philip had kept it all quiet.
There wasn’t any scandal. And now, if he wanted to marry her, he
could--if she wasn’t married too. No, he couldn’t understand Philip.
Emma had done something to him.
The return was a failure. He hadn’t even had any glory out of it, except
on that first night when he’d had his triumph over pie-faced Elmer; but
who wanted a triumph over a thing like Elmer? No, he’d been forgotten,
first in the excitement of the riot when they’d killed a couple of dirty
foreigners, and then by Naomi running off and killing herself with a
preacher. Em wouldn’t let him say that preachers were a bad lot but he
had his ideas, all the same. The Town had forgotten all about him--him,
a man who lost his memory, and who had been thought dead for twenty-six
years. Of course he hadn’t _quite_ lost his memory, but he might have
lost it....
And then he was homesick. The Town wasn’t home to him any more. It was
no more his _real_ home than Philip was his _real_ son, or Emma his
_real_ wife.
He was thinking all these things, mechanically rolling a ball back and
forth to the twins, when Philip came in. At first Jason didn’t notice
him, and when he did look up, the drawn, white look on the face of his
strange son frightened him. He tried to jest, in a wild effort to drive
away that sense of depression.
“Well, here I am,” he said brightly. “Back again like a bad penny.”
Philip didn’t answer him, and he said, “I just ran in to say I’m going
home day after to-morrow.”
“Home?” asked Philip, with a look of bewilderment.
“Yes ... home to Australy.”
“Oh.” Then the boy pulled himself together with an effort. “But I
thought this was your home.”
“No ... not really. You see, I’ve lived out there most of my life. And
this darned Town has changed so, it don’t seem the same any longer. It’s
all full of new people ... and foreigners. Most of ’em have never heard
of me.”
“What’ll Ma think?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t told her, but she knows I had to go back some
day. She’ll think I’m comin’ back. She’ll have that to look forward to.”
“You’re not coming back ... ever?”
“It ain’t likely. They say an animal wants to go home when he’s dying.
Well, that’s me. I want to go home.”
“But you’re not dying.”
“No, but I ain’t as young as I once was. I don’t want there to be no
mistake.” He appeared to grow even more dejected. “If I’m out there,
I’ll know where I am. It’s no place for a man like me here in this Town.
Why, there ain’t room to breathe any more.” He took a cigar out of his
yellow waistcoat pocket and offered it to Philip, who refused it
instinctively, and then accepted it, moved by the pathetic effort at
friendliness. The little man wanted to tell him something; he wanted to
treat him as a son, to create suddenly a bond that had never existed. He
held a match for the cigar and then lighted his own. “It’s like this,
Philip,” he said. “I’ve been thinking it over. You don’t want to stay in
this Town any more?”
“No.”
“It’s no place for a fella like you any more than it is for one like me.
We’ve got to have room to breathe and think. I often think that. It’s a
nasty place, this Town--no room for a fella to do as he wants ... always
somebody a-watchin’ of ’im.”
Philip scarcely heard what he was saying, but he did notice the return
of the haunting, half-comic accent. It was the first time that he had
ever seen his father grave, the first time a serious thought had ever
pierced the gay, shiny surface. And suddenly he felt a queer affection
for the little man. Jason was making so great an effort that his face
had turned red as a turkey-cock’s.
“It’s like this, Philip.... Why don’t you come away with me to
Australia? It’s a fine life, and I’m rich out there.” He waited for a
moment, and when Philip didn’t answer, he said, “You could begin all
over again--like a new person. I know you could, because I did it myself
... I started all over.” Again he waited. “There’s nothing to keep you,
is there? No woman?”
He always thought of women first--his father. Philip turned slowly. “Yes
... there is.”
“Does she count as much as that?”
“Yes.”
“You could marry her and take her along, couldn’t you? She ain’t a
married woman, is she?”
“No.”
“She’d be likely to go with you?”
“Yes, she’d go anywhere I chose, I guess.”
“She must be the right sort.”
There was a pause, and Jason struck suddenly at the thing that had been
hanging over both of them like a shadow. “Out there, you’d be where your
Ma couldn’t put her nose in.”
“Oh, I’m going away.... I’m not going to stay here.”
Jason suddenly brightened. “Then come along with me. I’d even wait till
you could get away. We ought to get better acquainted, Philip, and you’d
like it out there.” He laid a hand suddenly on Philip’s arm. “I’ll tell
you something, if you promise not to tell your Ma ... at least not till
I’m gone.”
He looked searchingly at Philip, who asked, “What is it?”
“You mustn’t tell. You’ve got to promise.”
“No, I won’t tell.”
“You’ve got brothers and sisters out in Australia!”
Jason looked at him with an air of expectancy, but Philip only looked
puzzled.
“What on earth do you mean by that, Pa?”
“You wouldn’t be alone out there. You see I’ve got a family there
too.... You’d have brothers and sisters there.”
“But you’re married to Ma.”
“That’s all right. I ain’t a bigamist. I’ve just never been married to
Dora--that’s my other wife. She knows about Em. I told her everything. I
guess she always liked me so much that not being married didn’t
matter.”
The little man put his head on one side. At the thought of Dora his
depression seemed to vanish. As for Philip, he simply stared, failing to
live up to such an announcement. It neither surprised nor shocked him,
for the whole thing seemed completely unreal, as if he were holding the
fantastic conversation in a dream. It was the other thing that was
real--the sight of the room in disarray with Mary’s handkerchief laid on
the table by the hand of Naomi ... the memory of the sordid bed with the
depression in the gray coverlet.
“You don’t seem surprised,” said his father.