The Best Short Stories of 1919, and the Yearbook of the American Short Story
Play Sample
DISHES[7]
By AGNES MARY BROWNELL
From The Pictorial Review
"Well, I guess that's the last of that!"Myra Bray said grimly, and blinked at the smashed fragments of the cup.
It had been so fragile, that even the sound of its breaking was thin and evanescent like a note blown, not struck.Now as it lay on the floor, it seemed dwindled to nothing more than the fine gilt stem that had been its handle, and irregular pinkish fragments like fallen petals.
"Myry Bray!Butterfingers!"Myra apostrophized herself, and darted a quick, sidelong glance in the direction of old Mrs. Bray, her mother-in-law.
It had been old Mrs. Bray's cup.This was old Mrs. Bray's house.When Myra married Marvin Bray it had been with the understanding that they must make their home with his mother, now that Nellie was gone.
Old Mrs. Bray said nothing.The pink cup had belonged to Nellie; Marvin's had been blue.They had been old-time Christmas gifts; and they had never been used.They were too fine to use.All those years they had stood side by side on an upper shelf of the safe, along with the majolica pickle-dish, the cracker-jar that Abbie Carter had painted in a design of wheat-heads, the lemonade-set that George's wife had presented upon the occasion of a visit, and a collection of little china souvenirs—trays and miniature pitchers with "Souvenir of the Springs" inscribed upon them.
"At least the saucer's safe," ventured Myra, after a pause.She had only just come to live with old Mrs. Bray. She wondered how she would take it. "Well—might's well sweep up the muss!"
Old Mrs. Bray spoke.Myra thought she detected a quiver in her voice:
"Pick 'em up," her mother-in-law directed, "and put 'em here in my apron."Myra obeyed.Old Mrs. Bray gathered up her apron and went away to her room.She did not emerge till nearly supper-time.
Once Myra had gone to her door.It was inhospitably closed.Myra thought she detected a faint chinking sound."Now I wonder"—thought Myra—"is she agrievin' or asulkin'?I'd ruther it was asulkin'—an old pink chiny cup!I'd buy her another, only I s'pose it wouldn't make it up to her—Nellie's and all.Mebbe if I hurried and put off my waist, I could finish up her challis.She don't need the challis, and I do the waist.But mebbe it might take her mind off—losin' Nellie and then losin' the cup.I expect that come hard to Mother Bray."
Myra smoothed her hair and put on a fresh afternoon percale.To see Myra with her thin brown face, her slicked-back black hair which showed white threads like ravellings, in her afternoon house-dress of gray percale, one would never have taken her for a bride.Yet Myra had a very bridal feeling, sitting in her own home, with her own sewing, instead of running the machine in the shop, as she had done before her marriage.That it was, in reality, her husband's mother's home, and her husband's mother's sewing, scarcely altered the case.It was home, not shop.She had been married in August, when work fell slack.Now it was October.She had not broken anything until to-day.
Myra sewed and rocked and looked up at the framed portraits of Marvin and Nellie and Frank as children—the girl in queer plaid, and a locket; the boys in gilt-braided suits.Old and crude as the drawing was, it had a look of them—that steady, serious look of Marvin which he had never lost, and Nellie's—bold and managerial.Frank had died.Poor mother.She had known trouble.
At five, old Mrs. Bray came stiffly out. She had a curious, secretive air, not in the least mournful nor accusative, as Myra had feared.Myra held up the dress—a soft, gray challis with lavender pipings.Old Mrs. Bray's eyes widened like a pleased child's.
"Want to try it on?"suggested Myra.
"It ain't done!"
"To the last hook."She began to assist her mother into the new dress.
Mrs. Bray was a pretty old woman.There was about her an effect of fragile bloom like that of her old cup.In her gray-and-lavender she was like a quaint pastel.
"There!"cried Myra, standing off to view the effect.
"I ain't agoin' to take it off!"declared old Mrs. Bray suddenly; and waited for the remonstrance.
Nellie had always said: "Why, mother!Of course you'll take it off right away!Wear your good clothes out at home!"
To her surprise, Myra assented."Keep it on, and let Marvin see how fine you look."
"Wun't you need me about supper?"
"Now you just set and let me get supper alone to-night."
"I'll set the table," decided old Mrs. Bray."I guess just laying plates won't hurt it none."
Myra set about her biscuits.Marvin had to have his hot bread.Suddenly she heard a little splintering crash, followed by a whimpering wail—"Myry!Oh, Myry!I've broke the sasser!"The last remnants of Nellie's saucer, with their pink, fluted edges like ravished petals, lay spread out at old Mrs. Bray's feet.
"Now ain't that just too bad!(I s'pose she was touching it, for old times' sake—and her trembly old fingers and all, she let it slip.)Never mind, Mother; you got the blue one yet.And mebbe that saucer can be mended—"
Her mother with a jealous sweep of old hands, gathered up the fragments of the broken saucer."I don't want mended dishes," she said resentfully, and went stiffly away to her room.
That night, when they were alone, Myra told Marvin about Nellie's cup and saucer."And I just know she's akeeping of the pieces, and amourning over them," she finished. "Such things get to have associations. I 'most wish it had been your cup that got broke. She's got you, and Nellie's gone."
"Gone—what's a hundred miles!"
"I'm afraid she misses Nell."
"Now don't you go getting notions in your head.Nell was a master hand for work, but she didn't keep things up a mite better than you—not so good, to my notion.You're restfuller.Nell couldn't rest herself nor let anybody else.Nell couldn't atouched them biscuit—fact!"
"I try to keep things up as much like Nell as I can.I'd ruther use white table-cloths myself, but Nell always used the checkered.And my own chiny set the folks gave me—but I know Mother'd feel strange without her old white ones.There's lots of pretty chiny in the safe, but Nell always used it so careful.I've never used a piece.And yet, just adustin' that pink cup I had to go and drop it!I don't s'pose it was ever drunk out of."
"What's the good," argued Marvin, "of having things too fine to use?"
"You and me, Marvin, think the same about them things.But Nell and Mother—they're different."
"You're a good woman, Myry."
It pleased Myra to be told that she was good, and that her biscuits surpassed those of the capable Nell.But such compliments, for all their practicality and worth, sent no flush to her sallow cheek.
In her woman's magazine, which came to her monthly, lovers (and more rarely, husbands) were always breathing into the heroine's ear, "I love you.How beautiful you are!"or sentiments in that tenor.Marvin had not told her he loved her.He had asked her seriously and respectfully to marry him, when it became apparent that the efficient Nell was about to wed.And he had never told her that she was beautiful.She could not have believed him if he had.
Two days after the accident to the pink cup, the majolica pickle-dish was found shattered in front of the safe, when Marvin came out to start the kitchen fire.No one could account for its being there.The safe doors were ajar, and they decided that the majolica dish must have got pushed too near the edge of the shelf, and that a sudden jar had dislodged it. The safe doors were never remembered to have been left open before; the majolica dish had always sat well back; and nothing more jarring than Marvin's step disturbed the habitual quiet of the house. Still, how else account for it? "Mebbe Tom leaped up and done it," suggested old Mrs. Bray. The sleepy Tom, a handsome Tiger-stripe, sunk in bodily comfort, seemed to eye her reproachfully. He had not leaped in years.
Old Mrs. Bray carried away with her the fragments of the majolica pickle-dish and that afternoon, and other afternoons, she passed in the solitary privacy of her room.
Still her retirement seemed to work her no ill.From these solitary vigils she always emerged dressed in her gray-and-lavender.Ordinarily the ladies Bray wore percale on week day afternoons—fresh ones, but prints for all that.That had been Nell's way.Although old Mrs. Bray had a closet hung with good wool dresses, and even one festival silk.
Myra's trousseau had been so simple as scarcely to deserve the name.She had been married in a neat, dark suit, turned out in the shop where she had been employed for more than seven years.Myra had been "on skirts" for most of the seven years; and her dress had been almost a uniform—skirt and blouse.But she had secretly sewed for herself another sort of dress—house-dresses for the afternoon, of inexpensive, but delicate and light-colored fabrics, made a little "fussy."These she never wore.Old Mrs. Bray never wore fussy clothes; and it had not been Nell's way.The gray-and-lavender challis had been in the nature of an experiment.Old Mrs. Bray was plainly pleased; but she rarely wore it.She said it would make it common.
So the Brays, as in Nellie's régime, continued to wear the common gray percales, and to eat off the common white crockery.And with a strange, bewitched pertinacity, the fine, decorative bits of china, shut away on their upper shelf in the safe continued to get themselves broken.
Once it was one of the glasses of George's wife's lemonade-set.These glasses had ornate gilt bands about the brim, and painted flowers upon the side. Taking down the set one day, to show George's wife's gift to a caller (gifts were never gifts in fee simple in the Bray household. Always part possession seemed vested in the donor) old Mrs. Bray let slip one of the glasses. The fragments lay in a path of sun, struck through and through with light, they seemed to possess a strange, new iridescence.
"Now ain't that too bad!"sympathized the caller."Spoils the whole set.You want to get every bit of that glass up and in the ash-can.Glass is awful to grind in."
Old Mrs. Bray gathered up the pieces.They sent out strange gleams like rude gems. Myra and the caller watched sympathetically the eager abruptness of her departure.
"Your mother-in-law is some shaky," observed the caller."She hadn't ought to go to handle such delicate things."
"I expect she won't come out again," Myra said."It always makes Mother feel bad to break things."
Old Mrs. Bray did not come out again till after the caller had departed.She had on her gray-and-lavender dress."Always when Mother breaks a dish seems like she goes and puts on her gray-and-lavender," thought Myra; but she only said, "You look nice in that dress, Mother."
"I know I do," returned old Mrs. Bray serenely, "but I don't aim to make it common, Myry."
At holiday time, Nell and her husband came for a visit.Nell immediately proceeded to take the reins of government.She was a big, good-looking woman, younger than Myra.She had a large, well-modeled face with bloomy cheeks, golden brown eyes, fringed thick as daisies, and crisply undulating waves of dark hair.She disposed of their greetings in short order, retired to her old room to change into serviceable work things, and issued her ultimatum.
"Now don't go to any fuss, Myry.John and me ain't company.Treat us like the family.You've changed the roaster, ain't you, Myry?This ain't near so good a place for it.I've brought you one of my hens, Mother—all dressed and ready. We'll have it for dinner. Now Myry, don't you go to getting out a white table-cloth. Get one of them red-checkered ones. I s'pose those are your weddin' dishes—well, leave 'em be, now you got them down. But we won't use 'em common—the old white ones is plenty good enough. Folks that use their best every day has got no best. You might get the potatoes on now, Myry."
"Let me finish settin' the table, Myry," pleaded old Mrs. Bray.A moment later there was a crash, "Oh, Nellie!Oh, Myry!I didn't go to do it!My arm breshed it."
"Marvin's souvenir pitcher his Aunt Mat give him one Fair time!It must a' be'n fifteen year old!"
"I didn't go to do it!"quavered old Mrs. Bray.
"Who ever heard of such a thing?Of course you didn't do no such crazy thing!But that don't save its being broke.Here—let me sweep it up."
"Don't you sweep them pieces up!"shrilled her mother.
This voice of high command on the part of her little old subservient mother gave Nell pause.She stood, dust-pan in hand, looking down upon that stiffly stooping figure garnering into her gathered apron a little heap of splintered china.
"Mother must be getting childish," Nell said to Myra, when old Mrs. Bray had trotted stiffly away with her spoils.
Myra did not reply.She hoped Nell would not discover that ravished shelf of prized old china.
"Well—Nell got ye in hand?"inquired Nell's husband, John Peebles, at dinner.The good-natured wink which accompanied the words, the hearty voice and friendly manner, robbed the words of offense.They seemed rather a humorous gibe directed against Nell.These two got along excellently well.There was about John Peebles an effect of tender strength, re-assuring and at the same time illuminating—responsive to weakness, but adamant to imposition.Even the managerial Nell had not succeeded in piercing that armored side of him—his 'thus far and no further.'"
"Aw—you!"said Nell, adoringly.
"I bet Nell's met her boss!"grinned Marvin."He don't go so fur as to beat ye, does he, Nell?"
"Smarty!"returned Nell.Her eyes crinkled up at the corners.She had met her match, and she knew it and gloried in it.But she didn't want any sass from the family.
She had none.They submitted without demur.The dish-pan sunned in the old place.The towels dried along a line of her own stretching."John and me don't mean to make you any work," she assured them.They made no work.It seemed there had never been so much leisure.
"Myry," inquired Nell, "where's that other glass that goes with George's wife's lemonade-set?"
"Oh, it must be 'round som'ers," Myra returned vaguely.
"Round som'ers!Why ain't they all together?"Nell prodded in further search.
"Where's my pink gilt cup and saucer Aunt Em gimme one Christmas?"
"Ain't it there?"ventured Myra, with a cowardly shrinking from confession, not so much on her own account as for old Mrs. Bray.There was the majolica pickle-dish, the gilt, beflowered lemonade-glass, Abbie Carter's cracker-jar, certain of the fragile souvenir pin-trays stacked in a corner of the shelf.
"Here's Marvin's blue one.It's funny where them things can be.I always kept them here together, on this shelf."
"They're som'ers," Myra repeated vaguely.
Old Mrs. Bray had sat throughout this conversation, making buttonholes in a new gray percale.Once, when Nell was back at the sink, she reached out a wavering, fat old arm, and gave Myra's apron-string a tug, as a bad child pulls a cat's tail in a sort of impish humor.Her eyes, blue and shining as a child's saucer, looked very wise.A little laugh clucked in her throat.
"Mother—you feel chilly?You want to keep out of drafts," cautioned Nellie from the sink.
"Never felt more chipper!"averred old Mrs. Bray.
She had not spent an afternoon in her room since Nell's arrival. To-day, however, after dinner, she withdrew with an air of intending to remain there for some time.She took her buttonholes with her.It was likely that Nell could not content herself until she had searched every cupboard and pantry for the missing treasure.
"I declare—it is the beatin'est thing!Whatever can have become of them?"she apprized Myra."You find much time to read, Myry?"
Myra found time to read her woman's magazine from cover to cover, in the course of the month.Some things she read more than once—those frankly impossible stories in which the heroines were always beautiful and always loved.Myra had never known a heroine; the women of her acquaintance were neither beautiful nor adored; and were probably quite comfortably unaware of this lack.
"I'm getting notional," Myra accused herself fearfully.The Family Doctor Book, a learned and ancient tome, confirmed these suspicions.It treated of this, and related matters, with a large assurance, like a trusty confidant.
"Funny how long Mother stays in her room!"wondered Nell.
"Mebbe she's fell asleep.Old people need all the sleep they can get.It's mostly so broken."
"I'm agoing to see!"deposed Nell.
Myra had never invaded that withdrawn privacy.But Nell, with her grenadier step, went swiftly and threw open the door.
"What on earth!Mother!"
Old Mrs. Bray's voice streamed quavering out, "Oh, Nellie!Don't scold me!Myry!—"
Somehow Myra was there—past the affronted Nell in the door.In the instant silence they made a strange tableau.
Old Mrs. Bray in her fine gray-and-lavender gown was seated before her little wash-hand-stand.The floral pitcher in its floral bowl had been set to one side on the floor.What covered the towel-protected top of the stand, was Nellie's looted treasure.
There were the fragments of the pink cup and saucer; the leaf-green and brown majolica bits that had been the pickle-dish; the iridescent curved sides of George's wife's lemonade-glass; Aunt Em's shattered souvenir pitcher; Abbie Carter's cracker-jar with its smashed wheat-heads. Myra only looked bewilderedly; but on Nell's gaping face apprehension succeeded stupefaction and dissolved in its turn into a great brimming tenderness.
"Scold you, Mother?Oh, Mother—what must you think me!(Oh, poor Mother—poor Mother—she's gone daft!)"
"I always admired pretty broken bits of chiny," old Mrs. Bray confessed."But the pitcher was a accident—reely it was, Nellie.I never went to let that fall.My arm breshed it.But the sasser and the pickle-dish and George's wife's lemonade-glass and Abbie Carter's cracker-jar—I done them apurpose.And I can't say I regret the pitcher, nuther."
"Yes, Mother!Yes, yes!It's all right; I understand.(Myry, don't you leave her!I thought she was gettin' childish, but Oh—to think—I'll have John go for Doc Bradley right away.Let 'er amuse herself—but don't you leave her alone a minute!Poor Mother!Poor old Mother!Aplayin' with broken chiny dishes!)"
"What's Nell awhisperin' to ye?"inquired old Mrs. Bray, sharply."There's nothin' to whisper about as I know.Did ever you see anything purtier than this pink chiny piece, Myry?It broke so clean, and curved as a petal.And this here piece of George's wife's lemonade-glass—it's handsome as a brooch.See how the flower come out!Why, Myry, I've set here and fairly eat off these dishes!"
"Yes, Mother.But sha'n't we put them up now!Some one might drop in—Nell bein' here."
She could not bear that Marvin and John and the doctor should see this pitiful child's play.
Old Mrs. Bray assented with the utmost good nature.She drew up a box of lacquer and proceeded to lay her china service carefully and dextrously away.She set the box quite openly along the shelf beside her bonnet-box and the snug, little brown round pasteboard roll that held her little old round muff.Presently they heard steps in the sitting-room.Some one had dropped in—but it was only Marvin and John and old Doc Bradley.
Marvin's face held a look of scared apprehension; John's withheld judgment; Nell was frankly red-eyed.She had been walking fiercely back and forth in the yard unable to face again that piteous picture.
The only unclouded faces there were Doc Bradley's and old Mrs. Bray's.She gave him a shrewd look.He returned it in kind."So—o—" said old Mrs. Bray, noting their various scrutiny.There was even an effect of state about her as she settled herself in her special rocker.But she said, quite simply and conversationally,
"Do you want I should tell you about them dishes?"
"Well—it was thisaway.And understand—I don't blame nobuddy.Folks are different.I always loved pretty dishes, but I never got to use 'em.First on account of you being little"—she eyed Nellie and Marvin with benignant allowance—"and after that, because of Nell always bein' agen' using things common.She's like her father.He was thataway.He was a good man, but he 'lowed good things shouldn't be used common.And then when Myry come with her purty weddin' dishes and all, I'd hoped she'd be sort o' different—more like me.But seem like she favored Nell.But I'd never thought of breakin' them if it hadn't a be'n for the pink cup.That give me the idee.That very night I broke the sasser to it.I figured I'd get the use of them dishes some way."
Old Mrs. Bray clucked pleasantly, and resumed.
"I'd always wanted to wear one o' my good dresses afternoons, too.Well—Myry made me one.And she was reel good about wantin' me to wear it common.I had a good man.I've had good children.I've lived a long life.But two things I wanted, I never had—pretty dishes to use, and to be dressed up afternoons.Myry makin' me that dress turned my head, I reckon.And the pink cup finished it."
"I take the full blame.It was me done both—broke the cup and sewed the dress"—spoke up Myry."And it's you I favored all along, Mother.If you knew how I've honed to set the table with my weddin' dishes.And I could show you—I've got some things you've never seen—house-dresses—pink—sprigged—"
"Meanin' no offense, Nellie—and Marvin—you can't help bein' like your pa.I guess I'm just a foolish old woman."
"We're all like we're made," sounded the oracular accents of Mr. Peebles."Joke's on you all right, Nell."
"I guess I'm it," she admitted cheerfully.
Doc Bradley looked sharply at Myra when she let him out.Perhaps he noted the pathos of that thin face; those speaking eyes, that seemed to confess a secret longing.
"If you should feel the call, just break a few dishes on your own account!"he advised her."I like to see folks get what they want.If they want it bad enough, they'll get it."He thought it might be a dress, perhaps—something pretty.Women in Myry's case have odd notions.
Myry had an odd notion.She wanted to be told that she was beautiful and loved.
"You little black stringy thing!"she told herself fiercely."He's fond of you.And good to you.He's like his pa; he won't show it common.And anyways—you beautiful!"
But every month she read, with a new and avid interest, those far-fetched, extravagant tales of beautiful and beloved women.
During the remainder of Nell's stay, old Mrs. Bray and Myra felt a certain delicacy about inaugurating the use of the white cloths, the wedding china, and the pretty bits on the safe-shelf.But when the Peebles's visit was over, the table achieved a patterned whiteness and a general festive appearance.Old Mrs. Bray donned the gray-and-lavender every afternoon, and Myra bloomed out in pink print.She scarcely ever went abroad now, but for all that, her world was infinitely widened.Once Marvin, dangling from two spread fingers a tiny yoke, inquired doubtfully, "Do you think it's big enough to go round his neck?"
He was always urging her to have help in, and not to tire herself out.But curiously, he never noted the pink print any more than if it had been dull slate.That had not been his pa's way; and it was not his way.But he was good to her.What more could a woman ask?
After Nell came, he felt aggrieved—quite useless and in the way. The women were always displaying things—digging them out from the bottoms of drawers—clouds of soft, white things, with here and there a rift of color in tassel or tufting.
There came a night when he sat alone.In the beginning, he had tried to read—he picked up her woman's magazine, eyeing it curiously, that these silly, floppy sheets should hold, as they did, women's eyes.There were pictures in it—always pictures—pictured embraces, with words beneath."How beautiful you are!I love you—I love you!How beautiful you are!"Always harping on the same thing—love and beauty.As if life were a sentimental thing like that!
He flung it down.How could he stay his mind on such stuff, when Myry—when Myry—
Nell, important and managerial, occasionally came out and elbowed him about in some mysterious search.At such times, old Mrs. Bray, done up for the night in a highly flowered and mantle-like garment, came creeping inquiringly in.
"Now, Nell—you know what Myry told ye—if you was to fergit now—"
"All right, Mother.I won't forget."
"You know where to find 'em—"
"Yes, I know where to find 'em."
"Now, Nell, I promised Myry—"
"What did you promise Myry?"Marvin flared in sudden jealousy.Both women eyed him, as from a great and unattainable height.Then Nell's capable back disappeared beyond Myry's door; and his mother's little old grotesque and woolly figure was swallowed up by the black hall.
Again he took up the magazine.Again looked at the picture.Again, scarcely seeing them, he read the words.Again he sat; and again Nell elbowed him importantly, and his mother in her snail-like wrappings, came creeping in to remind Nell—
When Doc Bradley came out, at first he thought the man, sprawled loosely in the chair, must be asleep—till he lifted his eyes.They were sleepless and inflamed like a watch-dog's.
"Hold on!Wait a minute!Nell's boss now.You don't want to go in looking that way—you'd skeer 'im!"
"What'll I say?"inquired Marvin hoarsely; "Myry's a good woman—she 's been a good wife to me—too good—"
"Tell 'er something she don't know!Say something fond-like and foolish."
"You can come in now," granted the lofty Nell.
Somehow, old Mrs. Bray had preceded him.But he never saw her.He never even saw the managerial Nell.He saw his wife's face, looking so little and white from out a ruffled lace cap.There were circles of ruffles about her thin wrists.There was a lace ruffle in the neck of her gown.For these were Myry's coronation robes; it was about this adorning that old Mrs. Bray had continuously cautioned Nell.Nell, in that smug, proprietary manner of hers, had turned back a blanket—enough to show the tiny yoke which he had dangled, and the neck which it encircled, and the red and wrinkly head on top of that—-
Like a well-conned article of catechism, words came to Marvin—words he could never have got from his pa.
"Oh, Myry—I love you!How beautiful you are!"
A strange cosmetic glowed on Myra's white cheek.Happiness is the surest beautifier.He might never say it again.It was not likely that he would.He favored his pa.But she had had her great moment—her beautiful and beloved moment.She smiled drowsily up at old Mrs. Bray, beaming beneficently above; and remembered, in an odd flash, the pink china cup.This was her cup—full and running over.
"Come on out now, and let her sleep," ordered the dictatorial Nell."Who'd a' thought, now, Myry had her little vanities?That lace cap now, and them ruffles—for Marvin!Some folks has the strangest notions."
"'Tain't notions!"protested old Mrs. Bray.
"Oh, yes, it is!And all right, if you feel that way—like you and your dishes, now."
"Myry and me both is powerful set on dishes," exulted old Mrs. Bray.
THE BLOOD-RED ONE[8]
By MAXWELL STRUTHERS BURT
From Scribner's Magazine
It was a February evening, so it seems, about five o'clock, and old Mr. Vandusen, having left his hat and ulster in the coatroom, had retraced his steps along the entrance hall of the St.Dunstan Club to the wide doorway that led into the first-floor library.He usually sought the library at this time of day; a little group of men, all of whom he knew well, were as a rule to be found there, and they were friendly, not overly argumentative, restful.Now he paused between the heavy portières, partly drawn aside, and peered for a moment into the room.The light from the hall behind him made a pool of faint illumination at his feet, but beyond that there was only a brown darkness, scented with the smell of books in leather bindings, in which the figures of several men, sprawled out in big chairs before the window, were faintly visible.The window itself, a square of blank fog-blurred dusk, served merely to heighten the obscurity.Mr. Vandusen, a small, plump shadow in the surrounding shadows, found an unoccupied chair and sank into it silently.
"And that's just it," said Maury suddenly, and as if he was picking up the threads of a conversation dropped but a moment before; "and that's just the point"—and his usually gentle voice was heavy with a didacticism unlike itself—"that affects most deeply a man of my temperament and generation.Nemesis—fate—whatever you choose to call it.The fear that perhaps it doesn't exist at all.That there is no such thing; or worse yet, that in some strange, monstrous way man has made himself master of it—has no longer to fear it. And man isn't fit to be altogether master of anything as yet; he's still too much half devil, half ape. There's this damned choked feeling that the world's at loose ends. I don't know how to put it—as if, that is, we, with all the devilish new knowledge we've acquired within the past fifty years, the devilish new machines we've invented, have all at once become stronger than God; taken the final power out of the hands of the authority, whatever it is, toward which we used to look for a reckoning and balancing in the end, no matter what agony might lie between. Perhaps it's all right—I don't know. But it's an upsetting conclusion to ask a man of my generation offhandedly to accept. I was brought up—we all were—to believe in an ordered, if obscure, philosophical doctrine that evil inevitably finds its own punishment, and now—!"
"But—" began Tomlinson.
Maury interrupted him."Yes, yes," he said, "I know all that; I know what you are going to say.I am perfectly aware of the fact that the ways of Nemesis are supposed to be slow ways—exceedingly.I am aware of the fact that in the Christian doctrine the process is not usually completed until after death, but nowadays things are different.How, since all else moves so swiftly, can a just God afford any longer to be patient?Time has been obliterated in the last four years; space and centuries telescoped; the sufferings of a century compressed into a few cycles of months.No, there is something wrong, some break in the rhythm of the universe, or those grotesque ghouls who started the whole thing, those full-bodied, cold-blooded hangmen, who for forty years have been sitting back planning the future of men and women as they planned the cards of their sniggering skat games, would awake to a sun dripping blood."He paused for a moment."And as for that psychiatric cripple, their mouthpiece," he concluded sombrely, "that maimed man who broods over battle-fields, he would find a creeping horror in his brain like death made visible."
"And you think he will not?"....
In the darkness Mr. Vandusen suddenly sat up very straight and tried to pierce with his eyes the shadows to the right of him.
Again the chair creaked.
"And you think he will not?"asked the voice again.
The words fell one by one into the silence, like stones dropped into a pool by a precise hand.As the ripples of sound they created died away in the brown dusk, the room seemed for a moment to hold a hushed expectation that made ordinary quiet a matter of movement and sound.From the drab street outside the voice of a newsboy, strident and insistent, put a further edge to the sharp minute."N'extra!"he shouted."N'extra!'Nother big raid on west'n front!"
It was Torrance who asked the question."What—" he said."But, but—why—!"And then his wheezing inarticulateness broke like a dislocated bellows.
Mr. Vandusen, leaning forward in his chair, did not realize at the time the unreasonableness of the sharp blaze of irritation that at the interruption burned within him.It was not until much later, indeed, that he realized other odd circumstances as well: Torrance's broken amazement, for instance; the silence of Maury, and Wheeler, and, above all, of Tomlinson.At the moment he realized nothing, except an intense curiosity to hear what the man who had just sat down next to him had to say."An extraordinary voice!Altogether extraordinary!Like a bell, that is, if a bell could by any chance give a sense of an underlying humor."And yet, even considering all this, when one is old and has heard so many voices—But here he was quite rigid in the darkness."Do be quiet!"he whispered sharply."Can't we be quiet!"
"Thanks!"said the voice, with its cool, assured inflections."There is nothing so very extraordinary.Men's brains are not unalike.Merely—shall I go on?"
And before Mr. Vandusen's hurried assent could be uttered, the quiet tones assumed the accent of narration."Good," they said."Very well, then.But first I must ask of you a large use of your imagination.I must ask you, for instance, to imagine a scene so utterly unlike this February night that your eyes will have to close themselves entirely to the present and open only to my words. I must ask you to imagine a beech forest in early November; a beech forest dreaming beneath the still magic of warm, hazy days; days that come before the first sharp cold of winter. Will you imagine that?"
"Yes!"murmured Mr. Vandusen; and he noticed that the other men did not answer at all.
"The mild sunlight," continued the voice, "filters through the naked boughs and touches the smooth silver trunks and the moss about their feet with a misty gold as iridescent as the wings of dragonflies.And as far as you can see on every side stretch these silver boles, dusted with sunlight; in straight lines, in oblique columns, until the eye loses itself in the argent shadows of the distance.
"In the hidden open places, where the grass is still green toward its roots, wild swine come out of the woods and stare with small red eyes; but save for the crackling of the twigs beneath their feet it is very quiet.Marvellously so.Quiet with the final hush of summer.Only rarely a breeze stirs the legions of the heaped-up gray leaves, and sometimes, but rarely, one hears far off the chattering of a squirrel.So!—that is my forest.
"Through it runs like a purple ribbon a smooth, well-kept road.And it, too, adds to the impression of stillness, as the untenanted handiwork of man always does.On the rolled, damp surface are the marks of the cloven feet of the swine.
"Now there is a snapping of dead wood, a rustling of leaves, and an immense tusker—a grizzled leader of a herd—comes ponderously through the sun-dappled aisles to the edge of the road.For a moment he stands there, secure and unperturbed, and then suddenly he throws up his head, his little eyes wide and startled, and, wheeling, charges back to where his satellites are browsing.There is a breathless scurrying of huge bodies; then utter silence again, except that far away a limb cracks.But only for a moment is the road deserted.It seems as if the shadow of the great tusker was still upon it when, beyond the bend, a horn, sweet as a hunting-horn, blows once, twice, ends in a fanfare of treble notes, and a long, gray motor-car sweeps into view, cutting the sunlight and the pooled shadow with its twinkling prow.Behind it is another, and another, and another, until six in all are in sight; and as they flash past one has a glimpse, on the seats of the landaulets, of a number of men in long cloaks and helmets; big and little men; fat men and sharp-featured; elderly men and young men, and particularly of one man, in the second car from the front, who looks straight ahead of him and is not interested in the chatter of his companions. He is a stern man, rather terrible, and his face wears a curious pallor. On the crest of a wooded slope, a quarter of a mile away, the giant boar sniffs the odor of the gasolene and delicately wrinkles his nose.
"And this," said the voice, "this convoy of motor-cars, these horns, almost as gay as the hunting-horns of former days, was, as you have guessed, The Maimed Man—as you choose to call him—come back to a hunting-lodge to rest, to slip from his shoulders for a while, if he could, the sodden cloak he had been wearing for the past three years and as many months.
"It was dark when they came to the hunting-lodge, a long, two-storied building of white plaster and timber-work above.The sun had been gone a while beyond the low hills to the west, and in the open place where the house stood only a remnant of the red dust of the sunset still floated in the pellucid air.Here the beeches gave way to solid ranks of pines and firs, and the evening sweetness of these fell upon the senses like the touch of cool water upon tired eyes.The headlights of the motor-cars cut wide arcs of blinding light in the gathering darkness.One by one the cars stopped before the entrance with throbbing engines and discharged their loads.The short flight of stairs became for a few minutes a swaying tableau of gray cloaks.There was a subdued ringing of spurs.The lamps from within the doorway touched the tips of the helmets so that they twinkled like little stars.
"The Maimed Man descended slowly and passed between his waiting suite.The scent of the pines had stirred his heart with memories.He was thinking of the last time he had been here, years before—well, not really so many years before, only four years, and yet it seemed like a recollection of his boyhood.He paused inside the threshold to remove his cloak. A hand, with a curious lack of duplication to it, stretched itself forward. The Maimed Man turned abruptly to see a servant with one arm bowing toward him. For a moment he paused, and then:
"'You are wounded?'he asked, and, although nothing was further from his desire, his voice had in it a little rasping sound; anger it seemed, although it might very well have been fear.
"The man turned a brick-red.He had never quite been able to recover from the feeling that in some way to be crippled was a shameful thing.He had been very strong before.
"'At Liège, your Majesty,' he murmured.'In the first year.'
"'Always the left arm,' said The Maimed Man.'Always the left.It seems always so.'But now he was angry.He turned to one of his suite.'Can I not escape such things even here?'he asked.He went up without further words to his rooms. From his study a long door of glass opened onto a balcony.He remembered the balcony well.He opened the door and stepped out.The twilight had gone now.The night was very still and touched with a hint of crispness.Stars were beginning to show themselves.The black pines that came down to the edge of the clearing were like a great hidden army."
There was a little pause.
"And so," said the voice, "I can come now almost at once to the first of the two incidents I wish to tell you.I choose only two because there is no need of more.Two will do.And I shall call the first 'The story of the leaves that marched.'
"The warm days still held, and at the hunting-lodge there was much planning to keep things moving and every one busy and content.But secret planning, you understand.The Maimed Man is not an easy person for whom to plan unless he thinks that he has the final decision himself.There were rides and drives and picnics and, in the afternoons, usually a long walk, in which the older and stouter members of the suite either stayed at home or else followed painfully in the rear of their more active companions. The Maimed Man is a difficult person to keep up with; he walks very fast across country, swinging his stick, choosing, it would seem, the roughest ways. It is almost as if he wished to rid himself of others; and he is inordinately proud of his own activity. It was a curious sight to see his straggling attendants, spread out through the silver vistas of the beeches, like earnest trolls, all in one way or another bent upon a common end. And I suppose it was on account of this trick of The Maimed Man that one afternoon, toward dusk, he found himself almost completely alone, save for myself, who managed somehow to keep step, and a silent huntsman in gray who strode on ahead with the quiet, alert step of a wild animal.
"It was very still.There was no breeze at all.Not a sound except the sound of the dead leaves beneath our feet; and The Maimed Man was not, as was his usual wont, talking.Indeed, he seemed very preoccupied, almost morosely so.Every now and then he cut with his stick at a bush or a yellowed fern as he passed.Presently the trees opened upon a little glade swimming in sunlight.And then there was a brook to cross, and beyond that a gentle slope before the trees began again.The sunlight was pleasantly warm after the coolness of the forest, and the slope, with its soft dried grass, seemed an inviting place to rest.The Maimed Man continued until he had reached the farther belt of trees, and then he turned about and faced the sinking sun, that by now was changing itself into a nebulous radiance on the horizon.The forest stretched in gentle billows as far as the eye could see.
"'We will stop here,' said The Maimed Man, 'until the others catch up.Lazy-bones!If they had one-half the work to do that my poorest man has to the south they would not lose their legs so readily.'Then he sat down and lit a cigarette.I sat beside him.Farther up on the slope, in the shadow of the trees, sat the huntsman.We waited.The sun burned away its quivering aura and began to sink blood-red below the hills.Long shadows fell, penetrated with the dancing flecks of twilight.
"'Here they come!'said The Maimed Man suddenly.'I see gray moving.There—below there, amongst the trees!' He pointed with his cane. Far back in the secret aisles of the forest across the brook there did indeed seem to be a movement. The Maimed Man half arose to his feet. 'I will shame them, the lazy-bones,' he said, and then he sat down again, with an odd, soft collapse.
"For, you see, it was very still, as I have said.Not a trace of wind.The forest seemed to be slumbering.And yet there had come out of it, and across the open place, and up the slope, so that it touched the hair and chilled the cheek, something that was not wind and yet was like it.A little clammy cat's-paw.So!And then was gone.And on its heels came the leaves.Yes, millions of them.But not blown; not hurriedly.Very hesitatingly; as if by their own volition.One might have said that they oozed with a monstrous slowness out from between the crepuscular tree-trunks and across the open space toward the brook.Gray leaves, creeping forward with a curious dogged languor.And when they came to the brook they paused on its farther edge and stopped, and the ones behind came pushing up to them.And looking down upon them, they might have been the backs of wounded men in gray, dragging themselves on their knees to water....
"I don't know how long this moment lasted—minutes perhaps; perhaps no longer than the drawing in and letting out of a breath.It was broken by the figure of a man—an upstanding man, this time—who stepped out of the forest opposite and, halting for a moment on the edge of the clearing, looked up to where The Maimed Man was sitting.Then he signalled to some one behind him, and presently one by one the figures of the belated suite appeared.They formed themselves in a little group and with some precision marched across the clearing.As they trampled upon the stricken leaves by the brookside the fixed stare in The Maimed Man's eyes faded, and he watched them with a rigid attention.Shortly they came to where he had got to his feet.A huge elderly man with a red face led them.
"'But your Majesty,' he objected, 'it is not fitting.You should not leave us in this way.Even here, is it altogether safe?'
"The Maimed Man did not answer.Covertly and with a sly shamefacedness, unlike himself, he was trying to read the expression in the huntsman's face.But that faithful fellow's eyes were bland.There was no sign that he had seen anything out of the ordinary....
"There is no need," said the voice, "for delay.From this to the second incident I would describe to you is only a step.I shall not go into details.For these I can safely trust to your imaginations.And yet I would not, of course, have you gather that what I have just told you is without background—was out of a clear sky.Naturally, it was not; it was a cumulation, an apex.Such things do not happen altogether suddenly.There is a nibbling away at the banks, a little rivulet here and there, and then, all at once, a torrent like a hunted river under the moon.I called the first apex 'The story of the leaves that marched'; I shall call the second 'The mist that came up suddenly.'
"Two weeks had passed; quiet days, slow weeks, quiet and slow as the sunlight through the trees.The two doctors at the hunting-lodge, round, sharp-spoken men, with big, near-sighted spectacles, rubbed their hands together and nodded with certainty when they held their daily consultations.'He is improving rapidly,' they said.'The lines in his face are going.A little more exercise, a little more diversion—so!'They imagined crosses on their chests.
"Have you ever known mist on a moonlight night in a forest?Not a woods, not an open country with timber scattered through it, but a real forest; so limitless, so close-pressing, that one has the same sense of diminished personality and at the same time the same sense of all obstructions cleared away between oneself and the loneliness of the universe that one has at sea.As if, that is, you found yourself, a mere shadow in the darkness, kneeling close before an altar on which blazed, so that you could not altogether raise your head, the magnificence of a star.But mist in a moonlight forest is even more disembodying than mist on a moonlight sea.There are the dark masses of the trees, showing every now and then above the changing wraiths of white, and the summits of half-seen hills, to give an impression of a horizon near yet seemingly unattainable.
"They had finished supper in the great oak-ceilinged room down below, where a fire burned in the stone embrasure, and the soft lights of candles in silver candelabra made only more tenebrous the darkness overhead.The Maimed Man leaned back in his chair and peered with narrowed eyelids through the smoke of his cigar at the long table stretching away from him.For a moment he felt reassured; a hint of the old assurance that had once been one of his greatest gifts.It was partly a physical thing, stirring in his veins like the cool blood that follows the awakening from healthy sleep.The sight of all these friends of his, these followers of his, with their keen, sunburnt faces, or their wrinkled and wise ones—!Surely he occupied a position almost unassailable; almost as unassailable as that of the God of Force whose purposes of late had at times puzzled him in a new and disturbing way—.What nonsense!He gripped power as securely as he could grip, if he wished, his sword.What strength in heaven or earth could break a man's will, provided that will had been sufficiently trained?He felt pleasantly tired from the walk of the afternoon; he thought that he would go up to his rooms for a while, perhaps write a personal letter or two, afterward come down again for a game of cards.He stood up; the long double lines of men at the table rose with him, as a unit, at attention.The Maimed Man looked at them for a prolonged second, his heart stirred with pride; then he wheeled about and departed.
"In his workroom above, two secretaries were writing at a table under the rays of a green-shaded lamp.They jumped to their feet as he entered, but he waved them aside.
"'I shall return in a moment,' he said.'First I wish to finish my cigar.'
"He opened the glass door onto the balcony, but, as it was cool, he stepped back and asked for his military cloak.When this was adjusted, he stepped once more into the moonlight....And then, suddenly, there was no moonlight at all, or just the faintest glimmer of it, like light seen through milky water. Instead, he had stepped into a swirling vapor that in an instant lost him completely from the door he had just left; a maelstrom of fog, that choked him, half blinded him, twisted about him like wet, coiling ropes, and in a dreadful moment he saw that through the fog were thrust out toward him arms of a famine thinness, the extended fingers of which groped at his throat, were obliterated by the fog, groped once more with a searching intentness.
"'God!'said The Maimed Man.'God!'—and fought drunkenly for the wall behind him.His hands touched nothing.He did not even know in which direction the wall lay.He dreaded to move, for it seemed as if there was no longer a railing to save him from falling.There was no solidity anywhere.The world had become a thing of hideous flux, unstable as when first it was made.Gelid fingers, farther reaching than the rest, touched the back of his neck.He gave a hoarse, strangled cry and reeled forward, and fell across the balustrade that came up out of the mist to meet him.And slowly the mist retreated; down from the balcony and across the open place beneath.A narrow line of dew-brightened grass appeared and grew wider.The tops of the trees began to show.But The Maimed Man could not take his eyes off the mist, for it seemed to him that the open place was filled with the despairing arms of women and of children, and that through the shifting whiteness gleamed the whiteness of their serried faces.Behind him was the warm glow of the room, shining through the glass doors.But he did not dare go in as yet; it was necessary first to control the little flecks of foam that despite his endeavor still wet his lips.For you see," said the voice, and in the darkness its accents took on a slow, rhythmical sombreness, like the swish of a sword in a shuttered room, "this was far worse than the leaves.For, after all, the dead are only the dead, but to the living there is no end."
At least a minute—fully a minute—must have passed, a minute in which the brown shadows of the library, held back for now this long while by the weaving magic of the voice, stepped forward once more into their places, while Mr. Vandusen waited for the voice to continue.Then the spell broke like a shattered globe, and, with a sudden realization of many things, he leaned forward and felt the chair to the right of him. There was no one there. He paused with his hand still on the leather seat. "Would you mind telling me," he asked, and he found that he was speaking with some effort and with great precision, "if any of you know the gentleman who has just left?"
"Left?"said Tomlinson sharply.
"Yes—left."
Tomlinson's voice was incredulous."But he couldn't have," he insisted."From where I am sitting I would have seen him as he reached the door.Although, if he really is gone, I can say, thank the Lord, that I think he's a faker."
On silent feet young Wheeler had departed for the hall.Now he returned."It may interest you to know," he said, "that I have just interviewed the doorman and the boy who is stationed at the steps leading back, and they both say no one has come in or out in the last half-hour."
Suddenly his careful voice rose to a high note."What the devil—!"he sputtered.He strode over to the electric switch."For Heaven's sake, let's have some light," he said."Why do we always insist upon sitting in this confounded darkness?"
THE WEDDING JEST[9]
By JAMES BRANCH CABELL
From The Century
I. Concerning Several Compacts
It is a tale which they narrate in Poictesme, telling how love began between Florian de Puysange and Adelaide de la Forêt.They tell also how young Florian had earlier fancied other women for one reason or another; but that this, he knew, was the great love of his life, and a love which would endure unchanged as long as his life lasted.
And the tale tells how the Comte de la Forêt stroked a gray beard and said:
"Well, after all, Puysange is a good fief—"
"As if that mattered!"cried his daughter, indignantly."My father, you are a deplorably sordid person."
"My dear," replied the old gentleman, "it does matter.Fiefs last."
So he gave his consent to the match, and the two young people were married on Walburga's eve, on the last day of April.
And they narrate how Florian de Puysange was vexed by a thought that was in his mind.He did not know what this thought was.But something he had overlooked; something there was he had meant to do, and had not done; and a troubling consciousness of this lurked at the back of his mind like a small formless cloud.All day, while bustling about other matters, he had groped toward this unapprehended thought.
Now he had it: Tiburce.
The young Vicomte de Puysange stood in the doorway, looking back into the bright hall where they of Storisende were dancing at his marriage feast. His wife, for a whole half-hour his wife, was dancing with handsome Etienne de Nérac. Her glance met Florian's, and Adelaide flashed him an especial smile. Her hand went out as though to touch him, for all that the width of the hall severed them.
Florian remembered presently to smile back at her.Then he went out of the castle into a starless night that was as quiet as an unvoiced menace.A small and hard and gnarled-looking moon ruled over the dusk's secrecy.The moon this night, afloat in a luminous, gray void, somehow reminded Florian of a glistening and unripe huge apple.
The foliage about him moved at most as a sleeper breathes as Florian descended eastward through the walled gardens, and so came to the graveyard.White mists were rising, such mists as the witches of Amneran notoriously evoked in these parts on each Walburga's eve to purchase recreations which squeamishness leaves undescribed.
For five years now Tiburce d'Arnaye had lain there.Florian thought of his dead comrade and of the love which had been between them—a love more perfect and deeper and higher than commonly exists between men; and the thought came to Florian, and was petulantly thrust away, that Adelaide loved ignorantly where Tiburce d'Arnaye had loved with comprehension.Yes, he had known almost the worst of Florian de Puysange, this dear lad who, none the less, had flung himself between Black Torrismond's sword and the breast of Florian de Puysange.And it seemed to Florian unfair that all should prosper with him, and Tiburce lie there imprisoned in dirt which shut away the color and variousness of things and the drollness of things, wherein Tiburce d'Arnaye had taken such joy.And Tiburce, it seemed to Florian—for this was a strange night—was struggling futilely under all that dirt, which shut out movement, and clogged the mouth of Tiburce, and would not let him speak, and was struggling to voice a desire which was unsatisfied and hopeless.
"O comrade dear," said Florian, "you who loved merriment, there is a feast afoot on this strange night, and my heart is sad that you are not here to share in the feasting.Come, come, Tiburce, a right trusty friend you were to me; and, living or dead, you should not fail to make merry at my wedding."
Thus he spoke.White mists were rising, and it was Walburga's eve.
So a queer thing happened, and it was that the earth upon the grave began to heave and to break in fissures, as when a mole passes through the ground.And other queer things happened after that, and presently Tiburce d'Arnaye was standing there, gray and vague in the moonlight as he stood there brushing the mold from his brows, and as he stood there blinking bright, wild eyes.And he was not greatly changed, it seemed to Florian; only the brows and nose of Tiburce cast no shadows upon his face, nor did his moving hand cast any shadow there, either, though the moon was naked overhead.
"You had forgotten the promise that was between us," said Tiburce; and his voice had not changed much, though it was smaller.
"It is true.I had forgotten.I remember now."And Florian shivered a little, not with fear, but with distaste.
"A man prefers to forget these things when he marries.It is natural enough.But are you not afraid of me who come from yonder?"
"Why should I be afraid of you, Tiburce, who gave your life for mine?"
"I do not say.But we change yonder."
"And does love change, Tiburce?For surely love is immortal."
"Living or dead, love changes.I do not say love dies in us who may hope to gain nothing more from love.Still, lying alone in the dark clay, there is nothing to do as yet save to think of what life was, and of what sunlight was, and of what we sang and whispered in dark places when we had lips; and of how young grass and murmuring waters and the high stars beget fine follies even now; and to think of how merry our loved ones still contrive to be even now with their new playfellows. Such reflections are not always conducive to philanthropy."
"Tell me," said Florian then, "and is there no way in which we who are still alive may aid you to be happier yonder?"
"Oh, but assuredly," replied Tiburce d'Arnaye, and he discoursed of curious matters; and as he talked, the mists about the graveyard thickened."And so," Tiburce said, in concluding his tale, "it is not permitted that I make merry at your wedding after the fashion of those who are still in the warm flesh.But now that you recall our ancient compact, it is permitted I have my peculiar share in the merriment, and I drink with you to the bride's welfare."
"I drink," said Florian as he took the proffered cup, "to the welfare of my beloved Adelaide, whom alone of women I have really loved, and whom I shall love always."
"I perceive," replied the other, "that you must still be having your joke."
Then Florian drank, and after him Tiburce.And Florian said:
"But it is a strange drink, Tiburce, and now that you have tasted it you are changed."
"You have not changed, at least," Tiburce answered, and for the first time he smiled, a little perturbingly by reason of the change in him.
"Tell me," said Florian, "of how you fare yonder."
So Tiburce told him of yet more curious matters.Now the augmenting mists had shut off all the rest of the world.Florian could see only vague, rolling graynesses and a gray and changed Tiburce sitting there, with bright, wild eyes, and discoursing in a small chill voice.The appearance of a woman came, and sat beside him on the right.She, too, was gray, as became Eve's senior; and she made a sign which Florian remembered, and it troubled him.Tiburce said then:
"And now, young Florian, you who were once so dear to me, it is to your welfare I drink."
"I drink to yours, Tiburce."
Tiburce drank first; and Florian, having drunk in turn, cried out: "You have changed beyond recognition!"
"You have not changed," Tiburce d'Arnaye replied again."Now let me tell you of our pastimes yonder."
With that he talked of exceedingly curious matters.And Florian began to grow dissatisfied, for Tiburce was no longer recognizable, and Tiburce whispered things uncomfortable to believe; and other eyes, as wild as his, but lit with red flarings from behind, like a beast's eyes, showed in the mists to this side and to that side, and unhappy beings were passing through the mists upon secret errands which they discharged unwillingly.Then, too, the appearance of a gray man now sat to the left of that which had been Tiburce d'Arnaye, and this new-comer was marked so that all might know who he was; and Florian's heart was troubled to note how handsome and how admirable was that desecrated face even now.
"But I must go," said Florian, "lest they miss me at Storisende and Adelaide be worried."
"Surely it will not take long to toss off a third cup.Nay, comrade, who were once so dear, let us two now drink our last toast together.Then go, in Sclaug's name, and celebrate your marriage.But before that let us drink to the continuance of human mirth-making everywhere."
Florian drank first.Then Tiburce took his turn, looking at Florian as Tiburce drank slowly.As he drank, Tiburce d'Arnaye was changed even more, and the shape of him altered, and the shape of him trickled as though Tiburce were builded of sliding fine white sand.So Tiburce d'Arnaye returned to his own place.The appearances that had sat to his left and to his right were no longer there to trouble Florian with memories.And Florian saw that the mists of Walburga's eve had departed, and that the sun was rising, and that the graveyard was all overgrown with nettles and tall grass.
He had not remembered the place being thus, and it seemed to him the night had passed with unnatural quickness.But he thought more of the fact that he had been beguiled into spending his wedding-night in a graveyard in such questionable company, and of what explanation he could make to Adelaide.
II. Of Young Persons in May
The tale tells how Florian de Puysange came in the dawn through flowering gardens, and heard young people from afar, already about their maying.Two by two he saw them from afar as they went with romping and laughter into the tall woods behind Storisende to fetch back the May-pole with dubious old rites.And as they went they sang, as was customary, that song which Raimbaut de Vaqueiras made in the ancient time in honor of May's ageless triumph.
Sang they:
"May shows with godlike showing
To-day for each that sees
May's magic overthrowing
All musty memories
In him whom May decrees
To be love's own.He saith,
I wear love's liveries
Until released by death
"Thus all we laud May's sowing,
Nor heed how harvests please
When nowhere grain worth growing
Greets autumn's questing breeze,
And garnerers garner these—
Vain words and wasted breath
And spilth and tasteless lees—
Until released by death.
"Unwillingly foreknowing
That love with May-time flees,
We take this day's bestowing,
And feed on fantasies
Such as love lends for ease
Where none but travaileth,
With lean, infrequent fees,
Until released by death."
And Florian shook his sleek, black head."A very foolish and pessimistical old song, a superfluous song, and a song that is particularly out of place in the loveliest spot in the loveliest of all possible worlds."
Yet Florian took no inventory of the gardens.There was but a happy sense of green and gold, with blue topping all; of twinkling, fluent, tossing leaves and of the gray under side of elongated, straining leaves; a sense of pert bird-noises, and of a longer shadow than usual slanting before him, and a sense of youth and well-being everywhere. Certainly it was not a morning wherein pessimism might hope to flourish.
Instead, it was of Adelaide that Florian thought: of the tall, impulsive, and yet timid, fair girl who was both shrewd and innocent, and of her tenderly colored loveliness, and of his abysmally unmerited felicity in having won her.Why, but what, he reflected, grimacing—what if he had too hastily married somebody else?For he had earlier fancied other women for one reason or another: but this, he knew, was the great love of his life, and a love which would endure unchanged as long as his life lasted.
III. What Comes of Marrying Happily
The tale tells how Florian de Puysange found Adelaide in the company of two ladies who were unknown to him.One of these was very old, the other an imposing matron in middle life.The three were pleasantly shaded by young oak-trees; beyond was a tall hedge of clipped yew.The older women were at chess, while Adelaide bent her meek, golden head to some of that fine needle-work in which the girl delighted.And beside them rippled a small sunlit stream, which babbled and gurgled with silver flashes.Florian hastily noted these things as he ran laughing to his wife.
"Heart's dearest!"he cried.And he saw, perplexed, that Adelaide had risen with a faint, wordless cry, and was gazing at him as though she were puzzled and alarmed a very little.
"Such an adventure as I have to tell you of!"said Florian then.
"But, hey, young man, who are you that would seem to know my daughter so well?"demanded the lady in middle life, and rose majestically from her chess-game.
Florian stared, as he well might.
"Your daughter, madame!But certainly you are not Dame Melicent."
At this the old, old woman raised her nodding head.
"Dame Melicent?And was it I you were seeking, sir?"
Now Florian looked from one to the other of these incomprehensible strangers, bewildered; and his eyes came back to his lovely wife, and his lips smiled irresolutely.
"Is this some jest to punish me, my dear?"But then a new and graver trouble kindled in his face, and his eyes narrowed, for there was something odd about his wife also.
"I have been drinking in queer company," he said."It must be that my head is not yet clear.Now certainly it seems to me that you are Adelaide de la Forêt, and certainly it seems to me that you are not Adelaide."
The girl replied:
"Why, no, messire; I am Sylvie de Nointel."
"Come, come," said the middle-aged lady, briskly, "let us have an end of this play-acting!There has been no Adelaide de la Forêt in these parts for some twenty-five years, as nobody knows better than I.Young fellow, let us have a sniff at you.No, you are not tipsy, after all.Well, I am glad of that.So let us get to the bottom of this business.What do they call you when you are at home?"
"Florian de Puysange," he answered speaking meekly enough.This capable large person was to the young man rather intimidating.
"La!"said she.She looked at him very hard.She nodded gravely two or three times, so that her double chin opened and shut.
"Yes, and you favor him.How old are you?"He told her twenty-four.She said inconsequently: "So I was a fool, after all.Well, young man, you will never be as good-looking as your father, but I trust you have an honester nature.However, bygones are bygones.Is the old rascal still living, and was it he that had the impudence to send you to me?"
"My father, madame, was slain at the Battle of Marchfeld—"
"Some fifty years ago!And you are twenty-four.Young man, your parentage had unusual features, or else we are at cross-purposes. Let us start at the beginning of this. You tell us you are called Florian de Puysange and that you have been drinking in queer company. Now let us have the whole story."
Florian told of last night's happenings, with no more omissions than seemed desirable with feminine auditors.
Then the old woman said:
"I think this is a true tale, my daughter, for the witches of Amneran contrive strange things, with mists to aid them, and with Lilith and Sclaug to abet.Yes, and this fate has fallen before to men that have been over-friendly with the dead."
"Stuff and nonsense!"said the stout lady.
"But, no, my daughter.Thus seven persons slept at Ephesus, from the time of Decius to the time of Theodosius—"
"Still, Mother—"
"And the proof of it is that they were called Constantine and Dionysius and John and Malchus and Marcian and Maximian and Serapion.They were duly canonized.You cannot deny that this thing happened without asserting no less than seven blessed saints to have been unprincipled liars, and that would be a very horrible heresy—"
"Yet, Mother, you know as well as I do—"
"And thus Epimenides, another excellently spoken-of saint, slept at Athens for fifty-seven years.Thus Charlemagne slept in the Untersberg, and will sleep until the ravens of Miramon Lluagor have left his mountains.Thus Rhyming Thomas in the Eildon Hills, thus Ogier in Avalon, thus Oisin—"
The old lady bade fair to go on interminably in her gentle, resolute, piping old voice, but the other interrupted.
"Well, Mother, do not excite yourself about it, for it only makes your asthma worse, and does no especial good to anybody.Things may be as you say.Certainly I intended nothing irreligious.Yet these extended naps, appropriate enough for saints and emperors, are out of place in one's own family.So, if it is not stuff and nonsense, it ought to be.And that I stick to."
"But we forget the boy, my dear," said the old lady."Now listen, Florian de Puysange.Thirty years ago last night, to the month and the day, it was that you vanished from our knowledge, leaving my daughter a forsaken bride.For I am what the years have made of Dame Melicent, and this is my daughter Adelaide, and yonder is her daughter Sylvie de Nointel."
"La!Mother," observed the stout lady, "but are you certain it was the last of April?I had been thinking it was some time in June.And I protest it could not have been all of thirty years.Let me see now, Sylvie, how old is your brother Richard?Twenty-eight, you say.Well, Mother, I always said you had a marvellous memory for things like that, and I often envy you.But how time does fly, to be sure!"
And Florian was perturbed.
"For this is an awkward thing, and Tiburce had played me an unworthy trick.He never did know when to leave off joking; but such posthumous frivolity is past endurance.For, see now, in what a pickle it has landed me!I have outlived my friends, I may encounter difficulty in regaining my fiefs, and certainly I have lost the fairest wife man ever had.Oh, can it be, madame, that you are indeed my Adelaide!"
"Yes, every pound of me, poor boy, and that says much."
"And that you have been untrue to the eternal fidelity which you swore to me here by this very stream?Oh, but I cannot believe it was thirty years ago, for not a grass-blade or a pebble has been altered; and I perfectly remember the lapping of water under those lichened rocks, and that continuous file of ripples yonder, which are shaped like arrow-heads."
Adelaide rubbed her nose.
"Did I promise eternal fidelity?I can hardly remember that far back.But I remember I wept a great deal, and my parents assured me you were either dead or a rascal, so that tears could not help either way.Then Ralph de Nointel came along, good man, and made me a fair husband, as husbands go—"
"As for that stream," then said Dame Melicent, "it is often I have thought of that stream, sitting here with my grandchildren where I once sat with gay young men whom nobody remembers now save me. Yes, it is strange to think that instantly, and within the speaking of any simple word, no drop of water retains the place it held before the word was spoken; and yet the stream remains unchanged, and stays as it was when I sat here with those young men who are gone. Yes, that is a strange thought, and it is a sad thought, too, for those of us who are old."
"But, Mother, of course the stream remains unchanged," agreed Dame Adelaide."Streams always do except at high water.Everybody knows that, and I see nothing remarkable about it.As for you, Florian, if you stickle for love's being an immortal affair," she added, with a large twinkle, "I would have you know I have been a widow for three years.So the matter could be arranged."
Florian looked at her sadly.To him the situation was incongruous with the terrible archness of a fat woman.
"But, madame, you are no longer the same person."
She patted him upon the shoulder.
"Come, Florian, there is some sense in you, after all.Console yourself, lad, with the reflection that if you had stuck manfully by your wife instead of mooning about graveyards, I would still be just as I am to-day, and you would be tied to me.Your friend probably knew what he was about when he drank to our welfare, for we should never have suited each other, as you can see for yourself.Well, Mother, many things fall out queerly in this world, but with age we learn to accept what happens without flustering too much over it.What are we to do with this resurrected old lover of mine?"
It was horrible to Florian to see how prosaically these women dealt with his unusual misadventure.Here was a miracle occurring virtually before their eyes, and these women accepted it with maddening tranquillity as an affair for which they were not responsible.Florian began to reflect that elderly persons were always more or less unsympathetic and inadequate.
"First of all," said Dame Melicent, "I would give him some breakfast. He must be hungry after all these years. And you could put him in Adhelmar's room—"
"But," Florian said wildly, to Dame Adelaide, "you have committed the crime of bigamy, and you are, after all, my wife!"
She replied, herself not unworried:
"Yes, but, Mother, both the cook and the butler are somewhere in the bushes yonder, up to some nonsense that I prefer to know nothing about.You know how servants are, particularly on holidays.I could scramble him some eggs, though, with a rasher.And Adhelmar's room it had better be, I suppose, though I had meant to have it turned out.But as for bigamy and being your wife," she concluded more cheerfully, "it seems to me the least said the soonest mended.It is to nobody's interest to rake up those foolish bygones, so far as I can see."
"Adelaide, you profane equally love, which is divine, and marriage, which is a holy sacrament."
"Florian, do you really love Adelaide de Nointel?"asked this terrible woman."And now that I am free to listen to your proposals, do you wish to marry me?"
"Well, no," said Florian; "for, as I have just said, you are no longer the same person."
"Why, then, you see for yourself.So do you quit talking nonsense about immortality and sacraments."
"But, still," cried Florian, "love is immortal.Yes, I repeat to you, precisely as I told Tiburce, love is immortal."
Then said Dame Melicent, nodding her shriveled old head:
"When I was young, and served by nimbler senses and desires, and housed in brightly colored flesh, there were many men who loved me. Minstrels yet tell of the men that loved me, and of how many tall men were slain because of their love for me, and of how in the end it was Perion who won me. For the noblest and the most faithful of all my lovers was Perion of the Forest, and through tempestuous years he sought me with a love that conquered time and chance; and so he won me. Thereafter he made me a fair husband, as husbands go. But I might not stay the girl he had loved, nor might he remain the lad that Melicent had dreamed of, with dreams be-drugging the long years in which Demetrios held Melicent a prisoner, and youth went away from her.No, Perion and I could not do that, any more than might two drops of water there retain their place in the stream's flowing.So Perion and I grew old together, friendly enough; and our senses and desires began to serve us more drowsily, so that we did not greatly mind the falling away of youth, nor greatly mind to note what shriveled hands now moved before us, performing common tasks; and we were content enough.But of the high passion that had wedded us there was no trace, and of little senseless human bickerings there were a great many.For one thing"—and the old lady's voice was changed—"for one thing, he was foolishly particular about what he would eat and what he would not eat, and that upset my house-keeping, and I had never any patience with such nonsense."
"Well, none the less," said Florian, "it is not quite nice of you to acknowledge it."
Then said Dame Adelaide:
"That is a true word, Mother.All men get finicky about their food, and think they are the only persons to be considered, and there is no end to it if once you begin to humor them.So there has to be a stand made.Well, and indeed my poor Ralph, too, was all for kissing and pretty talk at first, and I accepted it willingly enough.You know how girls are.They like to be made much of, and it is perfectly natural.But that leads to children.And when the children began to come, I had not much time to bother with him; and Ralph had his farming and his warfaring to keep him busy.A man with a growing family cannot afford to neglect his affairs.And certainly, being no fool, he began to notice that girls here and there had brighter eyes and trimmer waists than I.I do not know what such observations may have led to when he was away from me; I never inquired into it, because in such matters all men are fools.But I put up with no nonsense at home, and he made me a fair husband, as husbands go.That much I will say for him gladly; and if any widow says more than that, Florian, do you beware of her, for she is an untruthful woman."
"Be that as it may," replied Florian, "it is not quite becoming to speak thus of your dead husband.No doubt you speak the truth; there is no telling what sort of person you may have married in what still seems to me unseemly haste to provide me with a successor; but even so, a little charitable prevarication would be far more edifying."
He spoke with such earnestness that there fell a silence.The women seemed to pity him.And in the silence Florian heard from afar young persons returning from the woods behind Storisende, and bringing with them the May-pole.They were still singing.
Sang they:
"Unwillingly foreknowing
That love with May-time flees,
We take this day's bestowing,
And feed on fantasies—"
IV.YOUTH SOLVES IT
The tale tells how lightly and sweetly, and compassionately, too, then spoke young Sylvie de Nointel:
"Ah, but, assuredly, Messire Florian, you do not argue with my pets quite seriously.Old people always have some such queer notions.Of course love all depends upon what sort of person you are.Now, as I see it, mama and grandmama are not the sort of persons who have real love-affairs.Devoted as I am to both of them, I cannot but perceive they are lacking in real depth of sentiment.They simply do not understand such matters.They are fine, straightforward, practical persons, poor dears, and always have been, of course, for in things like that one does not change, as I have often noticed.And father, and grandfather, too, as I remember him, was kind-hearted and admirable and all that, but nobody could ever have expected him to be a satisfactory lover.Why, he was bald as an egg, the poor pet!"
And Sylvie laughed again at the preposterous notions of old people.She flashed an especial smile at Florian.Her hand went out as though to touch him, in an unforgotten gesture."Old people do not understand," said Sylvie de Nointel in tones which took this handsome young fellow ineffably into confidence.
"Mademoiselle," said Florian, with a sigh that was part relief and all approval, "it is you who speak the truth, and your elders have fallen victims to the cynicism of a crassly material age.Love is immortal when it is really love and one is the right sort of person.There is the love—known to how few, alas!and a passion of which I regret to find your mother incapable—that endures unchanged until the end of life."
"I am so glad you think so, Messire Florian," she answered demurely.
"And do you not think so, mademoiselle?"
"How should I know," she asked him, "as yet?"He noted she had incredibly long lashes.
"Thrice happy is he that convinces you!"says Florian.And about them, who were young in the world's recaptured youth, spring triumphed with an ageless rural pageant, and birds cried to their mates.He noted the red brevity of her lips and their probable softness.
Meanwhile the elder women regarded each other.
"It is the season of May.They are young and they are together.Poor children!"said Dame Melicent."Youth cries to youth for the toys of youth, and saying, 'Lo!I cry with the voice of a great god!'"
"Still," said Madame Adelaide, "Puysange is a good fief."
But Florian heeded neither of them as he stood there by the sunlit stream, in which no drop of water retained its place for a moment, and which yet did not alter in appearance at all.He did not heed his elders for the excellent reason that Sylvie de Nointel was about to speak, and he preferred to listen to her.For this girl, he knew, was lovelier than any other person had ever been since Eve first raised just such admiring, innocent, and venturesome eyes to inspect what must have seemed to her the quaintest of all animals, called man.So it was with a shrug that Florian remembered how he had earlier fancied other women for one reason or another; since this, he knew, was the great love of his life, and a love which would endure unchanged as long as his life lasted.
THE WRISTS ON THE DOOR[10]
By Horace Fish
From Everybody's Magazine
Between his leather easy-chair at one end of his drawing-room and the wall with his wife's portrait at the other, Henry Montagu was pacing in a state of agitation such as he had never experienced in his fifty years of life.The drawing-room was no longer "theirs."It was his—and the portrait's.The painting was of a girl who was not more beautiful in radiance of feature and lovable contour of body than the woman a generation older who had died two months ago.
Suddenly he stopped short in the middle of the room, his hands in his pockets."My God!"he cried.
Then he shut his teeth on the words as sharply and passionately as he had uttered them, and raised one of his hands to his brow.There were drops of cold sweat upon it.
Mr. Montagu was a simple, selfish, good-natured business-man, never given to imaginative thoughts or to greater extremes of mood than the heights and depths of rising and falling stocks.Yet his experience of the last two hours had shown him to himself as a creature wretchedly inadequate to face the problem that confronted him—the simple problem of widowerhood.
He was not bitter at his wife's death. Not only did he consider himself too sensible for that, but he was too sensible. Death is an inevitable thing. And the one fact involving the simplicity of the problem was no more than many another man had borne without a thought—his childlessness.
Yet as if the whole two months in their strangeness their sad novelty, had been concentrating their loneliness for an accumulated spring at him, the last two hours had driven home to him that this secondary fact had not been inevitable, that what he was suffering to-night could have been avoided.
He had not wished to have children, and neither had the beautiful woman whose painted spirit smiled down so pitilessly now on his tragedy of jangled nerves and intolerable solitude.Deliberately and quite frankly, without even hiding behind the cowardly excuse of the tacit, they had outspokenly chosen not to.
After his desperate exclamation, he had laughed and thrown himself into his chair.He had forced the laugh, seeking to batter down with it a thrill that was akin to fright at an abrupt realization that in those two dreadful hours he had done three unprecedented things.He had spoken aloud there by himself, an action he had always ascribed exclusively to children and maniacs; he had harbored absurd temptations; and finally he had ejaculated "My God!"which he had thought appropriate to a man only in the distresses of fiction or after complete ruin on the Stock Exchange.
That exclamation had sprung from him when he had caught himself thinking how gladly he would give half his fortune if he could have a companion, even his butler, for the rest of the evening, his whole fortune, exactly as if he had died, if he could but have a son to give it to.
That freedom from care, which they had chosen to call freedom from responsibility, had been their mutual property, but to-night, in his hopeless solitude, it seemed that he was paying the whole price for it.She had met the unknown, but with the known—himself, her whole life—beside her, and her ordeal was over.His, he felt now, was worse, and already beginning.After all, he reflected, there was a certain rough justice in it; the one spared longer in the world of bodily people bore, in consequence, the reverting brunt of their double selfishness.But the remnant of life seemed a poor thing to-night.The further it stretched, in his suddenly stirred imagination, the poorer, the emptier, it seemed.
And having stirred, after a whole lifetime of healthy sleep, his imagination gripped him in a strong and merciless embrace.It seemed to twist him about and force him to look down the vista of the coming years and at all their possibilities, even the desecrational one of marrying again and calling into life the son that he had never wanted before.At the thought, he flushed with the idea that the portrait's eyes were reading his face, and compelled himself to look bravely at it; but as he met the lovely eyes strange questions darted into his brain: whether he would not rather have been solely to blame; whether his all-possessive love of her would not be more flawless now if she had been a flawless eternal-feminine type, longing for motherhood, but denying it for his sake; whether he would not be happier now in looking at her portrait if some warm tint from a Renaissance Madonna had mellowed the radiant Medici Venus who smiled from the frame.He was seized by a desire to turn the gazing picture to the wall.
Half-way across the room, he checked the impulse with a gasp of self-disgust, but with hands raised involuntarily toward it he cried:
"Oh, why didn't we?"
As he stood trembling with his back to it, the second absurd temptation of the night assailed him—to dash on his hat and go to Maurice's, a restaurant of oblique reputation to which his wife had once accompanied him out of curiosity, and which, in a surprising outburst of almost pious prudery, she had refused to visit again.Nor had she ever allowed him to go thereafter himself, and though she had made no dying request of him, he knew that, if she had, that would have been it.
In his shaken state the thought of his one club, the Business Men's, was repugnant.Maurice's, expansive, insinuating and brilliant, called to his loneliness arbitrarily, persistently.But with a glance over his shoulder at the portrait, he put the thought away.Then, straightening up, he walked to his chair again, sat tensely down, and faced the long room and his childish terror at its emptiness.
Innocent as had been his impulse toward Maurice's and full as was Broadway with places as glittering and noisy, his morbid duty to debar that one resort seemed to him to condemn him to the house for the night. Why was it the butler's night out? Even to know that he was below stairs—Would other nights be like this? Every night—The possibility turned him cold. His thoughts were racing now, and even as he gripped the arms of the chair a still worse terror gripped his mind. His loneliness seemed to have become an actual thing, real as a person, a spirit haunting the luxurious, silent house. He was facing the door, and its heavy mahogany, fixing his attention through his staring gaze, seemed to be shutting him alone with the dead. Save for his trembling self and his wife's painted eyes, the big room was lifeless. It was beyond the closed door that his imagination, now running beyond control, pictured the presence of his frightful guest—his own solitude, coming in ironical answer to his craving for companionship.
Were those live eyes of the dead creating his sense of an impending life in the house?Was it his wife, who, never having created a child for him, was forcing on him now a horrible companion?Again he started desperately toward the picture, again he caught himself, again he cried, "My God!"and faced his terror passionately, facing too, this time, the closed door.
"You fool!You fool!"
His voice sounded weak and strange to him as if indeed some one else had spoken.The paralyzing thought that such a mood of panic could be the beginning of real madness had shaken his voice and his whole body, and again Maurice's, now as a positive savior, rushed into his mind.But he threw the idea of refuge contemptuously away.He would stand his ground and not leave the house that night; yet even as he stood, he asked himself if this was not because he feared to open the door.
With a gasp, he drew himself up in the center of the room, and in a surge of determined anger, with his eyes on the door, facing it as he would have faced an enemy before he attacked, he deliberately gave his mind to his fear, letting it sweep through him, trying to magnify it, reading every horror that he could into the imagined presence that he intended to dispel, and then, tormenting himself with slow steps, he walked to the door, reached his hand to the knob, and opened it.
Though his mouth opened for a cry of terror, no sound came from him as he staggered back, and a waiting figure pitched into the room, rushed wildly past him with a whimper like that of a wounded animal, and flung itself, face forward, into the empty chair.
As if through the same doorway that had given entrance to the desperate wretch, his terror seemed to leave him.While he stood gasping, with pounding heart, staring at the limp, shuddering manhood that had hurled itself into his home, Henry Montagu suddenly felt himself a man again.
With the cold plunge of his senses into rationality, they told him that he was in the presence of some fatal and soul-sickening tragedy, yet this horror that had dashed into the hollow privacy of his house was at least real to him.Overwhelmed as he was by the frightful appearance of the young man, who was now weeping abandonedly, he had no fear of him, and his first act was a practical one—he swiftly, quietly closed the door.It was done in an instinct of protection.It would be useless to question him yet, but that he was a fugitive, and from something hideous, Montagu took for granted.
He stood looking across the room at his outlandish guest, trying to docket the kaleidoscopic flock of impressions that had flown into his mind from the instant he swung back the door.Though noble, even splendid in its slender lines, the youth's figure had half-fallen, half-sprung through the doorway, animal-like.There had not been even a ghost of sound in the hallway, yet it was as if he had been in the act of hurtling himself against the closed door, hammering at it with upraised hands.Mr. Montagu had been horrified by it instantaneously, as by a thing of violence with every suggestion of the sordid, but the poor sobbing fellow who now lay in the chair with his arms and head drooping over the big leather arm seemed to him as immaculately dressed as himself.Remembering the fleeting posture at the door, his eyes went involuntarily to the hanging, graphic hands. In the light of his reading-lamp they gleamed white, and as he watched, his heart sinking with pity at their thinness, two slow red drops rolled from under the cuffs down the palms, and fell to the floor.
"Good God!"breathed Henry Montagu.
He had never doubted for the fraction of a second that his guest was a criminal, and in every sense a desperate one, but, just as instinctively, he felt certain that no matter what the horror he had run from, he was more sinned against than sinning.Every line in the boy's fragile, pathetic figure went straight to the older man's heart.It came to him, almost joyously, that there had been premonition in his strange mood of longing for a son.As an end to this nerve-racking night, there was work to do—for the remainder of it, at least for a brief moment, he had a companion in his grim, empty house.
"Thank God!"he exclaimed aloud.
"Thank God!Thank God!"
The young man had spoken, and Mr. Montagu, as he heard the words, remembered that between the sobs there had been, in faint, broken syllables, "My God!My God!"again and again, and that he had understood at last what it was to hear that from a man who was neither ruined by the Stock Exchange nor the weak victim of childish terror.But now, this repetition of his varied expression startled him.It was like an echo of himself.
Again he shook himself together.If the boy could speak, it was time to question him.He had not yet seen his face, beyond a flashing imprint on his brain of a look of terrific fear and terrific exultation as it had dashed past him, but he was prepared to like it.He braced himself, walked over and stood in front of the chair.With an object—even this object—to justify it, he gladly surrendered himself now to the fatherly instinct he had so bitterly struggled against, and he felt that he would like, with his first words, to put his hand reassuringly on the crumpled shoulder.But the night had left his nerves still raw—in his sensitivity he could not bear the thought that the trembling figure would shrink from his touch, and he kept his hand firmly at his side.
"My boy," he said gently, "you mustn't be afraid of me.Tell me what you've done."
The young man raised his head, sank back in the chair, and looked at him.
Not once in the long evening of lonely terror, not when he had first heard himself talking aloud, not when he had dashed at his wife's portrait, not when he had faced the thought of madness, had Mr. Montagu had such a shock.An eternally lost soul, a damned thing staring at paradise, seemed to gaze at him out of the boy's eyes.He thought he was seeing all the sins of the world in them, yet the look was appallingly innocent.He seemed to be discovering those sins in the dark, ravening eyes, but to be feeling them in himself as if the forgotten, ignored innermost of his own life were quaking with guilt under the spell of this staring presence.In the state of horrified sympathy to which it had precipitated him, he morbidly felt almost responsible for the brooding evil in the boy as well as aghast at it.But even this sense of sin, implying as it did a skeleton of naked, primal right and wrong seemed of small import to his astounded mind beside the nameless, unmentionable sorrow that pervaded the face and stabbed at Henry Montagu's heart.He knew without question that he was looking at tragedy—worse than he had supposed the world could hold or any human thing, in any world, be subject to.It was a man's face in every line and poise and suggestion, but for all its frightful knowledge he had to call it beautiful—the clear-cut word "handsome" ran away from it like a mouse into a hole, leaving it a superb horror that, as soon as his paralyzed muscles could respond to his instinct, drove his hand to his face to shut away the deliberate, searching gaze.
"Done?" answered the young fellow at last. "What have I done? Good God!"
For the third time, it was one of his own three exclamations totally new to him that night, and the coincidence drove home to him, this time, with a sense of omen.But his guest was speaking again, and, forcing himself to look calmly at the tragic face he listened breathlessly.
"I've done a thing never accomplished in human life before, a thing more terrific than the world's entire history, from the moment of the first atom crawling on it has ever known!"
He could not have spoken more solemnly and convincingly if he had reverently murdered, one by one, a whole nation of people, and it was some such picture that came into Henry Montagu's mind as, shivering and fascinated, he watched him and listened.
But the young man said no more.
"If—if you will tell me what you've done," said Mr. Montagu haltingly, his pity sweeping every caution away, "or simply what you want of me, I will do anything for you that I possibly can."
"There is nothing in this world," answered the boy wearily, "that anybody can do for me."But suddenly, impulsively, he added: "There is just one thing, that you can do—not for me, but for yourself.Don't ask me questions.For your own sake don't!"
"But—" began Mr. Montagu.
"If you knew who I am or what I am, and what I've deliberately done," cried the boy, "you'd curse this night, and curse me, the longest day you lived! What—what is your name?"
"Henry Montagu," said his host simply.
He pondered it."That has a nice sound.I like it.And I—I like you.So don't ask me questions!"
The elder man was looking down at the thin white hands again, and the naïve comment brought a sudden contraction to his throat. "Poor little boy!" was on his lips, but an intuition like a woman's warned him that the words would make the desolate figure weep again, and his utmost strength quailed from the thought of seeing it, now that he had seen the face. As the white hands clasped themselves together, he had seen that the under sides of the wrists were bruised and dark. Facially, nothing could have been more unlike than this youth to the paint and plaster symbols that crowded before him from his memory, yet the red drops that he had seen drip to the floor, the wickedness and waste that he seemed to expiate and represent, the whole obvious torment of his being, had forced a simile upon him which he now blurted out.
"Whoever and whatever you are, whatever terrible thing you've done, I only know that you make me think of—of—Oh, the crown of thorns, the cross—you know what I mean!"
"Some one with a crown of thorns?"said the young man wonderingly."Who was that?"
Mr. Montagu stared at him incredulously.That any man, no matter how base a criminal, and one, indeed, who had cried out again and again the name of God, should not know the story and the name of God's son, astonished him, for the moment, more than anything yet had done.
"Oh, yes, yes, I remember now," continued the boy."Yes, that was very, very sad.But I'm selfish and preoccupied with my own dreadful trouble, and that whole history, tragic as it was, was a very happy one compared with mine!"
With a cold shudder, Henry Montagu believed him.He realized that as yet he had done nothing for him.Food and drink had occurred to him, but in the minutes that they had passed together the stranger had grown more virile.He was no longer the incredible figure of wretchedness that had dashed into the room.He was sitting forward in the chair now, his eyes on the portrait.
"Is that your wife?"he asked.
"My—my dead wife," answered Mr. Montagu.
His own eyes reverting again and again to the lacerated wrists, he did not see the changing expressions in his visitor's as they studied the eyes of the portrait; but as the boy now leaped impulsively to his feet he saw in them a fierce gleam that was like the hatred of a maniac.He thrilled with renewed terror as the boy once more sprang to him like an animal, and with a growl in his throat rushed toward the portrait.
"Stop!"he shouted, and the boy almost cringed to a halt in the middle of the floor.
When, after his first chill of horror at the act itself, Henry Montagu realized that the desecration was his own thought, his own impulse carried into fierce determination, he sank weak and dizzy into the chair that the boy had left.But again he mastered his frightened mind and thrust away from it the sinister oppression of omen and coincidence. Unwillingly but helplessly, he was letting into his thoughts the theory that, after he had opened the door instead of before he had opened it, the room had been harboring a maniac. And the theory stabbed him. A mushroom growth of tenderness had germinated in his pity and was growing nearer and nearer to a personal liking for the beautiful, pathetic figure of youth that stood before him, wilted and helpless again, in the center of the room.
"My boy," he said quietly, "I ought to resent that but strangely enough I don't find myself resenting the idea of your taking strange liberties in my house.In fact, I—I had that same impulse.I nearly did that myself, just before you burst in here."
The young man looked at him in amazement.
"You were going to turn—Mrs. Montagu's picture to the wall? Wh—why, you old dirty beast!"
To Henry Montagu there was no vulgarity in the words.Their huge reproach of him drove every other quality out of them and a deep color into his face.
"But I—I quelled the impulse.And y—you would actually have done it!"he stammered.
"I had a reason and a right to!" cried the young man. "I'd never seen it before and if it repelled me I had a right never to look at it again! But she was your wife!"
Once more he stood, his eyes avoiding the portrait and wandering hungrily about the rest of the beautiful room.
"Well," he said, after a few moments, "good-by!"And he walked toward the door.
"Stop!"cried Mr. Montagu again.He sat forward on the edge of the chair, trembling.After hours of successive surprises, the simple announcement of his visitor's departure had struck him cold with the accumulated force of his past lonely terror and his present intense curiosity.Again the boy had obeyed his command with a visible shiver, and it hurt the older man by recalling to him the suggestion of crime, of the place and the tragedy he must have escaped from, the unknown cloud he was under.But however involved in the horrible he might become by detaining him, shaken and filled with inexplicable grief as he was by his presence, worst of all was the fear of being alone again after a frightful, brief adventure in his life, vanished and unexplained. He wanted to reassure and comfort the wavering, sorrowful boy, but all he could stammer in apology for his shout was: "Wh—where are you going?"
"What difference does it make to you where I go?" asked the boy drearily. "If you must know, I'm going to Maurice's."
Mr. Montagu sprang to his feet.With bitten lips he kept himself silent at this final thrust of the hypernatural, but the damp beads had returned to his brow.His terror lasted only a moment, and in his resurging desire to hold back the boy, he demanded both curiously and assertively:
"What are you going to Maurice's for?"
He had not supposed that there was a particle of color in the pitiful face, but as the boy answered, a delicate flesh-tint seemed to leave it, turning him deathly white.
"I—I want to look at the women," he said.
At his agitation and pallor, the hectic whisper of his voice, above all, the light of fiendish hate that leapt into his beautiful eyes and ravaged their look, a physical sensation crept through the older man from head to foot and held him motionless.
But it was not horror at the boy himself.As he stood there wan and shivering before him, every best instinct in Henry Montagu rushed uppermost, and he felt that he would give anything in his life, gladly devote, if not actually give, that life itself, to set the boy right with the world.And with his terror gone and his horror going, he impulsively walked across the room and stood between him and the door.
"Why do you leave me this way?You mustn't mind what I say to you or how I say it, for it can't be any more abrupt or strange than the way you came here.I don't want you to go to Maurice's.And if you do, I'm going with you."
"No!No!"cried the boy fearfully.
"I don't want you to leave me.I want you to confide in me.I want you to trust me, and to tell me, without fear, what it is you've done."
"No, no, no, no!Don't ask me to!"cried the boy.
"I do ask you to.I have some right to know.I'd be justified in detaining you if I wanted to—"
"You couldn't!"cried the trembling youth passionately.
"I said I'd be justified. Are you, in dashing like a shot into my life and then leaving me without a word to explain it?I've played host to you gladly, though you've torn my nerves to pieces.Remember how you came here!"
"Yes!Yes!"ejaculated the boy bitterly."I'm an intruder!I forced myself on you and I know it!God knows I know it!"
"I didn't mean it unkindly. I tell you, I want you to stay!I want you to, no matter what you are or what you've done.You've admitted that you've done something—something terrific—"
"And I have!" cried the boy, his eyes lighting wildly. "At last, at last! I've done it, I've done it!"
"And in spite of it, I want you to stay!Whatever it is, I want to protect you from the consequences of it!"
"Look to yourself!" cried the boy. "You'll curse me yet for coming here! Let me go, and protect yourself!"
"I am no longer considering myself, I've done that too much in my life, and to-night I'm reckless. No matter what the crime you've done—"
"Crime?" His visitor flashed wondering eyes upon him. "You fool! You fool!" Again, the exclamation was like an echo of himself, but Mr. Montagu had no time to entertain the thought, for the boy was stammering out his astonishment in hysterical syllables. "I—a criminal! I—I—Oh, I might have known it would seem that way to you! But I—"
Again under the penetrating gaze his host felt himself morbidly guilty, but there was a thrill of gladness in his heart that now welcomed the grim alternative of the boy's simple madness.
"Stay with me!"he cried."Sleep here, and rest, and then—"
"Let me go to Maurice's!"cried the boy desperately."You'll regret it if you don't!Oh, for the pity of God, for pity of yourself, let me leave you while I still offer to leave you!"
Mr. Montagu backed himself against the door.
"Why do you want to go there?"he demanded."What is it you want to look at the women in Maurice's for?"
The boy hung fire under the determined voice.
"The—the women who go to Maurice's are—are—of a—certain kind, aren't they?"
"Some of them—most of them," said Mr. Montagu."If you've never been there, why do you want so to go?They're not unusual; simply—painted women."
"Painted?"repeated the boy in astonishment.He turned to the portrait."That's a painted woman, too. Aren't they alive at Maurice's?"
In his marvel at the enormous innocence of it, Mr. Montagu wondered, for the first time, what the young man's age could definitely be, but in a moment he remembered the one pitiful way to account for the pathetic question, and his voice was very gentle as he said:
"My boy, if you have your heart set on going to Maurice's, you shall go.But surely, after this mysterious time together in my house, and knowing that whatever you may be I welcome your companionship, you won't refuse my request to let me go with you?To say that I've enjoyed it would be to put a queer word to a terrible business that I have no way of understanding.But until you came I was bitterly, hungrily lonely—"
"Don't!Don't!"cried the boy.He had begun to tremble at the earnest tenderness of the voice."I can't bear it!You don't know what you're talking about!Oh!let me go to Maurice's, and let me go alone!If you insist on going with me I can't stop you—"
"I do insist," said Mr. Montagu.
"But I can plead with you not to! And I can warn you what the price will be! Oh—" and he stretched out his hands in so imploring a gesture that his host could see the dull, dried blood of his cruelly injured wrists—"for God's sake, for God's sake, believe what I tell you! If you leave this house with me to-night, you're lost! Oh, God, God, I see you don't believe me! Tell me this, I beg of you, I demand of you—did you feel that I was in the hall to-night, before you opened the door?"
"Yes," said Mr. Montagu.
"Had I made any noise?"
"No."
"Then I can prove to you that I know what I'm saying! I did that! I made you feel me! Till after you let me in, I wasn't strong enough to make a sound! Yet I made you know I was there! Am I telling the truth, then? When I started to leave you, and now, even now, in warning you I was doing, I am doing, a more unselfish thing, a decenter thing, than any you've ever done in all your years of life! It's because I like you more than I want to! I'm unselfish, I tell you! I wanted you to go to Maurice's with me! I intended to make you, as I made you let me in! But if you do, you'll find me out! I'll tell you! I won't be able to conceal it! You'll know the truth about me! You've said all this was mysterious—for your own sake, let it stay so! You needn't think all truths are beautiful, and the truth about me is the most ghastly in the universe!"
"I want to find you out," said Mr. Montagu, steadying his voice. "I want to know the truth."
"By that cross and crown of thorns that mean so much to you and nothing at all to me," implored the boy, "don't go! I swear to you, mine is a more terrible secret than any living heart has ever held! You'll hate me, and I don't want you to! Oh, while I don't, while I'm merciful to you, believe me, and let me go alone! No loneliness that you could ever suffer would equal the price that you will pay if you go with me!"
Though the sense of horror sweeping indomitably through him was worse than any he had felt before, Mr. Montagu's answer was deliberate and resolute:
"I told myself only a few minutes ago that I would sacrifice anything in my life, almost my life itself, to—well, to this.Do you mean that the price would be—my—death?"
He threw every possible significance demandingly into the word, and the boy's voice was suddenly quiet in its tensity as he gazed back at him.
"It would be worse than death," he said solemnly."If you let me go, and face your loneliness here, there's a chance for you, though I've warned you as it is.If you leave the house with me to-night, you're as lost as I am, and I am irretrievably damned and always have been damned.As truly as you see me standing before you now, the price is—madness."
"Come," said Mr. Montagu, and without another word he opened the door.
At Maurice's, Mr. Montagu led the way to the far side of the big room, threading in a zigzag through the gleam of bright silver, the glitter of white linen, the crimson of deep carnations.Maurice's in its own way was admirably tasteful; as distinctively quiet and smooth in its manners and rich hangings as it was distinctly loud in its lights and ragged in its music.No after-theatre corner of Broadway had a crisper American accent of vice, or displayed vice itself more delicately lacquered.The place was as openly innocent as a street, with a street's sightless and irresponsible gaze for what occurred in it.And nothing remarkable occurred, save the fungus growth of what was to occur elsewhere.
Mr. Montagu, on the way to the table, looked several times over his shoulder, ostensibly to speak to his companion, but in reality to see whether the extraordinary boy was running the gantlet of eyes he had presupposed he would.And each time he met inquisitive faces that were not only staring but listening.
His own conspicuousness was grilling, but it was part and parcel of his insistent bargain; he could understand, quite sympathetically, how the youth's appearance, as awful as it was immaculate, should pound open the heart of any woman alive; and his suppressed excitement was too powerful for him to resent even the obvious repugnance in the faces of the men until he imagined an intentional discourtesy to the boy on the part of the waiter.
To himself, the man was over-servile, and elaborately cautious in pulling out his chair, but he stood, with his face quite white, and his back to the boy, and pulled out none for him.Henry Montagu had never yet bullied a waiter, and he did not bully now.But with an icy glare of reproof at the man, he rose and set the chair for his guest himself.
"Shall I order for you?"he asked gently as the boy sat quietly down; and made irritably incisive by the tendency of near-by men and women to listen as well as watch, he emphasized his expensive order of foods and wines, repeated each item loudly to cheapen the listeners, and sent the man scuttling.
In his intense desire to see the effect of the queerly chosen place on his queerly chosen companion, he now turned to him.And as he saw the effect, every shock of the night seemed to recoil upon him.The feeling of mystery; the foreboding, despite his courage and his conviction that the boy was mad, of the imminent unknown; his recurrent and absorbing curiosity to learn the gruesome secret that he had declared; all rushed one by one back upon him, and then as swiftly left him to the simple grip of horror at his face.It was gazing at woman after woman, here, there and yonder, throughout the large room, deliberately, searchingly, venomously, its great eyes and set lips and every tense haggard line fuller and fuller of an undying hate that eclipsed even that which had shaken Henry Montagu before they came.Appalled and fascinated, he looked with him, and back at him, and with him again, to the next and the next.There were women there, and ladies of every sort, good, bad and indecipherable; yet in every instance the childlike, horribly sophisticated eyes had picked their victim unerringly, deterred by neither clothes, veneer, nor manner.
As he stared with him from frightened female face to frightened female face, Mr. Montagu realized shamefully that his own features were helplessly mirroring the detestation of the boy's, and he changed from very pale to very red himself as woman after woman flushed crimson under his gaze.Yet the boy's face grew calm and his voice was perfectly so as he turned at last from his horrid review and met the eyes of his host.
"I see what you meant, now, by 'painted' women. Well, they'd much better be dead!"
At the tone, cruelly cool as if he planned to see that they were, Mr. Montagu shivered. "Why, why do you hate them like that?" he whispered.
The fierce anger flickered dangerously in the great eyes again.
"Because they're my enemy!Because they and the wicked thing they mean are my prowling, triumphant enemy, and the enemy of all others like me!"
"Oh, my boy, my boy!" pleaded the man of the world, sickly. "You don't realize it, but I can tell you from appearances—some of those women you stared at are here with their husbands!"
"So was your wife when she came here," said the boy.
Mr. Montagu fell back in his chair with a gasp.As swiftly as it had leapt into his mind, the frightful implication of the words leapt out again in his amazement at the boy's knowledge of the incident.
But the waiter stepped between them with the order, and in obvious terror now instead of simple aversion, clattered it down with trembling hands.
"Go away!Go away!"commanded Mr. Montagu angrily."I'll arrange it! Go!" And the waiter escaped.
"How did you know?"he asked; but without waiting for a reply he poured out the boy's wine and his own, and took a long hasty draft.
"Now, how did you?"
"Oh!"cried the boy piteously."Don't ask me!I shouldn't have said it!I knew I'd let it out if you came here with me!I'll be telling you everything in a minute, and you'll go stark mad when you know!"
The inference rushed again upon Henry Montagu, a worse vague horror than any yet, and he almost sprang from his chair.
"Are you going to tell me my wife was unfaithful to me, and with—with—"
"Fool! Fool!" cried the boy. "I wish to God she had been unfaithful to you! I tried to make her, I can tell you that! Then there'd have been at least half a chance for me! But now that she's dead, there's no chance for either of us, even you! Unless—O God! —unless you'll control yourself and think! I beg you again, I beg of you, think again! Go away from here, go now, without asking me anything more, and there's just a shade of a chance for you! I told you there was none if you left the house, but there may be, there may be! Go home, and forget this, and be satisfied your wife loved you, for she did. She kept herself for you at my expense! Go now, and they'll let you go. But if you stay here and talk to me, you'll leave this place in manacles! I'm here, among those women, and I'm with you! My secret will come out and drag you down, as I planned it should before I began to like you! And you like me, too—I feel it. For my sake, then, for God's sake and for your sake, won't you go?"
"No!"cried Mr. Montagu, almost roughly in his eagerness."I don't judge you, but it's your duty, and in your power, to put me where I can!I harbored you, thinking you were a frightened fugitive, and you weren't.I'm your voluntary host in circumstances of mysterious horror and you ask me to quit you in ignorance!I won't!You sicken me with a doubt about the wife I loved—Who are you?What are you?"
"If you believed I knew as much of her as I said I did," cried the boy, "why don't you believe me when I assure you that she loved you? What more should you demand? I meant everything I said, and more—your wife was nothing but a licensed wanton, and you knew it! You ask me who and what I am—so long as she loved you, who are you, and what are you, to point a finger at her?"
A rush of instinctive fury filled the man, but he felt as dazed at finding himself angry at the beautiful unhappy youth, as if he had known him for years, and he only gasped and stared.
"If you think I'm crazy," cried the boy, "I'll show you, as I showed you once before, that I know what I'm talking about! I'll tell you something that was a secret between you two, and your wife didn't tell me, either! The night you'd been here, after you'd gone home, after you were locked in your room, you disputed about this place!She refused to come here again, and she refused to tell you why!But I know why!"
Once more Mr. Montagu gasped and with a thrill of wondering terror.
"Who are you and what are you?"he demanded."I command you to solve this mystery and solve it now!"
His voice had risen to a shout, but a sudden lump in his throat silenced it, for the boy was weeping again.
"Oh," wept the boy, "if you've liked me at all, put it off as long as you can, for you'll make me tell you I hate you, and why I hate you!"
"Hate me?"
It had struck Henry Montagu like a flail in the face, wiping away his anger, his astonishment at the boy's uncanny knowledge, even his astonishment that the word was able to strike him so.
"I—I've suffered enough through you!"he stammered painfully."And if I've got to suffer more, I insist on doing it now and getting it over with!"
"Don't! don't! It will never be over with!" gulped the boy.
"I'm through!"cried Mr. Montagu."Who are you? What are you?"
At the determined finality of the voice the boy quivered like a helpless thing, and his stuttering ejaculations came as if shaken out of him by the shivering of his body.
"Wh—who am I?"
"Yes!"
"Wh—what am I?"
"Yes!"
Never yet had he been so awful as in the torment and majesty that gazed like fate at Henry Montagu now, and the frightful fire of the eyes seemed to dry up the tears on his cheeks at its first flare of accusing righteousness.
"I'm the child that you and your wife refused to have!"
As the aghast man shrank back before his blighting fury, he leaned farther and farther toward him.
"Now do you know why I hate you as no human thing can hate? Your wilful waste has made my hideous want! Now do you know why I said I'd done a more terrific thing than had ever been done in the world's history before? I've gotten in! At last, at last, I've gotten in, in spite of you, and after she was dead! I've done a greater and more impossible thing than that great Mystery the world adores! I've gotten in despite you, and without even a woman's help! When we spoke of that life once before to-night, I shocked you! Do you believe now that my history is more terrible, or not? He suffered, and suffered, and He died. But He'd lived! His torture was a few hours—for mine to-night, I've waited almost as many years as He did, and to what end? To nothing! God, God, do you see that?"
He twisted open his hands and held out his bruised wrists before the trembling man's eyes."For all those years—"
He suddenly drew himself to his full height and threw them passionately above his head in the posture that had haunted Henry Montagu from the first instant's glimpse of him.
"For all those endless years, ever since your marriage-night, I've stood beating, beating, beating at the door of life until my wrists have bled! And you didn't hear me! You couldn't and she wouldn't! You didn't want to! You wouldn't listen! And you—you never have heard that desperate pounding and calling, not even to-night, though even so, with that woman out of the way, I made you feel me! But she'd heard me, the ghoul! She heard me again and again! I made her! I told her what she was, and that you knew it, and I meant it! Her marriage certificate was her license! She gave you a wanton's love, and you gave her just what you got! And I made her understand that! I made her understand it right here in this place! That's why I wanted to come here—I could see only her picture, and I wanted to see a real one of them! Until to-night, I could never see either of you, but I always knew where you were!
"And when you brought her here, I made her look at that enemy of me and my kind that I could always feel—those women that she was one of and that she knew she was one of when I screamed it at her in this place! For I was with you two that night!I was with you till after you'd gone home, you demons! That's why she'd never come near the place again, the coward, the miserable coward! That's why I hate her worse than I hate you! There's a pitiful little excuse for the men, because they're stupider
"For the hideous doom of all our hopeless millions, the women are more wickedly to blame, because they must face the fact that we are waiting to get in. God, God, I'd gladly be even a woman, if I could! But you're bad enough—bad enough—bad enough to deserve the fate you face to-night! And now, God help you, you're facing it, just as I said you would! You deserve it because you were put here with a purpose and you flatly wouldn't fulfil it! God only demands that mankind should be made in His image. In a wisdom that you have no right to question. He lets the images go their own way, as you've gone yours. Yet you, and all others like you, the simple, humble image-workers, instead of rejoicing that you have work to do, set your little selves up far greater than Great God, and actually decide whether men shall even be!
"You have a lot of hypercritical, self-justifying theories about it—that it's better for them not to live at all than to suffer some of the things that life, even birth itself, can wither them with. But there never yet was any living creature, no matter how smeared and smitten, that told the truth when he said he wished he'd never been born, while we, the countless millions of the lost, pound and shriek for life—forever shriek and hope! That's the worst anguish of the lost—they hope! I've shown what can be done through that anguish, as it's never been shown before. Even the terrible night that woman died, I hoped! I hoped more than ever, for knowing then that for all eternity it was too late, I hoped for revenge! And revenge was my right! Yes, every solitary soul has a right to live, even if it lives to wreck, kill, madden its parents!And now, oh, God, I've got my revenge when I no longer want it!The way you took me in, the way you wanted me to stay when I'd almost frightened you to death, made me want to spare you!It was my fate that I—I liked you—I—more than liked you. And I tried to save you! Oh, God, God, how I've tried!"
As he stood with his hands thrown forth again and his wretched eyes staring into those of the white-faced man, Henry Montagu met the wild gaze unflinchingly.He had sat dumbstruck and shuddering, but the spasmodic quivering of his body had lessened into calmness, and his whispered, slow words gained in steadiness as they came: "My boy, I admit you've nearly driven me to madness just now. I was close to the border! I can't dispute one shred of reproach, of accusation, of contempt. Your fearful explanation of this night, the awful import of your visit and yourself have shaken me to the center of my being. But its huge consistency is that of a madman. You poor, you pitiful, deluded boy, you tell me to believe you are an unborn soul, while you stand there and exist before my eyes!"
The boy gave a cry of agony—agony so immortal that as he sank into his chair and clutched the table, an echoing moan of it wrenched from the older man.
"I don't exist! Didn't I tell you my secret was more terrible than any living heart had ever held? I'm real to you since I made you let me into your thoughts to-night. I'm real to you, and through your last moment of consciousness through eternity I always will be! But I won't be with you! You don't believe me yet, but the moment you do, I won't be here! And I never can be real to any other creature in the universe—not even that prostitute who refused to be my mother!I don't exist, and never can exist!"
"But you do! You do! You do! You're there before me now!" gasped Mr. Montagu through chattering teeth. "How can you deny that you're sitting here with me in this restaurant? I forgive you—I love you, and I forgive you, but, thank God, I see through you at last!You're a fanatic, a poor, frenzied maniac on this subject, and you've morbidly spied on and studied me as a typical case of it; through your devilish understanding and divination you've guessed at that conversation between me and my wife, and like the creature I pictured you in my house, a ravening, devouring thing, you've sought to drag me into your hell of madness!But you shan't!I tell you I see through you at last, you pitiful mad creature!You know you're there before my eyes, and just so truly as you are, not one syllable do I believe of what you've told me!"
As the boy sprang with a venomous shout to his feet, all the hate in his terrible being sprang tenfold into his eyes.
"Do you call me 'mad,' and 'creature'? Do you dare deny me, now, after all I've told you? You coward, you coward! You've denied me life, but you can't deny this night! The people in this place will let you know presently! I tried to spare you. Though I'd thirsted for my revenge I pleaded with you, prayed to you to spare yourself! If you'd stayed in the house, you might have come to your senses and forgotten me! But what hope for you is there now? Do you still believe I exist? Look back at the night! Do you remember the portrait? You commanded me to stop—commanded, as you've always commanded my fate, and I was powerless. To me, that was a parental command—from you, you who deliberately wouldn't be my parent! Did you see me wince under it? If you hadn't done it, you'd have found me out right then! I'm not a physical thing, and I couldn't have moved it! I only said I was going to Maurice's! I couldn't have come here if you hadn't brought me! When you wondered, as we were starting out, whether I had a hat, I stooped down in the hall. But you only thought I picked one up! As we came in here, you only thought I checked it! Did you see the man stare as you reached out to take my check away from me? Have I eaten or drunk to-night? I've not, for I'm not a creature! And mad, I? Look to yourself, as I told you to look before it was too late! You fool, you've been staring inoffensive women out of countenance, with all the hate from my face printed on yours, and in the eyes of all these people you've been sitting here for half an hour talking to yourself, and ordering wine and food for an empty chair! You won't ever believe you're mad, but every one else will!"
"So help me God," cried Henry Montagu, white and trembling, "you're there!I swear you're there!"
"So help you God, I'm there!"cried the boy frightfully, pointing straight at him.
"Right there, in your brain, there, there, and only there! I'm no more flesh and blood than—than I ever was, because, you murderer, you and your damned wife never would let me be! Well, do you see through me now?"
"No! No!" screamed Mr. Montagu. "I don't see through you! I don't!" But as he leaned forward to clutch at him in his terror, all that he could see before him was a closed door beyond a dozen tables, a disused entranceway diagonally opposite the one that had let them in. "I don't believe you!" he wailed. "Oh, my God, my God, my God, where are you?" He turned frantically to the men and women nearest him. "You saw him! There was a boy with me, wasn't there? Wasn't there? Yes, see, there, isn't he going for that door? Oh, my boy, my boy!" And he dashed toward it. He heard the terrible screams of women, and chairs and a table crashed in his wake. He reached it. It was locked.
Desperately sobbing, he hurled himself against it.
It seemed to him as if all the men in the restaurant fell upon him.Strong, merciless hands dragged down and pinioned the wrists with which he had beaten against the door.
"GOVERNMENT GOAT"[11]
By SUSAN GLASPELL
From The Pictorial Review
Joe Doane couldn't get to sleep.On one side of him a family were crying because their man was dead, and on the other side a man was celebrating because he was alive.
When he couldn't any longer stand the wails of the Cadaras, Joe moved from his bedroom to the lounge in the sitting-room. But the lounge in the sitting-room, beside making his neck go in a way no neck wants to go, brought him too close to Ignace Silva's rejoicings in not having been in one of the dories that turned over when the schooner Lillie-Bennie was caught in the squall last Tuesday afternoon and unable to gather all her men back from the dories before the sea gathered them. Joe Cadara was in a boat that hadn't made it—hence the wails to the left of the Doanes, for Joe Cadara left a wife and four children and they had plenty of friends who could cry, too. But Ignace Silva—more's the pity, for at two o'clock in the morning you like to wish the person who is keeping you awake was dead—got back to the vessel. So to-night his friends were there with bottles, for when a man might be dead certainly the least you can do is to take notice of him by getting him drunk.
People weren't sleeping in Cape's End that night. Those who were neither mourning nor rejoicing were being kept awake by mourners or rejoicers. All the vile, diluted whisky that could be bought on the quiet was in use for the deadening or the heightening of emotion. Joe Doane found himself wishing he had a drink. He'd like to stop thinking about dead fishermen—and hearing live ones. Everybody had been all strung up for two days ever since word came from Boston that the Lillie-Bennie was one of the boats "caught."
They didn't know until the Lillie-Bennie came in that afternoon just how many of her men she was bringing back with her. They were all out on Long Wharf to watch her come in and to see who would come ashore—and who wouldn't. Women were there, and lots of children. Some of these sets of a woman and children went away with a man, holding on to him and laughing, or perhaps looking foolish to think they had ever supposed he could be dead. Others went away as they had come—maybe very still, maybe crying. There were old men who came away carrying things that had belonged to sons who weren't coming ashore. It was all a good deal like a movie—only it didn't rest you.
So he needed sleep, he petulantly told things as he rubbed the back of his neck, wondered why lounges were made like that, and turned over. But instead of sleeping, he thought about Joe Cadara. They were friendly thoughts he had about Joe Cadara; much more friendly than the thoughts he was having about Ignace Silva. For one thing, Joe wasn't making any noise. Even when he was alive, Joe had made little noise. He always had his job on a vessel; he'd come up the Front street in his oilskins, turn in at his little red house, come out after a while and hoe in his garden or patch his wood-shed, sit out on the wharf and listen to what Ignace Silva and other loud-mouthed Portuguese had to say—back to his little red house. He—well, he was a good deal like the sea. It came in, it went out. On Joe Cadara's last trip in, Joe Doane met him just as he was starting out. "Well, Joe," says Joe Doane, "off again?" "Off again," said Joe Cadara, and that was about all there seemed to be to it. He could see him going down the street—short, stocky, slow, dumbBy dumb he meant—oh, dumb like the sea was dumb—just going on doing it.And now—
All of a sudden he couldn't stand Ignace Silva. "Hell!" roared Joe Doane from the window, "don't you know a man's dead?"In an instant the only thing you could hear was the sea.In—Out-
Then he went back to his bedroom."I'm not sleeping either," said his wife—the way people are quick to make it plain they're as bad off as the next one.
At first it seemed to be still at the Cadaras.The children had gone to sleep—so had the friends.Only one sound now where there had been many before.And that seemed to come out of the sea.You got it after a wave broke—as it was dying out.In that little let-up between an in, an out, you knew that Mrs. Cadara had not gone to sleep, you knew that Mrs. Cadara was crying because Joe Cadara was dead in the sea.
So Joe Doane and his wife Mary lay there and listened to Annie Cadara crying for her husband, Joe Cadara.
Finally Mrs. Doane raised on her pillow and sighed."Well, I suppose she wonders what she'll do now—those four children."
He could see Joe Cadara's back going down the Front street—broad, slow, dumb"And I suppose," he said, as if speaking for something that had perhaps never spoken for itself, "that she feels bad because she'll never see him again."
"Why, of course she does," said his wife impatiently, as if he had contradicted something she had said.
But after usurping his thought she went right back to her own."I don't see how she will get along.I suppose we'll have to help them some."
Joe Doane lay there still.He couldn't help anybody much—more was the pity.He had his own three children—and you could be a Doane without having money to help with—though some people didn't get that through their heads.Things used to be different with the Doanes.When the tide's in and you awake at three in the morning it all gets a good deal like the sea—at least with Joe Doane it did now.His grandfather, Ebenezer Doane, the whaling captain—In—Out—Silas Doane—a fleet of vessels off the Grand Banks—In—Out—All the Doanes.They had helped make the Cape, but—In—Out—Suddenly Joe laughed.
"What are you laughing at?" demanded his wife.
"I was just laughing," said Joe, "to think what those old Doanes would say if they could see us."
"Well, it's not anything to laugh at," said Mrs. Doane.
"Why, I think it is," good-humoredly insisted her husband, "it's such a joke on them."
"If it's a joke," said Mrs. Doane firmly, "it's not on them."
He wasn't sure just who the joke was on. He lay thinking about it. At three in the morning, when you can't sleep and the tide's in, you might get it mixed—who the joke was on.
But, no, the joke was on them, that they'd had their long slow deep In—Out—their whaling and their fleets, and that what came after was him—a tinkerer with other men's boats, a ship's carpenter who'd even work on houses"Get Joe Doane to do it for you."And glad enough was Joe Doane to do it.And a Portagee livin' to either side of him!
He laughed. "You've got a funny idea of what's a joke," his wife said indignantly.
That seemed to be so. Things he saw as jokes weren't jokes to anybody else. Maybe that was why he sometimes seemed to be all by himself. He was beginning to get lost in an In—Out. Faintly he could hear Mrs. Cadara crying—Joe Cadara was in the sea, and faintly he heard his wife saying, "I suppose Agnes Cadara could wear Myrtie's shoes, only—the way things are, seems Myrtie's got to wear out her own shoes."
Next day when he came home at noon—he was at work then helping Ed.Davis put a new coat on Still's store—he found his two boys—the boys were younger than Myrtie—pressed against the picket fence that separated Doanes from Cadaras.
"What those kids up to?"he asked his wife, while he washed up for dinner.
"Oh, they just want to see," she answered, speaking into the oven.
"See what?"he demanded; but this Mrs. Doane regarded as either too obvious or too difficult to answer, so he went to the door and called, "Joe!Edgar!"
"What you kids rubberin' at?"he demanded.
Young Joe dug with his toe."The Cadaras have got a lot of company," said he.
"They're crying!"triumphantly announced the younger and more truthful Edgar.
"Well, suppose they are?They got a right to cry in their own house, ain't they?Let the Cadaras be.Find some fun at home."
The boys didn't seem to think this funny, nor did Mrs. Doane, but the father was chuckling to himself as they sat down to their baked flounder.
But to let the Cadaras be and find some fun at home became harder and harder to do. The Lillie-Bennie had lost her men in early Summer and the town was as full of Summer folk as the harbor was of whiting. There had never been a great deal for Summer folk to do in Cape's End, and so the Disaster was no disaster to the Summer's entertainment. In other words, Summer folk called upon the Cadaras. The young Doanes spent much of their time against the picket fence; sometimes young Cadaras would come out and graciously enlighten them. "A woman she brought my mother a black dress." Or, "A lady and two little boys came in automobile and brought me kiddie-car and white pants." One day Joe Doane came home from work and found his youngest child crying because Tony Cadara wouldn't lend him the kiddie-car. This was a reversal of things; heretofore Cadaras had cried for the belongings of the Doanes. Joe laughed about it, and told Edgar to cheer up, and maybe he'd have a kiddie-car himself some day—and meanwhile he had a pa.
Agnes Cadara and Myrtie Doane were about of an age. They were in the same class in high school. One day when Joe Doane was pulling in his dory after being out doing some repairs on the Lillie-Bennie he saw a beautiful young lady standing on the Cadaras' bulkhead. Her back was to him, but you were sure she was beautiful. She had the look of some one from away, but not like the usual run of Summer folk. Myrtie was standing looking over at this distinguished person.
"Who's that?"Joe asked of her.
"Why," said Myrtie, in an awed whisper, "it's Agnes Cadara—in her mourning."
Until she turned around, he wouldn't believe it. "Well," said he to Myrtie, "it's a pity more women haven't got something to mourn about."
"Yes," breathed Myrtie, "isn't she wonderful?"
Agnes's mourning had been given her by young Mrs. MacCrea who lived up on the hill and was herself just finishing mourning.It seemed Mrs. MacCrea and Agnes were built a good deal alike—though you never would have suspected it before Agnes began to mourn.Mrs. MacCrea was from New York, and these clothes had been made by a woman Mrs. MacCrea called by her first name.Well, maybe she was a woman you'd call by her first name, but she certainly did have a way of making you look as if you weren't native to the place you were born in.Before Agnes Cadara had anything to mourn about she was simply "one of those good-looking Portuguese girls."There were too many of them in Cape's End to get excited about any of them.One day he heard some women on the beach talking about how these clothes had "found" Agnes—as if she had been lost.
Mrs. MacCrea showed Agnes how to do her hair in a way that went with her clothes. One noon when Joe got home early because it rained and he couldn't paint, when he went up-stairs he saw Myrtie trying to do this to her hair. Well, it just couldn't be done to Myrtie's hair. Myrtie didn't have hair you could do what you pleased with. She was all red in the face with trying, and being upset because she couldn't do it. He had to laugh—and that didn't help things a bit. So he said:
"Never mind, Myrtie, we can't all go into mourning."
"Well, I don't care," said Myrtie, sniffling, "it's not fair."
He had to laugh again and as she didn't see what there was to laugh at, he had to try to console again. "Never mind, Myrt," said he, "you've got one thing Agnes Cadara's not got."
"I'd like to know what," said Myrtie, jerking at her hair.
He waited; funny she didn't think of it herself."Why—a father," said he.
"Oh," said Myrtie—the way you do when you don't know what to say. And then, "Well,——"
Again he waited—then laughed; waited again, then turned away.
Somebody gave Mrs. Cadara a fireless cooker.Mrs. Doane had no fireless cooker.So she had to stand all day over her hot stove—and this she spoke of often."My supper's in the fireless cooker," Mrs. Cadara would say, and stay out in the cool yard, weeding her flowerbed bed."It certainly would be nice to have one of those fireless cookers," Mrs. Doane would say, as she put a meal on the table and wiped her brow with her apron.
"Well, why don't you kill your husband?" Joe Doane would retort. "Now, if only you didn't have a husband—you could have a fireless cooker."
Jovially he would put the question, "Which would you rather have, a husband or a fireless cooker?"He would argue it out—and he would sometimes get them all to laughing, only the argument was never a very long one.One day it occurred to him that the debates were short because the others didn't hold up their end.He was talking for the fireless cooker—if it was going to be a real debate, they ought to speak up for the husband.But there seemed to be so much less to be said for a husband than there was for a fireless cooker.This struck him as really quite funny, but it seemed it was a joke he had to enjoy by himself.Sometimes when he came home pretty tired—for you could get as tired at odd jobs as at jobs that weren't odd—and heard all about what the Cadaras were that night to eat out of their fireless cooker, he would wish that some one else would do the joking.It was kind of tiresome doing it all by yourself—and kind of lonesome.
One morning he woke up feeling particularly rested and lively. He was going out to work on the Lillie-Bennie, and he always felt in better spirits when he was working on a boat.
It was a cool, fresh, sunny morning.He began a song—he had a way of making up songs.It was, "I'd rather be alive than dead."He didn't think of any more lines, so while he was getting into his clothes he kept singing this one, to a tune which became more and more stirring.He went over to the window by the looking-glass.From this window you looked over to the Cadaras. And then he saw that from the Cadaras a new arrival looked at him.
He stared.Then loud and long he laughed.He threw up the window and called, "Hello, there!"
The new arrival made no reply, unless a slight droop of the head could be called a reply.
"Well, you cap the climax!"called Joe Doane.
Young Doanes had discovered the addition to the Cadara family and came running out of the house.
"Pa!" Edgar called up to him, "the Cadaras have got a Goat!"
"Well, do you know," said his father, "I kind of suspected that was a goat."
Young Cadaras came out of the house to let young Doanes know just what their privileges were to be with the goat—and what they weren't.They could walk around and look at her; they were not to lead her by her rope.
"There's no hope now," said Joe, darkly shaking his head. "No man in his senses would buck up against a goat."
The little Doanes wouldn't come in and eat their breakfast.They'd rather stay out and walk round the goat.
"I think it's too bad," their mother sighed, "the kiddie-car and the ball-suit and the sail-boat were enough for the children to bear—without this goat. It seems our children haven't got any of the things the Cadaras have got."
"Except—" said Joe, and waited for some one to fill it in.But no one did, so he filled it in with a laugh—a rather short laugh.
"Look out they don't put you in the fireless cooker!"he called to the goat as he went off to work.
But he wasn't joking when he came home at noon.He turned in at the front gate and the goat blocked his passage.The Cadaras had been willing to let the goat call upon the Doanes and graze while calling."Get out of my way!"called Joe Doane in a surly way not like Joe Doane.
"Pa!" said young Joe in an awed whisper, "it's a government goat."
"What do I care if it is?"retorted his father."Damn the government goat!"
Every one fell back, as when blasphemy—as when treason—have been uttered. These Portuguese kids looking at him like that—as if they were part of the government and he outside. He was so mad that he bawled at Tony Cadara, "To hell with your government goat!"
From her side of the fence, Mrs. Cadara called, "Tony, you bring the goat right home," as one who calls her child—and her goat—away from evil.
"And keep her there!"finished Joe Doane.
The Doanes ate their meal in stricken silence. Finally Doane burst out, "What's the matter with you all? Such a fuss about the orderin' off of a goat."
"It's a government goat," lisped Edgar.
"It's a government goat," repeated his wife in a tense voice.
"What do you mean—government goat?There's no such animal."
But it seemed there was, the Cadaras had, not only the goat, but a book about the goat.The book was from the government.The government had raised the goat and had singled the Cadaras out as a family upon whom a government goat should be conferred.The Cadaras held her in trust for the government.Meanwhile they drank her milk.
"Tony Cadara said, if I'd dig clams for him this afternoon he'd let me help milk her to-night," said young Joe.
This was too much. "Ain't you kids got no spine? Kowtowing to them Portuguese because a few folks that's sorry for them have made them presents. They're ginniesYou're Doanes."
"I want a goat!"wailed Edgar.His father got up from the table.
"The children are all right," said his wife, in her patient voice that made you impatient."It's natural for them to want a few of the things they see other children having."
He'd get away!As he went through the shed he saw his line and picked it up.He'd go out on the breakwater—maybe he'd get some fish, at least have some peace.
The breakwater wasn't very far down the beach from his house. He used to go out there every once in a while. Every once in a while he had a feeling he had to get by himself. It was half a mile long and of big rocks that had big gaps. You had to do some climbing—you could imagine you were in the mountains—and that made you feel far off and different. Only when the tide came in, the sea filled the gaps—then you had to "watch your step."
He went way out and turned his back on the town and fished. He wasn't to finish the work on the Lillie-Bennie. They said that morning they thought they'd have to send down the Cape for an "expert." So he would probably go to work at the new cold storage—working with a lot of Portagee laborers. He wondered why things were this way with him. They seemed to have just happened so. When you should have had some money it didn't come natural to do the things of people who have no money. The money went out of the "Bank" fishing about three years before his father sold his vessels. During those last three years Captain Silas Doane had spent all the money he had to keep things going, refusing to believe that the way of handling fish had changed and that the fishing between Cape's End and the Grand Banks would no longer be what it had been. When he sold he kept one vessel, and the next Winter she went ashore right across there on the northeast arm of the Cape. Joe Doane was aboard her that night. Myrtie was a baby then. It was of little Myrtie he thought when it seemed the vessel would pound herself to pieces before they could get off. He couldn't be lost! He had to live and work so his little girl could have everything she wanted—After that the Doanes were without a vessel—and Doanes without a vessel were fish out of sea. They had never been folks to work on another man's boat. He supposed he had never started any big new thing because it had always seemed he was just filling in between trips. A good many years had slipped by and he was still just putting in time. And it began to look as if there wasn't going to be another trip.
Suddenly he had to laugh. Some joke on Joe Cadara! He could see him going down the Front street—broad, slow, dumb. Why, Joe Cadara thought his family needed him. He thought they got along because he made those trips. But had Joe Cadara ever been able to give his wife a fireless cooker? Had the government presented a goat to the Cadaras when Joe was there? Joe Doane sat out on the breakwater and laughed at the joke on Joe Cadara. When Agnes Cadara was a little girl she would run to meet her father when he came in from a trip. Joe Doane used to like to see the dash she made. But Agnes was just tickled to death with her mourning!
He sat there a long time—sat there until he didn't know whether it was a joke or not.But he got two haddock and more whiting than he wanted to carry home.So he felt better.A man sometimes needed to get off by himself.
As he was turning in at home he saw Ignace Silva about to start out on a trip with Captain Gorspie. Silva thought he had to go. But Silva had been saved—and had his wife a fireless cooker? Suddenly Joe Doane called.
"Hey!Silva!You're the government goat!"
The way Doane laughed made Silva know this was a joke; not having a joke of his own he just turned this one around and sent it back."Government goat yourself!"
"Shouldn't wonder," returned Joe jovially.
He had every Doane laughing at supper that night."Bear up!Bear up!True, you've got a father instead of a goat—but we've all got our cross!We all have our cross to bear!"
"Say!" said he after supper, "every woman, every kid, puts on a hat, and up we go to see if Ed. Smith might happen to have a soda."
As they were starting out, he peered over at the Cadaras in mock surprise. "Why, what's the matter with that goat?That goat don't seem to be takin' the Cadaras out for a soda."
Next day he started to make a kiddie-car for Edgar.He promised Joe he'd make him a sail-boat.But it was up-hill work.The Cape's End Summer folk gave a "Streets of Bagdad" and the "disaster families" got the proceeds.Then when the Summer folk began to go away it was quite natural to give what they didn't want to take with them to a family that had had a disaster. The Doanes had had no disaster; anyway, the Doanes weren't the kind of people you'd think of giving things to. True, Mr. Doane would sometimes come and put on your screen-doors for you, but it was as if a neighbor had come in to lend a hand. A man who lives beside the sea and works on the land is not a picturesque figure. Then, in addition to being alive, Joe Doane wasn't Portuguese. So the Cadaras got the underwear and the bats and preserves that weren't to be taken back to town. No one father—certainly not a father without a steady job—could hope to compete with all that wouldn't go into trunks.
Anyway, he couldn't possibly make a goat. No wit or no kindness which emanated from him could do for his boys what that goat did for the Cadaras. Joe Doane came to throw an awful hate on the government goat. Portagees were only Portagees—yet they had the government goat. Why, there had been Doanes on that Cape for more than a hundred years. There had been times when everybody round there worked for the Doanes, but now the closest his boys could come to the government was beddin' down the Cadaras' government goat! Twenty-five years ago Cadaras had huddled in a hut on the God-forsaken Azores! If they knew there was a United States government, all they knew was that there was one. And now it was these Cadara kids were putting on airs to him about the government. He knew there was a joke behind all this, behind his getting so wrought up about it, but he would sit and watch that goat eat leaves in the vacant lot across from the Cadaras until the goat wasn't just a goat. It was the turn things had taken. One day as he was sitting watching Tony Cadara milking his goat—wistful boys standing by—Ignace Silva, just in from a trip, called out, "Government goat yourself!" and laughed at he knew not what.
By God! —'t was true! A Doane without a vessel. A native who had let himself be crowded out by ignorant upstarts from a filthy dot in the sea! A man who hadn't got his bearings in the turn things had taken. Of a family who had built up a place for other folks to grow fat in. Sure he was the government goat. By just being alive he kept his family from all the fancy things they might have if he was dead. Could you be more of a goat than that?
Agnes Cadara and Myrtie came up the street together. He had a feeling that Myrtie was set up because she was walking along with Agnes Cadara. Time had been when Agnes Cadara had hung around in order to go with Myrtie! Suddenly he thought of how his wife had said maybe Agnes Cadara could wear Myrtie's shoes. He looked at Agnes Cadara's feet—at Myrtie's. Why, Myrtie looked like a kid from an orphan asylum walking along with the daughter of the big man of the town!
He got up and started toward town.He wouldn't stand it!He'd show 'em!He'd buy Myrtie—— Why, he'd buy Myrtie——!He put his hand in his pocket.Change from a dollar.The rest of the week's pay had gone to Lou Hibbard for groceries.Well, he could hang it up at Wilkinson's.He'd buy Myrtie——!
He came to a millinery store.There was a lot of black ribbon strewn around in the window.He stood and looked at it.Then he laughed.Just the thing!
"Cheer up, Myrt," said he, when he got back home and presented it to her. "You can mourn a little. For that matter, you've got a little to mourn about."
Myrtie took it doubtfully—then wound it round her throat. She liked it, and this made her father laugh. He laughed a long time—it was as if he didn't want to be left without the sound of his laughing.
"There's nothing so silly as to laugh when there's nothing to laugh at," his wife said finally.
"Oh, I don't know about that," said Joe Doane.
"And while it's very nice to make the children presents, in our circumstances it would be better to give them useful presents."
"But what's so useful as mourning?" demanded Doane. "Think of all Myrtie has got to mourn about. Poor, poor Myrtie—she's got a father!"
You can say a thing until you think it's so. You can say a thing until you make other people think it's so. He joked about standing between them and a fireless cooker until he could see them thinking about it. All the time he hated his old job at the cold storage. A Doane had no business to be ashore freezing fish. It was the business of a Doane to go out to sea and come home with a full vessel.
One day he broke through that old notion that Doanes didn't work on other men's boats and half in a joke proposed to Captain Cook that he fire a ginnie or two and give him a berth on the Elizabeth. And Bill Cook was rattled. Finally he laughed and said, "Why, Joe, you ought to be on your own vessel"—which was a way of saying he didn't want him on his. Why didn't he? Did they think because he hadn't made a trip for so long that he wasn't good for one? Did they think a Doane couldn't take orders? Well, there weren't many boats he would go on. Most of them in the harbor now were owned by Portuguese. He guessed it wouldn't come natural to him to take orders from a Portagee—not at sea. He was taking orders from one now at the cold storage—but as the cold storage wasn't where he belonged it didn't make so much difference who he took orders from.
At the close of that day Bill Cook told him he ought to be on his own vessel, Joe Doane sat at the top of those steps which led from his house down to the sea and his thoughts were like the sails coming round the Point—slowly, in a procession, and from a long way off.His father's boats used to come round that Point this same way.He was lonesome to-night.He felt half like an old man and half like a little boy.
Mrs. Cadara was standing over on the platform to the front of her house. She too was looking at the sails to the far side of the breakwater—sails coming home. He wondered if she was thinking about Joe Cadara—wishing he was on one of those boats. Did she ever think about Joe Cadara? Did she ever wish he would come home? He'd like to ask her. He'd like to know. When you went away and didn't come back home, was all they thought about how they'd get along? And if they were getting along all right, was it true they'd just as soon be without you?
He got up. He had a sudden crazy feeling he wanted to fight for Joe Cadara. He wanted to go over there and say to that fireless cooker woman, "Trip after trip he made, in the cold and in the storm. He kept you warm and safe here at home. It was for you he went; it was to you he came back. And you'll miss him yet. Think this is going to keep up? Think you're going to interest those rich folks as much next year as you did this? Five years from now you'll be on your knees with a brush to keep those kids warm and fed."
He'd like to get the truth out of her! Somehow things wouldn't seem so rotten if he could know that she sometimes lay in her bed at night and cried for Joe Cadara.
It was quiet to-night; all the Cadara children and all the Doanes were out looking for the government goat.The government goat was increasing her range.She seemed to know that, being a government goat, she was protected from harm.If a government goat comes in your yard, you are a little slow to fire a tin can at her—not knowing just how treasonous this may be.Nobody in Cape's End knew the exact status of a government goat, and each one hesitated to ask for the very good reason that the person asked might know and you would then be exposed as one who knew less than some one else.So the government goat went about where she pleased, and to-night she had pleased to go far.It left the neighborhood quiet—the government goat having many guardians.
Joe Doane felt like saying something to Mrs. Cadara.Not the rough, wild thing he had wanted to say a moment before, but just say something to her.He and she were the only people around—children all away and his wife up-stairs with a headache.He felt lonesome and he thought she looked that way—standing there against the sea in light that was getting dim.She and Joe Cadara used to sit out on that bulkhead.She moved toward him, as if she were lonesome and wanted to speak.On his side of the fence, he moved a little nearer her.She said,
"My, I hope the goat's not lost!"
He said nothing.
"That goat, she's so tame," went on Joe Cadara's wife with pride and affection, "she'll follow anybody around like a dog."
Joe Doane got up and went in the house.
It got so he didn't talk much to anybody.He sometimes had jokes, for he'd laugh, but they were jokes he had all to himself and his laughing would come as a surprise and make others turn and stare at him. It made him seem off by himself, even when they were all sitting round the table. He laughed at things that weren't things to laugh at, as when Myrtie said, "Agnes Cadara had a letter from Mrs. MacCrea and a mourning handkerchief." And after he'd laughed at a thing like that which nobody else saw as a thing to laugh at, he'd sit and stare out at the water. "Do be cheerful," his wife would say.He'd laugh at that.
But one day he burst out and said things.It was a Sunday afternoon and the Cadaras were all going to the cemetery.Every Sunday afternoon they went and took flowers to the stone that said, "Lost at Sea."Agnes would call, "Come, Tony!We dress now for the cemetery," in a way that made the Doane children feel that they had nothing at all to do.They filed out at the gate dressed in the best the Summer folk had left them and it seemed as if there were a fair, or a circus, and all the Doanes had to stay at home.
This afternoon he didn't know they were going until he saw Myrtie at the window.He wondered what she could be looking at as if she wanted it so much.When he saw, he had to laugh.
"Why, Myrt," said he, "you can go to the cemetery if you want to. There are lots of Doanes there. Go on and pay them a visit.
"I'm sure they'd be real glad to see you," he went on, as she stood there doubtfully. "I doubt if anybody has visited them for a long time. You could visit your great-grandfather, Ebenezer Doane. Whales were so afraid of that man that they'd send word around from sea to sea that he was coming. And Lucy Doane is there—Ebenezer's wife. Lucy Doane was a woman who took what she wanted. Maybe the whales were afraid of Ebenezer—but Lucy wasn't. There was a dispute between her and her brother about a quilt of their mother's, and in the dead of night she went into his house and took it off him while he slept. Spunk up! Be like the old Doanes! Go to the cemetery and wander around from grave to grave while the Cadaras are standin' by their one stone! My father—he'd be glad to see you. Why, if he was alive now—if Captain Silas Doane was here, he'd let the Cadaras know whether they could walk on the sidewalk or whether they were to go in the street!"
Myrtie was interested, but after a moment she turned away."You only go for near relatives," she sighed.
He stood staring at the place where she had been. He laughed; stopped the laugh; stood there staring. "You only go for near relatives." Slowly he turned and walked out of the house. The government goat, left home alone, came up to him as if she thought she'd take a walk too.
"Go to hell!"said Joe Doane, and his voice showed that inside he was crying.
Head down, he walked along the beach as far as the breakwater. He started out on it, not thinking of what he was doing. So the only thing he could do for Myrtie was give her a reason for going to the cemetery. She wanted him in the cemetery—so she'd have some place to go on Sunday afternoons! She could wear black then—all black, not just a ribbon round her neck. Suddenly he stood still. Would she have any black to wear? He had thought of a joke before which all other jokes he had ever thought of were small and sick. Suppose he were to take himself out of the way and then they didn't get the things they thought they'd have in place of him? He walked on fast—fast and crafty, picking his way among the smaller stones in between the giant stones in a fast, sure way he never could have picked it had he been thinking of where he went. He went along like a cat who is going to get a mouse. And in him grew this giant joke. Who'd give them the fireless cooker? Would it come into anybody's head to give young Joe Doane a sail-boat just because his father was dead? They'd rather have a goat than a father. But suppose they were to lose the father and get no goat? Myrtie'd be a mourner without any mourning. She'd be ashamed to go to the cemetery.
He laughed so that he found himself down, sitting down on one of the smaller rocks between the giant rocks, on the side away from town, looking out to sea.
He forgot his joke and knew that he wanted to return to the sea.Doanes belonged at sea.Ashore things struck you funny—then, after they'd once got to you, hurt. He thought about how he used to come round this Point when Myrtie was a baby. As he passed this very spot and saw the town lying there in the sun he'd think about her, and how he'd see her now, and how she'd kick and crow. But now Myrtie wanted to go and visit him—in the cemetery. Oh, it was a joke all right. But he guessed he was tired of jokes. Except the one great joke—joke that seemed to slap the whole of life right smack in the face.
The tide was coming in.In—Out—Doanes and Doanes.In—Out—Him too.In—Out—He was getting wet.He'd have to move up higher.But—why move? Perhaps this was as near as he could come to getting back to sea. Caught in the breakwater. That was about it—wasn't it? Rocks were queer things. You could wedge yourself in where you couldn't get yourself out. He hardly had to move. If he'd picked a place he couldn't have picked a better one. Wedge himself in—tide almost in now—too hard to get out—pounded to pieces, like the last vessel Doanes had owned. Near as he could come to getting back to sea. Near as he deserved to come—him freezing fish with ginnies. And there'd be no fireless cooker!
He twisted his shoulders to wedge in where it wouldn't be easy to wedge out.Face turned up, he saw something move on the great flat rock above the jagged rocks.He pulled himself up a little; he rose; he swung up to the big rock above him.On one flat-topped boulder stood Joe Doane.On the other flat-topped boulder stood the government goat.
"Go to hell!" said Joe Doane, and he was sobbing. "Go to hell!"
The government goat nodded her head a little in a way that wagged her beard and shook her bag.
"Go home!Drown yourself!Let me be!Go 'way!"It was fast, and choked, and he was shaking.
The goat would do none of these things. He sat down, his back to the government goat, and tried to forget that she was there. But there are moments when a goat is not easy to forget. He was willing there should be some joke to his death—like caught in the breakwater, but he wasn't going to die before a goatAfter all, he'd amounted to a little more than thatHe'd look around to see if perhaps she had started home.But she was always standing right there looking at him.
Finally he jumped up in a fury. "What'd you come for? What do you want of me? How do you expect to get home?" Between each question he'd wait for an answer. None came.
He picked up a small rock and threw it at the government goat. She jumped, slipped, and would have fallen from the boulder if he hadn't caught at her hind legs. Having saved her, he yelled: "You needn't expect me to save you. Don't expect anything from me!"
He'd have new gusts of fury at her. "What you out here for? Think you was a mountain goat? Don't you know the tide's comin' in? Think you can get back easy as you got out?"
He kicked at her hind legs to make her move on. She stood and looked at the water which covered the in-between rocks on which she had picked her way out. "Course," said Joe Doane. "Tide's in—you fool! You damned goat!"With the strength of a man who is full of fury he picked her up and threw her to the next boulder."Hope you kill yourself!"was his heartening word.
But the government goat did not kill herself.She only looked around for further help.
To get away from her, he had to get her ashore.He guided and lifted, planted fore legs and shoved at hind legs, all the time telling her he hoped she'd kill herself.Once he stood still and looked all around and thought.After that he gave the government goat a shove that sent her in water above her knees.Then he had to get in too and help her to a higher rock.
It was after he had thus saved the government goat from the sea out of which the government goat had cheated him that he looked ahead to see there were watchers on the shore.Cadaras had returned from the cemetery.Cadaras and Doanes were watching him bring home the government goat.
From time to time he'd look up at them.There seemed to be no little agitation among this group.They'd hold on to each other and jump up and down like watchers whose men are being brought in from a wreck. There was one place where again he had to lift the government goat. After this he heard shouts and looked ashore to see his boys dancing up and down like little Indians.
Finally they had made it.The watchers on the shore came running out to meet them.
"Oh, Mr. Doane!" cried Mrs. Cadara, hands out-stretched, "I am thankful to you! You saved my goat! I have no man myself to save my goat. I have no man. I have no man!"
Mrs. Cadara covered her face with her hands, swayed back and forth, and sobbed because her man was dead.
Young Cadaras gathered around her.They seemed of a sudden to know they had no father, and to realize that this was a thing to be deplored.Agnes even wet her mourning handkerchief.
Myrtie came up and took his arm."Oh, Father," said she, "I was so 'fraid you'd hurt yourself!"
He looked down into his little girl's face. He realized that just a little while before he had expected never to look into her face again. He looked at the government goat, standing a little apart, benevolently regarding this humankind. Suddenly Joe Doane began to laugh. He laughed—laughed—and laughed. And it was a laugh.
"When I saw you lift that goat!"said his wife, in the voice of a woman who may not have a fireless cooker, but—!
Young Joe Doane, too long brow-beaten not to hold the moment of his advantage, began dancing round Tony Cadara with the taunting yell, "You ain't got no pa to save your goat!" And Edgar lispingly chimed in, "Ain't got no pa to save your goat!"
"Here!" cried their father, "Stop devilin' them kids about what they can't help. Come! Hats on! Every Doane, every Cadara, goes up to see if Ed. Smith might happen to have a soda."
But young Joe had suffered too long to be quickly silent. "You ain't got no pa to get you soda!" persisted he.
"Joe!" commanded his father, "stop pesterin' them kids or I'll lick you!"
And Joe, drunk with the joy of having what the Cadaras had not, shrieked, "You ain't got no pa to lick you! You ain't got no pa to lick you!"
THE STONE[12]
By HENRY GOODMAN
From The Pictorial Review
"Martha Sloan is goin' the way o' Jim," said Deems Lennon to his wife."See," and he pointed through the open window toward the cemetery."I seen her before Jim's stone, beggin' on her knees an' mumblin' with her hands stretched out.She been that way a number o' times when I come upon her as I was fixin' up the graves."
Mrs. Lennon, a stout, pleasant-faced woman, looked in the direction indicated by her husband.Together they watched Martha Sloan, white-haired, thin, and bent, making her way up the cemetery path.She was nervous and her walk was broken by little, sudden pauses in which she looked about.
"Poor soul," said Mrs. Lennon, "she's afraid.She ain't been herself sence Dorothy died.Losin' the two children right after Jim has broken her up completely."
"She's afraid for herself," said her husband."If you heard her up there by that stone you'd have thought she was speakin' to some one alive, to some one who could do her things."
"Oh well, that's enough to make any one queer," Mrs. Lennon said.Then she stopped, and watched the figure on the hillside.
"Look," said Mrs. Lennon, "look at her.She's down on her knees."
Deems stood by her near the window.
"That's it," he exclaimed."That's exactly what she's been doing now for some time.I heard her speak.I don't know where she got the idea. She thinks Jim's following her—reaching out for her—trying to grasp her. I heard her plead. I don't know what'll come of it."
They were both startled when, as suddenly as Martha Sloan had knelt, she rose from her place before the gravestone and, moving in nervous haste, ran down the pathway.
"Deems, we must go to her," said Mrs. Lennon."Maybe we can do something for her."And as they both hurried into the kitchen and out of the house, Martha Sloan, panting and white-faced with fright, rushed to the house.
"Deems," she gasped."Deems, it's Jim.He's reaching out.He's reaching out to seize me."
"Martha, calm yourself," said Deems, taking Martha Sloan's shaking hand in his."That ain't right.You're sensible.You mustn't think so much of it.You must keep your mind away."
"That's right, Martha," Mrs. Lennon said, as she helped Martha Sloan into the house."You mustn't keep thinking of Jim, and keep going up there all the time.There's many things waiting for you at home, and when you're through there why don't you come over to us?"
But Martha Sloan, either not hearing or not heeding the words of Deems and his wife, sat huddled, nervously whispering, more to herself than to her friends."It's Jim.It's his hand reaching out to me.He took Dorothy.He took Joseph, and he's reaching out now to me.He can't stand having me living."
She was nervous and in the power of a fear that was stronger than her will.She sat uneasily looking about her as if knowing that she was safe in the house of friends, but as if feeling herself momentarily in the presence of something strange and frightful.She cast frightened looks about her, at the room, at Mrs. Lennon, and at Deems. She looked at them in silence as if she did not know how to speak to them until, prompted by great uneasiness, she spoke in a loud whisper, "Take me home.Take me home, Deems. I want to get away."
Deems slipped into his coat, said to his wife, "I'll be back soon," then, helping Martha from the chair, walked out with her.
"Come now, Martha, you know us well enough.We're your friends, aren't we?And we tell you there's nothing to fear.It's all your believing.There's nothing after you.There's nothing you need fear."
"You don't know.It was he took my two children.He took Dorothy.When they laid her out in the parlor, I could just see him standing at her head.He was cruel when he lived.He beat them; Dorothy and Joseph, they hated him.And when they laid out Joseph after his fall, when the bridge gave way, Jim was standing by his head, and his eyes were laughing at me like he'd say, 'I took him, but now there's you.'And he's trying for me now."
Deems was pleased that she was speaking.He hoped that in conversing she would find respite from her thoughts.
"No, Martha," he said, "that wasn't Jim took Dorothy and Joseph.You know there's a God that gives and takes.Their years were run.Can't you see, Martha?"
"It was Jim who took.He couldn't see them living.When he lived he couldn't see them growing up to be themselves.He took them like he took me from you.D' you remember, Deems, how he came and in no time I was his?He owned me completely."
Deems was silent.There was no arguing.Even now there was vividly alive in his mind, and, he knew, in the minds of the other villagers, the recollection of that sense of possession which went with Jim Sloan.He recalled that William Carrol had hanged himself when he could not pay Jim Sloan the debt he owed him.It was true that Jim Sloan had owned his children as if they were pieces of property.The whole village had learned to know this fact soon after these children had grown up.Deems, recalling his feelings for Martha Sloan, remembered now the amazement, the astonishment, with which he had viewed the change that came over Martha immediately after her marriage to Jim Sloan.
She had been light-hearted and joyful as if overflowing with the vitality natural to the country about the village.There had been gladness in her laugh.Immediately after her marriage all this had changed.
Martha had been wont to run lightly about her father's house. Her movements had become suddenly freighted with a seriousness that was not natural to her. Her laughter quieted to a restrained smile which in turn gave way to a uniform seriousness. The whole village noted and remarked the change. "He is older than she," they said, "and is making her see things as he does."
When they reached the house, Martha, without a word, left Deems and hurried in.Deems turned away, looking back and shaking his head, the while he mumbled to himself, "There's no good in this.There's no good for Martha."
He was struck motionless when suddenly he beheld Martha by the window.He had thought her slightly composed when she had left him, for her manner was more quiet than it had been.Now he was startled.Out of the window she leaned, her eyes fastened on the distant gravestone—white, large, and dominating—a shaft that rose upright like a gigantic spear on the crest of the hill.He watched her face and head and saw that her movements were frightened.As she moved her head—it seemed she was following something with her eyes which, look as closely as he could, he failed to make out—there was a jerkiness of movement that showed her alert and startled.
From the musty, dark parlor Martha looked out on the cemetery.There, clear in the evening light, stood the large white stone—a terrible symbol that held her.To her nervous mind, alive with the creations of her fear, it seemed she could read the lines,
JAMES SLOAN
BORN SEPT. 14, 1857
DIED NOV. 12, 1915
and below it, stamped clearly and illumined by her fright,
HIS FAITHFUL WIFE
MARTHA SLOAN
BORN AUG. 9, 1871. DIED——
At the thought of the word "Died," followed by the dash, she recoiled.The dash reaching out to her—reaching to her—swept into her mind all the graspingness of James which had squeezed the sweetness out of life—all the hardness which had marked his possession of her. Was it her mind, prodded by terror, that visualized it? There, seeming to advance from the hill, from the cemetery, from the very gravestone which was beginning to blot and blurr in her vision, she saw a hand—his hand! It was coming—coming to her, to crush what of life was left in her.
Even in her own mind, it was a miracle that she had survived Jim's tenacity.When Jim had died, she began suddenly to recover her former manner of life.She began to win back to herself.It was as if, the siege of Winter having lifted, the breath and warmth of Spring might now again prevail.
Then had come the horrors of uncontrollable dreams followed by the death by fire of Dorothy.That had shaken her completely.
She recalled their rescuing Dorothy, how they had dragged her out of the fire, her clothes all burned off.They had sought to nurse her back to health, and in the week before her daughter died she had learned something of what had happened the night of the fire.In her sleep Dorothy had heard herself called and she thought it was her father's voice.She had arisen when she seemed to see beside her her father as he had looked in life.
She had followed him to the barn and suddenly he had told her that he had come back to take her with him as he had promised to before his death.In her struggle to escape him she had flung the lantern.In the parlor they had laid out Dorothy—a blackened, burnt frame.
All her care and love and solicitude she concentrated on Joseph. She thought that perhaps by an intenser, all embracing love for Joseph she would be enabled to defeat the spell that she felt hanging over her life. Then, when it seemed that life would begin anew to take on a definite meaning—Joseph, grown up, was giving purpose to it—she remembered that some one had knocked timidly on the door and had announced in a frightened voice: "Mrs. Sloan! There's been a terrible accident, the bridge fell——?"She remembered that she had screamed, "My Joseph!My boy!"and then had found herself in the parlor, the body laid out on the couch.
She remembered suddenly that the parlor had seemed to contain the presence of Jim.She had looked up to see dimly what seemed the figure and face of her dead husband.In the eyes that seemed to be laughing she read the threat, "I took him, but now there's you."
As these recollections flooded and flowed through her mind, a frightened nervousness seized upon Martha, standing by the window.Somehow she was being held by a fear to move.Something seemed to have robbed her of the strength and resolution to turn from the window.
There came to her the impression that there was some one in the room with her.The feeling grew subtly upon her and added to her fear of turning around.So she kept her eyes looking out of the window up at where the shaft of the gravestone stood.But, more clearly now than before, she sensed something that seemed to reach out from the gravestone and carry to her, and at the same time there grew the feeling that the presence in the room was approaching her.
She was held in fright.All her nervous impulses impelled her to flight.Like a whip that was descending over her head, came the mirage from the gravestone until, in a mad, wild attempt to evade it, she flung about in the room as if to dash across and away from the window.Suddenly she was halted in her passage by the presence of Jim.The dim parlor was somehow filled with a sense of his being there, and in the dusk near the mantelpiece and at the head of the couch, there stood in shadowy outline her husband, come back.
"Jim!"she uttered, in a frightened gasp, and threw her hands outward to protect herself from his purpose.But she saw clearly the shadowy face and eyes that said unmistakably, "I have come for you."
She was terror-bound.There was no advance, for moving forward meant coming closer to that presence, meant walking into his very grasp.
She was about to speak, to plead for herself, to beg, "Jim, leave me."
In her terror and dread of his approach, she turned hastily to the window and leaped down. Wildly she scrambled up, bruised and shaken, and screaming hoarsely, while in unthinking terror she moved her hands, as if beating off unwelcome hands, she ran pantingly up the road which led to Deems's house.
The silence and the air of happy quietness that filled the house of her friends seemed to lay a spell upon Martha.Caring for her as if she were of the household, Deems and his wife were gratified by the change that apparently was coming over their charge.
In their room, after Martha had bid them good night, Deems questioned his wife.
"And how is Martha behavin', now?"
"You couldn't tell she's the same woman.Remember how she was when we found her at the door that night—all mumbling and frightened so she couldn't talk?Well, now she's calm and happy like.What she needed was being with some one."
The quietness of her surroundings had had its effect on Martha.They showed in the calm self-possession with which she walked about, persisting in her efforts to help Mrs. Lennon in her household work.The atmosphere of bustling activity—Deems's coming and going from the village, from the cemetery, whither he went with his trowel and spade to keep in repairs the many graves and plots on the hillside—all this seemed to have drawn on some reservoir of unsuspected vitality and composure within Martha.
These were the visible effects.In fact, however, there had grown in Martha's mind a plan—a desire to cut herself forever free of Jim's sinister possession—and this plan she fed from a reservoir of nervous power that was fear and terror converted into cunning and despair.She went about the house not as if relieved of fear of Jim, but cautiously, as if somewhere in back of her mind was a way out, a way out, to win which required care and watchfulness.
In this spirit she observed Deems's movements about the house until she learned where he left his lantern and the box where he put away his trowel and mallet and chisel. Now that the plan was clear in her own mind, there was nothing to do but carry it out.She would cut the dreadful tie that held her to Jim—the tie, the potency of which gave to the dead man the power of holding her so completely.Reckoning thus, she became wary of her companions as if fearing that they might in some way interfere with her plans if they got wind of them.She knew that her every move was watched, for she found that Mrs. Lennon had constituted herself her guardian.Since her coming to the house, she had never left its shelter, finding at first that companionship and reassurance which gave her courage and resolution against Jim and the power to survive the terror of thought of him, and finding finally that, with the formation of her plan, she would have to conceal it from Deems and his wife.She came to this conclusion in this wise.
One day, in the kitchen she came upon a newly sharpened cleaver, its edge invisibly thin and its broad, flat side gleaming in the sun.Mrs. Lennon was by the window and from without came the sounds of Deems chopping wood.
Her mind was filled with a sudden clearness of thought and, swinging the cleaver in the air, she said to Mrs. Lennon:
"You know—here's how I can break away from Jim.When he reaches out—reaches out for me, I can just cut off his hand."
Mrs. Lennon stood motionless, startled by the unexpected words.She had thought Martha's mind free of all fears of Jim.She was brought up sharply by this sudden speech and gesture."Deems," she called, "Deems, come here."
Deems had taken the cleaver hastily from Martha's hands, and that night told his wife that Martha would have to be watched closely.He feared that Martha was becoming deranged.
Martha had discovered that she was watched when one night she left her room.She heard the door open and instantly she felt the hands of Mrs. Lennon on her arm and heard a gentle, persuasive voice asking her to return to bed.
It was the next day, in the dusk of a turn in the hallway, that Martha once more felt the presence of Jim. If her life in the peaceful household of her friends had brought an outward calm, a mantle of repose and quiet, this was instantly torn up by the vision that formed before her eyes in the half dim hallway. Instantly she was the old Martha, held in the grasp of terror. Her face was drawn in tense, white lines, her lips were deformed, and with trembling gaunt hands she thrust back the apparition. Her screams, "Jim, let me be, let me be," brought Mrs. Lennon running and called Deems from his work in the wood-shed.
They found her in a faint on the floor.They carried her to her room and put her to bed, Mrs. Lennon speaking to her, soothing and trying to bring her back to her former calm.
There followed a few days of rain which seemed in some way to make Martha less uneasy and restless.Deems and his wife, seeing her silent and apparently resting, felt that slowly the terror she had been suffering was being washed out.Martha's attitude encouraged this feeling.She rested in silence, attentive to the dropping of the rain and learning once more to wear her old-time composure.
When Deems returned toward nightfall one day, it was with the news that the incessant rains had done serious damage in the cemetery.Dripping from the drenching he had received in his tour of inspection, his boots muddy, and his hands dirty from holding to the precarious bushes, he shook with cold as he reported on what he had found.In his narrative he had quite forgotten the presence of Martha who sat by, silent and waxen-faced.
"And you ought to see," he said, turning to his wife, "how the rain has run down those graves.You know, it's loosened Jim Sloan's stone so, I'm afraid it'll fall against the first heavy blow."
Martha's exclamation "Oh!"recalled to him her presence.He stopped talking for a while, then hoping to blot out the effects of his statement he began a lively story of the number of trees that had fallen across the road, and how he had been told that over at Rampaco the post-office had been struck by lightning.
He did not know it, but Martha was deaf to his reports. She had her own thoughts. She felt herself curiously strong of will, and there raced in her blood the high determination to act that very night. Not for nothing had she spent the rain drenched days in terrified silence in her room. All of her energies that were still capable of being mustered to her resolve, she had converted in the crucible of her will, and huddled in terror, she had forged the determination to go out when the time came and to cut herself free of the fiendish power that was searing her mind and slowly crushing her. She remembered that in her faint, when she lay limp and inert, a thing of dread, she had felt herself crumple up at the touch of Jim—Jim reaching out to her. Now she would cut herself free of him at the very source of his power over her. She would go that very night.
She cast a glance toward the closet where Deems kept his trowel and chisel.She would have need of them, she knew.She said "Good night" rather more loudly and vehemently than she had intended, for she was feeling nervous.
She was awakened by a feeling of cold.As she sat up she saw that the door was open.What was it drew her eyes through the hallway and out into the open and brought her up suddenly?There came upon her an eeriness that startled and chilled her, and suddenly, as if it were coming at her through the open door, fingers out-thrust, there appeared the hand.
She was out of bed on the instant.Somehow in her throat she repressed the upstartled cry, "Jim," by an effort that strained all her nerves and made her face bloodless white.She could not, however, repress completely the instinctive movement of her hands to ward off the menacing hand.Suddenly a panic seized her and in terrified haste she moved to the closet and, feeling a moment, took what she knew was Deems's chisel.
Do what she could, she could not stem the flow of panic, and suddenly as she began to pant and breathe heavily with the strain of terror, she began also to gasp her pleadings to Jim.
"Don't, Jim.Don't take me," and, as if not at all of her own volition, but at that of a guiding power, she moved out of the house, ghastly in the night, mumbling and shivering.
She was still atremble—she was now chilled by the dampness of ground and air—when she stood by Jim Sloan's gravestone.White it gleamed against the sky, and now Martha's trembling and murmuring turned into a furious industry as she raised the chisel to the stone.
"Jim—you'll let me be, won't you?You'll let me be?I want 'a live yet."She began a frenzied hacking at the gravestone, seeing nothing but the play of her chisel, and the white, fearful stone towering over her, hearing nothing but the rasp of the chisel—not even hearing the rattle of the loosened gravel as it slid from under the stone.
Deems Lennon and his wife were awakened by a heavy crash."What can it be?"he asked his wife, and then left the bed and ran up to Martha's room.She was gone.Instantly they were both fully awake.
"It's Jim's grave she's gone to," ventured Deems. "Remember the way she said 'Oh!'that time I told how the rain loosened the stone?Come on, we'll go see."
In the dark when they were near the spot where the stone used to stand, they heard a moaning.They approached and found Martha caught under the stone, her body crushed, her dying breath coming slowly and heavily, carrying her words, "Let me go!Jim, let me go!"