Part 5

In the five minutes a man came in, and George explained that the cook was sick.

“Why the hell don’t you get another cook?” the man asked. “Aren’t you running a lunch counter?” He went out.

“Come on, Al,” Max said.

“What about the two bright boys and the nigger?”

“They’re all right.”

“You think so?”

“Sure. We’re through with it.”

“I don’t like it,” said Al. “It’s sloppy. You talk too much.”

“Oh, what the hell,” said Max. “We got to keep amused, haven’t we?”

“You talk too much, all the same,” Al said. He came out from the kitchen. The cut-off barrels of the shotgun made a slight bulge under the waist of his too tight-fitting overcoat. He straightened his coat with his gloved hands.

“So long, bright boy,” he said to George. “You got a lot of luck.”

“That’s the truth,” Max said. “You ought to play the races, bright boy.”

The two of them went out the door. George watched them through the window pass under the arc light and cross the street. In their tight overcoats and derby hats they looked like a vaudeville team. George went back through the swinging door into the kitchen and untied Nick and the cook.

“I don’t want any more of that,” said Sam, the cook. “I don’t want any more of that.”

Nick stood up. He had never had a towel in his mouth before.

“Say,” he said. “What the hell?” He was trying to swagger it off.

“They were going to kill Ole Andreson,” George said. “They were going to shoot him when he came in to eat.”

“Ole Andreson?”

“Sure.”

The cook felt the corners of his mouth with his thumbs.

“They all gone?” he asked.

“Yeah,” said George. “They’re gone now.”

“I don’t like it,” said the cook. “I don’t like any of it at all.”

“Listen,” George said to Nick. “You better go see Ole Andreson.”

“All right.”

“You better not have anything to do with it at all,” Sam, the cook, said. “You better stay way out of it.”

“Don’t go if you don’t want to,” George said.

“Mixing up in this ain’t going to get you anywhere,” the cook said. “You stay out of it.”

“I’ll go see him,” Nick said to George. “Where does he live?”

The cook turned away.

“Little boys always know what they want to do,” he said.

“He lives up at Hirsch’s rooming house,” George said to Nick.

“I’ll go up there.”

Outside the arc light shone through the bare branches of a tree. Nick walked up the street beside the car tracks and turned at the next arc light down a side street. Three houses up the street was Hirsch’s rooming house. Nick walked up the two steps and pushed the bell. A woman came to the door.

“Is Ole Andreson here?”

“Do you want to see him?”

“Yes, if he’s in.”

Nick followed the woman up a flight of stairs and back to the end of a corridor. She knocked on the door.

“Who is it?”

“It’s somebody to see you, Mr. Andreson,” the woman said.

“It’s Nick Adams.”

“Come in.”

Nick opened the door and went into the room. Ole Andreson was lying on the bed with all his clothes on. He had been a heavy-weight prizefighter and he was too long for the bed. He lay with his head on two pillows. He did not look at Nick.

“What was it?” he asked.

“I was up at Henry’s,” Nick said, “and two fellows came in and tied up me and the cook, and they said they were going to kill you.”

It sounded silly when he said it. Ole Andreson said nothing.

“They put us out in the kitchen,” Nick went on. “They were going to shoot you when you came in to supper.”

Ole Andreson looked at the wall and did not say anything.

“George thought I better come and tell you about it.”

“There isn’t anything I can do about it,” Ole Andreson said.

“I’ll tell you what they were like.”

“I don’t want to know what they were like,” Old Andreson said. He looked at the wall. “Thanks for coming to tell me about it.”

“That’s all right.”

Nick looked at the big man lying on the bed.

“Don’t you want me to go and see the police?”

“No,” Ole Andreson said. “That wouldn’t do any good.”

“Isn’t there something I could do?”

“No. There ain’t anything to do.”

“Maybe it was just a bluff.”

“No. It ain’t just a bluff.”

Ole Andreson rolled over toward the wall.

“The only thing is,” he said, talking toward the wall, “I just can’t make up my mind to go out. I been in here all day.”

“Couldn’t you get out of town?”

“No,” Ole Andreson said. “I’m through with all that running around.”

He looked at the wall.

“There ain’t anything to do now.”

“Couldn’t you fix it up some way?”

“No. I got in wrong.” He talked in the same flat voice. “There ain’t anything to do. After a while I’ll make up my mind to go out.”

“I better go back and see George,” Nick said.

“So long,” said Ole Andreson. He did not look toward Nick. “Thanks for coming around.”

Nick went out. As he shut the door he saw Ole Andreson, with all his clothes on, lying on the bed looking at the wall.

“He’s been in his room all day,” the landlady said downstairs. “I guess he don’t feel well. I said to him: ‘Mr. Andreson, you ought to go out and take a walk on a nice fall day like this,’ but he didn’t feel like it.”

“He doesn’t want to go out.”

“I’m sorry he don’t feel well,” the woman said. “He’s an awfully nice man. He was in the ring, you know.”

“I know it.”

“You’d never know it except from the way his face is,” the woman said. They stood talking just inside the street door. “He’s just as gentle.”

“Well, good-night, Mrs. Hirsch,” Nick said.

“I’m not Mrs. Hirsch,” the woman said. “She owns the place. I just look after it for her. I’m Mrs. Bell.”

“Well, good-night, Mrs. Bell,” Nick said.

“Good-night,” the woman said.

Nick walked up the dark street to the corner under the arc light, and then along the car tracks to Henry’s eating house. George was inside, back of the counter.

“Did you see Ole?”

“Yes,” said Nick. “He’s in his room and he won’t go out.”

The cook opened the door from the kitchen when he heard Nick’s voice.

“I don’t even listen to it,” he said, and shut the door.

“Did you tell him about it?” George asked.

“Sure. I told him, but he knows what it’s all about.”

“What’s he going to do?”

“Nothing.”

“They’ll kill him.”

“I guess they will.”

“He must have got mixed up in something in Chicago.”

“I guess so,” said Nick.

“It’s a hell of a thing.”

“It’s an awful thing,” Nick said.

They did not say anything. George reached down for a towel and wiped the counter.

“I wonder what he did?” Nick said.

“Double-crossed somebody. That’s what they kill them for.”

“I’m going to get out of this town,” Nick said.

“Yes,” said George. “That’s a good thing to do.”

“I can’t stand to think about him waiting in the room and knowing he’s going to get it. It’s too damned awful.”

“Well,” said George, “you better not think about it.”

THE SCARLET WOMAN

BY LOUIS BROMFIELD

From _McClure’s_

I can see her now as she used to come down the steps of her narrow house between the printer’s office and the little shop of Rinehart, the German cobbler--little, rickety steps, never in too good repair, especially as she grew older and the cost of everything increased and that mysterious money of hers seemed to go less and less far in the business of meeting the necessities of life. It was a house but one room wide, of wood painted a dun colour; the most ordinary and commonplace of houses which a stranger would not even have noticed--yet until yesterday, when they pulled it down, a house invested with a terrific glamour and importance. It was a house of which no one spoke; a house which the Town, in its passionate desire to forget (which was really only a hypocrisy), raised into such importance that one thought of it when one forgot the monuments which had been raised to the leading citizens of the community: to the bankers, to the merchants, to the politicians who had made it (as people said with a curious and non-committal tone which might have meant anything at all) “what it was to-day.” One remembered it even when one forgot the shaft of granite raised in the public square to remind the Town that John Shadwell had been one of its leading citizens.

I can see her now--Vergie Winters--an old woman past eighty, coming painfully down those rickety steps, surrounded always by that wall of solitude which appeared to shut out all the world. Old Vergie Winters, whose dark eyes at eighty carried a look of tranquil, defiant victory. Vergie Winters, of whose house no one spoke; whose door had been stoned by boys who knew nothing of her story but sensed dimly that she was the great pariah of the Town. Old Vergie Winters went on and on, long after John Shadwell was in his grave, refusing to give way, living there on the main street of the Town as if she were alone in the vast solitude of a desert. Sometimes she spoke to Rinehart, the cobbler, and sometimes to her neighbour on the other side; and of course in the shops they were forced to sell her things, though in one or two places they had even turned her away--and she had gone without a word, never trying to force her way anywhere.

It all began almost a century ago, before the Civil War, when one day in April Vergie Winters, tall and dark, with great, burning dark eyes set in a cool, pale face, opened the door of her father’s house to John Shadwell, tall and handsome and blond, the youngest lawyer in the Town. It happened so long ago that it seems now to have no more reality than a legend, especially when one remembers Vergie only as an immensely old woman coming painfully down her narrow, crooked steps. But it happened; it must have happened to have made of Vergie Winters so great a character in all the community. It must have been the rare sort of love which comes like a stroke of lightning.

He would have married Vergie Winters, they said (the old ones who remembered the beginnings of Vergie’s story and passed it on to their children and grandchildren) but there was already a girl to whom John Shadwell was betrothed, and in the background a powerful father, and John Shadwell’s career--which Vergie Winters, being only the daughter of a Swiss immigrant farmer, could do nothing to aid.

Long afterward, the Town said, “Look at her! You can see what a drag she would have been on him, with her queer, silent ways. A pity, too, for she was a beautiful girl. A pity she was always bad!”

But they never thought, of course, that if things had been different, Vergie Winters might not have been queer and silent; and now, looking back, one can see that they were quite wrong. It was not Vergie Winters who was a drag on his career. It was the other woman, John Shadwell’s wife, who turned into a strange, whining, melancholy invalid before they had been married two years. And what could John Shadwell do? Desert her? It was not possible. And in the way of such invalids she lived for more than forty years, forty dreary years, complaining, hypochondriac, nagging. She outlived even her husband, a great, vigorous, handsome man, who treated her patiently and with gentlemanly respect.

“It was a pity about John Shadwell’s wife,” people said. “And she was such a lady, too.”

And Vergie Winters? She did not break her heart. She did not marry some stupid lout and give up her life to a dull unhappiness. She did not wither away into spinsterhood. She loved John Shadwell, who knows how passionately, how deeply, in the profound depths of that curious, remote soul of hers? She left her parents (“to set herself up in dressmaking and millinery,” so she said), and took a narrow wooden house on Main Street, where she put up a card in the window and sold hats to the women of the Town. And before two years had passed it was to this narrow house that John Shadwell came, secretly--it must have been with an amazing secrecy, for no one even suspected the visits for more than three years. She made no effort to be more friendly with people about her than was required by the simple routine of her trade. She lived placidly, with a strange, rich contentment, inside the walls of the narrow little house. One met her sometimes, usually after darkness had fallen, walking with her slow, dignified step along the streets of the Town. But she was alone ... always alone.

Only once in all those sixty years was she ever known to leave the house overnight, and that was once, three years after John Shadwell was married, when she went away for a few months, “to visit her aunt in Camden.” It was not long after she returned that John Shadwell, “whose poor wife could never have any children,” adopted a girl baby. His wife, it was said, made no protest so long as the child had a good nurse and did not worry her. She was “so miserable, always ailing. She would give anything in the world for the health some women had.”

“You couldn’t blame her,” said the Town, “for feeling like that. They say she never has a moment’s good, wholesome sleep.”

John Shadwell went to the Legislature, the youngest man in the state to hold such an office; and when the time for reelection came the fight was bitter, and into it some enemy thrust the name of Vergie Winters. So the story spread, and so the name of Vergie Winters went the way of most smalltown milliners. Millinery was a “fast” business and Vergie Winters was a “fast” woman. A committee called upon her and asked her to leave the Town. And John Shadwell did nothing. If he came to her defense, he was ruined at the very beginning of that precious career. So Vergie gave him up, but she did not leave the Town. In the little parlour with the hats in the window she received the committee, and in that calm, aloof way she told them that they could not force her to leave. They could not prove that she had broken any law. She was a free citizen. She even looked at them out of the depths of those dark, candid eyes, and lied.

“John Shadwell,” she said, “is nothing to me. If he has come here once or twice, it is only because he is my lawyer.”

She must protect John Shadwell.

And so she sent them away baffled, even perhaps a little intimidated ... a committee of red-faced, self-righteous townsmen who had known, some of them at least, far worse women than Vergie Winters.

But her trade dwindled. Women no longer came to her for hats, unless they were the shady ladies of the streets. And Vergie Winters never turned them away, perhaps because she needed desperately their trade, perhaps because it never occurred to her, in that terrible solitude to which she had dedicated her life, ever to judge them. They came and sometimes they stayed to talk. A few of them were run out of town, but new ones always took their places. They always went to Vergie Winters for their bonnets.

“She is such a lady. She has such a fine air,” they said. And, “It’s so restful sitting there in her cool parlour.”

But their trade did her no good. “It only goes to show,” said the Town.

It was really the beginning of her colossal solitude. She did not go away. She did not flee from the threats that sometimes came to her. She was sure of herself. She would not surrender. And she could wait. She effaced herself from the life of John Shadwell. And when the Town began putting two and two together, she was even forced to give up walking through the twilight in the direction of John Shadwell’s house, where from the opposite side of the street she could watch with a furtive eye the little girl who played on the lawn about the iron dogs and deer. She never went out except to buy the few things she needed to eat, and for her trade. It was about this time that a shop run by a Presbyterian elder refused to sell her a spool of thread with which to sew the bright roses on the hats of the ladies of the streets. She did not make a scene; she did not even complain. She went quietly from the shop and never again passed through its doors.

But there were always the gay ladies. They came and went; but there were always some in the town, so it must have had some need for them. They could not live without money, yet they always had it, though they toiled not nor spun, to pay Vergie Winters for their hats. Some died; one or two were murdered in saloon brawls, but Vergie Winters never turned them away. They were her only friends. One wonders what secrets, what confidences they brought to Vergie Winters, sitting there in her narrow little house. One wonders what a dark history of the Town’s citizens went into the grave when Vergie Winters was carried down those narrow, rickety steps for the last time. But she said nothing. She simply waited.

At last what she hoped--what she must have known--would happen, came to pass. One cold night while Vergie Winters sat sewing on the gay hats a key turned in the lock, and John Shadwell came back to her. He came in the face of scandal, of ruin, because he could not help himself. It had begun in a flash of lightning when Vergie Winters opened the door of her father’s house to let him in, and now John Shadwell found that it went on and on and on.... There was no stifling it.

Who can picture that return? Who can imagine the sudden upleaping in the calm, withdrawn soul of Vergie Winters--who had such faith in this love that she sacrificed all her life to it?

And so for years John Shadwell came, on the occasions when he was not in Washington, to see Vergie Winters in the narrow wooden house. She kept on with her precarious trade, for she would never while he lived accept any money from him. Besides, she could not, for his sake, afford to arouse suspicions. For herself it did not matter; she could not be worse off.

Thus Vergie Winters and John Shadwell passed into middle age, and there came a time when he no longer sought election but instead became a power behind the throne, a man who shaped the careers of other men. He held power in the palm of his hand and no longer depended on votes. He grew careless, and one night he was seen by a Negro stable boy turning his key in the back door of Vergie Winters’s house.

After that there were women who crossed the street in order to avoid passing the window with the gay bonnets; and children, hearing their parents whisper as they drove by on a summer evening, came to understand dimly that some evil monster lay hidden behind the neat fringed curtains. Once, while John Shadwell was away in Washington, boys stoned the house and broke all the windows; but Vergie Winters said nothing. In the morning a Slovak glazier, who was new to the Town and had never heard of its Scarlet Woman, came and repaired the damage; and after he had gone she was seen coming down the narrow steps, in that terrible pool of solitude, as if nothing at all had happened. So far as any one knew, she never spoke of the affair to John Shadwell. She wanted to save him, it seemed, even from such petty annoyances.

And then as the years passed she sometimes saw from her window--the only safe spot from which she might peep--the figure of John Shadwell’s adopted daughter, grown now into a girl of twenty. A thousand times she must have watched the girl, always in company with John Shadwell’s sister, a large, bony spinster, as the pair came out of the shop on the corner and crossed the street in order that a girl so young and innocent might not have to pass the house of Vergie Winters.

Thus she sat in the narrow, dun-coloured house, working at the gay bonnets, on the afternoon that John Shadwell’s adopted daughter was married to a son of the Presbyterian elder who refused to sell Vergie Winters a spool of thread. Perhaps on that afternoon she had a visit from one of the ladies of the street, who sat talking to her (she was such a lady) while the girl in her bridal dress walked down the aisle of the brick Presbyterian church--with no mother sitting in the pew on the right because John Shadwell’s wife had been too much upset by the preparations for the wedding.

And one is certain that on the same night, when the festivities were ended, the figure of a middle-aged man followed the shadows of the alley behind Vergie Winters’s house, and let himself in with a key he had carried for more than twenty years. And one can hear him telling Vergie Winters who was at the wedding, and that there never was a prettier bride, and what music they played, and what there was at the wedding breakfast; and assuring her, as he touched her hand gently, that the bit of lace she had given him had been used in the bridal dress. He had told them he bought it himself.

Then, slowly, the town came to accept the state of affairs as a permanent scandal. One seldom spoke of it any longer. One simply knew that Vergie Winters and John Shadwell had been living together for years. He was rich, he was important, he was a power in politics; and now that his career no longer mattered, he had grown indifferent and a little defiant. So far as John Shadwell was concerned, he was a leading citizen nearly seventy years old, the grandfather of children by his adopted daughter.