PART TWO

THE SLATE-COLORED HOUSE

1

Long ago Mrs. Downes had followed the example of other thrifty householders and painted her dwelling that peculiar slate-gray which gave the whole town so depressing an aspect. It was a color which did not show the marks of the soot that rose from the blast-furnaces and chimneys to fall and fall again over the community. The color, however, in the case of Emma’s house, seemed to extend to the inside, to lie in some peculiar fashion in the very warp and woof of the place. Being a woman of affairs she was seldom at home save when she returned to sleep and so the breath of conviviality scarcely touched its walls. The nearest approach occurred on the occasion, once each year, when she opened the place to entertain the Minerva Circle. Then she flung open the massive oak doors which separated the dining-room from the parlor and had in bleak rows of collapsible chairs, hired from McTavish, the undertaker, to support the varying weights of her fellow club members.

The refreshments were provided from the kitchens of her own restaurant--an assortment of salads, sandwiches and ice creams familiar enough to the regular patrons, but exciting and worldly novelties to ladies who did their own cooking or at best had only rather incompetent hired girls. But even this occasion was not one which left behind those ghosts of gayety which haunt the pleasant houses of the blessed; it was at best a gathering of tired, middle-aged women seated on hard chairs who wrestled with worries over children and husbands, while one or another of their fellow-members read from a rustling paper the painfully prepared account of her trip to the Yellowstone, or if the occasion was an intensely exciting one, of her voyage to Europe. Sometimes, it is true, Emma Downes rose to announce that she would read one of the interesting letters from her son, for these letters came vaguely under the head of geography and foreign travel, just as at the meetings of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, they came hazily under the classification of temperance. And as many of the members belonged to both organizations and were also friends of Emma, they sometimes heard the same letter several times.

No one ever dined or lunched with Emma. She had no meals at home, as she took no holidays save Sunday, when it was the tradition to lunch with Elmer, who, she sometimes reflected, was certainly rich enough from the profits of his pump works to set a better table. In Emma there was a streak of sensuality which set her apart from her brother--she liked a comfortable house and good food (it was really this in the end which made the Peerless Restaurant a triumphant success). But there was evidence of even deeper fleshliness, for the brief interlude of Mr. Downes--that butterfly of passion--had shaken her life for a time and filled it with a horrid and awful uneasiness.

In the parlor, above the tiled mantelpiece, there hung an enlarged photograph of the derelict husband from which he looked out as wooden and impassive as it was possible for a photographer to make him. Yet life had not been altogether extinguished, for there was in the cocky tilt of the head and the set of a twinkling eye which could not be extinguished, in the curve of the lip beneath the voluminous dragoon mustaches, something which gave a hint of his character. He was, one could see, a swaggering little man, cock-of-the-walk, who had a way with women, even with such game as the invincible Emma--a man who was, perhaps, an odd combination of helplessness and bravado, a liar doubtless and a braggart. On the occasions of Minerva Circle meetings a vase of flowers always stood beneath the picture, a gesture touching and appropriate, since all that remained of Mr. Downes lay, as every one knew, somewhere in China and not in a well-ordered grave among the dead of his wife’s family.

2

It was to this bleak and cheerless house that Philip and Naomi returned one winter night in the midst of a blizzard which buried all the town in snow and hid even the flames of the blast-furnaces which were always creeping distressingly nearer to Emma Downes’ property.

All the way from Baltimore during two days and a night of traveling in one dreary day-coach after another they had sat sullenly side by side, rarely speaking to each other, for Philip, driven beyond endurance, had suddenly lost his temper and forbidden her to speak again of going back to Megambo. For a time she had wept while he sat stubbornly staring out of the window, conscious of the stares of the two old women opposite, and troubled by suspicions that Naomi was using her tears to shame him before their fellow-passengers. When there were no more tears left she did not speak to him again, but she began to pray in a voice just loud enough for him to hear. This he could not forbid her to do, lest she should begin to weep once more, more violently than ever, but he preferred her prayers for his salvation to her weeping, for tears made him feel that he had abused her and sometimes brought him perilously near to surrender. He tried to harden his heart by telling himself that her tears and prayers were really bogus and produced only to affect him, but the plan did not succeed because it was impossible to know when she was really suffering and when she was not. Since that moment when he pushed her aside into the dust and fired at the painted niggers, a new Naomi seemed to have been born whom he had never known before. It was a Naomi who wept like Niobe and, turning viciously feminine, used weakness as a horrible weapon. There were moments when he felt that she would have suffered less if he had beaten her daily.

She had been, as Emma hoped, “working over him” without interruption since the moment at Zanzibar when Lady Millicent bade them a curt good-by and Philip told her that he meant never to return to Megambo nor even be a missionary again. She was still praying in a voice just loud enough for him to hear when she was interrupted by his saying, “There’s Ma, now--standing under the light by the baggage-truck.”

Emma stood in the flying snow, wrapped warmly in a worn sealskin coat with leg-o’-mutton sleeves, peering up at the frosted windows of the train. At first sight of her a wave of the old pleasure swept Philip, and then gradually it died away, giving place to a disturbing uneasiness. It was as if the sight of her paralyzed his very will, reducing the stubbornness which had resisted Naomi so valiantly, to a mere shadow. He felt his new-born independence slipping from him. He was a little boy again, obeying a mother who always knew best.

It was not that he was afraid of her; it lay deeper than fear, a part of his very marrow. He was troubled, too, because he knew that he was about to hurt her, whom he wanted to hurt less than any person in the world. Naomi did not matter by the side of his mother; what happened to Naomi was of no importance.

She saw them at once, almost as if some instinct had led her to the exact spot where they got down. Naomi she ignored, but Philip she seized in her arms (she was much bigger than he, as she had been bigger than his father). The tears poured down her face.

“Philip,” she cried. “My boy! Philip!”

From the shadow of a great pile of trunks a drunken baggage hustler watched the scene with a wicked light of amusement in his eye.

Then she noticed Naomi, who stood by, shivering in her thin clothes. For a moment there was a flash of hostility in her eye, but it passed quickly, perhaps because it was impossible to feel enmity for any one who looked so pale and pitiful and frightened. Philip, noticing her, too, suspected that it was not the cold alone that made her tremble. He knew suddenly that she was terrified by something, by his mother, by the sound of the pounding mills, of the red glow in the sky--more terrified than she had been in all the adventure by the burning lake. And all at once he felt inexplicably sorry for her. She had a way of affecting him thus when he least expected it.

“Come,” said Emma, composed and efficient once more. “You’re both shivering.”

The transfer to a smelly, broken-down cab was accomplished quickly, since missionaries have little need for worldly goods and Philip and Naomi had only what they had bought in Capetown.

On the way up the hill, the snow blew in at the cracks of the cab windows, and from time to time Emma, talking all the while, leaned forward and patted Philip’s knees, her large face beaming. Philip sat back in his corner, speaking only to answer “Yes” or “No.” No one paid any heed to Naomi.

Elmer Niman was waiting for them at the slate-colored house, seated gloomily in the parlor before the gas-logs by the side of his wife, a fat, rather silly woman, who was expecting hourly her second child, conceived, it seemed, almost miraculously after an hiatus of ten years and conscientious effort in that direction. Emma held her in contempt, not only because she was the wife of her brother, but because she was a bad housekeeper and lazy, who sat all day in a rocking-chair looking out from behind the Boston fern in her bow-window, or reading sentimental stories in the women’s magazines. Moreover, Emma felt that she should have accomplished much sooner the only purpose for which her brother had married--an heir to inherit his pump works. And when she gave the matter thought, she decided, too, that Mabelle had deliberately trapped her brother into matrimony.

But there was no feeling of hostility between them, at least not on Mabelle’s side, for it might have been said that Mabelle was not quite bright and so never felt the weight of her sister-in-law’s contempt. At the moment she simply sat rocking mildly and remarking, “I won’t get up--it’s such an effort in my condition”--a remark which brought a faint blush into Naomi’s freckled cheeks.

As soon as Philip saw his uncle--thin, bilious and forbidding--standing before the gas-logs--he knew that they all meant to have it out if possible at once, without delay. Uncle Elmer looked so severe, so near to malice, as he stood beneath the enlarged photograph of Philip’s jaunty father. There was no doubt about his purpose. He greeted his nephew by saying, “Well, Philip, I hadn’t expected to see you home so soon.”

For a second the boy wondered whether his mother had told Uncle Elmer that he had come back for good, never to return to Africa, but he knew almost at once that she had. There was a look in his cold eyes which, as Philip knew well, came into them when he fancied he had caught some one escaping from duty.

He and Naomi were thrust forward to the fire and he heard his mother saying, “I’ll have Essie bring in some hot coffee and sandwiches,” dimly, as in a nightmare, for he was seized again with a wild surge of the fantastic unreality which had possessed him since the moment when he fell unconscious beside the barricade. The very snow outside seemed unreal after the hot, brassy lake at Megambo.

He thought, “Why am I here? What have I done? Am I dreaming, and really lie asleep in the hut at Megambo?” He even thought, “Perhaps I am two persons, two bodies--in two places at the same time. Perhaps I have gone insane.” Of only one thing was he certain and that was of a strange, intangible hostility that surrounded him in the persons of all of them, save perhaps of Aunt Mabelle, who sat rocking stupidly, unconscious of what they were set upon doing to him. He knew the hostility that was there in the cold eyes of Uncle Elmer, and he knew the hostility that was in Naomi, and it occurred to him suddenly that there was hostility even in the way his mother had patted his knees as they rode through the blizzard.

They talked of this and that, of the voyage, the weather, the prodigious growth of the town and the danger of strikes in the Mills (for every one in the town lived under the shadow of the pounding mills), and presently Emma said, “But you haven’t told us about the uprising. That must be a good story.”

Philip said, “Let Naomi tell it. She can do it better than I.”

So Naomi told the story haltingly in the strong voice which always seemed strange in so fragile a body. She told it flatly, so that it sounded like a rather bad newspaper account made up from fragments of mangled cables. Once or twice Philip felt a sudden passionate desire to interrupt her, but he held his peace. It was the first time that he had heard her talking of it, and she didn’t see it at all. He wanted to cry out, “But you’ve forgotten the sound of the drums in the night! And the sight of the fire on the plains!” He thought his mother might understand what he saw in it, but Uncle Elmer wouldn’t. He decided to save it to tell his mother when they were alone. It was _his_ story, _his_ experience; Naomi had never shared it at all.

He heard Naomi saying, “And then we came to the coast--and--and that’s all there is to it.”

“But what about the Englishwoman?” his mother was asking.

“Oh, she went away north again--right away--I must say we were glad to be rid of her. I didn’t care for her at all--or Swanson either. She was hard and cruel--she didn’t like us and treated us like fools, like the dirt under her feet, all except Philip. I think she--well, she liked him very much.”

At the end her voice dropped a little and took on a faint edge of malice. It was a trick Philip had only noticed lately, for the first time during the long voyage from Capetown. It hung, quivering with implications, until Philip burst out:

“Well, if it hadn’t been for her we’d all be dead now. I don’t know about you, but I’m glad I’m alive. Maybe you’d rather be dead.”

Naomi made no answer. She only bowed her head a little as if he had struck her, and Uncle Elmer said, “What about Swanson? What’s happened to him?”

Naomi’s head, heavy with its mass of sandy hair, raised again. “Oh,” she said, “_he_ went back to Megambo. _He_ didn’t want to desert the post. He thought all the natives were depending on him.”

“Alone?”

“Yes, all alone.”

For a moment the silence hung heavy and unpleasant; Philip, miserable and tortured, sat with his head bowed, staring at the Brussels carpet. It was his mother who spoke.

“I must say it was courageous of him. When I saw him before you all left I didn’t think much of him. He seemed stupid....”

“But he has faith,” said Naomi, “and courage. He was for not raising a hand during the attack. He didn’t want to kill, you see.”

Sitting there, Philip felt them beating in upon him, mercilessly, relentlessly, and he was afraid, not of any one of them but because all of them together with the familiar sight of the room, the veneered mahogany furniture, the red wallpaper, even his father’s photograph with the flowers beneath it, made him feel small and weak, and horribly lonely as he had sometimes felt as a little boy. He kept saying to himself, “I’m a man now. I won’t give in--I won’t. They can’t make me.”

And then Uncle Elmer launched the attack. His method aimed, as if by some uncanny knowledge, at Philip’s weakest part. He began by treating him as a little boy, humoring him. He even smiled, an act so rare with Uncle Elmer that it always seemed laden with foreboding.

“And what’s this I hear about your not going back, Philip--about your changing your mind?”

Philip only nodded his head without speaking.

“You mustn’t think of it too much just now. Just forget about it and when you’re rested and better everything will come out all right.”

Then Philip spoke. “I’m not going back.”

But Uncle Elmer pondered this, still humoring him as if he were delirious or mad.

“Of course, it’s a matter of time and rest. I’ve always felt toward you as I would toward my own son--if I had one.” (Here Aunt Mabelle bridled and preened herself as if flattered by being noticed at last, even by implication.) “I’m thinking only of your own good.”

“I’m not going back,” repeated Philip dully.

The singsong voice of Uncle Elmer went on: “Of course, once you’ve had the call--there’s no mistake. You can’t turn back from the Lord once you’ve heard the call.”

“I never had the call.”

“What do you mean? You can’t imagine a thing like that. Nobody ever imagined he heard the Lord calling him.”

“It’s true, though--I must have imagined it.”

He couldn’t say, somehow, what he wanted to say, because it wasn’t clear in his own mind. He _had_ thought he had heard the call, but now he saw it wasn’t really so at all. He felt vaguely that his mother was somehow responsible for the feeling.

Uncle Elmer waited for a time, as if to lend weight to his words.

“Do you understand that it is a great sin--to abandon the Lord’s work--the greatest sin of which a human creature can be guilty?”

Philip was trembling now like a man under torture. He couldn’t fight back, somehow, because he was all confused, inside, deep down in his soul. It was as if his brain were all in knots.

“I don’t know what is sin and what isn’t. I’ve been thinking about it--I used to think of it for hours at a time at Megambo, I couldn’t do my work for thinking of it--I don’t know what is sin and what isn’t, and you don’t either. None of us know.”

“We all know, Philip. The Bible tells us.”

(Yes, that was true. The Bible had it all written down. You couldn’t answer a thing like that.)

“He’s lost his faith,” said Naomi.

“You must pray, Philip. I pray when I’m in doubt--when I’m in trouble. I’ve prayed when I’ve been worried over the factory, and help always came.”

“I can’t explain it, Uncle Elmer. It’s a spiritual thing that’s happened to me.... I couldn’t go back--not now!”

Uncle Elmer’s eyebrows raised a little, superciliously, shocked.

“A spiritual thing? To turn your back on God!”

“I haven’t said that--” How could he explain when “spiritual” meant to them only Uncle Elmer’s idea of “Biblical”? “I mean it is something that’s happened to my spirit--deep inside me.”

How could he explain what had happened to him as he lay in the rushes watching the procession of black girls? Or what had happened as he stood half-naked by the dying fire listening to the drums beating against the dome of the night? How could he explain when he did not know himself? Yet it was an experience of the spirit. It had happened to his soul.

He kept repeating to himself, “I won’t--I won’t. They can’t make me.” He saw his mother watching him with sad eyes, and he had to look away in order not to weaken and surrender.

Then Naomi’s flat voice, “I’ve prayed--I’ve pled with him. I never cease to pray.” She had begun to weep.

Philip’s jaw, lean from illness and dark from want of shaving, set with a sudden click. His mother saw it, with a sudden sickening feeling that the enlarged photograph above his head had come to life. She knew that jaw. She knew what it meant when it clicked in that sudden fashion.

“It’s no use talking about it--I won’t go back--not if I burn in Hell.”

Uncle Elmer interrupted him, all the smoothness gone suddenly from his voice. “Which you will as sure as there’s a God above!”

The thin, yellow, middle-aged man was transformed suddenly into the likeness of one of the more disagreeable Prophets of the Old Testament. He was cruel, savage, intolerant. Emma Downes knew the signs; she saw that Elmer was losing his temper and beginning to roll about in the righteousness that made him hard and cruel. If he went on against that set, swarthy jaw of Philip, only disaster could come of it. They would lose everything.

“We’d all better go to bed; it’s late and we’re all worn out--Philip and Naomi most of all. There’s no hurry about deciding. When Philip’s well again--”

They meant to postpone the struggle, but not to abandon it. They bade each other good-night and Aunt Mabelle, rising from her rocking-chair with difficulty, smiled and insisted on kissing Philip, who submitted sullenly. Secretly she was pleased with him as she was always pleased when she saw some one get the better of Elmer.

As the door closed beneath the horrid glare of the green-glass gas-jet, Uncle Elmer turned.

“And what will you do, Philip, if you don’t go back? You’ll have to start life all over again.”

“I don’t know,” Philip answered dully. But he did know, almost, without knowing it. He knew deep down within the very marrow of his bones. There was only one thing he wanted to do. It was a fierce desire that had been born as he lay beneath the acacia-tree watching the procession of singing women.

3

When Uncle Elmer and Aunt Mabelle, walking very carefully on account of Aunt Mabelle’s “condition,” had gone down the path into the flying snow, Emma said, “We’ll all go to bed now. You’re to have the spare-room, Philip, Naomi will sleep with me.”

“No, I can’t sleep yet. I’m going to sit up a while.”

“Then put out the gas when you come to bed. It gets low toward morning and sometimes goes out by itself.”

Naomi went off without a word, still enveloped in the aura of silent and insinuating injury, and Philip flung himself down on the floor before the gas-log, as he had always done as a boy, lying on his stomach, with the friendly smell of dust and carpet in his nostrils, while he pored over a book. Only to-night he didn’t read: he simply lay on his back staring at the ceiling or at the enlarged photograph of his father, wondering what sort of man he had been and whether, if he were alive now, he would have helped his son or ranged himself with the others. There was a look in the eye which must have baffled a man like Uncle Elmer.

Upstairs, directly overhead, Naomi and Emma prepared for bed in silence. Only once did either of them speak. It happened when Emma burst out with admiration as Naomi let down the heavy mass of dull reddish hair. They both undressed prudishly, slipping on their outing-flannel nightgowns before removing their underwear, and hastily, because the room was filled with damp chill air. Emma lent her daughter-in-law one of her nightgowns, for Naomi had no use for outing-flannel in East Africa, and possessed only a sort of shapeless trousseau of patterned calico. The borrowed garment gave her the air of a woman drowning in an ocean of cotton-flannel.

After the gas was extinguished, they both knelt down and prayed earnestly, and toward the same end--that the Lord might open Philip’s eyes once more and lead him back to his duty.

The moment the blankets were drawn about their chins, they began to talk of it, at first warily, feeling their way toward each other until it became certain that they both wanted the same thing, passionately and without division of purpose. Naomi told her mother-in-law the whole story--how she had worked over him, how she had even made the inarticulate Swanson summon courage to speak, how she had prayed both privately and in public, as it were, before Philip’s eyes. And nothing had been of any use. She thought perhaps the wound had injured his brain in some way, for certainly he was not the same Philip she had married; but once when she had suggested such a thing to him, he had only attacked her savagely, saying, “I’m just as sane as you are--wanting to go back to those dirty niggers.”

“Dirty niggers,” Naomi said, was an expression that he had undoubtedly picked up from the Englishwoman. She always spoke of the natives thus, or even in terms of profanity. She smoked cigars. She used a whip on her bearers. In fact, Naomi believed that perhaps she was the Devil himself come to ruin Philip and in the end to drag him off to Hell.

“I would have gone back without Philip,” she said, “but I couldn’t go alone with Swanson, and I felt that the Lord meant me to cleave to Philip and reclaim him. That would be a greater victory than the other.”

Emma patted her daughter-in-law’s thin hand. “That’s right, my dear. He’ll go back in the end, and a wife ought to cleave to her husband.” But there was in the gesture something of hostility, as there had been in her touching Philip a little while before. It was as if she said, “All the same, while he’s here, he belongs to me.”

And then Emma, listening, said, “Sh! There he comes now up the stairs.”

They both fell silent, as if conscious that he must not know they lay there in the darkness plotting (not plotting, that was a word which held evil implications) but planning his future, arranging what would be best for him body and soul--a thing, they knew, which he could not decide in his present distracted state of mind. They both fell silent, listening, listening, listening to the approaching tread of his feet as they climbed the creaking stairs, now at the turn, now in the upper hall, now passing their door. He had passed it now and they heard him turning the white china knob of the door into the dismal spare-room.

He would think they were both asleep long ago.

They talked for a while longer, until Naomi, worn by the wretched journey in a day-coach and lulled by the warmth with which the great vigorous body of Emma invested the walnut bed, fell asleep, her mouth a little open, for there had never been a surgeon anywhere near her father’s mission to remove her adenoids. But she did not sleep until Emma had learned beyond all doubt that in this matter Naomi was completely on her side; and that there was no possibility of children to complicate matters. Naomi was still a virgin, and somehow, in some way, that was a condition which might be made use of in the battle. She was not certain of the manner, but she felt the value of Naomi’s virginity as a pawn.

Nor did she fall asleep at once. She suffered from a vague, undefined sense of alarm, which she had not known in more than twenty years of life wherein men played no rôle. She had not suffered thus since the disappearance of her husband. He seemed to have returned to her now with the return of her son. Philip, she saw, was a child no longer, but a man, with a little gray already in his black hair, terrifyingly like his father in appearance.

It was more, too, than appearance, for he had upon her the same effect that his father had had before him--of making her feel a strange desire to humor, to coddle him, to go down on her knees and do his bidding. He was that sort of man. Even Naomi seemed at moments to succumb to the queer, unconscious power. Lying there in the darkness Emma determined resolutely to resist this disarming glamour, for she had lost his father by not resisting it. She must make the resistance for her own and for Philip’s good, though it would have been a warmer and more pleasant, even a voluptuous feeling to have yielded to him at once.

One thing, she saw, was clear--that Philip did not mean to run away as his father had done. He had returned to fight it out, with his dark jaw set stubbornly, because there was in him something of herself, which his father had lacked, something which, though she could not define it, filled her with uneasiness. She, the invincible Emma, was a little frightened by her own son.

And it touched her that he seemed so old, more, at times, like a man of forty than a boy of twenty-six: his face was lined, and his mouth touched by bitterness. He was no longer her little boy, so soft and good-looking, with that odd, blurred haze of faith in his blue eyes. He had a face now and the fact disturbed her, she could not tell why. He had been a little boy, and then, all at once, a man, with nothing in between.

At last--even after Philip, lying tormented in the spare bedroom, had fallen asleep, she dropped into an uneasy slumber, filled with vague alarms and excursions in which she seemed to have, from time to time, odd disturbing glimpses of a Philip she had never known, who seemed to be neither boy nor man, but something in between, remarkably like his worthless scamp of a father, who lived always to the full.

4

The Town stood built like Rome upon Seven Hills, which were great monuments of earth and stone left by the last great glacier, and on these seven hills and in the valleys which surrounded them a whole city, created within the space of less than a century, had raised houses and shops, monstrous furnaces spouting flame and smoke and cavernous sheds black and vast as the haunts of legendary monsters, where all day and night iron and steel drawn from the hot bellies of the furnaces was beaten into rails and girders, so that other towns like it might spring into existence almost overnight. The Mills and furnaces could not, it seemed, work fast enough, so there were always new ones building, spreading out and out, along the borders of the railroad which touched the Atlantic Ocean on one side and the Pacific on the other.

It was not a pretty town. The sun rarely rose unobscured by clouds of hanging black smoke: the air was never still day or night from the vibrations of that gigantic beating and pounding. There was no house nor building unstained by long streaks made by the soot which fell like black manna from the skies. But it was a rich town, fabulously rich and busy as an ant-hill overturned carelessly by the foot of man. People were always crawling in and out of the Mills, up the long hill to the Main Street that was bordered by hundreds of little shops which sold cheap clothing and furniture, swarming over the bright steel threads of the railroads and through the streets in the dark region known as the Flats, which was given over to the slave ants brought in from foreign countries to work day and night without light or air. On the hills, at a little distance, dwelt those who in a way subsisted upon the work of the slave ants--all the little merchants, the lawyers, the bankers who were rich because the world about them was rich, because the little world was a hive of activity where men and women were born, and toiled, and lived and died endlessly. For them it was not a struggle to exist. It was scarcely possible not to succeed.

It had made even Emma Downes rich in a small way. The money seemed forever pouring out, rolling off: one had only to find a clear spot and stand there waiting to catch what rolled towards it.

On the seven hills the ants had their social life, divided into caste upon caste. In the Flats the slave ants had no existence at all. They seldom climbed the hills. One never saw them. But on the hills there were ants of all sorts, and odd reasons determined why they were what they were: sometimes it was money, sometimes ambition, sometimes clothes, sometimes the part of the ant-hill which they occupied, sometimes the temple in which they worshiped. They fussed over these things and scurried about a great deal in their agitation.

At the bottom of the heap were the slave ants who had no existence and at the top was an old woman who occupied a whole hill to herself and was content to live there surrounded on all sides by the black, dark mills and the workers. She was a sort of queen ant, for she was a disagreeable, scornful old woman, and she made no effort. She was immensely rich and lived somberly in a grand manner unknown elsewhere in the Town; but it was, too, more than this. She was scornful and she inspired awe. Her name was Julia Shane. She had been born a queen ant.

Emma Downes did not know her. It is true that she had seen the old woman often enough in a mulberry victoria drawn by high-stepping black horses, as she passed the Peerless Restaurant; she had seen her sitting very straight and grim, dressed in mauve and black, or wrapped comfortably in sables. Sometimes her daughters rode with her--the one who was religious and worked among the people of the Flats, and the one who lived in Paris and was said to be fast.

There were reasons, of course, why they did not know each other--antlike reasons. Emma lived in the wrong part of the Town. She was the sister of Elmer Niman, who was a pious man with a reputation for being a sharp dealer. Emma and Elmer cared nothing for the things on which the old woman spent insanely great sums of money, such things as pictures and carpets and chairs. To Emma, a chair was a chair; the fancier it was, the prettier and more tasteful it must be. And Emma went to a church that was attended by none of the fashionable ants, and the old woman went to no church at all. Emma was President of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, which the old lady considered not only as great nonsense, but as an impertinent effort to fly in the face of Nature. Emma had a missionary son, and to Julia Shane missionaries were usually self-righteous meddlers. (The old lady had never even heard of Naomi Potts, “the youngest missionary of the Lord in darkest Africa.”) There was reason upon reason why they never met. Emma thought her a wicked old thing, who ought to be reformed, and Julia Shane didn’t know that Emma existed.

It was immensely complicated--that antlike world.

For Philip it was no more complicated now than it had been in his childhood, when he had gone his own shy, solitary way. He had been lonely as a child, with the loneliness which all children know at moments when they are bruised and hurt: only with him it seemed always to have been so. It may have been the domination, even the very presence, of a woman so insensitive and crushing as Emma Downes that bruised and hurt him ceaselessly and without consciousness of relief. It was worse, too, when she was your mother and you adored her.

He had been happiest in moments when, escaping from his mother and the slate-colored house, he had gone off to wander through the fields beyond the Town or along the railway tracks among the locomotives. It was the great engines which he liked best, monsters that breathed fire and smoke, or sat still and silent in the cavernous roundhouse, waiting patiently to have bolts tightened, or leaks soldered, so that they might go on with their work. They did not frighten him as they might have frightened some children: they seemed ferocious but friendly, like great ungainly dogs. They terrified him less than Uncle Elmer or the preacher, Mr. Temple. (Mr. Temple was gone now and another younger, more flowery man named Castor had taken his place.)

By some miracle he had been able to keep his secret from his mother and continued, even when he was grown, to wander about for hours among the clanging wheels and screaming whistles during his holidays from the theological seminary. Some childish cunning had made him understand that she must never know of these strange expeditions, lest she forbid them. She was always so terrified lest something happen to him.

In all his childhood he could remember having had only two friends--one of them, McTavish, the undertaker, was kept as much a secret as the friendly locomotives had been; for Philip, even as a child, understood that there was something about the fat, jovial man which Emma detested with a wild, unreasonable fury.

The other was the black-haired, blue-eyed, tomboyish Mary Watts, who lived a dozen blocks away in a more fashionable part of Town where each house had its big stables and its negro coachmen and stable boys. She was older than he by nearly two years, and much stronger: she detested girls as poor weak things who liked starched skirts and dickies of white duck that were instruments of torture to any one who liked climbing and snowball fights. So she had recruited Philip to play on the tin roof of the carriage shed and build the house high up in the branches of the crabapple tree. He always felt sorry for her because she had no mother, but he saw, too, with a childish clarity, that it was an advantage to be able to do exactly as you pleased, and build the tree-house as high in the air as you liked, far up among the shiny little red apples where it made you thrillingly sick to look over the edge.

But this friendship was throttled suddenly on the day (it was Philip’s twelfth birthday) they went to play in the hay-loft. They had been digging in the fragrant hay and building tunnels, and feeling suddenly tired and hot, they lay down side by side, near the open door. In the heat, Philip, feeling drowsy, closed his eyes and listened to the whirring of the pigeons that haunted the old stable, happy, contented and pleased in a warm, vague way to be lying there beside his friend Mary, when suddenly he heard his mother’s hearty voice, and, opening his eyes, saw her standing at the top of the stairs. He could see that she was angry. She said, “Philip, come home at once--and you, Mary, go right in to your aunt. You ought to be ashamed of yourself!”

She swept him off without another word and at home she shut him in the storeroom, where she talked to him for an hour. She told him he had done a shameful thing, that boys who behaved like that got a disease and turned black. She said that he was never to go again to Mary Watts’ house or even to speak to her. She told him that because he had no father she must be both father and mother to him, and that she must be able to trust him in the hours when she was forced to be at the bakery earning money to feed and clothe them both.

When she had finished, Philip was trembling, though he did not cry, because men didn’t behave like babies. He told her he was sorry and promised never to speak to Mary Watts again.

And then she locked him in for an hour to ponder what she had said. He didn’t know what it was he had done: he only felt shameful and dirty in a way he had never felt before, and terrified by a fear of turning black like those nigger boys who lived in the filthy houses along the creek by the Mills.

When Emma came back to release him from the storeroom prison, she forgave him and, taking him in her arms, kissed and fondled him for a long time, saying, “And when you’re a big boy and grown up, your mother will always be your girl, won’t she?”

She seemed so pleasant and so happy, it was almost worth the blind pain to be able to repent and make promises. But he never had the fun of playing again with Mary Watts. He went back to his beloved engines. Sometimes he played ball, and he played well when he chose, for he was a smallish, muscular boy, all nerves, who was good at games; but they never interested him. It was as if he wanted always to be alone. He had had friends, but the friendships had ended quickly, as if he had come to the bottom of them too soon. As a little boy there was always an odd, quizzical, affectionate look in his eye, and there were times when, dreaming, he would wander away into mazes of thought with a perpetual air of searching for something. He, himself, never knew what it was.

And then at seventeen, taciturn, lonely and confused, he had stumbled upon God. The rest was easy for Emma, especially when Naomi came unexpectedly into their lives. Sometimes, in bitter moments, she had thought of Philip as a symbol of vengeance upon his errant father: she had kept him pure and uncontaminated by the world. She had made of him a model for all the world to observe.

5

When, on the morning after his return, Philip went out of the door of the slate-colored house, and down the walk through the drifted snow, he knew suddenly that he was more lonely, more aimless than he had ever been. The blizzard was over, and the sky lay cold and gray above the curtain of everlasting smoke. At the gate he hesitated for a moment, wondering which way he would turn; and then abruptly he knew that it made no difference; there was no one that he wanted to see, no one with whom he could talk. He knew that in the house behind him there were two women who thought it shameful for him to be seen at all in the streets. They had even hoped, no doubt, that he would not show himself so soon. Even people who knew the story Emma had told of illness and wounds and a holiday, would think that he ought to have stuck at his post and fought it out there.

People, he knew--at least the people of their sort who were church-goers--were like that: they were willing to pile glory upon visiting missionaries, but they gave money grudgingly and expected missionaries to stick to their tasks. The money they gave warmed their hearts with a wicked Roman Catholic sense of comforts bought in Heaven. They would think he ought not to have returned until he had earned a proper holiday. For himself he did not care, especially since he knew he was far more wicked than they imagined, but with his mother and Naomi it was different. At the sight of Naomi, sitting pale and miserable across the table from him at breakfast, he had been stricken suddenly with one of those odd twinges of pity which sometimes delivered him into her hands, bound and helpless. When he thought of it now--how near he had been to yielding--he was frightened. Such odd, small things could turn a whole life upon a new path.

He closed the gate and turned towards the left, without thinking why he had chosen that direction until he found himself turning down the long hill to the Flats. He was going towards his beloved locomotives exactly as he had done a dozen years earlier when he could think of no one he wanted to see in all the Town; and suddenly he was almost happy, as if he were a boy of twelve once more, and not a man of twenty-six who had lost more than ten precious years of life.

It struck him, as he waded through heaps of snow already blackened by soot, that the Town had changed: it was not, in some subtle way, the same place. Where once it had seemed a dull, ugly Town, friendly because it was so familiar, it now seemed rather exciting and lively, and even thrilling. It was so alive, so busy, so filled with energy. As he descended the hill the impression grew in intensity. The pounding of the Mills, the leaping red flames above the furnace chimneys, the rumbling, half-muffled clamor of the great locomotives--all these things gave him a sudden, tremendous feeling of life. He saw for the first time, though he had passed them a thousand times in his life, those long rows of black houses where the mill-workers lived huddled together in squalor. He saw one or two sickly geraniums behind the glass, a crimson featherbed hung from a window, a line of bright clothes all dancing frozen and stiff as dead men in the cold wind.

For a moment he halted on the bridge that crossed Toby’s Run and, standing there, he watched the great cranes at work lifting, with a weird animal intelligence, their tons of metal, picking up a burden in one place and setting it down in another. The air smelled of hot metal and the pungent tang of coal-smoke. Beneath him the stream, no longer water, but a flowing mass of oil and acids and corrosion, moved smoothly along: in a stream so polluted even ice could not freeze along the banks. Beyond the mills and piled low on the top of its patrician hill the mass of Shane’s Castle showed itself against the leaden sky. It had been red brick once, but long ago it had turned black. There were only dead trees in the park surrounding it.

It all stood out sharp and clear--the houses, the river, the furnaces, the great engines, the lonely, quiet homes on the hills; and suddenly he knew what it was that made the difference. The Town seemed a new, strange place because of that queer thing which had happened to him at Megambo. The scales had fallen from his eyes. He remembered how suddenly he had seen the lake, the forest, the birds, in a new way, as if outlined by light; and that odd, sensual feeling of strength, of vigor, of life, overwhelmed him again, as it had done while he stood naked in the moonlight listening to the ominous drums. For a moment he fancied that he heard them once more, but it was only the pounding of the Mills. It was new to him after having been away for so long; the sound hadn’t yet come to be a part of the silence which one did not hear because it was always there.

As he turned away he caught a glimpse of a pale, tall figure all in gray turning a corner down one of the sodden streets of the mill-workers. After a moment he recognized it slowly: it was Irene Shane, the daughter of Old Julia--the daughter who had given all her life and her money to work among the poor of the Flats. He remembered her then--she was the one who had started a club-house and a school where the foreigners, the Hunkies and Dagoes, might learn to speak English and their wives might learn to save the babies who died like flies. She carried it on herself, with only the aid of a Russian mill-hand, because people in the Town wouldn’t give money. He remembered his mother’s having mentioned it in a letter. “The Church was against it,” she wrote, “because it took time and money away from foreign missions.”

He looked after the thin figure until it disappeared into one of the houses, and then turned away. As he walked he found himself thinking of Mary Watts. His mother had written that Mary Watts had something to do with the club-house, until she married the new superintendent of the mills. He must ask his mother what had become of Mary Watts. Of course, she was Mary Conyngham now.... It was odd, but she was the only person in the Town that he wanted to see. At last he had thought of some one.

On his way up the hill once more, he passed, near the establishment of McTavish, the undertaker, the tall, powerful, middle-aged figure of the Reverend Castor bound upon some errand. He was a rather handsome man, a little pompous but with a kind face, who was quite bald and wore the hair which the Lord had spared him very long and wound about his head, in a way calculated to conceal his baldness. People said he was a good man, and a fiery preacher with a wife who had been a complaining invalid for fifteen years and rarely left her bed. Philip scarcely knew him, though it was he who had married himself and Naomi and blessed them when they left for Africa. The clergyman did not see him now and Philip slipped by unnoticed.

From behind the glass of the Funeral Parlor, he knew that McTavish and his cronies had seen him. They sat in there hugging the stove, a group of middle-aged and elderly men who played checkers or rummy and gossiped all day. It was a great place for news, since most deaths were reported at once to the fat, good-natured McTavish. Every one was buried by McTavish; he was the one who laid the hill-ants to rest deep in the gravel of the seventh of these glacial hills. McTavish never went to church and the big iron stove was known, even on Sunday, as the nucleus of a band of shocking atheists and mockers. McTavish seemed to understand at once whether the one he had come to bury was loved or whether it was simply a relative from whom you were likely to inherit. He was a bachelor who had no life save that which centered about the iron stove; yet he knew the Town in a way that no one else knew it because he was always near to the root of all things.

Philip knew that the group about the stove were saying, “There goes Emma Downes’ boy who went to Africa for a missionary. He was always a queer one--not a bit like Emma.”

And then they would launch into talk about the old story of Jason Downes and his fantastic disappearance into the depths of China, where he had escaped in the end the last ministrations of McTavish. They knew everything, those old men. Each one was a walking history of the Town.

Philip, half a block off now, began to feel that sense of life which somehow sustained them. He began to feel people, ambitions, jealousies, loves and hatreds, stirring all about him in a strange, complicated maze.

Naomi was waiting for him, dressed to go out. She had put on a thick blue veil because, Philip suspected, she did not want to be recognized.

“Your Ma wants us to eat at the restaurant,” she said, and together they set out in silence.

Miraculously they met no one on the way, and once inside the big, white, clean restaurant, Emma led them to the table where, shielded by a screen from draughts, she always ate. The restaurant began to fill with customers--clerks, lawyers, mill-employees, shopkeepers, farmers and their wives in from the country for the day--all lured by the excellent food supplied by Emma. After a time the tables were all filled and people stood waiting their turn. It was marvelous, the success of Emma. Dishes clattered, orders were shouted, the cash-register clanked and banged unceasingly. She was proud of the place and happy there: it was clear that she could not imagine living away from such a hubbub and din.

While they were eating the stewed dried corn which she gave her customers in place of the usual insipid canned variety, she asked, “What did you do this morning, Philip?”

“I went for a walk.”

“Where?”

“In the Flats.”

“You might have chosen a handsomer part of the Town. You might have gone out to see the new Park.”

He didn’t tell her about the locomotives. Once he had kept it a secret because she would have forbidden him to return to them. Now, he kept his secret for some other reason: he did not know quite what it was. He only knew that Emma and Naomi must not know of it. It would only make them believe that he was completely crazy.

Presently, when they had reached the squash pie, he asked, “What’s become of Mary Watts?” And at the same moment he felt himself blushing horribly, for in some way the memory of the imprisonment in the storeroom returned to claim him unawares, and make him feel a shameful little boy unable to look his mother in the eye. Only he understood now: he knew what lay beneath the ancient, veiled accusations....

“Oh, she’s had a sad time,” said Emma. “You know she married the superintendent of the Mills--John Conyngham--a man fifteen years older than she was, and every one thought it was a good match. But he died--three weeks ago--while you were on the ocean, leaving her with two small children. They’ve some money, but not very much. The Watts house was sold when old Watts died--to pay his debts. She’s living with Conyngham’s sister, who’s quite well off. They’re in the old Stuart house in Park Avenue. Old Stuart lost all his money hanging on to too much land, so they bought the house off him. I guess Conyngham wasn’t a very good husband--I used to see his bicycle sitting in front of Mamie Rhodes’ house. There couldn’t have been much good in that--men like Mamie Rhodes too well.”

She knew it all, the story in all its details, even to Mamie Rhodes, at whose name women in the Town were wont to bristle. No one _knew_ anything about Mamie: it was just that she was much too young for her years, and did something to men--nobody knew just what it was--that made her very popular.

“And what was he like?” asked Philip.

“Conyngham,” said Emma, “John Conyngham? He was handsome, but I never liked his looks. I’d never trust a man that looked like that.”

What she meant was that there was something about John Conyngham that reminded her of the derelict Mr. Downes, and that the sight of him had always disturbed her in a terrifying way. She couldn’t bear to look at him.

“He died of pneumonia,” she said above the clatter of the dishes and the prosperous banging of the cash-register. “They say he caught it coming home in the rain from Mamie Rhodes’ on Thanksgiving night.”

Philip listened and the dull red still burned under the dark skin. He was aware that the two women were watching him, secretly, as they might watch a man who was a little unbalanced: they had been doing so without cessation since his return. They were a little like two purring cats watching prey all innocent of their intentions.

6

It was impossible, of course, for the three of them to continue playing the game of hide-and-seek, pretending that Philip and Naomi had not returned or that Philip was too ill to go out; it was impossible for Naomi to go about forever disguised by a thick veil. Even Emma’s eternal policy of allowing things to work themselves out appeared after a month to be productive of no result, for Philip’s “mental condition” showed no signs of improvement. He remained, rocklike, in his determination, while the two women watched, stricken with uneasy fears because the Philip whom they had once known so well that they could anticipate and control his every impulse, now seemed a creature filled with vague and mysterious moods and ideas that lay quite beyond the borders of their understanding.

Their watching became at times unbearable to him, for it gave him the suffocating sense of being a maniac who was not to be trusted alone. He took to spending more and more time away from the house, either walking the country roads or wandering through the black Flats where he was safe from encountering any one or anything, save the gray figure of Irene Shane, going her tireless rounds. Once he had a glimpse of the old lady herself--Irene’s mother--riding by wrapped in sables on the last ride she was ever to take.

A sense of waiting, more definite, more intense, than the tension of the long day at Megambo, settled over the slate-colored house. It was broken on the fourth Sunday after Philip’s return when the three of them lunched, as usual on boiled mutton, at Uncle Elmer’s. It was a gloomy lunch, tainted by the sense of Philip’s sin. The gloom enveloped all of them, save Aunt Mabelle and her ten-year-old daughter, Ethel, who showed already signs of resembling her mother in feebleness of character and inertia of mind. The room was, through a lack of windows, dark, and under the fog of smoke that enveloped the Town it became even more cavernous and dreary; but Elmer Niman never permitted his wife to waste gas in illumination. One groped for food in the dark, while Elmer talked of the low pressure occasioned by the sad waste of gas in the Town.

The break came only after considerable preparation on the part of Emma. She said, quite casually, “I saw Reverend Castor yesterday. He came into the restaurant to see me.”

“He’s not looking as well,” put in Aunt Mabelle. “It must be a strain to have an invalid wife. It’s not natural for a man to live like that.”

Elmer interrupted her, feeling perhaps that she was bound toward one of those physiological observations which she sometimes uttered blandly and to the consternation of all her world.

“He is a good man. We are fortunate in having him.”

“God will reward him for his patience,” observed Emma.

“I talked to him day before yesterday,” said Naomi. “I think I may go to sing in the choir while we are on our holiday.”

Vaguely Philip began to sense the existence of a plot, conceived and carried out with the express purpose of forcing him to do something he had no desire to do. It seemed to him that they had rehearsed the affair.

“There is an empty place on the alto side,” observed Emma. “They could use a good strong voice like yours.”

“Of course,” said Naomi, “it’s so long since I’ve sung--not since I used to lead the singing at the revival meetings.”

“And Philip--he used to sing.”

“He never does now. He wouldn’t help me teach the natives at Megambo.”

Philip, listening, fancied that he caught a sympathetic glance from Aunt Mabelle. She was silly and stupid, but sometimes it seemed to him that she had flashes of uncanny intuition: she had, after all, had great experience with the tactics of Elmer and his sister. She sat opposite Philip, eating far too much, lost in cowlike tranquillity. She was still bearing patiently the burden which by some error in calculation had been expected hourly for more than a month. Only yesterday she had said, “I expect little Jimmy will have all his teeth and be two years old when he is born!”--a remark that was followed by an awkward silence. Married to another man she would undoubtedly have had ten or fifteen children, for she was born to such a rôle.

“That’s how I met Elmer,” she said brightly, “singing in the choir. I used to sing alto, and he sang bass. He sat right behind me and his foot....”

“Mabelle!” said Elmer.

She veered aside from the history of a courtship which always engaged her with a passionate interest. “Well, I’ve always noticed that lots of things begin in church choirs. There was that Bunsen woman who ran off with....”

Emma trod upon her, once more throttling her flow of reminiscences.

“That’s right, Naomi,” she said, “it’ll help pass the time while you’re waiting.” And then, polishing her spoon with her napkin (an action which she always performed ostentatiously as an implication upon the character of Mabelle’s housekeeping) she said, “By the way, he’s planned a Sunday night service which is to be given over entirely to you and Naomi--Philip. Think of that. It’s quite an honor.” (She would sit well down in front that night where she could breathe in all the glory.) “I told him, of course, that you’d be delighted to do it.”

“Yes,” said Naomi, “he spoke to me about it. We’ll tell our experiences.” The prospect of so much glory kindled a light in the pale eyes--the light of memories of revival meetings when she had been the great moving force.

Then Philip spoke for the first time. “I won’t do it--I’m through with all that.”

There was a horrible silence, broken only by the clatter of a fork dropped by little Ethel on her plate.

“What do you mean?”

“I told you all that before. I thought you must have understood by now. I can’t go on saying it forever.”

“But, Philip ... you can’t refuse a good man like the Reverend Castor. You can’t when he’s been so kind. He always prayed for you and Naomi every Sunday, publicly, as if you were our special missionaries.”

There was only silence from Philip. The dark jaw had hardened suddenly.

“When we were all looking forward to it so much,” added Emma.

Then suddenly there came to him a faint suspicion--shadowy and somewhat shameful--of what it was all about. They were looking forward to an orgy of public notice and glory, to sitting bathed in the reflected light while he talked about Africa to a congregation of faithful admirers. He even suspected that this was the reason they were so determined to ship him back to Africa. They would find glory in his sufferings. He was angry suddenly, even hostile.

“You can tell him I won’t do it.”

“But, Philip, you must tell him yourself.”

“I don’t want to see him.”

Here Uncle Elmer took a hand, using the familiar tactics. “Of course, I can understand that--Philip’s not wanting to see him.” He grimaced suddenly at Emma to let him manage it. “I’ll speak to Reverend Castor myself. I’ll explain about Philip’s condition.”

For a second Philip grew hot with anger; he even pushed back his chair from the table as if to rise and leave. It was, oddly enough, Aunt Mabelle who restrained him. He fancied he caught a sudden twinkle in her round eyes, and the anger subsided.

Another painful silence followed, in which Rose, the negro maid-of-all-work, placed the Floating Island violently before Aunt Mabelle to be served. The room grew darker and darker, and presently Uncle Elmer said, “I suppose, Philip, if you intend to stay here you’ll be looking for some sort of work. It will mean, of course, starting life all over again.”

“Yes.”

“Of course you could teach--a young man with a good education like yours. It cost your mother a lot of work and trouble to educate you.”

“Yes.”

“But if you can’t get such work right away, I could make a place in the factory for you. Of course,” and here Uncle Elmer smiled his most condescending smile, “of course, with your kind of training you wouldn’t be much good at first. You’d have to learn the business from the ground up. You could begin in the shipping department.”

It was the first time any of them had admitted even a chance of his not returning to Africa; but they did not mean to yield, for Emma said, “That perhaps would help him over this nervous trouble.”

And then Philip shattered everything with an unexpected announcement. It was as if a bomb had exploded in the dust and shadows beneath the table.

“I’ve already got a job,” said Philip. “I’m going to work to-night at midnight.”

“To-night--at midnight?” asked Emma. “What on earth do you mean?”

“I’m going to work in the Mills. I’ve got a job.”

“The Mills! You’re crazy. What do you mean--the Mills?”

“I mean the Mills,” said Philip, looking at his plate. “It’s all been settled.”

Suddenly Naomi began to cry, at first silently, and then more and more noisily, as if all the dammed emotions of months had given way. Emma rose to comfort her, and Aunt Mabelle, murmuring, “Oh, dear! Oh, dear!” helplessly pushed the water-pitcher across the table. Little Ethel, conscious of the strain of the whole meal, and frightened by the outburst of hysterics, began to cry too, so that Aunt Mabelle became occupied in comforting her.

Philip, able to stand it no longer, rose and, flinging back his chair, said, “Damn!” in a loud voice, and walked out of the house. His swearing moved Naomi to new outbursts. She began to cry about the Englishwoman--the source of all her troubles.

It was all horrible, and it was the last time that Philip ever entered his uncle’s house.

When he returned late that night he found them all waiting for him in the parlor, ready to attack once more, but they accomplished nothing. He went upstairs and changed his clothes. When he came down, he was dressed for the Mills in an old pair of trousers, an old coat and a flannel shirt. Aunt Mabelle, round and sloppy, was standing in the ghoulish light of the green lamp. The others were all seated in the parlor gloomily, as if brooding over the problem of a daughter gone astray.

From the shadows, Aunt Mabelle seized his arm, “Is it true? Is Naomi going to have a little baby?”

Philip looked at her with a sudden astonishment. “No,” he said savagely. “Who gave you such an idea?”

Aunt Mabelle seemed to shrink into herself, all softness and apology. “I didn’t know ... I just couldn’t understand a woman carrying on like that if she wasn’t.”

7

It was more than an hour before the midnight shift began at the Mills, and during that hour Philip walked, sometimes running, along the empty streets, through the falling snow, all unconscious of the cold. He was for a time like a madman living in an unreal world, where all values were confused, all emotions fantastic and without base: in his tired brain everything was confused--his love for his mother, his hatred for his uncle, his pity for Naomi, and his resentment at all three of them for the thing they were trying to do. He wanted to run away where he might never see any of them again, yet to run away seemed to him a cowardly thing which solved nothing. Besides, if he ran away, he would never see Mary Conyngham, and Mary had in some odd fashion become fixed in his mind, an unescapable part of the whole confusion. He _must_ see Mary Conyngham, sometime, in some way.

He was afraid to stay, depressed by the feeling that whenever he returned to the house, he was certain to find them there--waiting, watching him. Why, a man could be driven to insanity by people like that who treated him always as if he were mad.

But worst of all, he had no longer any faith in God: there was nothing of that miraculous essence which seemed to take from one’s shoulders all the burden of doubt and responsibility. He couldn’t say any longer, “I will leave it to God. He will devise a way. Whatever happens, He will be right. I must accept His way.” He knew, sharply, completely, for the first time, that a faith must be born in himself, that he had taken up his own life to mold in his own fashion: there was no longer that easy refuge in a God, Who would arrange everything. If he had trusted to God now he would have been on his way to Africa, disposed of, not by God, but by the hands of his mother and Naomi and Uncle Elmer.

He could be a coward and weak no longer.

After he had gone a long way he found himself on a height that seemed strange to him, in that part of the Town which lay just above the Flats. It was not strange, of course, for he had stood on the same spot a hundred times before. It was strange only because he was in an odd fashion a new person, born again, a different Philip from the one who had stood there as a boy.

The sight that lay spread out below him suddenly brought a kind of peace: he stopped running, and grew calm and, watching it, he succumbed slowly to its spell. By night, the hard, angular lines of that smoky world melted into a blue mystery, pierced and spotted here and there by lights--the great blue-white lights of the arc-lights in the Mill yards, the leaping scarlet flames that crowned the black furnaces, the yellow lights plumed with steam of the great locomotives moving backward and forward like shuttles weaving a vast carpet with the little signal-lights, red and yellow and mauve and green, set like jewels in a complicated design. In the darkness the grim blacks and grays took on color. Color and light lay reflected from the canopy of smoke and steam that hung above the whole spectacle. Piercing the glow of light, rose the black columns of the chimneys and furnaces.

Above it all rose the endless sound of pounding, like the distant booming of a gigantic surf, pierced now and again by the raucous, barbaric squeals of a locomotive.

Halted and given poise by the sight, he stood for a long time looking down into the very center of the roaring hive, forgetting himself suddenly and all his fantastic troubles; and slowly an odd thing happened to him. He felt strong: he wasn’t any longer puzzled and afraid. It was as if there lay in the turbulent scene some intoxicating sense of power which took the place of his missing faith. The spectacle beneath him became alive with a tremendous sense of vitality and force that he had not found in all his mystical groping toward God. This thing that lay below him was real, he knew, real in a solid, earthly fashion, created by men in the face of hostile Nature, free of any weak dependence upon a Power which at best had only a doubtful existence. Yet the awful power of this world created by the feeble hand of man was in an odd fashion like the power of the lake, the forest, the sounds of life on the hill at Megambo.

Hazily there came to him the feeling that here lay his salvation, and presently he was overcome by an intense desire to plunge deep into the very midst of the whirling maelstrom of noise and heat and light and power.

Hurrying, he descended the hill, crossing the little river of oil and corruption, passing a great open space covered with cinders, beneath the white glare of lights hanging high above him, until he came at last to a high fence and a gate where he explained who he was and showed his card. He had an odd feeling that he should have said simply, “I have come here to save myself,” as if the Italian gatekeeper would have known what he meant.

Inside this barrier the sound of pounding grew more and more violent. He went past one cavernous shed and another and another until he came to the one marked with a gigantic number in white paint--17. The yard, the shed, all the world about him was swarming with men--big, raw-boned men with high cheekbones, little, swarthy men, black men, men with flat, Kalmuck noses, some going towards the sheds, some moving away from them. Those who moved homeward were so black with sweat and soot that one could not tell which were negroes and which were white.

Stepping through a doorway, he found himself in a vast cavern echoing with sound, that reached up and up until its height became lost in smoke and shadows. High up, near the top, great cranes with white lights like piercing eyes, and tiny, black figures like ants climbing over them, moved ceaselessly back and forth, picking up tons of metal and putting it down again with a tremendous clatter. Here and there along the sides stood furnaces out of which men were drawing from time to time great piles of metal all rosy-white with heat. Flames leaped out of the ovens, licking the sides and casting fantastic shadows over the powerful, half-naked figures of the workers. The gigantic sound of hammering reverberated through the black cavern.

After a moment Philip addressed a thin, swarthy man with burning eyes. “Where is Krylenko?” he asked. But the man understood no English. “Krylenko,” he repeated, shouting, above the din, “Krylenko.”

The thin man grinned. “Oh, Krylenko,” and, pointing, indicated the figure of a powerful, blond man, who stood leaning on a crowbar before an oven a little way off. He was, like the others, naked to the waist, and his white skin was already streaked with soot and sweat. When he turned, Philip saw that he was young, younger even than himself, and that his eyes were blue beneath a great mop of hair so yellow that it had the appearance of having been bleached. The eyes were intelligent.

In English with only a shadow of an accent he told Philip to strip off his coat and shirt and take up a crowbar. In a moment he was standing there with the others, indistinguishable among so many workers. He was half-naked, as he had been beside the fire at Megambo, and the same voluptuous sense of power swept through him. It was oddly terrifying, this cavern filled with flame and smoke and sweating men. It was oddly like the jungle.

8

Behind him in the slate-colored house Aunt Mabelle waited, yawning and wishing for bed, while Elmer and Emma and Naomi sat in silence, pondering whether their battle had been completely lost. They sat in silence, and Naomi sometimes dried her red-rimmed eyes and sobbed, because there was nothing to say, nothing to do. It was all so much worse than they had expected. With Philip living, as one might have said, in hiding, life could still be endured, and one could go on pretending, pretending, pretending, that he was merely ill, and one day would go back to Megambo to the glory and justification of them all. No one of them really believed any longer in the pretense of Philip’s illness. Tacitly they would pretend to believe it because it was a good weapon: they would not even admit their doubts to each other. But from the moment he sprang up from Uncle Elmer’s table they knew that he was quite in his right mind, and knew exactly what he meant to do. He was in his right mind, but he was a strange, unmanageable Philip.

And now he had disgraced them in a new and shameful way by going to work, not in an office over columns of figures, or even into a polite business such as Uncle Elmer’s pump works, but by plunging straight into the Flats, into the Mills to work with the Hunkies and Dagoes. It was a thing no American had ever done. It was almost as if he had committed theft or murder.

After they had sat thus for more than hour, always beneath the larky gaze of the “late” Mr. Downes, Uncle Elmer rose at last and making himself very thin and stiff as a poker, he said, “Well, Em, I’ve decided one thing. If Philip doesn’t come to his senses within two weeks, I’m through with him forever. You can tell him that--tell him I give him just two weeks, not an hour more--and then I’m through with him. After that I never want to see him again, or hear his name spoken. And when he gets into trouble from his wicked ways, tell him not to come to me for help.”

He expected a response of some sort from his sister, but there was only silence, while she sat grimly regarding the carpet. It seemed that he felt a sudden need for an answer, even though he must strike at her unchivalrously upon a wound which he must have believed cured long ago.

“You see,” he said, “all this comes of making a marriage long ago that I was against. I knew what I was talking about when I warned you against Jason Downes.”

For a moment she did not answer him, but when she spoke it was to upset him, horribly, by one of those caprices to which women are prey. It may have been because of the strain of the day, but it was more probable that there still was left the embers of her old, inexplicable passion for the worthless Mr. Downes, embers fanned into flame by the return of Philip.

She said, “Very well, Elmer. I’ll tell him, but you can consider everything over between you and me, too. I don’t want to see you again. If you can’t speak to Philip, you needn’t speak to me either. I should never have told you. You haven’t done anything at all but make things worse.”

For a time he only stared at her out of round eyes that were like blue marbles. “Well!” he said, coughing. “Well! I’ve done my duty. Don’t say that I haven’t.”

“A lot of good it’s done,” said Emma with bitterness, “a lot of good....”

She seemed, the indomitable Emma, very near to tears. In her corner Naomi snuffled so that they would take some notice of her.

He had meant to make his exit with a cold dignity, and a sense of injury, but Aunt Mabelle stood across his path. Unable any longer to keep up the battle against sleep, she was dozing peacefully in her rocking-chair, unconscious even of the scene that had taken place. She had to be prodded and spoken to sharply, and at last she wakened slowly to profuse apologies, and a walk home with a husband who never addressed her.

Her child was born the following day. Early in the evening before Elmer came home from the factory, she came to see Naomi, to discover what had happened on the night before, during her nap. (She had a way of “running in” on Naomi. They liked each other.) While she was talking the pain began, and Naomi went at once to fetch a cab. It arrived quickly, and Mabelle bustled into it, was driven home at top speed. But haste was of no use; she was carried upstairs by the cab driver and the butcher’s boy, and before the doctor arrived the child was born. Naomi had never seen anything like it: the whole business took less time than with the native women at Megambo.

“I’m like that,” Mabelle told her; “it only takes a minute.”

The child was small and rather puny, to have been born of such an amiable mountain as Mabelle. It was a boy, and they called him James after his grandfather.

Emma called on her sister-in-law and sent broths and jellies from the restaurant, but she did not speak to her brother.

She told the news to Philip when he wakened to go to work, and he looked at the floor for a long time before he said, in a low voice, “Yes--that’s fine. He wanted a boy, didn’t he?”

Something in his eye as he turned away made Emma lay a hand on his arm.

“Philip,” she said in a low voice, “if you’re _really_ never going back to Africa, I mean _really_ not going back--you might have a child of your own.”

“Yes,” he answered, “I might.”

That was all he said, but Emma in all her bluntness had divined the thought that came to him so quickly. He wanted a child with all the hunger of a deeply emotional nature; what she did not divine was that he did not want a child with Naomi for the mother. He couldn’t bear to think of it, and he went to work that night sick at heart, plunging into the work like a man leaping from an unbearable heat into a deep pool of cool water. In that fiercely masculine world, he found pleasure in the soreness of his muscles, in the very knowledge that he would, when the day was finished, fall into a deep slumber, wearied to death, to find a world in which would be no troubles.

9

Naomi, too, had suffered in her own complaining fashion. After a life passed in a fierce activity, the empty days began to hang upon her spirits like leaden weights. As far back as she could remember her life had been a part, as the daughter and then the wife of a missionary, of a struggle against heat and disease and ignorance, her soul always warmed by the knowledge that she was doing God’s work, that the pain and discomforts of the body were as nothing in comparison to the ecstasies of the soul. Save for a few weeks, she had never known life in the civilized world, and now in the midst of it there seemed to be no place for her. She tried dusting and cleaning the slate-colored house (there was no cooking to do, for they ate always at the restaurant), but there was no satisfaction in it. She came in a few days to hate it. She tried making garments to be shipped to the missions, long nightgowns with which to clothe the nakedness of savages, but her fingers were clumsy, and she found herself as indifferent a seamstress as she was a housekeeper. The tomblike silence of the house depressed her, and in these first weeks she dreaded going out, lest she should meet women who would ask after her plans. After a time she found herself seated like Aunt Mabelle for hours at a time, staring out of the windows at the passers-by.

After the scene at Uncle Elmer’s there seemed for a time no solution of their troubles. She plunged into choir singing, where her loud, flat voice filled a much-needed place; and she went without Philip to talk at the Sunday Evening Service of her experiences in Africa. Emma was there and Uncle Elmer, treating the congregation to the spectacle of a brother and sister who occupied the same pew without speaking to each other. But somehow everything was changed, and different from those glorious days so short a time before when the sound of her voice had moved whole congregations to a frantic fervor. The assembly-room now showed great gaps of empty seats, like missing teeth, along the sides and at the back. Naomi wasn’t any longer a great attraction as “the youngest missionary of the Lord in darkest Africa”: she was a woman now, a missionary like any other missionary. And there were, too, strange rumors circulating through the flock of the quarrel between Emma and her brother and other rumors that Naomi and Philip weren’t really missionaries at all any longer, but had both deserted the cause forever. There were a hundred petty bits of gossip, all magnified and sped on their way by friends of Emma who resented the reflected glory in which she bathed herself.

No, something had gone wrong, and the whole affair seemed stale and flat, even the little reception afterward. Emma, of course, stood with the Reverend Castor and Naomi, while members of the congregation filed past. Some congratulated Naomi on her work and wished her fresh successes; one or two asked questions which interested them specially--“was it true that a nigger king had as many as eighty wives?” and, “did they actually eat each other, and if so how was the cooking done?” Emma was always there, beaming with pride, and answering questions before Naomi had time to speak. The Reverend Castor from time to time took Naomi’s hand in his and patted it quite publicly, as if she were a child who had recited her first piece without forgetting a line. He kept saying, between fatherly pats, “Yes, the Lord has brought our little girl safely home once more. He has spared her for more work.”

But it was a failure: it had none of the zest of those earlier meetings, none of the hysterics and the wild singing of _Throw Out the Life Line_ and _The Ninety and Nine_, and other hymns that acted as powerful purges to the emotions. The occasion was dampened, too, by the curiosity of various old ladies regarding the absence of Philip; they kept asking question upon question, which Emma, with much practice, learned to parry skilfully. “He didn’t feel well enough to make the effort. You see, the fever clings on--that’s the worst part of it.”

For she was squeezing the last drop of triumph before the débâcle; and of course she always believed in the depths of her soul that Philip _would_ go back to Africa some day. She meant, in the end, to accomplish it as she had already accomplished the things she desired--all save the recovery of Mr. Downes.

But it was Naomi who suffered most, for behind the mild and timid exterior there lurked an ironclad egotism which demanded much of the world. It demanded more attention and enthusiasm than had been her share at the Sunday Evening Service; it demanded respect and, curiously enough, evidence of affection (it was this last rather pitiful hunger that drew her close to Aunt Mabelle). She understood well enough that Emma had no affection: what capacity for love Emma possessed was all directed toward Philip. And before many weeks had passed Naomi knew bitterly that although she lived in the same house with her husband and his mother she really occupied no more of a place in it than Essie, the poor-house slavey. But Aunt Mabelle was kind to her, and would come and sit for hours rocking and gossiping, occasions when the only interruption was the periodic cry of the pallid baby, which Mabelle stifled at once by opening the straining bombazine of her bosom and releasing the fountain of life.

This last was a spectacle which Naomi came to regard with a faint and squeamish distaste. She grew to have a passionate dislike for the pallid infant that lay gorged with milk in Mabelle’s ample lap. Even the frank and open manner of the black women had never accustomed her to the exposé in which Mabelle indulged with such an air of satisfied pride.

“I’ve always had plenty of milk,” Mabelle would say, as she settled back comfortably. “The doctors say I’ve enough for any three normal children.”

Naomi, indeed, had spent half her life in an effort to conceal black nudity in yards of cheap calico.

But deeper than any of these flurried emotions lay the shadowy knowledge that the pallid child was in a way a reproach to herself, and a vague symbol of all the distasteful things that lay before her, for she felt that sooner or later the tangle would end in bringing her to the state of a wife in reality, of facing even perhaps the business which Mabelle managed with such proud composure. In the midst of the wilderness at Megambo she was still safe, protected by the fantastic sense of honor that lay in Philip; but here in this complicated world of which she knew nothing, when each day she felt her security, her fame, her glory, slipping from under her feet, the thing drew constantly nearer and nearer. If she could not force Philip to return, the day would come when with all her glory and prestige faded and bedraggled, she would no longer be a missionary, but only Philip’s wife.

There were moments when, on the verge of hysteria, she thought of leaving them all and going back alone to Africa; but when the moments passed, she found herself strangely weak and incapable of action. For a strange and frightening thing had begun to happen. At Megambo when Philip had always been gentle and submissive, it was herself who dominated and planned. They were comrades in the work of the Lord, and Philip rarely reached the point of being irritable. In those days he had meant no more to her than the clumsy Swanson. Save that he was tied to her by law, he might have been only another worker in the mission. And now it was changed somehow; and Philip ignored her. There were whole days when he never spoke to her at all--days and nights spent in working in the black Mills and sleeping like a dead man to recover from the profound weariness that attacked him.

This new Philip frightened her in a way she had never been frightened before. She found herself, without thinking, doing little things to please him, even to attract his notice. There were still moments when, wrapping herself in the shroud of martyrdom, she flung herself, the apotheosis of injured womanhood, before him to be trampled upon; but they were not profitable moments, for they no longer had any effect upon him; and so, slowly they came to be abandoned, since it seemed silly thus to abase herself only to find that she had no audience. It frightened her, for it seemed that she was losing slowly all control of a life which had once been so neatly and thoroughly organized. She wanted desperately to regain her ancient hold over him, and in the lonely moments when Mabelle was not there she sometimes awakened in horror to find herself sitting before the gigantic walnut mirror letting down the masses of her long, straight, reddish hair, trying it in new ways, attempting to discover in what position her face seemed prettiest. And then, filled with disgust at her own wickedness, she would fling herself on the walnut bed and burst into a passion of tears and prayer, to arise at last strangely calm and comforted. Surely God would not abandon her--Naomi Potts, who had given all her life to God. Sometimes she fancied that she, instead of Philip, was the one whose brain was weak; for no sane woman could do the things she had done.

Slowly, imperceptibly, the curious power of the Mills had begun to make itself felt. It was as if Philip, returning from the Flats at noon each day, brought with him, clinging to his very clothes, traces of the fascination which they held for him. It was not that she herself felt any of the fascination, for she regarded the Mills with a growing hatred: it was only that they fixed upon Philip himself some new and tantalizing quality. She liked to see him come home at noon, hard and unshaven, blackened by soot and sweat. Sitting in her rocking-chair by the window, the sight of him as he swung along, his head bowed a little, filled her with odd flutterings of pleasant emotion. She felt at times that strange weakness which so often attacked Emma unawares--of wanting to yield and spoil him by caresses and attention. She had strange desires to fling herself down and let him trample upon her, not in the old, dramatic sense, but in a new way, which seemed to warm her whole body.

This new Philip, hard and thin, returning from the Mills with his flannel shirt open upon his bare chest, disgusted and fascinated her. And then when the knob turned and the door opened, all the little speeches she had planned, all the little friendly gestures, seemed to wither and die before his polite coldness.

He would say, “I’ll wash up and we can go right away to eat,” or “Tell Essie to bring some hot water.”

There was nothing more than that. Sometimes it seemed to her that he treated her as a servant whom he scarcely knew.

It came, at length, to the point when she spoke of it, timidly and with hot blushes, to Aunt Mabelle. She said she wanted to be kind to Philip, she wanted to be friendly with him, but somehow she couldn’t. He was so changed and cold and hard. If she could only get him back to Africa everything would be all right: they had been happy there, at least she had been, and as for Philip, he didn’t seem any happier now that he was doing what he wanted to do. He never seemed happy anywhere, not since the day they had arrived at Megambo.

Mabelle, rocking little Jimmy, listened with the passionate interest of a woman who found such a conversation fascinating. She led Naomi deeper and deeper into the mire and at last, when she had considered all the facts, she said, “Well, Naomi, it’s my opinion that you ought to have a child. Philip would like a baby. He’s that kind. I know them when I see them. Now, my Elmer hates children. They get in his way and I think they make him feel foolish and awkward, God alone knows why. But Philip’s different. He ought to have a lot of children. He’d love ’em, and it would be a tie between you.”

Naomi raised the old difficulty. “But if we go back to Africa--we can’t take a little baby there.”

“Well, you’d have to work that out, of course. Em would take care of it. She’d find time somehow. She can do anything she sets her mind to.” Naomi, it seemed, wouldn’t meet her eye and Aunt Mabelle pushed on, with the tact and grace of a walrus. “Did you ever see a doctor to find out why you hadn’t had one? A doctor can help sometimes.”

Naomi was suddenly pale and shaking. Without looking at Mabelle she said in a low voice, “I don’t have to see the doctor to find out why.”

Mabelle’s rocking-chair paused in its monotonous bobbing. “You don’t mean to say you’ve been doing sinful things to prevent it--you, Naomi Downes, a missionary!”

Naomi, wringing her hands, said, “No, I don’t know what you mean. I haven’t been doing sinful things.... I ... we couldn’t have had a baby ... we’ve--we’ve never lived together.”

The rocking-chair still remained quiescent, a posed symbol of Mabelle’s shocked astonishment. “Well, I don’t know what you mean. But it seems sinful to me if a man and wife don’t live together. What does the Bible say? Take unto yourself a wife and multiply. Look at all the begats.”

Naomi burst out, “We meant to ... some day. Only we couldn’t out there in Africa.”

“Well, you ought to have taken a chance.” Mabelle seemed outraged and angry for the first time in all Naomi’s friendship with her, and it was only after a long time that the rocking-chair began once more its unending motion. The baby, startled by a sudden cessation of the soothing motion, set up a cry and Mabelle, loosening ten of the twenty-one buttons that held together her straining basque, quieted it at once.

“What do you expect?” asked Mabelle rhetorically. “What do you expect? A man isn’t going on courting forever for nothing--especially after he’s married to a woman. He’ll get tired after a while. Philip’s a man like any other man. He’s not going on forever like this. He isn’t that kind. Any woman can tell in a glance--and he’s the kind that can wrap a woman around his thumb.” Then, being a woman whose whole philosophy was based upon her own experience, she said, “Why, even my Elmer wouldn’t stand it, like as not. He’s not much at things like that and he’s always ashamed of himself afterwards. I guess it was a kind of duty with him--still he’s a man.” And turning back again to the subject at hand, she asked, “Did you ever know about Philip’s father? Why, that man was like a rabbit. You’d better look out or you’ll lose him altogether.”

It was the longest single speech Mabelle had made in years, and after it she sat rocking herself for a long time in profound meditation. Naomi cried a little and dried her eyes, and the baby fell back into a state of coma. The chair creaked and creaked. At last Mabelle got up heavily, deposited the sleeping child on the sofa, and put on her jacket and hat.

“Take my advice, Naomi,” she said. “It can’t go on like this. If you don’t want to lose him, you’ll do what I say. I’m a good judge of men and Philip is worth keeping. He’s better than his Ma, Pa, Uncle Elmer, or any of ’em. I wish I was married to such a man.”

10

Emma in these days found relief in a vast activity. The restaurant business kept growing and growing until at last she secured a long lease on the shoe store next door and undertook the necessary alterations. She was in and out of the place a score of times a day, watching the carpenters, the plumbers and the painters, quarreling with the contractor and insisting that pipes should be placed where it was impossible to place them and pillars spaced so that there would be a permanent danger of the roof falling in upon her customers.

She was active, too, in her church work and contributed half a wagon load of cakes and pies to the annual June church fair. The Minerva Circle met at her house and Naomi was introduced to those members whom she did not know already, and so launched in a series of sewing parties which she attended in a kind of misery because on account of Philip she could not answer honestly the persistent questions of her new women “friends.” And Emma kept up as well her fervent activities as President of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, carrying war into the enemy’s country, trying to drive whisky from a country of mills and furnaces where every other corner was occupied by a saloon. She even called upon Moses Slade, Congressman of the district, and lately become a widower, in his great boxlike house set back among the trees on Park Avenue. It was an odd call which began with open hostility when she urged him to wear a white ribbon and declare himself at once on the side of God and Purity.

But Slade, being a politician, felt that Fortune had not yet sided with God and Purity, and declined the honor with a great flow of eloquence for which he was famed. There was much talk of his being chosen to represent the majority of the people, and as yet the majority seemed unfortunately (“the human race is naturally wicked and must be educated to goodness--we must not forget that, Mrs. Downes”) still on the side of gin.

He was a man of fifty, with a great stomach and massive feet and hands, who had a round, flat face and a broad, flat nose, with odd little shifty eyes. He was bald in front, but what remained of the once luxuriant black locks was now worn, loose and free, bobbed in a style which women came, shockingly, to adopt years afterward.

He received Emma in his study, a room with red walls, set round with mastodon furniture in mahogany and red leather. In the beginning he was taken aback by the vigor and power of Emma’s handsome figure.

She said to him, “The day will come, Mr. Slade, when you will have to vote on the side of purity if you wish to survive--you and all your fellow-members.”

And he replied, “That, Mrs. Downes, is what I am waiting for--a sign from the people. You may tell your members that my heart is with them but that I must not lose my head. A sign is all I’m waiting for, Mrs. Downes--only a sign.”

Emma, feeling that she had gained at least half a victory, turned the conversation to other things. They discussed the Republican chances at the coming election, and the lateness of the summer, the question, as it was called, of “smoke abatement” and, of course, the amazing growth and prosperity of the Town. They found presently that they saw eye to eye on every subject, for Emma was in her own way a born politician. Congressman Slade observed that since the death of his wife (here a deep sigh interrupted his observation) life had not been the same. To lose a woman after thirty years! Well, it made a gap that could never be filled, or at least, it was extremely unlikely that it would be filled. And now his housekeeper had left, leaving him helpless.

Emma, in her turn, sighed and murmured a few words of condolence. She knew what it was to be alone in the world. Hadn’t she been alone for more than twenty years? Ever since Mr. Downes, going to China to make a fortune for himself and his son, had been killed there. They hadn’t even found his body, so that she hadn’t even the consolation of visiting his grave. That, of course, was a great deal. Congressman Slade ought to be thankful that he had his wife’s grave. It helped. In a way, it made the thing definite. It was not like the torturing hope in which she had lived for twenty years.... Yes, more than twenty years, hoping all the while that he might not be really dead. Oh, she understood. She sympathized.

“But as to the housekeeper, Mr. Slade, don’t let that trouble you. Come and take your meals at the restaurant. I’d be delighted to have you. It would be an honor to have you eat there.”

“I’ll take up your offer,” he said, slapping his knee almost jovially. “I’ve heard how excellent it is. But, of course, I’ll pay for it. I couldn’t think of it otherwise.”

For a moment, there appeared in the manner of Emma the faintest hint of an ancient coquetry, long forgotten and grown a little stale. It was a mere shadow, something that lurked in the suspicious bobbing of the black ostrich plumes in her hat.

“Oh, don’t think of that,” she said. “It would be a pleasure--an honor.”

She rose and shook his hand. “Good-by, Mr. Slade, and thank you for letting me waste so much of your time.”

“It was a pleasure, madam, a pleasure,” and going to the door, he bowed her out of his widowed house.

* * * * *

When she had gone, Moses Slade returned to his study and before going back to his work he sat for a long time lost in thought. The shadow of a smile encircled the rather hard, virtuous lips. He smiled because he was thinking of Emma, of her fine figure and healthy, rosy face, of the curve of the full bosom, and the hips from which her dress flowed away like the waters of a fountain.

From the very moment of Minnie’s death--indeed, even long before, during the dragging, heavy-footed years of her invalidism--he had been thinking, with a deep sense of guilt, of a second marriage. The guilt had faded away by now, for Minnie had been in her grave for two summers and he could turn his thoughts in such a direction, freely and with a clear conscience. After all, he was a fine, vigorous man, in his prime. People talked about fifty-five as old age--a time when a man should begin to think of other things; but people didn’t know until they _were_ fifty-five. He had talked like that himself once a long while ago. And now, look at him, as good a man as ever he was, and better, when it came to brains and head. Why, with all the experience he had had....

As he sat there, talking to himself, his earnestness became so great that his lips began to move, forming the words as if he were holding a conversation, even arguing, with another Moses Slade, who sat just across from him in the monstrous chair on the opposite side of the desk. He must, he felt, convince that other Moses Slade.

He went on talking. Look at Mrs. Downes! What a fine woman! With such noble--(yes, noble was the only word)--such noble curves and such a fine, high color. She, too, was in her prime, a fine figure of a woman, handsomer now than she had been as a skinny young thing of eighteen. There was a woman who would make a wife for a man like himself. And she had sense, too, running a business with such success. She’d be a great help to a man in politics.

He began prodding his memory about her. He remembered the story of her long widowhood, of Mr. Downes’ mysterious death. Yes, and he even remembered Downes himself, a whipper-snapper, who was no good, and had a devastating way with women. (Memories of a hot-blooded youth began to rise and torment him.) Well, she was better off without him, a no-good fellow like that. And what a brave fight she’d made! She was a fine woman. She had a son, too, a son who was a missionary, and--and--Why, come to think of it, hadn’t the son given it up and come home? That didn’t sound so good, but you could keep the son out of the way.

The truth was that Moses Slade really wanted a skinny young thing of twenty, but a Congressman who wrote “Honorable” before his name couldn’t afford to make a fool of himself. He couldn’t afford to marry a silly young thing, or ever get “mixed up” with a woman. A man of fifty-five who kept wanting to pinch arms and hips had to be careful. If he could only pinch, just one pinch, some one like--well, some one as plump as Mrs. Downes, he’d feel like a boy again. He felt that youth would flow back again into him through the very tips of the pinching fingers. It wasn’t much--just wanting to pinch a girl. Why did people make such a fuss about it?

He almost convinced himself that a full-blown rose like Emma Downes was far better than a skinny young thing. There was, too, of course, the Widow Barnes, who lived next door, still in her prime, and with a large fortune as well.

He took up the Congressional Record, and tried to lose himself in its mountains and valleys of bombast and boredom, but in a little while the book lay unnoticed on his heavy thighs and he was arguing with the other Moses Slade across the desk.

Suddenly, as if he had been roused from a deep sleep, he again found himself talking aloud. “Well,” he thought, “something has got to be done about this.”

11

Meanwhile Emma, walking briskly along beneath the maples of Park Avenue, found her mind all aglitter with interesting projects. She often said that she always felt on the crest of the wave, but to-day it was even better than that; she felt almost girlish. Something had happened to her, while she sat with Moses Slade, consoling him and accepting his consolations. He had noticed her. She marked the look in his eye and noticed the fingers that drummed impatiently the fine edge of his black serge mourning trousers. A man behaved like that only when a woman made him nervous and uneasy. And as she walked, there kept coming back to her in a series of pictures all the adventures of a far distant youth, memories of sleighrides and church suppers, of games of Truth and Forfeits. There was a whole gallery of young men concerned in the flow of memories--young men, tragically enough, whom she might have married. They were middle-aged or oldish now, most of them as rich and distinguished as Moses Slade himself. Somehow she had picked the poorest of the lot, and so missed all the security that came of a sound husband like Slade.

Well (she thought), she wasn’t sorry in a way, for she had been happy, and it wasn’t too late even now to have the other thing--wealth, security. She’d made a success of her business, and could quit it now with the honest satisfaction of knowing it hadn’t defeated her--quit it, or, better still, pass it on to Philip and Naomi, if he were still sure that he wouldn’t go back to Megambo. Perhaps that was the way out--to let him take it off her shoulders, and so bring him out of those filthy mills where he was disgracing them all. But then (she thought), what would she do with no work, nothing on which to center her life? It wasn’t as if she were tired: she’d never felt as well in her life as in this moment moving along under the slightly sooty maples. No, she couldn’t settle down to doing nothing, sitting at home rocking like Naomi and Mabelle. (She fairly snorted at the thought of Mabelle.) Of course, if she married again, married some one like Moses Slade--not Moses Slade, of course (she scarcely knew him), but some one like him. Such a thing wasn’t impossible, and with a husband of his age marriage couldn’t be very unpleasant. She could go to Washington and do much good for such causes as temperance and woman suffrage.

And then, abruptly, her thoughts were interrupted by the voice of some one speaking to her.

“How do you do, Mrs. Downes?” Looking up, she saw it was Mary Watts ... now Mary Conyngham ... looking pale and rather handsome in her widow’s clothes.

“Why, Mary Watts, I haven’t seen you in ever so long.”

There was a certain gush in Emma’s manner that was too violent. The cordiality of Mary Watts had, too, the note of one who disliked the object of her politeness. (Emma thought, “She usually pretends not to see me. She’s only stopped me because she wants to ask about Philip.”)

“I’ve been away,” said Mary; “I had the children in the South. That’s why you haven’t seen me.”

“Yes, now that you speak of it, I do remember reading it in the paper.”

And Mary, who never possessed any subtlety, went straight to the point. “I hear,” she said, “that Philip has come home.”

“Yes, he’s been home for some time.”

“Is it true that he’s working in the Mills ... as a day laborer?”

(“What business is it of yours?” thought Emma.)

“Yes, it’s a notion he had. I think he wants to find out what it’s like. He thinks a missionary ought to know about such things.”

“I suppose he’ll be going back to Africa soon?”

“Oh, yes. I think he’s impatient to be back.”

“His wife’s here, too?”

“Yes, she’s here.”

“I’ve never met her. Perhaps I’d better call.”

“Yes, she’s always there. She doesn’t go out much.”

There was an awkward pause and Mary, looking away suddenly, said, “Well, good-by, Mrs. Downes. Remember me to Philip.”

“Of course,” said Emma. “Good-by.”

Once after they had parted, Emma looked back to watch Mary. She looked handsome (Emma thought), but sad and tired. Perhaps it was the trouble she had had with Conyngham and Mamie Rhodes ... carrying on so. Still, she didn’t feel sorry for Mary; you couldn’t feel sorry for a girl who had such superior airs. She was always stuck-up--Mary Watts; and she’d better not try any of her tricks on Philip.

Her thoughts flew back to Philip. Something had to be done about him. He’d been home for nine months now, and people were beginning to talk; they were even beginning to find out about the Mills. (Why, Mary Watts knew it already.) Being so busy with the new addition to the restaurant and the church and the Union affairs, she hadn’t done her best by him these last few weeks; she’d been neglecting her duty in a way. It wasn’t too late for him to go back to Megambo--why, he might still become Bishop of East Africa. If he didn’t, it would go to that numbskull, Swanson, as first in the field.

And instead of that, he was working like a common Dago in the Mills.

And Naomi, she wasn’t any help at all. Funny, too, when she’d always thought Naomi could look out for herself and manage Philip. Instead, she seemed to grow more spineless every day--almost as if she were siding with Philip. She was getting just like Mabelle, sitting around all day in a trance, rocking. Something had to be done.

Then, for no reason at all, unless it happened through that train of memories fired by the behavior of Moses Slade, which led back to her youth, she thought of Naomi’s preciously guarded virginity.

Perhaps (she thought) if they had a child, if Philip and Naomi lived together as man and wife, they would all have a greater hold upon him. A man with a _real_ wife and children wasn’t as free as a man like Philip, who had no responsibilities (now that he’d become so strange), save those imposed by the law. Perhaps he would come to love Naomi and do things to please her. He’d come in time to want things from her. A thing like that did give you a hold over a man: it was a precarious hold, and you had to be very clever about it, but it was something, after all. If there was a child, she (Emma) could take charge of it when Philip and Naomi went back to the place God had ordained for them.

As she walked, the idea grew and grew. Why (she wondered) hadn’t it occurred to her before, as the one chance left? Naomi would hate it, and probably refuse at first, but she must be made to understand that it was her duty, not only as a wife (there were plenty of passages in the Bible to prove it), but as an agent of God. Why, it was almost another case of Esther and Ahasuerus, or even Judith and Holofernes. Look what they had done for God!

Yes, there was a chance of managing Philip, after all. If they fixed on him such new responsibilities, it might bring him to his senses.

Suddenly, in the midst of these torrential thoughts, she found herself at the very door of her own house, and, entering, she called out, “Naomi! Naomi!” in her loud, booming voice.

From her rocking-chair by the window, Naomi rose and answered her. She had been crying, perhaps all the afternoon, and her pale eyes were swollen and rimmed with red.

“Naomi,” she said, flinging aside her hat and jacket, “I’ve had a new idea about Philip. I think we’ve been wrong in our way of managing him.”

12

At the same moment, Philip was walking along the road that led out into the open country, talking, talking, talking to Mary Conyngham.

He had met her in a fashion the most natural, for he had gone to walk in the part of the town where Mary lived. There were odd, unsuspected ties between the people who lived on the Hill and those who lived in the Flats, and he had come to know of her return from Krylenko, his own foreman; for Krylenko had heard it from Irene Shane, who had seen Mary herself at the school that Irene kept alive in the midst of the Flats. Krylenko told him the news while they sat eating their breakfast out of tin pails and talking of Irene Shane. Once he heard it, there was no more peace for Philip: he thought about her while he worked, pulling and pushing great sheets of red-hot metal, while the thick smoke blew in at the windows of the cavernous shed. All through the morning he kept wondering what she was like, whether she had changed. He kept recalling her face, oval and dark, with good-humored blue eyes and dark hair pulled back in a knob at the back of her small head. That was the way he remembered her, and he tormented himself with doubts as to whether she had changed. She wasn’t a girl any longer; she was the mother of two children, and a widow. She had been through troubles with her husband.

At lunch he scarcely spoke to Naomi and his mother, and he never uttered the name of Mary Conyngham, for something made him cautious: he could not say what it was, save that he felt he oughtn’t to speak of her before the other two. He had to see Mary Conyngham; he had to talk with her, to talk about himself. He couldn’t go on any longer, always shut in, always imprisoned in the impenetrable cell of his own loneliness. It was Mary Conyngham who could help him; he was certain of it.

He left Naomi at the door of the restaurant, telling her that he meant to go for a walk. He would return later to sleep. No, he didn’t feel tired. He thought a walk would do him good.

And then, when he had left her, he walked toward the part of the town where Mary lived, and when he reached her street, he found that he hadn’t the courage even to pass her house, for fear she might see him and wonder why he was walking about out there on the borders of the town. For an hour he walked, round and round the block encircling her house, but never passing it. It wasn’t only that she might think him a fool, but she might be changed and hard. If she had changed as much as he himself had changed, it would only be silly and futile, the whole affair. But he couldn’t go on forever thus walking round and round, because people would think him mad, as mad as his mother and Naomi believed him.

Crossing the street, he looked up, waiting for a wagon to pass, and there on the opposite side stood Mary Conyngham. She did not see him at once, perhaps (he thought) because she had not expected to see him, and so had not recognized him. She was wearing a short skirt, known as a “rainy daisy,” though it was a bright, clear day. She looked pale, he thought, and much older--handsomer, too, than she had once been. All the tomboyish awkwardness had vanished. She was a woman now. For a moment he had a terrible desire to turn and run, to hide himself. It was a ridiculous thought, and it came to nothing, for as the wagon passed she saw him, and, smiling, she crossed the street to meet him. His heart was beating wildly, and the rare color came into his dark cheeks.

“Philip,” she said, “I’ve been wondering where you were.”

It gave him the oddest sensation of intimacy, as if the meeting had been planned, and he had been waiting all this time impatiently.

They shook hands, and Mary said, “I’ve just left your mother.” And Philip blushed again, feeling awkward, and silly, like a boy in his best clothes, who didn’t know what to do with his hands. He was dressed like a workman in an old suit and blue cotton shirt.

Suddenly he plunged. “I came out here on purpose. I wanted to see you.”

“Have you been to the house?”

“No,” he hesitated. “No ... I’ve just been walking round, hoping to run into you.”

It was five years since they had last seen each other, and longer than that since they had really been friends. Talk didn’t come easily at first. Standing there on the corner, they made conversation for a time--silly, banal conversation--when each of them wanted to talk in earnest to the other.

At last Philip said, “Are you in a hurry? Could I come home with you?”

“No, I’m not in a hurry. I’ve left the children with Rachel.... Rachel is my sister-in-law. We share expenses on the house. But I don’t think we better go home. Are you tired?” she asked abruptly.

“No.”

“Because if you aren’t, we might go for a walk. I was afraid you might be, after working all night at the Mills.”

For a moment Philip looked at her sharply. “How did you know I was in the Mills?”

She laughed. “Krylenko told me. I saw him yesterday. He was helping Irene teach English to a lot of dirty and very stupid Poles.”

“He’s a nice fellow--Krylenko. I didn’t know there were such men down there.”

“Nobody knows it without going down there. Shall we walk a bit?”

They set out along Milburn Street, past the row of houses surrounded by green leaves and bright trees. It was the hill farthest from the Mills and the soot seldom drifted so far. As they drew nearer and nearer to the open fields, the queer sense of restraint began a little to melt away. They even laughed naturally as they had done years before when they had played together.

“It was a funny thing,” said Philip. “I’ve been wanting to see you ever since I came back. That’s why I came out here this afternoon--on a chance of meeting you. I came as soon as I heard you were home.”

He was walking with his hands clasped behind him, his dark brows puckered into a fine line with the effort he was making. He didn’t know how to talk to women, at least women like Mary, and, in spite of their old, old friendship, he felt shy with her. With her dead husband and her two children, she seemed so much older and wiser. Some odd, new complication had entered their relationship which made it all difficult and confused. Yet she seemed to take it calmly, almost sadly.

“Tell me,” she said presently. “Philip, tell me about yourself. You don’t mean to go back?” She halted and looked at him squarely.

“No, I don’t mean to go back.” And all at once he found himself pouring out to her the whole story. He told her how he hated it all from the beginning, how he had begun to doubt, how the doubts had tortured him; how he had prayed and prayed, only to find himself slipping deeper and deeper. He told her of the morning by the lake, of the terrible night of the drums, of the coming of the queer Englishwoman, and the fight that followed, in which his last grain of faith had gone. Suddenly, he realized that he was telling the whole story for the first time. He had never spoken of it before to any one. It was as if all the while, without knowing it, he had been saving it for Mary Conyngham.

“And so,” she said, “you’ve come back to stay. Do you think you’ll stay?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know. There’s nothing else to do.”

“And why did you go to work in the Mills?”

“I don’t know. At least, I didn’t know at the beginning.”

“Was it because you wanted to work among the people in the Flats?”

“No ... no ... I’m through with meddling in other people’s lives.”

There was a bitterness in his tone which Mary must have guessed had some relation to the woman she had left a little while before; only Philip had always adored his mother. Emma Downes boasted of it.

“I think I went into the Mills,” he was saying, “because I had to find something solid to get hold of ... and that was the solidest thing I could find. It’s awfully solid, Mary. And it’s beginning to do the trick. At first I hadn’t faith in anything, least of all myself, and now I’ve got something new to take its place. It’s a kind of faith in man--a faith in yourself. I couldn’t go on always putting everything into the hands of God. It’s like cheating--and people don’t do it really. They only pretend they do. If they left it all to God, I suppose things would work out somehow; but they don’t. They insist on meddling, too, and when a thing succeeds then God is good and he’s answered their prayers, and if it fails, then it is God’s Will. But all the while they’re meddling themselves and making a mess of things.”

“And you don’t mean ever to go back to the church?”

For a moment he didn’t answer. Then he said in a low voice, “No ... I don’t believe any longer--at least, not in the way of the church. And the church--well, the church is dead so far as the world is concerned. It’s full of meddling old women. It might disappear to-morrow and the world would go on just the same. That’s one thing about the Flats.... Down there you get down to brass tacks. You know how little all the hubbub really means.”

“Do people know how you feel?”

“No, they just think I’m a little mad. I’ve never told any one any of this, Mary, until now.”

She looked at him shyly. “Your blue shirt suits you better than your black clothes, Philip. I always thought you weren’t made for a preacher.”

He blushed. “Perhaps ... anyway, I feel natural in the blue shirt.” He halted again. “You know, Mary, it’s been the queerest thing--the whole business. It’s as if I never really existed before. It’s like being born again--it’s painful and awful.”

They were quite clear of the Town now. It had sunk down behind the rolling hills. They sat down side by side presently on the stone wall of the bridge that crossed the brook. The water here was clear and clean. It turned to oil further on, after it had passed through the Flats. For a time they sat in silence, watching the sun slipping down behind the distant woods that crowned Trimble’s Hill. In the far distance the valley had turned misty and blue.

Presently Mary sighed suddenly, and asked, “And your wife? What’s to be done about her? She’s a missionary, too, and she still believes, doesn’t she?”

A shadow crossed Philip’s face. “Yes, that’s the trouble. It’s made such an awful mess. She’s always lived out there. She’s never known any other life, and she doesn’t know how to get on here. That’s the trouble. Sometimes I think she ought to go back ... alone, without me. She’d be happier there.”

For a moment there was a silence, and Philip fancied that she began to say something, and then halted abruptly; but he couldn’t be certain. It may have only been the noise of the brook. He looked at her sharply, but she rose and turned her back.

“We’d better start back,” she said. “It will be getting dark.”

For a long time they walked side by side in silence--an odd silence in which they seemed to be talking to each other all the while. It was Mary who actually spoke.

“But you don’t mean to go on forever in the Mills? Have you thought what you want to do?”

Again he waited for a long time before answering her. It must have seemed to Mary that he was being shy and cautious with her, that despite the pouring out of his story, there was still a great deal that he had kept hidden away. He had the air of a man who was afraid of confidences.

At last he said, “I don’t know whether I ought to speak of it, but I do know what I want to do. It sounds ridiculous, but what I want to do is ... is ... paint.” He blurted it out as if it required an immense effort, as if he were confessing a sin.

“Pictures?” asked Mary. “Do you know anything about it?”

“No ... not very much. I’ve always wanted to, in a way. A long time ago, when I was a boy, I used to spend all my time drawing things.” His voice fell a little. “But as I grew older, it seemed foolish ... and the other thing came up ... and I did that instead. You see, I’ve been drawing a bit lately. I’ve been drawing in the Flats--the engines and cranes and chimneys. They always ... well, they fascinated me as far back as I can remember.” When she did not answer, he said, “You remember ... I used to draw when I was a kid....”

For a time she considered this sudden, fantastic outburst, and presently she said, “Yes, I remember. I still have the picture you made of Willie, the pony ... and the tree-house....” And then after another pause. “Have you thought about a teacher?”

“No ... but ... don’t think I’m conceited, Mary ... I don’t want a teacher. I want to work it out for myself. I’ve got an idea.”

She asked him if she might see some of the drawings.

“I haven’t shown them to any one,” he said. “I don’t want to yet ... because they aren’t good enough. When I do a good one ... the kind I know is right and what I meant it to be, I’ll give it to you.”

His secret, he realized suddenly, was out--the secret he had meant to tell no one, because he was in a strange way ashamed of it. It seemed so silly for any one in the Town to think of painting.

The odd, practical streak in Mary asserted itself. “Have you got paints? You can’t get them here in the Town.”

“No ... I haven’t needed them. But I’ll want them soon. I want to begin soon.”

“I’m going to Cleveland on Monday,” she said. “I’ll get them there ... everything you need. You’d never find them here.”

And then, since he had let escape his secret, he told her again of the morning by the lake at Megambo, and the sudden, fierce desire to put down what he saw in the procession of black women carrying water to the young plantations. He tried to tell her how in a way it had given him a queer sense of religious ecstasy.

It was almost dark now, and the fragrance of the garden on the outskirts of the Town filled the air.

Mary smiled suddenly. “You know,” she said, “I don’t think you really hated Africa at all. It wasn’t Africa you hated. You loved it. And I don’t think you mean to stay here all your life. Some day you’ll be going back.”

He left her in the shadows as the older of her children, a tow-headed girl of three, came down the path to meet her, calling out her name.

On returning to the slate-colored house, he opened the door to find Naomi awaiting him.

“Supper is ready,” she said. “I sent Essie to the restaurant for it, so you wouldn’t have to walk up there.”

He thanked her, and she answered, “I thought you’d be tired after walking so long.”

“Thank you. I did take a long walk. I wanted to get into the open country.”

While they ate, sitting opposite each other, beneath the glow of the dome painted with wild-roses, he noticed that she was changed. She seemed nervous and uneasy: she kept pressing him to eat more. She was flushed and even smiled at him once or twice. He tried to answer the smile, but his face seemed made of lead. The effort gave him pain.

Suddenly he thought, “My God! She is trying to be nice to me!” And he was frightened without knowing why. It was almost as if, for a moment, the earth had opened and he saw beneath his feet a chasm, vague and horrible, and sinister.

He thought, “What can have changed her?” For lately there had grown up between them a slow and insinuating enmity that was altogether new. There were moments when he had wanted to turn away and not see her at all.

She poured more coffee for him, and he became aware suddenly that his nerves were on edge, that he was seeing everything with a terrible clarity--the little freckles on the back of her hand, the place where the cup was chipped, the very figures and tiny discolorations of the ornate wallpaper.

“Your mother won’t be home till late,” she said. “She’s gone to report her talk with Mr. Slade to the ladies of the Union.”

He wondered why she had told him something which he already knew. But he was kind to her, and tried not to seem different, in any way, from what he had always been. He was sorry for Naomi more than ever since her life had become such an empty, colorless thing.

At last he was finished, and thanking her again, he left her helping Essie to clear away the table, and went upstairs with a strange feeling that she had stayed behind to help only because she didn’t want to be alone with him.

Undressing, he lay for a long time in the darkness, unable to sleep because of the acuteness which seemed to attack all his senses. He heard every small noise in the street--the cries of the children playing in the glare of the arc-lights, the barking of dogs, the distant tinkle of a piano. Slowly, because he was very tired, the sounds grew more and more distant, and he fell asleep.

He slept profoundly, as a man drowned in the long exhaustion of the Mills. He was awakened by something touching him gently at first, as if it were part of a dream. It touched him again and then again, and slowly he drifted back to consciousness. Being a man of nerves, he awakened quickly, all at once. There was no slow drowsiness and clinging mists of slumber.

He opened his eyes, but the room was in complete blackness, and he saw nothing. It must have been late, for even the sounds of the street had died away, to leave only the long pounding of the Mills that was like the silence. Somewhere, close at hand, there was a sound of breathing. For a second he thought, “I have died in my sleep.”

Then the thing touched him again. It was a bit of metal, cold and rigid, not longer than a finger. And in a sudden flash he knew what it was--a metal hair-curler. The thing brushed his forehead. He knew then, quickly. It was Naomi come to him to be his wife. She was bending over him. The darkness hid her face. She made no sound. It was unreal, like something out of a dream.

13

In the Mills Philip had come to know the men who worked at his oven, one by one, slowly, for they were at first suspicious of him as a native from the Hills who came to work among them. It was Krylenko more than any of them who broke down the barrier which shut him away from all those others. Krylenko, he came presently to understand, was a remarkable fellow. He was young, not perhaps more than twenty-five or six, a giant even among the big Poles, who worked with the strength of three ordinary men. There was a magnificence about his great body, with its supple muscles flowing beneath the blond, white skin. Naked to the waist, and leaning on his great bar of iron, there were times when he seemed a statue cut in the finest Parian marble. It was this odd, physical splendor that gave him a prestige and the power of leadership, which would have come to nothing in a stupid man; but Krylenko was intelligent, and hidden within the intelligence there lay a hard kernel of peasant shrewdness. He knew what it was he wanted and he was not to be turned aside; he was, Philip had come to understand, partly the creation of Irene Shane, that pale, transparent wraith, who spent all her days between the Flats and the great, gloomy house known as Shane’s Castle. She had found him in her night class, a big Russian boy with a passion for learning things, and she had taken him to help her. She had perhaps discerned the odd thing about Krylenko, which set him apart from the others, that he had a vision. He had no ambition for himself, but his queer, mystical mind was constantly illuminated by wonderful plans of what he might do for his people. By this, he did not mean his own country people, but all the hordes of workers who dwelt in the rows of black houses and spent half their lives in the Mills. To him they were, quite simply, brothers--all the Poles, the Lithuanians, the Italians, the Croats, even the negroes who came up from the South to die slowly working over the acid vats. In his own Slavic way he had caught a sense of that splendor of the Mills which sometimes overwhelmed Philip. Only Krylenko saw, what was quite true, that the people in the Flats belonged to another world from those on the Hill. They made up a nation within a nation, a hostile army surrounded and besieged.

He meant to help his people to freedom, even by doing battle, if circumstance demanded it. At times there was about him the splendor of the ancient prophets.

It was for this reason that he stayed in the pounding-sheds, as a simple foreman, refusing to go elsewhere, though he could have had after a time one of the easy places in the shipping-rooms. He might have been one of those men who, “working their way from the bottom of the ladder,” turned to oppress his own people. There were plenty of shrewd, hard-headed, pitiless men like that--men such as Frick and Carnegie, who had interests in these very Mills. Only he wasn’t concerned for himself. He had a queer, stupid, pig-headed idea of helping the men about him; and he was one of those fantastic men to whom Justice was also God.

He had his own way of going about it; and he was not a sentimentalist. He knew that to get things in this world, one had to fight; and so he had gone quietly about organizing men, one here, one there, into the dreaded unions. It had to be done secretly, because he would have been sent away, blacklisted and put outside the pale if the faintest suspicion of his activity reached the ears even of the terrified little clerks who talked so big. There were meetings sometimes in the room over Hennessey’s saloon, with men who wandered into town on one train and out on the next. It was a slow business, for one had to go carefully. But even with all the care there were whispers of strange things going on beneath the rumbling surface of the Flats. There were rumors which disturbed the peace of the stockbrokers, and stirred with uneasiness the people on the Hill--the bankers, the lawyers, the little shopkeepers--all the parasite ants whose prosperity rested upon the sweat of the Flats. There were, too, spies among the workers.

They even said on the Hill that old Julia Shane and that queer daughter of hers had a finger in the pie, which was more than true, for they did know what was happening. In their mad, fantastic way they had even given money.

There was always a strange current of fear and suspicion running beneath the surface, undermining here and there in places that lay below ground. In the first weeks Philip had become aware slowly of the sinister movement. He came to understand the suspicions against him. And then abruptly, bit by bit, perhaps because of his own taste for solitude and his way of going off to sit alone in a corner eating his own lunch, Krylenko had showed signs of friendliness, stifled and hindered in the beginning by the strangeness which set apart a dweller in the Flats from one on the Hill. One by one, the other men came to drop their suspicions and presently Philip found himself joining in their coarse jokes, even picking up snatches of their outlandish tongues. He came, in a way, to be one of them, and the effect of the communion filled him with a sense of expansion, almost as if he could feel himself growing. In a life dedicated to loneliness, he felt for the first time that warm, almost sensual feeling of satisfaction in companionship. He came to understand the men who worked at his own oven--Sokoleff, who drank whisky as if it were water, and sweated it all out as fast as he drank it, Krylenko himself, who was in love with an Italian girl who couldn’t marry him until her orphaned brothers and sisters were grown, and Finke, the black little Croat who sometimes lost his head and talked wildly about revolution. And a dozen others--simple, coarse men, whose lives seemed plain and direct, filled too with suffering, though it was of a physical sort concerned with painful work, and childbirth, and empty stomachs, and so unlike that finer torture which Philip himself suffered.

And presently he found that the Mills were saving him--even his brain: the grimness, the bitter tang of the black life in the Flats, presented a savage reality which was to him like a spar in the open sea. There was no reality, he thought sometimes, even in his marriage to Naomi. It was all shadowy and unreal, filled with sound and fury which seemed baseless and even silly, when one thought of this other life of fire and steel. His own existence had been a futile, meaningless affair of vapors, swooning and ecstasies.

And then on the morning after Naomi had come to him, Krylenko fixed it for him to join the Union. To Philip it was a move that took on a significance out of proportion with the reality: it had an importance which for the others was lacking. He had entered the sinister conspiracy against his own people on the Hill; it marked the closing of a door behind him. He was certain now never to turn back.

All night and all morning he scarcely spoke to Krylenko and Finke and Sokoleff. He worked beside them, silent and sweating, his mind and soul in a confused state of alternate satisfaction and torment. Once or twice, he caught himself smiling into the depths of the burning ovens, like an idiot. He was smiling because of what had happened there in the dark in his room, with the pleasure of a boy come at last of age. It filled him with an odd, warm feeling of satisfaction and power. He was at last a man, like those others, Finke and Sokoleff and even Krylenko, who took such things as part of the day’s routine, as they took eating and drinking. For them, a thing so commonplace couldn’t mean what it meant to him. It couldn’t give them that strange feeling of being suddenly set free after a long imprisonment. It couldn’t mean a fever bred of long restraint that was vanished. And slowly through the long hours by the hot ovens his nerves grew relaxed and his mind cleared. The memory of the hot, tormenting nights at Megambo seemed distant and vague now. He was, as he had said to Mary Conyngham, being slowly born again. Something tremendous had happened to him. He was aware of a new strength and of a power over women, even women like his mother, and Naomi, terrified and hysterical in the darkness. He was free. A great light like a rocket had burst in the darkness.

At noon when the whistles blew, Krylenko, tucking in his shirt, said, “Come on and have a drink.... We gotta celebrate, all of us.”

For a moment Philip hesitated. He had never drunk anything, even beer, but now there seemed a difference. What the hell difference did it make if you drank or not? These men about him all drank. It was the only pleasure they had, most of them, except what they found in the dismal, shuttered houses of Franklin Street. There was a reason now to drink. They would think he was celebrating his entrance into the Union, and all the time he’d be celebrating the other thing which they knew nothing about, which they wouldn’t even understand.

“Yes,” he said, “I’ll go.”

Hennessey’s saloon stood at the corner of Halstead Street and the Erie tracks, just at the foot of the hill crowned by Shane’s Castle. It was open night and day, and always filled with smoke and noise and drunken singing. Noise was its great characteristic--the grinding, squeaking sound of brakes on the endless freight-trains that passed the door, the violent, obscene voices of protesting drunks, the pounding of the Mills, and the ceaseless hammering of the tinny mechanical piano that swallowed nickels faster and faster as the patrons grew drunker and drunker. The only silence seemed to hang in a cloud about Mike Hennessey, the owner, a gigantic Irishman, with a beefy red face and carroty hair. He wasn’t the original Hennessey. The founder, his father, was long since dead. In his day the famous Hennessey’s had been only a crossroads saloon. There were no mills and furnaces. His customers were farmers. This silent Mike Hennessey knew his business: he watched men get drunker and drunker while the cash-register banged and jangled. He never spoke. He was afraid of no man, and he had a very special scorn for the Dagoes and their way of using knives to fight. He paid five hundred dollars a month to the mayor, which made the police both blind and deaf to the noise and lights of the saloon which had no closing hours, and a thousand more to veil in purity his row of shuttered houses in Franklin Street. There was a hard, flinty look in his cold blue eyes, that said: “I know the price of everything in this bedlam of a Town. Every man and woman has a price.”

But the hard blue eyes which never changed, widened ever so slightly for a brief second as the swinging doors opened and Philip came in with Finke and Krylenko and Sokoleff.

They sat at a table in the corner, where the mechanical piano growled and jangled. It was the full tide of drinking in the saloon, the hour when one shift of workers had left and another, dog-tired and black with soot, had only arrived. Most of them came unwashed from the Mills and their black faces together with the drifting smoke and clatter of sound gave the place the aspect of some chamber in Hell. The four companions began by drinking whisky, all of them but Philip perfectly straight. They would, Krylenko said, drink beer afterward to finish up.

The whisky, even diluted, burned and then warmed him. Finke and Sokoleff drank steadily, one glass after another, until the alcohol presently killed their weariness and Sokoleff began to grow hilarious and Finke to talk of revolution. For them the bad liquor took the place of rest, of sleep, of food, of cleanliness, even of decency. In the Flats it was useless to search for any decent thing, because comfort, food and warmth were not to be found there. Finke and Sokoleff had learned long ago that they lay only at the bottom of a glass filled many times with the rot-gut whisky that Hennessey sold.

Krylenko only drank a little and then said he must go, as he had to see Giulia before he went to bed. The great Ukrainian had washed himself carefully all over with cold water at the Mills, while the other three waited, Finke and Sokoleff standing by and making Rabelaisian jokes about his preparations for the courtship. Krylenko took it with good-natured tolerance, but there was an odd, shining look in his small, clear blue eyes.

Philip, sitting in a faint, warm haze, remembered the scene with pleasure, conscious that he belonged to them now. He was a member of the Union, one of them at last, but more than that he had become like them a man. He was drinking with them to celebrate.

Krylenko, taking leave of them, touched Philip on the shoulder. “You better go home now and get some sleep.”

“No,” said Philip; “I’m going to stay a while.”

The big Russian’s great hand closed on his shoulder with a powerful but gentle pressure. “Look here, Philip,” he said, “you ain’t like these two. You can’t stand it. You better go home now. They’re just a pair of hogs. Nothing hurts ’em.”

But Philip felt hazy enough to be stubborn and a little shrewd. He sided with Finke and Sokoleff, who kept protesting noisily. He meant to have one more drink--beer this time--and then he’d go.

Krylenko, shaking his big yellow head, went off to see Giulia, and, as Philip watched his great shoulders plowing their way through the mob, something odd happened to him. It was as if a light had gone out; instead of feeling jolly and a bit wild, he was seized in the grip of melancholy. He wanted suddenly to weep. He remembered what Krylenko had said about hogs, and, staring in a queer daze at Finke and Sokoleff, he saw them by some fantastic trick of the mind as two pigs with smutty faces thrusting their noses into the big drinking-glasses. He wanted suddenly to rise and wash himself all over with cold water as Krylenko had done--to wash away the smoke, the smell of sweat and the noise that filled the room. He didn’t want to talk any more or listen to the lewd jokes which Finke and Sokoleff kept on making about Krylenko’s courtship. He sat silently and stared into space.

And as the fumes of the alcohol filled his brain, the impulse to wash himself grew stronger and stronger. He came to feel vaguely that there were other things beside the soot and sweat that he wanted to wash away, and slowly he knew what it was. He wanted to wash away with cold water the memory of the night before, the fantastic memory of what had happened with Naomi.

Finke and Sokoleff had forgotten him. The one had gone off to stand by the bar talking red revolution, and the other was shouting wildly to stop “that Gott-damned piano.” The room seemed to expand and then contract, growing vast and cavernous like the Mill shed and then pressing in upon him, squeezing the horrible noise tight against his ear-drums. He felt sick and filled with disgust. Suddenly he knew that he was drunk and he knew that he hadn’t meant to be. It had happened without his knowing it. He was drunk, and last night he had slept with a harlot. Oh, he knew now. It sickened him. It might just as well have been a harlot, one of those women out of Hennessey’s shuttered houses. It would have been better, because he wouldn’t have to go back to a woman like that: he’d never see her again. And he wouldn’t have that queer little knot, like a cramp in a weary muscle, that was almost hatred for Naomi.

The drunker he got, the clearer it all seemed. And then suddenly his tired brain gave way. He fell forward and buried his face in his hands. He knew now and he began to weep drunkenly. He knew now, because he had learned in a strange way during the darkness of the slate-colored house. He knew why it was that he had had to see Mary Conyngham; he knew why he had walked with her into the open country. He was in love with Mary Conyngham; he had been in love with her ever since he could remember. And it was Naomi who shared his bed.

Disgust enveloped him in physical sickness, and the old desire to wash himself in cold water returned passionately. What Krylenko had said was true. “You ain’t like these two--just a couple of hogs.” Krylenko knew with that shining look in his blue eyes. Krylenko had his Giulia, and he, Philip, had nothing ... less than nothing, for he had bound himself in a terrible, sickening fashion to Naomi. It was all horrible. He was drunk and he wanted suddenly to die.

Some one touched his shoulder, and he raised his head. It was Hennessey, looking down at him out of the cold blue eyes.

“Look here,” he said. “You’re drunk enough. Get out of here and go home. Your Ma is Emma Downes, and I don’t want to get mixed up with a hell-cat like her.”

For a second Philip was blinded by rage. He wanted to kill Hennessey for the insult to his mother. He tried to get up, but he only knocked his glass on the floor, and then fell down beside it. He tried again to rise, and then Hennessey, cursing, bent over and picked him up as if he’d been a child, and carried him, plowing through the heat and confusion, out the swinging doors. In the open air, he placed him on his feet, holding him upright for a moment till he got a sense of his balance. Then, giving him a little push, he said, “There now. Run along home to your Ma like a good little boy. Tell her not to let her little tin Jesus come back again to Hennessey’s place if she don’t want him messed up too much to be a good missionary.”

14

In the slate-colored house, the Minerva Circle was seated on the collapsible chairs from McTavish’s, listening to a paper by Mrs. Wilbert Phipps on her visit to the Mammoth Caves of Kentucky. To overcome the boredom, some thought about their children and their husbands, or even the hired girl, filling in the time until the dreary reading was over, and they might fall back again into gossip and recipes and children’s ailments. It was the price they paid for the honor which came to each of them every eighteen months of standing before the Minerva Circle and reading a paper to which no one listened.

The folding-doors between the parlor and the sitting-room had been opened and those leading from the parlor to the hall were closed. Upstairs Naomi lay in bed with her hair still in steel curlers: she was too ill to come down. She had wept hysterically all the night and most of the morning. When Emma had tried to comfort her with vague, soothing words about matrimony, nothing had made any difference. It was only Aunt Mabelle’s visit, colored by great chunks of wisdom and frankness drawn from her own experience and conferences with many other married ladies upon a subject which she always found absorbing, that reduced Naomi at length to a calmer state of mind. And Mabelle was sitting by her now, nursing the baby, and pouring forth details of her own history, in an effort to forestall fresh outbursts.

Downstairs, in the dining-room and kitchen, Emma bustled about, scolding the slattern Essie, and thinking that it was just like Naomi to have chosen such a busy and awkward occasion for following her advice. So Emma had to look after all the refreshments herself. She was putting out the plates of fruit salad on the dining-room table, when she heard the knob of the front door turn. Pausing in her work, she saw the door open, gently and carefully, as Philip entered. His foot caught on the carpet, he tripped and fell.

In the next moment she knew. He was drunk. He couldn’t get to his feet.

Behind the closed doors of the parlor the thin, refined voice of Mrs. Wilbert Phipps was saying, “And then the guide caught some fish in a net and showed them to us. They proved most interesting, as they were quite without eyes, and therefore blind. It seems that living so long in the darkness the eyes shriveled up in succeeding generations until they disappeared. I remember saying to Wilbert: ‘Think of it! These fish are quite blind!’”

Philip, struggling to his feet, heard the word “blind.” “Yes, I was blind too. But I’m not any longer. Naomi made a man of me. She made a man of me.”

He laughed wildly, and Emma, clapping a hand over his mouth, put her arm about his shoulders and guided him up the stairs. She helped to undress him and put him to bed. She knew all the little knacks of doing it: she had learned long ago by caring for his father.

He didn’t speak to her again, and buried his face in the pillow, biting into it with his strong, even teeth.

Belowstairs, Mrs. Wilbert Phipps was finishing her paper. “And so,” she was saying in the flat voice she adopted for such occasions, “that was the visit that Mr. Phipps and I made to the Mammoth Cave. It was most interesting and not expensive. I advise you ladies all to make it at the earliest opportunity. We can never know enough of the geographical marvels of this, the greatest, freest and most noble nation under the protection of God.”

Emma got down just in time. She congratulated Mrs. Phipps on the fascination of her paper, and regretted being able to hear only a little of it, but what she heard made her want to hear more: it was so fascinating. She did not say that the only part she heard was a sentence or two dealing with blind fishes.

It was Aunt Mabelle who “brought Naomi round.” She had that quality of soft, insensitive people which, if allowed to expose itself long enough, becomes in the end irresistible. Aunt Mabelle was in her way a philosopher, possessing indeed even the physical laziness which gives birth to reflection. She was neither happy nor unhappy, but lived in a state of strange, cowlike contentment, which knew neither heights nor depressions. She was surprised at nothing, and through her long rocking-chair contemplation upon life and love, birth and death, she had shared the confidences of so many women that such behavior as Naomi’s did not strike her as remarkable, but only to be listed in the vast category of human folly.

“Don’t think you’re remarkable or different,” she told Naomi. “You’re just like any other woman.”

It was Aunt Mabelle who led Naomi into the routine of matrimony as a tried and experienced working elephant leads another, freshly captured, into the routine of piling teak logs and pushing carts. She made it all seem the most natural thing in the world.

But it was only after a week of hiding and of sudden outbursts of tears that Naomi returned to Philip--a new and uncomplaining Naomi curiously broken and acquiescent. Aunt Mabelle noticed the difference with the little round blue eyes that seemed too stupid and sleepy to notice anything; she saw that something very odd had happened to Naomi: nothing that was very odd in her (Mabelle’s) experience in such cases, but odd only because it had happened to Naomi. It was as if she had found suddenly some reason for existence in a world where before she had no place, as if she enjoyed this newly discovered marital relationship.

Emma, too, noticed the difference--that Naomi began to take an interest in her appearance, and even went so far as to buy some ribbons and bits of lace which she sewed awkwardly on her somber woolen dresses. Her anemic cheeks at moments even showed the shadow of color. She went almost briskly to her choir rehearsals and made a feeble attempt at resuming her manufacture of calico mother-hubbards.

It was, thought Emma, working itself out. She was not one to discuss such things, and yet she knew that Naomi had followed her advice. Why, Naomi was almost like a bride. She was certain in the end to gain a hold over Philip, for he was not the sort whose eye wandered: he never looked at another woman. He wasn’t like his father. Emma told herself these things twenty times a day. (And she knew things which she would never admit knowing.) If things went well, he was certain to come round in the end, for there was nothing like a wife and family to bring a man to his senses. When he was older and perhaps Bishop of East Africa, and the youngest bishop of the church, he would thank his mother for all her strength of will. He would look back and understand then how right she had been at the time when, for a moment, his foot had strayed from the path. Then God would bring her her just reward.

There was one thing she did not understand--the intoxication of Philip. At first she succumbed to righteous fury, filled with a wild desire to punish him by shutting him in the storeroom as she had done when he was a little boy. All the night after she had helped him up the stairs, she lay awake, pondering what she should do. The thing had frightened her in a fashion she did not understand: it was an event which seemed to thrust upward out of the shadowy depths of heritage, imperiling all her carefully made plans. It gave her for the first time a sense of awe for her son, because it opened vistas of behavior of which she did not believe him, a boy so carefully brought up, capable. It was this fear which led her into paths of caution, and prevented her from pouring out a torrent of reproach. When a week passed and then another without any repetition of the disgraceful episode, she settled back into her old sense of confident security. Philip was her boy, after all. She could trust him. And fortunately no one had seen him drunk; no one knew.

But it troubled her that he never spoke of it. His silence hurt her. Always he had told her everything, shared all his secrets and plans with her, and now he shut her out of everything. He was polite and kind to herself and to Naomi, but he never told them anything.

Still, he seemed to be less restless now, even if he was more silent. He was beginning, she thought, to soften a little. In the end, when it was all settled and he had returned to the arms of the Lord, she could perhaps sell her restaurant business and give herself over completely to missionary work and her clubs.

It wasn’t that she had given up the idea of matrimony; it was only that she had laid it aside for the moment, since Moses Slade had said nothing in the least definite. He had been encouraging, and very friendly; he had taken her at her word and come to have his meals at the restaurant. On the occasion of his third visit, she said, “Perhaps you’d rather eat in my corner? A man like you, who is so prominent, is always stared at so.”

So he had come to take his meals in the corner behind the screen, arriving after one, so that he never interfered with the family lunch of Philip, Naomi and herself. Sometimes she sat with him while he ate great plates of meat and potatoes and huge slices of pies. He was a vigorous man and an enormous eater. They talked usually of politics, and she thought more than once, “Of course, some people might think such a marriage undignified, but it wouldn’t matter, because of all the influence I’d have. As the wife of a Congressman in Washington, I’d be a power for good.”

They returned sometimes to the subject of their widowhood and loneliness, and once he seemed almost on the verge of speaking, when she was called to the telephone to speak to Mrs. Wilbert Phipps about her paper.

After a time she again urged him not to pay for his meals. It would be a pleasure, she said, to have such a distinguished man as her guest. One meal more or less meant nothing in the ocean of her prosperity. But he was wily and insisted that he could not impose upon her generosity. And then one morning she received from him a letter, saying that he had been called back to Washington suddenly, and would not be able to see her before leaving. He said nothing of marriage; it was a very polite, but a very cautious letter. And Emma resolved to put him out of her mind, and never again to ask him to have his meals at the Peerless Restaurant.

15

When Philip awoke to the sound of the alarm-clock on the night that followed the scene in the hall, he was quite sober again, though his head ached horribly. He was alone in the darkness and suffered from a wretched feeling of shame. It was as if he had plunged into some pit of filth which still clung to him, despite all the washing in the world. It was a conviction of shame, almost of sin, stronger than he had known since, as a little boy, he had listened to one of Emma’s terrifying lectures upon purity and the future life. It concerned what had happened on the night before in this very room, it concerned Hennessey’s saloon, and the memory of Hennessey’s hard voice, “Go on home to your Ma!” and the vague memory of something which had happened in the hall while a voice said something about blindness. He wakened in the exact position in which he had fallen asleep, with his face half-buried in the pillows. He was dirty and unshaven. Slowly he remembered the events of the day before, one by one, but, fitting them together, he could not see how they had brought him here, soiled and filled with a sense of horror.

While he dressed, he tried to fathom what it was that had caused a collapse so sudden and complete, and it seemed to him that it all had very little to do with the chain of things that had happened yesterday; it lay deeper than that. It went back and back into the past. There were moments when it seemed to him that he had been moving towards this night ever since he had been born. It was as if he had no power because he did not even know what it was.

At the Mills, Sokoleff and Finke and Krylenko were already by the oven. They greeted him, as they always did, without comment. Of his drunkenness they said nothing, Sokoleff and Finke perhaps because they were themselves too drunk to have noticed it. He had arrived, sober and ashamed, with the fear that they would use it as an excuse of coarse jokes. And now they did not even remember. For them a thing like that was part of the day’s business, just as rabbit-like love and its various counterfeits were things which one took for granted.

He didn’t talk to them, even while they all sat eating their lunches. It was as if something had robbed him of the very power of speech. And he felt that they were more remote now and strange than they had ever been, even on the first night he had come there to work by the glowing ovens.

Only Krylenko seemed to understand anything at all. He laughed, and said, “You feel pretty bad after yesterday. Well ... you’ll sweat it out. You get over it quick like that. You can drink like a hog but you sweat it all out right away.”

He grinned feebly and said nothing, but he remembered what Krylenko had said, “You ain’t like those other fellows.” It was true: he wasn’t like them, and at the moment he wanted to be like them more than all else on earth. It seemed to him that salvation lay in drinking like a hog and living like a rabbit. He couldn’t do it, because something walled him in and shut him away from that fierce turbulent current of life which he felt all about him and could never enter. It was the old hunger, more clear now and understandable, which had driven him to the Mills, seizing him on the night he stood on the Hill looking down upon the miraculous beauty of the Flats at night.

He knew now that he wasn’t even free. Naomi hadn’t freed him after all, and his celebration had been all for nothing, a bitter joke. He was still the same, only with a strange sense of having been soiled. Weary and sick and disgusted, he felt suddenly like a little child who wanted comforting, only it never occurred to him now to turn to his mother as he had once done. Something had happened, some mysterious snapping of the bonds which bound them together. He found himself wishing with a passionate feeling of self-reproach that he might not see her again. It was partly shame and partly because his love for her had vanished in some inexplicable fashion. It struck him with horror that he had no love any longer either for her or for Naomi. The one he respected because he owed her so much: she was so much stronger and more valiant than himself. The other he pitied because he understood through pitying himself that she, too, must be miserable.

He worked on in silence passionately, straining in every muscle, shoving and pushing the hot steel, until the patches of soot in the sides of the shed began to turn gray with the light of dawn. The sweat that streamed down his body seemed in some way to purify his soul, and at last he grew so weary that all his troubles seemed to lose themselves in the terrible heat and clamor of the pounding hammers.

Only one thing remained in his weary mind, and that was a fierce desire to see Mary Conyngham. If he saw her, he would have peace, because she would understand. She seemed to him like a cool lake into which he could plunge, bathing his whole soul, and his body too, for he understood now what love could be if the woman was Mary Conyngham. _Naomi had made a man of him._ ...

But it was impossible ever to see her again, because he had nothing to offer her. He belonged now to Naomi, beyond all doubt. Naomi was his wife, she might even be the mother of his child. What could he offer to Mary Conyngham?

For Emma had done her work well. Her son _was_ a decent sort, and not at all like his father.

In the weeks that followed he did not see Mary Conyngham. As if she had understood what happened during that walk into the open country, she sent him the paints she had bought, with a little note asking him to take them as a present from her on his return from Africa. She sent them to him at the Mills by the hand of Krylenko, and so put an end to the shameful hope that he would see her when she returned. It was marvelous how well she understood, and yet the very knowledge of her understanding made it all the more unbearable, for it was as if she said, “I know what has happened,” and tragically, in the voice that seemed so much sadder than it had once been, “There’s nothing to be done.”

He kept the box of paints and brushes at Krylenko’s boarding-house where he came to be regarded with a kind of awe by the Ukranians as an odd mixture of artist and lunatic. Without thinking why, he kept the whole affair a secret from Naomi and his mother. He told them that the afternoons when he worked, painting and rubbing out, painting and rubbing out, among the rows of dirty houses, were spent in walking or doing extra work at the Mills. It became slowly a sort of passion into which he poured his whole existence. It was only in those hours when he worked horribly to put on bits of canvas and wood that strange, smoky glamour which he found in the Flats, that he was able to forget Mary Conyngham and the dull sordid sense of uneasiness which enveloped all his existence in the slate-colored house. No one save Krylenko saw anything he painted, and Krylenko liked it all, good, bad and indifferent, with all the overwhelming vitality of his friendly nature. (He had come in a way to treat Philip as a child under his special protection.) Sometimes he puzzled his head over the great messes of black and gray and blue, but he saw, oddly enough, what Philip was driving at.

“Yes,” he’d say, rubbing his nose with his huge hands. “It’s like that ... that’s the way it _feels_. That’s what you’re after, ain’t it?”

He never went again to Hennessey’s saloon, although the memory of Hennessey’s epithet clung and rankled in his brain. “I don’t want to get mixed up with that hell-cat.” He could, he thought, go and shoot Hennessey, but no good would come of it; nothing would be accomplished, and life would only become more horrible and complicated. He couldn’t fight Hennessey, for the Irishman could break him across his knee. Once, a long while ago, when he was a boy, he would have flung himself at Hennessey, kicking and biting and punching, to avenge the insult to his mother, but all that seemed to belong vaguely to another life which no longer had anything to do with him. The epithet festered in his brain because there were times when it led to horrible doubts about his mother--that perhaps she wasn’t, after all, so good and noble and self-sacrificing. It gave him a sudden, terrifying glimpse of what she must seem to others outside that circle in which she moved and had her whole existence. But that was only because they didn’t know her as he knew her ... for the good woman she was. At moments he even felt a fierce resentment toward her because she stood somehow between him and that rich savor of life which he felt all about him. If she had not existed he could have gone to Hennessey’s place as much as he liked, drinking as much as he pleased. He could have come nearer to Sokoleff and Finke and even Krylenko.

She must be a powerful woman when a man like Hennessey feared her.... Hennessey, he thought sometimes, who was like some beast out of that other cruel jungle at Megambo.

As he lost himself more and more deeply in the effort to catch in color the weird fascination of the world about him, the anguish of the life at Megambo began to fade into the shadows of the existence which had belonged to that other Philip, who began to seem so strange and distant. Sometimes, the sight of his mother returning from church, or the sound of Naomi pounding the tinny piano and singing revival hymns in her loud voice (as if she were trying to recapture some of her past glory), brought to his mind a sharp picture of the other Philip, pale and shy and silent, dressed always in dark clothes--a Philip who worshipped a mother who was never wrong and respected a wife who had no fear of the jungle; and the picture gave him an odd flash of pity, as if the image had been that of some stranger. His life now wasn’t exactly happy, but it was better than the life of that other Philip, for now he stood with his feet fairly planted on the ground; it was an existence that was real, in which he was aware of a sinfulness that was really a temptation toward sin. He wasn’t tortured any longer by battling with shadows. There were times when he was forced to laugh (a trifle bitterly) at the memory of a Philip who had suffered at his own doubts and agonies over the awful prospect of turning his back upon the church. It was finished, but no one would believe him, no one, except Mary Conyngham.

He came to accept the attentions of Naomi, for he could not see what else there was to do, and after a time it became a relationship which he managed to fit into the scheme of things as he went to work seven days a week and ate three meals a day; but there was no joy in it, save that obscure satisfaction which came of knowing that like other men he had a woman who belonged to him.

They never spoke of it to each other: it was a thing which happened silently in the night, as if they both were ashamed, and afterward Philip still had the strange feeling that in some way he had been soiled. It was, after all, exactly such a relationship as he might have had with any of the women in Franklin Street. If it was different, it was only because Naomi was in love with him, and this love of hers sometimes frightened him, because it made him more than ever her prisoner. There sometimes came into her eyes that same look of shining rapture that he had seen there in the days when she was giving her life to God at Megambo. You could see it in the way she watched him. Yet the word love had never been spoken between them, and the possibility of children had never been uttered.

It was as if all her adoration of God had been turned upon Philip.

Presently he began to drink, taking a glass on his way to work, and another on his way home, but he did not go to drink with any of the men from his own furnace. He did not go to Hennessey’s; he went to a saloon where the back room was filled with Polish girls and no one had ever heard of Emma. The whisky made him feel jolly and forget the slate-colored house. He got there the feeling that he was himself, Philip Downes, for the first time in his life, as if at last he had been completely born. No one in the place had ever heard of the other Philip. It was only an illusion which came to him while the alcohol had possession of his brain, and so he came to drink more and more regularly because it made him happy. With a glass or two he was able to forget the life he shared with Naomi.

16

He was sitting one afternoon in Krylenko’s room working on a view of the Flats which included the oily creek, a row of battered houses, and a glimpse of furnaces. For two days he had worked on it, and out of the lines and color there began to emerge something which he recognized with a faint sense of excitement as the thing he had been searching for. It grew slowly with each stroke of the brush, a quality which he could not have described, but something which he felt passionately. He was beginning a little to succeed, to do something which he would want to show, not to the world, but to ... to ... Mary Conyngham. He would send it to her as a gift, without a word. Certainly she wouldn’t mind that. She would understand it as she understood all else. As he worked, his passion for painting and his love for Mary Conyngham became in a strange fashion blended and inextricable. It was as if he were talking to her with the line and color, telling her all the choked, overpowering, hot emotions that were kindled when he thought of her.

Presently, as the light began to fail, he put down his brushes, and, taking up his worn coat and hat, he closed the door to return to the slate-colored house. In that sudden exultation, even the prospect of encountering Naomi did not depress him. Feeling his way along the greasy hallway smelling of boiled cabbage and onions, he descended the stairs and stepped into the street. It was that hour between daylight and darkness, when sharp contours lose their hard angles, and ugliness fades mysteriously into beauty--the hour in the Flats when all the world changed magically from the squalor of daylight into the glowing splendor of the night.

Outside, the street was alive with dirty, underfed children. There seemed to be myriads of them, all drawn like moths out of the darkness towards the spots of light beneath each street-lamp. A great, ugly Ukranian sat on the steps rocking gently and playing a Little Russian song on a wheezy concertina.

For a moment, while Philip stood in the shadow of the doorway, looking down the long vista of the hot, overcrowded street, he felt again the old, poignant sense of the richness, the color that was born simply out of being allowed to live. And then suddenly he became aware of a familiar presence close at hand, of a voice heard in the twilight above the clamor of children, which made him feel suddenly ill.

Before the doorway of the next house he could see the dim figure of Irene Shane, a pale gray figure which seemed at times almost a ghost. The other woman he could not see in the hard reality, but he saw with all the painful clearness of an image called up by the sound of her soft voice. It was Mary Conyngham calling on some sick baby. He listened, hiding in the shadow, while a Polish woman talked to her in broken English. Then suddenly she turned away and with Irene Shane passed so near to the doorway that he could have touched her.

She was gone, quickly, lost in the crowd. He hadn’t run after her and cried out what was in his heart, because he was afraid. His whole body was shaking; and he burned with a fire that was at once agony and delight, for the thing that had happened with Naomi made this other pain the more real and terrible.

For ten minutes he sat on the step of Krylenko’s boarding-house, his head in his hands. When at last he rose to climb the hill, all the sense of exhilaration had flowed away, leaving him limp and exhausted. For weeks he had worked twelve hours a day in the Mills, painted while there was still daylight, and slept the little time that remained; and now he knew suddenly that he was horribly tired. His body that was so hard and supple seemed to have grown soft and heavy, his legs were like sacks of potatoes. Near the top of the hill, before the undertaking parlor of McTavish, he felt so ill that he had suddenly to sit down. And while he sat there he understood, with a cold horror, what had happened to him. It was the Megambo fever coming back. The street began to lose its colors, and fade into shadows of yellow before his eyes.

Behind him the door opened, and he heard a booming voice asking, “Anything the matter, Philip? You look sick.”

Philip told McTavish what it was, and felt a feeble desire to laugh at the thought of being succored by the undertaker.

“I know,” said McTavish. “It used to come back on me in the same way. I got a touch of it in Nicaragua, when I was a boy.” Here he halted long enough to grunt, for he had bent down and was lifting Philip in his corpulent embrace bodily from the steps. He chuckled, “I was a wild ’un then. It’s only since I got so damned fat that the fever left me.”

He put Philip in one of the chairs before the stove. There was no fire in it now, but the door was left open for the old rips to spit into the ashes.

“You look sick--yellow as paint.”

Philip tried to grin and began to shiver.

“It’s nothing. I’ve often felt like this.” The memory of the old fever took possession of him, setting his teeth on edge at the thought of the chill-hot horrors and all the phantasmagoria of jungle life which it invoked. Out of the terror of sickness, one thought remained clear--that perhaps this was the best way out of everything, to die here in the chair and let McTavish prepare what remained of him for the grave. He wouldn’t then be a nuisance to any one, and Naomi, free, could go back to Megambo.

McTavish was pouring whisky down his throat, saying, “That’ll make you stop shaking.” And slowly warmth began to steal back. He felt dizzy, but a little stronger.

“I’ll take you home,” said McTavish, standing off and looking at him. “You know a fellow like you oughtn’t to be working in the Mills. Why, man, you’re thin as a fence-rail. I’ve been watching you when you went past--getting thinner and thinner every day. And you’re beginning to look like an old man. A fellow of your age ought to be getting drunk and giving the girls a time. I wish to God I was twenty-six again.”

He finished with a great booming laugh, which was meant to be reassuring, but which Philip, even through the haze of illness, knew was meant to hide his alarm. He gave Philip another drink, and asked suddenly, “What’s the matter with you, anyway? There’s something wrong. Why, any fool can see that.” Philip didn’t answer him, and he added, “You don’t mean to go back to Africa. That’s it, ain’t it? I guessed that long ago, in spite of everything your Ma had to say. Well, if you was to go back like this, it’d be the end of you, and I propose telling your Ma so. I knew her well enough when she was a girl, though we don’t hold much with one another now.”

Philip suddenly felt too ill to speak to any one, to explain anything. McTavish had lifted him up and was carrying him toward the door, “Why you don’t weigh no more than a woman--and a little woman at that.”

He felt himself being lifted into McTavish’s buggy. The fat man kept one arm about him, and with the other drove the horses, which on occasions pulled his hearse. At length, after what seemed to Philip hours, they drew up before the slate-colored house.

It was Emma herself who opened the door. McTavish, the debaucher of young men, she saw, had got Philip drunk, and was delivering him to her like a corpse.

“What does this mean?” she asked.

Philip managed to say feebly, “I haven’t been drinking.”

McTavish, still carrying him, forced his way past her into the hall. “Where do you want to put him? You’ve got a pretty sick boy here, and the sooner you know it the better.”

They carried him upstairs and laid him on his and Naomi’s bed. Naomi was in the room, and Mabelle was with her, and as they entered, she got up with a wild flutter of alarm, while McTavish explained. Philip asked for water, which Naomi went to fetch, and McTavish led Emma with him into the hall.

Downstairs, they faced each other--two middle-aged people, born to be enemies by every facet of their characters; yet, oddly enough, McTavish had once been a suitor for Emma’s hand in those far-off days when Emma had chosen such a hopeless mate as Jason Downes. “Sometimes, drawing deep out of his own experience, the philosophic McTavish had wondered how on earth he had ever fallen in love with Emma, or how she had come to be in turn the abject slave of such an amiable scamp as Downes. It made no sense, that thing which got hold of you, brain and body, in such a tyrannical fashion. (He was thinking all this again, as he stood facing the ruffled Emma beneath the cold glow of the green Moorish light.)

“Look here, Em,” he was saying, “that boy has got to have a little peace. You let him alone for a time.”

“What do you mean? What does a man like you, John McTavish, know about such things?”

The fat undertaker saw in a swift flash that the invincible Emma was not only ruffled, but frightened.

“Well, you know what I mean. The boy ain’t like you. That’s where you’ve always made a mistake, Em ... in thinking everybody is like yourself. He’s a bundle of nerves--that boy--and sensitive. Anybody with half an eye can see it.”

“I ought to know my boy.” She began to grow dramatic. “My own flesh ... that I gave birth to ... I ought to know what’s good for him, without having to be told.”

McTavish remained calm, save for an odd wave of hatred for this woman he had desired thirty years ago. “That’s all right. You ought to know, Em, but you don’t. You’d better let him alone ... or you’ll be losing him ... too.”

The last word he uttered after a little pause, as if intentionally he meant to imply things about the disappearance and death of Mr. Downes. She started to speak, and then, thinking better of it, checked herself, buttoned her lips tightly, and opened the front door with an ominous air.

“No, I ain’t going till I’ve finished,” he was saying. “I know you, Em. I’ve known you a long time, and I’m telling you that if you love that boy you’ll stop tormenting him ... you’ll do it for your own good. If he gets well, I think I’ll take a hand myself.”

He went through the door, but Emma remained there, looking after the fat, solid form until it climbed into the buggy, and drove off, the vehicle swaying and rocking beneath the weight of his three hundred odd pounds. She was frightened, for she felt the earth slipping away from under her feet as it had done once before, a long time ago. The whole affair was slipping away, out of her control. It was like finding herself suddenly in quicksand.

Upstairs in the darkened room, Aunt Mabelle, left alone with Philip, pulled her rocking-chair to the side of the bed. She had news, she thought, which would cheer him, perhaps even make him feel better.

“Philip,” she said softly. “Philip.” He turned his head, and she continued, “Philip, I’ve got good news for you. Are you listening?”

Philip nodded weakly.

“Naomi is going to have a little baby ... a little baby. Think of that!”

She waited, and Philip said nothing. He did not even move.

“Aren’t you glad, Philip? Think of it ... a little baby.”

He whispered, “Yes ... of course ... I’m glad,” and turned his face into the pillow once more.

Aunt Mabelle, excited by her news, went on, “You won’t have to wait long, because she’s already about four months along. She didn’t want to talk about it. She wasn’t even sure what was the matter, but I dragged it out of her. I thought she was looking kind of peaked.”

Then the door opened, and Emma and Naomi came in together. Naomi crossed to the bed, and, bending over Philip, said, “Here’s the water, Philip.” He stirred and she put her arm under his head while he drank. It seemed to him that all his body was alive with fire.

When he had finished, Naomi did an extraordinary thing. She flung herself down and burying her head against his thin chest, she began to sob wildly, crying out, shamelessly before Emma and Mabelle, “You mustn’t be sick, Philip. You mustn’t die ... I couldn’t live without you now. You’re all I’ve got.... No ... no ... you mustn’t die.” She clung to him with terrifying and shameless passion. “I couldn’t live without you ... I couldn’t ... I couldn’t ... I’ll never ... leave you.” Her long, pale hair came unfastened and fell about her shoulders, covering them both. “I’ll never leave you. I’ll do whatever you want.”

It was Emma who seized her by force and dragged her off him; Emma who, shaking her, said in a voice that was horrible in its hatred, “You fool! Do you want to make him worse? Do you want to kill him?”

And Naomi cried out, “He’s mine now. He’s mine! You tried to poison him against me. You can’t take him away from me any more. He belongs to me!”

It was horrible, but to Philip the scene had no reality; it came to him through the haze of his fever, as if it had been only an interlude of delirium.

When Naomi grew a little more calm, Aunt Mabelle said to her in a whisper, “I told him.”

Naomi, still sobbing, asked, “Was he glad?”

“As pleased as Punch,” said Aunt Mabelle. “It always pleases a man. It makes him feel big.”

On the bed Philip lay shivering and burning. The room appeared to swell to an enormous size and then slowly to contract again till it was no bigger than a coffin. After a time, it seemed to him that he was already dead and that the three women who moved about the room, undressing him, fussing with the window-curtain, talking and sobbing, were simply three black figures preparing him for the grave. A faint haze of peace settled slowly over him. He would be able to rest now. He would never see them again. He was free.

17

It was not, after all, the old Megambo fever, but typhoid which had been lurking for months in the filth of the Flats. Irene Shane knew of it and Mary Conyngham and one or two doctors who were decent enough to take cases for which there was little chance either of pay or glory. It was typhoid that had brought Mary and Irene to talk to the Polish woman in the doorway next to Krylenko’s boarding-house. Typhoid was a word that existed in an aura of terror; a disease which might strike any of the Hill people. So long as it happened in the Flats (and the fever lurked there winter and summer) it did not matter. But with Philip it struck at the people on the hills. The news spread quickly. There was another case and then another and another. The newspapers began to talk of it and suddenly the Town learned that there were sixty cases in the Flats and that eleven Hunkies and Dagoes were already dead.

When Emma first heard that the illness was typhoid, she snorted and said, “Of course! What could you expect? He got it working in the Flats among those Hunkies and Dagoes. They throw all their slops right into the streets. They ought to be shut off and a wall placed around them. They always have typhoid down there. Some day they’ll have a real epidemic and then people will wake up to what it means--bringing such animals into a good clean country!”

The doctors, summoned by Emma in her terror, told her that Philip’s case was doubly serious because he had already had fever twice in Megambo and because his whole body was thin and sick. He fell into a state of stupor and remained thus. He seemed to have no resistance.

For days terror racked Emma and Naomi. Each of them prayed, secretly and passionately, begging God to spare the life of the man who became suddenly the only possession in the world which they cherished. And out of their fight there was born a kind of hostility which made their earlier distrust of each other fade into oblivion. There were hours and days when they scarcely addressed each other, when it seemed that the slightest disagreement might hurl them into open warfare. Mabelle was always in the house, moving about, comforting Naomi and exasperating Emma by her sloppy ways.

Indeed, the perpetual sight of Mabelle and her squalid overfed brat in her neat house filled Emma with a distaste to be equaled only by such a calamity as the discovery of vermin in one of her beds. But she found herself suddenly delivered into Mabelle’s hands; for Mabelle was the only person who could “do anything with” Naomi. If Emma approached her, she grew tense and hysterical. And it was, of course, impossible to think of ridding herself of both: you couldn’t turn from your home the woman who was to be the mother of your grandchild.

Mabelle she hated, too, for her passionate and morbid absorption in the subjects of love and childbirth; she seemed to Emma to stand as a symbol of obscenity, who must as such have tortured her brother Elmer. She was a symbol of all that side of life which Emma had succeeded in putting out of her mind for so many years.

But there was one other person who had the power of calming Naomi. This was the Reverend Castor, who, since Naomi’s condition prevented her from appearing in the choir, came himself two or three times a week to comfort her and inquire after her husband. Except for Mabelle, he seemed to be Naomi’s only friend.

“He is,” she told Emma, “a very sympathetic man, and he reminds me of my father. He is just the same build and bald in the same way.”

The Reverend Castor had a beautiful voice, low and mellow and filled with rich inflections which Mrs. Wilbert Phipps had once spoken of as an “Æolian harp.” He could have had, people said, a great success as an Evangelist, but he was so devoted to his bedridden wife that he would not leave her, even for such a career. The church, they said, was indeed fortunate to keep him, even though it was at the price of his own misfortune. Words of condolence and courage spoken in the rich voice had a strange power of rousing the emotions. Once or twice Emma had come upon him sitting in the twilight of the parlor talking to Naomi of illness and faith, of death and fortitude, in so moving a fashion that the tears came into her eyes and a lump into her throat. And he was a good man--a saint. One felt it while talking to him. He was a man who believed, and had devoted his whole life to the care of a sick wife.

Sometimes Mabelle lingered long after the hour when she should have been in her kitchen preparing supper for Elmer. There were in the Reverend Castor’s voice intimations of things which she had never found in her own chilly husband.

As Naomi’s time drew nearer, the conversation of Mabelle grew proportionately more and more obstetrical.

They compared symptoms and Mabelle’s talk was constantly sprinkled with such remarks as, “When I was carrying Jimmy,” or, “When Ethel was under way.” She even gave it as her opinion that Naomi, from the symptoms, might be having twins.

She appeared to have a strange, demoralizing effect upon Naomi, for the girl came presently to spend all the day in a wrapper, never bothering to dress when she rose. And Emma discovered that for days at a time she did not even trouble to take off the metal bands which she used for curling her long, straight hair. The two of them sat all day long in rocking-chairs while little Jimmy, who was beginning to walk a little, crept from one piece of furniture to another. He had already ruined one corner of the Brussels carpet in the parlor.

Meanwhile, in the great walnut bed Philip lay more dead than alive. There were long periods when he recognized no one and simply lay as if made of stone, white, transparent, with a thin, pinched look about the temples. The lines seemed to have faded from his face, giving him a pathetic, boyish look. The only life lingered in the great dark eyes which in his fever were larger and more burning than ever. The doctors who came and went sometimes shook their heads and expressed belief that if the patient could be got to show any interest in the life about him there was hope. But he appeared to have no desire to recover. Even in those moments when his wife gave way and, weeping, had to be taken from the room, he only stared at her without speaking.

Failing to take into account the terrible vitality which came to him from Emma and the toughness of that father whom none of them had ever seen, they marveled that he could go on living at all. Yet week after week passed when he grew no better or worse. None of them knew, of course, about Mary Conyngham and how the thought of her sometimes came to him and filled him with a fierce desire to live. When his sick brain cleared for a little while, he knew with a strange certainty that he could not die leaving her behind, because in some way life would be left incomplete. It was a thought which troubled him, as he was troubled when he could not get a picture to come right because he was not yet a good painter.

And then one day Emma’s own doctor took her aside in the hall and said, “There’s one thing you must understand, Mrs. Downes. No matter how much your son wants to return to Africa, you mustn’t let him go. If he gets well and tries to go back, it will be the end of him. I know he’ll want to go back, but it’ll be suicide to send him where there’s fever.”

When the doctor had gone, Emma put on her hat and jacket and went for a walk. It was a thing she never did, for there were no moments in her busy life to be wasted simply in walking; but there seemed no other way to find solitude in a world filled with Naomi and Mabelle, little Jimmy and the trained nurse. She had to be alone, to think things out.

She saw clearly enough that, whatever happened, there was now no chance of Philip’s going back to Africa and the knowledge filled her with a blank, inexplicable feeling of frustration. But after she had grown more calm, she began to feel more like herself and thus more able to cope with her troubles.

Philip could not go back, and he was to have a child. But if he could not go back to duty, neither, she saw, must he be allowed to return to the Flats. The one, surely, was just as dangerous as the other, and the Mills carried with them a sense of failure and disgrace. No, up to now she had been patient in the belief that he would return to his senses; but the time for patience had passed.

The old feeling of her own strength and righteousness began to return to her in great surging waves of confidence.

John McTavish! What did he know of her husband’s weakness? Or Philip’s weakness? How could he know that both of them were the sort who had to be guided? John McTavish! (She snorted at the thought.) A waster, a vulgar man, about whom gathered the riffraff of the Town. What had he ever done for the good of any one?

She had a sudden desire to see Moses Slade. Somehow she felt he’d understand her problem and approve her strong attitude. There was a man who did things. A distinguished man! A man who’d made his mark! Not a good-for-nothing like John McTavish.

The old possibility of marrying Moses Slade kept stealing back over her. Through pride and a faint sense of being a woman rejected, she tried not to think of it, but it was no good trying to put it out of her mind because it was always stealing back upon her unawares. Perhaps if she sent him a postcard, a pretty view of the new park, it would serve to remind him of her without being, properly speaking, a piece of forwardness. The temptation kept pricking her. It would be splendid to be the wife of a Congressman, and it would solve the difficulty of Philip. She could turn over the restaurant to him and Naomi.

Nearly two hours passed before she returned to the house, but in that time all life seemed to have become subdued and conquered once more. It had all been worked out. She sat down at once and wrote a perfectly impersonal message to Congressman Slade on the back of a picture postcard of the new monument to General Tecumseh Sherman that adorned dubiously the new park. On the way to the restaurant she posted it. As she left the house she heard Naomi sobbing alone in the corner of the darkened parlor, and a great wave of contempt swept over her for people who were not strong enough to manage their own lives.

On the same night the Reverend Castor led his congregation, or a fraction of it, in addressing to the Lord words of supplication and entreaty on behalf of “their brother Philip Downes, who lay at the point of death.” He begged that Philip, who had sacrificed his health, might be spared “to carry on the noble work among the black and sinful children of the great African continent.”

As he prayed, with arms extended and face upturned to heaven, the fine nose, the shapely dome of his head and imposing expanse of his chest, took on a classic, moving dignity. As the sonorous voice, trembling with emotion, rolled over the heads of his flock more than one woman felt herself slipping dimly into the grip of strange disturbing emotions.

He prayed longer than usual, painting for the Lord a moving and luxurious picture of the trials suffered by His servant; in Old Testament phrases he finished by calling the attention of God to the suffering of Naomi, who sat at home, ill herself, praying for the life of the husband she loved with such noble and selfless devotion.

When he had finished, there were tears in all eyes, and Emma, seated near the back, was sobbing in a warm mist of suffering and glory. In some way his eloquence had purified them all. It was as if each one of them had passed with Philip through the flame of suffering. They felt purged and clean and full of noble thoughts, almost ready at last to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

The sound of “Amens!” trembled in the air and before it had died away completely, Miss Swarmish, an old maid with a mustache, struck out several loud chords on the tinny piano and in her booming voice led them in singing, _Throw out the Life Line!_ They sang with militant enthusiasm, their voices echoing in the vast, damp basement of the church. It was an oblique glorification of Philip, the renegade, who lay unconscious in the slate-colored house. It was as if they, too, were forcing him back.

When they had finished the orgy of music and the Benediction was spoken, the usual stir was silenced suddenly by Emma’s rich voice. She had risen to her feet at the back of the room and was standing with her hands clasped on the back of the chair before her.

“Brothers and sisters,” she was saying, in a voice rich with emotion, “I know that all of you feel for me in the illness of my son. I have felt for some time that I should speak to you about him” (here, overcome by feeling, she coughed and hesitated) “to make an answer to the talk that has come to my ear from time to time. I feel that to-night--to-night is the time--the occasion ordained by God. I have very little to say. You know that his health has been wrecked forever by his work among our ignorant, sinful brothers in Africa. He is lying at the point of death. Your prayers have touched me to the depths of my heart, and if it is God’s will, surely they will help towards his recovery.” (Here she hesitated once more.) “People wondered why he came back. It was because his health was ruined. People wondered why he went into the Flats to work. It was because he wanted to know the life there. He has been through a great spiritual struggle. He fell ill because he was tormented by the wish to go back to his post, to those ignorant black men who live in darkness. If he recovers ...” (her voice broke suddenly) “if he recovers ... he can never go back. The doctors have told me that it would be nothing short of suicide. He has given his health, perhaps his life, in carrying forward our great purpose of sending the light to heathen.”

She hesitated for a moment as if she meant to say more, and then sat down abruptly, too overcome for speech. For a moment there was silence, and then one by one women began to gather about her, sobbing, to offer comfort. It was a touching scene, in which Emma managed to control herself after a time. Surrounding her, they moved out of the church in a sort of phalanx. Two or three of them even followed her a little way down the street. But it was her brother, Elmer, who accompanied her home. In his stiff, cold way he proposed to let bygones be bygones.

“At a time like this,” he said, “it’s not right for a brother and sister to quarrel.” And then, after an awkward silence, “I’ve no doubt that when Philip is well again, he’ll come to his senses and behave himself.”

He stopped at the slate-colored house for Aunt Mabelle, who had come over to sit with Naomi, and before they left, all of them, even Naomi, seemed to have changed in some way, to have grown more cheerful, as if the Heavenly joy of the prayer-meeting still clung like perfume to their very garments. Things, they all felt, were beginning to work themselves out.

18

When he had closed the roll-top desk in his study and locked the door after him, the Reverend Castor turned his steps toward the parsonage, still lost in the exalted mood which, descending miraculously upon the congregation, had risen to a climax in the noble words of Mrs. Downes. There was a lump in his throat when he thought of the goodness of women like her. She’d had a hard life, bringing up her boy, feeding and clothing him, and finding time, nevertheless, to care for his soul and give herself to church work. It was women like her who helped you to keep your faith, no matter what discouragements arose.

For a moment, a suspicion of disloyalty colored his meditations and he thought, “If I had only been blessed with a wife like Emma Downes!”

But quickly he stifled the thought, for such wickedness came to him far too often, especially in the moments when he relaxed and allowed his mind to go its own way. The thing seemed always to be lying in wait, like a crouching animal stealing upon him unawares. “If only I’d had some other woman for a wife!” The thing had grown bolder and more frequent as the years piled up. He would be fifty years old in another month. It kept pressing in upon him like the pain of an aching tooth. Soon he’d be too old to care. And he would die, having missed something which other men knew. He was growing older every day, every minute, every second ... older, older, older.

In a sudden terror, he began to repeat one of the Psalms in order to clear his mind and put to rout the grinning, malicious thought. He said the Psalm over three times, and then found that God had sent him strength. Walking the dark, silent street, he told himself that there were others far worse off than he. There was poor Naomi Downes with the husband she worshipped dying hourly, day and night, in the very house with her. She, too, had courage, though she wasn’t as strong as her mother-in-law. She wasn’t perhaps as fine a character as Emma, but there was something more appealing about her, a weakness and a youth that touched your pity. It was terrible to see a young girl like that with her husband dying and a baby coming on. He remembered that he must go again to-morrow and pray with her. It was odd (he thought) how little prayer seemed to comfort her--a girl like that who was a missionary and the daughter of missionaries. He must have a talk with her and try to help her.... She seemed to be losing her great faith....

He was on the front porch of the parsonage now, turning his key in the lock, and something of the wild emotion of the prayer-meeting still clung to him. It had been a glorious success. He was still thinking of Naomi as he closed the door, and heard a whining voice from the top of the stairs.

“Is that you, Samuel?”

He waited for a moment and then answered, “Yes, my dear.”

“What kept you so late? I’ve been frightened to death. The house was full of noises and I heard some one walking about in the parlor.”

“We prayed for Philip Downes,” he said, turning out the light.

The whining voice from above-stairs took on an acid edge. “And you never thought about your poor suffering wife at home all alone. I suppose it never occurs to you to pray for _me_!”

He stood in the darkness, waiting, unwilling to climb the stairs until her complaints had worn themselves out. The voice again: “Samuel, are you there?”

“Yes, Annie.”

“Why don’t you answer me? Isn’t it enough to have to lie here helpless and miserable?”

“I was turning out the light.”

“Well, I want the hot-water bottle. You’ll have to heat water. And make it hot, not just lukewarm. It’s worse again. It’s never been so bad.”

As he went off to the kitchen, fragments of her plaints followed him: “I should think you’d have remembered about the hot-water bottle!” And, “If you’d had such pain as mine for fifteen years....”

Yes, fifteen years!

For fifteen years it had been like this. The old wicked thought came stealing back into his mind. If only he had a wife like Emma Downes or her daughter-in-law, Naomi ... some one young like Naomi. He was growing older, older, older....

He began again to repeat the Psalm, saying it aloud while he waited by the stove for the kettle to boil.

19

In the Flats the number of deaths began to mount one by one with the passing of each day. When disease appeared in any of the black, decaying houses, it had its way, taking now a child, now a wife, now a husband, for bodies that were overworked and undernourished had small chance of life in a region where the very air stank and the only stream was simply an open sewer. Doctors came and went, sometimes too carelessly, for there was small chance of pay, and to the people on the Hill the life of a worker was worth little. The creatures of the Flats were somehow only a sort of mechanical animal which produced and produced and went on producing.

The churches went on sending missionaries and money to the most remote corners of the earth; the clergymen prayed for the safety of their own flocks, while their congregations sat frightened and resentful, believing that somehow the people in the Flats had caused the catastrophe. It could not be (they reasoned) that God would send such a calamity upon a Town so God-fearing.

Irene Shane and Mary Conyngham closed their school because there was no longer any time to teach when people were ill and dying to right and left. Mary sat night after night at the beds of the dying. She saw one of Finke’s thirteen children die and then another and another. She listened to his cursing and drunken talk of revolution, and all the while she knew bitterly enough that those of the family who remained would be happier because they would have more to eat.

The Mills went on pounding and pounding; they were building new furnaces and new sheds. There seemed no end to it. It did not matter if people in the Flats died like flies, because there were always more where they came from--hordes of men and women and children who came filled with glorified hopes to this new country.

One day Mary read in the papers that the man who owned the Mills, himself a German immigrant, had built himself a marble palace on Fifth Avenue and would now divide his time between Pittsburgh and New York. He was becoming a gentleman: he had engaged an expert, a cultivated man of taste, to fill his New York house with pictures brought from Europe. The Town _Gazette_ printed an editorial drawing a moral from the career of the great magnate. See what could be done in this great land of God-given opportunity! A man who had begun as an immigrant. But it said nothing of the foundations on which the marble palace rested. It appeared to have arisen miraculously with the aid and sanction of God, innocent of all connection with the stinking Flats.

Mary, watching the spectacle about her, felt her heart turning to stone. If she was to be saved from bitterness, it would only be, she believed, through the touching faith of the ignorant wretches about her. She came to feel a sympathy for the cursing of a man like Finke: she herself even wanted at times to curse. She understood the sullen drunkenness of men like Sokoleff. What else was there for them to do? Something--perhaps a sense of dull misery, perhaps a terror of death--had slowly softened their resentment toward herself and Irene Shane. Once they had been looked upon as intruders come down from the Hills to poke about in filthy hallways and backyards filled with piles of rubbish and rows of privies. But it was no longer possible to doubt them. The two women, gently bred and fastidious, slept night after night at the school in the midst of the Flats. They sat up night after night by the beds of the dying.

There were times when Mary wondered why Irene Shane poured out all her strength in succoring these wretched people. She sensed deep in Irene a strange kind of unearthly mysticism which made her seem at times stubborn and irritable. It was a mysticism strangely akin to that groping hunger which had always tormented Philip. The likeness came to her suddenly one night as she sat by the bed of one of Finke’s dying children. It seemed to her a strange and inexplicable likeness in people so different. Yet it was true--they were both concerned with shadowy problems of faith and service to God which never troubled the more practical Mary. And Irene, she fancied, was prey to a sense of atonement, as if she must in some way answer to God for the wickedness of a father long dead and a sister who was, as the Town phrased it, “not all she should have been.” There was, too, that hard, bitter old woman who lay dying and never left Shane’s Castle--old Julia Shane, the queen ant of all the swarming hive.

As for herself, Mary knew well enough why she had come to work in the Flats: she had come in order to bury herself in some task so mountainous and hopeless that it would help her to forget the aching hurt made by John Conyngham’s behavior with Mamie Rhodes. It required a cure far more vigorous even than a house and two children to make her forget a thing like that.

She had been, people said, a fool to put up with such behavior. But what was she to do? There were the children and there was her own devotion to John Conyngham, a thing which he had thrown carelessly aside. It wasn’t even as if you suffered in secret: in the Town a thing like that couldn’t be kept a secret. The very newsboys knew of it. She had found a sort of salvation in working with Irene Shane. People said she was crazy, a woman with two small children, to go about working among Hunkies and Dagoes; but she took good care of her children, too, and she supplied the people in the Flats with what no amount of such mystical devotion as Irene Shane could supply: she had a sound practical head.

She was an odd girl (she thought) when you came to consider it, with a kind of curse on her. She had to have some one to whom she could give herself up completely, pouring out all the soul in a fantastic devotion. John Conyngham had tired of it, perhaps (she sometimes thought) because he was a cold, hard, sensual man who had no need for such a thing. A woman like Mamie Rhodes (she thought bitterly) suited him better. If she had been married to Philip, who needed it so pathetically....

In the long nights of vigil, she thought round and round in circles, over the same paths again and again.... And before many nights had passed she found herself coming back always to the thing she knew and tried constantly to forget ... that it had been Philip whom she loved always, since those very first days in the tree-house. It seemed to her that at twenty-eight her life, save for her children, was already at an end. She was a widow with only memories of an unhappy married life behind her and nothing to hope for in the future. Philip was married and, so Krylenko told her, about to have a child of his own. She didn’t even know whether he even thought of her. And yet, she told herself, fiercely, _she did know_. He had belonged to her always, and she knew it more than ever while they had sat on the bridge, during that solitary walk into the open country.

Philip was _hers_, and he was such a fool that he would never know it. He was always lost in mooning about things that didn’t matter. _She_ could save him: she could set straight his muddles and moonings. He needed some one who thought less of God and more of making a good pie and keeping his socks darned.

She herself had never thought much about God save when her children were born and her husband died, and even then she had been only brushed by a consciousness of some vast and overwhelming personal force. Life, even with its pain, seemed a satisfactory affair: there was always so much to be done, and it wasn’t God that Philip needed but pies and socks and a woman who believed in him.

She knew every day whether he was better or worse and she found herself, for the first time in all her life, praying to God to spare his life. She didn’t know whether there was a God or whether He would listen to one who only petitioned when she was in need, but she prayed none the less, believing that if there was any God, He would understand why it was she turned to Him. If He did not understand, she told herself rebelliously, then He was not worthy of existing as God.

She did not go to the slate-colored house, though she did ask for news on one occasion when she met Emma in the street. She understood that Emma had resented her friendship for Philip, even when they were children, and so avoided seeming to show any great interest. But she heard, nevertheless, sometimes from Krylenko who had even gone to the door to inquire, and sometimes from the doctor, but most of the time it was McTavish who kept her informed.

McTavish was the only person whom she suspected of guessing her secret.

After she had stopped day after day at his undertaking-parlors, he looked at her sharply one day out of his humorous little blue eyes, and said, “If Philip gets better, we’ve got to help him.” Then he hesitated for a moment and added, “Those two women are very bad for him.”

He was, she understood, feeling his way. When she agreed, by not protesting, he went on, “You ought to have married him, Mary, when you had a chance.”

“I never had a chance.”

“I thought perhaps you had.... I understand. She began her dirty work too soon.”

Mary knew well enough whom he meant by “she.” It struck her that he seemed to hate Emma Downes with an extraordinary intensity.

“Still it may work out yet,” he said. “Sometimes things like that are a little better for waiting.”

She did not answer him, but spoke about the weather, and thanked him and said good-by, but she felt a sudden warmth take possession of all her body. “_Still it may work out yet._” He never spoke of it again, but when she came in on her way up the hill, he always looked at her in the same eloquent fashion. It was odd, too, that the look seemed to comfort her: it made her feel less alone.

It was from Krylenko that she first heard news of the catastrophe that was coming: he told her and Irene Shane, perhaps because he had confidence in them, but more, perhaps, because he knew that in the end they were the only ones beyond the borders of the Flats to whom he might look for sympathy. The news frightened her at first because there had never been any strike in the Town and because she knew that there was certain to be violence and suffering and perhaps even death. She understood that the spirit which moved the big Ukranian was an eternal force of the temper which had made bloodshed and revolution since the beginning of time. It shone in his blue eyes--the light of fanaticism for a cause. The thing, he said, had been brewing for a long time: any one with half an intelligence could have seen it coming. And Mary knew more than most, for she knew of the hasty, secret meetings in the room over Hennessey’s saloon with men who came into the Town and out again like shadows. She watched the curious light in Krylenko’s eyes in turn kindle a light in the pale eyes of an unecstatic old maid like Irene Shane. She felt the thing spreading all about her like a fire in the thick underbrush of a forest. It seemed to increase as the plague of typhoid began to abate. In some mysterious way it even penetrated the secure world settled upon the Seven Hills.

She had, too, a trembling sense of treason toward those whom the Town would have called her own people--but her heart leaped on the day when Krylenko told her that Philip, too, was on their side. He was, the Ukranian said, a member of the new Union: they had celebrated his joining months ago at Hennessey’s saloon. It made Philip seem nearer to her, as if he belonged not at all to the two women who guarded him. Krylenko told her on the day when every one was certain that Philip was dying, and it served to soften the numb pain which seemed to blind her to all else in the world.

In the afternoon of the same day, Irene Shane said to her, “My mother is dying, and I’ve cabled to my sister, Lily, to come home.”

20

When Moses Slade was not in Washington, he always went on Sundays to the Baptist Church which stood just across the street from Emma’s house of worship. It was not that he was a religious man, for he had enough to do without thinking about God. The service bored him and during the sermon he passed the time by turning his active mind toward subjects more earthly and practical, such as the speech he was to make next week at Caledonia, or what answer he would have for the Democratic attack upon his vote against the Farmers’ Relief Bill. (How could they understand that what was good for farmers was bad for industry?) In the beginning, he had fallen into the habit of going to church because most of his votes came from churchgoing people: he went in the same spirit which led him to join sixteen fraternal organizations. But he had gone for so long now that he no longer had any doubts that he was a religious, God-fearing man. (In Washington it did not matter: he could sit at home on Sunday mornings in old clothes drinking his whisky with his feet up on a chair while he read farm papers and racing news.)

Of all the citizens of the Seven Hills, he alone appeared in the streets on Sunday mornings clad in a Prince Albert and a top-hat. Any other citizen in such a fancy-dress costume would have been an object of ridicule, but it was quite proper that he--the Honorable Moses Slade, Congressman--should be thus garbed. He carried it off beautifully; indeed, there was something grand and awe-inspiring in the spectacle of the big man with thick, flowing hair and an enormous front, standing on the steps of the First Baptist Church, speaking to fathers and mothers and patting miserable children imprisoned in stiff Sunday clothes.

On one hot September Sunday he was standing thus (having just patted the last wretched child) when the doors of the church opposite began to yield up its dead. Among the first to descend the Indiana limestone steps appeared the large, handsome figure of Emma, dressed entirely in dark clothing. Moses Slade noticed her at once, for it was impossible not to notice such a magnetic personage, and he fancied that she might go away without even knowing he was there. (He would never learn, of course, that she had hurried out almost before the last echo of Reverend Castor’s Benediction had died away, because she knew that the Baptist Church was always over a little before her own.)

In that first glance, something happened to him which afterward made him feel silly, but at the moment had no such effect. A voice appeared to say, “I can’t wait any longer,” and excusing himself, he hurried, but with an air of dignity, down the steps of his church, and, crossing the street in full view of the now mingling congregations, raised his glistening top-hat, and said, “Good-morning, Mrs. Downes.”

Emma turned with a faint air of surprise, but with only the weakest of smiles (for was she not in sorrow?) “Why, Mr. Slade, I didn’t know you were back.”

“May I walk a way with you?”

“Of course, it would be a pleasure.”

Together they went off beneath the yellowing maples, the eyes of two congregations (to Emma’s delight) fastened on them. One voice at least, that of the soured Miss Abercrombie, was raised in criticism. “There’s no fool,” she observed acidly, “like an old one.”

When they had gone a little way beyond the reach of prying eyes and ears, Moses Slade became faintly personal in his conversation.

“I appreciated your sending me that postcard,” he said.

“Well, I thought you’d like to see the new monument to General Sherman. I knew it was unveiled while you were away, and seeing that you took so much interest in it....” Her voice died away with a note of sadness. The personal touch had filled them both with a sense of constraint, and in silence he helped her across the street, seizing her elbow as if it were a pump-handle.

Safely on the opposite side, he said, “I was sorry to hear of the illness of your son. I hope he’s better by now.”

Emma sighed. “No ... he’s not much better. You see, he gave up his health in Africa working among the natives.” She sighed again. “I doubt if he’ll ever be well again. He’s such a good boy, too.”

“Yes, I always heard that.”

“Of course, he may not live. We have to face things, Mr. Slade. If God sees fit to take him, who am I to be bitter and complain? But it isn’t easy ... to have your only son....” She began to cry, and it occurred to Moses Slade that she seemed to crumple and grow softly feminine in a way he had not thought possible in a woman of such character. He had never had any children of his own. He felt that she needed comforting, but for once words seemed of no use to him--the words which always flowed from him in an easy torrent.

“You’ll forgive me, Mr. Slade, if I give way ... but it’s gone on for weeks now. Sometimes I wonder that the poor boy has any strength left.”

“I understand, Mrs. Downes,” he said, in a strange, soft voice.

“I always believe in facing things,” she repeated. “There’s no good in pretending.” She was a little better now and dabbing her eyes with her handkerchief. Fortunately, no one had passed them: no one had witnessed the spectacle of Emma Downes in tears, walking with Congressman Slade.

Before the slate-colored house, they halted, and Mr. Slade asked, “Would you mind if I came in? I’d like to hear how the boy is.”

She left him in the parlor, sitting beneath the enlarged portrait of the late Mr. Downes, while she went off up the stairs to ask after Philip. Naomi and Mabelle were there talking, because Naomi no longer went out on account of her appearance, and Mabelle, who always went to sleep in church, avoided it whenever possible. Emma did not speak to them, but hurried past their door to the room where Philip lay white and still, looking thin and transparent, like a sick little boy.

Downstairs, in the darkened parlor, Moses Slade disposed his weight on the green plush, and, leaning on his stick, waited. His mind seemed to be in utter confusion, his brain all befogged. Nothing was very clear to him. He regarded the portrait of Emma’s husband, remembering slowly that he had seen Downes years ago, and held a very poor opinion of him. He had been a clever enough fellow, but he never seemed to know where he was going. Emma (he had begun already with a satisfactory feeling of warmth to think of her thus) was probably well rid of him. She had made a brave struggle of it. A fine woman! Look how she behaved about this boy! She believed in facing things. Well, that was a fine, brave quality. He, too, believed in facing things. He couldn’t let her go on alone like this. And he began to think of reason after reason why he should marry Emma Downes.

She was gone a long while, and presently he found his gaze wandering back to the portrait. The dead husband seemed to gaze at him with an air of mockery, as if he thought the whole affair was funny. Moses Slade turned in his chair a little, so that he did not look directly at the wooden portrait.

And then he fell to thinking of Philip. What was the boy like? Did he resemble his father or his mother? Had he any character? Certainly his behavior, as far as you could learn, had been queer and mysterious. He might be a liability, yes, a distinct liability, one which was always making trouble. Perhaps he (Moses Slade) ought to go a little more slowly. Of course the boy might die, and that would leave everything clear, with Emma to console. (He yearned impatiently to console her.) It was a wicked thought; but, of course, he wasn’t actually _hoping_ that the boy would die. He was only facing things squarely, considering the problem from every point of view as a statesman should.

Again he caught the portrait smirking at him, and then the door opened, and Emma came in. She had been crying again. He stood up quickly and the old voice said, “I can’t wait any longer.” He took her hand gently with a touch which he meant to be interpreted as a sympathetic prelude to something more profound. She didn’t resist.

“Well?” he asked.

Emma sank down on the sofa. “I don’t know. They thought he’d be better to-day, and ... and, he isn’t.”

“You mustn’t cry--you mustn’t,” he said in a husky voice.

“I don’t know,” she kept repeating. “I don’t know what I’m to do. I’m so tired.”

He sat down beside her, thankful suddenly that the room was dark, for in the darkness courtship was always easier, especially after middle-age. He now took her hand in both his. There was a long silence in which she gained control of herself, and she did not withdraw her hand nor resist in any way.

“Mrs. Downes,” he said presently in a husky voice. “Emma ... Mrs. Downes ... I have something to ask you. I’m a sober, middle-aged man, and I’ve thought it over for a long time.” He cleared his throat and gave her hand a gentle pressure. “I want you to marry me.”

She had known all along that it was coming. Indeed, it was almost like being a girl once more to see Moses Slade, man-like, working his way with the grace of an elephant toward the point; but now it came with the shock of surprise. She couldn’t answer him at once for the choke in her throat. For weeks she had borne so much, known such waves of sorrow, that something of her unflagging spirit was broken. She thought, “At last, I am to have my reward for years of hard work. God is rewarding me for all my suffering.”

She began to cry again, and Moses Slade asked quickly, “You aren’t going to refuse--with all I can give you....”

“No,” she sobbed, and, leaning forward a little, as if for support, placed her free hand upon his fat knee. “No ... I’m not going to refuse ... only I can’t quite believe it.... I’ve had such a hard time. I’d begun to think that I should never have a reward.”

Suddenly he leaned over and took her awkwardly in his arms. She felt the heavy metal of his gold watch-chain pressing into her bare arm, and then she heard footsteps descending the stairs in the hallway. It was Mabelle going home at last. She was certain to open the door, because Mabelle couldn’t pass a closed door without finding out what was going on behind it.

“Wait!” said Emma, sitting up very straight. “You’d better sit on the other chair.”

Understanding what it was she meant, he rose and went back to the green plush. The steps continued, and then, miraculously, instead of halting, they went past the door and out into the street.

The spell was broken, and Moses Slade suddenly felt that he had made a fool of himself, as if he had been duped by an adventuress.

“It’s Mabelle,” said Emma, who had ceased weeping. “My brother Elmer’s wife. She has such a snoopy disposition, I thought we’d better not be found ... found ... well, you understand.” She blew her nose. “You’ve made me happy ... you don’t know what it’s like to think that I won’t have to go on any more ... alone ... old age is all right, if you’re not alone....”

“Yes, I understand that!” He was a little upset that she treated the affair as if they were an elderly pair marrying for the sake of company in adjoining rocking-chairs. That wasn’t at all the way he had looked upon it. In fact, he had been rather proud at the thought of the youthful fervor which had driven him to cross the street a little while before. By some malicious ill-fortune, Mabelle’s footsteps had cut short the declaration at the very moment when he had been ready to act in such a way as to establish the whole tone of their future relationship.

“Yes, I understand that,” he repeated, “but there’s no use talking about old age. Why, we’re young--Emma--I suppose I can call you Emma?”

She blushed. “Why, yes, of course.”

“You wouldn’t mind if I called you just Em? That was my mother’s name, and I always liked it.”

“No, don’t call me Em. It’s a name I hate--not on account of your mother, of course ... Moses.”

She couldn’t think why she objected to the name: she had been called Em all her life, but somehow it was connected with the vague far-off memory of the romantic Jason Downes. He had called her Em, and it seemed wrong to let this elderly, fleshy man use the same name. It seemed vaguely sacrilegious to put this second marriage on the same basis as the first. She had _loved_ Jason Downes. She knew it just now more passionately than she had ever known it.

“You understand,” she said, laying one hand gently on his.

“Yes, of course, Emma.”

They were standing now, awkwardly waiting for something, and Moses Slade again suddenly took her in his arms. He pinched her arm, ever so gently--just a little pinch; and then he began at once to make a fool of himself again.

“When shall it be?” he asked. “We must fix a date.”

She hesitated for a moment. “Don’t ask me now. I’m all confused and I’ve had so much to worry me. We mustn’t be hasty and undignified--a man in your position can’t afford to be.”

“We can be married quietly ... any time. No one would know how long I’d been courting you.” Then he suddenly became romantic. “The truth is that I’ve wanted to marry you ever since that day you came to see me. So it’s been a long time, you see.”

For a moment she was silent and thoughtful. At last she said, “There’s one thing we ought to consider, Moses. I don’t know about such things, but you’ll know, being a lawyer. It’s about my first husband. You see they never found his body out there in China. They only know he disappeared and must have been killed by bandits. Now what I mean is this ... he mightn’t be dead at all. He might have lost his mind or his memory. And if he turned up....”

Moses Slade looked at her sharply. “You _do_ want to marry me, don’t you, Em ... I mean Emma.... You’re not trying to get out of it?”

“Of course I want to marry you. I only mentioned this because I believe in facing things.”

“How long has he been gone?”

“It’s twenty-four years this January. I remember it well. It was snowing that night, just after the January thaw....”

He checked what would have been a long story by saying, “Twenty-four years ... all alone without a husband. You’re a brave little woman, Emma.” He made a clicking sound with his tongue, and looked at her fondly. “Well, that’s a long time ... long enough for him to be considered dead under law. But we’ll have him declared dead by law and then we won’t have to worry.”

Emma was staring at the floor with a curious fixed look in her eyes. At last she said, “Do you think that would be right? He might still be alive. He might come back.”

Moses Slade grew blustering, as if he were actually jealous of that shadow of the man who kept looking down at him with an air of sardonic amusement.

“It won’t make any difference if we declare him dead. Besides, he hasn’t got any right to you if he _is_ alive.”

It wasn’t that she was simply afraid he might return; the source of her alarm went much deeper than that. She felt that she couldn’t trust herself if he did return; but of course she couldn’t explain that to Moses.

“It wasn’t quite that,” she murmured, and, conscious that the remark didn’t make sense, she asked quickly, “How long ought it to take?”

“A couple of months.”

“We could be married after that?”

“Yes, as soon as possible.”

Moses Slade took her hand again. “You’ve made me a happy man, Emma. You won’t regret it.” He picked up his hat. “I’d like to call to-night. Maybe you’d go to evening service with me?”

“No, I think we’d better not let any one know about it till it’s settled.”

“Maybe you’re right. Well, I’ll come to the restaurant to-morrow for lunch.”

He kissed her again, a bit too ardently, she felt, to be quite pleasant, and they went into the hall. At the same moment the figure of Naomi appeared, descending the stairs heavily. She was clad only in a nightgown and a loose kimono of flowered stuff. Her hair, still in curl-papers, lay concealed beneath a kind of mob-cap of bright green satin, trimmed with soiled lace. It was impossible to avoid her.

“Naomi,” said Emma, in a voice of acid, “this is Mr. Slade--Moses, my daughter-in-law, Naomi.”

Naomi said, “Pleased to meet you.” Moses Slade bowed, went through the door, and the meeting was over.

When the door closed, Emma stood for a moment with the knob in her hand. Naomi was watching her with a look of immense interest and curiosity strangely like the look that came so often into the eyes of Mabelle when curiosity about the subjects of love and childbirth became too strong for her feeble control.

“Is that Mr. Slade ... the Congressman?” asked Naomi.

“Yes, it is.” There was something in Naomi’s look that maddened her, something that was questioning, shameless, offensive, and even accusing.

“What made him come to see us?”

Emma controlled herself. She felt lately that it was all she could bear always to have Naomi in the house.

“He came to ask about Philip.”

“I didn’t know that he knew Philip.”

“He didn’t, but he’s an old friend of mine.” The lie slipped easily from her tongue.

“Philip’s better,” Naomi answered. “He opened his eyes and looked at me. I think he knew me.”

“Did he speak?”

“No, he just closed them again without saying anything.”

Emma moved away from the door as Naomi turned into the dining-room. “Naomi,” she called suddenly, “is the Reverend Castor coming this afternoon?”

“Yes ... he said he was.”

“Surely you’re going to put on some clothes before he comes?”

“I was going to fix my hair.”

“You must put on some clothes. I won’t have you going about the house all day looking like this--half dressed and untidy. You’re a sight! What will a man like Mr. Slade think--a man who is used to Washington where there’s good society.”

Naomi stared at her for a moment with an unaccustomed look of defiance in her pale eyes. (Emma thought, “Mabelle has been making her into a slattern like herself.”)

“Well, in my condition, clothes aren’t very comfortable. I think in my condition I might have some consideration.”

Emma began to breathe heavily. “That has nothing to do with it. When I was in your condition I dressed and went about my work every day. I wore corsets right up to the end.”

“Well, I’m not strong like you.... The doctor told me....”

Emma broke in upon her. “The doctor didn’t tell you to go about looking like a slattern all day! I wish you’d tell Mabelle for me that I’d like to come home just once without finding her here.”

The fierce tension could not endure. When it broke sharply, Naomi sat down and began to cry. “Now you want to take her away from me,” she sobbed. “I’ve given up everything to please you and Philip ... everything. I even gave up going back to Megambo, where the Lord meant me to be. And now I haven’t got anything left ... and you all hate me. Yes, you do. And Philip does too sometimes.... He hates me.... You wanted me to marry him, and now see what’s come of it. I’m even in this condition because you wanted me to be.” She began to cry more and more wildly. “I’ll run out into the street. I’ll kill myself. I’ll run away, and then maybe you’ll be happy. I won’t burden you any longer.”

Emma was shaking her now, violently, with all the shame and fury she felt at Moses’ encounter with this slatternly daughter-in-law, and all the contempt she felt for a creature so poor spirited.

“You’ll do no such thing, you little fool! You’ll brace up and behave like a woman with some sense!”

But it was no good. Naomi was simply having one of her seizures. She grew more hysterical, crying out, “You’d like to be rid of me ... both of you. You both hate me.... Oh, I know ... I know ... I’m nothing now ... nothing to anybody in the world! I’m just in your way.”

Emma, biting her lip, left her abruptly, closing the door behind with ferocious violence. If she had not gone at once, she felt that she would have laid hands on Naomi.

Moses Slade, bound toward his own house, walked slowly, lost once more in a disturbing cloud of doubts. With Emma out of sight, the ardent lover yielded place to the calculating politician. He suffered, he did not know why, from a feeling of having been duped. The sight of Naomi so untidy and ill-kempt troubled him. He hadn’t known about the child. The girl must be at least seven months gone, and he hadn’t known it. Of course (he thought) you couldn’t have expected Emma voluntarily to mention a subject so indelicate. Nevertheless, he felt that she should have conveyed the knowledge to him in some discreet fashion. Even if the boy did die, the situation would be just as bad, or worse. If he left a widow and a child.... He felt suddenly as if in some way Emma herself had tricked him, as if she herself were having a child, and had tricked him into marrying her to protect herself....

In a kind of anguish he regretted again that he had been so impetuous in his proposal to the widow Barnes that he had shocked her into refusal. _She_ wasn’t so fine-looking a woman as Emma, but she was free, without encumbrances or responsibilities, without a child. Of course, Emma would never know that in the midst of his courtship he had been diverted by the prospect of Mrs. Barnes. She would never know what had been the reason for the months of silence....

21

Since the reconciliation, the Sunday dinner at Elmer Niman’s had again been resumed, and Emma, on her way there, suffered as keenly from doubts as her suitor had done on his homeward journey. Now that the thing was accomplished, or practically so, she was uneasy. It was not, she reflected, a simple thing to alter the whole course of one’s life at her age. There would be troubles, difficulties, for Moses Slade was not, she could see, an easy man to manage. To be sure, he was less slippery than Jason had been: a Congressman could never run off and disappear. But, on the other hand, he was as rocklike and solid as his own portly figure.

She faced the thing all the way to Elmer’s house, examining it from every possible angle, except the most important of all--the angle of ambition. In the bottom of her heart, hidden and veiled by all the doubts and probings, there lay a solid determination to marry Moses Slade. The restaurant was a complete success, enlarged to a size commensurate with the possibilities of the Town. Nothing more remained to be done, and she was still a healthy, vigorous woman in the prime of life. As the wife of Moses Slade, new vistas opened before her.... There had never been any doubt about her course of action, but she succeeded in convincing herself that she was going slowly and examining every possibility of disaster.

What she found most difficult to bear was the lack of a confidante. Even though, as she admitted to herself, it was silly to think of such a thing as love between herself and Moses, she had nevertheless an overwhelming desire to share the news with some one. It was almost as strong as the feeling she had experienced twenty-seven years earlier after accepting Jason’s declaration. She could not, she felt, go in safety beyond the borders of a discreet hinting to any of her woman friends: a mere rumor soon spread among them with the ferocity of a fire in a parched forest. Naomi was the last person to tell, especially since that queer Mabelle look had come into her eyes. And her brother? No, she couldn’t tell him, though she supposed he would be pleased at her marrying so solid a man. It wasn’t clear to her why she couldn’t bring herself to tell him, save that it was connected vaguely with the memory of his behavior on the occasion of announcing her engagement to Jason. He might behave in the same fashion again; and on the first occasion he had only forgiven her when Jason had vindicated his opinion by disappearing. Elmer, she knew, loved to say, “I told you it would end like this.”

There remained only Philip, and he was too ill to be told; but when she thought of it, she began to doubt whether she would have told him if he had been well.

It was the first time since his return that she had had need to confide in him, and now she found herself troubled by the feeling that it wouldn’t be easy. Until now she had gone bravely on, ignoring the changes in their relations as mother and son, but now that a test had arisen, she saw that there had been a change. She saw, despite herself, that he had become in a way a stranger--her boy, who had always loved her, whom she worshipped with a maternal passion too intense to be put into words. Her boy, whose very character she had created as she had created his flesh, had become a stranger with whom she couldn’t even discuss her own plans. Once he would have believed that whatever she did was right.

As she thought of it, she walked more rapidly. Why, she asked herself, had this happened to her? Hadn’t she given all her life to him? Hadn’t she worked her fingers to the bone? Hadn’t she watched and guarded him from evil and sin, kept him pure? Had she ever thought of anything but his welfare and saving him from the pitfall of his father’s weaknesses? A lump came into her throat, and a moisture into her eyes. What had she done to deserve this?

She felt no resentment against him. It was impossible to blame him in any way. He was a good boy, who had never caused her any trouble--not trouble in the real sense, for his doubts about his calling were temporary, and perhaps natural. Since he could never go back to Africa, he would in the end settle down with some church of his own. He might even perhaps become a bishop, for certainly he was more clever than most preachers, a thousand times more clever than the Reverend Castor, and more of a gentleman, more of what a bishop ought to be. And after this illness perhaps he would see the light once more. Perhaps the Lord had sent this illness for just that reason.

No, Philip was a perfect son. She was sure that he still loved her.

She tried to hate the Mills, but that was impossible, and in the end the suspicion came to her that the change was due in some way to Naomi. It must be Naomi. She had always thought that Naomi disliked her. Why, she didn’t know. Hadn’t she done everything for Naomi? Hadn’t she treated her as if she were her own daughter?

And her only reward was spite and jealousy.

While she thought of it, it occurred to her that the change in Philip--the _real_ change--his slipping away from her--had begun at the time that Naomi became his wife in more than name: until that time he had always been her boy who adored her. Suddenly, she saw it all clearly; it was Naomi for whom she had done everything, who had stolen Philip from her.

Her tears were dried by the time she reached her brother’s front step, but the lump in her throat was still there, and it remained all through the lunch, so that at times she felt that she might suddenly weep, despite herself. In her sorrow, she paid little heed to her brother’s usual long speeches, or to Mabelle’s idiotic interruptions. But she was able to despise Mabelle with a contempt which made any previous emotion pale by comparison. Because Mabelle was Naomi’s friend, she, too, seemed responsible for what had happened.

After lunch, when Mabelle had gone out to the kitchen for a time, Emma took her brother aside in the grim parlor, and said, “Elmer, I have something to ask of you.”

He looked at her sharply, in a way in which he had looked at her for years on occasions when he thought she might be asking for money. It had never yet happened, but the unguarded look of alarm had never wholly died since the moment that Jason Downes left his wife penniless.

“It’s not what you think,” said Emma coldly. “It’s only about Mabelle. I want you to keep her from coming to the house so often.”

“But why, Emma?”

“You don’t know that she spends all her days there. I never go home without finding her ... and I think she’s bad for Naomi ... just now.”

“How bad for her?”

He was standing with his hands clasped behind him, watching her. For a moment she looked squarely into his eyes, hesitating, wondering whether she dared speak the truth. Then she took the plunge, for she felt suddenly that Elmer would understand. There was a bond between them not of fraternal affection (for there were times when they actually disliked each other), but a tie far stronger. He would understand what she meant to say, because he was, in spite of everything, very like her. They were two people who had to rule those about them, two people who were always right. She knew that he understood her contempt for Mabelle as a woman and as a housekeeper; the fact that Mabelle was his wife made little difference.

“You’ll understand what I mean, Elmer. You know that Mabelle doesn’t keep house well. You know she’s ... well, lazy and untidy. And that is why she’s bad for Naomi. Naomi wasn’t meant for a wife and mother, I’m afraid. She’s a miserable failure at it. I’m trying to put character into her, to make something of her ... but I can’t, if Mabelle’s always there. She undoes all I can do.”

He unclasped his hands, and, after a moment, said, “Yes, I think I know what you mean. Besides, Mabelle ought to be at home looking after her own house a little. You’d think that she couldn’t bear the sight of it. She’s always gadding.” He turned away. “She’s coming now. I’ll speak to her, and if she still bothers you let me know.”

Mabelle came through the swinging beaded portières. “It’s too bad Naomi couldn’t come, too, for lunch. It’s a pity she feels like she does about being seen in the street. I have tried to make her sensible about it. Why, when I was carrying Ethel....”

Both of them gave her black looks, but Mabelle, seating herself at once in the rocking-chair, rattled on without noticing.

22

The inspiration came to Emma at the evening service, when she was struck again by the quality of sympathy in the voice and countenance of the Reverend Castor. He, of course, was the one with whom to discuss the problem of her marriage. He would understand, and he would be able, as well, to give her advice. Nor did he ever betray all the ladies of his congregation who came to him with their troubles. And he had been so sympathetic over Philip’s long illness, showing so deep a solicitude, calling at the house three or four times a week.

Almost at once she felt happier.

At the end of the service, she waited until he had shaken hands with all the congregation, smiling and making little jests with them, as if he had not done so twice a day for fifty-two Sundays a year, ever since he had felt the call. When they had all gone, she said, “Could I take a moment of your time, Reverend Castor? I want advice over something that worries me.”

It was a request he heard often enough, from one woman after another--women who asked advice upon every subject from thieving hired girls to erring husbands. There were times when he felt he could not endure listening to one more woman talk endlessly about herself. It wearied him so that he wanted to flee suddenly, leaving them all, together with the hand-shaking and the very church itself, behind him forever. Sometimes he had strange dreams, while he was awake, and with his eyes wide open, of fleeing to some outlandish place like those marvelous islands in the South Seas where there were none of these things. And then to calm his soul, he would tell himself cynically that even in those islands there were women.

He led her to his study, which he had been driven to establish at the back of the church, since there was no peace in the parsonage from the complaining voice above-stairs. There the two of them sat down. It occurred to Emma that he looked very white and tired, that there were new lines on his face. He couldn’t be an old man. He wasn’t much older than herself, yet he was beginning to look old. It was, she supposed, the life he led at home. A clergyman, of all people, needed an understanding, unselfish wife.

“And now,” he was saying, “I’m always pleased to help, however I can in my humble way.”

He was a good man, who never sought to evade his duty, however tired he was. He wanted, honestly, to help her.

She began to tell him, constructing an approach to the fact itself by explaining what a lonely, hard life she had had since the death of her husband in China. She touched upon the Christian way in which she had brought up her boy, and now (she said) that he was a grown man and married and would soon have a parish of his own (since he could not return to Africa) she would be left quite alone. She wanted the rest which she had earned, and the companionship for which she would no doubt hunger in her old age. These were the reasons why she had accepted the offer of Moses Slade. Yet she was troubled.

She leaned back in her chair and sighed. What did he think? Could he help her to decide?

The study was a gloomy room, lighted in the day-time by a single sooty Gothic window and at night by a single jet of gas. There was a roll-top desk, a long heavy table, a cabinet where the choir music was kept, and two or three sagging, weary leather chairs. Before he answered her, the tired eyes of the Reverend Castor rested for a time on the meager furniture as if he had lost himself in deep thought. She waited. This attitude was, however, merely professional, and wholly misleading. He was not in deep thought. He was merely thinking, “She doesn’t want advice. She only wants to talk about herself. Whatever I say will make no difference. She means to marry him, no matter what happens.”

But because this was his work he spoke at last, setting forth one by one all the arguments she had repeated to herself earlier in the day, concluding with the remark, “The reasons on the other side you have put very well yourself.”

Emma stirred in the springless leather chair. “Then what do you advise?”

“Mrs. Downes, it is a matter that no one can decide but yourself. Pray God to help you, and do what you think is right.”

He was troubled, and, in a vague way, disturbed and unhappy, because in the back of his mind the worm of envy was at work, gnawing, gnawing, gnawing--a sinful worm that gave him no peace. Moses Slade was free to marry again, and he had chosen Emma Downes. He had thought of Emma Downes for himself, in case ... (the wicked thought returned to him again like a shadow crossing his path) ... in case Annie’s illness carried her off at last. It seemed to him that all the world was going past him, while he remained behind, chained to a complaining invalid.

Emma rose, and, after he had turned the gas out and locked the door, they went out together. It was a clear, quiet night, when for once there seemed to be no soot in the air, and the stars seemed very close. For a moment they both stood listening, and at last Emma said, “Am I right, or am I growing deaf? Do the Mills sound very far away to-night ... sort of weak?”

He listened, and then said, “Yes, it’s queer. They sound almost faint.”

There was another silence. And Emma gave a low, groaning sound. “Maybe that’s it ... maybe they’ve gone out on strike.”

“There’ll be trouble,” said the Reverend Castor. “It makes me kind of sick to think of it.”

They bade each other good-night, and went their ways, the Reverend Castor hurrying along, because he was more than an hour late. He knew that when he arrived she would be out of her bed, standing at the upper window looking for him, her mind charged with the bitter reproaches she had thought out to fling at him, torturing sarcasms dealing with what had kept him so long in the study. She had an obsession that he meant to be unfaithful to her; she never ceased to hint and imply the most odious things. She was always accusing him of disgraceful things about women....

As he came nearer and nearer to the parsonage, he was seized by a terrible temptation to turn away, to disappear, never to enter the doors of his home again. But a man of God, he knew, couldn’t do a thing like that. And now God--even God--seemed to be deserting him. He couldn’t drive these awful thoughts from his mind. He began desperately to repeat his Psalm.

Turning past the hedge, he saw that there was a light in the upper window, and against the lace curtains the silhouette of a waiting figure, peering out eagerly.

When Emma entered the house, she discovered that all the lights were on, that Philip had been forgotten, and that his nurse and Mabelle were with Naomi, who was being forced to walk up and down. Mabelle sat giving advice and saying repeatedly that she never had such trouble even with her first baby. In a little while, the doctor came, and seven hours later Mabelle’s predictions were vindicated, for Naomi gave birth at last to twins, a boy and a girl. At about the same hour the last echo of the pounding at the Mills died away into silence, and the last fire in the blast-furnace died into ashes. In the room next to Naomi’s, Philip opened his eyes, called for a drink of water, and for the first time in four months knew that his head was clear and that his body was not burning or shaking. It was an extraordinary thing, the nurse observed, as if his children coming into the world had called him back to life.

He came back to consciousness out of a strange country peopled with creatures that might have haunted a Gothic nightmare, creatures who seemed as confused and unreal as the fantastic world on which they moved. Sometimes his mother was present, moving about, oddly enough, against the background of the jungle at Megambo, moving about among the niggers, converting them in wholesale lots. At times she would disappear suddenly, to return almost at once, driving before her with Lady Millicent Wimbrooke’s rawhide whip whole troops of natives, dressed completely, even to bonnets and shoes, like the people one saw in Main Street. And then she would feed them at the Peerless Restaurant, which seemed to have been set up intact on the borders of the gloomy forest. Once Lady Wimbrooke appeared herself with her portable-bath and rifle, and shooting about her carelessly, she drove all of them, including Emma, out of the restaurant into Main Street, which appeared miraculously to have sprung up just outside the door. Once outside, he discovered that all of them--Emma herself and the niggers, were walking stark naked in the car-tracks in the middle of the street. He, himself, seemed to be carrying a banner at the head of the parade on which was written in fiery letters, “Let God look out for himself. We will do the same.” And at the corner he found Mary Conyngham waiting to keep a tryst, and neither he nor she seemed to take any notice of the fact that he was as naked as the day he was born.

And Naomi was there, too, always in the background, only she was not the Naomi he knew, but a large woman with a soft, powerful body, like Swanson’s, above which her pale face peered out comically from beneath a sun-bonnet woven of reeds. Once or twice he had mistaken her for Swanson playing a joke on him.

At other times he seemed to be back in the Mills, or in Hennessey’s saloon, where Emma entered presently and broke all the mirrors; and then all of them were suddenly squeezed out of the doors to find themselves in the jungle, which appeared to have sprung up all about them, impenetrable save for a single path in which was stuck a cast-iron guide-post, reading, “To the Mills.” The air was filled with the sound of distant thunder, but he could not make out whether it was the distant sound of tom-toms, or the pounding of monstrous steel hammers. Oddly enough, it seemed quite natural, as if the trees, the jungle and the Mills belonged thus together.

And Mary Conyngham was always there. It seemed that she was married to him, and that they had somewhere a family of children which he had never seen and could not find.

Once he witnessed a horrible sight. He saw Emma pursuing the black virgin who had long ago been eaten by the leopards. The virgin, naked, save for her ornaments of copper wire, ran to the lake, and across the water, skimming the surface like a kingfisher of ebony, and, as Emma gave chase, she sank like a stone, disappearing beneath the brassy surface without a sound.

For a long time after he returned to life, memories of the dead, nightmarish world clung to him like wisps of the haze that sometimes veiled the lake at Megambo in the wet season. He did not know how long he had been ill, and at times it seemed to him that he had died and was not living at all. His body felt light as air, but when he tried to raise it, it failed him, slipping back in a miserable weakness. And then, bit by bit, as the memories of the delirium faded into space, the hard, barren world about him began to take shape ... the starched lace curtains at the windows, which Emma kept clean despite all the soot, the worn rocking-chair, the table at the side of the bed crowded with medicines, and, finally, the strange figure of the nurse. And then he understood that Naomi must be somewhere near at hand, and his mother. He had a vague feeling that they must have become old now, and gray, after all the years he had been ill.

It was Emma whom he saw first, and recognized. She came into the darkened room, and stood silently by the side of the bed until he, conscious that there was some one near him, opened his eyes, and said in a weak voice, “Is that you, Ma?”

Without answering him, she fell on her knees beside the bed and took his head in her hands, kissing him passionately again and again on his forehead. She wept and said over and over again, “Philip, my boy! The Lord has given me back my boy!”

There was something frightening in the wildness of her emotion. The nurse, hearing her weeping, came in to warn her that she must be calm, and Philip said weakly, “It’s all right. I understand. She’s always been like that.”

Once it would never have occurred to him to speak thus, as if he were detached from her and stood quite apart, protecting her. Protecting Emma! Something had happened to him during that long night of four months’ delirium.

When his mother had gained control of herself once more, she sat down by the side of the bed, and, taking his hand, she held it clasped passionately in hers, while she sat looking at him, without once speaking. For some reason, he could not look at her, perhaps because in the intensity of her emotion she was asking from him a response which he could not give. He was ashamed, but it was impossible to pretend. Instead of any longer seeming almost a part of her, he was detached now in a strange, definite fashion. In his weakness, it seemed to him that he was seeing her for the first time and he was ashamed and sorry for her. He knew that before long she, too, would understand that there was a difference, that in some way their relationship had been broken forever. The old Philip was dead, and the new one suddenly pitied her from a great distance, as he pitied Naomi. It was as if the weakness gave him a clairvoyance, a second sight, which illuminated all the confusion of mind that had preceded the long night.

Lying there, with his eyes closed, her passionate cry, “Philip, my boy!” burned itself into his brain. He was, he knew, unworthy of that consuming love she had for him.

After a long time he heard her asking, “Philip, are you awake?”

“Yes, Ma.” But he did not open his eyes.

“I have some good news that will delight you.”

What could it be? Perhaps she had arranged his return to Megambo. She would think that was good news.

“It’s about Naomi. You’re a father now, Philip ... twice a father, Philip. You’ve two children. They were twins.”

The knot of perplexity which had been tormenting his brain suddenly cleared away. Of course! That was what he couldn’t remember about Naomi. She had been going to have a baby, and now she had had two. Still he did not open his eyes. It was more impossible now than ever. He did not answer her, and presently Emma asked, “You heard what I said, Philip?”

“Yes, Ma.”

“You’re glad, aren’t you?”

He answered her weakly, “Of course ... why, of course, I’m glad.”

Again there was a long silence. He was ashamed again, because he had been forced to lie, ashamed because he wasn’t proud, and happy. His mother sat there trying to raise his spirits, and each thing she said only drove them lower. In that curious clarity of mind which seemed to possess his soul, he knew with a kind of horror that he had wanted to waken alone, free, in a new country, where he would never again see Naomi, or his mother, or the lace curtains, or the familiar, worn rocking-chair. That, he saw now, was why he had wanted to die. And now he was back again, tied to them more closely than ever.

At last he said in a low voice, “It was like Naomi, wasn’t it ... to have twins?”

“What do you mean?”

He hesitated a moment, and then said, “I don’t know ... I’m tired ... I don’t know.”

Again a silence. Deep inside him something kept urging him to break through all this web which seemed to be closing tighter and tighter around him. The last thought he could remember before slipping into the nightmare returned to him now, and, without knowing why, he uttered it, “There won’t be any more children.”

“Why?” asked Emma. “What are you trying to say?”

“Because I don’t mean to live with Naomi ever again. It’s a wicked thing that I’ve done.”

She began to stroke his forehead, continuing for a long time before she spoke. She was having suddenly to face things--things which she had always known, and pretended not to know. At last she said, “Why is it a wicked thing to live with your lawful wife?”

The world began to whiz dizzily about his head. Odd flashes of light passed before his closed eyes. It seemed to him that he must speak the truth, if he were ever to open them again without shame.

“Because she’s not really my wife ... she’s just like any woman, any stranger ... I never loved her at all. I can’t go on ... living like that. Can’t you see how wicked it is?”

Emma was caught in her own web, by the very holy principles she upheld--that it was wrong to marry some one you did not love. It was this same thing which disturbed her peace of mind about Moses Slade.

“You loved her once, Philip, or you wouldn’t have married her.”

“No, I didn’t know anything then, Ma.” The color of pain entered his voice. “Can’t you see, Ma? I wasn’t alive then. I never loved her, and now it’s worse than that.”

The stroking of his forehead suddenly ceased. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Philip.... We’d better not go on now. You’re tired and ill. Everything will be different when you are well again.”

For a second time there came to him a blinding flash of revelation. He saw that she had always been like that: she had always pushed things aside to let them work themselves out. An awful doubt dawned upon him that she was not always right, that sometimes she had made a muddle of everything. A feeling of dizziness swept over him.

“But it will break her heart, Philip,” she was saying. “She worships you.... It will break her heart.”

Through a giddy haze he managed to say, “No ... I’m so tired.... Let’s not talk any more.” He felt the nightmare stealing back again, and presently he was for some strange reason back at Megambo, sitting under the acacia-tree, and through the hot air came the sound of voices singing, in a minor key:

“_Go down to the water, little monkey,_ _To the life of lives, the beginning of all things._”

He thought wildly, “I’ve got to get free. I must run.... I must run.”

Emma, holding his hand, felt the fever slipping back. She heard him saying, “Go down to the water, little monkey,” which clearly made no sense, and suddenly she sprang up and called Miss Bull, the nurse.

“It’s odd,” said Miss Bull, white and frightened, “when he was so much better. Did anything happen to upset him?”

“No,” said Emma. “Nothing. We barely talked at all.”

The nurse sent Essie for the doctor, reproaching herself all the while for having allowed Emma to stay so long a time by the bed. But it was almost impossible to refuse when a woman like Mrs. Downes said, “Surely seeing his mother won’t upset him. Why, Miss Bull, we’ve always been wonderful companions--my boy and I. He never had a father, you see. I was both mother and father to him.” Miss Bull knew what a gallant fight she’d made, for every one in the Town knew it. A widow, left alone, to bring up her boy. You couldn’t be cruel enough to stop her from seeing her own son.

When the doctor came and left again, shaking his head, Emma was frightened, but her fright disappeared once more as the fever receded again toward morning, and when at last she fell asleep, she was thinking, “He doesn’t belong to her, after all. He’s never belonged to her. He’s still my Philip.” There was in the knowledge a sense of passionate triumph and joy, which wiped out all else--her doubts about Moses Slade, her worry over Philip’s future, even the sudden, cold terror that gripped her as she felt the fever stealing back into his thin, transparent hand. He didn’t belong to Naomi. Why, he almost hated her. He was still her boy.... And she had defeated Naomi.

In the darkness the tears dampened the pillow. God had not, after all, forsaken her.