"Indeed," he said to himself, pursuing the thought, "it has been worse.
She has not had a fortune on which to live in peace nor has she had the
remembrance of youthful days of wild adventure that must comfort the last
days of the old man. Instead she has been watching me as the old man
watches his thermometer and Father has been the dog in her house chasing
playthings." The figure pleased him. He stood at the gate, the wind
singing in the trees along the street and driving an occasional drop of
rain against his cheek, and thought of it and of his life with his mother.
During the last two or three years he had been trying to make things up to
her. After the sale of the newspaper business and the beginning of his
success with Freedom he had driven her from the washtub and since the
beginning of her ill health he had spent evening after evening with her
instead of going to Wildman's to sit with the four friends and hear the
talk that went on among them. No more did he walk with Telfer or Mary
Underwood on country roads but sat, instead, by the bedside of the sick
woman or, the night falling fair, helped her to an arm chair upon the
grass plot at the front of the house.
The years, Sam felt, had been good years. They had brought him an
understanding of his mother and had given a seriousness and purpose to the
ambitious plans he continued to make for himself. Alone together, the
mother and he had talked little, the habit of a lifetime making much
speech impossible to her and the growing understanding of her making it
unnecessary to him. Now in the darkness, before the house, he thought of
the evenings he had spent with her and of the pitiful waste that had been
made of her fine life. Things that had hurt him and against which he had
been bitter and unforgiving became of small import, even the doings of the
pretentious Windy, who in the face of Jane's illness continued to go off
after pension day for long periods of drunkenness, and who only came home
to weep and wail through the house, when the pension money was gone,
regretting, Sam tried in fairness to think, the loss of both the washwoman
and the wife.
"She has been the most wonderful woman in the world," he told himself and
tears of happiness came into his eyes at the thought of his friend, John
Telfer, who in bygone days had praised the mother to the newsboy trotting
beside him on moonlit roads. Into his mind came a picture of her long
gaunt face, ghastly now against the white of the pillows. A picture of
George Eliot, tacked to the wall behind a broken harness in the kitchen of
Freedom Smith's house, had caught his eye some days before, and in the
darkness he took it from his pocket and put it to his lips, realising that
in some indescribable way it was like his mother as she had been before
her illness. Freedom's wife had given him the picture and he had been
carrying it, taking it out of his pocket on lonely stretches of road as he
went about his work.
Sam went quietly around the house and stood by an old shed, a relic of an
attempt by Windy to embark in raising chickens. He wanted to continue the
thoughts of his mother. He began recalling her youth and the details of a
long talk they had held together on the lawn before the house. It was
extraordinarily vivid in his mind. He thought that even now he could
remember every word that had been said. The sick woman had talked of her
youth in Ohio, and as she talked pictures had come into the boy's mind.
She had told him of her days as a bound girl in the family of a thin-
lipped, hard-fisted New Englander, who had come West to take a farm, and
of her struggles to obtain an education, of the pennies saved to buy
books, of her joy when she had passed examinations and become a school
teacher, and of her marriage to Windy--then John McPherson.
Into the Ohio village the young McPherson had come, to cut a figure in the
town's life. Sam had smiled at the picture she drew of the young man who
walked up and down the village street with girls on his arms, and who
taught a Bible class in the Sunday school.
When Windy proposed to the young school teacher she had accepted him
eagerly, thinking it unbelievably romantic that so dashing a man should
have chosen so obscure a figure among all the women of the town.
"And even now I am not sorry although it has meant nothing but labour and
unhappiness for me," the sick woman had told her son.
After marriage to the young dandy, Jane had come with him to Caxton where
he bought a store and where, within three years, he had put the store into
the sheriff's hands and his wife into the position of town laundress.
In the darkness a grim smile, half scorn, half amusement, had flitted
across the face of the dying woman as she told of a winter when Windy and
another young fellow went, from schoolhouse to schoolhouse, over the state
giving a show. The ex-soldier had become a singer of comic songs and had
written letter after letter to the young wife telling of the applause that
greeted his efforts. Sam could picture the performances, the little dimly-
lighted schoolhouses with the weatherbeaten faces shining in the light of
the leaky magic lantern, and the delighted Windy running here and there,
talking the jargon of stageland, arraying himself in his motley and
strutting upon the little stage.
"And all winter he did not send me a penny," the sick woman had said,
interrupting his thoughts.
Aroused at last to expression, and filled with the memory of her youth,
the silent woman had talked of her own people. Her father had been killed
in the woods by a falling tree. Of her mother she told an anecdote,
touching it briefly and with a grim humour that surprised her son.
The young school teacher had gone to call upon her mother once and for an
hour had sat in the parlour of an Ohio farmhouse while a fierce old woman
looked at her with bold questioning eyes that made the daughter feel she
had been a fool to come.
At the railroad station she had heard an anecdote of her mother. The story
ran, that once a burly tramp came to the farmhouse, and finding the woman
alone tried to bully her, and that the tramp, and the woman, then in her
prime, fought for an hour in the back yard of the house. The railroad
agent, who told Jane the story, threw back his head and laughed.
"She knocked him out, too," he said, "knocked him cold upon the ground and
then filled him up with hard cider so that he came reeling into town
declaring her the finest woman in the state."
In the darkness by the broken shed Sam's mind turned from thoughts of his
mother to his sister Kate and of her love affair with the young farmer. He
thought with sadness of how she too had suffered because of the failings
of the father, of how she had been compelled to go out of the house to
wander in the dark streets to avoid the endless evenings of war talk
always brought on by a guest in the McPherson household, and of the night
when, getting a rig from Culvert's livery, she had driven off alone into
the country to return in triumph to pack her clothes and show her wedding
ring.
Before him there rose a picture of a summer afternoon when he had seen a
part of the love making that had preceded this. He had gone into the store
to see his sister when the young farmer came in, looked awkwardly about
and pushed a new gold watch across the counter to Kate. A sudden wave of
respect for his sister had pervaded the boy. "What a sum it must have
cost," he thought, and looked with new interest at the back of the lover
and at the flushed cheek and shining eyes of his sister. When the lover,
turning, had seen young McPherson standing at the counter, he laughed
self-consciously and walked out at the door. Kate had been embarrassed and
secretly pleased and flattered by the look in her brother's eyes, but had
pretended to treat the gift lightly, twirling it carelessly back and forth
on the counter and walking up and down swinging her arms.
"Don't go telling," she had said.
"Then don't go pretending," the boy had answered.
Sam thought that his sister's indiscretion, which had brought her a babe
and a husband in the same month had, after all, ended better than the
indiscretion of his mother in her marriage with Windy.
Rousing himself, he went into the house. A neighbour woman, employed for
the purpose, had prepared the evening meal and now began complaining of
his lateness, saying that the food had got cold.
Sam ate in silence. While he ate the woman went out of the house and
presently returned, bringing a daughter.
There was in Caxton a code that would not allow a woman to be alone in a
house with a man. Sam wondered if the bringing of the daughter was an
attempt on the part of the woman to abide by the letter of the code, if
she thought of the sick woman in the house as one already gone. The
thought amused and saddened him.
"You would have thought her safe," he mused. She was fifty, small, nervous
and worn and wore a set of ill-fitting false teeth that rattled as she
talked. When she did not talk she rattled them with her tongue because of
nervousness.
In at the kitchen door came Windy, far gone in drink. He stood by the door
holding to the knob with his hand and trying to get control of himself.
"My wife--my wife is dying. She may die any day," he wailed, tears
standing in his eyes.
The woman with the daughter went into the little parlour where a bed had
been put for the sick woman. Sam sat at the kitchen table dumb with anger
and disgust as Windy, lurching forward, fell into a chair and began
sobbing loudly. In the road outside a man driving a horse stopped and Sam
could hear the scraping of the wheels against the buggy body as the man
turned in the narrow street. Above the scraping of the wheels rose a
voice, swearing profanely. The wind continued to blow and it had begun to
rain.
"He has got into the wrong street," thought the boy stupidly.
Windy, his head upon his hands, wept like a brokenhearted boy, his sobs
echoing through the house, his breath heavy with liquor tainting the air
of the room. In a corner by the stove the mother's ironing board stood
against the wall and the sight of it added fuel to the anger smouldering
in Sam's heart. He remembered the day when he had stood in the store
doorway with his mother and had seen the dismal and amusing failure of his
father with the bugle, and of the months before Kate's wedding, when Windy
had gone blustering about town threatening to kill her lover and the
mother and boy had stayed with the girl, out of sight in the house, sick
with humiliation.
The drunken man, laying his head upon the table, fell asleep, his snores
replacing the sobs that had stirred the boy's anger. Sam began thinking
again of his mother's life.
The effort he had made to repay her for the hardness of her life now
seemed utterly fruitless. "I would like to repay him," he thought, shaken
with a sudden spasm of hatred as he looked at the man before him. The
cheerless little kitchen, the cold, half-baked potatoes and sausages on
the table, and the drunken man asleep, seemed to him a kind of symbol of
the life that had been lived in that house, and with a shudder he turned
his face and stared at the wall.
He thought of a dinner he had once eaten at Freedom Smith's house. Freedom
had brought the invitation into the stables on that night just as to-night
he had brought the letter from the Chicago company, and just as Sam was
shaking his head in refusal of the invitation in at the stable door had
come the children. Led by the eldest, a great tomboy girl of fourteen with
the strength of a man and an inclination to burst out of her clothes at
unexpected places, they had come charging into the stables to carry Sam
off to the dinner, Freedom laughingly urging them on, his voice roaring in
the stable so that the horses jumped about in their stalls. Into the house
they had dragged him, the baby, a boy of four, sitting astride his back
and beating on his head with a woollen cap, and Freedom swinging a lantern
and giving an occasional helpful push with his hand.
A picture of the long table covered with the white cloth at the end of the
big dining room in Freedom's house came back into the mind of the boy now
sitting in the barren little kitchen before the untasted, badly-cooked
food. Upon it lay a profusion of bread and meat and great dishes heaped
with steaming potatoes. At his own house there had always been just enough
food for the single meal. The thing was nicely calculated, when you had
finished the table was bare.
How he had enjoyed that dinner after the long day on the road. With a
flourish and a roar at the children Freedom heaped high the plates and
passed them about, the wife or the tomboy girl bringing unending fresh
supplies from the kitchen. The joy of the evening with its talk of the
children in school, its sudden revelation of the womanliness of the tomboy
girl, and its air of plenty and good living haunted the mind of the boy.
"My mother never knew anything like that," he thought.
The drunken man who had been sleeping aroused himself and began talking
loudly--some old forgotten grievance coming back to his mind, he talked of
the cost of school books.
"They change the books in the school too often," he declared in a loud
voice, turning and facing the kitchen stove, as though addressing an
audience. "It is a scheme to graft on old soldiers who have children. I
will not stand it."
Sam, enraged beyond speech, tore a leaf from a notebook and scrawled a
message upon it.
"Be silent," he wrote. "If you say another word or make another sound to
disturb mother I will choke you and throw you like a dead dog into the
street."
Reaching across the table and touching his father on the hand with a fork
taken from among the dishes, he laid the note upon the table under the
lamp before his eyes. He was fighting with himself to control a desire to
spring across the room and kill the man who he believed had brought his
mother to her death and who now sat bellowing and talking at her very
death bed. The desire distorted his mind so that he stared about the
kitchen like one seized with an insane nightmare.
Windy, taking the note in his hand, read it slowly and then, not
understanding its import and but half getting its sense, put it in his
pocket.
"A dog is dead, eh?" he shouted. "Well you're getting too big and smart,
lad. What do I care for a dead dog?"
Sam did not answer. Rising cautiously, he crept around the table and put
his hand upon the throat of the babbling old man.
"I must not kill," he kept telling himself aloud, as though talking to a
stranger. "I must choke until he is silent, but I must not kill."
In the kitchen the two men struggled silently. Windy, unable to rise,
struck out wildly and helplessly with his feet. Sam, looking down at him
and studying the eyes and the colour in the cheeks, realised with a start
that he had not for years seen the face of his father. How vividly it
stamped itself upon his mind now, and how coarse and sodden it had become.
"I could repay all of the years mother has spent over the dreary washtub
by just one long, hard grip at this lean throat. I could kill him with so
little extra pressure," he thought.
The eyes began to stare at him and the tongue to protrude. Across the
forehead ran a streak of mud picked up somewhere in the long afternoon of
drunken carousing.
"If I were to press hard now and kill him I would see his face as it looks
now all the days of my life," thought the boy.
In the silence of the house he heard the voice of the neighbour woman
speaking sharply to her daughter. The familiar, dry, tired cough of the
sick woman followed. Sam took the unconscious old man in his arms and went
carefully and silently out at the kitchen door. The rain beat down upon
him and, as he went around the house with his burden, the wind, shaking
loose a dead branch from a small apple tree in the yard, blew it against
his face, leaving a long smarting scratch. At the fence before the house
he stopped and threw his burden down a short grassy bank into the road.
Then turning he went, bareheaded, through the gate and up the street.
"I will go for Mary Underwood," he thought, his mind returning to the
friend who years before had walked with him on country roads and whose
friendship he had dropped because of John Telfer's tirades against all
women. He stumbled along the sidewalk, the rain beating down upon his bare
head.
"We need a woman in our house," he kept saying over and over to himself.
"We need a woman in our house."
CHAPTER VII
Leaning against the wall under the veranda of Mary Underwood's house, Sam
tried to get in his mind a remembrance of what had brought him there. He
had walked bareheaded through Main Street and out along a country road.
Twice he had fallen, covering his clothes with mud. He had forgotten the
purpose of his walk and had tramped on and on. The unexpected and terrible
hatred of his father that had come upon him in the tense silence of the
kitchen had so paralysed his brain that he now felt light-headed and
wonderfully happy and carefree.
"I have been doing something," he thought; "I wonder what it is."
The house faced a grove of pine trees and was reached by climbing a little
rise and following a winding road out beyond the graveyard and the last of
the village lights. The wild spring rain pounded and rattled on the tin
roof overhead, and Sam, his back closely pressed against the front of the
house, fought to regain control of his mind.
For an hour he stood there staring into the darkness and watched with
delight the progress of the storm. He had--an inheritance from his mother
--a love of thunderstorms. He remembered a night when he was a boy and his
mother had got out of bed and gone here and there through the house
singing. She had sung softly so that the sleeping father did not hear, and
in his bed upstairs Sam had lain awake listening to the noises--the rain
on the roof, the occasional crash of thunder, the snoring of Windy, and
the unusual and, he thought, beautiful sound of the mother singing in the
storm.
Now, lifting up his head, he looked about with delight. Trees in the grove
in front of him bent and tossed in the wind. The inky blackness of the
night was relieved by the flickering oil lamp in the road beyond the
graveyard and, in the distance, by the lights streaming out at the windows
of the houses. The light coming out of the house against which he stood
made a little cylinder of brightness among the pine trees through which
the raindrops fell gleaming and sparkling. An occasional flash of
lightning lit up the trees and the winding road, and the cannonry of the
skies rolled and echoed overhead. A kind of wild song sang in Sam's heart.
"I wish it would last all night," he thought, his mind fixed on the
singing of his mother in the dark house when he was a boy.
The door opened and a woman stepped out upon the veranda and stood before
him facing the storm, the wind tossing the soft kimono in which she was
clad and the rain wetting her face. Under the tin roof, the air was filled
with the rattling reverberation of the rain. The woman lifted her head
and, with the rain beating down upon her, began singing, her fine
contralto voice rising above the rattle of the rain on the roof and going
on uninterrupted by the crash of the thunder. She sang of a lover riding
through the storm to his mistress. One refrain persisted in the song--
"He rode and he thought of her red, red lips,"
sang the woman, putting her hand upon the railing of the little porch and
leaning forward into the storm.
Sam was amazed. The woman standing before him was Mary Underwood, who had
been his friend when he was a boy in school and toward whom his mind had
turned after the tragedy in the kitchen. The figure of the woman standing
singing before him became a part of his thoughts of his mother singing on
the stormy night in the house and his mind wandered on, seeing pictures as
he used to see them when a boy walking under the stars and listening to
the talk of John Telfer. He saw a broad-shouldered man shouting defiance
to the storm as he rode down a mountain path.
"And he laughed at the rain on his wet, wet cloak," went on the voice of
the singer.
Mary Underwood's singing there in the rain made her seem near and likeable
as she had seemed to him when he was a barefoot boy.
"John Telfer was wrong about her," he thought.
She turned and faced him. Tiny streams of water ran from her hair down
across her cheeks. A flash of lightning cut the darkness, illuminating the
spot where Sam, now a broad-shouldered man, stood with the mud upon his
clothes and the bewildered look upon his face. A sharp exclamation of
surprise broke from her lips:
"Hello, Sam! What are you doing here? You had better get in out of the
rain."
"I like it here," replied Sam, lifting his head and looking past her at
the storm.
Walking to the door and standing with her hand upon the knob, Mary looked
into the darkness.
"You have been a long time coming to see me," she said, "come in."
Within the house, with the door closed, the rattle of the rain on the
veranda roof sank to a subdued, quiet drumming. Piles of books lay upon a
table in the centre of the room and there were other books on the shelves
along the walls. On a table burned a student's lamp and in the corners of
the room lay heavy shadows.
Sam stood by the wall near the door looking about with half-seeing eyes.
Mary, who had gone to another part of the house and who now returned clad
in a long cloak, looked at him with quick curiosity, and began moving
about the room picking up odds and ends of woman's clothing scattered on
the chairs. Kneeling, she lighted a fire under some sticks piled in an
open grate at the side of the room.
"It was the storm made me want to sing," she said self-consciously, and
then briskly, "we shall have to be drying you out; you have fallen in the
road and got yourself covered with mud."
From being morose and silent Sam became talkative. An idea had come into
his mind.
"I have come here courting," he thought; "I have come to ask Mary
Underwood to be my wife and live in my house."
The woman, kneeling by the blazing sticks, made a picture that aroused
something that had been sleeping in him. The heavy cloak she wore, falling
away, showed the round little shoulders imperfectly covered by the kimono,
wet and clinging to them. The slender, youthful figure, the soft grey hair
and the serious little face, lit by the burning sticks caused a jumping of
his heart.
"We are needing a woman in our house," he said heavily, repeating the
words that had been on his lips as he stumbled through the storm-swept
streets and along the mud-covered roads. "We are needing a woman in our
house, and I have come to take you there.
"I intend to marry you," he added, lurching across the room and grasping
her roughly by the shoulders. "Why not? I am needing a woman."
Mary Underwood was dismayed and frightened by the face looking down at
her, and by the strong hands clenched upon her shoulders. In his youth she
had conceived a kind of maternal passion for the newsboy and had planned a
future for him. Her plans if followed would have made him a scholar, a man
living his life among books and ideas. Instead, he had chosen to live his
life among men, to be a money-maker, to drive about the country like
Freedom Smith, making deals with farmers. She had seen him driving at
evening through the street to Freedom's house, going in and out of
Wildman's, and walking through the streets with men. In a dim way she knew
that an influence had been at work upon him to win him from the things of
which she had dreamed and she had secretly blamed John Telfer, the
talking, laughing idler. Now, out of the storm, the boy had come back to
her, his hands and his clothes covered with the mud of the road, and
talked to her, a woman old enough to be his mother, of marriage and of
coming to live with him in his house. She stood, chilled, looking into the
eager, strong face and the eyes with the pained, dazed look in them.
Under her gaze, something of the old feeling of the boy came back to Sam,
and he began vaguely trying to tell her of it.
"It was not the talk of Telfer drove me from you," he began, "it was
because you talked so much of the schools and of books. I was tired of
them. I could not go on year after year sitting in a stuffy little
schoolroom when there was so much money to be made in the world. I grew
tired of the school teachers, drumming with their fingers on the desks and
looking out at the windows at men passing in the street. I wanted to get
out of there and into the streets myself."
Dropping his hands from her shoulders, he sat down in a chair and stared
into the fire, now blazing steadily. Steam began to rise from his trousers
legs. His mind, still working beyond his control, began to reconstruct an
old boyhood fancy, half his own, half John Telfer's, that had years before
come into his mind. It concerned a picture he and Telfer had made of the
ideal scholar. The picture had, as its central figure, a stoop-shouldered,
feeble old man stumbling along the street, muttering to himself and poking
in a gutter with a stick. The picture was a caricature of puttering old
Frank Huntley, superintendent of the Caxton schools.
Sitting before the fire in Mary Underwood's house, become, for the moment,
a boy, facing a boy's problems, Sam did not want to be such a man. He
wanted only that in scholarship which would help him to be the kind of man
he was bent on being, a man of the world doing the work of the world and
making money by his work. Things he had been unable to get expressed when
he was a boy and her friend, coming again into his mind, he felt that he
must here and now make it plain to Mary Underwood that the schools were
not giving him what he wanted. His brain worked on the problem of how to
tell her about it.
Turning, he looked at her and said earnestly: "I am going to quit the
schools. It is not your fault, but I am going to quit just the same."
Mary, who had been looking down at the great mud-covered figure in the
chair began to understand. A light came into her eyes. Going to the door
opening into a stairway leading to sleeping rooms above, she called
sharply, "Auntie, come down here at once. There is a sick man here."
A startled, trembling voice answered from above, "Who is it?"
Mary Underwood did not answer. She came back to Sam and, putting her hand
gently on his shoulder, said, "It is your mother and you are only a sick,
half-crazed boy after all. Is she dead? Tell me about it."
Sam shook his head. "She is still there in the bed, coughing." He roused
himself and stood up. "I have just killed my father," he announced. "I
choked him and threw him down the bank into the road in front of the
house. He made horrible noises in the kitchen and mother was tired and
wanted to sleep."
Mary Underwood began running about the room. From a little alcove under a
stairway she took clothes, throwing them upon the floor about the room.
She pulled on a stocking and, unconscious of Sam's presence, raised her
skirts and fastened it. Then, putting one shoe on the stockinged foot and
the other on the bare one, she turned to him. "We will go back to your
house. I think you are right. You need a woman there."
In the street she walked rapidly along, clinging to the arm of the tall
fellow who strode silently beside her. A cheerfulness had come over Sam.
He felt he had accomplished something--something he had set out to
accomplish. He again thought of his mother and drifting into the notion
that he was on his way home from work at Freedom Smith's, began planning
the evening he would spend with her.
"I will tell her of the letter from the Chicago company and of what I will
do when I go to the city," he thought.
At the gate before the McPherson house Mary looked into the road below the
grassy bank that ran down from the fence, but in the darkness she could
see nothing. The rain continued to fall and the wind screamed and shouted
as it rushed through the bare branches of the trees. Sam went through the
gate and around the house to the kitchen door intent upon getting to his
mother's bedside.
In the house the neighbour woman sat asleep in a chair before the kitchen
stove. The daughter had gone.
Sam went through the house to the parlour and sat down in a chair beside
his mother's bed, picking up her hand and holding it in his own. "She must
be asleep," he thought.
At the kitchen door Mary Underwood stopped, and, turning, ran away into
the darkness along the street. By the kitchen fire the neighbour woman
still slept. In the parlour Sam, sitting on the chair beside his mother's
bed, looked about him. A lamp burned dimly upon the little stand beside
the bed and the light of it fell upon the portrait of a tall,
aristocratic-looking woman with rings on her fingers, that hung upon the
wall. The picture belonged to Windy and was claimed by him as a portrait
of his mother, and it had once brought on a quarrel between Sam and his
sister.
Kate had taken the portrait of the lady seriously, and the boy had come
upon her sitting in a chair before it, her hair rearranged and her hands
lying in her lap in imitation of the pose maintained so haughtily by the
great lady who looked down at her.
"It is a fraud," he had declared, irritated by what he believed his
sister's devotion to one of the father's pretensions. "It is a fraud he
has picked up somewhere and now claims as his mother to make people
believe he is something big."
The girl, ashamed at having been caught in the pose, and furious because
of the attack upon the authenticity of the portrait, had gone into a spasm
of indignation, putting her hands to her ears and stamping on the floor
with her foot. Then she had run across the room and dropped upon her knees
before a little couch, buried her face in a pillow and shook with anger
and grief.
Sam had turned and walked out of the room. The emotions of the sister had
seemed to him to have the flavour of one of Windy's outbreaks.
"She likes it," he had thought, dismissing the incident. "She likes
believing in lies. She is like Windy and would rather believe in them than
not."
* * * * *
Mary Underwood ran through the rain to John Telfer's house and beat on the
door with her fist until Telfer, followed by Eleanor, holding a lamp above
her head, appeared at the door. With Telfer she went back through the
streets to the front of Sam's house thinking of the terrible choked and
disfigured man they should find there. She went along clinging to Telfer's
arm as she had clung to Sam's, unconscious of her bare head and scanty
attire. In his hand Telfer carried a lantern secured from the stable.
In the road before the house they found nothing. Telfer went up and down
swinging the lantern and peering into gutters. The woman walked beside
him, her skirts lifted and the mud splashing upon her bare leg.
Suddenly Telfer threw back his head and laughed. Taking her hand he led
Mary with a rush up the bank and through the gate.
"What a muddle-headed old fool I am!" he cried. "I am getting old and
addle-pated! Windy McPherson is not dead! Nothing could kill that old war
horse! He was in at Wildman's grocery after nine o'clock to-night covered
with mud and swearing he had been in a fight with Art Sherman. Poor Sam
and you--to have come to me and to have found me a stupid ass! Fool! Fool!
What a fool I have become!"
In at the kitchen door ran Mary and Telfer, frightening the woman by the
stove so that she sprang to her feet and began nervously making the false
teeth rattle with her tongue. In the parlour they found Sam, his head upon
the edge of the bed, asleep. In his hand he held the cold hand of Jane
McPherson. She had been dead for an hour. Mary Underwood stooped over and
kissed his wet hair as the neighbour woman came in at the doorway bearing
the kitchen lamp, and John Telfer, holding his finger to his lips,
commanded silence.
CHAPTER VIII
The funeral of Jane McPherson was a trying affair for her son. He thought
that his sister Kate, with the babe in her arms, had become coarsened--she
looked frumpish and, while they were in the house, had an air of having
quarrelled with her husband when they came out of their bedroom in the
morning. During the funeral service Sam sat in the parlour, astonished and
irritated by the endless number of women that crowded into the house. They
were everywhere, in the kitchen, the sleeping room back of the parlour;
and in the parlour, where the dead woman lay in her coffin, they were
massed. When the thin-lipped minister, holding a book in his hand, held
forth upon the virtues of the dead woman, they wept. Sam looked at the
floor and thought that thus they would have wept over the body of the dead
Windy, had his fingers but tightened a trifle. He wondered if the minister
would have talked in the same way--blatantly and without knowledge--of the
virtues of the dead. In a chair at the side of the coffin the bereaved
husband, in new black clothes, wept audibly. The baldheaded, officious
undertaker kept moving nervously about, intent upon the ritual of his
trade.
During the service, a man sitting behind him dropped a note on the floor
at Sam's feet. Sam picked it up and read it, glad of something to distract
his attention from the voice of the minister, and the faces of the weeping
women, none of whom had before been in the house and all of whom he
thought strikingly lacking in a sense of the sacredness of privacy. The
note was from John Telfer.
"I will not come to your mother's funeral," he wrote. "I respected your
mother while she lived and I will leave you alone with her now that she is
dead. In her memory I will hold a ceremony in my heart. If I am in
Wildman's, I may ask the man to quit selling soap and tobacco for the
moment and to close and lock the door. If I am at Valmore's shop, I will
go up into his loft and listen to him pounding on the anvil below. If he
or Freedom Smith go to your house, I warn them I will cut their
friendship. When I see the carriages going through the street and know
that the thing is right well done and over, I will buy flowers and take
them to Mary Underwood as an appreciation of the living in the name of the
dead."
The note cheered and comforted Sam. It gave him back a grip of something
that had slipped from him.
"It is good sense, after all," he thought, and realised that even in the
days when he was being made to suffer horrors, and in the face of the fact
that Jane McPherson's long, hard role was just being played out to the
end, the farmer in the field was sowing his corn, Valmore was beating upon
his anvil, and John Telfer was writing notes with a flourish. He arose,
interrupting the minister's discourse. Mary Underwood had come in just as
the minister began talking and had dropped into an obscure corner near the
door leading into the street. Sam crowded past the women who stared and
the minister who frowned and the baldheaded undertaker who wrung his hands
and, dropping the note into her lap, said, oblivious of the people looking
and listening with breathless curiosity, "It is from John Telfer. Read it.
Even he, hating women as he did, is now bringing flowers to your door."
In the room a wind of whispered comments sprang up. Women, putting their
heads together and their hands before their faces, nodded toward the
school teacher, and the boy, unconscious of the sensation he had created,
went back to his chair and looked again at the floor, waiting until the
talk and the singing of songs and the parading through the streets should
be ended. Again the minister began reading from the book.
"I have become older than all of these people here," thought the youth.
"They play at life and death, and I have felt it between the fingers of my
hand."
Mary Underwood, lacking Sam's unconsciousness of the people, looked about
with burning cheeks. Seeing the women whispering and putting their heads
together, a chill of fear ran through her. Into the room had been thrust
the face of an old enemy to her--the scandal of a small town. Picking up
the note she slipped out at the door and stole away along the street. The
old maternal love for Sam had returned strengthened and ennobled by the
terror through which she had passed with him that night in the rain. Going
to her house she whistled the collie dog and set out along a country road.
At the edge of a grove of trees she stopped, sat down on a log, and read
Telfer's note. From the soft ground into which her feet sank there came
the warm pungent smell of the new growth. Tears came into her eyes. She
thought that in a few days much had come to her. She had got a boy upon
whom she could pour out the mother love in her heart, and she had made a
friend of Telfer, whom she had long regarded with fear and doubt.
For a month Sam lingered in Caxton. It seemed to him there was something
that wanted doing there. He sat with the men at the back of Wildman's, and
walked aimlessly through the streets and out of the town along the country
roads, where men worked all day in the fields behind sweating horses,
ploughing the land. The thrill of spring was in the air, and in the
evening a song sparrow sang in the apple tree below his bedroom window.
Sam walked and loitered in silence, looking at the ground. In his mind was
the dread of people. The talk of the men in the store wearied him and when
he went alone into the country he found himself accompanied by the voices
of all of those he had come out of town to escape. On the street corner
the thin-lipped, brown-bearded minister stopped him and talked of the
future life as he had stopped and talked to a bare-legged newsboy.
"Your mother," he said, "has but gone before. It is for you to get into
the narrow path and follow her. God has sent this sorrow as a warning to
you. He wants you also to get into the way of life and in the end to join
her. Begin coming to our church. Join in the work of the Christ. Find
truth."
Sam, who had listened without hearing, shook his head and went on. The
minister's talk seemed no more than a meaningless jumble of words out of
which he got but one thought.
"Find truth," he repeated to himself after the minister, and let his mind
play with the idea. "The best men are all trying to do that. They spend
their lives at the task. They are all trying to find truth."
He went along the street, pleased with himself because of the
interpretation he had put upon the minister's words. The terrible moments
in the kitchen followed by his mother's death had put a new look of
seriousness into his face and he felt within him a new sense of
responsibility to the dead woman and to himself. Men stopped him on the
street and wished him well in the city. News of his leaving had become
public. Things in which Freedom Smith was concerned were always public
affairs.
"He would take a drum with him to make love to a neighbour's wife," said
John Telfer.
Sam felt that in a way he was a child of Caxton. Early it had taken him to
its bosom; it had made of him a semi-public character; it had encouraged
him in his money-making, humiliated him through his father, and patronised
him lovingly because of his toiling mother. When he was a boy, scurrying
between the legs of the drunkards in Piety Hollow of a Saturday night,
there was always some one to speak a word to him of his morals and to
shout at him a cheering word of advice. Had he elected to remain there,
with the thirty-five hundred dollars already in the Savings Bank--built to
that during his years with Freedom Smith--he might soon become one of the
town's solid men.
He did not want to stay. He felt that his call was in another place and
that he would go there gladly. He wondered why he did not get on the train
and be off.
One night when he had been late on the road, loitering by fences, hearing
the lonely barking of dogs at distant farmhouses, getting the smell of the
new-ploughed ground into his nostrils, he came into town and sat down on a
low iron fence that ran along by the platform of the railroad station, to
wait for the midnight train north. Trains had taken on a new meaning to
him since any day might see him on such a train bound into his new life.
A man, with two bags in his hands, came on the station platform followed
by two women.
"Here, watch these," he said to the women, setting the bags upon the
platform; "I will go for the tickets," and disappeared into the darkness.
The two women resumed their interrupted talk.
"Ed's wife has been poorly these ten years," said one of them. "It will be
better for her and for Ed now that she is dead, but I dread the long ride.
I wish she had died when I was in Ohio two years ago. I am sure to be
train-sick."
Sam, sitting in the darkness, was thinking of a part of one of John
Telfer's old talks with him.
"They are good people but they are not your people. You will go away from
here. You will be a big man of dollars, it is plain."
He began listening idly to the two women. The man had a shop for mending
shoes on a side street back of Geiger's drug store and the two women, one
short and round, one long and thin, kept a small, dingy millinery shop and
were Eleanor Telfer's only competitors.
"Well, the town knows her now for what she is," said the tall woman.
"Milly Peters says she won't rest until she has put that stuck-up Mary
Underwood in her place. Her mother worked in the McPherson house and it
was her told Milly. I never heard such a story. To think of Jane McPherson
working all these years and then having such goings-on in her house when
she lay dying, Milly says that Sam went away early in the evening and came
home late with that Underwood thing, half dressed, hanging on his arm.
Milly's mother looked out of the window and saw them. Then she ran out by
the kitchen stove and pretended to be asleep. She wanted to see what was
up. And the bold hussy came right into the house with Sam. Then she went
away, and after a while back she came with that John Telfer. Milly is
going to see that Eleanor Telfer finds it out. I guess it will bring her
down, too. And there is no telling how many other men in this town Mary
Underwood is running with. Milly says----"
The two women turned as out of the darkness came a tall figure roaring and
swearing. Two hands flashed out and sank into their hair.
"Stop it!" growled Sam, beating the two heads together, "stop your dirty
lies!--you ugly she-beasts!"
Hearing the two women screaming the man who had gone for the railroad
tickets came running down the station platform followed by Jerry Donlin.
Springing forward Sam knocked the shoemaker over the iron fence into a
newly spaded flower bed and then turned to the baggage man.
"They were telling lies about Mary Underwood," he shouted. "She tried to
save me from killing my father and now they are telling lies about her."
The two women picked up the bags and ran whimpering away along the station
platform. Jerry Donlin climbed over the iron fence and confronted the
surprised and frightened shoemaker.
"What the Hell are you doing in my flower bed?" he growled.
* * * * *
Hurrying through the streets Sam's mind was in a ferment. Like the Roman
emperor he wished that all the world had but one head that he might cut it
off with a slash. The town that had seemed so paternal, so cheery, so
intent upon wishing him well, now seemed horrible. He thought of it as a
great, crawling, slimy thing lying in wait amid the cornfields.
"To be saying that of her, of that white soul!" he exclaimed aloud in the
empty street, all of his boyish loyalty and devotion to the woman who had
put out a hand to him in his hour of trouble aroused and burning in him.
He wished that he might meet another man and could hit him also a swinging
blow on the nose as he had hit the amazed shoemaker. He went to his own
house and, leaning on the gate, stood looking at it and swearing
meaninglessly. Then, turning, he went again through the deserted streets
past the railroad station where, the midnight train having come and gone
and Jerry Donlin having gone home for the night, all was dark and quiet.
He was filled with horror of what Mary Underwood had seen at Jane
McPherson's funeral.
"It is better to be utterly bad than to speak ill of another," he thought.
For the first time he realised another side of village life. In fancy he
saw going past him on the dark road a long file of women, women with
coarse unlighted faces and dead eyes. Many of the faces he knew. They were
the faces of Caxton wives at whose houses he had delivered papers. He
remembered how eagerly they had run out of their houses to get the papers
and how they hung day after day over the details of sensational murder
cases. Once, when a Chicago girl had been murdered in a dive and the
details were unusually revolting, two women, unable to restrain their
curiosity, had come to the station to wait for the train bringing the
newspapers and Sam had heard them rolling the horrid mess over and over on
their tongues.
In every city and in every village there is a class of women, the thought
of whom paralyses the mind. They live their lives in small, unaired,
unsanitary houses, and go on year after year washing dishes and clothes--
only their fingers occupied. They read no good books, think no clean
thoughts, are made love to as John Telfer had said, with kisses in a
darkened room by a shame-faced yokel and, after marrying some such a
yokel, live lives of unspeakable blankness. Into the houses of these women
come the husbands at evening, tired and uncommunicative, to eat hurriedly
and then go again into the streets or, the blessing of utter physical
exhaustion having come to them, to sit for an hour in stockinged feet
before crawling away to sleep and oblivion.
In these women is no light, no vision. They have instead certain fixed
ideas to which they cling with a persistency touching heroism. To the man
She has not had a fortune on which to live in peace nor has she had the
remembrance of youthful days of wild adventure that must comfort the last
days of the old man. Instead she has been watching me as the old man
watches his thermometer and Father has been the dog in her house chasing
playthings." The figure pleased him. He stood at the gate, the wind
singing in the trees along the street and driving an occasional drop of
rain against his cheek, and thought of it and of his life with his mother.
During the last two or three years he had been trying to make things up to
her. After the sale of the newspaper business and the beginning of his
success with Freedom he had driven her from the washtub and since the
beginning of her ill health he had spent evening after evening with her
instead of going to Wildman's to sit with the four friends and hear the
talk that went on among them. No more did he walk with Telfer or Mary
Underwood on country roads but sat, instead, by the bedside of the sick
woman or, the night falling fair, helped her to an arm chair upon the
grass plot at the front of the house.
The years, Sam felt, had been good years. They had brought him an
understanding of his mother and had given a seriousness and purpose to the
ambitious plans he continued to make for himself. Alone together, the
mother and he had talked little, the habit of a lifetime making much
speech impossible to her and the growing understanding of her making it
unnecessary to him. Now in the darkness, before the house, he thought of
the evenings he had spent with her and of the pitiful waste that had been
made of her fine life. Things that had hurt him and against which he had
been bitter and unforgiving became of small import, even the doings of the
pretentious Windy, who in the face of Jane's illness continued to go off
after pension day for long periods of drunkenness, and who only came home
to weep and wail through the house, when the pension money was gone,
regretting, Sam tried in fairness to think, the loss of both the washwoman
and the wife.
"She has been the most wonderful woman in the world," he told himself and
tears of happiness came into his eyes at the thought of his friend, John
Telfer, who in bygone days had praised the mother to the newsboy trotting
beside him on moonlit roads. Into his mind came a picture of her long
gaunt face, ghastly now against the white of the pillows. A picture of
George Eliot, tacked to the wall behind a broken harness in the kitchen of
Freedom Smith's house, had caught his eye some days before, and in the
darkness he took it from his pocket and put it to his lips, realising that
in some indescribable way it was like his mother as she had been before
her illness. Freedom's wife had given him the picture and he had been
carrying it, taking it out of his pocket on lonely stretches of road as he
went about his work.
Sam went quietly around the house and stood by an old shed, a relic of an
attempt by Windy to embark in raising chickens. He wanted to continue the
thoughts of his mother. He began recalling her youth and the details of a
long talk they had held together on the lawn before the house. It was
extraordinarily vivid in his mind. He thought that even now he could
remember every word that had been said. The sick woman had talked of her
youth in Ohio, and as she talked pictures had come into the boy's mind.
She had told him of her days as a bound girl in the family of a thin-
lipped, hard-fisted New Englander, who had come West to take a farm, and
of her struggles to obtain an education, of the pennies saved to buy
books, of her joy when she had passed examinations and become a school
teacher, and of her marriage to Windy--then John McPherson.
Into the Ohio village the young McPherson had come, to cut a figure in the
town's life. Sam had smiled at the picture she drew of the young man who
walked up and down the village street with girls on his arms, and who
taught a Bible class in the Sunday school.
When Windy proposed to the young school teacher she had accepted him
eagerly, thinking it unbelievably romantic that so dashing a man should
have chosen so obscure a figure among all the women of the town.
"And even now I am not sorry although it has meant nothing but labour and
unhappiness for me," the sick woman had told her son.
After marriage to the young dandy, Jane had come with him to Caxton where
he bought a store and where, within three years, he had put the store into
the sheriff's hands and his wife into the position of town laundress.
In the darkness a grim smile, half scorn, half amusement, had flitted
across the face of the dying woman as she told of a winter when Windy and
another young fellow went, from schoolhouse to schoolhouse, over the state
giving a show. The ex-soldier had become a singer of comic songs and had
written letter after letter to the young wife telling of the applause that
greeted his efforts. Sam could picture the performances, the little dimly-
lighted schoolhouses with the weatherbeaten faces shining in the light of
the leaky magic lantern, and the delighted Windy running here and there,
talking the jargon of stageland, arraying himself in his motley and
strutting upon the little stage.
"And all winter he did not send me a penny," the sick woman had said,
interrupting his thoughts.
Aroused at last to expression, and filled with the memory of her youth,
the silent woman had talked of her own people. Her father had been killed
in the woods by a falling tree. Of her mother she told an anecdote,
touching it briefly and with a grim humour that surprised her son.
The young school teacher had gone to call upon her mother once and for an
hour had sat in the parlour of an Ohio farmhouse while a fierce old woman
looked at her with bold questioning eyes that made the daughter feel she
had been a fool to come.
At the railroad station she had heard an anecdote of her mother. The story
ran, that once a burly tramp came to the farmhouse, and finding the woman
alone tried to bully her, and that the tramp, and the woman, then in her
prime, fought for an hour in the back yard of the house. The railroad
agent, who told Jane the story, threw back his head and laughed.
"She knocked him out, too," he said, "knocked him cold upon the ground and
then filled him up with hard cider so that he came reeling into town
declaring her the finest woman in the state."
In the darkness by the broken shed Sam's mind turned from thoughts of his
mother to his sister Kate and of her love affair with the young farmer. He
thought with sadness of how she too had suffered because of the failings
of the father, of how she had been compelled to go out of the house to
wander in the dark streets to avoid the endless evenings of war talk
always brought on by a guest in the McPherson household, and of the night
when, getting a rig from Culvert's livery, she had driven off alone into
the country to return in triumph to pack her clothes and show her wedding
ring.
Before him there rose a picture of a summer afternoon when he had seen a
part of the love making that had preceded this. He had gone into the store
to see his sister when the young farmer came in, looked awkwardly about
and pushed a new gold watch across the counter to Kate. A sudden wave of
respect for his sister had pervaded the boy. "What a sum it must have
cost," he thought, and looked with new interest at the back of the lover
and at the flushed cheek and shining eyes of his sister. When the lover,
turning, had seen young McPherson standing at the counter, he laughed
self-consciously and walked out at the door. Kate had been embarrassed and
secretly pleased and flattered by the look in her brother's eyes, but had
pretended to treat the gift lightly, twirling it carelessly back and forth
on the counter and walking up and down swinging her arms.
"Don't go telling," she had said.
"Then don't go pretending," the boy had answered.
Sam thought that his sister's indiscretion, which had brought her a babe
and a husband in the same month had, after all, ended better than the
indiscretion of his mother in her marriage with Windy.
Rousing himself, he went into the house. A neighbour woman, employed for
the purpose, had prepared the evening meal and now began complaining of
his lateness, saying that the food had got cold.
Sam ate in silence. While he ate the woman went out of the house and
presently returned, bringing a daughter.
There was in Caxton a code that would not allow a woman to be alone in a
house with a man. Sam wondered if the bringing of the daughter was an
attempt on the part of the woman to abide by the letter of the code, if
she thought of the sick woman in the house as one already gone. The
thought amused and saddened him.
"You would have thought her safe," he mused. She was fifty, small, nervous
and worn and wore a set of ill-fitting false teeth that rattled as she
talked. When she did not talk she rattled them with her tongue because of
nervousness.
In at the kitchen door came Windy, far gone in drink. He stood by the door
holding to the knob with his hand and trying to get control of himself.
"My wife--my wife is dying. She may die any day," he wailed, tears
standing in his eyes.
The woman with the daughter went into the little parlour where a bed had
been put for the sick woman. Sam sat at the kitchen table dumb with anger
and disgust as Windy, lurching forward, fell into a chair and began
sobbing loudly. In the road outside a man driving a horse stopped and Sam
could hear the scraping of the wheels against the buggy body as the man
turned in the narrow street. Above the scraping of the wheels rose a
voice, swearing profanely. The wind continued to blow and it had begun to
rain.
"He has got into the wrong street," thought the boy stupidly.
Windy, his head upon his hands, wept like a brokenhearted boy, his sobs
echoing through the house, his breath heavy with liquor tainting the air
of the room. In a corner by the stove the mother's ironing board stood
against the wall and the sight of it added fuel to the anger smouldering
in Sam's heart. He remembered the day when he had stood in the store
doorway with his mother and had seen the dismal and amusing failure of his
father with the bugle, and of the months before Kate's wedding, when Windy
had gone blustering about town threatening to kill her lover and the
mother and boy had stayed with the girl, out of sight in the house, sick
with humiliation.
The drunken man, laying his head upon the table, fell asleep, his snores
replacing the sobs that had stirred the boy's anger. Sam began thinking
again of his mother's life.
The effort he had made to repay her for the hardness of her life now
seemed utterly fruitless. "I would like to repay him," he thought, shaken
with a sudden spasm of hatred as he looked at the man before him. The
cheerless little kitchen, the cold, half-baked potatoes and sausages on
the table, and the drunken man asleep, seemed to him a kind of symbol of
the life that had been lived in that house, and with a shudder he turned
his face and stared at the wall.
He thought of a dinner he had once eaten at Freedom Smith's house. Freedom
had brought the invitation into the stables on that night just as to-night
he had brought the letter from the Chicago company, and just as Sam was
shaking his head in refusal of the invitation in at the stable door had
come the children. Led by the eldest, a great tomboy girl of fourteen with
the strength of a man and an inclination to burst out of her clothes at
unexpected places, they had come charging into the stables to carry Sam
off to the dinner, Freedom laughingly urging them on, his voice roaring in
the stable so that the horses jumped about in their stalls. Into the house
they had dragged him, the baby, a boy of four, sitting astride his back
and beating on his head with a woollen cap, and Freedom swinging a lantern
and giving an occasional helpful push with his hand.
A picture of the long table covered with the white cloth at the end of the
big dining room in Freedom's house came back into the mind of the boy now
sitting in the barren little kitchen before the untasted, badly-cooked
food. Upon it lay a profusion of bread and meat and great dishes heaped
with steaming potatoes. At his own house there had always been just enough
food for the single meal. The thing was nicely calculated, when you had
finished the table was bare.
How he had enjoyed that dinner after the long day on the road. With a
flourish and a roar at the children Freedom heaped high the plates and
passed them about, the wife or the tomboy girl bringing unending fresh
supplies from the kitchen. The joy of the evening with its talk of the
children in school, its sudden revelation of the womanliness of the tomboy
girl, and its air of plenty and good living haunted the mind of the boy.
"My mother never knew anything like that," he thought.
The drunken man who had been sleeping aroused himself and began talking
loudly--some old forgotten grievance coming back to his mind, he talked of
the cost of school books.
"They change the books in the school too often," he declared in a loud
voice, turning and facing the kitchen stove, as though addressing an
audience. "It is a scheme to graft on old soldiers who have children. I
will not stand it."
Sam, enraged beyond speech, tore a leaf from a notebook and scrawled a
message upon it.
"Be silent," he wrote. "If you say another word or make another sound to
disturb mother I will choke you and throw you like a dead dog into the
street."
Reaching across the table and touching his father on the hand with a fork
taken from among the dishes, he laid the note upon the table under the
lamp before his eyes. He was fighting with himself to control a desire to
spring across the room and kill the man who he believed had brought his
mother to her death and who now sat bellowing and talking at her very
death bed. The desire distorted his mind so that he stared about the
kitchen like one seized with an insane nightmare.
Windy, taking the note in his hand, read it slowly and then, not
understanding its import and but half getting its sense, put it in his
pocket.
"A dog is dead, eh?" he shouted. "Well you're getting too big and smart,
lad. What do I care for a dead dog?"
Sam did not answer. Rising cautiously, he crept around the table and put
his hand upon the throat of the babbling old man.
"I must not kill," he kept telling himself aloud, as though talking to a
stranger. "I must choke until he is silent, but I must not kill."
In the kitchen the two men struggled silently. Windy, unable to rise,
struck out wildly and helplessly with his feet. Sam, looking down at him
and studying the eyes and the colour in the cheeks, realised with a start
that he had not for years seen the face of his father. How vividly it
stamped itself upon his mind now, and how coarse and sodden it had become.
"I could repay all of the years mother has spent over the dreary washtub
by just one long, hard grip at this lean throat. I could kill him with so
little extra pressure," he thought.
The eyes began to stare at him and the tongue to protrude. Across the
forehead ran a streak of mud picked up somewhere in the long afternoon of
drunken carousing.
"If I were to press hard now and kill him I would see his face as it looks
now all the days of my life," thought the boy.
In the silence of the house he heard the voice of the neighbour woman
speaking sharply to her daughter. The familiar, dry, tired cough of the
sick woman followed. Sam took the unconscious old man in his arms and went
carefully and silently out at the kitchen door. The rain beat down upon
him and, as he went around the house with his burden, the wind, shaking
loose a dead branch from a small apple tree in the yard, blew it against
his face, leaving a long smarting scratch. At the fence before the house
he stopped and threw his burden down a short grassy bank into the road.
Then turning he went, bareheaded, through the gate and up the street.
"I will go for Mary Underwood," he thought, his mind returning to the
friend who years before had walked with him on country roads and whose
friendship he had dropped because of John Telfer's tirades against all
women. He stumbled along the sidewalk, the rain beating down upon his bare
head.
"We need a woman in our house," he kept saying over and over to himself.
"We need a woman in our house."
CHAPTER VII
Leaning against the wall under the veranda of Mary Underwood's house, Sam
tried to get in his mind a remembrance of what had brought him there. He
had walked bareheaded through Main Street and out along a country road.
Twice he had fallen, covering his clothes with mud. He had forgotten the
purpose of his walk and had tramped on and on. The unexpected and terrible
hatred of his father that had come upon him in the tense silence of the
kitchen had so paralysed his brain that he now felt light-headed and
wonderfully happy and carefree.
"I have been doing something," he thought; "I wonder what it is."
The house faced a grove of pine trees and was reached by climbing a little
rise and following a winding road out beyond the graveyard and the last of
the village lights. The wild spring rain pounded and rattled on the tin
roof overhead, and Sam, his back closely pressed against the front of the
house, fought to regain control of his mind.
For an hour he stood there staring into the darkness and watched with
delight the progress of the storm. He had--an inheritance from his mother
--a love of thunderstorms. He remembered a night when he was a boy and his
mother had got out of bed and gone here and there through the house
singing. She had sung softly so that the sleeping father did not hear, and
in his bed upstairs Sam had lain awake listening to the noises--the rain
on the roof, the occasional crash of thunder, the snoring of Windy, and
the unusual and, he thought, beautiful sound of the mother singing in the
storm.
Now, lifting up his head, he looked about with delight. Trees in the grove
in front of him bent and tossed in the wind. The inky blackness of the
night was relieved by the flickering oil lamp in the road beyond the
graveyard and, in the distance, by the lights streaming out at the windows
of the houses. The light coming out of the house against which he stood
made a little cylinder of brightness among the pine trees through which
the raindrops fell gleaming and sparkling. An occasional flash of
lightning lit up the trees and the winding road, and the cannonry of the
skies rolled and echoed overhead. A kind of wild song sang in Sam's heart.
"I wish it would last all night," he thought, his mind fixed on the
singing of his mother in the dark house when he was a boy.
The door opened and a woman stepped out upon the veranda and stood before
him facing the storm, the wind tossing the soft kimono in which she was
clad and the rain wetting her face. Under the tin roof, the air was filled
with the rattling reverberation of the rain. The woman lifted her head
and, with the rain beating down upon her, began singing, her fine
contralto voice rising above the rattle of the rain on the roof and going
on uninterrupted by the crash of the thunder. She sang of a lover riding
through the storm to his mistress. One refrain persisted in the song--
"He rode and he thought of her red, red lips,"
sang the woman, putting her hand upon the railing of the little porch and
leaning forward into the storm.
Sam was amazed. The woman standing before him was Mary Underwood, who had
been his friend when he was a boy in school and toward whom his mind had
turned after the tragedy in the kitchen. The figure of the woman standing
singing before him became a part of his thoughts of his mother singing on
the stormy night in the house and his mind wandered on, seeing pictures as
he used to see them when a boy walking under the stars and listening to
the talk of John Telfer. He saw a broad-shouldered man shouting defiance
to the storm as he rode down a mountain path.
"And he laughed at the rain on his wet, wet cloak," went on the voice of
the singer.
Mary Underwood's singing there in the rain made her seem near and likeable
as she had seemed to him when he was a barefoot boy.
"John Telfer was wrong about her," he thought.
She turned and faced him. Tiny streams of water ran from her hair down
across her cheeks. A flash of lightning cut the darkness, illuminating the
spot where Sam, now a broad-shouldered man, stood with the mud upon his
clothes and the bewildered look upon his face. A sharp exclamation of
surprise broke from her lips:
"Hello, Sam! What are you doing here? You had better get in out of the
rain."
"I like it here," replied Sam, lifting his head and looking past her at
the storm.
Walking to the door and standing with her hand upon the knob, Mary looked
into the darkness.
"You have been a long time coming to see me," she said, "come in."
Within the house, with the door closed, the rattle of the rain on the
veranda roof sank to a subdued, quiet drumming. Piles of books lay upon a
table in the centre of the room and there were other books on the shelves
along the walls. On a table burned a student's lamp and in the corners of
the room lay heavy shadows.
Sam stood by the wall near the door looking about with half-seeing eyes.
Mary, who had gone to another part of the house and who now returned clad
in a long cloak, looked at him with quick curiosity, and began moving
about the room picking up odds and ends of woman's clothing scattered on
the chairs. Kneeling, she lighted a fire under some sticks piled in an
open grate at the side of the room.
"It was the storm made me want to sing," she said self-consciously, and
then briskly, "we shall have to be drying you out; you have fallen in the
road and got yourself covered with mud."
From being morose and silent Sam became talkative. An idea had come into
his mind.
"I have come here courting," he thought; "I have come to ask Mary
Underwood to be my wife and live in my house."
The woman, kneeling by the blazing sticks, made a picture that aroused
something that had been sleeping in him. The heavy cloak she wore, falling
away, showed the round little shoulders imperfectly covered by the kimono,
wet and clinging to them. The slender, youthful figure, the soft grey hair
and the serious little face, lit by the burning sticks caused a jumping of
his heart.
"We are needing a woman in our house," he said heavily, repeating the
words that had been on his lips as he stumbled through the storm-swept
streets and along the mud-covered roads. "We are needing a woman in our
house, and I have come to take you there.
"I intend to marry you," he added, lurching across the room and grasping
her roughly by the shoulders. "Why not? I am needing a woman."
Mary Underwood was dismayed and frightened by the face looking down at
her, and by the strong hands clenched upon her shoulders. In his youth she
had conceived a kind of maternal passion for the newsboy and had planned a
future for him. Her plans if followed would have made him a scholar, a man
living his life among books and ideas. Instead, he had chosen to live his
life among men, to be a money-maker, to drive about the country like
Freedom Smith, making deals with farmers. She had seen him driving at
evening through the street to Freedom's house, going in and out of
Wildman's, and walking through the streets with men. In a dim way she knew
that an influence had been at work upon him to win him from the things of
which she had dreamed and she had secretly blamed John Telfer, the
talking, laughing idler. Now, out of the storm, the boy had come back to
her, his hands and his clothes covered with the mud of the road, and
talked to her, a woman old enough to be his mother, of marriage and of
coming to live with him in his house. She stood, chilled, looking into the
eager, strong face and the eyes with the pained, dazed look in them.
Under her gaze, something of the old feeling of the boy came back to Sam,
and he began vaguely trying to tell her of it.
"It was not the talk of Telfer drove me from you," he began, "it was
because you talked so much of the schools and of books. I was tired of
them. I could not go on year after year sitting in a stuffy little
schoolroom when there was so much money to be made in the world. I grew
tired of the school teachers, drumming with their fingers on the desks and
looking out at the windows at men passing in the street. I wanted to get
out of there and into the streets myself."
Dropping his hands from her shoulders, he sat down in a chair and stared
into the fire, now blazing steadily. Steam began to rise from his trousers
legs. His mind, still working beyond his control, began to reconstruct an
old boyhood fancy, half his own, half John Telfer's, that had years before
come into his mind. It concerned a picture he and Telfer had made of the
ideal scholar. The picture had, as its central figure, a stoop-shouldered,
feeble old man stumbling along the street, muttering to himself and poking
in a gutter with a stick. The picture was a caricature of puttering old
Frank Huntley, superintendent of the Caxton schools.
Sitting before the fire in Mary Underwood's house, become, for the moment,
a boy, facing a boy's problems, Sam did not want to be such a man. He
wanted only that in scholarship which would help him to be the kind of man
he was bent on being, a man of the world doing the work of the world and
making money by his work. Things he had been unable to get expressed when
he was a boy and her friend, coming again into his mind, he felt that he
must here and now make it plain to Mary Underwood that the schools were
not giving him what he wanted. His brain worked on the problem of how to
tell her about it.
Turning, he looked at her and said earnestly: "I am going to quit the
schools. It is not your fault, but I am going to quit just the same."
Mary, who had been looking down at the great mud-covered figure in the
chair began to understand. A light came into her eyes. Going to the door
opening into a stairway leading to sleeping rooms above, she called
sharply, "Auntie, come down here at once. There is a sick man here."
A startled, trembling voice answered from above, "Who is it?"
Mary Underwood did not answer. She came back to Sam and, putting her hand
gently on his shoulder, said, "It is your mother and you are only a sick,
half-crazed boy after all. Is she dead? Tell me about it."
Sam shook his head. "She is still there in the bed, coughing." He roused
himself and stood up. "I have just killed my father," he announced. "I
choked him and threw him down the bank into the road in front of the
house. He made horrible noises in the kitchen and mother was tired and
wanted to sleep."
Mary Underwood began running about the room. From a little alcove under a
stairway she took clothes, throwing them upon the floor about the room.
She pulled on a stocking and, unconscious of Sam's presence, raised her
skirts and fastened it. Then, putting one shoe on the stockinged foot and
the other on the bare one, she turned to him. "We will go back to your
house. I think you are right. You need a woman there."
In the street she walked rapidly along, clinging to the arm of the tall
fellow who strode silently beside her. A cheerfulness had come over Sam.
He felt he had accomplished something--something he had set out to
accomplish. He again thought of his mother and drifting into the notion
that he was on his way home from work at Freedom Smith's, began planning
the evening he would spend with her.
"I will tell her of the letter from the Chicago company and of what I will
do when I go to the city," he thought.
At the gate before the McPherson house Mary looked into the road below the
grassy bank that ran down from the fence, but in the darkness she could
see nothing. The rain continued to fall and the wind screamed and shouted
as it rushed through the bare branches of the trees. Sam went through the
gate and around the house to the kitchen door intent upon getting to his
mother's bedside.
In the house the neighbour woman sat asleep in a chair before the kitchen
stove. The daughter had gone.
Sam went through the house to the parlour and sat down in a chair beside
his mother's bed, picking up her hand and holding it in his own. "She must
be asleep," he thought.
At the kitchen door Mary Underwood stopped, and, turning, ran away into
the darkness along the street. By the kitchen fire the neighbour woman
still slept. In the parlour Sam, sitting on the chair beside his mother's
bed, looked about him. A lamp burned dimly upon the little stand beside
the bed and the light of it fell upon the portrait of a tall,
aristocratic-looking woman with rings on her fingers, that hung upon the
wall. The picture belonged to Windy and was claimed by him as a portrait
of his mother, and it had once brought on a quarrel between Sam and his
sister.
Kate had taken the portrait of the lady seriously, and the boy had come
upon her sitting in a chair before it, her hair rearranged and her hands
lying in her lap in imitation of the pose maintained so haughtily by the
great lady who looked down at her.
"It is a fraud," he had declared, irritated by what he believed his
sister's devotion to one of the father's pretensions. "It is a fraud he
has picked up somewhere and now claims as his mother to make people
believe he is something big."
The girl, ashamed at having been caught in the pose, and furious because
of the attack upon the authenticity of the portrait, had gone into a spasm
of indignation, putting her hands to her ears and stamping on the floor
with her foot. Then she had run across the room and dropped upon her knees
before a little couch, buried her face in a pillow and shook with anger
and grief.
Sam had turned and walked out of the room. The emotions of the sister had
seemed to him to have the flavour of one of Windy's outbreaks.
"She likes it," he had thought, dismissing the incident. "She likes
believing in lies. She is like Windy and would rather believe in them than
not."
* * * * *
Mary Underwood ran through the rain to John Telfer's house and beat on the
door with her fist until Telfer, followed by Eleanor, holding a lamp above
her head, appeared at the door. With Telfer she went back through the
streets to the front of Sam's house thinking of the terrible choked and
disfigured man they should find there. She went along clinging to Telfer's
arm as she had clung to Sam's, unconscious of her bare head and scanty
attire. In his hand Telfer carried a lantern secured from the stable.
In the road before the house they found nothing. Telfer went up and down
swinging the lantern and peering into gutters. The woman walked beside
him, her skirts lifted and the mud splashing upon her bare leg.
Suddenly Telfer threw back his head and laughed. Taking her hand he led
Mary with a rush up the bank and through the gate.
"What a muddle-headed old fool I am!" he cried. "I am getting old and
addle-pated! Windy McPherson is not dead! Nothing could kill that old war
horse! He was in at Wildman's grocery after nine o'clock to-night covered
with mud and swearing he had been in a fight with Art Sherman. Poor Sam
and you--to have come to me and to have found me a stupid ass! Fool! Fool!
What a fool I have become!"
In at the kitchen door ran Mary and Telfer, frightening the woman by the
stove so that she sprang to her feet and began nervously making the false
teeth rattle with her tongue. In the parlour they found Sam, his head upon
the edge of the bed, asleep. In his hand he held the cold hand of Jane
McPherson. She had been dead for an hour. Mary Underwood stooped over and
kissed his wet hair as the neighbour woman came in at the doorway bearing
the kitchen lamp, and John Telfer, holding his finger to his lips,
commanded silence.
CHAPTER VIII
The funeral of Jane McPherson was a trying affair for her son. He thought
that his sister Kate, with the babe in her arms, had become coarsened--she
looked frumpish and, while they were in the house, had an air of having
quarrelled with her husband when they came out of their bedroom in the
morning. During the funeral service Sam sat in the parlour, astonished and
irritated by the endless number of women that crowded into the house. They
were everywhere, in the kitchen, the sleeping room back of the parlour;
and in the parlour, where the dead woman lay in her coffin, they were
massed. When the thin-lipped minister, holding a book in his hand, held
forth upon the virtues of the dead woman, they wept. Sam looked at the
floor and thought that thus they would have wept over the body of the dead
Windy, had his fingers but tightened a trifle. He wondered if the minister
would have talked in the same way--blatantly and without knowledge--of the
virtues of the dead. In a chair at the side of the coffin the bereaved
husband, in new black clothes, wept audibly. The baldheaded, officious
undertaker kept moving nervously about, intent upon the ritual of his
trade.
During the service, a man sitting behind him dropped a note on the floor
at Sam's feet. Sam picked it up and read it, glad of something to distract
his attention from the voice of the minister, and the faces of the weeping
women, none of whom had before been in the house and all of whom he
thought strikingly lacking in a sense of the sacredness of privacy. The
note was from John Telfer.
"I will not come to your mother's funeral," he wrote. "I respected your
mother while she lived and I will leave you alone with her now that she is
dead. In her memory I will hold a ceremony in my heart. If I am in
Wildman's, I may ask the man to quit selling soap and tobacco for the
moment and to close and lock the door. If I am at Valmore's shop, I will
go up into his loft and listen to him pounding on the anvil below. If he
or Freedom Smith go to your house, I warn them I will cut their
friendship. When I see the carriages going through the street and know
that the thing is right well done and over, I will buy flowers and take
them to Mary Underwood as an appreciation of the living in the name of the
dead."
The note cheered and comforted Sam. It gave him back a grip of something
that had slipped from him.
"It is good sense, after all," he thought, and realised that even in the
days when he was being made to suffer horrors, and in the face of the fact
that Jane McPherson's long, hard role was just being played out to the
end, the farmer in the field was sowing his corn, Valmore was beating upon
his anvil, and John Telfer was writing notes with a flourish. He arose,
interrupting the minister's discourse. Mary Underwood had come in just as
the minister began talking and had dropped into an obscure corner near the
door leading into the street. Sam crowded past the women who stared and
the minister who frowned and the baldheaded undertaker who wrung his hands
and, dropping the note into her lap, said, oblivious of the people looking
and listening with breathless curiosity, "It is from John Telfer. Read it.
Even he, hating women as he did, is now bringing flowers to your door."
In the room a wind of whispered comments sprang up. Women, putting their
heads together and their hands before their faces, nodded toward the
school teacher, and the boy, unconscious of the sensation he had created,
went back to his chair and looked again at the floor, waiting until the
talk and the singing of songs and the parading through the streets should
be ended. Again the minister began reading from the book.
"I have become older than all of these people here," thought the youth.
"They play at life and death, and I have felt it between the fingers of my
hand."
Mary Underwood, lacking Sam's unconsciousness of the people, looked about
with burning cheeks. Seeing the women whispering and putting their heads
together, a chill of fear ran through her. Into the room had been thrust
the face of an old enemy to her--the scandal of a small town. Picking up
the note she slipped out at the door and stole away along the street. The
old maternal love for Sam had returned strengthened and ennobled by the
terror through which she had passed with him that night in the rain. Going
to her house she whistled the collie dog and set out along a country road.
At the edge of a grove of trees she stopped, sat down on a log, and read
Telfer's note. From the soft ground into which her feet sank there came
the warm pungent smell of the new growth. Tears came into her eyes. She
thought that in a few days much had come to her. She had got a boy upon
whom she could pour out the mother love in her heart, and she had made a
friend of Telfer, whom she had long regarded with fear and doubt.
For a month Sam lingered in Caxton. It seemed to him there was something
that wanted doing there. He sat with the men at the back of Wildman's, and
walked aimlessly through the streets and out of the town along the country
roads, where men worked all day in the fields behind sweating horses,
ploughing the land. The thrill of spring was in the air, and in the
evening a song sparrow sang in the apple tree below his bedroom window.
Sam walked and loitered in silence, looking at the ground. In his mind was
the dread of people. The talk of the men in the store wearied him and when
he went alone into the country he found himself accompanied by the voices
of all of those he had come out of town to escape. On the street corner
the thin-lipped, brown-bearded minister stopped him and talked of the
future life as he had stopped and talked to a bare-legged newsboy.
"Your mother," he said, "has but gone before. It is for you to get into
the narrow path and follow her. God has sent this sorrow as a warning to
you. He wants you also to get into the way of life and in the end to join
her. Begin coming to our church. Join in the work of the Christ. Find
truth."
Sam, who had listened without hearing, shook his head and went on. The
minister's talk seemed no more than a meaningless jumble of words out of
which he got but one thought.
"Find truth," he repeated to himself after the minister, and let his mind
play with the idea. "The best men are all trying to do that. They spend
their lives at the task. They are all trying to find truth."
He went along the street, pleased with himself because of the
interpretation he had put upon the minister's words. The terrible moments
in the kitchen followed by his mother's death had put a new look of
seriousness into his face and he felt within him a new sense of
responsibility to the dead woman and to himself. Men stopped him on the
street and wished him well in the city. News of his leaving had become
public. Things in which Freedom Smith was concerned were always public
affairs.
"He would take a drum with him to make love to a neighbour's wife," said
John Telfer.
Sam felt that in a way he was a child of Caxton. Early it had taken him to
its bosom; it had made of him a semi-public character; it had encouraged
him in his money-making, humiliated him through his father, and patronised
him lovingly because of his toiling mother. When he was a boy, scurrying
between the legs of the drunkards in Piety Hollow of a Saturday night,
there was always some one to speak a word to him of his morals and to
shout at him a cheering word of advice. Had he elected to remain there,
with the thirty-five hundred dollars already in the Savings Bank--built to
that during his years with Freedom Smith--he might soon become one of the
town's solid men.
He did not want to stay. He felt that his call was in another place and
that he would go there gladly. He wondered why he did not get on the train
and be off.
One night when he had been late on the road, loitering by fences, hearing
the lonely barking of dogs at distant farmhouses, getting the smell of the
new-ploughed ground into his nostrils, he came into town and sat down on a
low iron fence that ran along by the platform of the railroad station, to
wait for the midnight train north. Trains had taken on a new meaning to
him since any day might see him on such a train bound into his new life.
A man, with two bags in his hands, came on the station platform followed
by two women.
"Here, watch these," he said to the women, setting the bags upon the
platform; "I will go for the tickets," and disappeared into the darkness.
The two women resumed their interrupted talk.
"Ed's wife has been poorly these ten years," said one of them. "It will be
better for her and for Ed now that she is dead, but I dread the long ride.
I wish she had died when I was in Ohio two years ago. I am sure to be
train-sick."
Sam, sitting in the darkness, was thinking of a part of one of John
Telfer's old talks with him.
"They are good people but they are not your people. You will go away from
here. You will be a big man of dollars, it is plain."
He began listening idly to the two women. The man had a shop for mending
shoes on a side street back of Geiger's drug store and the two women, one
short and round, one long and thin, kept a small, dingy millinery shop and
were Eleanor Telfer's only competitors.
"Well, the town knows her now for what she is," said the tall woman.
"Milly Peters says she won't rest until she has put that stuck-up Mary
Underwood in her place. Her mother worked in the McPherson house and it
was her told Milly. I never heard such a story. To think of Jane McPherson
working all these years and then having such goings-on in her house when
she lay dying, Milly says that Sam went away early in the evening and came
home late with that Underwood thing, half dressed, hanging on his arm.
Milly's mother looked out of the window and saw them. Then she ran out by
the kitchen stove and pretended to be asleep. She wanted to see what was
up. And the bold hussy came right into the house with Sam. Then she went
away, and after a while back she came with that John Telfer. Milly is
going to see that Eleanor Telfer finds it out. I guess it will bring her
down, too. And there is no telling how many other men in this town Mary
Underwood is running with. Milly says----"
The two women turned as out of the darkness came a tall figure roaring and
swearing. Two hands flashed out and sank into their hair.
"Stop it!" growled Sam, beating the two heads together, "stop your dirty
lies!--you ugly she-beasts!"
Hearing the two women screaming the man who had gone for the railroad
tickets came running down the station platform followed by Jerry Donlin.
Springing forward Sam knocked the shoemaker over the iron fence into a
newly spaded flower bed and then turned to the baggage man.
"They were telling lies about Mary Underwood," he shouted. "She tried to
save me from killing my father and now they are telling lies about her."
The two women picked up the bags and ran whimpering away along the station
platform. Jerry Donlin climbed over the iron fence and confronted the
surprised and frightened shoemaker.
"What the Hell are you doing in my flower bed?" he growled.
* * * * *
Hurrying through the streets Sam's mind was in a ferment. Like the Roman
emperor he wished that all the world had but one head that he might cut it
off with a slash. The town that had seemed so paternal, so cheery, so
intent upon wishing him well, now seemed horrible. He thought of it as a
great, crawling, slimy thing lying in wait amid the cornfields.
"To be saying that of her, of that white soul!" he exclaimed aloud in the
empty street, all of his boyish loyalty and devotion to the woman who had
put out a hand to him in his hour of trouble aroused and burning in him.
He wished that he might meet another man and could hit him also a swinging
blow on the nose as he had hit the amazed shoemaker. He went to his own
house and, leaning on the gate, stood looking at it and swearing
meaninglessly. Then, turning, he went again through the deserted streets
past the railroad station where, the midnight train having come and gone
and Jerry Donlin having gone home for the night, all was dark and quiet.
He was filled with horror of what Mary Underwood had seen at Jane
McPherson's funeral.
"It is better to be utterly bad than to speak ill of another," he thought.
For the first time he realised another side of village life. In fancy he
saw going past him on the dark road a long file of women, women with
coarse unlighted faces and dead eyes. Many of the faces he knew. They were
the faces of Caxton wives at whose houses he had delivered papers. He
remembered how eagerly they had run out of their houses to get the papers
and how they hung day after day over the details of sensational murder
cases. Once, when a Chicago girl had been murdered in a dive and the
details were unusually revolting, two women, unable to restrain their
curiosity, had come to the station to wait for the train bringing the
newspapers and Sam had heard them rolling the horrid mess over and over on
their tongues.
In every city and in every village there is a class of women, the thought
of whom paralyses the mind. They live their lives in small, unaired,
unsanitary houses, and go on year after year washing dishes and clothes--
only their fingers occupied. They read no good books, think no clean
thoughts, are made love to as John Telfer had said, with kisses in a
darkened room by a shame-faced yokel and, after marrying some such a
yokel, live lives of unspeakable blankness. Into the houses of these women
come the husbands at evening, tired and uncommunicative, to eat hurriedly
and then go again into the streets or, the blessing of utter physical
exhaustion having come to them, to sit for an hour in stockinged feet
before crawling away to sleep and oblivion.
In these women is no light, no vision. They have instead certain fixed
ideas to which they cling with a persistency touching heroism. To the man