A Good Woman (Bromfield)/Part 3/Chapter 13
Philip had spent the morning of that same day among the tents where the strikers lived in the melting snow. He had made sketches, a fragment here, a fragment there—tiny glimpses that were in their own way more eloquent than the lifting of the whole curtain. They were a weekly affair now, done regularly on a fragment of some denunciating speech or editorial. They appeared weekly in the Labor Journal. Now he chose an editorial in which the Chairman of the Board of Mill Directors made a speech filled with references to Christ and appeals to end the strike and return to an era of Peace on Earth; now it was an address from the Governor of the State—a timid man, a bit of a fool, and destined one day to be President of the Nation. Moses Slade suffered twice more, for his pompous bombastic speeches made irresistible subjects for burlesque. But, as the weeks passed, Philip found himself less and less interested in making propaganda for the workers, and more and more concerned with the purity of his line. The room above the stable came to be papered in sketches made on bits of newsprint or fragments of butchers' brown paper. A frenzy of work took possession of him, and for whole days at a time he never left the place, even to see his children. There were even times when he forgot the very existence of Mary Conyngham. But he did go faithfully twice a week to stay with the twins so that Naomi might go to choir practice. It was, he knew, the only pleasure which lay in his power to give her.
The importance of the thing appeared to make her happy, and to diminish the aching sense of strain that was never absent: when they were together. She began, little by little, to grow used to a husband whose only activities were those of a nursemaid, but she still tried pathetically to please him. She made a heroic effort to dress neatly and keep the house in order (although there were times when he spent his whole visit to the twins in putting closets in order and gathering the soiled clothing into piles), and she never spoke any more of his coming back to her. The only fault seemed to be a jealousy which she could not conquer.
She kept asking him questions, disguised in a pitiful air of casualness, about what the Shanes' house was like, and whether he thought Lily Shane as beautiful a woman as she was supposed to be. Once she even asked about Mary Conyngham. He always answered her in the same fashion—that he had never been inside the Shanes' house, and did not know Lily Shane, and had spoken to Mary Conyngham but once since he had come home. Sometimes he fancied that it was more than mere jealousy that prompted her questions: he thought, too, there was something in them of wistful curiosity about a world filled with people she would never know. She still had the power of rousing a pity which weakened him like an illness.
He did tell her at last that he had seen Lily Shane three or four times walking in the park, once in the moonlight, and that he thought she was a beautiful woman; but he never told her how the figure of Lily Shane was inextricably a part of that strange illuminating vision that came to him as he stood by the vine-clad window. It was, he believed, the sort of thing no one would understand, not even Mary. Naomi would only think him crazy and go at once to tell his mother. They would begin all over again humoring him as a madman or a child. No, he did not know Lily Shane, and yet he did know her, in a strange, unearthly, mystical fashion, as if she stood as a symbol of all that strange, sensuous world of which he had had a single illuminating intuition as he stood by the window. It was a world in which all life was lived on a different plane, in which tragedies occurred and people were happy and unhappy, but it was a world in which success and happiness and tragedy and sorrow were touched by grandeur. There was in it nothing sordid or petty, for there were in it no people like Uncle Elmer and Naomi and Mabelle. One could enter it if one knew how to live. That, he saw, was a thing he must learn—how to live, to free himself of all that nastiness and intolerance and pettiness of which he had suddenly become aware. He had to escape from all those things which the old Philip, the one who was dead, had accepted, in the blindness of a faith in a nasty God, as the ultimate in living.
This new Philip, prey to a sickening awareness, had been working all the morning in the Flats and ate with Krylenko at the tent where the homeless strikers were fed soup and coffee and bread, and, on returning to the stable, he lay down on the iron bed and fell asleep. He did not know how long he lay there, but he was awakened presently by a curious feeling, half a dream, that some one had come into the room with him. Lying quietly, still half-lost in a mist of sleep, he became slowly aware that some one was walking softly about beyond the screen. Rising, he pushed it aside and, stepping out, saw who it was. Standing in the shadow near the window, peering at the drawings, was Lily Shane, hatless, with her honey-colored hair done in a knot at the back of her neck, her furs thrown back over her shoulders. At the sound of his step, she turned slowly and said, "Oh! I thought there was no one here. I thought I was alone."
It was a soft voice, gentle and musical, exactly the right voice for such a figure and face. At the sound of it, he was aware suddenly that he must appear ridiculous—coatless, with his hair all rumpled. It was the first time he had ever spoken to such a woman, and something in her manner—the complete calm and assurance, the quiet, almost insolent lack of any apology, made him feel a gawky little boy.
"I . . . I was asleep," he said, desperately patting down his hair.
She smiled. "I didn't look behind the screen. Hennery told me you hadn't come in." But there was a contradiction behind the smile, a ghost of a voice which said, "I did look behind the screen. I knew you were there."
And suddenly, for the first time, Philip was stricken by an awful speculation as to how he looked when asleep. He knew that he was blushing. He said, "It doesn't matter. It's your stable, after all."
"I didn't mean to disturb you. I've stayed longer than I meant to . . . but—you see . . ."—she made a gesture toward the drawings—"I found all these more fascinating than I expected. I knew about you. My sister told me . . . but I didn't find what I expected. They're so much better. . . . You see, it's always the same. I couldn't believe it of the Town. Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?"
He began to tremble a little. He'd never shown them to any one save Krylenko, who only wanted pictures for propaganda and liked everything, good and bad. And now some one who lived in a great world such as he could scarcely imagine, thought they were good. Suddenly all the worries, the troubles, slipping from him, left him shy and childlike.
"I don't know whether they're good or bad," he said, "only . . . only I've got to do them."
She was standing before the painting of the Flats seen from the window, over which he had struggled for days. She smiled again, looking at him. "It's a bit messy . . . but it's got something in it of truth. I've seen it like that. It was like that one moonlight night not so long ago. I was walking in the garden . . . late . . . after midnight. I noticed it."
She sat down in one of the chairs by the stove. "May I stay and talk a moment?"
"Of course."
"Sit down too," she said.
Then he remembered that he was still without a coat, and, seizing it quickly, he put it on and sat down. His mind was all on fire, like a pile of tinder caught by a spark. He had never seen anything like this woman before. She wasn't what a woman who had led such a life should have been. She wasn't hard, or vulgar, or coarse, as he had been taught to believe. She must have been nearly forty years old, and yet she was fresh as the morning. And in her beauty, her voice, her manner, there was an odd quality of excitement which changed the very surface of everything about her. Her very presence seemed to make possible anything in the world.
She was saying, "What do you mean to do about it?"
"About what?"
She made a gesture to include the drawings. "All this."
It seemed to him for the first time that he had never thought of what he meant to do about it. He had just worked, passionately, because he had to work. He hadn't thought of the future at all.
"I don't know . . . I want to work until I can find what I know is here . . . I mean in the Mills and in the Flats. And then . . . some day . . . I . . . I want to go back to Africa. . . . I've been to Africa, you know. I was a missionary once." He thought that from the summit of her worldliness she might laugh at him for being a missionary; but she didn't laugh. She clasped her hands about her knee, and he saw suddenly that they were very beautiful hands, white and ringless, against the soft, golden sables. He wanted to seize a pencil and draw them.
She didn't laugh at him. She only said, "Tell me about that . . . about Africa . . . I mean."
And slowly he found himself telling the whole story, passionately, as he had never told it before, even to Mary Conyngham. He seemed to find in it things which he hadn't seen before, strange lights and shadows. He told it from beginning to end, and when he had finished, she said, looking into the fire, without smiling, "Yes, I understand all that. I've never been religious or mystical, but I've always had my sister Irene. I've seen it with her. You see I'm what they call a bad lot. You've probably heard of me. I'm only thankful I'm alive and I try to enjoy myself in the only world I'm sure of."
He went on, "You see, when I've learned more, I want to go back and paint that country. It had a fascination for me. I guess I'm like that Englishwoman . . . Lady Millicent . . . the one I told you about. She said there were some people who couldn't resist it."
When he finished, he saw that all his awe of her had vanished. He knew her better than any one in the world, for she had a miraculous way of understanding him, even those things which he did not say. The desire for the jungle and the hot lake swept over him in a turbulent wave. He wanted to go at once, without waiting. He was thirsty for a sight of the reedy marshes. The procession of black women moved somehow across the back of the room beyond Lily Shane. He was hot all at once, and thirsty for the water they carried up the slope to the parched ground.
She understood what he was trying to tell her . . . she had caught a magnificence, a splendor, that was not to be put into words. He wasn't afraid any more, or shy. It was as if she existed in an aura of contagious lawlessness.
She took out a cigarette from a lacquered box. "Do you mind if I smoke?"
"No."
"I didn't know. . . ."
He watched her curiously. There lay in the soft curve of her body, in the long slim leg crossed over the other, in the curve of the fur thrown back across her shoulders, in the poise of her arm, all the perfection of some composition designed and executed by a great artist. It was a kind of perfection he had never dreamed of, something which had arisen mysteriously during years out of the curious charm of her own personality. It was, too, a completeness born of the fearlessness which he had sensed for a moment by the window. Suddenly he thought, "Some day I shall be of that world. I shall succeed and become great. And Mary, too, will share it."
He had almost forgotten Mary, but it was only, he told himself shamefully, because she had been there with him all the while. It was almost as if she were a part of himself: whatever happened to him must happen also to her. It was not that he had fallen in love with this stranger, or even that he desired her: the emotion was something far beyond all that, a sort of dazzled bewilderment shot through with streaks of hope and glamour which brought near to him that world in which people were really alive.
Suddenly he summoned all his courage. He said, blushing under his dark skin, "I want to draw you. I want to make a picture of you."
She moved a little and smiled.
"No," he said, quickly. "Like that. Don't move."
He wanted to capture the grace and elegance of the pose, so that he might have it always, as a little fragment, caught and held, of this thing which he knew to exist, beyond his reach. She sat quietly. "Yes, of course . . . only it's almost dark now . . ."
He seized a pencil and a bit of paper, working swiftly, as he had done at the soup-kitchen. He must hurry (he thought) or she would be gone again back to Paris. She appeared presently to have forgotten him, and sat, with the remnant of the cigarette hanging from her long white fingers, while she stared into the fire. There was a curious sense of repose in the whole body, and a queer sadness too. She might have been quite alone. He had the feeling that she had forgotten his existence.
He worked nervously, with long, sure strokes, and with each one he knew that he was succeeding. In the end he would fix her thus forever on a fragment of paper. And then suddenly he heard some one enter the stable below, and, fumbling with the door, open it and hurry up the steps. He went on, pressed by the fear that if he were disturbed now the thing would never be finished. He had to have it. It would be a kind of fetish to keep off despair.
It was Lily Shane who moved first, stirred perhaps by a sense of being watched. As she moved, Philip turned too, and there, half-way up the stairs where she had halted at sight of them, stood Naomi, staring.
She was breathless, and beneath a carelessly pinned hat, from which wisps of hair escaped, her face showed red and shining as a midsummer day. For one dreadful moment the three remained silent, staring at each other. Lily Shane stared with a kind of bored indifference, but there was in Naomi's eyes a hurt look of bewilderment. Suddenly she turned back, as if she meant to go away again without speaking to either of them. Philip knew the expression at once. She had looked thus on the day that Lady Millicent appeared out of the forest with the Arab marching before her. It was the look of one who was shut out from something she could not understand, which frightened her by its strangeness.
It was Lily Shane who moved first. The burnt cigarette dropped from her fingers and she stamped on it. The action appeared to stir Naomi into life.
"Philip," she said. "I came to tell you that your Pa has come home."