A Good Woman (Bromfield)/Part 1/Chapter 1
She found the letter when she returned to the slate-colored house from the regular monthly meeting of the Augusta Simpson Branch of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. It was eleven o'clock at night and this letter lay, like any quite ordinary and usual letter, on the dining-room table in the dim radiance of gaslight turned economically low in the dome hand-painted in a design of wild-roses. Her first thought as she took off her sealskin tippet was that it must have arrived by the last post, which came at four, and so could have been in her hands seven hours earlier if the slattern Essie had not forgotten to give it to her. But what, she reflected as she removed her hat and jacket, could you expect of a girl of unknown parentage taken from the county poor farm to help around the house in return for her clothing, her board and two dollars a month pocket money? What could you expect from a girl who was boy-crazy? How was such a creature to understand what a letter from Philip meant to her? What could a slut like Essie know of a mother's feelings for her only son?
She knew it was from Philip by the round, boyish handwriting and by the outlandish stamp of Zanzibar. (It would be another for the collection of her brother Elmer.)
Mrs. Downes approached the table with the majestic step of a woman conscious of her dignity and importance in the community; the knowledge of these things lay like a shadow across the sweep of her deep bosom, in the carriage of her head, in the defiant rustle of her poplin bustle and leg-o'-mutton sleeves. It was so easy to see that, in her not too far-distant youth, she had been an opulent beauty in the style of Rubens, less yielding and voluptuous, perhaps, than his Venuses, but of a figure which inclined to overflow. And this beauty in its flowering had not gone unnoticed, for in that far-off day she had been courted by half the eligible, and all the ineligible, men of the town. In the brief moments of depression so rare with a person of such abundant vitality, she comforted herself by thinking, "In any case, I could have been the wife of a county judge, or a bank president, or even of a superintendent of the Mills." But the truth was that she was not the wife of any of them (in fact she had no husband at all) because, by a unique error of judgment forever inexplicable, she had chosen to marry one of the ineligibles, the giddiest but the most fascinating of all her suitors. Now, at forty-eight, she had come to believe that it was better so, that she was more content with the position she had made for herself, single-handed, than as a protected wife who was a mere nobody. The memory of her ancient beauty, hardened long ago into roughly chiseled lines by the struggle to succeed, she had put aside as a negligible affair in comparison to the virtues with which time and trouble had endowed her.
Her sense of satisfaction flowed from many springs, not the least of which was the knowledge that when Mr. Downes saw fit to desert her (she always phrased it thus to herself) he had not left behind a bereft and wilting female. She took satisfaction in the knowledge that she had calmly burnt his note explaining that it was impossible for any man to continue living with so much virtue, and then with equal calm told the world that Mr. Downes had gone away to China on business. Rolling up her sleeves, she had embarked fearlessly upon establishing a bakery to support herself and the two-year-old son who remained, the sole souvenir of her derelict mate.
Indeed, she had not even asked help of her brother, Elmer Niman, the pump manufacturer, who could have helped her easily enough, because she could not bear the thought of giving him an opportunity to say, "I told you so," with regard to Mr. Downes, and because she knew well enough that his penurious nature would never provide her with enough to live upon decently. These were the reasons she set down in her conscious mind; the ones which she did not consider were different—that hers was a spirit not to be chained, and possessed of an energy which could not have been soothed by rocking-chairs and mere housekeeping.
And so, almost at once, the bakery had flourished, and as the Mills brought prosperity and hordes of new citizens to the town, it turned presently into the Peerless Bakery and Lunch Room, and quite recently it had become the Peerless Restaurant, occupying an entire ground-floor at the corner of Maple and Main Streets. She was now known in the town as "an independent woman," which meant that she had no debts, owned her own house, and possessed a flourishing business.
All this she had wrought out of nothing, by her own energy, and far from harboring thoughts of retirement, she still went every day to survey the cooking and to sit near the cash-register during the full stream of noon and evening patronage.
But Mr. Downes, it seemed, fancied himself well out of a bad bargain, for he never returned; and when a year had passed, during which she constantly spoke of his letters and his doings in China, she went to the mausoleum which her brother called his home and told him that she had had no news of Mr. Downes for some months and that she feared something had happened to him in the Orient, which was, as he (Elmer) knew, a sinister place at best. So Elmer Niman, hopeful that some fatal catastrophe had befallen a brother-in-law of whom he disapproved, and to whom he had never spoken, took up the matter with the Government. The ensuing investigation dragged into light two or three stray, light-fingered gentlemen whose last desire was to be unearthed, but found no trace of the missing Mr. Downes—a mystery explained perhaps in Emma's mind by the fact that he had never been in China at all and that she had never received any letters from him.
In due time Mrs. Downes put on mourning and the derelict husband became enveloped in the haze of romance which surrounds one who apparently has met his death among the bandits of the Manchurian mountains. From then on she never spoke of him save as "Poor Mr. Downes!" or "My poor husband!" or to friends as "Poor Jason!" She alluded to a fatally adventurous nature which she had never been able to subdue and which had always filled her with foreboding. And now, twenty-four years later, she had come, herself, to believe that his body had long ago turned to dust in the Gobi Desert. (She had always been rather vague about geography and from time to time distributed his remains over half of Asia.) At the time the affair aggravated her brother's nervous dyspepsia by causing him much fury and agitation, and it cost the Government a large amount of money, but it fixed the legend of Mr. Downes' business trip to China, and so left her with more dignity and prestige than are the lot of a deserted wife.
The sedative effect of more than twenty years had dimmed the fascination of Mr. Downes to a point where it was possible for her to believe that he was, after all, only a scamp who had trifled with her affections and one whom she had never really loved at all—or at least only enough to make the presence of a son respectable in the eyes of the Lord. If he had "lived," she told herself, he would have gone his waggish, improvident way, leaving her and her son somewhat at the mercy of the dyspeptic Elmer; as things stood, she was successful and well off. Her once passionate and rather shameful desire to have him back seemed very remote now; she no longer wanted him to return; her only fear was that he might rise from the grave in—which she had placed him with such thoroughness. For years the thought had raised an uneasy feeling in her bosom; but when years passed without a word from him she decided that he must really be dead. There were still moments, however, when she came close to betraying herself by saying, "When Mr. Downes went away"—which could, of course, pass for meaning anything at all.
Each night she thanked God that her son—their son, she was forced to admit—would never know that his father was a scamp. He was a half-orphan to whom she had been both mother and father, and her training (she thanked God again) had left its mark. Her son was a fine young man with no bad habits, smoking, drinking or otherwise, who, married to Naomi Potts (known throughout the churchgoing world as "the youngest missionary of God"), was himself spreading the light among the heathen of that newly discovered land between Victoria-Nyanza and the Indian Ocean. He and Naomi and a third missionary were the first in the field. "In blackest Africa" was the way she expressed it. "My son," she would say proudly, "who is head of a mission in blackest Africa."
No, she reflected frequently, it was impossible to think of Philip, so handsome, so clean, so pure, so virtuous, so molded by her own hand, as the son of Jason Downes. She had succeeded in everything save changing his appearance: he had the same rather feline good looks which had ruined his father by inducing women to fling themselves at his head. (It was a thing she could never understand—how any woman could fling herself at the head of a man, even a man as handsome as Jason had been.)