A Good Woman (Bromfield)/Part 2/Chapter 15
When Philip awoke to the sound of the alarm-clock on the night that followed the scene in the hall, he was quite sober again, though his head ached horribly. He was alone in the darkness and suffered from a wretched fecling of shame. It was as if he had plunged into some pit of filth which still clung to him, despite all the washing in the world. It was a conviction of shame, almost of sin, stronger than he had known since, as a little boy, he had listened to one of Emma's terrifying lectures upon purity and the future life. It concerned what had happened on the night before in this very room, it concerned Hennessey's saloon, and the memory of Hennessey's hard voice, "Go on home to your Ma!" and the vague memory of something which had happened in the hall while a voice said something about blindness. He wakened in the exact position in which he had fallen asleep, with his face half-buried in the pillows. He was dirty and unshaven. Slowly he remembered the events of the day before, one by one, but, fitting them together, he could not see how they had brought him here, soiled and filled with a sense of horror.
While he dressed, he tried to fathom what it was that had caused a collapse so sudden and complete, and it seemed to him that it all had very little to do with the chain of things that had happened yesterday; it lay deeper than that. It went back and back into the past. There were moments when it seemed to him that he had been moving towards this night ever since he had been born. It was as if he had no power because he did not even know what it was.
At the Mills, Sokoleff and Finke and Krylenko were already by the oven. They greeted him, as they always did, without comment. Of his drunkenness they said nothing, Sokoleff and Finke perhaps because they were themselves too drunk to have noticed it. He had arrived, sober and ashamed, with the fear that they would use it as an excuse of coarse jokes. And now they did not even remember. For them a thing like that was part of the day's business, just as rabbit-like love and its various counterfeits were things which one took for granted.
He didn't talk to them, even while they all sat eating their lunches. It was as if something had robbed him of the very power of speech. And he felt that they were more remote now and strange than they had ever been, even on the first night he had come there to work by the glowing ovens.
Only Krylenko seemed to understand anything at all. He laughed, and said, "You feel pretty bad after yesterday. Well . . . you'll sweat it out. You get over it quick like that. You can drink like a hog but you sweat it all out right away."
He grinned feebly and said nothing, but he remembered what Krylenko had said, "You ain't like those other fellows." It was true: he wasn't like them, and at the moment he wanted to be like them more than all else on earth. It seemed to him that salvation lay in drinking like a hog and living like a rabbit. He couldn't do it, because something walled him in and shut him away from that fierce turbulent current of life which he felt all about him and could never enter. It was the old hunger, more clear now and understandable, which had driven him to the Mills, seizing him on the night he stood on the Hill looking down upon the miraculous beauty of the Flats at night.
He knew now that he wasn't even free. Naomi hadn't freed him after all, and his celebration had been all for nothing, a bitter joke. He was still the same, only with a strange sense of having been soiled. Weary and sick and disgusted, he felt suddenly like a little child who wanted comforting, only it never occurred to him now to turn to his mother as he had once done. Something had happened, some mysterious snapping of the bonds which bound them together. He found himself wishing with a passionate feeling of self-reproach that he might not see her again. It was partly shame and partly because his love for her had vanished in some inexplicable fashion. It struck him with horror that he had no love any longer either for her or for Naomi. The one he respected because he owed her so much: she was so much stronger and more valiant than himself. The other he pitied because he understood through pitying himself that she, too, must be miserable.
He worked on in silence passionately, straining in every muscle, shoving and pushing the hot steel, until the patches of soot in the sides of the shed began to turn gray with the light of dawn. The sweat that streamed down his body seemed in some way to purify his soul, and at last he grew so weary that all his troubles seemed to lose themselves in the terrible heat and clamor of the pounding hammers.
Only one thing remained in his weary mind, and that was a fierce desire to see Mary Conyngham. If he saw her, he would have peace, because she would understand. She seemed to him like a cool lake into which he could plunge, bathing his whole soul, and his body too, for he understood now what love could be if the woman was Mary Conyngham. Naomi had made a man of him. . . .
But it was impossible ever to see her again, because he had nothing to offer her. He belonged now to Naomi, beyond all doubt. Naomi was his wife, she might even be the mother of his child. What could he offer to Mary Conyngham?
For Emma had done her work well. Her son was a decent sort, and not at all like his father.
In the weeks that followed he did not see Mary Conyngham. As if she had understood what happened during that walk into the open country, she sent him the paints she had bought, with a little note asking him to take them as a present from her on his return from Africa. She sent them to him at the Mills by the hand of Krylenko, and so put an end to the shameful hope that he would see her when she returned. It was marvelous how well she understood, and yet the very knowledge of her understanding made it all the more unbearable, for it was as if she said, "I know what has happened," and tragically, in the voice that seemed so much sadder than it had once been, "There's nothing to be done."
He kept the box of paints and brushes at Krylenko's boarding-house where he came to be regarded with a kind of awe by the Ukranians as an odd mixture of artist and lunatic. Without thinking why, he kept the whole affair a secret from Naomi and his mother. He told them that the afternoons when he worked, painting and rubbing out, painting and rubbing out, among the rows of dirty houses, were spent in walking or doing extra work at the Mills. It became slowly a sort of passion into which he poured his whole existence. It was only in those hours when he worked horribly to put on bits of canvas and wood that strange, smoky glamour which he found in the Flats, that he was able to forget Mary Conyngham and the dull sordid sense of uneasiness which enveloped all his existence in the slate-colored house. No one save Krylenko saw anything he painted, and Krylenko liked it all, good, bad and indifferent, with all the overwhelming vitality of his friendly nature. (He had come in a way to treat Philip as a child under his special protection.) Sometimes he puzzled his head over the great messes of black and gray and blue, but he saw, oddly enough, what Philip was driving at.
"Yes," he'd say, rubbing his nose with his huge hands. "It's like that . . . that's the way it feels. That's what you're after, ain't it?"
He never went again to Hennessey's saloon, although the memory of Hennessey's epithet clung and rankled in his brain. "I don't want to get mixed up with that hell-cat." He could, he thought, go and shoot Hennessey, but no good would come of it; nothing would be accomplished, and life would only become more horrible and complicated. He couldn't fight Hennessey, for the Irishman could break him across his knee. Once, a long while ago, when he was a boy, he would have flung himself at Hennessey, kicking and biting and punching, to avenge the insult to his mother, but all that seemed to belong vaguely to another life which no longer had anything to do with him. The epithet festered in his brain because there were times when it led to horrible doubts about his mother—that perhaps she wasn't, after all, so good and noble and self-sacrificing. It gave him a sudden, terrifying glimpse of what she must seem to others outside that circle in which she moved and had her whole existence. But that was only because they didn't know her as he knew her . . . for the good woman she was. At moments he even felt a fierce resentment toward her because she stood somehow between him and that rich savor of life which he felt all about him. If she had not existed he could have gone to Hennessey's place as much as he liked, drinking as much as he pleased. He could have come nearer to Sokoleff and Finke and even Krylenko.
She must be a powerful woman when a man like Hennessey feared her. . . . Hennessey, he thought sometimes, who was like some beast out of that other cruel jungle at Megambo.
As he lost himself more and more deeply in the effort to catch in color the weird fascination of the world about him, the anguish of the life at Megambo began to fade into the shadows of the existence which had belonged to that other Philip, who began to seem so strange and distant. Sometimes, the sight of his mother returning from church, or the sound of Naomi pounding the tinny piano and singing revival hymns in her loud voice (as if she were trying to recapture some of her past glory), brought to his mind a sharp picture of the other Philip, pale and shy and silent, dressed always in dark clothes—a Philip who worshipped a mother who was never wrong and respected a wife who had no fear of the jungle; and the picture gave him an odd flash of pity, as if the image had been that of some stranger. His life now wasn't exactly happy, but it was better than the life of that other Philip, for now he stood with his feet fairly planted on the ground; it was an existence that was real, in which he was aware of a sinfulness that was really a temptation toward sin. He wasn't tortured any longer by battling with shadows. There were times when he was forced to laugh (a trifle bitterly) at the memory of a Philip who had suffered at his own doubts and agonies over the awful prospect of turning his back upon the church. It was finished, but no one would believe him, no one, except Mary Conyngham.
He came to accept the attentions of Naomi, for he could not see what else there was to do, and after a time it became a relationship which he managed to fit into the scheme of things as he went to work seven days a week and ate three meals a day; but there was no joy in it, save that obscure satisfaction which came of knowing that like other men he had a woman who belonged to him.
They never spoke of it to each other: it was a thing which happened silently in the night, as if they both were ashamed, and afterward Philip still had the strange feeling that in some way he had been soiled. It was, after all, exactly such a relationship as he might have had with any of the women in Franklin Street. If it was different, it was only because Naomi was in love with him, and this love of hers sometimes frightened him, because it made him more than ever her prisoner. There sometimes came into her eyes that same look of shining rapture that he had seen there in the days when she was giving her life to God at Megambo. You could see it in the way she watched him. Yet the word love had never been spoken between them, and the possibility of children had never been uttered.
It was as if all her adoration of God had been turned upon Philip.
Presently he began to drink, taking a glass on his way to work, and another on his way home, but he did not go to drink with any of the men from his own furnace. He did not go to Hennessey's; he went to a saloon where the back room was filled with Polish girls and no one had ever heard of Emma. The whisky made him feel jolly and forget the slate-colored house. He got there the feeling that he was, himself, Philip Downes, for the first time in his life, as if at last he had been completely born. No one in the place had ever heard of the other Philip. It was only an illusion which came to him while the alcohol had possession of his brain, and so he came to drink more and more regularly because it made him happy. With a glass or two he was able to forget the life he shared with Naomi.