A Good Woman (Bromfield)/Part 3/Chapter 15
It seemed that something in the spirit of the irrepressible Jason Downes took possession of the house, for Emma turned almost gay, and at times betrayed signs of an ancient coquetry (almost buried beneath so many hardening years) in an actual tendency to bridle. For the first time since Jason had slipped quietly out of the back door, the sallow dining-room was enlivened by the odors, the sounds, the air of banqueting: a dinner was held that very night to celebrate the prodigal's return. Elmer came, goaded by an overpowering curiosity, and Mabelle, separated for once from Jimmy, her round, blue eyes dilated with excitement and colored by that faintly bawdy look which so disturbed Emma. And Philip was there, of course, and Naomi, paler than usual, dressed in a badly fitting new foulard dress, which she and Mabelle had "run up at home" in the hope of pleasing Philip. The dress had been saved for an "occasion." They had worked over it for ten days in profound secrecy, keeping it to dazzle Philip. It was thick about the waist, and did not hang properly in the back, and it made her look all lumpy in the wrong places. In case Philip did not notice it, Mabelle was to say to him, "You haven't spoken about Naomi's pretty new dress. She made it all herself—with her own hands." They had carefully rehearsed the little plot born of Mabelle's romantic brain.
But when Naomi arrived at the slate-colored house, she took Mabelle quickly into a corner and said, "Don't speak of the dress to him." And when Mabelle asked, "Why not?" she only answered, "You can do it later, but not to-night. I can't explain why just now."
She couldn't explain to Mabelle that she was ashamed of the dress, nor why she was ashamed of it. She couldn't say that as she stood on the stairs of the stable and saw a handsome woman, in a plain black dress, with her knees crossed, and furs thrown back over her fine shoulders, that the pride of the poor little foulard dress had turned to ashes. She couldn't explain how she had become suddenly sick at the understanding that she must seem dowdy and ridiculous, standing there, all red and hot and disheveled, staring at them, and wanting all the time to turn and run, anywhere, on and on, without stopping. She couldn't explain how the sight of the other woman had made the foulard dress seem poor and frowzy, even when she put on the coral beads left her by her mother, and pinned on the little gold fleur-de-lys watch her father had given her.
When she first arrived, she kept on her coat, pretending that the house was cold, but Emma said, "It's nonsense, Naomi. The house is warm enough," and the irrepressible Mabelle echoed, "That's what I say, Emma. She ought to take it off and show her pretty new dress."
Naomi had looked quickly about her, but Philip hadn't been listening. He was standing with Uncle Elmer beside his father, who was in high spirits, talking and talking. He wouldn't notice the dress if only she could keep people from speaking of it.
She hadn't spoken of Lily Shane to Philip. All the way back to the flat by the railroad they had talked of nothing but his father and the poor bits of information she had been able to wring from the excited Essie; and when they arrived it was to find Mabelle waiting breathlessly to discuss it with them. She had been already to the slate-colored house and seen him with her own eyes. She didn't stay long (she said) because she felt as if she were intruding on honeymooners. Did they know that he had lost his memory by a fall on the boat going out to China, and that it had only come back to him when he had a fall six months ago out of the mow on his ranch in Australia? Yes, it was Australia he had been to all this time. . . .
She went on and on. "Think of it," she said. "The excitement of welcoming home a husband you hadn't seen in twenty-six years . . . like a return from the dead. I don't wonder your Ma is beside herself."
Naomi heard it all, dimly, as if all Mabelle's chatter came to her from a great distance. She should have been excited, but she couldn't be, with something that was like a dull pain in her body. She could only keep seeing Lily Shane, who made her feel tiny and miserable and ridiculous—Lily Shane, whom Philip said he didn't even know, and had never spoken to. Yet he knew her well enough to be making a picture of her. He never thought of making a picture of his own wife.
She felt sick, for it was the first time she had ever seen herself. She seemed to see at a great distance a pale, thin, freckled woman, with sandy hair, dressed in funny clothes.
And then she would hear Mabelle saying through a fog, "Your Ma wants you to come right up to supper. You can get Mrs. Stimson—the druggist's wife—to sit with the twins."
Mabelle hurried off presently, and Mrs. Stimson came in duly to sit with the twins. She gave up the evening at her euchre club because the excitement of sitting up with the grandchildren of a man who had returned after being thought dead for twenty-six years was not to be overlooked. She would hear all the story at first hand when Philip and Naomi returned, before any one else in the Town had heard it. She could say, "I sat with the twins so that Philip and Naomi could go to supper with Mr. Downes himself. I heard the whole thing from them."
As they went up the hill to the slate-colored house, Naomi said nothing, and so they walked in silence. She had begun to understand a little Philip's queer moods, and she knew now that he was nervous and irritable. She had watched him so closely of late that she had become aware of a queer sense of strain which once she had passed over unnoticed. She had learned not to speak when Philip was like that. And as they climbed the hill, the silence, the strain, seemed to become unbearable. It was Philip who broke it by crying out suddenly, "I know what you're thinking. You're thinking I lied to you about Lily Shane. Well, I didn't. Before God, I never spoke to her until to-day, and I wouldn't have, even then, but she came to my room without my asking her."
For a moment, she wanted to lie down in the snow and, burying her face in it, cry and cry. She managed to say, "I wasn't even thinking of her. Honestly I wasn't, Philip. And I believe you."
"If that's so, why do you sulk and not say anything?"
"I wasn't sulking. I only thought you didn't want to talk just now."
"I hate it when you act like a martyr." This time she was silent, and he added, "I suppose all women do it . . . or most women . . . it's what Ma does when she wants to get her way. I hate it."
She thought, "He said 'most women' because he meant all women but Lily Shane." But she was silent. They did not speak again until they reached the slate-colored house.
It wasn't really Naomi who lay at the bottom of his irritation, but the thought of his father. The return troubled him. Why should he have come now after twenty-six years? It was, he thought, almost indecent and unfair, in a way, to his mother. He tried, when he was not talking to Naomi, to imagine what he must be like—a man who Emma said had gone out to China to make money for his wife and child, a man who adored her and worshipped his son. He was troubled, because the moral image created by his mother seemed not to fit the enlarged, physical portrait in the parlor. In these last years he had come to learn a lot about the world and about people, and one of the things he had learned was that people are like their faces. His mother was like her large, rather coarse and energetic face; Naomi was like her pale, weak one; and Lily Shane and Mary and Uncle Elmer and even Krylenko and McTavish were like theirs. It was impossible to escape your own face. His father, he thought, couldn't escape that face that hung in the parlor.
When the door opened and he stepped into the parlor, he saw that his father hadn't escaped his face. He felt, with a sudden sensation of sickness, that his father was even worse than his face. It was the same, only a little older, and the outlines had grown somehow dim and vague from weakness and self-indulgence. Why, he thought again, did he ever come back?
But his mother was happy again. Any one could see that.
And then his father turned and looked at him. For a moment he stared, astonished by something in the face of his son, something which he himself could not perhaps define, but something which, with all the sharp instincts of a sensual nature he recognized as strange, which had little to do with either himself or Emma. And then, perhaps because the astonishment had upset him, the meeting fell flat. The exuberance flowed out of Jason Downes. It was almost as if he were afraid of his son—this son who, unlike either himself or Emma, was capable of tragedy and suffering. His eyes turned aside from the burning eyes of his son.
"Well, Philip," he said, with a wild effort at hilarity, "here's your Pa . . . back again."
Philip shook hands with him, and then a silence fell between them.
But it was Jason Downes who dominated the family gathering. Philip, silent, watched his father's spirits mounting. It seemed to him that Jason had set himself deliberately to triumph over his dour, forbidding brother-in-law, and to impress his own son. It was as if he felt that his son had a poor opinion of him, and meant to prove that he was wrong in his judgment.
He told the whole story of the voyage out, of his fall down a companionway, and the strange darkness that followed. Once more he bowed his head and exhibited the scar.
"But," said the skeptical Elmer sourly, "you always had that scar, Jason. You got it falling on the ice at the front gate."
"Oh, no. The one before was only a small one. The funny thing was that I struck my head in exactly the same place. Wasn't that queer? And then when I fell out of the mow I hit it a third time. That's what the doctors in Sydney said made it so serious." For a moment, conscious that the embroidering had begun, Emma looked troubled and uneasy.
And Mabelle, with a look of profound speculation, asked, "And what if you hit it a fourth time? Would that make you lose your memory about Australia?"
Jason coughed and looked at her sharply, and then said, "Well, no one could say about that. If it happened again, it would probably kill me."
"Well," said Mabelle, "I must say I never heard a more interesting story . . . I never read as interesting a one in any of the magazines . . . not even in the Ladies' Home Journal."
For a moment Philip wanted to laugh at Mabelle's question, but it wasn't a natural desire to laugh: it sprang from a blend of anger and hysterics. He loathed the whole party, with Mabelle and her half-witted questions, his mother with all her character gone in the silly blind admiration for her husband, Uncle Elmer and his nasty, mean questions, and Naomi, silent, and looking as if she were going to cry. (If only she wouldn't sulk and play the martyr!) And Mabelle's half-witted questions were worse than Uncle Elmer's cynical remarks, for they made him see suddenly that his father was lying. He was creating a whole story that wasn't true, and he was enjoying himself immensely. If it was a lie, if he had deliberately deserted his wife and child, why had he come back now?
Jason went on and on, talking, talking, talking. He told of his ranch of eighteen hundred acres and of the thousands of sheep he owned and of the sixty herders employed to take care of them. He described the long drouths that sometimes afflicted them, and told a great deal about Melbourne and Sydney.
"Your Pa," he said, addressing Philip, "is an important man out there." And the implication was, "You don't think much of him, but you ought to see him in Australia."
But Philip was silent, and thought, "He's probably lying about that, too," and, as the conversation went on, he thought, "He's never said anything about women out there. He's never spoken about that side of his life, and he's not the kind to leave women alone."
"And I suppose you'll be wanting to take Emma back to Australia," said Uncle Elmer, regarding Jason over his steel-rimmed spectacles.
"No . . . I won't be doing that. After all, her life is here, ain't it? I shall have to go back from time to time to look after my affairs, but . . ."
"Don't speak of that now," Emma interrupted, "when you've only just arrived."
"But we have to face these things," said Jason.
Suddenly Emma turned away from the table to the doorway where Essie, in terror of interrupting the party, yet fascinated still by the spell of Jason's narrative, stood waiting. She was standing, as she always stood, on the sides of her shoes.
"What is it, Essie? What are you standing there for?"
"There's a man come to see Mr. Downes."
"What does he want?"
"He's from the newspaper."
"Tell him to come back to-morrow."
But Jason had overheard. He rose with the napkin still tucked into the fawn-colored vest. "No, Essie. . . . Tell him I'll speak to him now."
"But, Jason. . . ."
"Yes, Em. . . . I might as well get it over."
There was no holding him now; but Emma succeeded in thrusting forward a word of advice.
"Remember, Jason, what the newspapers are like. Don't tell them too much."
A shadow crossed her face, and Philip thought suddenly, "Ma knows he's lying too, and she's afraid he'll overdo it." And then a more fantastic thought occurred to him—that she knew for a good reason that he was lying, that perhaps she had planned the lie to cover up an earlier one.
"I must say it's all very remarkable . . . how Jason's affairs have turned out," said Elmer. "I never would have thought it."
"You never believed in him," said Emma, with an air of triumph, "and now you see."
To Philip the whole room, the table, the people about it, the figure of the slattern Essie standing in the doorway, all their petty boasting and piety and lying, became suddenly vulgar and loathsome. And then, almost at once, he became ashamed of himself for being ashamed, for they were his people. He had no others. It was a subtle, sickening sort of torture.