A Good Woman (Bromfield)/Part 3/Chapter 24
The rooming-house stood in one of the side streets in the dubious quarter that lay between the river wharfs and the business district—a region of Pittsburgh once inhabited by middle-class families, and now fallen a little over the edge of respectability. It was one of a row of houses all exactly alike, built of brick, with limestone stoops, and all blackened long ago by the soot of mills and furnaces. Number Twenty-nine was distinguished from the others only by the fact that the stoop seemed to have been scrubbed not too long ago, and that beside the sign "Rooms to Let to Respectable Parties," there was another card emblazoned with a gilt cross and bearing an inscription that was not legible from the sidewalk. Philip and McTavish, peering at the house, noticed it, and, turning in at the little path, were able to make out the words. The card was stained and yellow with age, and beneath the cross they read, "Jesus said, 'Come unto me.'"
For a moment, McTavish gave Philip an oblique, searching look, and then pressed the bell. There was a long wait, followed by the sound of closing doors, and then a tired little woman, with her hair in a screw at the back of her head, stood before them, drying her hands on a soiled apron.
Philip only stared at her, lost in the odd, dazed silence that had settled over him from the moment the telegram had come. He seemed incapable of speech, like a little child in the care of McTavish. It was the fat undertaker who lifted his hat and said, "This is Mr. Downes, and I'm the undertaker." He coughed suddenly, "The Coroner told us that . . . they had left some things in the room."
The little woman asked them in, and then began suddenly to cry. "I've never had such a thing happen to me before . . . and now I'm ruined!"
McTavish bade her be quiet, but she went on and on hysterically. In all the tragedy, she could, it seemed, see only her own misfortune.
"You can tell me about it when we're upstairs," said McTavish, patting her arm with the air of a bachelor unused to the sight of a woman's tears, and upset by them. "Mr. Downes will wait down here."
Then Philip spoke suddenly for the first time. "No . . . I'm going with you. I want to hear the whole thing. I've . . . I've got to know."
There was a smell of cabbage and onions in the hallway. As McTavish closed the door, the whole place was lost in gloomy shadows. The tired woman, still sobbing, and blowing her nose on the soiled apron, said, "It's upstairs."
They followed her up two flights of stairs to a room at the back. It was in complete darkness, as if the two bodies were still there, and as she raised the window-shade there came into view a whole vista of dreary backyards littered with rubbish and filled with lines of newly washed clothing. The gray light revealed a small room, scarcely a dozen feet square, with a cheap pine table, a wash-bowl, pitcher and slop-jar, two chairs and a narrow iron bed. On the walls hung a bad print of the Sermon on the Mount and a cheaply illuminated text, "Come unto Me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden." The bed was untouched, save for two small depressions at the side away from the wall.
Near the door there were little rolls of torn newspaper—the paper (Philip thought, with a sudden feeling of sickness) with which they had stuffed the cracks of the door to imprison the smell of gas. A newspaper and a Bible lay on the table beside the wash-bowl.
"I left everything just as it was," said the woman; "just as the Coroner ordered."
Those two depressions on the side of the bed suddenly took on a terrible fascination for Philip. It was as if they were filled by the forms of two kneeling figures who were praying.
"Here's the bag they brought," said the woman. She bent down and opened it. "You see it was empty. If I'd known that . . . but how was I to know?" It was a cheap bag made of paper and painted to imitate leather. It stood in a corner, mute, reproachful, empty.
Philip was staring at it in silence, and McTavish said again, "Maybe you'd better go downstairs and wait."
For a moment there was no answer, and then Philip replied, "No, I mean to stay. I've got to hear it."
The woman began to tell her story. They had come to the rooming-house about nine o'clock in the evening. "I remember the hour because Hazel—that's the girl that helps me with the house—had finished the dishes and was going to meet a friend." She had one room empty, and she was only too glad to rent it, especially to a clergyman. Oh, he had told her who he was. He told her he was the Reverend Castor and that the woman with him was his wife. They were, "he said, on their way east, and came to the rooming-house because he had heard Mr. Elmer Niman speak of it once as a cheap, clean, respectable place to stay at when you came to Pittsburgh. "You see," she explained, "I'm very careful who I take in. Usually Methodists and Baptists. They recommend each other, and that way I do a pretty good business, and it's always sure to be respectable." She sighed and said, "It wasn't my fault this time. I never thought a preacher would do such a thing, and being recommended, too, by Mr. Elmer Niman."
They went, she said, right up to their room, and, about half-past ten, when Hazel came back, she heard voices singing hymns. "They weren't singing very loud . . . sort of low and soft, so as not to disturb the other roomers. So I thought it was a kind of evening worship they went through every night, and I didn't say anything. But onc of my other roomers came to me and complained. I was pretty near undressed, but I put on a wrapper and went up to tell them they'd have to be quiet, as other people wanted to sleep. They were singing, Ancient of Days, and they stopped right away. They didn't even say anything."
The woman blew her nose again on her apron, sighed, and went on. "So I went to sleep, and about one o'clock my husband came in. He's so crippled with rheumatism he can't work much and he'd been to a meeting of the Odd Fellows. It must have been about one o'clock when he waked me up, and after he'd gotten into bed and turned out the light, I told him that I'd rented the empty room. And he said, 'Who to?' and I told him a Reverend Castor and his wife. He sat up in bed, and said, 'His wife!' as if he didn't believe me, and I said, 'Yes, his wife!' And then Henry got out of bed and lit the gas, and went over to his coat and took out a newspaper. I thought it was kind-a funny. He opened it, and looked at it, and said, 'That ain't his wife at all. It's a woman who sings in his choir. The scoundrel, to come to a respectable house like this!' And then he showed me the newspaper, and there it all was about a preacher in Milford who'd run away with a choir singer. And there was his name and everything. You'd have thought he'd have had the sense to take some other name if he was going to do a thing like that."
McTavish looked at her quietly. "I don't think he'd ever think of a thing like that. He was a good man. He was innocent."
The woman sniffed. "I don't know about that. But it seems to me a good man wouldn't be trapsin' around with another man's wife."
The look in McTavish's eyes turned a little harder. When he spoke, his voice was stern. "I know what I mean. He was a good man. He had a hellion for a wife. She deserved what she got and worse."
Something in the quality of his voice seemed to irritate the woman, for she began to whine. "Well, you needn't insult me. I was brought up a good Christian Methodist, and I'm a regular churchgoer, and I know good from bad."
McTavish turned away in disgust. "All right! All right! Go on with your story."
"Well," said the woman, "Henry—that's my husband—said, 'You must turn them out right away. We can't have the house defiled by adulterers!'" Her small green eyes turned a glare of defiance at McTavish. "That's what they were—adulterers."
"Yes," said McTavish wearily. "There's no denying that. But go on."
"So I got up, and went to their room and knocked. I smelled gas in the hall and thought it was funny. And then I knocked again and nobody answered. And then I got scared and called Henry. He was for sending for somebody to help break down the door, and then I turned the knob and it was open. They hadn't even locked it. It just pushed open, easy-like. The room was full of gas, and you couldn't go in or strike a match and you couldn't see anything. But we left the door open, and Henry went to get the police. And after a time I went to open the window, and when I pulled up the window-shade and the light from the furnaces came in, I saw 'em both a-lyin' there. He was sort of slumped down beside the bed and she was half on the bed a-lyin' on her face. They'd both died a-prayin'."
The thin, dreary voice died away into silence. McTavish looked at Philip. He was sitting on one of the stiff pine chairs, his head sunk on his chest, his fingers unrolling mechanically bit by bit the pieces of newspaper with which the door had been stuffed. Automatically he unrolled them, examined them and smoothed them out, putting them in neat piles at his feet. They were stained with tears that had fallen silently while he listened. And then, suddenly, he found what he had been looking for. He handed it to McTavish without a word, without even raising his head.
It was a scrap torn hastily to stuff the door, but in the midst of it appeared in glaring headlines: "Preacher Elopes
With Missionary
Romance begins at choir
practice. Woman a
former Evangelist"
The editors had kept their word to Emma, but the story had leaked out into the cities nearby.
McTavish read it in silence, and turned to the woman. Philip did not even hear what they were saying. He was thinking of poor Naomi lying dead, fallen forward on the bed where she had been praying. It was poor Naomi who had made that ghastly depression in the gray-white counterpane. He saw what had happened. He saw them coming in, tired and frightened, to this sordid room, terrified by what they had done in a moment of insanity. He saw them sitting there in silence, Naomi crying because she always cried when she was frightened. And perhaps he had taken the newspaper out of his pocket and laid it on the table and as it fell open, there was the headline staring at them. They must have seen, then, that they were trapped, that they could neither go on nor turn back. In their world of preachers and Evangelists and prayer there was no place for them. And presently they must have noticed the print of the Sermon on the Mount, and at last the framed text—"Come unto Me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden. . . ." They must have seen the text written in letters of fire, inviting them, commanding them—"Come unto Me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden. . . ." It must have seemed the only way out. And then they had sung hymns until the harpy had knocked at the door and bade them be silent.
The depression in the bed kept tormenting him. The two figures kneeling there, praying, praying for forgiveness, until one of them slumped down, unconscious, and the other was left alone, still praying. . . . Which one of them had gone first? He hoped it was Naomi, for she would be so frightened at being left alone. For the one who was left alone, those last moments must have seemed hours. And Naomi must have been frightened. She was destroying herself—a sin which once she had told him was the unforgivable.
He saw then that the faith which had given her strength in that far-off unreal world at Megambo must have been failing her for a long time. It must have died before ever she set out on the mad journey that ended in this wretched room. Or she must have been mad. And then, all at once, the memory of her figure kneeling in the dust of the Mission enclosure rose up and smote him. He saw her again, her face all illumined with a queer, unearthly light. She had been ready then to die by the bullets of the painted niggers. She should have died then, happy in the knowledge of her sacrifice. He had saved her life—he and that queer Englishwoman—only that she might die thus, praying alone, lost, forgotten. . . .
She should have died at Megambo—a martyr.
Suddenly he heard the voice of the tired little woman, "And here is her hand-bag." She held it out to McTavish, a poor morsel of leather, all hardened and discolored by the rain. "That's how we found her address. It was written on a card."
McTavish opened it mechanically, and turned it upside-down. A few coins rattled out. He counted them . . . eighty-five cents. The woman opened a drawer of the table. "And here is his." The worn wallet contained a great amount of silver and ninety odd dollars in bills. They had meant to start life again with ninety odd dollars.
"They must have been mad," said McTavish. He touched Philip's shoulder. "Come . . . we'd better go."
Philip rose in silence, and McTavish turned toward the Bible that lay open on the table. "Was that theirs?" he asked.
"No, that's mine. I keep Bibles in all my rooms."
McTavish turned toward the door, and she said, "The bag . . . ain't you going to take the bag?"
McTavish turned toward Philip.
"No," said Philip. "You may keep it."
The woman frowned. "I don't want it. I don't want any of their things left in my house. I've suffered enough. They ruined me. I don't want my house polluted."
McTavish started to speak, and then thought better of it. He simply took up the bag and followed Philip. They went down the two flights of odorous stairs and out of the door. The policeman who had accompanied them was waiting on the sidewalk. As the door closed, they heard the woman sobbing and calling after them that she, an honest, God-fearing woman, had been ruined.
In silence they turned their backs on the dingy house, with the sign, "Rooms to Let to Respectable Parties," and the emblazoned text, "Jesus said, 'Come unto me. . . .'"
Half-way down the block, McTavish said, "You mustn't think about it, Philip. You mustn't brood. You had nothing to do with it."
"How can I help thinking about it?" He could only see them kneeling there by the bed praying until the end, innocent save that they had tried to escape from a life which circumstance or fate had made too cruel for them to bear. They had died without ever knowing the happiness which had come to him and Mary. He saw bitterly that there was not even any great dignity in their death, but only a pathos. They had not even known a poor tattered remnant of human happiness. They had simply run away, fleeing from something they could not understand toward something that was unknown.
"How can I ever think of anything else?"