A Good Woman (Bromfield)/Part 4/Chapter 4

by Louis Bromfield

4

When Emma returned home one night from the restaurant to find a letter from Madagascar addressed in a strange handwriting, she knew what had happened. For a long time, she sat at the dining-room table, staring at the letter, for the sight of it threw her into one of those rare moods when for a moment she gave herself over to reflection and so came unbearably near to seeing herself. She had known all along that it was certain to happen, yet the knowledge had not prepared her in any way. It seemed as hard to bear as if he had been killed suddenly by some terrible accident in the Mills.

He had not told her he was returning to Megambo until he had gone, when it was too late for her to act; and now she knew that he had died without ever seeing the letter she had sent, as it were, into space, to follow him in time to turn him back. He had died, she saw, without even knowing at all she had written, begging him not to be so hard, to think of her as his mother who was willing to sacrifice everything for his happiness. She would (she had written) forgive Mary, and try her best to behave toward her as if Mary were her own daughter. What more could she have done? To forgive Mary who had stolen him from her?

As she sat there the dull pain of a hopeless loneliness took possession of her. Here she was, at fifty, beginning for the first time to feel tired and in need of companionship, and she had no one—not even her own grandchildren. It was cruel, she told herself, to have suffered as she had suffered, with no reward but this—to end life alone after struggling for so long, always bent upon doing the right thing. Surely she had lived as God meant her to live, a Christian life filled with sacrifice to individuals and duty. Surely no one since Job had been so bitterly tried . . . no husband . . . no son . . . alone.

And presently her blunt, strong fingers tore open the envelope, and she read the letter. It was brief, almost like a cablegram . . . a few lines which told her what she already knew, that Philip, her little boy, was dead. The sight of the word "dead" and the name "Mary Downes" signed at the end, filled her with a sudden wave of bitterness that swept away all her sorrow. It was Mary who had stolen him from her like a thief. What could be more sinful than to steal from a mother a son for whom she had sacrificed her whole life? It was Mary who had destroyed him in the end, by filling his head with strange ideas, and leading him back to Africa. She was finished now with Mary. She would like to see Mary dead. And some day (perhaps it had happened already) Mary would receive the wandering letter and read, "I will even forgive Mary and try to treat her as if she were my own daughter." Then perhaps for a moment she would feel remorse over what she had done.

The letter lay crumpled in her work-stained hand. She began suddenly to weep, falling forward and burying her head in her arms beneath the glow of the gasdome, painted with wild-roses. She had suffered too long. . . . She kept seeing Philip as a little boy. . . .

After midnight, when she had ceased to weep, she rose, and, turning out the light, went up the creaking stairs of the home she had made her own by the labor of her own hands . . . the house (she thought bitterly) she had meant for Philip. She had done everything for his sake.

Alone in her own room, she thought, "I must not give in. I must go on. God will in the end reward me." The old spirit began to claim her.

She put on mourning (a thing her conscience had not permitted her to do when Naomi died), and in the Town people said, "Poor Emma Downes! She has had almost too much to bear. It is a life like hers that makes you sometimes doubt God . . . a good woman like that deserves a better reward." She even had a letter from Moses Slade.

Only McTavish did not join in the pity. To him it seemed that the chain of her calamities was as inevitable as a Greek tragedy. It was not God, but Emma herself, who had created them. And he saw what the others did not, that Emma was by no means a broken woman.

And, after a time, she came even to create a certain glory out of Philip's death, for she found that people believed he had gone back to Megambo to take up his old work, and so had gone back to certain death and martyrdom. She did not disillusion them: it could not, surely, be wrong to let them believe that her Philip was a martyr. Philip, who must now be with God, would understand. And, sitting in church, she knew that people about her thought of him as her martyred son. He had not lived to be Bishop of East Africa, but he had died a martyr. . . .

There remained, however, one more blow. Two months after Philip's death, she received a second letter, in a strange handwriting, this time from Australia. As she opened it, there fell out a photograph on a picture postcard. It was the photograph of seven people, all of them strangers save Jason, who sat in the middle of the front row beside a large, rather coarse and plain woman, whose hand rested on his shoulder. At the bottom was written: "Upper row: Jason, Henry, Hector. Lower row: Bernice, old Jason, self and Emma."

It was "self and Emma" which startled her. Who was "self," and who was "Emma"?

She read:

"Dear Madam:

"I am writing because I knew you would be interested in the details of Jason's death. . . ."

(Jason's death! Jason dead!)

"He died a month ago on board ship coming home. . . ."

(Coming home! What did it mean—coming home? This house was Jason's home!)

"He died from a fall down some steps. I guess he had been taking a drop too much. You know how Jason was. And he hit his head where he had fallen once before. You remember the scar he had. Well, that's where he hit himself. He didn't ever become conscious again, and died two days later.

"I know you will be wondering about the postcard. Well, it is me and Jason and our five children. No, Jason was no bigamist. We was never married. He came to my father's ranch looking for work twenty-four years ago. The eldest, Jason, is twenty-two come Michaelmas. He wasn't much good as a worker, but he was good company and the ranch was a lonely place, so Pa kept him on. He told such good stories. And the following spring—I was eighteen then, but developed like a woman of twenty-five, he seduced me. I guess I wanted to be seduced. You know what a way Jason had with women. My only complaint against him as a husband was that it was hard to keep him in order. Well, when Pa found out that I was in the family way, he was hoppin' mad, and I didn't care, because I was off my nut about Jason. Pa said he had to marry me, and Jason said he couldn't, because he already had a wife. So then when Pa had cooled down a bit," he said we was all to go to Sydney, and pretend we was married there, and if Jason ever deserted me he'd go after him with a gun and shoot him. The way it was about here then, it didn't make much difference if yow was married or not. It was kind of wild. So we pretended we was married because Pa was a believer and a Primitive Methodist.

"Well, at the time Pa died, we had four children, and he left everything to me, I being his only child, and heir. Emma was born after he died. Maybe you'll think it was funny about her name. It was Jason who wanted to call her Emma. He said he'd like to because it made him think of old times. I said it was all the same to me, though I wanted to call her Opal.

"Jason must have told you that he was rich and owned a lot of land. He was always a liar. Well, it ain't true. He didn't own a square foot of land, and he never made a ha'penny in all the time he was my husband. I even gave him the money to go back to America to see you. He wanted to go so bad I couldn't say no to him. I guess he was curious about that son of his in America, and maybe he wanted to see you, too. I just wanted you to know this, so you wouldn't think there was any money coming to you or your son.

"I always speak of him as my husband. He may have been married to you, but he was really mine. He was happy out here and I need never to reproach myself for anything I did while he was alive. He always belonged to me and as I've often told him, before he passed away, that counts for more than all the banns and marriage certificates in the world. That's why I didn't mind his paying you a brief visit. I knew he'd come back to me.

"Well, I can't think of any more that ought to be said. He often spoke of you kindly. The worst he ever said was, 'Em had an unfortunate temperament.' I think that was how he put it. He was embalmed on ship, and at his funeral looked very natural. He was a remarkable young-looking man for his age. Well, I will stop now.

"Yours respectively,

"Dora Downes.

"(Mrs. Jason Downes.)

"Postscriptum. The picture is good of all except me and Emma. I never did photograph well. It was a thing Jason always said—that photographs never did me justice."

When she had finished reading, Emma took up the postcard and looked again at the three strapping sons and the two robust daughters, but her chief interest lay in the figure of Dora Downes (Mrs. Jason Downes!) She was a healthy, rather plain woman, with an enormous shelflike bosom on which her fat double chin appeared to rest. Beside her, Jason appeared, small and dapper and insignificant, like a male spider beside the female who devours her mate after he has filled Nature's demands.

"She must have been plain always," thought Emma. "She's really a repulsive woman."

Then she rose and, going into the kitchen, lifted an iron plate from the stove, and thrust into the coals the letter and the picture postcard, sending them the way of that other letter left by Jason twenty-seven years earlier.

One thing in the letter she could not forget—"I knew he'd come back to me."

It was a little more than a year later that Moses Slade and Emma Downes were married quietly in Washington, but not so quietly that Sunday newspapers did not have pictures of the bride and bridegroom taken outside the church. They had come together again, through the strangest circumstances, for Moses, still unmarried, had found himself suddenly involved with Mamie Rhodes, who Emma had once said "did something to men." He was, in fact, so involved that blackmail or the ruin of a career seemed the only way out . . . the only way save marriage with some woman so prominent and so respectable as to suffocate any doubts regarding his breach of morality. "And what woman," he had asked himself, "fitted such a rôle as well as Emma Downes, who was now a widow . . . a real widow whose troublesome son was dead." He saw with his politician's eye all the protection she could give him as a prominent figure, known for her moral strictness and respectability, pitied for the trials she had borne with such Christian fortitude. Such a woman, people (voters) would say, could not marry him if the stories about Mamie Rhodes were true.

So he had gone to Emma and, confessing everything, thrown himself upon her mercy. For five days she kept him in doubt, and terror, lest she refuse, and in the end she accepted, but only at a price . . . that it should remain, as she expressed it, "a marriage in name only."

In the end, she subdued even Moses Slade. It was in reality Emma who sat in his seat in the House of Representatives. It was Emma who cast his votes. She became, in a small way, a national figure, concerned always with moralities and reforms. She came into a full flowering as chairman or member of a dozen committees and movements against whisky and cigarettes, and for Sunday closing. She made speaking tours, when she was received by palpitating ladies who labored in vain to sap the robust vitality of their country. There were times when her progress became a marvel of triumph. She was known as a splendid speaker.

But the apotheosis of her glory was reached in the war, when she offered her services as a speaker to right and to left—to aid recruiting, or Y.M.C.A. funds, to attack Bolshevism and denounce the barbarous Huns. She had a marvelous speech which began on a quavering note: "I had a son of my own once, but he gave his life as a martyr in Africa, fighting the good fight for God and home and Christian faith, even as all our boys are fighting to-day against a whole race, a whole nation bent upon spreading murder and destruction across the face of God's bright earth. (Cheers.) If my son were alive to-day, he would be over there, on the rim of the world (cheers), etc., etc."

It was in making this speech that she wore herself out. The end came on a wet, chill night in Kansas City, when, speaking on behalf of the Y.M.C.A., she was taken with a chill. Moses Slade came from Washington to be at her bedside, and so was there at the end to tell her that "she'd given her life as much as any soldier who fell in Flanders Field."

She was buried in the Town, alone, for the grave of her husband was in Australia, and that of her son beside a tepid lake in East Africa. The funeral service, in the enthusiasm of the war, became a sort of public festival, done to the titanic accompaniment of the Mills, which pounded now as they had never done before, to heap up piles of shells in the dead, abandoned park of Shane's Castle. It was an end which she would have liked. The new preacher, more sanctimonious but less moving than the Reverend Castor, made a high-flown and flowery funeral oration. He did it skilfully, though it was a difficult thing to speak of her trials and still not raise the ghosts of Naomi and the Reverend Castor. But the ghosts were there: they troubled the minds of every member of the congregation.

In conclusion, he said in a voice rich with enthusiasm, "She never lost her faith through trials more numerous than are the lot of most. She gave her son to God and her own life to this great cause which is so near to the heart of us all. She was brave and courageous, and generous and tolerant, but she fought always for the right like a good soldier. She never had any doubts. She was, in brief, all that is meant when our hearts lead us to say of some one, 'She was a good woman. . . .'"

It was in the following year that the Town bought the Castle from Lily Shane who had never returned to it since the night of the riot. The Town demolished the place and even dug away the hill itself to make a site for the new railway station. When the wreckers attacked the stable they found a room whose walls were covered with pencil sketches. By the window stood a half-finished painting black with soot and dust. On the table there was a coffee-pot, several soiled plates, and a fragment of something which turned out to be bread. Nearby beneath a layer of soot lay a woman's handkerchief of fine linen marked with the initials M.C.; one of the workmen took it home to his wife. The other things—the sketches and the painting—were thrown into a heap and burned on the very spot where eight years before there had been another fire in the snow.

The End