MY FIRST intimation of Zillah Gruber, as I dozed there in the doorway over a cigarette, midway between the noisy, lighted cheer of the airless shack and the damp gloom of the equally airless July night, came in the clutch of a brown claw of a hand upon my dirt-caked shoe.
I started: "For the love of Pete—"
"You busy, Meester—Chuckles?"
"No—Oh, no."
"You say to come to you when I am afraid; I am afraid now." She had slid upon me out of the darkness and she crouched there, clinging to my shoe, Her ridiculous version of my nickname—something in the contrast it offered to her own sodden life—stabbed at my pity for her; and her appeal to my unfledged manhood was irresistible.
"It's that beast—Gruber again!" I cried.
"No, not him; worse than him. Sh! I show you." She stretched her body, which, in its miserable clothes, had always looked to me more like a lean and spiritless bag of old rags than anything human, to peer cautiously into the shack, where the men of our road gang were playing poker; her dark face was sallow with her fear. Now she extended a hand into the patch of yellow light from the door, revealed to me a twist of gay pink wrapping paper. "See!" Slowly she unfolded the paper.
I bent over it. She exerted the witch's power of mesmerism over me. I laughed aloud in my relief; I don't know what I had expected her to conjure up—some evil poison, perhaps, or one of her fearful gypsy charms; it was only a silver crescent, a single earring, of curious design and of quite barbaric size.
"It came—it came today. I have got it out of the mail in the village. It is from Tony; Tony has found me."
"Tony?"
"Tony Zack—my husband."
"But Gruber—I didn't know you'd been married before?"
"Tony is my husband. Joe Gruber—I have run away with him from Tony, six—seven years ago."
"Oh," I murmured inadequately.
"Tony search for me—six, seven years he search. He never give up. I know some day, sure, he finds me. Now—" Zillah's hand closed tight over the silver crescent as though the sight of it were too terrifying for her to bear.
"It comes down in the family," she continued; "the Zacks, they give it to you when they marry you, and it means you are good wife, true wife . . ."
"He's a gypsy too?" I said, for want of anything else to say.
"As gypsy as the ribs of God!" she answered proudly. "He keeps the other earring; it is his way of telling me he comes. Pretty . . . but they sag so heavy I was glad to leave them behind. .
"A long time," she brooded. "Oh I know, Meester Chuckles"—sitting back on her heels she looked: up at me curiously—"you think I am old. I am twenty-nine."
Why, she was only ten years older than I! It was incredible. I stared at her, the old, brown face, framed in untidy black hair of an oily straightness, with its deep lines dragging down to the drooped corners of her mouth: a face that expressed nothing so strongly as resignation and a shameful submission. An old, old woman, at twenty-nine! And yet an odd glitter in her black eyes, almost a wildness which I noticed before, challenged me at that moment.
But why—why—? A dozen questions came crowding to my lips. Why had she left her Tony in the first place? And why, by all things holy, had she stayed by Gruber if she was not bound to him? I could only sit and frown over her; I had no precedent, in all the range of my experience, by which I could understand the terrible thralldom of a Zillah Gruber. I thought of the college girls leading us fellows a merry chase, and of my mother whose word was law, over and above Dad's, in our house. My gosh!
"You were afraid of him, too—your—husband?" I tried.
"Yes. He would have killed me sometime."
"Just as you've afraid of Gruber."
"No, I hate him." She tried to express it, more to herself than to me: "Tony strikes me because he has a black temper, because he is mad with me. Joe—he strikes me because—because I am his woman, and it pleases him with himself—makes him feel the man . . ."
Zillah's whole body drooped flaccidly with her shame.
"But Zillah, if it's a warning, why don't you clear out, leave 'em both flat?"
"No use; Tony follows always. Tony knows I belong to him—it is true of gypsy marriage. And Joe—Joe says I am his," she mumbled.
Well, of course, knowing Gruber, I could see that clash; when you hit Gruber in his sense of possession, you hit him hardest: But Zillah—she irritated me past bearing! That a woman should draw two such brutes must argue something against the woman herself, some appeal to brute nature. "Why do you stand it!" I burst out in a heat.
"Why?" Zillah looked at me blankly, then got wearily to her feet. "He comes back from town; I must go." She dropped the token down her dirty calico blouse, shuddered once convulsively. She concluded the business with a fatalistic and matter-of-fact prediction: "Tony comes all right. When he comes, he kills; he has the right to kill. You will see."
She turned, but, before she slid away into the night, she came back, close to me, with a sudden laughing animation.
"Look," she boasted, "sometimes I have fought back. Once I bit that Tony Zack until I saw the red blood come!"
She was gone then, off to the shell of an empty house, deeper in the hollow, which Gruber as boss of the gang, had appropriated for himself. She had melted into the vague, pale mists that came in from the river. I, too, shuddered. It was a murky night: a night like Gruber himself, swollen, intruding . . .
II
"HEIGH you, Chuck Adams, come sit in on the game!" sang out Murphy from the tobacco-veiled interior.
