The Strange Woman

by Ben Ames Williams

  He had a like alarm when some time after the portrait was finished Ephraim came home for a few days’ stay. Since Ephraim first went to Boston, Isaiah had encouraged him to stay there and to use his free time in travel. He told Ephraim this was a part of a young man’s education, refusing to admit even to himself that he remembered the boy’s awakening interest in Jenny, which had been interrupted when he sent Ephraim away.

  Ephraim came home on this occasion without advance notice; and when he saw the painting he studied it, looking from it to Jenny as though perplexed by what he saw. Jenny watched him, and Isaiah watched them both, and he said at last sharply:

  ‘Well, what’s the matter, Eph? What are you staring at?’

  ‘I can’t decide whether it’s like her or not,’ the boy told him. He laughed. ‘I don’t think it is,’ he said to Jenny. ‘If you were like that, I’d be afraid of you.’

  Jenny smiled and said in those quiet tones which were always pitched so low that her listeners had need to be attentive in order to hear: ‘Why, Eph, you don’t ever have to be afraid of me.’

  Isaiah, suddenly alert, looked from one of these young people to the other with narrowing eyes. When Jenny was with Mr. Hardy, and when she talked with Ephraim now, he heard in her voice something which alarmed him. While they discussed the portrait together, he reflected with relief that Ephraim would be going back to Cambridge soon.

  VII

  Isaiah had had since they were married no cause to complain of Jenny. She was always serene and composed, thoughtful of him in little ways, grateful for everything he did; and she was as she passed from girlhood into womanhood so completely beautiful that he swelled with pride like a turkey cock when he appeared in public with her by his side. Marriage had in some ways rejuvenated him. He felt younger, was full of a restless energy, tireless in all business affairs; and he thanked her for this, told her more than once:

  ‘Why, Jenny, you make me feel like a colt again!’

  She had never denied him anything. They slept together in the high canopy bed in the big upstairs room; and Jenny in her sleep never moved, nor did she wake if he was sometimes uneasy beside her. There was a smaller room opening off theirs, where he kept his possessions and where he prepared for the night. Usually she came upstairs before him, while he extinguished the candles or the whale-oil lamps and bolted the doors; but he was apt to hurry after her, and when he was undressed he went in and climbed into bed to lie watching her leisurely preparations for the night. He used to laugh to see how long it took her to be ready to come to bed, and she might smile with him, but she never hurried. He particularly liked to watch the curve of her arms and the turn of her head as she brushed her hair and separated it and braided it in two heavy braids. Then she would snuff the last candle and in the darkness he heard her—or if a moon were shining saw her—take off the figured silk wrapper she had put on over her nightgown when she undressed, and so come to bed beside him; and on chilly nights he would press near her, warming himself against her young body.

  He was apt to be cold at night, and in winter he wore a nightcap and heavy underwear under his nightshirt and used the warming pan to prepare the bed before he got into it. Even in summer he kept the windows closed, resenting and fearing any breath of outside air. Jenny had always accepted his wishes in this respect, and their nights together rested and restored him; but after Mr. Hardy had made her likeness and after Ephraim’s few days at home there began to be a change. She who had always slept so quietly now no longer did so. She stirred and twisted in her sleep, assuming strange positions, her knees in the small of Isaiah’s back crowding and fretting him. If he moved away from her she followed him, so that sometimes he got up and went to the other side of the bed and lay down there; but when he did so, even in her sleep—she was so persistent that he sometimes thought she was awake and plaguing him—she would move toward him again, her knees nudging him till he had no peace at all.

  When he was driven at last to protests, she said contritely: ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Isaiah! I think it must be because there’s no air in the room. Sometimes I dream I’m smothering.’

  He protested that no people of sense had air in their bedrooms, and she agreed that this was true; but her restless movements continued night after night until he was driven to opening a window a crack, and then wider and wider. She began after that to sleep as she had used to, without movement; but he was cold, and if he drew near her to warm himself, her elbows and knees jabbed him in the ribs or in the back. His nights were spoiled; and at last in self-defense he proposed to set up a smaller bed in his dressing room and sleep there.

  ‘Why, we might try it,’ she agreed. ‘I do want you to be comfortable, Isaiah!’

  Isaiah had forgotten how pleasant it could be to sleep alone. In the smaller room, with doors and windows closed and sometimes—even in summer—with a fire in the little stove, he could have the stifling heat his cooling blood desired.

  So the arrangement, begun as an experiment, persisted. Isaiah might still go in to watch her do her hair, but when she was ready for bed he retreated to his sanctuary where he could have things as he chose.

  VIII

  After her father’s death, the small house in which they had lived became Jenny’s property. Isaiah had long since made Tim give him a mortgage deed to it, but because he saw how it pleased her to think of the house as her own, he never told her so, left its disposition completely in her hands. She herself never returned to it at all, but she sent Mrs. Hollis to put it in order, and at regular intervals to keep it so; and Isaiah saw to it that necessary repairs were made from time to time.

  The house had no occupant until the third year after Tim died. Then Jenny found a tenant for it, a woman named Lena Tempest. Isaiah, from the first, had fondly insisted that Jenny do nothing more laborious than polite needlework. Her hands, at once soft and strong, were his delight, and he would not have them marred; so Mrs. Hollis when they moved into the new house came to live with them and took complete charge of the establishment. At first she cooked and cleaned and did everything herself; but the work was more than she could handle alone, and eventually she engaged Lena Tempest to come in by the day and do the washing.

  Lena Tempest was a newcomer to Bangor. She was a woman in her late thirties, who, when she found herself mysteriously denied maternity by nature, embraced all mankind in a general affection in which there was much more of the mother than the wanton. She was Scandinavian, tall and fair, with fine blue eyes. Her mother had after her father’s death run a boarding house in Springfield, patronized by Connecticut River lumbermen, where Lena at eighteen took the part of a little man named Connell against Dan McIsaac who was twice his size. Connell came out of that encounter with a broken arm and two cracked ribs; but he might as easily have been killed if Lena had not smashed McIsaac’s head with a chair so hard that she cracked his skull. Connell gratefully insisted that she marry him, and she did; but he was drowned on the drive the following spring, and Lena—who had been disturbed since her marriage by the fact that McIsaac never recovered his wits after that buffet she had given him—took her victim in hand and they lived together and continued the management of the boarding house which by her mother’s death had come under Lena’s direction. For eight years she was the loyal slave of Dan McIsaac’s moods, whether tyrannical or amorous; and only after his death did she accept the devotion which Jeff Tempest had offered long before. Jeff was a lovable big man, but he quickly drank up or gambled away all Lena’s savings. After the boarding house had followed the rest, Jeff, hearing of the rising lumber trade on the Penobscot, decided to remove to Bangor, and she came with him. He was killed when a log rolled on him in one of General Veazie’s mills at Old Town; and since then Lena had earned her living by doing odd jobs of household work around the town.

  When she came to labor in the Poster home, a curious intimacy sprang up between her and Jenny, and they spent many hours in talk together. Isaiah at last discovered this and expressed a surprised disapp
roval.

  ‘What do you want to set and talk to her for?’ he protested.

  ‘Why, I like her,’ Jenny told him. She added and he had a faint suspicion that she was teasing him: ‘Of course she’s not what we call a good woman. She says she was never married to Jeff Tempest, and she’s had a strange, hard life, with rough men.’

  ‘Why, that’s scandalous, Jenny!’ he protested. ‘You ought to get her out of the house!’

  ‘Oh, no,’ she insisted. ‘You see, she looks at such things in a different way. She’s not the sort that just go with men for money, Isaiah. She says it’s the same as marrying a man, if you like him and want to make him happy.’

  Isaiah was shocked at such words from Jenny, whom he had thought completely innocent, and he felt it his duty as a leading citizen and a good churchman to insist that Lena be banished; but Jenny would not consent to this.

  ‘It’s not her fault,’ she insisted, and she said: ‘Why, she talks about her men just the way I talk about you, and when she’s living with one of them she never looks at any other man.’ And when he tried to muster some violence of condemnation, she said, with her head on one side, looking at him wisely: ‘But Isaiah, she’s with her men the same way Mrs. Wetzel was with you.’

  He had not guessed that she knew or even suspected the truth about Mrs. Wetzel, and Jenny was still so like a child, with that purity of countenance which always distinguished her, that he found it hard to speak of these matters under her calm and steady eyes. She suggested that he talk with Lena himself, and he agreed to do so.

  Lena easily won him. There was in her a long understanding of mankind, so that she knew how to make Isaiah laugh and like her as Jenny did. He might sit for an hour watching her as she labored at her tubs, her strong white arms soap-flecked; and he chuckled at the tales she told of her life in Springfield, and of the rough and lusty rivermen, and of the women whose profession it was to please them.

  But she had, she assured him, put all that behind her. It was now her ambition to save enough money out of her small earnings to be able to set up for herself in the laundry business. Jenny and Isaiah in the end made this possible. Lena lodged in the basement of a rooming house that was at best semi-respectable, on Broad Street on the west side of the Stream and near the river. Toward the end of March a heavy fall of warm rain precipitated a sudden rise of water in the river, and on the first of April the jam of ice above town gave way and in a groaning, grumbling mass came trundling downstream. But below town the ice jammed again; and behind it the water rose with an astonishing rapidity. It overflowed the wharves, sweeping away lumber and shingles piled there during the winter for shipment as soon as the river should open for navigation, and toppling one sloop that was on the stocks over on its side. So rapidly that there was no time to move anything to higher ground, the water flooded the cellars and the lower floors of houses near the shore; and Lena was among the sufferers.

  When Isaiah came home that night, Jenny told him what had happened to Lena. ‘The flood washed her out,’ she said. ‘Everything she owns is not only wet but caked with mud, and she can’t live in that room any more. So, Isaiah, I’ve an idea. I like Lena, and she’s always been wanting to set up a laundry business. I’m going to let her rent my house. It’s high enough so it never gets flooded out, and it ought to be lived in, anyway. She’d take good care of it, and it would make her happy too.’

  Isaiah, who never long opposed Jenny in anything, agreed, and the result was that Lena was presently established in Tim Hager’s small house on Poplar Street, taking in washing from the young bachelors of the town. In the years that followed, as Bangor grew, so did her business; and she hired first one and then another young woman to help her. When the house became too small for her, Isaiah gave Jenny the money to enlarge it, and he went one day to inspect the alterations.

  He found that Lena had four girls working under her direction, and there was a youthfulness and a friendliness about them which seemed to him suspicious. ‘I sh’d think you’d want women that looked more like they could do enough to earn their keep,’ he urged.

  But Lena said good-naturedly: ‘They earn their keep, Mr. Poster. Don’t you worry about that. And Lord love you, my customers are all single gentlemen. You know yourself that a young man would rather talk to a pretty young woman than a hard-working old one, any time!’

  ‘All the same, I want no scandalous goings on in this house,’ he said severely; and she laughed and assured him that any girl in her house would behave, and that none but gentlemen should call upon them, or she would know the reason why.

  Isaiah told himself that to push the matter further, to attempt to evict Lena, would involve making explanations to Jenny which his wife was still too young and innocent to hear; so he decided to shut his eyes and let the new arrangement stand.

  IX

  Bangor in these years was growing at an accelerating pace, and it was becoming increasingly conscious of this fact. Isaiah one evening proudly read aloud to Jenny from the columns of the Penobscot Journal, which had just begun publication, a leading article which said:

  The activity of trade in Bangor at the present time is cheering to its citizens, and excites the admiration of strangers. A large share of our merchants are in the very comfortable condition of having as much as they can do. Our streets exhibit the bustle of a city, and a fleet of shipping is constantly in the harbor. Boats and rafts are passing on the river at all times, in all directions. A large number of buildings are in progress, including several blocks of stores. Six or seven brickyards within this village are in constant operation. A spacious hotel, we believe the largest in the State, is well filled. Laboring men are in great demand, and at the highest wages.

  ‘Now that Barnes is a smart man!’ said Isaiah, as he slapped the paper approvingly. The Journal’s editor was Phineas Barnes, a graduate of Waterville, recently come to town. ‘A paper like that is what this town needs. Bangor’s going to be the biggest city in Maine, and maybe in New England. The best pine in the world is in Maine, and folks have got to have good punkin pine if they’re going to get along at all; and we’re the ones will cut it and make it into lumber and sell it to ’em.’

  Jenny, sitting across from him, busy with a bit of needlepoint, nodded her smooth head. ‘Yes, Isaiah,’ she said, ‘and it’s men like you who have done it, too; seeing what was going to happen, helping it along.’

  Isaiah, as always, beamed under her praise. ‘We’ve just begun,’ he declared. ‘I was talking with General Veazie today about the Brewer Bridge and the business it’s brought to town. I thought that bridge was a big idea, but now he’s figuring on a railroad to Old Town, and maybe to Houlton, and there’ll be railroads coming through from Augusta by and by. The only thing holds us back now is the river’s froze up all winter so’s we can’t ship lumber out. Fix it so we can load it right on the steam trains, and there’ll be no stopping us at all.’

  He sat dreaming, and he looked again at the paper in his hand. ‘I won’t live to see the whole of it.’ he admitted. ‘But the way things are going, there’ll be ten thousand people here in Bangor, even in my time. I was counting up with Amos Patten, day before yesterday. There are right on to seventy stores and shops in town now, and fifty-one houses and stores building, one place and another. We can saw forty million feet of boards, up at the mills in Stillwater and Orono, not counting all the other mills on the main river and on the Kenduskeag. This coming winter there’ll be four hundred yokes of oxen working in the woods, hauling logs against the drive next spring.’ He chuckled gleefully. ‘That means business, and profits, and I’ll get my share of them.’ He looked at her fondly. ‘You’re going to be a rich woman when I die, Jenny.’

  ‘Don’t talk so, Isaiah! I want you to live a long time.’

  He cackled happily. ‘I aim to. Since I married you, I feel like a colt sometimes.’

  She smiled. ‘You’re always saying that!’

  ‘Well, I do!’ he insisted. ‘I’ve got more ideas
than I could work out if I lived to be a thousand.’ He added, more soberly: ‘But I don’t want to die and leave you with a lot of prop’ty to take care of. You wouldn’t know how to do.’

  ‘I’ll have Ephraim to help me,’ she reminded him.

  He stared at her, suddenly angry, not at her but at the thought of her and Ephraim together after he was gone. ‘Him!’ he said explosively. ‘I wouldn’t give shucks for him! Since he went off to Harvard College he’s too high and mighty for Bangor. Chance is he’ll want to go and live in Europe or somewhere, and think himself too good for this town! No, you can’t count on Eph, Jenny. But don’t you worry!’ He rose, his anger gone, and came and patted her shoulder affectionately. ‘I’m going to fix it so you’ll be all right. I’m going to sell off the most of my house lots here in town. The lots Mr. Bulfinch surveyed brought good prices, and I’ve got better land than any of that. And I’ll sell off the heft of my timber lands. There’s no sense in holding on too long. We might get another fire like that one a few years back that burned over a couple of my townships. Pine on the stump is worth something, but a fire can burn it up awful quick. I’d rather have boards stacked at the mills, or else the money in hand.’

  ‘Don’t you think Ephraim will come home when he’s through college?’ she asked, not lifting her eyes from her work.

  He resented her speaking of his son again, and he looked down at her bowed head for a moment with angry eyes before answering. ‘I don’t know’s he will, and I don’t know’s he won’t,’ he said then shortly. He turned away, crossing to his own chair, picking up the paper he had dropped. ‘I don’t know as I want him to,’ he said, almost sullenly. ‘You and me are well enough as we are!’