The Strange Woman

by Ben Ames Williams

  ‘Yes,’ he admitted hoarsely.

  She laughed, yet so softly he scarce heard her. She extended her hand and let it rest upon his shoulder, and her finger touched the lobe of his ear, lightly tracing its outline, pressing it gently aside. Her fingertip was warm. She whispered: ‘Why are you afraid?’

  He said, tremblingly at first and then in sudden desperate relief that the words were out: ‘I can’t stand it much longer, being near you all the time.’

  She spoke reassuringly, as though appeasing a hungry boy. ‘Yet he is old, Ephraim. He will not live very long.’

  He looked at her blankly. ‘That’s an awful thing to say, Jenny.’

  A swift anger showed in her eyes. ‘You poor little rabbit!’ she whispered; and then in a cool, almost a mocking tone: ‘When will you come to be a man, boy?’ And more gently: ‘Yet I do not want you frightened, Ephraim. I told you once—remember?—that you need never be afraid of me.’

  He whispered: ‘What do you want?’

  She spoke in a quiet challenge. ‘What do you want, Ephraim? Are you afraid to tell me?’ The word was a whiplash laid across his cheek.

  His eyes met hers at last, and he saw in hers a flickering fire like the play of heat lightning along a far horizon. He said in a breathless tone: ‘You hate father, don’t you?’

  She nodded. ‘He ought to have died,’ she said, and then she added: ‘But I could learn to hate you, too. Or any coward. Do you want me to?’ Her tones were cold as ice.

  He clenched his fists. ‘I’ve loved you since that time I came home from college, Jenny.’ The words, once loosed, poured out of him. ‘I’ve loved you and been afraid of you too.’ She smiled, and smoothed the shoulder of his coat with the palm of her hand as he went on: ‘The times you’ve kissed me-even that day I came home to stay—when I think of them it’s like a spark in powder. And I can’t stop thinking of them!’ He pounded his knees weakly with his fists. ‘But God damn my soul to hell for saying so!’

  She turned away with a quick, contented movement, turned to the nearest chair, seemed about to sit down. She stood there with her back to him, her head bent as though in thought; and his eye followed the lovely line of her side, from shoulder to waist. When she faced him, there was something new in her eyes and in her tone.

  ‘You were trying to persuade Isaiah to do something,’ she remembered. ‘With all that talk at dinner.’ Her manner said that they were allies now, that all was settled between them. ‘What was it? What did you want him to do?’

  The sudden change, the return to everyday affairs, was like a reprieve. He seized on it, spoke eagerly, telling her what Mr. Holbrook had said, insisting that Isaiah was missing an opportunity for a handsome profit. She listened, yet he thought she was thinking more of him than of what he said. He talked at length, clinging to matter-of-fact words so that other words need not be spoken, till at last there was no more to say.

  She nodded then. ‘I see. You think Isaiah should do this?’

  ‘I’m sure there’s a big profit in it.’

  ‘Isaiah’s getting so old,’ she said. ‘He needs you to make decisions for him, Ephraim. He would approve this, after it was done.’ And she asked: ‘Has he the money to do what you want?’

  ‘Yes—lying idle in the bank.’

  She smiled. ‘He trusts you more and more. Do you know what I think? If you had the authority to draw on his account, you could buy this fine land for him without his knowing.’

  ‘But I haven’t the authority,’ he reminded her.

  She came nearer him again. ‘I will persuade him to give it to you,’ she promised. ‘You and I between us must see to it that his affairs are rightly handled. He will give you the authority if I ask him. If you had it, would you do this?’

  He hesitated. ‘I don’t know.’

  She said chidingly: ‘Still so full of doubts? So easily afraid? A man must sometimes be bold, Ephraim!’

  He nodded hurriedly. ‘All right; yes, I guess I would.’

  ‘Then I will persuade him,’ she promised; and she said in a teasing tone: ‘You know, Ephraim, three times—the day you came home, and the night at Carr’s Wharf, and the night we thought Isaiah would die—three times I have kissed you. I wish some day you would kiss me.’

  He came storming to his feet, all a leaping flame; but she eluded him, stepping quietly backward, saying in matter-of-fact tones: ‘Not now. Now it is time to wake Isaiah.’

  6

  IN THIS matter of giving

  Ephraim authority to draw upon his funds, Isaiah was stubborn for a while; but Jenny pressed him tirelessly. To do what she proposed, she pointed out, was no more than sensible and wise. ‘Suppose you got sick again, Isaiah?’ she urged. ‘Something might happen while you were out of your head that needed tending to, but Ephraim couldn’t do anything.’ She persisted day by day, and in the end, by argument and by cajolery, she won her point.

  Yet Isaiah’s surrender was conditional. ‘Mind you,’ he told Ephraim, ‘you’re not to use this power only when I tell you to—or if I’m sick and can’t decide.’

  After that warning, Ephraim would have retracted his promise to buy Mr. Holbrook’s bond; but Jenny laughed at his fears, mocking him in smiling ways, her tone faintly derisive, yet light and tender too. He found in her in these days an extraordinary secret gaiety, and a provocative beauty and warmth which clouded all his senses. Invitation dwelt always in her eyes, and he had opportunity enough to do what half of him wished to do; yet there was still in him a tenacious loyalty to his father which held him in restraint. When now she urged him to go to Mr. Holbrook, he referred to Isaiah’s word.

  ‘He told me not to use the money unless on his order,’ he protested, ‘or if he were sick again.’

  A sort of passion darkened her cheek. ‘Must you always keep telling me what he said!’

  He muttered in a puzzled tone: ‘Something’s different in you, Jenny, since he was sick. Before, you always seemed to like him, really; but now, when you talk about him you almost—grit your teeth!’

  She nodded, speaking softly and absently as though in self-appraisal. ‘I used to like him when I was a child, because if I let him kiss me, he’d give me goodies at the store; and when he married me, I knew he’d be good to me if I let him do what he wanted. But after I knew you, Ephraim, I hated sleeping in the same bed with him, so I used to kick and toss to keep him awake; and because he hated fresh air I kept our windows open, till finally he went into the other room, slept there. After that he didn’t come to me often. It was bad when he did, but it was funny too.’ Her tone suddenly hardened. ‘But then the night we came home from Augusta—when I had to sleep with him, hold him all night in my arms—I wished him dead.’ She shuddered, and Ephraim remembered his own repulsion at the sight of the wasted old man, and she finished strongly, her eyes as cold as ice: ‘And now when he comes to me it’s as if a dead man touched me. There’s never a minute of the day that I don’t wish he were dead, that there was just you and me.’ A blazing passion rang in her whispered cry: ‘I wish he were dead, Ephraim!’

  Sometimes when he was with her his blood pounded through his body, shaking him, and his vision was obscured as by a red veil; and it was so now. He wiped his eyes with both hands, as though to see the better; and he pleaded:

  ‘But Jenny, he’s my father!’

  ‘Yes,’ she assented. ‘As long as he’s alive.’ Her tone was pitiless. She murmured in a keen longing: ‘But how long must he live, Ephraim? That little spark of stale life in him, a child could pinch it out!’

  His eyes met hers in a horrible silence. They were in the big room, standing together by the table; and he felt a chill wind blow upon the back of his neck. She came a little toward him, her voice no more than a whisper, half smiling so that those small indentations showed in her cheeks as though she were about to cry; and she repeated very softly:

  ‘How long must the old man live—live between us, Ephraim?’

  He dared not let her touch him
. He moved a step backward to escape, said desperately: ‘I’ll go see Mr. Holbrook today.’

  She looked at him with a bleak scorn naked in her eyes, then turned quietly away.

  II

  June came booming up the river, and life in Bangor was on the flood.

  Every packet brought a new flood of speculators and potential citizens; and the town that three years before had numbered no more than as many thousand people was approaching the eight thousand mark. Hundreds of houses and store buildings and new wharves were everywhere under way. The streets had been churned to a quagmire as the frost went out of the ground, and there had been no time nor inclination to scrape and level them. Pot-holes were filled with branches cut off and thrown loosely in; cedar poles formed a corduroy foundation in the wetter spots where springs or surface drainage sent trickles across the road. The mud turned to dust and back to mud again with every rain, and the heavy teams hauling lumber and rock and brick for construction work churned holes which there was never time to fill. Footpaths by the roadside were the only sidewalks, and in the busy streets these disappeared so that pedestrians picked their way along in front of the stores, forever dodging teams or carriages, crossing where they could.

  And everywhere, at street corners, in the taverns, wherever two men met, the trading went on and paper passed from hand to hand. There was a current of excitement in the air so intense that most men were infected; and the fever in their blood burned so hot that they might stay all night at the Coffee House or at one of the other taverns or at John Bright’s news room, in endless talk of what had been and what might be.

  Pat Tierney, who after his leg healed had returned to work as Isaiah’s stable man and coachman, quit his job to devote his time to speculation. His first venture had prospered, and so had others since. Pat himself became close-mouthed with success; but Sam Smith told Ephraim:

  ‘He’s made ten thousand already. Right now he owns bonds on half a township. Pat’s a smart Irishman. He’ll be one of the big men in Bangor in his day.’

  Ephraim wetted his lips. He had made his deal with Holbrook, paying five thousand dollars for the Boston man’s bond. Holbrook jibbed a little, when the dicker came to be concluded, protesting that Ephraim had waited so long that the bond was worth six thousand dollars now; but Ephraim had enough of his father in him to be a good trader, and in the end Holbrook was glad to take his profit and turn the money back into a new speculation.

  Money as such began to have little value in the public mind, and those who were infected rushed to turn every dollar they could find into bonds; but Ephraim, after using a part of Isaiah’s funds in hand, went no further. He was haunted by a sense of guilt for what he had done, and also by a zealous eagerness to turn over the transaction at a profit, and thus justify his venture; but while there were buyers enough for small parcels when the required investment ran into hundreds, not many were prepared to risk thousands; and also, there were more men with bonds to sell than with money to buy.

  Isaiah remained awhile in ignorance of what Ephraim had done. In ordinary times the transaction could not have been long hidden from the old man; but circumstances combined to make possible concealment now. The money which Ephraim had used had been in the Commercial Bank. Isaiah had gone with Ephraim to give Ned Richardson, the cashier, a written authorization which permitted his son to draw out the funds; but since his sickness his hearing was almost completely gone, so he seldom ventured to town where he might be forced to talk to someone. To this extent, circumstances protected Ephraim; but also he had spoken to Mr. Richardson, warning him to silence.

  ‘Father’s failing fast,’ he explained. ‘So we don’t bother him unless we have to. He can’t discuss anything without getting excited, and that tires him out.’

  The cashier said drily: ‘If he knew his money was buying bonds for land he didn’t know anything about, it’d kill him, like as not.’ Mr. Richardson had the banker’s mind, which distrusts easy profits and discounts hopeful dreams; and he had thus far been able to keep a level head through the rising hysteria. ‘Isaiah never did hold with buying a pig in a poke!’

  ‘We have reliable information about this tract,’ Ephraim assured him, trying to sound like a sober business man. ‘But don’t speak of it to him—unless of course he asks you.’

  The banker, though he might distrust the young man’s judgment, had no reason to be suspicious of Ephraim himself. So though he saw Isaiah once or twice, Ephraim’s warning and the fact that Isaiah, to cover his own deafness, was apt now to monopolize every conversation with a shrill monologue, kept him from speaking of the matter to the old man at all.

  III

  In July the new steamboat Bangor, Captain Barker, came up the river. Captain Barker claimed that she was the first iron steamboat built in the United States; and this fact led crowds to troop down to the wharf to see her. She was of about four hundred tons, with a tall black smokestack and two masts which were rigged with sails for emergency use; and to familiarize potential patrons with her comfort and speed, an excursion to Castine and Belfast was arranged.

  Bangor folks were skeptical about steamboats. The packets Free Trade and Madawaska still plied regularly to Boston; and they were well patronized. With a sailing vessel a man at least knew that sooner or later he Would catch a fair wind and reach his destination; but with steam, let the engine break down and there you were! But Captain Barker, proud of his command, laughed at these doubts: and when Jenny heard of the proposed excursion she suggested that she and Isaiah and Ephraim go. Isaiah refused; but he told Ephraim to take Jenny, since her heart was set upon it, and Ephraim, despite his fear of the water, doubtfully agreed.

  The day proved to be fine. The Bangor cast off her lines at eight o’clock in the morning and turned down-river. There were about four hundred passengers aboard, as many ladies as gentlemen; and Ephraim and Jenny joined a group on the forward deck to escape the smoke and cinders and to watch each succeeding reach of the river unfold. For a while the conversation was exclamatory, centering upon the beauty of the day, discussing how much cooler it was on the water than on land and what a fine breeze the steamboat’s speed produced, commenting on the beauty of the scene and on the farms and towns along the way.

  Mrs. Nathaniel Harlow—whose husband, a Revolutionary soldier, had been granted the land east of the Stream and north of the bridge—with a warm merino shawl around her head and shoulders occupied a place of honor forward. Jenny had sent Ephraim to bring a chair for her from the cabin, and she sat there like a queen. She was an apple-cheeked old woman with a small, pursed mouth and a prim sense of her own importance as the widow of one of the first settlers in the town. Jenny and Ephraim stayed near her, and Jenny was solicitous to see that she was protected from the wind. George and Mrs. Thatcher joined them. Mrs. Thatcher, two or three years younger than Jenny, was a handsome woman with a rough, merry tongue. Mrs. Harlow’s son Nat and his wife presently appeared to urge that the old woman find a more sheltered spot, but she refused.

  “I want to see all there is to see,’ she declared. ‘And this child’—she touched Jenny’s aim affectionately—‘is taking good care of me!’

  So they all stayed with her; and Mr. and Mrs. Joe Littlefield, who conducted the Female High School, joined them. Mrs. Littlefield was excited over the fact that Mr. Caleb Cushing, recently returned from two years in Europe and a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, was coming to lecture before the Bangor Lyceum on his experiences abroad.

  ‘I’m so pleased!’ she said. ‘I heard him lecture last summer when I went to Boston. He’s a most remarkable man, and so interesting.’ She smiled at Ephraim and said: ‘I hope other young gentlemen like yourself will come to hear him. Usually there is no one to hear the really good things except ladies and workmen.’

  ‘I shall bring Ephraim,’ Jenny promised. ‘If we can leave Mr. Poster. So often he needs me.’

  Mrs. Harlow said approvingly: ‘You’ve given years of your life to caring for
people older than yourself, my dear. Some day you will be rewarded.’ Mrs. Thatcher laughed so merrily that her word gave no offense. ‘When Mr. Poster dies, you mean, Mrs. Harlow? Everyone says only General Veazie and two or three others are better off than he!’

  The old woman said reprovingly: ‘That remark does not become you, ’Becca!’ She patted Jenny’s hand. ‘Certainly this dear child expects no reward.’ She looked up at Jenny in a frank affection. ‘I think it is just your nature, my dear, to be thoughtful of older people—as you have been today of me.’

  Jenny smiled and said: 1 like old people best. They’re so frightened and lonely, really. It must be terrible to grow old till all the people your own age, whom you have known so long, are gone.’

  Mrs. Harlow nodded. ‘And till you’re just a nuisance to your children,’ she said, bridling.

  Nat Harlow laughed, and dropped his hand on her shoulder. ‘You’re an old hypocrite,’ he told her. ‘Fishing for compliments! You know you’re the best thing in our lives.’

  Mrs. Littlefield had been silent too long. ‘But I do think it’s so awfully important to have good lectures and go to hear them,’ she insisted. ‘Literary topics, specially, just inspire me! I think we all need literature in our lives.’

  Mrs. Thatcher said with her infectious chuckle: ‘I’d like books better if the people in them were more like the people I know. I wish people in books had more stomach aches and fewer fine sentiments!’

  Jenny suggested in her quiet tones that books were meant to make us forget the unpleasant daily things—like stomach aches. ‘I agree with Mrs. Littlefield,’ she said. ‘If we can interest men in good books, they won’t spend so much time in taverns. We’ll never stop rum-selling by organizing temperance societies, or even by passing laws.’

  Mrs. Harlow sniffed. ‘I just refuse to patronize any merchant who sells liquor,’ she said. ‘If enough of us did that, it would soon bring them to time.’