The Strange Woman

by Ben Ames Williams

  ‘And she told me if I didn’t kill my father while we were up in the woods, she’d tell him when he came home that I’d been with her.’ He saw Evered’s face stiffen in a sort of pain and he cried: ‘You don’t believe that, either; but it’s God’s truth! She’d hinted at it before, John, as good as asking me to kill him. Her name used to be Hager, and her father came from over Augusta way; and a man named Hager killed his wife over there this summer. Probably he was her father’s brother or something. Murder runs in the family! It’s God’s truth, John. She tried to get me to kill my father!’

  Evered met the other’s inflamed and twitching eyes, fastened on him, begging to be believed; and he could not face them. He poured brandy in his empty glass, gulped a swallow.

  ‘But I didn’t kill him!’ Ephraim cried, in a desperate appeal. ‘Or at least I didn’t mean to!’ He said shamedly: ‘I’ve always been scared of the water, John, even when I was a boy. I almost drowned once, and that made it worse. I was scared in the canoe on that trip—and I couldn’t sleep anyway, or cat, for thinking of her. I was half crazy! Coming down-river, we tried to run a rapids and the canoe tipped over. They say I stood up in it. I don’t remember. But I remembered being in the water, with a flour bucket holding me up, and father grabbed it, and I fought him for it, John. I didn’t know who he was. I was crazy! But I beat him off till he let go and sank and drowned.’ His eyes suddenly dilated. ‘They’ve never even found his body!’ he cried, like a scream, so loudly that Evered caught at him to silence him; and at that touch upon his arm Ephraim began to laugh through streaming tears, bowing forward till, his head buried in his arms and as though there were no strength left in him, he tipped forward out of the chair, his head thumping on the floor, and lay there shaking with terrible laughter and with helpless sobs.

  IV

  John did not sleep that night. He put Ephraim to bed, and the younger man, drugged as much by weariness as by drink, and purged and somehow eased by the flood of talk that had poured out of him, appeared at once to sleep. Evered sat by the table, thinking of what he had heard, trying to persuade himself that Ephraim spoke true. His mind did not altogether believe; but his heart did. In the wretched man’s abject babbling there had been the ring of truth. He tried to imagine such a woman as Ephraim described, who could mask the blackest villainy behind a lovely countenance; but it was impossible for him to bring her to life in his thoughts. His mother, whom alone among womankind he had known well and long, was all goodness and serenity and strength; and not pain but peace dwelt in her. The girls he had known as a boy in Freeport were healthy, forthright country damsels whom he might kiss at a husking, blushing as hotly as they; but there were no dark depths in them. The woman to whom in river towns other men turned had never seemed to him so much vicious as unfortunate or easily affectionate or perhaps maternal. He had seen their gentleness in tending hurt men as well as their loud readiness for casual and mercenary embraces. Nothing in his experience prepared him to comprehend such a woman as this.

  He thought Ephraim spoke what he meant for truth; but he knew well enough the depravity of which the other man was capable. A man saw in the world the things he looked for, and his every impression of life, of men or of women, was tainted and tinted by something within himself. To the pure all things were pure. Perhaps it was equally true that to the vile all things were vile. Ephraim had told him once, long ago, that he saw a wanton in every pretty woman he met. Was it not conceivable that Ephraim had seen in his father’s wife what was not there at all?

  Thinking of her, he remembered at last that he had her letter to Ephraim in his pocket, with the money Captain Howes had given him to deliver to the younger man. He drew the letter out and studied it. It was addressed to Ephraim in care of Captain Howes, in a neat, small hand, precisely legible, strong and controlled; and it was closed with a bit of crimson wax that bore the imprint of a seal in which the figure of a beaver gnawing at the slender trunk of a small tree had been deeply cut. But beyond these superficial indications it told John nothing. He wished to open it and read it, wished to scan the lines, to see what manner of words would be used and what message would be inscribed by such a woman as Ephraim had described.

  He laid it on the table within reach of his hand, staring at it with unseeing eyes, looking from it to Ephraim snoring on the bed. It was hard for him to feel for the other now anything except a profound abhorrence; yet he mustered pity, too. Certainly life had bludgeoned that small, wasted man. A better man than Ephraim might have been shattered by so many and such dreadful blows; but a friend if he were wise might help Ephraim back to strength and healthy sanity again, and Evered in his thoughts undertook the task, tried to plan what for the other’s sake he might best do.

  When the tall candle burned low, Evered snuffed it and sat in darkness for a while till day came in the windows. He did not stir until sunlight touched the room. Then he picked up the letter again. At the same time the sudden brightness roused Ephraim, and he grunted and opened his eyes. He blinked sleepily and tried to rise, and then lay back again and spoke steadily enough.

  ‘Didn’t you go to bed?’

  ‘No. I sat here thinking.’

  Ephraim saw the letter in John’s hand. ‘What’s that?’ he asked.

  ‘The letter from Mrs. Poster, for you.’ Evered rose to take it to the other man.

  Ephraim did not move when John extended the letter. ‘Read it,’ he directed. ‘Read it. See what she says.’

  V

  Dear Ephraim—

  I have been sadly troubled with concern for you since you came home, and I have wanted to make my peace with you, without knowing how. The day you came to the door, my great grief for my husband made me unfair to you. I have regretted, every minute since, what I said to you—that you had killed your father—before I closed the door against you and went weeping to my room. Why did you not come in, Ephraim? Then, if ever, you needed understanding and charity and kindliness; and this is your home. Here above every place else in the world you could expect to find refuge.

  Even before my tears had ceased to flow—for you know that though your father was an old man he had been always gentle and kind to me and I loved him well and grieved to know that he was gone—I sent Mrs. Hollis to call you to come to me; but you had gone. Since then I have asked Elder Pittridge to bring you to me; but he found you sodden with drink in the lowest taverns in the town, and when he wished to help you find yourself, you always rebuffed him.

  I have not known what to do except to pray that when your grief passes you will come back to sanity again, and be once more the fine man of whom your father was so proud. You have had my prayers every day, Ephraim.

  Elder Pittridge—I put much faith in his judgment—thinks you can never recapture your self-respect here in Bangor where every one blames you so unfairly for your father’s death. I grieve sometimes to think that my hurt, angry word the day you came home has set the tune they sing. Elder Pittridge thinks you will be better if you go away for a while, and Deacon Adams, whom I have consulted, agrees with him.

  So I have asked Elder Pittridge and Pat Tierney to see you aboard the Bangor when she sails today, and to put you in charge of Captain Howes, and to ask the Captain to give you when you land in Boston this my letter and also a little sum of money for your immediate expenses.

  I must tell you, Ephraim, that your father treated you most unfairly in his testament. It was made while you were still in college, before you came home and won his love and trust by your industry and your devotion. He drew another will after his illness, and showed it to me. In that he provided well for you, arranging that you should manage his affairs and have a handsome income. I know he meant to go to Judge Saladine and execute it, but you know how sensitive he was about his deafness, so that he hesitated to talk business; and he must have put it off from day to day. I have not found it among his papers, so I can only think that he may have destroyed it in his anger at you, the day we took the trip to Castine and Belfast on
the Bangor, when he learned that you had used his money to buy that bond.

  So the old will, Judge Saladine says, must stand. In that he bequeathed to you and to each of his other sons the sum of one thousand dollars, saying that he started life with a thousandth part of that and that you should all be grateful and well pleased. But so far as you are concerned, Ephraim, I want you to know that I shall carry out the terms of the will he wrote and showed to me. If you will come home, in your own good time, the work he designed for you to do will be waiting for your hands. Until you do, your income—the income he planned for you to have-will be yours; and you can draw on Mr. Richardson’s bank up to two thousand dollars a year.

  Remember too that this is your home. You have a battle to fight, Ephraim; and I pray that God will give you strength to win it. Your victory can never be complete until you take and maintain your rightful place here in Bangor. Pray for strength and courage, Ephraim. You are young, with a long, fine life ahead of you, and by strength you can make the world forget all that is past.

  You will have my prayers to help you. You were my husband’s son, so I sign myself,

  Your affectionate mother,

  JENNY POSTER

  VI

  When John Evered began to read this letter aloud, standing near the window, Ephraim was still in bed; but almost at once he moved, rising first on one elbow, then sitting up on the edge of the bed, finally coming to his feet. Evered did not mark these movements. He continued to read, his eyes following the neatly written lines; and from the letter in his hands a sort of warmth seemed to emanate, not physical but of the spirit. Each word was so packed with gentleness and kindly strength and wise counsel and good comforting! This was, he thought, the sort of letter his own mother might under the same circumstances have written to him—except, knowing her inarticulate simplicity, he knew that such a letter would have been beyond her powers. Yet these were the things his mother would have wished to say to him if he—like Ephraim—had lost himself in cowardice and in folly.

  So as he read he forgot Ephraim—and he forgot the things the other had told him—and he felt himself close to the writer of the letter in his hands, hearing her quiet words. But while he read, Ephraim crossed to the table. He stood there a moment listening, and his face twisted and became contorted with a sort of pain. The brandy bottle was under his hand, not quite empty. He lifted it to his mouth and let the scalding liquor run down his parched dry throat; and, when the bottle was empty he looked at it stupidly, as though unwilling to believe the liquor in it was gone.

  Then Evered finished the letter and turned to look at him; and Ephraim made a terrible sound like a gasping howl of inarticulate and insane rage. He threw the bottle with all his might blindly across the room. It struck the wall and did not break, dropped to the floor, rolled two or three feet till it collided with the leg of a chair and spun half around and rolled back an inch or two and oscillated slightly and lay still. Ephraim stared at it, and then he leaped toward it. He kicked it with his bare foot, heedless of pain, and the bottle went spinning under the bed to hit the baseboard on the other side. At the same time he burst into a flood of foul and sickening obscenity, sifting out of the dark recesses of his mind the most hideous words he could remember, pouring them out in a steaming, slimy stream till John, shocked at first into passivity, strode toward him and caught him and shook the frail little man into gasping silence; and Ephraim, his stomach revolting at the raw liquor he had poured into it, suddenly ejected it all, bending over John’s arm, hanging there like a rag, vomiting upon the floor.

  John held him tenderly. ‘Steady, Eph,’ he said. ‘Easy. You’ll feel better now.’

  Ephraim coughed his throat clear. He spat stringily and spat again, and straightened weakly and faced Evered, his eyes blind with tears. ‘Oh, she’s such a whore, John!’ he said hoarsely. ‘I can’t help it. She’s such a whore! I told you what she did, wanting me to sleep with her, tricking me into it, trying to make me kill my father. And then she writes a letter like that. Probably she read it to Deacon Adams so he’d know how good she was! John, she’s not human! She’s not even a human being!’ He took the letter, still in Evered’s hand, and stared at it, turning it over and over. He dropped it, rubbing his hands together as though they had been scorched by contact with the paper on which it was written. He backed away from it warily.

  John found himself full of a great compassion for Ephraim’s torment, so manifest in shaking hands and trembling limbs and writhing lips and staring eyes. He quieted the little man, led him to the bed, made him sit down and then lie down; and Ephraim turned on his face and began to cry like a small baby, to whom every woe is absolute and overwhelming. He wept aloud, with long, shuddering wails; he cried gaspingly:

  ‘Oh, John, I tried so damned hard to behave right! I tried to come away. I tried so hard to be good!’

  VII

  For a long time Evered sat beside the bed till Ephraim from simple exhaustion slept again. John’s hand was gentle on the other’s small thin shoulder, feeling how the flesh was wasted away, the poor bones so near the skin; and while he sat there, his lips compressed in a firm line. There was no longer any incredulity in him. He might have doubted all the other said, but now he had seen the scars, the unhealed wounds which that woman had left on Ephraim’s naked soul; and they were eloquent and could not be denied.

  Ephraim slept, and that was mercy. John had, he remembered, business of his own to do; and he decided he might safely leave Ephraim here for an hour or two alone. But while he was preparing to depart, the other roused and lay watching him and said at last:

  ‘Are you going, John?’

  ‘Oh, awake are you?’ Evered made his tone as matter-of-fact as possible. ‘Yes, but I’ll meet you here in a couple of hours.’ He hesitated, said then: ‘You’ll want to get yourself some clothes. I’ve your money here.’ He laid it on the table.

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ Ephraim agreed. ‘I’ll need some clothes.’

  ‘We’ll make plans later.’ Evered said. ‘I have some work in mind that you can do. I’ll need your help. Go back to sleep if you can; but I’ll be here in two hours at the longest.’

  ‘I’ll be here,’ the other assented. He said, grinning that wry and curiously pleasing grin which Evered remembered: ‘Don’t worry about me, John.’ ‘Of course not. You’ll be fine.’ Evered came to touch the other’s shoulder affectionately. ‘Don’t try to dodge me, Eph.’

  ‘Who, me?’ Ephraim protested, in the familiar, curiously boyish phrase. ‘Gee, no! I’ll be here when you come back.’

  But when John returned, two hours later, Ephraim, and the money, and Jenny’s letter, were gone.

  3

  JOHN never saw Ephraim

  again. When he returned to the hotel and found the other gone, his inquiries led nowhere. He spent a week in Boston, then went to Freeport to see his mother, and afterward met Colonel Black in Augusta where the Colonel was presenting applications for four townships of state lands which he wished to buy. John had expected they would return from there to Ellsworth; but Mrs. Black had decided on a Boston winter, and they went back to find a suitable house and to see her and the younger boys settled there. It was November before, bound for Ellsworth, they returned to Bangor again.

  They arrived in early afternoon, and since the drive to Ellsworth was a long one, they stayed overnight, and Colonel Black drove John here and there about the city. They saw a hectic activity everywhere; knots of excited men on every street corner, new buildings rising on every street. They stopped to inspect the new Bangor House, now approaching completion. There were drawing rooms and sitting rooms and special bathing rooms; and the great kitchen, Manager Wood assured them, was as well-equipped as the kitchen in the White House. He said the hotel would be opened on Christmas Day with a grand banquet for every lady and gentleman in town, and urged them both to attend.

  The Colonel could not. ‘I’ll be in Boston,’ he said. ‘But John here will represent us.’ John promi
sed to do so.

  The Colonel took John to call on business acquaintances, and he left invitations for three who were not in their offices—General Veazie and Rufus Dwinel and Amos Roberts—to sup with them.

  ‘They’re men you’ll come to know, and you’ll be doing business with them,’ he told John. ‘General Veazie already owns most of the saws at Old Town, and buys every mill that comes up for sale. Rufe Dwinel’s just finished building six double mills at West Great Works. Matter of fact, I’ve got some money of my own in that venture with him, but no one knows it except Rufe and me. Roberts only came to Bangor three years ago; but I’ll pick him to be one of the biggest operators on the river in ten years. He’s a sound man. He’s a director of the Mercantile Bank, and I’m thinking of backing him in starting a new bank. See what you think of them.’

  John had hoped he and the Colonel might call on Judge Saladine, perhaps at his home, and thus see Margaret; and also as they drove here and there he scanned every woman they met, thinking always that they might encounter Mrs. Poster, who if Ephraim told the truth hid behind a lovely mask evil unspeakable. But they neither went to Judge Saladine’s house nor met Jenny before they returned at last to the Exchange to await their guests.

  The three gentlemen arrived together, and the Colonel told them heartily: ‘John here is one of my young men. Just now I’m educating him, so he’s on the move most of the time; but he’ll be making Bangor his headquarters, beginning next year.’ He warned John laughingly: ‘Don’t ever let the General find out we own any mill property, or he’ll try to buy it—and steal it if he has to! Rufe Dwinel is honest enough, but he’s as contentious as two cats in a bag. Amos Roberts here, he doesn’t say much, but what he says most generally turns out to be true.’

  Judge Saladine joined them for supper, and John hoped there might be a chance to ask for Miss Saladine; but at table where they sat long the talk was all man talk. John, watching these men whom he met that day for the first time, was particularly taken by Mr. Dwinel. Dwinel was not much older than John himself, and John thought him remarkably handsome, yet in a thoroughly masculine way. His eye was large and bright and keen, but hard and steady and with no mirth in it to match the quizzical line at the corner of his mouth. His hair was dark and naturally a little curly; and he wore a luxuriant side whisker in front of each car which descended to cover the angle of his jawbone in a fashion which John thought admiringly he might some day imitate. Dwinel had a violent temper, but tonight nothing occurred to rouse it and he was genial and pleasant even to General Veazie whose loud voice and dogmatic pronouncements might sometimes strike sparks from the mildest man. Amos Roberts was the quietest of the three. He was taller even than John, with an impressive dignity.