The Strange Woman

by Ben Ames Williams

  The verdict silenced, too, the last whisper in Bangor against John; but it did not help Elder Pittridge. He met everywhere a quiet contempt which no one troubled to conceal; and his own recognition of the fact that this scorn was deserved made it the more bitter. He thought of John now, in a strong revulsion, as of an almost Christ-like virtue and nobility; thought of himself as Peter who thrice denied his Master. His hatred was forgotten, and by the very wrong he had inflicted, John was in his thoughts magnified. Remorse tore at him with raking talons from which he could not escape. If he could have lost himself again in Jenny’s arms, he might have mustered a swaggering bravado convincing to himself if to no other; but it was months since he had been alone with her except for an occasional casual word when John was near, and there had been since the day the libel first was published no invitation in her eyes nor in her tones. He knew instinctively that she had discarded him, that they would never again be to one another what they had been in those mad months of spring and summer when he alternated between a frenzied abandon in which the world seemed like to end and a shamed and wretched scorn of himself and of her. She had cast him aside; and now those he met, men and women he had known for years and whose respect he had earned and valued, likewise turned their backs on him.

  The account of the trial was published at length in the Whig and Courier; and Sam Upton, the editor, printed Elder Pittridge’s testimony verbatim, but without comment. Any comment would have been better than that silence. To contradict the eighty-odd witnesses—drawn from the lowest quarters of the town, and most of them with an admitted reason to hate John—who testified that his reputation was bad, Judge Saladine had called General Veazie, Rufus Dwinel, Deacon Adams, Colonel Black, and two or three others, men of the highest standing. For Elder Pittridge to read his own name in the shabby company of those who testified against John made his brooding regrets the more bitter.

  He thought—as he had thought many times in these months—of killing himself. To that pitch he did not come; but like the flagellants he scourged himself not only with words but with actual violence, so that he wore welts and bruises and raw, unhealing wounds and from the very hurt of them derived a grotesque comforting.

  Yet he did not immediately reach these depths; and for a while he haunted familiar scenes, hoping for some kindly glance or word. He went to church the first Sunday after the trial only to find himself isolated and alone in that company where he had always been a respected leader. He attended the concert given by the Washington Quartette Club of amateur singers, whereas the Whig and Courier said: ‘A highly intelligent and fashionable audience of the elite of the city in matters of taste’ were pleasantly entertained. But there, too, he found himself ignored, and Jenny was not in the company. On the following Sunday, a hopeless longing led him to pass the Congregational Church as the service ended, in the hope of seeing her. Pat Tierney with the carriage—on runners, since this winter snow lay deep everywhere—was waiting for the worshippers to emerge, and Elder Pittridge spoke to him with a brave cheerfulness.

  ‘Morning, Patrick! A fine day,’ he said.

  Pat pretended not to see him. He stared at the ears of his horses and flicked at them with the whip, and the tassel came so near the Elder’s cheek that he moved back hastily. Yet when a moment later the congregation began to emerge after the service, he returned to meet John and Jenny as, with Judge Saladine and others near, they reached the carriage.

  John spoke to him, extending his hand. ‘Good morning, Line,’ he said clearly, so that those near-by could hear. ‘You’ve made yourself a stranger. Come and see us.’

  Elder Pittridge clung to that offered hand almost desperately. ‘Why, I will, John,’ he said, his voice shaking.

  ‘I’m going up-river Friday,’ John explained, ‘to have an eye on things when the drive starts. So come soon.’

  The Elder nodded and he hopefully sought Jenny’s eye; but she passed him without a glance. John helped her into the carriage and they drove away.

  He did not go out to the house where he had so long been welcome during the week that followed; but after John departed up-river, he went one evening secretly to knock on the door. There was some delay before it was opened, not by Jenny herself but by Mrs. McGaw. When she saw Elder Pittridge and before he could speak, she closed the door with a quiet emphasis and a firm finality; and he went hopelessly back to town.

  February ended and March came in, and the lonely man turned to company he once had scorned. The lumbering crews would soon now be coming out of the woods; and down in Devil’s Half Acre their welcome was preparing. The population of the district along the east side of the Stream near its mouth, which in winter shrank to a skeleton, began to grow again. When he first went that way Elder Pittridge was met with suspicious glances, and with an occasional jeering taunt; but he ignored the glances and the taunts and ordered rum and drank it, sitting alone, sinking into a sodden stupor which was nevertheless release from the ordeal of keeping his own company. As in the succeeding days his collapse became increasingly complete, the jeers were silenced, and he began to be met in his new haunts with tolerance, and at last with pity that was not far from friendliness.

  But in his sober hours he still longed to see Jenny; and he went to the Lyceum lecture on ‘The State of Poetry in England,’ hoping vainly to encounter her there. That was his last venture into the circles where he had once been always welcomed. After that, so far as his old friends were concerned, he moved alone.

  II

  His last encounter with Jenny occurred in the hours between midnight and dawn on the morning of Sunday, the twenty-ninth of March. For almost the full month preceding, he had lived as a solitary, more often drunk than not, sleeping sometimes in his own bed, sometimes in the tavern or den where insensibility overtook him; and in his maudlin state he might be seen to pluck at his arms and body and legs with fingers like pincers, as though he tried to pull the flesh away from his bones, so that the crowds in the grogshops he frequented watched him in a wondering curiosity. He was apt, halfway from semi-sobriety to complete drunkenness, to become argumentative, truculent and quarrelsome. Once, far gone in rum, he attempted to take part in a loud discussion of the Oregon Question, and he made a speech in McNeill’s Tavern to a cheering audience which was indifferent to the issues involved but highly amused by his oratorical flights. He was encouraged to new efforts, and having exhausted the one topic, turned to another.

  ‘And I will say a few words to you now,’ he cried, ‘about a condition here in our fair city which is a shame and a disgrace to our good name! I refer, ladies and gentlemen——’ Good-humored cheers from his mixed audience drowned him out for a moment till with uplifted hands he commanded silence and so went on. ‘I refer, my friends, to the swine which everywhere run loose in our streets. It is nothing but hog, hog, hog, go where you will, into the streets, lanes, gardens, front yards, back yards, woodsheds——’

  Someone shouted amiably: ‘Don’t leave out the privies, Brother Pittridge!’

  Elder Pittridge bowed. ‘I thank you. The privies, yes, and even the kitchens of our homes, if the doors are left open for a moment. Wherever you go, swarms of miserable, half-starved and shivering hogs meet you at every step. Every person who can raise the means to scare up the skeleton of a swine with just enough life left in it to feel the pangs of unsatisfied hunger docs so; and the miserable creatures range from door to door through cold and snowdrifts, squealing and suffering!’

  A woman laughed in shrill amusement. ‘Now, ain’t that terrible about the poor pigs?’

  The tall, gaunt man levelled at her a bony finger. ‘You may well say so. But waste no sympathy on the swine! You too may wander one day from door to door.’ He flung up his arms, losing the track of his discourse, turning to a familiar topic. ‘It is all a part of rum’s horrid work. Not a month ago a party of honest lumbermen left their axes and their saws to go to Mattawamkeag for a debauch. A Troy man named Robert Lytell—I doubt not that some of you knew him—l
agged behind his fellows on the way back to camp, and froze to death beside the road. He left a wife, gentlemen; a wife and six small babies, homeless, fatherless.’ His voice broke in a sob. ‘There’s rum for you! That’s what rum will do for you, my poor brothers and sisters!’

  The man nearest him laughed and put a cup of raw liquor into his hand, and he drained it with a shudder and went on, his voice at a higher pitch. Usually his orations entertained his audience, but this was not always true. When his denunciations of rum became too violent, or when in rolling Biblical phrases he damned the strange woman and all her works, someone as truculent as he might take issue with him. At such times he seemed to welcome physical combat, courting the hardest blows as though pain were bliss to him. The fact that in these fights he was always worsted, and with an almost contemptuous ease, did not deter him on the next occasion; and there was seldom a day during this month of March that he did not wear on his countenance, in swollen mouth or nose or discolored eyes, the marks of losing battles.

  For a while, to ‘get old Pittridge started’ was a favored form of entertainment in the resorts he frequented, till the rapid decline of his faculties muddled his speech. He began to repeat himself, not always lucidly; and his discourses lost the vigor and fire which had at first distinguished them.

  He came to be a bore, more likely than not to be shouted down; and he learned at last to sit in a bitter, brooding silence, plucking at himself with claw-like hands, listening to the talk around him, but without attempting to take part in it at all.

  III

  With the approach of the time when the ice might be expected to go out of the river, the spring break-up gradually pushed Mexico and Oregon and the tariff and all such remote affairs out of the minds of Bangor men. The lumbering crews were emerging from the woods, and they reported an unprecedented amount of anchor ice in the river, six to eight feet deep almost everywhere, while in some places here on tidewater the ice was thirty feet thick. A succession of unusually low tides in the lower river had left this mass for the most part undisturbed, and a well which had been dug near the piers of the Bangor-Brewer Bridge found fourteen feet of ice there, most of it solid. The snow blanket in the woods was heavy, and warm rains, melting that snow overnight, would almost certainly produce a dangerous freshet.

  On the seventeenth of March the rain began, turned to snow and then to sleet and then to snow again, and finally to rain once more. Word came from Old Town that the rising water there was beginning to break the two or three feet of blue ice which covered the river, and bring it down to jam at every narrow sluice. By the twenty-fourth of the month the jam filled the river solidly from above Old Town to within two miles of Bangor. A small channel was open from the foot of the jam to the bridge, and ice- pokers were at work loosing big blocks and freeing them in this channel, so that they might pass harmlessly away.

  But on the twenty-sixth a thundershower came down the valley, with wind and heavy rain. Elder Pittridge, sprawling in his chair in the corner of McNeill’s Tavern, heard dimly through the alcoholic fog which obscured his senses the reports from each newcomer, and a man fresh from Old Town, shouting his news, had for a while the attention of them all.

  ‘They’re getting hell up there,’ he cried, ‘and worse to come! The new ice slides under the old till it hits bottom. River’s full of it, so no water can get through; and it’s rising all the time. Bridges are gone already, and if the jam don’t draw tonight, the mills will float right off their foundations.’

  McNeill said positively: ‘She won’t draw tonight. There’s a high run of tides, water in my collar right now. That’ll hold her back!’

  ‘By God, she’d better!’ the other insisted. ‘Or half the mills in Old Town and Stillwater will come down-river by morning.’

  But the jam did not draw, and the rain continued. Up-river above the jam, the water rose thirty feet higher than its normal level. The Basin Mills at Old Town, lifted off their foundations, floated off and packed into the jam; the City Mills followed them.

  ‘And that means we can’t get the winter’s cut sawed this year,’ McNeill announced. ‘Half of it will rot, or be lost. They’ll have to hold it up-river, anywheres they can.’

  There was still debate as to whether flood conditions would hit Bangor. Above the wharves the river was a mass of ice, rising higher than the usual level of the water, locked and motionless. Elder Pittridge, half-sobered by the excitement in the air, Saturday morning walked out on the bridge to look upstream. The ice above the bridge was a tumbled chaos, in which the pressure of the water, exerting tremendous force, caused constant small upheavals. Blocks of ice as big as a cart might be squeezed upward between two others, rising slowly to their full height above the level of the jam before toppling on their sides. The air was full of a grinding, groaning noise; there was a rumbling and a squealing everywhere in the ice mass; and the men and boys watching from the vantage of the bridge stood in a silent wonder at the sight.

  Elder Pittridge, scanning the ice through one of the windows of the bridge with dull, blinking eyes, found his attention fixed at last on a small object almost directly beneath where he stood. It lay on the ice that had packed against the bridge piers, and for a long time he did not realize what it was, his thoughts far away. But then something about it stirred recognition in him and he saw that this was the body of a baby, new-born and naked, lying face down in a pale huddle there.

  When he was sure, he went back to find Jerry Skinner, the tolltaker; and Jerry came out with him to the spot to see for himself. Others gathered to discover what it was these two looked at so intently. The baby’s body lay some distance from the pier, but Jerry thought they might reach it; and at his word men ran to bring ladders. Elder Pittridge, sobered by the sight, asked:

  ‘How did it get there? How came it there?’

  ‘Some woman that didn’t want it threw it off the bridge,’ Jerry guessed. ‘Might have been a woman from one of the houses on Exchange Street.’ And then he said in sudden memory: ‘I mind now, three girls came across late last night. I didn’t know who they was, shawls around their heads. Likely it was one of them.’

  The lost man shuddered. ‘Was it alive then, do you think?’

  ‘Might have been at first, but it wouldn’t last long down there. Just the fall would kill it. Or maybe it was dead before.’ The men bringing ladders were near when he cried loudly: ‘There it goes!’

  While they watched, the ice cake upon which the small body lay rose under the pressure it sustained. It tipped almost on edge, and the dead infant slid a little, then rolled over, then fell into a crevice in the ice. Instantly the crevice closed like jaws, ice cakes splintering against one another, grindingly.

  ‘Well, there wa’n’t any use in getting it, anyway,’ the toll-gatherer said philosophically; and he told the men as they arrived: ‘Don’t need the ladders now, boys. It’s gone.’

  He turned away; but Elder Pittridge stayed behind, watching with dark brooding eyes the ice in which the baby now lay entombed. There was a life, of so many potentialities, which had ended before it began; yet perhaps those potentialities were evil ones. Were there not many men who might better have died as infants? How much misery and shame might have been saved them—and the world—if their mother had pinched them out, just as the owner of a bitch which whelps destroys the maimed and weak among the litter. He wondered what mother, what poor shameless one among the creatures in Devil’s Half Acre, had thus ridded herself of an unwanted child; and his eyes filled with a wringing sympathy for her. No matter how hardened, she must have suffered in the doing, must always suffer in the memory of her action.

  Yet it was as much for himself as for her he wept, in a weak and spineless self-commiseration.

  IV

  His thoughts clung to the dead baby, and to its unknown mother, till a movement on the river attracted his attention. A small section of the upper jam broke away and came with a ponderous slowness downstream, carrying with it the wreckage of the City
Mills. It struck the ice immediately above the bridge with a terrific concussion, and fragments were thrown up in huge sheets and piles, some of the smaller flying clear to fall upon the mass and shatter with explosive sounds. The bridge on which Elder Pittridge stood shuddered under that shock; and instantly the water followed till—checked again by the jam above the bridge—it began to overflow the banks on either side.

  The people on the bridge had scattered before the approaching impact, running either way; but Elder Pittridge stayed where he was, not caring how soon death reached for him. On the Brewer side where a line of houses fronted the water he saw the flood pouring into windows, saw women and children running for safety from those houses to the higher land; and almost indifferently he turned that way in an automatic move to help them. But before he reached the other end of the bridge, he saw that those in the houses must have escaped, so he turned back.

  On the Bangor side, the sudden rising water had begun to sweep away lumber piled on the wharves awaiting shipment; and some of the wharf buildings were already shifting as the rising water lightened them to the floating point. By the time he reached the Bangor end of the bridge, scores of men were at work moving lumber back from the encroaching flood, carrying furniture and smaller objects out of the houses and buildings which the water had already reached. Elder Pittridge joined them, working with a desperate and driving energy, working as zealously as though these were his own possessions here in peril. He labored all that day, tirelessly, as long as there was light to see, rejoicing that in this common effort his help was welcomed. The waters of the Stream, backed up by that portion of the jam below its mouth, began to overflow the low ground on both sides of its banks. Before dark the buildings between the Stream and Exchange Street were flooded; but at dark the situation was no worse, and the jam was under increasing pressure with every hour that passed. When it should give way, unless it packed again in the narrows at High Head, the flood would pour down-river to the Bay.