So with darkness there was for a while some respite, and men had time to snatch a bite to eat; but Elder Pittridge did not seek food. He waited by the river above the Bangor end of the bridge, listening in the darkness for the first sounds that would indicate the jam was moving. The night was almost warm, the stars hidden, the air filled with misty haze rising from the ice. There were torches and lanterns everywhere in the watching crowd, and bonfires here and there around which men, wet and weary from their exertions during the day, huddled to await what was to come. But the light from these penetrated only a little distance; the river itself was hidden in hazy darkness.
It was almost midnight when there came in the constant grumbling and complaining of the ice a new note; a shrill and ominous sound. Elder Pittridge heard himself shouting: ‘There it draws!’ The cry ran along the margin of the flood and up through the city; and a clamor of church bells began, every bell clanging out the warning. From the banks it was impossible to see what was happening; but the roar from the river was deafening. He heard the splintering crash as one section of the bridge was carried away; and then the tail of the jam, loosened and lifted by the steadily rising water, spread out to brush along the banks as it moved downstream. The crowds fled, drawing back from its encroaching advance, shouting and screaming in the darkness; and Elder Pittridge heard the scrape and slither and thump of lumber piles dissolving into their component parts as the ice ground planks to splinters or the water swept them away.
When the tail of the jam passed below the bridge, the water which thrust it on began to fall to lower levels. He followed the receding flood, gauging by it the movement of the jam—unseen in the darkness—in the liver below. He came down toward the lower ground along the Stream, the water withdrawing before him till it was no more than eight or ten feet above its normal level; but then suddenly he felt it around his feet, and almost at once, before he could take a backward step, it had risen to his knees.
He knew what that meant. The jam had stopped again, packing in the narrows at High Head; and the combined waters of the river and the Stream, piling up behind it, rose with incredible speed. All along the margin of the flood, others had been as quick as he to guess the truth; and a general shout of many men and the shrill cries of women filled the night, and people everywhere fled blindly to safety. The grinding roar of the ice, tumbling and cracking as it wedged solidly in the narrows below the town, was even at this distance deafening; and the mighty river, draining rain and melting snow off seven thousand square miles of wilderness, rammed that ice plug hard home till it was an impenetrable dam rising from the river bed high above the normal level of the water. Barred thus from escape to sea, the flood banked high and then recoiled; and like a herd of stampeding cattle which begins to mill and then to spill in every direction, it overflowed the banks on both sides, and it came in swirling torrents and eddies, with hissing, sucking sounds that were terrifying in the steamy blackness of the pitch-dark night, surging up across the low flats along the east bank of Kenduskeag Stream.
Elder Pittridge had no more than realized that the water was rising before it threatened to overwhelm him. He backed stubbornly away till he reached Exchange Street, knee-deep, thigh-deep, knee-deep again as he encountered inequalities in the ground; and he felt earth treacherously crumble under him, and a raft of loose floating planks banged against his legs in the darkness so that he found his way through them in half panic. He had been less quick than others to take flight, so the sound of human voices receded and he was alone in the midst of the flood. He worked clear of the floating lumber and sought to make greater haste; but even on Exchange Street he was thigh-deep. All around him in the night there were the sounds of panic flight, the crash of collapsing buildings, the crushing impact of collisions when ice masses pounded against frail, wooden walls still standing; and as he sought to wade up Exchange Street to higher ground, the church bells still sang in startling clangor in the town, their voices coming muffled through the thickening river fog.
The water was deeper all the time, so he swung aside into a narrow alley between two buildings—a store block on one side, a house on the other—thinking to escape that way more readily to dry land. All around him and between him and the Stream was dark, but he saw a lighted window on the second floor of the house beside him; and he looked up, and a woman opened the window and leaned out.
He could not see her face, but he knew who she must be. This was Lena Tempest’s house, and its fame was wide. He shouted to her: ‘Get out of there, quick as ever you can! The whole river’s coming in on you! Get your girls out quick, or you’ll all drown!’
Lena did not answer him. She drew back and closed the window and disappeared; and Elder Pittridge, in a sudden rage at her stupidity which cost her life, felt along the wall and found the door and thrust it open. Water was better than knee-deep inside. There were no lights on the ground floor, but a lamp was burning in the upper hall; and he raced up the stairs.
Lena came striding to meet him there. She had not kept that flaxen comeliness which she had worn fifteen years before. She was heavier, with the solid weight which muscular women sometimes put on; and her face was like a man’s, leathery and lined and strong; and her eyes were old and wholly wise and leaden, flat and without depth, like those of a fish. The only obviously feminine thing about her was an absurd and hideous set of frizzed curls, too brightly hued to match the color of her own faded yellow hair, which was pinned above her ears and dangled all askew across her brow.
She met Line at the stairhead and without a word set her hard hand against his face and pushed him backward. His nose bones grated as though that push which was half blow had broken them. His grip on the rail saved him from falling; but he was flung to his knees. He scrambled to his feet, two or three steps below her, and he shouted in pain and rage:
‘Come out of here, you fool!’ Then in that blazing voice of his, suddenly moved to a dark hysteria, he cried: ‘Come, you shameless trull! “Behold the works of the Lord, what desolation he hath made in the earth!” Jehovah has let loose the flood waters of the deep to purge away your iniquities!’
Lena said briskly: ‘I’ll purge you, you long, slick limb of hell! Get out of my house before I kick your ribs in!’ She gathered up her skirts to free her booted feet.
But before he could speak or move, a low voice came from that lighted room behind her; a low, laughing, familiar voice.
‘Why, that sounds like Elder Pittridge, Lena!’ said that voice in amused contempt. ‘Bring him in to me.’
He knew that voice. It was Jenny’s. Jenny was here!
V
When Elder Pittridge, Lena’s heavy hand upon his shoulder pushing him forward, came into that small, lighted room, he was already shaken and mumbling with astonishment and terror. He saw a bed in which a woman lay; but his eyes were blurred and blinded. Not till he came nearer did his vision dear.
This was indeed Jenny, lying here very small and frail, yet smiling mirthlessly up at him. He wetted his dry, cracked lips, trying to speak, staring down at her. After a moment and without a word she turned down the coverlet which covered her so that he could see the round poll of a baby, newly bom, there in the crook of her arm.
He shuddered in a sickening horror, and something made him remember that other infant which the ice had today engulfed. That unwanted baby had been thrown there by some lost girl; perhaps by one of the very girls whom Lena housed here and who now were fled to escape the flood. How many other babies, born in this house, had gone that same cold road to the sea? Perhaps before dawn this red and wrinkled infant, so like the other, would by Lena’s hard and ruthless hands be committed to the hungry, icy waters. He stared down at the small head in the crook of Jenny’s arm as though at a frightful apparition, shaking with convulsions like sobs.
Jenny spoke in mocking amusement. ‘Don’t look so scared, Line,’ she protested. ‘Aren’t you glad to see our daughter? Look! She’s not yet three hours old.’
He mumbled:
‘Ours?’ Then, in full, helpless comprehension: ‘Oh, my God!’
‘Yes, ours, of course,’ she told him in those low, calm tones which suddenly to him were terrible. ‘Why are you surprised, my dear? Can I not conceive and bear, like other women?’
‘But—why didn’t you tell—How could you hide——’ She laughed. ‘What are stays for, Line? But you remember Meg did say I was a little breathless sometimes! Yet it did our daughter no harm. She’s fine! Lena says she never saw a finer baby.’
Elder Pittridge looked around at Lena Tempest, a grim and scowling figure. How many other babies had her hard hands twitched into the world—to live a little while and die? ‘What are you going to do with her?’ he asked in dull terror, turning to Jenny again.
Jenny smiled. ‘Oh, just leave her here. Lena will take care of her. I can’t well take her home, you know. John would know she wasn’t his.’
‘Here?’ His heart recoiled. Here in this house? The river would be better than Lena Tempest’s house, for any girl child; and this baby was his child, sprung from his loins. He began to sob aloud in babbling delirium, his reason at last unseated, lost in the bitter winds that blow between the worlds.
Jenny watched him in amused, malicious contempt. ‘I think so, yes.’ Then, in icy scorn suddenly unmasked: ‘Do you think Lena’s house not good enough for her, Line, when she had such a father as you?’ Her voice was pitiless. She turned her head as though weary of him. ‘Lena, throw him out,’ she said.
Lena’s great hand clamped on Elder Pittridge’s nerveless arm. She propelled him to the stairs, pushed him headlong down.
VI
Water was deeper in the alley now. Elder Pittridge half-waded and half-swam through the icy flood, groping in darkness, his knees giving way, not knowing where he went or why. After Lena Tempest thrust him out into the night, no one wittingly saw him again. There was a rumor next day that a man whom no one knew, but who was obviously insane, had been seen beating himself sickeningly with his fists and writhing on the ground in self-inflicted pain till someone tried to seize him and he scrambled to his feet, screaming as he fought them off and ran away. There was another rumor that someone, trying to cross Smith’s Bridge through water waist-deep, had been overwhelmed by the raging stream; but this rumor was discredited. When after the flood subsided he was missed—great bales of temperance literature sent to him by Neal Dow for distribution accumulated on his doorstep and were never claimed—it was assumed that he had gone away; but no inquiry was made. He was gone, and none regretted him; gone forevermore.
VII
Dan Evered
1
DAN EVERED’S first memory
was of his mother. In this memory she sat in a big, comfortable chair by a sunny window in the front bedroom where she and his father slept; and the bed itself was disordered, so that he knew she had just left it. She was dressed in something soft and voluminous, with a cashmere shawl around her shoulders. The window was open and a warm breeze came in, and the air seemed to him in remembrance to have been faintly scented with a pleasant fragrance of roses. His mother in his early memories of her always smelled like roses.
On this day which he remembered, he and Will came into her room, and Will ran and climbed into her lap, and she cautioned him smilingly not to hurt their new little brother; and Dan drew nearer to see the very small, red baby with a wrinkled nose and eyes tight shut. The baby lay in the curve of his mother’s arm while Will perched on her knee; and Dan, since there was no room on her lap for him, moved away a little, feeling lonely and sad. His mother must have seen this, for she called to him in melting tenderness:
‘Danny boy—come here to me!’
So he pressed close to her, careful not to hurt the new baby, and she embraced them all three, hugging his head and Will’s together against her breast, laughing and crying at the same time; and Dan felt the soft warmth he loved, and smelled a sweet, milky, maternal smell, and she cried: ‘Oh, I’m so proud and happy with my three big, big boys!’
Dan did not think of himself as big, and certainly the new baby was absurdly small; but Aunt Meg came in while they were all there and she too exclaimed at the newcomer’s size. ‘I declare, Jenny,’ she cried admiringly, ‘you hardly show it beforehand, but they’re always tremendous!’ Jenny laughed, ignoring the fact that Dan was listening, assuming as older people so often and so unwisely do a lack of comprehension in children. ‘I know it,’ she agreed. ‘Dan weighed ten and a half pounds, and Will was almost eleven, and Tommy here was a little over ten.’
Aunt Meg cried admiringly: ‘And you don’t have a bit of trouble! It’s as easy for you as opening an umbrella, and you’re always up in no time afterward!’
‘Tommy’s only eight days old,’ Dan’s mother proudly assented.
So Dan could always date his first memory as going back to eight days after Tommy was born. During the next two or three years, his life began to be well studded with incidents which he remembered. Most of them were fun, but one was frightening. Usually his mother was quick to forgive his youthful crimes, but one day when he was not conscious of any wrongdoing, she summoned him up to her room; and there was something in her bearing which made him afraid of her. She closed the door and slipped the bolt on it and said quietly:
‘Dan, someone picked all my nasturtiums. Was it you?’
Dan, mysteriously alarmed by her tone, began to cry, ‘No, mother,’ he said, honestly enough. ‘Ruth picked some to bring in the house, but I didn’t pick any.’
‘Not even one, Dan?’ she insisted.
He had, it is true, picked one blossom. He knew this was against the rules of the garden in which his mother took such pride; but the one he picked had seemed to him particularly beautiful, and he had kept it secretly in his pocket till it was crushed and faded. He stood appalled at his own crime now, and she said in her even tones that could be so terrifying:
‘I saw you, you know, from my window. I must teach you not to tell lies, Dan.’
Then she made him take down his breeches, and she whipped him with a limber birch switch on his bare thighs. She whipped him almost savagely, yet in a controlled and quiet way which made him awfully afraid, so that he screamed as much from fear as from pain; and he heard Will howling in sympathetic terror outside the bolted door. Then suddenly his mother dropped the switch and caught him in her arms and carried him to the chair by the window and sat down there, hugging him and kissing him; and she was crying now too, not with tears, but with dry, shuddering sobs that made her shake all over, and whispering to herself in a terrible aching tone: ‘Oh, why do I? Dear God, why do I?’ In the end it was he who sought to comfort her, patting her cheek and kissing her and begging her in a sort of panic not to cry any more.
II
Dan loved his father as much as he loved his mother, but in a different way. Toward his mother he began while he was still very young to feel a devotion not only possessive—he always spoke of her to Will and the others as ‘our mother,’ while of John he always said simply ‘father’—but protective too. One morning he woke early and became conscious of a sound which he presently realized was his mother’s voice; but she was uttering strange, muffled cries, and he jumped out of bed and ran along the hall to their door and burst in, his eyes wide with alarm.
His father and mother were tussling together by the window, still in their nightclothes, standing in the streaming morning sun; and his mother was pounding at his father with her fists and he was laughing and dodging the blows and trying to catch her hands, and she was making growling sounds exactly like a cat till she saw Dan and said in a quick, low tone:
‘Don’t, John! There’s Dan!’
They faced Dan together, and she was as pink as a rose, and his father said amiably: ‘Hello, son. Anything wrong?’
‘I heard mama crying,’ Dan confessed. ‘I thought someone was hurting her.’
His father laughed. ‘We were just playing,’ he explained. He looked at Jenny and chuckled. ‘In fact, she
was hurting me, instead of its being the other way around! Did you see her pound me, Dan?’
Dan knew he did not completely understand, but also he knew that everything was all right. There was something warm and happy and comfortable in the very air of the room here; and he grinned and said: ‘She hit you some good ones, didn’t she!’
Jenny said tenderly: ‘Poor Dan, so scared, and running to protect his mother! Come in bed with me, darling, while papa gets dressed.’
Dan at that invitation whooped with delight, and his cry woke the other boys and they all came running for the rare and perfect treat of a lazy morning hour with her, climbing over her, squabbling for the privilege of being next to her, revelling in her nearness; and their father laughed at them and said they were like so many bugs in a rug, and went into his wardrobe to dress. But he called Dan in there to speak to him confidentially.
‘Don’t tell the other boys what you saw, Dan,’ he said. ‘Nor anyone else, for that matter. People wouldn’t understand. We’ll keep that a secret among the three of us, mother and you and me.’
Dan promised, and he kept his word; but he always remembered that morning because of the particularly strong and heartening and beautiful happiness which he had felt between them when he came into the room and afterward. He often had this sense of a rapturous and sweet communion between his father and mother; and once, shyly, he asked his mother about it, and she said:
‘That’s just because we love each other so, Dan.’
He never spoke of this to his father, feeling in the big man’s presence a reticence that was a part of his almost worshipful love and pride, so overpowering that he could not bear to think of it. When he was alone with his father he was shy, as a young girl may be in the presence of a man she admires. It was a rare thing for them to talk of any but impersonal matters; yet many things passed between them without the necessity of words. If John spoke of something that had happened in the city, telling Jenny how this man had behaved worthily, or that one had done ill, Dan early began to understand that his father was really speaking to him, teaching him to understand what things were a mistake and what other actions and principles were good and perfect altogether. John did not say to his sons: You must do thus; you must not do so and so. But he spoke of the deeds of others in terms of strong approbation or of sober disapproval, in words so simple and clear that even a boy could understand. While he was still a youngster, Dan began to acquire John’s code; and he knew his father was transmitting this code to him, and accepted it because what his father said was per se true. Good men did not lie. They did not cheat nor play devious tricks. They did not do one thing, nor refrain from doing another, because they were afraid. They were afraid of nothing but fear. They did not deviously evade responsibility for their actions. They did what seemed the best and wisest thing to do—and accepted for good or ill the consequences. They did not abuse their own strength nor take advantage of the weaknesses of others. Those beliefs and many another came little by little to be a part of Dan; they combined to form a pattern, a rule from which any deviation brought regrets.
The Strange Woman Page 47