The Strange Woman

by Ben Ames Williams

  ‘I don’t know, Dan. He went away.’

  IX

  At the time of the big flood, Dan’s father was up-river overseeing the drive. As the danger of high water became obvious to everyone, Dan begged his mother to take him to see the ice jam which began to fill the river from Old Town down; but she would not, and she forbade him to go near the river. During the week of suspense before the high water hit Bangor, she stayed much of the time in her room, appearing only for meals, moving stiffly about the house, declining Mrs. McGaw’s offers of small attentions.

  Saturday morning, Mrs. McGaw went to Brewer to see her daughter. This was her usual custom; but when Pat came home, he reported that the crisis of the flood was near. ‘It won’t be safe to go across the bridge to fetch Mrs. McGaw home, ma’am,’ he said. ‘The bridge might go out while I was on the other side.’

  ‘Then don’t risk it,’ she agreed. ‘Let her stay till the danger is past.’

  Dan cried: ‘Oh, mama, can’t we please go watch and see what happens? Please, mama! Pat can take care of us!’

  His mother hesitated. Her lips were white, and it was dear that she felt badly; but she said at last: ‘Why, yes, Dan, I think you may. All of you.’ They shouted with delight and she added: ‘If Pat will take care of you.’

  ‘To be sure I will, ma’am,’ Pat promised. ‘And it would be a pity for them not to see it, at that, for a rare sight it is.’

  ‘Only, be home by dark,’ she warned them, and Pat promised, and they all trooped down into town to watch the frantic efforts of those who along the riverfront worked to move lumber piles which a further rise of water might wash away. Pat held fast to Will and Tommy all the time, and Dan held Mat’s hand, and they clung to safe vantages, and came home at dark, so tired that even Dan was ready enough to go to bed right after supper.

  They missed the climax of the flood, which befell during that night; for not even the church bells woke them. Jenny did not come down to breakfast in the morning; and Ruth said she had left word that she might sleep late, might even stay abed all day and was on no account to be disturbed. Assuming her consent, Dan and the other boys, with Pat dutifully shepherding them, roamed the town to see the damage done by the now receding waters, to exclaim at the marks which showed that the flood had at one stage been seven feet deep in the stores on West Market Place, to hear how the Drew Block on Kenduskeag Bridge had been swung around cock-billed and then miraculously set squarely on its foundations again. Dan thrilled to the story of how when the flood invaded the post office, General Miller hurried the clerks up the stairs to safety, but one of them lingered below and the General shouted:

  ‘Hey, Calvin, what the hell you doing?’

  The lagging clerk answered cheerfully: ‘Coming right up. I had to wait to stamp these paid letters!’

  They saw in the lower streets huge ice blocks, masses twenty feet square, cast high and dry and left there to obstruct the highways till they melted away; and vessels building on the ways had been crushed or buried under mud and miscellaneous debris; and they came home at dusk with many a tale to tell. But Ruth said their mother was still asleep.

  ‘Or anyways, she hasn’t rung for me all day,’ she said, ‘and you’re not to go pestering her. Keep quiet too, and let her rest if she can. I’ve had sick headaches myself and I know what they can do to you.’

  So their reports of what they had seen had to wait till next morning when Dan went to listen at her door and she heard him and called him in. She was still in bed, and she looked so pale and weak and small that his eyes widened with concern.

  ‘Are you sick, mother?’ he asked huskily.

  ‘A little, Dan,’ she confessed. ‘But I’ll soon be all right now.’ She added: ‘The worst was Saturday night.’ There was an almost mischievous twinkle in her eyes. ‘I had something on my stomach that was bothering me, but I got rid of it, so I’ll be better soon.’ She told him to bid Ruth bring her breakfast. ‘I’ll need another day or two in bed,’ she said. ‘I get over these attacks quickly, just by resting, so don’t you worry, Dan.’

  She must have been pretty sick, Dan decided, for she stayed in bed all that week; and once, outside her door, Dan heard her crying in such a desperate and terrible way that he dared not even go in to comfort her. But most of the time she was cheerful, and he and the other boys spent long hours with her, telling her all about the flood.

  They did not tell her that Pat and Ruth thought someone had broken into the house Sunday night, because there were muddy footprints in the hall and on the stairs Monday morning; and also Pat had found where a cart had left the road below the house, cutting deep ruts and leaving hoof marks in the lawn. But nothing, so far as they could see, had been stolen out of the house; so at Ruth’s insistence they protected their mother from any alarm by telling her nothing at all till she was about again.

  When they did tell her, she said calmly that they must have imagined these things. She suggested that it might have been Dan’s shoes which tracked the hall and stairs and that the horse which wandered on the lawn was probably a stray. Dan saw that Pat Tierney did not accept these explanations, receiving them in silence, but Pat did not argue the point with her.

  Before John came home she warned them all to say nothing to him of these matters.

  ‘And don’t tell your father I was sick,’ she said. ‘It would worry him so.’

  2

  FOR MONTHS after the great

  flood, the wounds it had inflicted on the city still left their scars. The most conspicuous was the broken bridge. The superstructure had floated down-river as far as Bucksport where it was secured; but it would be a year before the bridge was rebuilt, and Mrs. McGaw had to go back and forth to her daughter’s home by the ferry. When Dan’s father returned, a fortnight after the flood, Dan and Will persuaded him to take them down to Bucksport to see the wreckage of the bridge at anchor there; and they in turn showed him all the ravage nearer home, excitedly describing the great event, delighted when he exclaimed in wonder and amazement. They were as proud of that flood as though it had been their own production; and John was satisfyingly impressed by all they showed him.

  That summer they made a sort of family pilgrimage—all six of them—to see Grandmother Evered in Freeport. Jenny had not wished to make the trip with them, and Dan heard her urge John to go and take the boys and leave her at home; but she was somehow persuaded, and once they were on the Portland steamer she seemed to have as good a time as anyone. Dan’s grandmother had several times come to visit them in Bangor, until as she grew older travel became burdensome; and Dan remembered her from these visits as a quiet little old woman with merry twinkling eyes, but who never had much to say. He had sometimes suspected that she was a little shy and afraid in their big house with the servants to wait on her and the roaring city so near; but at her own home on this visit she was charming, mistress of herself and of all about her, making them welcome in every way, showing the boys old treasured things that had belonged to their grandfather or their father, telling them hilarious tales of their father’s boyhood, telling them about her other sons. She and Jenny were happy together, too; and Dan’s mother seemed during, the visit now to love John as she used to. Dan himself felt that there was something mysteriously pleasing in the fact that although at home his father and mother had rooms of their own, here they shared the same bed; and his mother was rosy and bright all the time, and sometimes in ways Dan could not understand she teased his father, with twinkling eyes and words that did not seem to mean quite what they said. Yet Dan never felt that fine warming happiness in them which he had used to feel, and once he thought his mother was frightened and faintly desperate and unhappy, and he wished he knew how to comfort her.

  Before they left for home, Grandmother Evered gave each of the boys a ring. ‘I gave a ring to each of my own sons when they went away,’ she explained, ‘to remind them.’ Dan asked what the ring was to remind them of, and she told him: ‘To remind them that wherever they might go they were
still a part of our family, and that we were all sharing our common strength and were stronger because of it. You see a ring is strong, until there is a break in it. After it is broken, the rest of it is weaker because of that break.’

  Jenny told her: ‘In our family it is John whose strength we all share.’ And she said, as though she had only just remembered this: ‘When we built our house, I persuaded John to use a huge oak timber for the ridgepole, the roof tree; and I’ve always thought of that and John together. He’s the rooftree of our house, the keystone of our arch. We all lean on him and are strong for doing so.’

  Dan had seen that huge timber running the length of their attic home; but he had never heard this, and he found it deeply moving and beautiful. He saw Grandmother Evered’s eyes fill with pride.

  ‘My John’s a fine man,’ she assented.

  Jenny smiled, and said in that tone she always used when she was teasing John: ‘Yes, and so awfully strong!’ Dan was glad his father was not there to hear, for he knew her teasing during this visit had disturbed him.

  When they set out for the return journey, the gaiety and tenderness which she had worn at Grandmother’s fell away from her and she looked tired and sad; and on the steamer an hour after they sailed, Dan went down to her cabin to summon her to join them on deck and found her crying desperately, thrown across the bunk, sobbing aloud. He was frightened and tried to comfort her; but without lifting her head she pleaded in a choking passion:

  ‘Go away! Oh, for God’s sake, go away!’

  He felt like crying himself. On deck he drew his father aside and told him about her tears; and he saw John’s lips whiten. Then his father went below and later he and Jenny came on deck together and she was again serene.

  That was Dan’s only visit to his grandmother, although his father still went to see her every two or three months as he always had. When she died a few years later, Dan was surprised to find how sorry he felt, and how deeply he shared his father’s quiet grief.

  They took another trip that summer, down to Searsport to picnic on the shore and eat clams and lobsters with Aunt Meg and Captain Pawl, and Dan had an undefined impression that there was something queer in Aunt Meg’s appearance; but he did not at the time connect this with the fact that toward the end of summer she had a baby, a girl named Elizabeth. The birth of Aunt Meg’s baby seemed to Dan to write a finish to the brightest chapter in his life. He had loved her for years, and even after her marriage, the fact that Captain Pawl was years older than she, and bald besides, somehow made her seem younger and lovelier than ever, and still remotely attainable. But when now he heard about the baby, she receded forever beyond his reach. He thought of himself as nobly enduring an irreparable loss and wore for a few days an air of sad detachment which provoked impatient questions from his brothers, who accused him of putting on airs.

  II

  In October, Dan discovered that his career as an entertainer was not, as he had hoped, ended. His composure in a trying hour during the rendition of that famous dialogue had won him a reputation which he was now required to sustain. The first law regulating the sale of liquor in Maine had passed at last; and the Friends of Temperance, seeking to consolidate their gains and to prepare for new conquests, proposed to organize a ‘concert’ which should both win converts and earn money for the cause. For that occasion, Dan under his mother’s calm insistence was required to memorize a lengthy speech, an address originally delivered—as the title- page of the printed copy read—in ‘The Brick Meeting House in Danvers, before the Society in that town for Suppressing Intemperance and Other Vices and for Promoting Temperance and General Morality,’ by a man named George Osgood. Those tremendous packages of temperance tracts sent by Neal Dow, which after Uncle Line’s disappearance continued to arrive addressed to him, had been turned over to Dan’s father; and among them Dan’s mother discovered scores of copies of Mr. Osgood’s address, and thought it wonderful.

  She drilled Dan painstakingly in its delivery, teaching him what seemed to her appropriate gestures. Mr. Osgood had begun in the most pessimistic vein, announcing that: ‘Vice has been a prominent trait in the human character from the first history we have of man down to the present time.’ Dan’s mother taught him to deliver these gloomy words in slow and measured tones; and some of the sentences and paragraphs which followed would remain all his life deep graven in his mind. The words, ‘unused to declamation in public it is with no small degree of diffidence that I attempt it on a subject that requires so much delicacy in its management he was trained to speak with a proper and becoming humility; but when he recited the effects of intemperance, it was in ringing tones. ‘The use of ardent spirits weakens the strength of a nation. In some it impairs, in others totally obliterates, religion in the heart. It is an insidious but sure poison, destructive of the life of those who indulge in its use.’ There followed an engrossingly detailed discussion of the results on the stomach of such indulgence, and a suggestion for a well-balanced diet free from alcohol. A kind word was spoken for tea and coffee. ‘It is being too rigid to deprive the community of these dainties.’ Then came a pathological explanation of the way in which ardent spirits produce disease; an analysis of the economic ills to which indulgence leads; and a long passage describing the ‘secret sighs and silent tears’ of the family of the afflicted.

  Dan found a delicious pleasure in reciting, in a voice full of the most piercing sweetness, the paragraph which began: ‘It always affords pleasure to an ingenuous mind to dwell on those traits of the female character that adorn and add loveliness to their charms. We admire that modesty of deportment, that delicacy of sentiment and that purity of thought that characterize most of the fair sex.’ He always thought of Aunt Meg when he launched on this passage, and to remember her inspired in him a laudable eloquence.

  He memorized this address, and the day came when he found himself declaiming the rolling periods to an appreciative audience which included a large number of boys of his own age or a little older. The occasion was a meeting called to organize the Cadets, a junior order designed to attract those still too young to be members of the Sons and Daughters of Temperance. Dan’s mother was an instigator of this enterprise; and he, by virtue of his ability to stand on his feet and face an audience without losing the power of speech, became one of the leading spirits in the organization. As he approached his ‘teens he took it with some seriousness.

  This was partly because he thus found release from the increasing unhappiness of his life at home. There was no longer on Jenny’s part—so far as her private life was concerned—any pretense of affection for Dan’s father. Publicly she held toward him a loyal, proud and happy manner, moving graciously beside him; and to anyone who saw her thus—Dan, watching her, often wondered how she could be so different from her normal self—she and John would have seemed the pattern of an affectionate and self-respecting couple. But at home when she spoke to Dan’s father, her low, quiet tones more often that not were edged and stinging.

  She had a trick of showing young Pat Tierney an affection which Dan—who roundly hated him—could not understand; nor could he understand why this demonstrativeness on her part disturbed his father, but he knew this was true. One Sunday afternoon he and his father were inspecting the garden, appreciating the rich bloom everywhere; and she came out to join them, moving toward them down the lawn. Then Will raced around the corner of the house with young Pat on his heels in a game of tag, the other children trooping after them; and Dan’s mother called affectionately:

  ‘Oh, Pat! Come here. I haven’t seen you all day!’

  So Pat gave over the pursuit and came to her, and she put her arm around his shoulders and walked with him thus toward Dan and his father. But Pat wished to escape. ‘I’m “It,” Mrs. Evered,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to catch Will.’

  She smiled and kissed him. ‘All right, run along.’ He raced away and she said, looking toward her husband: ‘He’s such a dear boy, John. I think he has all his father’s sweetness, don�
��t you?’

  Dan had never thought of old Pat as sweet! In fact, for months now Pat had been dour and brooding, as though there were some unhappy secret in his mind; so Dan thought her remark rather silly. Also, he felt anger like actual heat in his father as John said quietly:

  ‘He seems to me a malicious, rather unpleasant, definitely dishonest little boy.’

  ‘Mercy!’ She laughed in a tinkling way. ‘Malicious! Dishonest! Well, perhaps he is; but don’t women have to learn to overlook such qualities?’ The words in themselves were nothing, yet her tone made them a reproach; and Dan was not surprised that his father turned away. When he was gone, Dan protested in sore distress:

  ‘Mother, what makes you so mean to father?’

  She smiled at him wistfully. ‘Do you feel that I am, Dan?’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ he said bravely. ‘He’s unhappy just about all the time when he’s at home. I guess that’s why he goes away so much.’

  ‘I’ve tried to make his home attractive to your father, Dan,’ she said in still tones. ‘But he finds happiness elsewhere—in what strange places I don’t always know.’

  For some reason beyond his own understanding, that made him angry to the point of tears. ‘He does not!’ he blurted. ‘He doesn’t either!’

  She said gently: ‘I hope you can always keep your faith in him, Dan. I trusted him, too, for years.’ She walked slowly away across the lawn, her head bowed, sadness in the very line of her shoulders, and Dan looked after her in an angry helplessness.

  III

  Dan was ten years old at the time of the flood. The golden days of ’49 ushered in his ’teens. California was far away, but gold was a magic word, and it ran on every tongue for weeks and then for months. From Bangor scores of men set out for California to make their fortunes. The Penobscot Mining and Trading Company, organized one night at the Bangor House, enlisted a hundred and twenty members, each contributing four hundred dollars to a general fund; and Pat Tierney caught the fever and added his name to the roll. They chartered Captain Pawl’s Lucy brig to carry them around the Horn to California, and Captain Pawl himself would command her on that voyage.