The Strange Woman

by Ben Ames Williams

  When Miss Clarke gave a course of ten historical lectures in the school- house on State Street, though there were some who thought it deplorable that a woman should put herself forward as Miss Clarke did, Jenny persuaded Isaiah to subscribe for the course and they attended the lectures. They likewise joined the Lyceum, and the Literary Club.

  But in addition to her constant appearances, silent but devoted, at Isaiah’s side, Jenny had activities of her own. In the second year after they were married, a niece of Mrs. Amos Patten died of consumption which was attributed to the fact that she had laced herself too tightly; and an attempt was made to organize a society for the reform of female dress, to crusade against the wearing of busks, boards and stays, and equally against the custom of supplementing the deficiencies of the female figure with cushions, pillows, bolsters and other padding.

  Jenny was the moving spirit in this enterprise, and she counted on Mrs. Patten’s support. Mrs. Patten was an older woman, in her early forties. She was a daughter of Captain Isaac Hatch and her brother Tom and her mother still kept that tavern on Main Street where Captain Barrie had cut the spigots off the rum barrels with his sword; so she was not a wholehearted convert to the temperance cause of which Jenny was already a leading advocate. Nor was she enthusiastic about Jenny’s proposal to reform female dress, and though Jenny had some youthful converts, Mrs. Patten remained skeptical.

  ‘It’s all very well for you, child,’ she warned Jenny. ‘And for young scrippets like you! You’ve a waist like an hourglass, and a nice high front, and you’re not flat behind like most women; but wait till you’ve had a few babies and begin to get a middle-aged spread. You’ll be driven to stays and ruffles and bustles like the rest of us!’

  Nevertheless the society was duly organized, and there were enthusiastic meetings for a while; but the young wives who were the most ardent supporters of the new doctrine presently found that physical facts overruled their zeal, and one by one, as the members themselves waxed, the membership waned.

  III

  In April of the second year after Jenny and Isaiah were married, the First Parish Meeting House burned. The fire was blamed on an incendiary. Five years before, a half-witted boy named Friend Watson had set fire to Mr. Chick’s stable, and that fire spread and burned over all the territory between Main, Fish and Water Streets. The boy was locked up at the poorhouse as of unsound mind; but he had had imitators since. They were prompted perhaps by a desire to witness the pleasant hullabaloo which attended a conflagration; but whatever the motives, arson was the most common major crime in Bangor, and the fire which destroyed the church had certainly been set. The Selectmen offered a five hundred dollar reward for the discovery of the criminal, but he was never found.

  The church burned to the ground, destroying the organ and partially fusing the bell which Mr. Bussey had given the congregation, but plans for a new church were at once put under way, and within a few months it was completed. It stood on the old location, a square building with a white steeple at each of the four corners. Isaiah told Jenny: ‘It looks to me like a table turned upside down, with the legs sticking up in the air.’

  But no public dissatisfaction with the architecture was voiced. Calvin Edwards made the new organ, and Mr. Bussey’s bell was recast, though the splendor of its original tone could never be recaptured.

  The new structure was paid for by the sale of pews; and Isaiah was proud of the fact that Jenny took the lead in selling them, working through the wives of the members upon their husbands, organizing a pew committee which was so successful that after the hundred and thirty-four pews had been sold, not only was the church paid for but some two thousand dollars additional was turned over to the church treasury. By her activity in this work, the position which Jenny all her life would hold as a leader among the women of the congregation was established beyond disputing.

  IV

  Jenny, born in Bangor, had never been farther away than Castine in one direction, Old Town in the other, till three years after her marriage Isaiah took her with him on a business trip to Houlton. He had not planned to do so, but she proposed it. ‘There’s been so much talk about Houlton and the boundary disputes and all that I’d like to go,’ she said; and when Isaiah hesitated, she protested teasingly: ‘You’re afraid I’ll see some of those handsome soldiers there, the ones that were here three years ago.’

  This had not occurred to him, and the possibility disturbed him now; but to prove to himself that he did not fear the competition of uniforms, he agreed that she should go along. They were three days on the way, travelling by stage over the military road which had been cut by the troops since their coming and which except for an occasional stretch that was still unfinished and miry was good enough, lodging at night in crowded small taverns where Jenny was sometimes the only woman in the place.

  Houlton was a town of about fifty houses, with a fort and a customhouse, and Mars Hill, bold on the horizon to the northward, lifted its crown above the forested lands between. Isaiah’s business there was to meet a Scot named Gillies whom he had dispatched some weeks before to make an exploratory trip through the northern wilderness in search of pine lands worth the purchasing. They were beforehand, and they put up at the tavern to wait his arrival. At the common table the first evening they were joined by a man with his wife and two sons, and the man immediately fixed his attention so sharply on Jenny that Isaiah stiffened in resentment. The man seemed to be in his middle forties, astonishingly untidy in his dress, yet with a certain grace and zest in all his movements. His nose was his dominant feature, beneath a broad, square brow and above a narrow, mobile mouth embraced in deep lines that ran down from his nostrils.

  He continued to stare at Jenny so intently that Isaiah, sitting beside her, pulled his brown wig—which Jenny had soon after they were married persuaded him to substitute for his familiar skull cap—tighter on his head with an angry gesture; and the movement attracted the other man’s attention. He spoke to Isaiah, smiling in a sudden fashion full of charm.

  ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘I should like to make a drawing of your daughter. My name is Audubon, and drawing is my profession. It is true that I prefer to draw the likenesses of birds and of animals, but I draw people too, supporting myself in this way on the travels necessary to find the subjects I seek. Yet your daughter is of such a beauty——’

  Isaiah interrupted him with a harsh violence. ‘This is my wife, man, not my daughter!’

  The other looked at him and then at Jenny, and there was a twinkle in his eye; but his tone was grave and full of respect. ‘My apologies, sir, and my compliments too. You are a brave man! Yet I would still beg your permission to make a likeness of Madame.’

  Isaiah was confused, beyond his depth. ‘I don’t know about that,’ he admitted; but Jenny said smilingly:

  ‘Let him try it, Isaiah. I’ve never seen myself through anyone else’s eyes.’

  Audubon added his urgencies to hers, and as a warrant of his capacities, he showed Isaiah the portfolio of drawings which he had just completed in his travels through the Provinces. He made a sketch of Jenny next day, Isaiah sitting jealously near; and even before it was done, Isaiah, watching it approach completion, proposed to buy it. Mr. Audubon of course assented, but when he suggested a price of twenty-five dollars, Isaiah objected with such violence that Audubon bowed and said in an edged tone: ‘Then take it, my friend, with my compliments! I give it to you as a tribute to a very beautiful young woman.’

  ‘Don’t want it as a gift!’ Isaiah protested. ‘I’m willing to pay a fair price!’

  Audubon shrugged. ‘Who is to say what is a fair price?’ he countered. ‘Perhaps it is worthless, perhaps priceless. You and I are too near the subject to judge,’ He turned to Jenny. ‘Let Madame decide,’ he proposed, and put the sheet of drawing paper in her hands.

  Jenny when she took it was smiling; but after she had looked at it her smile faded. She studied her image for a long moment, and then, still staring at it, she said in her quiet
tones: ‘Buy it, Isaiah.’

  Isaiah hesitated. ‘Fifteen dollars?’ he suggested, turning to the painter.

  But before Audubon could reply, Jenny repeated, no more loudly but with a cold violence in her very quietness: ‘I said, buy it, Isaiah!’

  She watched them with level eyes while the money was paid over, the full price. Then she asked: ‘Now is it mine?’

  Audubon, a little puzzled, said: ‘But certainly, Madame.’

  Jenny nodded, and then, very carefully, she tore the drawing from top to bottom, and across again and again in an increasing violence till the whole was reduced to scraps. She threw them on the floor. She rose from her chair and took one step toward Audubon. Her cheeks were blazing.

  ‘If my husband were a younger man he would kill you,’ she said in controlled tones. ‘If I were a man I’d kill you myself!’

  Isaiah stared at her, dumb with astonishment; but Audubon after a moment laughed, and he bowed. ‘Thank you, Madame!’ he exclaimed. ‘I perceive that my portrait was a good one!’

  Isaiah, completely bewildered, looked from one to the other, protesting querulously: ‘What’s that for, Jenny? What did you go and do that for?’ But for a moment Jenny did not speak. She stared at the scattered fragments on the floor; and then suddenly her anger passed and she smiled and touched the artist’s arm.

  ‘You and I have eyes,’ she said quietly, and turned and left the room. Isaiah delayed a moment to say something apologetic about feminine vapors; but Audubon, careful not to smile, bowed again and said politely: ‘Sir, I think Madame—unwittingly and certainly unwillingly—paid me a very high compliment.’

  Isaiah blinked, more perplexed than ever; but before he could pry further into this mystery, a boy brought word that the man he expected had arrived. Audubon went with him to meet the woodsman.

  V

  Donald Gillies was a small, lean, tireless Scot, at this time in his later thirties; and he had long since demonstrated to Isaiah his reliability. He had a dry humor, and such a keen appreciation of his own jests that others less perceptive sometimes thought he laughed not at anything that had been said but at his listeners. With a party of sixteen men, carrying as provisions two hundred and fifty pounds of bread and a hundred and fifty pounds of pork, he had started up-river from Old Town in canoes, weeks before. They ascended the Penobscot almost due north to the Seboois Lake region, threaded the lakes northwesterly, carried across to Allegash waters, and came down that stream and the St. John’s, with occasional portages, to Woodstock, whence they crossed to Houlton.

  Audubon and Isaiah listened to Mr. Gillies with an equal interest now. ‘About twelve hundred miles I make it, for the whole trip,’ the little Scot told them. ‘And I’ll draw you up a map, Mr. Poster, that will tell the tale better than words.’

  Of much of the territory they had visited there were as yet no surveys.

  ‘I’ll lay it out by days’ journeys, Gillies explained. “I kept compass courses and bearings all the way, and tallied all the pine in sight.’

  Audubon asked eagerly how this was done; and Gillies explained: ‘Why, we’d climb tall trees and take a look around; or hills or mountains. The pines stand up fifty-sixty feet, sometimes more, over everything else.’ He told Isaiah: ‘I took a look at some of it that was handy; all good clean stuff. Didn’t see a tree the whole time.’

  The artist had many questions about the wild life of the region visited, both birds and beasts; and Gillies was amused at his interest in such unimportant matters. ‘I’d not know one bird from another,’ he declared. ‘I might have heard a pigeon-woodpecker rattle and never notice it, and like as not there were eagles and fishhawks along the way, and I mind seeing a few broods of scurry ducks on the river.’

  Audubon demanded to know what scurry ducks were; but Gillies shook his head. ‘All I know, they’re hard eating,’ he declared. ‘We did shoot a few, tried ’em every way. The first, we skinned ’em and put ‘em in the stew-pot with a flat rock on top and boiled ‘em till we could stick a knife through the rock.’ He slapped his knee and laughed, but Audubon looked at him in such a puzzled way that he sobered again and added: ‘After that we’d skin ’em out and tie a string to ’em and let ’em hang in rips of the quickest water we could find all night, and then go out in the morning and cut the string!’ He chuckled once and added: ‘We found some trout that had worked theirselves to death chawing at those ducks all night, but even the trout were too pore to eat after that.’

  He laughed again, till he saw that Audubon was not amused. ‘But animals, then?’ the artist insisted. ‘Surely you saw many wild creatures?’

  Gillies shook his head. ‘I did not,’ he said. ‘I was looking for pine, mind you.’ Then his eyes twinkled and he made one last attempt at humor. ‘The only animal I had an eye for at all was a porcupine, but then that’s one kind of pine.’

  VI

  Jenny’s experience with Mr. Audubon had a sequel. Isaiah reproached her for destroying the drawing just after he had paid a round price for it; and he insisted that he had liked it well.

  ‘Of course, Jenny, it wasn’t so beautiful as you are, but all the same, it pleased me,’ he said.

  Jenny was apparently contrite enough. ‘Something about it made me hate it,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know myself in it. I didn’t like myself. But next time, I won’t lose my temper, Isaiah.’

  Isaiah was not sure there would be a next time, since though Audubon had travelled with them as far as Bangor he was now gone on his way.

  When Isaiah spoke of the incident to Amos Patten, however, Amos offered a substitute. ‘If it’s a likeness of Mrs. Poster you’re wanting, take her to Mr. Hardy,’ he suggested. ‘He’s a good hand at it, and he could do fine for you, to be sure.’

  So that summer Jenny sat for her portrait a second time. Jeremiah Hardy, although he lived in Hampdon, had opened a studio on York Street, walking the seven miles to and from his home each day. He was at that time in his early thirties, and fairly launched on his career. As a youngster of fourteen in Hampden, he had seen the British overrun the town, and had watched from a safe distance the casual skirmish which led to the flight of the American militia. He had even then begun to show an aptitude for draughtsmanship, and also for engraving; and his first plates were graved on sheet copper which he salvaged from the wreck of the Adams, diving at low tide to strip off the sheathing on her bottom. At sixteen he painted a portrait of his sister, Mary Ann, which pleased his father so much that he was sent to Boston to study at Mr. Brown’s Academy; and he opened a studio for a while in Boston, till he came home to marry Catherine Wheeler in Hampden and settle there.

  He was a man with a wide, flexible mouth and a long upper lip under his hawk’s nose. His eyes, a little inclined to frown with the intensity of the gaze which he turned upon his sitter, were widely spaced and keen; and Isaiah, when he went with Jenny while she sat for him, saw with some misgivings that she watched the artist with a grave absorption, occasionally cocking her head a little on one side in that way which was always natural to her. Half-fearing she would treat the canvas as violently as she had Mr. Audubon’s drawing, Isaiah made it a point to be present at every sitting. When Mr. Hardy, so that he could watch the play of her features and her changing expressions, led Jenny to talk, and Isaiah saw in her an animation he himself had never evoked, he stirred uneasily. He was relieved when the portrait was done, and he paid Mr. Hardy’s fee, thirty dollars for the portrait and sixteen dollars for the frame, with never a word of argument, and took the portrait home with a sense of escape.

  Jenny had chosen to be painted in a black dress of heavy silk, with puffed sleeves and a tight-fitting bodice buttoned down the front, topped with a lace yoke and collar. For her sittings she put her hair in prim order, parted demurely in the middle and drawn back so that her ears showed. Her hair was naturally almost straight, but she arranged for these sittings soft curls above each ear and in front of the heavy knot at the back of her neck. The portrait emphasized her
broad brow and strong mouth and chin; and the strange purity of her countenance, which would always persist, was perfectly caught by the painter’s brush. Only in the faintly lifting brows, which, rising from the bridge of her nose toward her temples, curved scarcely at all, and in the eyes, which, while they were wide and frank, yet had on closer scrutiny no expression whatever, was there a suggestion that Mr. Hardy had sensed and perhaps had caught and laid on canvas something in Jenny that was calm, remote, potentially cruel and unshakably strong.

  If she saw this in the finished likeness, she did not protest, and to Isaiah the portrait seemed perfection. It was admired by everyone who saw it, and he hung it over the mantel in the big dining room, directly above Jenny’s usual seat at table; and when he sat facing her, looking from her to the painting above her head, he saw her in duplicate and did not know which was the more beautiful, the reality or its counterfeit.

  But at the same time he was made uneasy by the fact that Jenny spoke often of Mr. Hardy, and that sometimes she insisted on Isaiah’s taking her to the studio to see any new work upon which the artist might be engaged. Isaiah was so delighted with the portrait of Jenny that he felt he had driven a sharp bargain with the painter, and he had a certain sense of guilt whenever he met Mr. Hardy; but also Jenny’s persistent interest in the man himself was faintly disturbing.