The Strange Woman

by Ben Ames Williams

  He brought a shawl which she drew about her head and they set out, Jenny with her hand on his arm hurrying him along Main Street to the head of Poplar. By that time they were particles in a stream of people rushing to see what was going on. At first the stream moved freely, but when beyond the Coffee House the crowd grew more and more dense, their advance was retarded. By the time they came to Barker’s store the street was packed; but once they had passed the corner by the store, they moved more easily through the milling tumult all around them.

  The focus of the disturbance was on Carr’s Wharf. Torches gave some flickering light, and nearer, at the landward end of the wharf, a bonfire illuminated faces all around them in the crowd. Ephraim said in Jenny’s ear: ‘Hold your shawl close so no one will know you.’ She did so. As other newcomers joined the spectators, earlier arrivals were explaining what was going on; so they had only to listen, had no need to ask questions. A young man near them shouted cheerfully to some inquirer:

  ‘Why, one of Ma Hogan’s girls stole his money off a sailor off the Merry Andrew brig, and they’re taking the house to pieces looking for it! They’ve got crows and axes and sledges and whatever! There won’t be much left of that house if they keep on.’

  Jenny, pressing Ephraim’s arm, urged him nearer; and they made their way to the front ranks of the watching crowd. While others went on down to the wharf to take a hand in the work of destruction there, they stopped, half-concealed by people still in front of them, yet able to see what went on.

  The woman called Ma Hogan had come to Bangor the year before and put up this house of rough sawed lumber which the mob now sought to demolish. It was a two-story structure, but the roof pitched only one way so that it was more like a shed than a house. On the wharf level the ground floor was divided into two rooms. One was a kitchen and the other combined the functions of bar, dining room and dance floor. A fiddle could usually be heard squeaking there till the small hours, and the hoarse laughter of men and the shrill emptiness of feminine mirth came all night long through the rough walls. At the farther end, outside the house, a steep stair led to the second floor which was cut up into small bedrooms under the low, slanting roof.

  Ma Hogan ruled her customers—sailors from the vessels at anchor here or lumbermen just in from the river or the woods—with a fist as heavy as a man’s; and for allies she had two husky individuals who did not scruple to use clubs when clubs were needed. Unruly men were apt to find themselves quickly and decisively spilled out of a door on the water side of the wharf and they usually emerged from the river with their belligerent ideas effectually cooled. If now and then it proved that one of those subjected to this treatment could not swim, no one was likely to discover the fact; and unless he could save himself, the river might carry him quietly to sea. Them as can’t stand a ducking,’ Ma Hogan used to say, with a fine philosophy, ‘had best behave theirselves the way a gentleman should.’ Her establishment had prospered, and so had she, and not a few of her sayings were already a part of the folklore of the town. She tolerated no complaints. ‘Them as orders my vittles eats them,’ she frequently declared, ‘and them as drinks my rum likes it, and them as takes a fancy to one of my girls treats her like a lady or I’ll know the reason why.’ She coupled with arrogance a sublime generosity and was as ready to give as to sell the wares her establishment provided. Her business creed was simple. ‘I’ll give any man anything he wants, or I’ll lend any man money—once!’

  She allowed no fighting in her place, nor any offensive language. ‘Not counting swearing and such,’ she always explained, ‘because a man can call a girl a God damned little bitch and mean nothing but that she’s the sweetheart he’s always been looking for. But bad language I won’t stand, and I hate nast’ness.’ It was her boast that a man could spend a winter’s pay in her place in twenty-four hours—and get his money’s worth—if he were man enough.

  But Ma Hogan and her establishment faced ruin and destruction now. Men with axes and crowbars swarmed upon the roof, while others smashed the windows and doors. Whenever a window was ripped out, or a door torn away, or shingles came showering from the roof, the crowd on the wharf dragged the debris to the bonfire to feed the flames there; and over the whole scene hung the continuous and appalling sound of the voice of the mob, compounded of many voices, some laughing, some drunken, some murderous with anger that grew by what it fed on.

  A man near Ephraim and Jenny, just arrived, demanded to know where Ma Hogan’s girls were; and someone answered him:

  ‘They dragged ’em out and swung ’em over the side of the wharf with ropes, gave ’em a good ducking and turned ’em loose. Ma Hogan’s still in there, though. You can hear her yell.’

  The inquirer, a little ratlike man, screamed excitedly: ‘God damn the Irish anyway!’ He darted forward to lose himself in the mob upon the wharf. Someone freed a rafter of the doomed house and pried it up and over, and it carried a section of the roof itself, which fell into the crowd, exposing the upper room where it had covered the posts of a bed. Men dragged the mass of boards and shingles to the fire, and some one threw the bed down to the crowd on the wharf and it too went to feed the flames. In that sudden glare Ma Hogan herself appeared in the roofless upper room, belaboring the men who were there trying to pry loose another rafter; and one of them turned and struck her in the face so that she fell. She rose unsteadily and came to stand facing the crowd, and in the light of the flames Ephraim saw her face a mass of blood, her dress torn, her hair disordered and hanging in straggling strands about her shoulders. She stood embattled there above the mob, and at sight of her a cry rose, like the cry of maddened animals.

  The woman shook her fists in the air and screamed inarticulately. Her scream brought a sudden shuddering hush, and everyone heard her word.

  ‘You God damned rats and cowards! You going to stand there and see them tear my house down? Ain’t there a God damned one of you with guts and blood in him enough to help me?’

  Someone laughed, and she whirled toward the sound. ‘Laugh, you stinking bastard! Come up here where I can see you and I’ll give you something to laugh at!’ And then in a fierce appeal: ‘Ain’t there one single solitary Irishman in the lot of you? No, by God, or he wouldn’t stand there and let men treat women so, that never did them any harm!’

  There was a shamed stirring in the crowd, but at first no one moved. Behind the woman, the wreckers wrenched loose another great segment of the roof and slid it over the plate, and it dropped to the wharf and was caught by many hands and carried toward the fire; and Ma Hogan turned to attack again, and single-handed, the men at their work of destruction. She picked up a broken rafter and swung it over her head, but a sailor grappled her, and a man shouted:

  ‘‘Heave the old bag overside! That’ll cool her off!’

  Four of them caught her up by arms and legs, and they swung her, one, two, three. They threw her off the roof and she fell fifteen or twenty feet with a rousing splash into the waters of the river. Her screams were choked as she struck the water, and a great shout of laughter rose. Jenny’s fingers tightened hard on Ephraim’s arm, and some one threw a rope to the woman in the water and dragged her to the wharfside at its landward end, and she climbed up on the wharf again and stood, the centre of a hooting ring of men; and a man near Jenny and Ephraim in the crowd growled:

  ‘Faith, I’ll stand no more of that! A hundred men against one woman! Who’s for it?’

  A dozen others started forward with him, not together, but singly here and there; and Ephraim thought all of them were Irishmen. They plunged past the fire toward Ma Hogan’s side, and instantly the tumult on the wharf, which though destructive had before been good-natured enough, became a battle, where fists and then clubs flew with a fine impartiality.

  Ephraim felt Jenny beside him stir as though with a half-caught breath; and he looked down at her and saw her standing in a sort of ecstasy, her eyes shining. He tried to drag her away but she whispered passionately: ‘No, no, no!’ not looking a
t him, watching the conflict. The mob consisted mostly of sailors from the vessels here to load with lumber; but when now half their number of Irish laborers charged forward to take Ma Hogan’s part, from the crowd of spectators, raftsmen and woodsmen and rivermen surged forward on their heels. The smaller group of rescuers, thus attacked from behind and facing a superior enemy in front, were overwhelmed in a moiling confusion of blows given and taken. Men began to go over the edge of the wharf, sometimes knocked backward by a blow, sometimes driven by the impetus of a kick, sometimes heaved bodily by three or four men at once.

  One man broke through and tried to escape, running toward where Jenny and Ephraim stood, and another threw a club and it caught the fugitive in the shoulder with a crack of breaking bones, and he went down and tried to rise. He was on his hands and knees when the foremost of his pursuers jumped on him, feet first, knocking him flat. Then two or three men jumped up and down on him and kicked at him till he ceased to struggle and lay supine and senseless on the ground, not twenty feet from where Jenny and Ephraim stood.

  The crowd swirled between, shutting off their view, and someone shouted: ‘God damn the Irish! Let’s kill every one in town!’ The crowd of spectators began to stir and mill like angry bees, and Ephraim gripped Jenny’s arm.

  ‘Come away!’ he urged in a sudden alarm. ‘This is getting worse all the time. Come home!’

  She brushed him aside with a sort of violence—she was as tall as he and quite as strong—gliding forward to where the senseless man lay on the ground. Ephraim followed her, and as the crowd surged around them, he saw that she was on her knees, peering at the unconscious Irishman in a dark absorption. The man was breathing hardly at all. He lay limp and helpless as a rag, and his face was a mask of blood, his lips cut and torn, his eyes swollen, his nose crushed. The fire gave light enough to see, and Ephraim was sick at the sight. He caught Jenny’s arm again, drew her to her feet, swung her roughly toward him.

  ‘Come home!’ he cried.

  For answer, she flung her arm around his neck, dragged his head down, pressed burning, breathless lips to his, holding him for a moment helpless in that searing embrace. Then before he could move she turned and ran. He stood a moment paralyzed, till she was lost in the crowd.

  He searched for her awhile in vain, at last turned homeward. There was in him amazement and yet terror too. Ephraim knew enough of light and laughing passion; but Jenny, in that moment when she held him fast, had been like a devouring flame. He half-dreaded seeing her again.

  On Main Street, near their own door, he overtook her. She was walking unsteadily, her feet dragging as though from some great weariness. He caught her arm to support her.

  ‘Are you hurt?’ he asked.

  She shook her head. ‘No, I’m all right.’

  They came into the silent house. She started at once up the stairs, holding to the rail, pulling herself upward step by step. In spite of himself, he spoke her name in a husky whisper:

  ‘Jenny!’

  But she did not turn. In the hall above he heard a moment later the quiet closing of her door.

  3

  EPHRAIM was not a complex

  young man, and after his brief experience of outright dissipation he had acquired from John Evered some firmness and strength. In that moment when Jenny kissed him, he forgot everything but her; but lying long awake that night, he remembered that she was his father’s wife; and before he slept he decided that life here in the same house with her and his father must become intolerable. If he stayed, there could be but one end; and the thought, even while it inflamed him, filled him with shamed horror too. He made up his mind to go away.

  He came down in the morning determined upon this; but when Isaiah and Jenny appeared together at the breakfast table, she was as she had always been, serene and beautiful, wearing a purity of countenance which made him doubt his own memory of what had happened the night before. She bade him good morning as she always did, and Isaiah barked at him, and they sat down. It seemed to Ephraim incredible that she should be this morning so composed. He did not in the least understand what had happened the night before; assumed—as wiser men might have assumed—that Jenny had for a moment yielded to an overwhelming passion for him which she could not control. If she had now said openly to her husband: ‘Isaiah, Ephraim and I love each other. You must let us be happy together.’ It would not have surprised him so much as the fact that last night had left upon her no mark at all.

  The meal began. Ruth came in to serve them, and Ephraim, his eyes on his plate heard Jenny ask her quietly:

  “What is it, Ruth? You’ve been crying.’

  ‘It’s Pat Tierney, ma’am,’ Ruth unsteadily explained. ‘There was trouble in town last night, and crowds of no-goods hunting down all the Irish, and they caught poor Pat and broke his leg for him.’

  Isaiah cried sharply: ‘Eh? What’s that? Speak up, girl! What are you talking about?’

  Ruth began to cry openly, dabbing at her eyes. She told the story, and Jenny, pretending ignorance of the events of the night before, asked as many questions as Isaiah did. Ruth said that after the destruction of Ma Hogan’s house was completed, the mob’s lust for violence remained unsatisfied; and men had run to and fro through the town, searching out the boarding houses where most of the Irish lodged. Pat had been decently at home and in bed when they routed him out and threw him—as those four men had thrown Ma Hogan off the wharf—out of his own window.

  ‘So he sent word, Mis’ Poster,’ she explained, ‘that his leg’s broke and he can’t come if you was to want him today.’ She added fearfully: ‘And there’s some hurt worse than him, they say, and crowds chasing the Irish on the streets everywhere, and fighting and all.’

  Isaiah’s wrath rose with her every word, till Jenny dismissed her at last. ‘Poor Pat!’ she said, when the girl was gone. ‘I must go see him, see that he’s well taken care of.’ She said chidingly to Isaiah: ‘That’s what can happen in a town full of grogshops; drunkenness and fighting, and men hurt and killed. You have to expect it.’

  Isaiah told her in shrill scorn: ‘Don’t talk like a fool! With the town full of sailors and lumbermen all summer long, you’ve got to have places like that. If you didn’t, they’d go somewhere else to spend their money. It’s good for business.’ He admitted that every lazy idler in town hated the Irish. ‘But they’re good workers, and we need ’em.’ He arrived at last at a conclusion which satisfied him. As a town, Bangor had nothing like a police force. ‘But we’ve got to have one,’ he declared. ‘That means a city gov’ment. It’s high time, too. Town meeting’s so big now, with every man jack wanting to talk, that you can’t get any business done. A city gov’ment’s what we need, and I aim to see we get one.’

  II

  Ephraim took no part in this discussion, watching Jenny, wondering at her ability to dissemble so that no one could have suspected her of any first-hand knowledge of the events the night before. But when breakfast was done and before they left the table, he spoke of his decision to leave home, coming to the point abruptly and without preamble.

  ‘There’s a matter I want to talk to you about, sir,’ he told his father in grim resolution. ‘I’ve been thinking I might go back to Boston and find work there.’

  Isaiah stared at him. ‘Want to leave, do you?’ he echoed scornfully; and then in a sharp ire: ‘Might have known you would, soon’s you got so you was some use to me! What do you want to leave for?’

  Ephraim had not expected to be asked for reasons. His father had resented his homecoming; he supposed the older man would welcome his departure now. ‘Why, I’ve been thinking it over,’ he said lamely.

  Isaiah grunted. ‘Go if you’re a mind to,’ he said gruffly; but there was something almost like pain in his tones, and Jenny spoke quietly.

  ‘I think your father needs you here, Ephraim,’ she said.

  Her voice, the way she spoke his name, was enough to weaken Ephraim’s resolve. ‘Who, me?’ he protested. Then to Isaiah: �
��I didn’t know I was any use to you, sir.’

  ‘Well, you might be some day,’ Isaiah told him grudgingly, ‘if you keep on. I’ll say this for you, you don’t make mistakes. But if you don’t like it here, why, then go to Boston and be damned to you! I won’t stay you.’ His voice rose in shrill exasperation. ‘Only, if you go, don’t look to come meeching back again. If you go this time, I’m through with you.’

  Ephraim repeated: ‘Why, I didn’t know you wanted me. I won’t go right away, anyway. If I’m any help to you, of course I’ll stay.’

  Isaiah said harshly: ‘Suit yourself. I got along without you once, and if I have to, I can again.’

  He stumped away to his office. Ephraim would have followed him, but Jenny spoke his name and he hesitated. She looked at him with frank candor.

  ‘I think,’ she told him honestly, ‘that it’s because of me you want to go away.’

  He did not speak and she said: ‘I was—excited last night, Ephraim. I ask you to forget it—for your father’s sake. He needs you. He has done so much for me, I wouldn’t want to send you away from him.’

  She smiled appealingly. ‘He leans on you more and more, Ephraim,’ she said. ‘On you and me. We must help him, keep him happy, every way we can.’ So Ephraim stayed on.

  III

  The disorders in the town continued for a day or two, till the group of sober and resolute men whom Captain Bryant organized to patrol the streets restored peace again. Isaiah did not forget his belief that Bangor needed a city government; but in the profitable business season, as is the way of democracies, leading men of the town were too occupied with their own affairs to give much time to a discussion of the public good, so for the moment nothing was done.

  When Isaiah saw that Ephraim had abandoned his plan to go away, he began to entrust his son with more and more of his affairs. Also, there was another change in his attitude toward the younger man. At first after Ephraim’s homecoming Isaiah had watched him and Jenny with a jealous suspicion; but now, as though regretting his former distrust and wishing to make up for it, if Jenny proposed to go somewhere and asked for his company, he was apt to send Ephraim as his substitute.