The Strange Woman

by Ben Ames Williams

‘Who, me?’ he muttered, paralyzed and trembling.

  She almost laughed. ‘You always say that, you scared boy!’

  He caught her fiercely close, all bonds for a moment loosed, straining her in his arms in a long embrace; and she held him as though she would never let him go. But then suddenly she pushed him away, murmuring: ‘Quick! I hear Mrs. Hollis.’

  Mrs. Hollis, in fact, was coming along the hall. Ephraim darted toward the door into Isaiah’s room, was in time to meet her as she entered.

  ‘Mrs. Poster fainted,’ he said carefully. ‘I carried her in, put her to bed.’ And he added, looking toward the bed where his father lay: ‘Doctor Mason thinks he’ll die before morning.’

  He was astonished at his own tones, cold and steady and calm. It seemed impossible that in this moment, when every nerve in his body was jangling like snapped wires, he could speak so quietly.

  5

  ISAIAH did not die that night.

  Ephraim and Mrs. Hollis stayed with him, Jenny for once surrendering to sleep; and in the small hours, Mrs. Hollis discovered that Isaiah was perspiring. The fever had broken.

  She cried exultantly: ‘So he’ll get well, if he’s careful, Ephraim. That shows you how much a doctor knows!’ She went into the small adjoining room to wake Jenny and tell her the glad news; and Ephraim heard her say: ‘Wake up, child. Listen! He’s broke out in a sweat. I’ve seen enough old men sick the same way to know the signs. He’s going to get better!’

  Jenny, drugged with sleep, echoed stupidly: ‘Get better? Isn’t he going to die?’

  ‘That he is not!’ Mrs. Hollis assured her. ‘He’ll be as well as ever, and better, maybe, and he has you to thank for it, taking care of him every minute.’

  Ephraim heard Jenny wail wretchedly: ‘Oh, I wanted him to die! Why doesn’t he die?’

  Mrs. Hollis cried tenderly: ‘Hush now, darling! You’re so wore out you don’t know what you’re saying. You go back to sleep again. You’ve done your job, taking care of him. Now I’m going to take care of you.’

  So Jenny was silenced, and Mrs. Hollis came back into the sickroom. She was right in her prognosis. Isaiah when he woke knew them. He was still helplessly weak; but during the days that followed he mended fast, and Mrs. Hollis plied him with rich broths, and strength flowed back into him. He was not yet able to go abroad at the first balloting for city officers on the tenth of March, but in the next election he cast his vote for Allen Gilman, who was elected Mayor. By the time the ice went out of the river on the eighth of April, he was—or seemed to be—as well as he had been for years.

  II

  But Jenny did not recover so rapidly as he. She lay for days listless and dull, having no interest in food nor even in life itself; and Mrs. Hollis cared for her, letting no one see her.

  ‘The poor baby’s just wore down to nothing,’ she told Ephraim. ‘She’s nought but skin and bones, and she won’t more than pick at her vittles. I did think maybe seeing him would help her, but she’s that sick in her mind that she said she never wants to see him again! She’ll get over that when she’s herself again. She mostly sleeps, or lets on that she’s asleep, the whole day long; and the dear lamb needs every minute of it. She’ll be better by and by.’

  Ephraim wondered whether Mrs. Hollis was right in thinking that Jenny’s unwillingness to see Isaiah was only a symptom of her great weariness. Remembering that moment when he had carried her to her bed, that moment when her thin and nervous arms drew him down and her parched lips bruised his, he thought Jenny had come to hate Isaiah, as youth may hate age and its wasted, desiccated ugliness.

  The story of Jenny’s devoted attention during Isaiah’s illness was well circulated; and when as her energy began to return she could see her friends again, even though for a further while she did not come downstairs, the good women of Bangor called to praise her for her courage and to commiserate with her weakness now.

  Ephraim had not seen her during these weeks; but as Mrs. Hollis and presently Isaiah began to report that she was better all the time, he at once longed for and feared the moment when they would meet again. The memory of how she tugged him down and kissed him was like a great bell clanging in his ears. He thought again, as he had thought before, of going away, never to return; yet to do so was something of which he knew in his heart he would never be capable. There was no moment when he was not conscious of his danger. He was like a swimmer in the outer fringes of a whirlpool who might still if he were resolute and strong escape, yet who allows himself to drift in wide circles which—imperceptibly narrowing—bring him always nearer the vortex, till he is caught beyond salvation.

  During this period when he saw her not at all, half hoping to involve himself in a trap which would at the same time offer him security from the thing he at once dreaded and desired, he went more and more often to Ruth at night. Mrs. Hollis was living in the spare room, and she was up at all hours and might have discovered him; and he told himself he wished she would, so that he would have to marry the girl. Also, if Ruth became pregnant, marriage would be demanded of him, and he thought of marriage to Ruth as a safe harbor to which he might flee. Yet he would not seek this refuge without compulsion.

  His hours with Ruth brought him no satiety. It was easy in the darkness to pretend that she was Jenny; but the pretense inflamed him without bringing him content. During this interval when he did not see Jenny at all, she possessed him more completely than ever before.

  III

  Yet when Jenny at last began to come downstairs for a while in the afternoon, Ephraim avoided being alone with her. He attached himself to Isaiah, staying close by his father’s side; and Isaiah came to rely upon him more and more. They drew together, and a bond began to form between them, as though Isaiah in his old age clung hard to that part of himself which after he was dead would still survive in the person of his son.

  If Isaiah did not need him, and if he knew Jenny was to come downstairs, Ephraim left the house and went into the town that was a city now. With the opening of navigation, new floods of men were arriving, attracted by the tales that had gone abroad of fortunes to be made here; and the fever of gambling, which during the winter had somewhat abated, revived. At the same time, the city came to life in other ways. When the drives came down-river, the driving crews swarmed into the grogshops and gambling houses and brothels on Exchange and Washington and Hancock Streets to spend the money earned by their winter in the woods; and the nights were full of noisy turbulence. At the same time many of the newcomers from Boston drove up to Argyle or to Pea Cove to see the logs penned in the booms there, and to visit the mills and watch the saws rip the great logs into boards. When sawed lumber was to be brought down-river, it was rafted till it made a solid platform pegged and roped together; and sometimes the progress of these huge rafts from the mills to Bangor where vessels lay waiting to be loaded was made a picnic, with two or three dozen guests invited to ride down the river, and bountiful refreshments, solid and liquid too.

  Isaiah, at General Veazie’s urgency and on Ephraim’s advice, sold his mill interests in April to the General, keeping the cash in hand against its reinvestment. The General invited them all to one of these rafting parties, and Jenny wished to go, saying that a day on the water might help restore her strength again. Isaiah refused to be bothered with such foolishness. He said Ephraim might take her; but Ephraim, who was always uneasy when he was on the water, and who still avoided her, declined.

  Jenny, watching him quietly, repeated that she would like to make the trip. ‘I know it would be good for me,’ she said. ‘But I can’t very well go alone.’

  ‘It’s a waste of time.’ Ephraim protested, almost harshly, and Isaiah nodded in vigorous approval.

  ‘That’s the way to talk!’ he declared. ‘Let a young man learn to use his time and he’ll go far. If you waste a dollar, you can always get it back again if you’re smart; but you waste a minute and it’s gone.’

  Jenny said no more, but she looked at Ephraim in a way that
disturbed him, with a level and half-scornful appraisal in her eyes. He thought she guessed his fear of her, and blamed him for it too.

  IV

  In a desperate desire to break the spell which bound him, Ephraim sought new ways to please his father; and he succeeded, and in so doing, as we do love best those we serve well, began to love the old man. Isaiah’s obvious affection for him made the more bitter that hunger for Jenny which he could not long forget. To escape from her, and from his thoughts of her, he spent more and more time at the Coffee House, and wherever traders gathered in the town.

  The speculative fever this year was rising, carrying steadily upward on its flooding tide the prices of timber lands. Sam Smith’s counting room at the corner of Harlow and Prospect Streets was one of the trading centres. Sam and his brother Ed were of a boldly speculative turn of mind, ready at any time for large risks in a promising venture. They had recently built at their own expense the Central Bridge across the Kenduskeag, to make a more convenient route from the west side of the stream, where most of the hotels were located, to their place of business; and they thought it a good investment. Sam Smith and Amos Davis of W. P. Lawson & Co. had planted the seeds of this speculative mushroom, when they discovered a way to make it possible for persons with even a little money to buy wild lands. They took options on several tracts in the forested regions to the north, paying one-fourth down and giving mortgages for the balance, and proceeded to sell these lands in odd lots to small buyers. Colonel John Black, whose big house in Ellsworth was famous all over eastern Maine and who was the agent for the Bingham heirs, had originated this policy of selling off land in small lots; but Smith and Amos Davis were the first to buy on a large scalc simply for the purpose of selling. Their lands cost them as little as twelve cents an acre, seldom more than twenty-five; yet in this summer of 1833 the same lands were being bought and sold at prices as high as a dollar an acre, and in lots as small as fifty or a hundred acres and as large as whole townships.

  One day in May, Ephraim met in the counting room a man named Holbrook. Sam Smith introduced them. Sam just then was intoxicated by his easy success, confident of the future.

  ‘Here’s a man Isaiah ought to talk to, Ephraim,’ he said. ‘Mr. Holbrook spent most of the winter up-river on a survey, travelled on snowshoes, went everywhere. I know Isaiah thinks land prices are too high a’ready, but I take notice he’s not anxious to sell. I tell him he’s right not to sell. This is the time to buy. Some of this land that’s going begging at ninety cents and a dollar now will be worth ten dollars in ten years.’

  Ephraim agreed. ‘And father’s as sure of the future of pine as any man, Sam.’ he said. ‘He’s been buying Maine lands for a good many years—and selling damned little.’

  ‘Take Mr. Holbrook out to see him,’ Sam urged. ‘He’ll tell you some stories that will astonish you.’

  He left Ephraim and Holbrook together. Holbrook was a big man, broad-shouldered and powerful, yet with a surprisingly soft face, and too much flesh upon his bones. Ephraim thought it surprising that the man should carry any excess weight after his winter in the woods; but the hour’s talk they had together made him forget everything except the tales he heard. Holbrook had explored a region which the lumbermen had not yet reached, far up the West Branch of the Penobscot; and on good tributary streams capable of carrying the logs to the main river, he had located pine forests which he described in such terms that Ephraim’s eyes shone. He spoke of townships with a stand of a hundred million feet of pine, some with more, some with a little less. He himself had bought one township for a group of Boston men, and he estimated it would cut eighty million feet.

  ‘And it was about as poor a piece as I saw, at that,’ he declared. ‘But at fifty cents an acre it took all the money my backers had put up.’

  Ephraim made a mental calculation. A township ran to about twenty- two thousand acres. Holbrook must have paid eleven thousand dollars. ‘Is it bought and paid for?’ he asked with a new respect.

  Holbrook admitted that he had acquired only a bond for a deed, paying three thousand dollars cash; but the bond ran for a year and the price was agreed.

  ‘Will your backers lumber it?’ Ephraim asked.

  Holbrook shook his head. ‘They’ve just about got my report by now; but I’m looking for them to tell me to sell it—if I can get a fair price—and buy a better lot. No one knows the pine up there but me, so if I can sell this bond at a couple of thousand profit, I can buy another township I located, where the pine will run a hundred and twenty million easy.’

  V

  When he and Holbrook parted, Ephraim’s imagination was on fire. He had watched the prices of timber land pyramid until prices began to seem more real than the land itself. The land in which they dealt was a hundred miles away. The money was here. He went home planning how he might interest Isaiah in this transaction; and he opened the subject cautiously, reporting some of the tales he had heard. Without naming Holbrook, he repeated some of the man’s reports, hoping to arouse his father’s interest; but Isaiah laughed in dry scorn.

  ‘I’ve made a study of timber lands for twenty years,’ he declared. ‘And of surveys too. It takes a good man to size up the pine on a township, to see if it’s concussy or not, and whether it’s worth buying. Mr. Gillies could do it. Td take his word any time. But the lot that spends their days drinking rum down at the Coffee House and bragging about the pine they’ve seen, half of them don’t know a cat spruce from a hackmatack. Any time a man tries to sell me land, he’s got to show me the land, or else let a man I know look at it for me.’

  Ephraim pushed the point as far as he dared, till his father’s rising petulance warned him to silence; but it seemed to him a shame that with the money from the recent sale of Isaiah’s mill privileges lying idle, no advantage should be taken of the opportunities that here went begging every day. Isaiah had always held him on a tight financial rein, paying only after endless questioning the bills he incurred, grudging even a small sum for money in pocket. So he had no money of his own, could not act for himself; yet the itch for action was on him.

  He had opened the matter at the dinner table, and he sat silent through the rest of the meal, so absorbed that he did not notice that Jenny was watching him. They rose at last, and Isaiah turned toward his office. He had fallen into the habit of sleeping for an hour every afternoon on the couch there, while Ephraim worked at a small desk which had been installed for his use. They Went into the office together, and Jenny came to spread over Isaiah a heavy, knitted shawl as large as a blanket, and she tucked in his feet and adjusted his skull cap.

  Jenny stayed till Isaiah fell into the quick, light sleep of age, and then she came to Ephraim’s side—he had turned to the papers on his desk—and touched his arm. He looked up at her in surprise. She beckoned him toward the door, and when he hesitated, she nodded insistently and almost threateningly.

  He rose and followed her. She closed the door behind them and they were alone. It was the first time they had been alone since Isaiah’s illness weeks before.

  VI

  Isaiah’s office opened off the front hall, at one side of the front door. Next to it there was a big, high-ceiled room with tall windows and a huge fireplace of black marble. On the mantelpiece stood two whale-oil lamps with crystal prisms, ornamented with gold leaf. The room was lavishly furnished; a marble-topped table with a Phyfe base, half a dozen Chippendale chairs, a pier table under a tall glass that hung between two of the windows, a Queen Anne wing chair, a Hepplewhite wall cabinet in which some fine china and glass was kept for rare occasions and with candelabras of Waterford glass on top, a lampstand beside the wing chair where Isaiah usually sat through his short evenings, the bed-chair which he had used during his convalescence, a Hepplewhite desk against one wall. Wide doors opened into the dining room where Mr. Hardy’s portrait of Jenny hung.

  When Jenny and Ephraim came into the big room now, Ruth Green was still clearing the dining table. Jenny did not speak at once.
She crossed to stand before the tall glass, looking at her own reflection there with an impersonal interest. She raised one hand and touched her hair which never needed rearrangement. Ephraim watched her uneasily, and once he caught Ruth’s eye as the girl moved about the dining room; and he wondered remotely why Ruth had not long before this become pregnant and insisted on his marrying her. He told himself in a sullen desperation that he would have been glad to do so, would be glad to do so now if he had her condition as a weapon with which to overrule Isaiah’s possible objection.

  Till Ruth finished and departed, Jenny was silent. Ephraim sat down in the wing chair, a few paces from where she stood before the glass. She turned at last, leaning back against the table, her hands resting on its edge behind her, her head tilted a little backward, so that she looked down at him over her cheekbones. He was instantly conscious of every part of her, the facial bones outlined by cheek and chin and brow, the round line of her shoulders and the swelling of her breasts under the closely fitted dress she wore, the bones in her arms and wrists, her fingers curved over the table edge, her body bent backward by her posture. Her eyes were steady, and he thought suddenly that there was scorn in them, and a soft stir of anger. Her voice when she spoke was very low.

  ‘You have tried not to be alone with me, Ephraim,’ she said accusingly.

  ‘Who, me?’ he stammered, in an automatic reaction. Under the shock of this direct attack, strength went out of him; and his eyes fell, so that he stared at the pattern in the carpet on the floor. He heard her come nearer till he saw the hem of her dress and her full skirt near his feet.

  ‘Yes, Ephraim, you,’ she told him in a gentle amusement.

  ‘I ought to go away,’ he muttered.

  ‘Why?’ His face twisted miserably, and he made no reply. Her voice was no more than a murmur. ‘Because of what I said, when we thought Isaiah would die?’ she asked. He nodded, and she whispered: ‘He will die some day.’ When still he did not speak, she said accusingly: ‘You are afraid of me?’