The Strange Woman

by Ben Ames Williams

  ‘That’s my own notion,’ Duren explained, and he added frankly: ‘It’s as much a protection for me as for you, gentlemen. Where will the bookselling business ever get to, if people borrow books instead of buying them? Why, if you’d believe it, men will come into my store to look up a name in my directory and never offer to buy a copy. They’ll spend hundreds—yes, and thousands too—to buy land they never saw; but they won’t spend a dollar for a book like that, that they can hold in their hands.’ John, looking through the pages of his new purchase, commented: ‘Must have been a job of work to get all this information together.’

  ‘Why, it was and it wasn’t,’ Duren explained. ‘Of course it meant knocking at just about every door in town; but that’s not a bad idea for a young man who wants to get along. You get acquainted. I probably know more people to speak to than any man in Bangor—and I haven’t been here a year yet.’

  Colonel Black suggested that Bangor had already outgrown the directory; and Duren replied with a qualifying assent that John in later years came to recognize as habitual. ‘Well, it has and it hasn’t! You’ll find just about everyone in my directory is still here; yes, and means to stay. But I didn’t take any account of them that were just here to make their pile and go. We’ll he rid of them some day, but most of the men in my book will still be here.’

  John liked Freeman Duren, as he liked most of the men he met. He came to know well, and to be amused by, Sam Smith who had planted the seed from which this frenzy of speculation grew and who now rode the tide as a log rides the rapids. Sam came in one day in a towering anger because some technical hitch had prevented his buying a township offered for sale by the state. ‘Makes me mad enough to bite nails,’ he said; and—amused at the extravagance of his own wrath—he declared: “I’d like to bankrupt the damned State of Maine, yes, and Massachusetts too, if I could find a way to do it! One’s as bad as t’other.’ With pretended seriousness he appealed to Colonel Black: ‘How can I go about it, Colonel, to bankrupt the both of them?’

  ‘Well,’ the Colonel drily suggested, ‘the surest way I know is for you to go into partnership with them, Sam. You’d bankrupt the United States, the way you’re buying land!’

  He told John laughingly after Sam had left them: ‘That man’s a steam engine, going all the time! Today he’s here, tomorrow he’s on his way to Boston or New York, and a week from now he’s back again, having sold what he had to offer and hungry to buy more. He could sell the Devil a house on fire! I doubt he ever stops to sleep, or even to eat.’ He chuckled and added complacently: ‘Well, I’ll sell him as much as he will buy and pay for.’

  Sam came to them again and again. He was stocked with stories of successful speculation, which he spouted endlessly.

  ‘You’re touched in the head to sell an acre, Colonel!’ he insisted. ‘And it’s worse to sell at the prices you’re taking. Why, this thing has just begun! We’ve pine enough in Maine to build a house for every family in the country, and mills and water power to saw it into boards. I heard the other day about the winter’s cut on one tract that was bought for two dollars an acre. They cut two hundred and twenty-seven thousand feet of pine off one acre; one acre, man; one little, miserable, two-dollar acre; and that pine, sawed into boards, is worth up to twenty dollars a thousand at the wharf! That’s four or five thousand dollars’ worth of lumber off a two-dollar acre. And yet you go on selling land!’

  ‘Glad to sell you all you can pay for, Sam,’ Colonel Black told him cheerfully. ‘But, you know, you’re talking the price up on yourself all the time.’

  ‘I’ll pay anything I can raise. Man, you’re blind! D’ye know Mr. Chamberlain of Boston? He bought twenty-three thousand acres at forty-two cents in ‘32, then had to let it go. It brought eighty cents that winter, sold at one-fifty last summer, sold again at five dollars last week—and the buyer’s asking eight today!’ He threw up his hands. ‘And that’s nothing, Colonel. Nothing! I had one piece—I paid a dollar and a half, sold it at eight dollars yesterday.’

  ‘Did you get your money?’ the Colonel asked drily.

  ‘One-fourth down and three payments.’

  ‘Bills?’

  ‘Notes,’ Sam confessed, and colored angrily at his own word. ‘But damn it, the notes are good! I can discount them tomorrow! Man, I’ve seen half a township fetch a hundred and eight thousand dollars. I sold a full township to some New York men two weeks ago at twelve dollars. That cost twelve cents, when Massachusetts first sold the land. There’s a two-hundred-thousand-dollar profit on that one tract! Why, Colonel, I can name you five men in the Bangor House right now who were bankrupts when they came from Boston, and every one of them is worth a fortune today. Do you know Brown of Vassalboro?’ The Colonel shook his head. ‘Well, he bought a township a few years ago for seven thousand dollars. His father took it over and sold it a while back for ten dollars per acre- thought he did well—but the buyer sold it again for twelve dollars within the week.’ He said impressively: ‘Two hundred and sixty-four thousand dollars! Why, Colonel, you could have bought all the Massachusetts lands in Maine for a hundred thousand less than that, fifteen years ago.’ He laughed like a drunken man, intoxicated with his own words. ‘Did ye hear about the two paupers? They got loose from the almshouse one morning last week, and before they were caught that afternoon they’d made eighteen hundred dollars!’

  John heard these torrents of golden words day after day, but their very violence was their own remedy; and Colonel Black laughed at the tales and sold when he could—if the purchaser could pay.

  III

  Just as John plunged at once into a continual activity so did Jenny, resuming her old contacts, renewing her old round of visits to the many humble folk whom she befriended. She and John went to church in diligent attendance. Even from the pulpit they heard echoes of the speculative frenzy which filled the city. The Reverend Pomroy devoted a sermon to the subject. He said—without naming names—that one of the deacons was setting an evil example by trading in bonds.

  ‘I thought it my duty to remonstrate with him,’ he confessed, ‘But he met me with an unseemly levity, distorting the words of Saint Paul to say: “I would that thou wert almost and altogether such as I am, Reverend, except these bonds!”’ A smile appeared here and there in the congregation; and the minister saw this and was inspired to a blistering exhortation, denouncing not only the gambling but the fraud and chicanery which went with it, citing incidents. Sellers took prospective purchasers, strangers to the region, to inspect a fine tract and then sold them, under pretense that it was the same, another piece of land altogether. Surveyors were bribed to make false reports. Men executed and sold bonds on land to which they held no title. One man sold house lots on the outskirts of the town without owning the land. The city, the Reverend Pomroy said, had become a second Sodom, with every other vice following the trail blazed by the vices of lying and cheating and gambling; and he predicted in a blazing prophecy the loss and ruin and destruction sure to ensue.

  Jenny and John agreed profoundly with everything he said, John because he shared Colonel Black’s views, Jenny because she shared the minister’s reprobation of the increasing dissipation which followed in the train of this synthetic prosperity. They had returned to Bangor in time to see the lumbermen come out of the woods after their winter’s work, and the district where Jenny had lived as a child, Exchange and Washington and Hancock Streets, was for days ablaze with drunken, fighting, gambling men. Sailors from the scores of vessels in the river joined the throng, and when the drives were down, the crowds of roisterers received new recruits. No unescorted woman was safe from annoyance on the streets, even by day; and Jenny, going to and fro among her friends, urged that it was time the ladies of Bangor took the temperance movement more strongly in hand. She prepared a petition which had seven hundred and fifty signers, all ‘females of Bangor’ and which was forwarded to Augusta, appealing to the Legislature to ‘banish from our houses and our State the reproach and misery which the use of
ardent spirits constantly imposes.’

  Within a month after she and John came to Bangor she had resumed her place in the forefront of every movement for good in the city; but the temperance cause took most of her time. The State Temperance Society was gaining strength every year, and a score or so of Bangor’s leading citizens had attended its meeting in Augusta in February. There were regular gatherings in the Hammond Street vestry where representatives from all the churches came together to advocate total abstinence even from cider and strong beer. Elder Lincoln Pittridge was the flaming leader of the cause; and it was his urgency which led to the inclusion of these mild potations in the pledge. He promoted the formation of the Youth’s Temperance Society and the Young Men’s Mutual Reform Society. He was a handsome man in his middle thirties, lighted by some inner fire; and Jenny—and John for her sake—came to know him well, and to respect his sincerity as much as his zeal.

  IV

  They had time, too, for their own affairs. Jenny was determined that they should build as soon as possible a house of their own, and they began to look for a site. Isaiah had owned several parcels of land around the outskirts of the city, and they inspected each of these possible locations. John’s vote was for a certain piece of high land by the river; but Jenny pointed out, with a foresight which surprised him, that along the water wharves were sure to extend, and all that part of town would turn to business in the end.

  ‘I used to live on Exchange Street when I was a girl,’ she reminded him. ‘And you know what it’s like down there now, not fit for pigs!’

  This was true. Even along Harlow Street, where it paralleled the Stream above Main, the dives which catered to sailors and lumbermen were extending. So their choice fell at last on a tract well beyond the then limits of the city, on the north side of the Old Town road.

  The first time they drove out there, Jenny said: ‘I made Isaiah buy this land we’re going to see, John. It’s all woods. Father used to bring me out here, when I was little, to explore; and we’d stop at the Howard farm on the way home and Mrs. Howard used to give us cookies and milk and tell us stories about Indians, and Mr. Howard would tell us about fighting with Wolfe at Quebec.’ She laughed at a sudden memory and said: ‘She told us about once an Indian came to the house and wanted breakfast, and just as he started to eat it another one came in and they began to fight over it, and while they were still fighting, another Indian came in and ate up all the breakfast! She was sweet. They came here to live before there was a town at all. Their daughter Mary—Mrs. Mayhew—was the first white baby born here. Mrs. Howard died when I was seventeen, and Mr. Howard only lived two or three months afterward.’ Her hands were tight on his arm. ‘Oh, John, I hope we’ll live to be old, and die together! I know I wouldn’t live a minute if you died.’

  He smiled. ‘I’m not thinking of dying soon, Jenny. And if I did—you’re beautiful enough to bring a dead man back to life.’ They were richly happy together in these long June days.

  They explored the piece of land, some twenty or thirty acres, a dozen times, tramping through the thickets hand in hand. The pines which once had stood here were long since cut off, but they had been replaced by a fine stand of hardwood, beach and oak and maple. The spot which after many considerations they selected was on the crest of a low knoll, high enough and so placed that they would have a glimpse of the river when a few trees were cut away.

  But the site had a defect. Exactly where the house would need to stand, one oak reared above its fellows. It was a majestic tree, its trunk straight as a pine and full forty feet to the first branches, clean and fine; and since the others near were lesser, they wished to save it.

  ‘But it’s in just the wrong place.’ John pointed out. That’s exactly where the house ought to be.’ They had planned a frame house two stories high and shaped like an el, facing southeastward toward the river, the wing carrying back to shed and barn behind. ‘It will come right where the el angles on,’ he said. ‘Unless we change our plan—or put the house somewhere else, lower down the knoll.’

  There was in him a deep affection for fine trees, so that when he laid his axe to the base of a mighty pine it was regretfully; and he sometimes made in his thoughts a plea to the tree itself to be forgiven, just as savages about to kill an animal sacred to their eyes sometimes address to it an apology before they loose the deadly missile.

  Jenny would have cut the great oak without a qualm, but John was so strong in his desire to escape from that necessity that she tried to discover some compromise. They came one late afternoon to the knoll, and brought a basket of supper and stayed till dusk to watch the moonrise, talking together in hushed voices in the silent wood. The evening was still and sultry, and he heard a far rumble and said a shower was coming, said they had best start homeward; but she would not.

  ‘The tree will keep off the worst of it,’ she urged. ‘Let’s stay, John. Let’s pretend we’re lost children, or secret lovers meeting here.’

  So they sat on the warm ground at the foot of the tree while the moon through clouds pricked the forest with a pale, fairy light, and they were young together. He thought she was more beautiful than ever in these months when the secret they shared was still their own. She wanted him always with her, was jealous of their every moment apart and full of tender yearnings that could turn to a sort of fury when her knotted fists beat at him in passionate ecstasies, as though to inflict pain somehow contented and assuaged her.

  When the thundershower came nearer, and the crashes followed more and more closely on the blazing lightning strokes, he was uneasy to be gone; but in a laughing madness, as though the tingling air charged her with electric fluid, she held him by her side; and when the first drops spattered on the leaves high above them she drew him close, whispering secretly:

  ‘Cover me, John. Protect me from the rain.’

  And for a while it was as though the thunder and the lightning were within them, reverberating through them as it reverberated among the wooded hills and passed at last across the river and so moved on and was gone; till with the passing of the storm sanity came back to them again.

  The full beat of the shower had not touched them, and no more than a sprinkle of heavy drops penetrated the thick-leaved branches that were their shelter. ‘You see!’ she cried in happy triumph. ‘We didn’t get wet, hardly at all. The tree was like a roof over us.’ And she exclaimed in a delighted inspiration: ‘It was our rooftree, John! That’s what it must always be—the rooftree over us. We’ll build it into our house!’

  He did not at once understand, and she urged, in a quick excitement at her own thought: ‘We’ll make a great timber out of it for a ridgepole, like the key of an arch. Our house will be like an arch, John, with the rooftree to hold it together.’ She clung to him in a sweet ecstasy. ‘You’re my rooftree, John, holding our family together, standing against any storms.’ She laughed in a soft tenderness. ‘You’ve loved the big tree so! I think you’re brothers, you and the oak! Will you always be strong for me?’

  ‘It’s too heavy for a ridgepole, Jenny,’ he said doubtfully.

  ‘You’re so practical!’ she protested. ‘But so am I! We’ll build our house strong enough to hold it up. I want our house strong to last forever, John, Please, let’s do!’

  There was a masculine slowness in him, and she had to persuade him long. He never quite understood this wish in her to erect the great oak’s trunk as a symbol in the very structure of their home; but he could not in these months when she was doubly dear to him deny her anything.

  So the tree was felled, and others conveniently near, and timbers were rough-hewed and left to season for a winter. She was impatient to see the work put under way; but John said they must give the wood months to dry out and toughen.

  ‘It will be time enough next spring to frame the house,’ he said; and he laughed and told her: ‘We’ll have to use heavy stuff, Jenny.’ He began to catch the infection of her eagerness. ‘We’ll need all oak, sills fourteen inches square, and po
sts a foot on a side, and a plate big enough for a ship’s keel, to support that ridgepole you’re bound to have.’

  ‘It’s the way I want it, John,’ she insisted happily. ‘I want the old oak for our rooftree, the keystone of our house, just as you will always be the strong, unshakable keystone of my life—and of our lives.’

  7

  MRS. HOLLIS died in August.

  She never left her bed in the guest room after their homecoming. Almost at once, mortification set in at her toes and she died horribly, and there was the smell of death in her room and in all the house as long as she lived.

  Nevertheless she was happy during these last weeks of her life, hiding her suffering behind a mask of chuckling laughter, joking about her own agonies. ‘I never looked to die a little at a time,’ she declared. ‘It’s hard doing. Not everyone can manage it, I tell you!’ And she said to Jenny: ‘Not but I’d rather go the way Tim Hager did. Mind the night he just fell down and never got up again? That would be some easier for me—and for you, too, my dear.’

  Jenny during the weary days stayed much with her, giving the dying woman what comfort she could, giving her own strength so unstintingly that John was concerned, and sought to persuade her for the sake of their baby to spare herself the ordeal. But Jenny laughed at his fears.

  ‘I’ll be fine, John, and so will our son,’ she promised him. ‘It makes me happy to comfort Mrs. Hollis all I can. I’ve known her since I was a little girl, you see.’

  She seemed in fact to thrive on the devoted service she gave the dying woman; and sometimes John, coming home in the late afternoon, catching at once that faint smell of death which filled the house, would hear from the lower hall their laughing voices as in the room above they lived over again the days of Jenny’s girlhood. That they should be thus gay together filled him with wonder. Jenny was ingenious in devising ways to amuse and divert the dying woman. Once Mrs. Hollis saw herself in a mirror and was distressed by her own shrunken, haggard countenance and her stringy white hair; and Jenny went to Mrs. Shaw on Main Street and bought a frizette and some French ringlets and fancy hairwork and pinned them on Mrs. Hollis’ old head, and John came home and heard them laughing together almost in hysteria at the appearance she presented.