The Strange Woman

by Ben Ames Williams

  Mrs. Hollis liked to tell him about the years when Jenny was a child, and she told John how she rated Tim one night for his drunkenness till Jenny came to her father’s defense. ‘She fair drove out of the house,’ she confessed. ‘She’s a terror when she’s roused, Mr. Evered. Afraid for my life I was!’ She chuckled merrily. ‘You’ll best mind your manners or she’ll handle you, big as you are.’

  ‘She has me scared,’ Evered admitted, smiling. ‘If I don’t do to suit her, she gives me a good pounding.’

  Mrs. Hollis nodded. ‘I never saw a man but was the better for a lick now and then!’ she declared. ‘I mind the time I broke a broomstick over Hollis—but he never came home with a drop in him too much from that day on.’

  She had always in life borne herself decorously enough, but now, as though with the dissolution of the flesh so were the bonds long laid upon her loosed, her tongue ran freely. She spoke of the night when Tim died and Jenny came to Isaiah, and Isaiah fetched Deacon Adams and Amos Fatten to consult with him about her fate. ‘I have to laugh, thinking of the three of them standing staring at her like Susannah and the elders,’ she said, mirthful at the memory. ‘And this pretty innocent, not knowing what she did, putting out her sweet little leg all bruised and cut for them to see, and them weak as water at the sight of it! It was me told her to marry Isaiah. “You’ll not have the fun out of it you would from a fine young man,” I told her. “But he’ll be good to you—if you can stand bedding with the old galoot now and then—and you’ll still be young enough to find yourself a proper husband after he’s gone.”’ She appealed to Jenny in a sudden anxiety: ‘Was I wrong, my dear?’

  Jenny touched her brow. ‘You were never wrong. You always loved me, I know.’ She looked toward John. ‘You were right about my finding a proper husband, you see; and Isaiah was always good to me.’

  ‘And you to him,’ said the old woman stoutly; and she told John: ‘You’ve a dear good wife in Jenny, Mr. Evered.’

  ‘I know I have.’

  ‘Many a poor woman in this town has reason to name her in her prayers, for she’s always tending the sick and the old and weary—like me.’ Despite her smiles, her eyes filled.

  ‘I can never do enough for you,’ Jenny told her warmly. ‘I never can pay you for all you’ve done for me.’

  John and Jenny summoned every doctor in town to see her, and she accepted their prescriptions cheerily enough. ‘But there ain’t a one of them knows what he’s about,’ she declared. ‘They make wise faces and talk big, but I go on dying in my own way, just the same.’ She chuckled in deep amusement. ‘I’ve heard old Doc Perley up at Old Town say: “When disease in any form comes in contact with me it meets an all-powerful, all Conquering antagonist.” You’d have thought that the folks he took care of would have turned out to be immortal, but they went on dying just the same.’ And when the consulting doctors thought amputation might save her, or at least prolong her life, she said robustly: ‘You’ll leave me to die in one piece, thanks all the same!’ And she laughed again and related how Doctor Bradford, during an operation, wished to lay aside his knife for a moment and absent-mindedly jabbed it into his patient’s leg. ‘And when the folks watching him said that was no way to do, he said: “Don’t you give it a thought. That hole in him will get well before this one!”’ When one day Doctor Mason told her frankly that there was not one chance in a hundred she would recover, she retorted briskly: ‘Well, I’ll take that chance!’

  Her constant good humor made them forget her suffering. She was small and smaller day by day, but till delirium and at last coma heralded the imminent end she was always cheerful, had always an amusing word to say. John came to share Jenny’s affection for her, and to respect the old woman’s steady valor. When she died, he said to Jenny: ‘She conquered death. I never knew it could be so ugly as hers was, but she made it seem beautiful.’ He added: ‘But I hope the long strain wasn’t too hard for you.’

  ‘It wasn’t,’ she assured him; yet he found that during the first days she told him over and over every detail of Mrs. Hollis’ agony, dwelling on it again and again. He protested that she should at least try to forget the horrors she had witnessed; but she said:

  ‘It does me good to talk about them, helps get them out of my mind.’

  It was a relief to John when she began to forget, and when the house was free at last from the smell of death which had haunted it so long.

  II

  Despite her devotion to Mrs. Hollis, Jenny even during the old woman’s illness was alertly interested in all that went forward in the city. She regretted that Mr. Manning of New York had opened a school to instruct ‘young ladies, misses and masters’ in the arts of dancing and waltzing. ‘He says that he watches morals and manners and deportment,’ she told John. ‘But his saying so just shows the sort of thing dancing can lead to.’

  John chuckled and told her how Margaret Saladine had undertaken to teach him to waltz at Colonel Black’s home in Ellsworth the summer before; and she smiled, but she said: ‘I’m glad you didn’t learn, John. Of course, dancing may be all very well for ladies and gentlemen, but it sets a bad example to others.

  She added: ‘I don’t mean to criticize Miss Saladine. Do you think I’m too much of a puritan, John?’

  He told her she was neither too much nor too little of anything. ‘You’re exactly right,’ he said; and he added: ‘I saw Judge Saladine yesterday. You know they went to England last winter, and she’s staying in Paris till fall to cultivate her voice and to learn French. He says she’ll call on you when she comes home. You’ll like her, Jenny.’

  ‘Oh, I do, already’.’ she agreed. ‘Of course I only know her a little. The ladies I saw most, as long as Isaiah lived, were his friends’ wives, older than I; but I always liked Miss Saladine so much. I’ll want to know her better.’ She added smilingly: ‘But I shall see to it, John, that she doesn’t put any more dancing in your head, the little hussy!’

  ‘She was mighty nice to me at Colonel Black’s. I was just off the farm, and I felt lost.’

  She chided him gently. ‘You don’t ever need to be ashamed of coming from a farm, John. Your mother’s the finest woman I know.’

  ‘I wasn’t ashamed,’ he protested, reddening a little. ‘You ought to know that! I only meant that Miss Saladine was kind to me when she might have been amused.’

  She kissed him proudly. ‘She’d better never let me see her laughing at my John or I’ll scratch her eyes out!’ And they laughed together.

  She and John went to the concert in the City Hall on the first of July, when a mixed quartette from Boston—Mr. and Mrs. Andrews, Miss Woodward and Mr. Comer—sang ‘Hark, Apollo, Strike the Lyre!’, ‘On Fair Zurich’s Waters’ ‘Pretty Polly Hopkins’ and a dozen other selections. Jenny thought Mr. Comer’s voice was no longer as good as it must once have been; but John laughed heartily at the comical aspects of the performance in which Mr. Comer led the clowning, and preferred the mirth to the music. He good-naturedly escorted her to the frequent sacred concerts, but they gave him no pleasure except through her. He was much more entertained by Mr. Nichols, the ventriloquist.

  Twice during the early summer they went to Ellsworth, to stay a few days at Colonel Black’s. John would have enjoyed these visits, proud of Jenny’s beauty, proud of the admiration she aroused; but she confessed a firm disapproval of the Colonel’s prodigal hospitality. ‘People can have good times,’ she insisted, ‘without drinking all the time!’ He was always a little surprised, and sometimes amused, at her severity, and once or twice he teasingly reminded her that she was not in all matters so austere; but she kissed him and said: ‘It’s different, darling, when it’s you!’

  III

  Through that summer in Bangor the speculative tide ran high. To sell land—or to buy it—was the universal occupation, and prices continued to soar. Sam Smith bought from the Poster estate which John administered for Jenny eleven business lots at ten thousand dollars—Isaiah had originally paid four hundred an
d fifty dollars for the land—and came a week later to boast that he had sold them for thirteen thousand. Ransom Clark laid out Broadway Park, where lots were to be sold with a requirement that two-story brick houses should be erected on each one; but the lots went slowly. No one wanted to buy and build. Every buyer wanted to sell as quickly and as profitably as possible.

  But the crowd in town was interested in other things besides business, and every form of entertainment was well patronized. During the summer several groups of young men went on excursions to Moosehead Lake. The steamer Moosehead had been put in service there; and a party might go and spend a week on her or a month, cruising around the lake, fishing, or drinking and carousing if they chose. The trip was not an easy one, involving a stage journey to Monson and a fifteen-mile walk to reach the lake. Tickets were on sale in the bay at the Bangor House and the accounts brought back by those who made the trip helped attract new customers. A dozen times John was urged to go, but he preferred to stay at home with Jenny; and when he told her in a chuckling amusement tales he had heard of what happened on these excursions, she was strong in disapproval. ‘It’s shameful to think of,’ she said. ‘Young men going up there to do nothing but drink for a week or two weeks on end!’

  ‘Well, they fish too,’ he reminded her.

  ‘That’s just an excuse,’ she said.

  John encountered one day at the Bangor House a man just returned from one of these trips, a young man with pretentious side whiskers whose name was David Crosby and whom he had known in Harvard. Crosby had been one of the wealthier students and his home was in Boston, and he and John had shared no common ground; but now John as Colonel Black’s associate was a respected figure in the city, and Crosby sought him out with such a friendly greeting that John invited the young man to dinner. But he warned Crosby not to tell Jenny anything about this Moosehead excursion. ‘She doesn’t like that sort of thing,’ he said.

  ‘No more she should,’ Crosby agreed. ‘It was a rough time, Evered.’

  He was delighted with Jenny, and she asked him at dinner whether he meant to settle in Bangor.

  ‘No, I just came to see the excitement,’ he said. ‘We hear of nothing else in Boston! I came to be amused, but I’m catching the disease. You can’t escape it, can’t be twenty-four hours here without finding yourself—not knowing just how it happened—owning at least a quarter of a township; and about the time you realize it, someone grabs your elbow and wants to buy it from you at a profit,’ He laughed and said: ‘The queer thing is, no one seems to lose any money! Every seller makes a profit, or says he does.’

  John laughed with him. ‘But that’s because they’ve stopped thinking of money as specie, or even as bills,’ he said. ‘Money now is all notes. You buy a deed and give your note for a thousand, and I buy it from you and give you my note for two thousand, and I sell it for three thousand and take a note in payment, and the man who bought from me does the same.’ He said smilingly: ‘Why, you and Mrs. Evered and I could be millionaires in an hour on that basis, just buying and selling to each other around and around in a circle, ignoring our debts and counting up our profits—if our hands didn’t get tired of writing notes!’

  ‘Then you expect the whole thing to blow up?’

  ‘Money’s tighter all the time,’ John assured him. ‘Sooner or later men will be called on to take up their obligations—and they won’t be able to do it.’

  He asked what the other had done since he left Cambridge, and Crosby said: ‘I’ve travelled, mostly. I’m in cotton with my father, you know. I went to Mississippi last winter, on a buying trip.’

  Jenny inquired in a quick interest: ‘Did you see any slaves?’

  ‘Thousands, everywhere.’

  ‘Were they terribly abused and miserable?’

  Crosby shook his head. ‘No. They’re a cheerful, happy lot, mostly.’ She asked in a voice so tense that John looked at her in surprise: ‘Are they whipped all the time?’

  ‘Sometimes, I suppose; but I never saw anything of the sort.’ He added soberly: ‘But I saw a white man whipped, in Natchez. That was pretty bad.’

  And while she listened with pent breath, he explained: ‘He was a man named Foster. They said he had beaten his wife to death with a nigger whip. He was tried for murder, but he was acquitted, so a mob—they were all leading citizens, I was told—gave him a hundred and fifty lashes with cowhide whips, wore out two whips on him. Then they poured hot tar over him, and rolled him in feathers, and made him march through town, with a crowd trailing along and throwing rocks at him and yelling,’ Jenny asked in her low tones: ‘Did you see him whipped?’ John looked at her uneasily, thinking of their baby, thinking she should not hear such things, disturbed by the fascination which tales of violence always had for her; but Crosby said:

  ‘Yes. The cotton broker I was dealing with took me to see it.’

  She wetted her lips with her tongue. ‘Did the whip cut his back? Did he bleed?’

  John spoke quickly: ‘Stop, Crosby! It’s sickening to hear about. I suppose people who keep slaves don’t mind such things, but I don’t like the sound of them.’

  ‘I don’t like the thought of slavery myself,’ Crosby agreed, ‘but it’s the only way to raise cotton. These damned abolitionists will ruin the country before they’re through.’

  Jenny took issue with him on that point. Her opposition to slavery and all its works was already definite and strong. John listened to their discussion, glad they no longer talked of whipping, wondering that she should become flushed and agitated over a question which seemed to him, absorbed as he was in business which engaged him every hour, so remote from their lives and far away.

  IV

  Despite her slenderness, the fact that Jenny was to have a baby would never be conspicuous; but John discovered that pregnancy affected her in other ways, making her at first intensely ardent and desirous, making her afterward easily irritable so that sometimes, quite without intention, he provoked her to angry outbursts which left him bewildered and unhappy. When one day in October he reported that a mob had attempted to tar and feather Garrison, the editor of the Liberator, for his abolition doctrines, she accused him of sympathizing with the mob and raged, with streaming tears. The pro-slavery and anti-abolition meeting at the City Hall a little later provoked her to fury, and she upbraided him because he continued to meet and to deal courteously with Mr. Jewett, Captain Louder, Samuel Upton and others who had spoken at that meeting.

  She had, too, a morbid interest in ugly things. Early in November she insisted on attending the trial for murder of Isaac Spencer. The trial was held in the Baptist Meeting House, and the galleries were occupied by ladies; but John urged that for her to go to court was not only unseemly, but might have a bad effect on the baby. She silenced him angrily, demanding whether he expected her to sit all day at home and never go anywhere or do anything; and in the end inevitably she had her way. For the three days of the trial she was always in attendance, and when Spencer was sentenced to be hanged she came home in a strange excitement which John could not understand, and insisted on telling him how Spencer had looked when he heard his doom; and she described to him at length and in stark detail the hanging she had seen at Castine long ago. John’s floundering attempts to lead the conversation to some other topic angered her, and he was helplessly silent at last under the storm he had provoked.

  Her rages during these months were the more dreadful because, no mattered how infuriated she became, she never raised her voice; and the impact of harsh words spoken gently was sinister and frightening. She was like a cruel and pitiless judge, impervious to the suffering and terror of those he sentences. John winced under the biting lash of her soft whispering wrath.

  The most violent—and what to his relief proved to be the last of these outbursts—occured in November. It was provoked in a circuitous way. Along with the price of wild lands, the price of pine was advancing; and this had put a premium on trespassing and the theft of timber. Colonel Black was acti
ve in prosecuting every such depredation on Bingham lands and it was a part of John’s duties to attend court when an occasional marauder was brought to trial. The Colonel’s policy was to seize the stolen property as evidence. He told John:

  ‘You can’t count on a jury anywhere in the lumbering counties, not even here in Bangor, unless your case is so strong they don’t dare refuse a verdict. Juries are drawn from loafers and worthless men who hate the landowners. But if you secure the logs, even if the case goes against you, you’ve got your property back and they can’t take it away from you.’

  In accordance with this practice, when that summer the Colonel’s agents located some logs which had been stolen off Bingham land and boomed in Sunkhaze Stream, he took possession, marked the logs with a B, and set a watch to protect them. The result, when the trespassers sought to recapture the fruits of their theft, was a bloody affray in which some bones were broken; and it led to court where John, at Judge Saladine’s elbow, took a silent but effective part in securing the conviction of the men on trial.

  One evening a few days later he went down to Carr’s Wharf to give some instructions to a group of Colonel Black’s men who were to start up-river in the morning; and a man whose conviction he had helped to Secure recognized him as he passed under one of the new street lamps, and without warning kicked him from behind, violently.

  John staggered forward, fell off the sidewalk of two-inch hemlock planks that had recently been built, bounded to his feet and turned toward his assailant. He was not by nature combative, but once roused there was a lively recklessness in him; and the fact that he now found himself facing not one man but three did not make him hesitate. He said evenly: