The Strange Woman

by Ben Ames Williams

  He accepted her guidance. ‘Meg says he’ll be away all winter?’

  ‘Yes. But you mustn’t be a stranger, Line. You know he would want you to come, as you always have. And of course I want you, too—as much as the children do.’

  ‘I will,’ he promised. He tried to laugh. ‘I’ll come so often you’ll soon be tired of having me around.’

  She smiled. ‘When I am, I’ll surely tell you, Line,’ she promised. ‘But till I do-you may be sure you’re welcome. Come when you can.’

  III

  After they parted, he remembered her every word and intonation and every glance of her eye. She, clearly, recognized as he did the risk of gossip which his coming to the house involved; yet she had bidden him dare that risk and come. But his thoughts so far outreached the present moment that even for him to go to see her—since his thoughts were what they were—seemed to him like a betrayal of John. Whosoever lusted after a woman in his heart was already an adulterer; and he reminded himself of this with a guilty vehemence, and prayed for an honest mind. He could not control his thoughts, so he felt himself already damned; but he could control his physical actions, and he did not go to her till she sent for him, wrote him: ‘Come when you can. I’ve something I’d like to discuss with you.’

  The boys, when he appeared, welcomed him almost shyly. It was so long since he had seen them that he was, especially to the younger ones, half a stranger; and he had to invite them to that exploration of his pockets which they had used to initiate. Jenny smilingly watched them press around him, and for a while they had him to themselves; but then she sent them away.

  ‘I wanted your advice about a problem that has come up at the Children’s Home,’ she reassuringly explained. She had refused a place on the board of managers there, but by her singleness of purpose she dominated the direction of the institution. When Miss Folsom resigned as matron to marry Deacon Skinner of Brewer, Jenny had been dissatisfied with Mrs. Quimby, her immediate successor, and she had led the managers to replace Mrs. Quimby with Mrs. Norton. She told Line now about a difficulty which had arisen with Mrs. Norton; and although the matter seemed to him of 110 importance—it concerned the question whether Mrs. Norton should be required to teach the children their lessons, as Miss Folsom had done, or whether a teacher should be engaged—she discussed it at length, laying out every argument for or against, requiring his opinion.

  He answered emptily. To be alone with her here in the big living room, the doors closed, the bright fire crackling, was at once blissful and affrighting. Dusk presently would darken the windows, and they would sit here in the firelight, with the flames giving just enough light so that he could see how lovely she was, and at last the house, except for them, would be all asleep, and-if he stayed so long—they might go quietly and secretly up the wide stairs together. His ravenous thoughts, watching her while she talked of Mrs. Norton and of these unimportant matters, clung to her alone. Was it possible, he asked himself, that she was as unconscious as she seemed of the potency and of the peril of this quiet hour? If he rose and crossed to where she sat and drew her into his arms—what would she say? What do?

  Her words were of matters wholly impersonal. She spoke earnestly and strongly of her perplexities about the Home, and her eyes were intent, and her countenance wore an extraordinary purity. He found it impossible, looking at her untouched beauty now, to believe that she had borne John four children; that she and John had been these ten years devoted and passionate lovers.

  And yet—was it impossible? Was there not something of invitation, even of surrender, in her eyes? Was there not in her glances a lambent fire he had never seen before?

  They talked about the Children’s Home till he was fretfully weary of that subject; and he asked questions on his own account. Had she heard from John? Had the boys been well, escaping all the ills of childhood? ‘I feel as though I were all out of touch,’ he admitted. ‘I haven’t seen them since the day we went to Pushaw Lake.’ He hoped she might refer to their conversation there, bring them thus to that more intimate footing he wished somehow to achieve.

  But she only said that life went smoothly in its usual courses. She smiled and added: ‘Only some stray pigs got into my garden one night and almost ruined it!’ Swine in greater or less numbers had always run wild in the Bangor streets and still did so, dodging out of the way of passing teams with querulous squeals. ‘They must have rooted in my flower beds all night long,’ she said. ‘It was sickening. I threatened to put out poison for them, but John wouldn’t let me.’

  ‘You can’t poison dumb animals,’ he agreed. ‘They’re not to blame.’

  ‘Then I’d like to poison the people who let them run loose,’ she declared, laughing at her own heat. ‘Bangor’s full of pigs—and the human ones are the worst!’

  It had been mid-afternoon when he came to her. He stayed long, wondering whether she would invite him to supper, but she did not; and at last he began to see a smile in her eyes, as though she were amused at his lingering. He rose to say good-bye, hoping for protests, longing to hear her whisper: ‘No, Line. Stay.’ But she let him go.

  IV

  John came home for Christmas, making the trip with a caravan of teams sent to fetch supplies. He would stay a few days, and he invited Elder Pittridge home with him for supper. They met at John’s office, where Pat would pick them up; and John with a boyish enthusiasm displayed a writing machine which someone wished to sell him, and which printed small capital letters, clearly and neatly, on a piece of paper. ‘But I’m not buying it,’ he said. ‘It’s still new. I doubt it will work.’ He produced with some pride another new device, elastic bands useful for holding letters and bills in packets for filing, made by a Mr. Goodyear, of Providence, Rhode Island.

  John laid such emphasis on these small matters that Elder Pittridge thought the other was uneasily making conversation, and he was glad when the carriage came for them. On the way home John said in friendly reproach:

  ‘Jenny says you’ve been neglecting her. You mustn’t do that, Line. She likes to go to concerts and entertainments and the Lyceum lectures and such things; but she can’t well do it without an escort. And with me gone and Meg married and living down in Searsport, Jenny has no one now but her sewing circle and her church friends. It’s a lonely winter for her.’

  ‘I’ve been busy,’ Elder Pittridge admitted. ‘The cold winter has caused a lot of distress, you know. With the mills shut down, there are many idle men, families with no income. I try to do what I can to help them along.’

  ‘I know,’ John assented. ‘Jenny does a lot of that too, of course. There are dozens of women and children in Bangor who would go hungry if it weren’t for her and her friends. She tells me she’s given away eleven Franklin stoves and airtights this winter to people who couldn’t even keep warm; and since I’ve been at home there are children at the house every day to beg for food. Mrs. McGaw and Jenny always feed them.’ He added: ‘It’s the fact that we haven’t enough jobs here from November to May that’s making so many Maine men move to Massachusetts. That’s the weakness in the lumber business, Line. Most of the work—so far as Bangor is concerned—is concentrated in the summer. We’ll cure that some day.’ He added in friendly urgency: ‘But you ought to find time to see your friends.’

  ‘Well, you know, John, if I saw much of her, some clatter-tongues would start wagging.’

  John laughed. ‘What of it? Those whose opinion I value won’t think harm of Jenny—or of you. Why pay attention to the others?’ And as they drew up to the door: ‘So here we are.’

  Jenny made much of that reunion of the three of them. ‘It’s a pity Meg can’t be here,’ she said. ‘But she couldn’t come without her Captain, so it wouldn’t be the same.’

  She told John: ‘You should have come back for her wedding, my dear. There was never so happy a bride.’

  ‘Wish I could have,’ John agreed; and Elder Pittridge thought there was no reservation in his tone. ‘I’d go down and see them if I
had the time; but it can’t be managed.’

  He told them at the supper table how his winter was being spent. He was overseeing the work of half a dozen camps scattered along twenty miles of river. ‘We’ll have the biggest single drive that ever came downriver,’ he declared. ‘I want to see some men here tomorrow, see if the drive on the whole river can’t be organized as one proposition.’ And he explained the plan he had in mind. The extension of large-scale lumbering up the West Branch had begun sixteen years before, when Steve Bussell and nine or ten others cut off some monster pines in the Millinocket Lake region; but not even a systematic exploration of the upper river was made till 1837, and then primarily with the idea of opening a route of travel to Canada.

  ‘Now there are gangs lumbering all along the river.’ John told them. ‘But every man drives his own logs. There’s a dam at Chesuncook that helps give a head of water, and pays General Veazie as much in tolls every year as it cost him to build it; and there’s another at North Twin Lakes. But a company that went into it right, handled the drive for the whole river, could afford to put up dams and sluices wherever they’re needed, and take out rocks in the main channel, boom the coves, and so on. They could drive cheaper than any one outfit, and make a good profit for themselves doing it.’

  His plan was for a mutual company, membership open to any man owning timber land or engaged in lumbering along the river. ‘We’d have to work it out in proportion to the size of the operation, maybe give every owner one vote, and give every operator a vote for each six-ox team he’s got working. We’d assess costs, and divide profits. I’m going to see Ira Wadleigh about it tomorrow. I’ve talked with Aaron Babb, and he says he could save a lot of money for all of us if he could run the whole drive. He figures he could drive from Chesuncook Dam to Argyle for seventy-five cents a thousand, or maybe less. That beats the best we can do.’

  Listening, Elder Pittridge felt renewed in him that strong affection for the other man which had been almost forgotten. There was something in John Evered at once youthful in eagerness and zest, and mature in wisdom. Certainly there was no weakness in him anywhere. If now between him and Jenny a gulf had opened which John would not cross, yet to the world she would always hold her place as his wife, receiving his respect and deference if not his love. Elder Pittridge for this hour tonight remembered his own thoughts of her as though he saw them through John’s eyes, and he felt a sick contempt for those treacherous hungers in him which he had not been strong enough to stifle. When John urged again that he should see as much of Jenny as he could, he promised to do so—and swore to himself that from seeing her no harm should come.

  V

  So after John went back into the wilderness, Elder Pittridge went sometimes to the house; and three or four times he escorted Jenny to a concert, or to some other function which she wished to attend. If they were criticized for this he never knew it, nor was there ever anything, any word or sign, between them to make him uneasy; and his fears slept. He enjoyed being with her, and since no harm came of their hours together, he felt at last secure. Winter relaxed its grip upon the land and spring began to come. The drifts settled, the first birds appeared, the ice went out of the river, and at last after a night of soft rain the ground was left almost bare of snow. Tire first warm days tinted the dull brown of last year’s grass with green.

  Spring had in Bangor one manifestation which was not beautiful. When the ice went out and the lumber fleet worked up the river, the . sailors trooped ashore; and when the gangs came out of the woods they made straight for Bangor; and when the drives were down, the rivermen rushed to taste the delights of town. To welcome them, scores of dives along Washington and Hancock and Exchange and Harlow Streets waited with open doors. Taverns and grogshops, lodging houses and restaurants and forthright bawdy houses from March to November did a thriving business.

  The establishments—sometimes secretly or openly financed by Bangor men—knew no scruples. Lena Tempest’s place, with its pretty little harlots, enjoyed a certain distinction. Her doors were open only to those elect whom she chose to admit, and she herself kept the peace in her house, by force if need be. But elsewhere the customers were a brawling, truculent lot to whom a fight was a welcome part of any holiday; so every saloon and gaming hall and catch-penny joint had its staff of ruffians alert not so much to keep the peace as to protect property against physical damage. If a fight started indoors, whether it involved two men or a dozen, the combatants quickly found themselves in the street, sometimes with bumped heads, cut faces, or broken teeth as evidence of the ruthless methods of the bouncers.

  But there was other and more secret violence. When a man came out of the woods with money in his pockets, it was good business to rid him of it as quickly as possible; and if the individual was stubbornly slow to lose himself in a helpless intoxication, there were ways to hurry the process, relieve him of everything he possessed and be rid of him. If sometimes violence went too far—why, the river ran with a scouring tide to the sea.

  The Devil’s Half Acre was part of Bangor, but only one part. There was another Bangor made up of families who had travelled widely, of people of cultivation and taste who lived quietly and decently. There was a group characterized by steadily increasing wealth; there was the Bangor of the lumbermen, and there was the Bangor of the seafarers, the builders of ships and their owners and their captains. But the backbone of the city was made up of small merchants and sober and respectable artisans; joiners, coopers, painters, masons, stonecutters, turners, smiths, cordwainers, blockmakers, coppersmiths, curriers, fishmongers, hostlers, shipwrights, housewrights, wheelers, tanners, toolmakers and the like; yoemen and farmers, men who lived diligently and frugally, bred children and protected them and planned what their lives should be.

  To these sober folk spring was a season to be dreaded, since, in the weeks before the ice went out, the dives began to be reopened; and every stage brought from Augusta and Portland and even from Boston rough men and women coming to repopulate that district along the Stream. It was the shameful scenes to be encountered there which turned public opinion among decent folk more and more against the rum traffic; and this year Elder Pittridge, feeling within himself new powers and anxious to carry through to victory the long fight for a temperance law, began to go down to Exchange Street at night to see at first-hand what went forward there, gathering ammunition which he used at the regular meetings of Friends of Temperance in the Hammond Street vestry.

  As they felt their position increasingly endangered by the rising tide of public sentiment, the people of the Devil’s Half Acre were in a mood to fight back. One night when Elder Pittridge passed McPhail’s Tavern in an alley off Exchange Street, he was recognized and seized by three or four men and dragged indoors. He found himself the centre there of a drunken, angry crowd, damning him for his crusading efforts against them; and he faced them boldly, haranguing them for their crimes until someone on a happy inspiration filled a bucket with rum and, coming quietly behind him, emptied it over his head, drenching his clothes. The spectacle he presented suggested to their hilarious minds a further procedure; and despite his desperate struggles, they pinned him fast and poured rum down his throat until he was thoroughly drunk and presently became insensible.

  In this condition he was deposited on the doorstep of Deacon Adams, and at dawn the Deacon found him there, snoring heavily. On a sheet of paper pinned to his coat the word ‘Rummy’ had been painted in large letters.

  Deacon Adams took him indoors and kept him till he was himself again; and when Elder Pittridge told him what had happened, the Deacon accepted his report as true. But the perpetrators of the jest liked it too well to let it be forgotten, and the tale was spread abroad. It was, of course, distorted. Elder Pittridge, they insisted, had come down to McPhail’s and drunk himself into a stupor.

  His enemies and the enemies of his cause professed to believe this; and he himself, having told the truth to Deacon Adams, made no further protestation of his innocence. But
when in May the County Temperance Society planned a meeting in the City Hall to discuss and reprehend the seasonal renewal of activity in the Devil’s Half Acre, he, as a sort of martyr who had suffered for the right, was scheduled to be the principal speaker.

  VI

  The hall on the appointed night was crowded with people who had come from friendship, from enmity, or from a simple curiosity to hear what he would say; and Elder Pittridge, waiting his turn to speak, saw Jenny in the audience. He listened grimly while those who came before him said what had been said many times before, speaking generalities, deploring the disgrace which the existence of Devil’s Half Acre imposed upon the city. The Mayor and the Chief of Police in their turn gave the usual assurances that disorders would be dealt with, but they suggested that decent citizens might be well advised to avoid the quarter, and they pointed this advice by referring to the atrocious treatment which Elder Pittridge had encountered.

  These references evoked some amused smiles and some glances in his direction, so when at last he rose to speak, there was a burning rage in him. He was always a ready and a forceful talker; but today he was by his own anger inspired. Yet he began easily enough, controlling his voice, speaking with a sardonic moderation.

  ‘I have attended many such meetings as this, in the years that are gone,’ he said. ‘Most of you here have attended those same meetings. For me tonight, as for all of you, it has been as though we heard over again all the things that have been said here in other years. Of course what was said in other years is still true. We still daily see our fellow beings—some of them once respectable—falling into the mud in our streets, and when down not able to rise. We hear every winter of men insensible with liquor freezing to death in the snow. We still see grogshops everywhere, making drunkards by thousands.

  ‘We still deplore the vices of others—and ignore our own. We condemn intemperance, yet I see some here who themselves indulge.’ His voice began to rise from its easy level. ‘How can you assist in this work whilst you are in the habit of the common and daily use of ardent spirits? The youth with his first drink in his hand replies to your remonstrance: “Why do you upbraid or advise me? You drink. Why should not I?” You may tell him that you do not drink to excess, but will he believe it—or admit that he is not your equal in self-restraint?