Part 13

Mr. Montagu, on the way to the table, looked several times over his shoulder, ostensibly to speak to his companion, but in reality to see whether the extraordinary boy was running the gantlet of eyes he had presupposed he would. And each time he met inquisitive faces that were not only staring but listening.

His own conspicuousness was grilling, but it was part and parcel of his insistent bargain; he could understand, quite sympathetically, how the youth's appearance, as awful as it was immaculate, should pound open the heart of any woman alive; and his suppressed excitement was too powerful for him to resent even the obvious repugnance in the faces of the men until he imagined an intentional discourtesy to the boy on the part of the waiter.

To himself, the man was over-servile, and elaborately cautious in pulling out his chair, but he stood, with his face quite white, and his back to the boy, and pulled out none for him. Henry Montagu had never yet bullied a waiter, and he did not bully now. But with an icy glare of reproof at the man, he rose and set the chair for his guest himself.

"Shall I order for you?" he asked gently as the boy sat quietly down; and made irritably incisive by the tendency of near-by men and women to listen as well as watch, he emphasized his expensive order of foods and wines, repeated each item loudly to cheapen the listeners, and sent the man scuttling.

In his intense desire to see the effect of the queerly chosen place on his queerly chosen companion, he now turned to him. And as he saw the effect, every shock of the night seemed to recoil upon him. The feeling of mystery; the foreboding, despite his courage and his conviction that the boy was mad, of the imminent unknown; his recurrent and absorbing curiosity to learn the gruesome secret that he had declared; all rushed one by one back upon him, and then as swiftly left him to the simple grip of horror at his face. It was gazing at woman after woman, here, there and yonder, throughout the large room, deliberately, searchingly, venomously, its great eyes and set lips and every tense haggard line fuller and fuller of an undying hate that eclipsed even that which had shaken Henry Montagu before they came. Appalled and fascinated, he looked with him, and back at him, and with him again, to the next and the next. There were women there, and ladies of every sort, good, bad and indecipherable; yet in every instance the childlike, horribly sophisticated eyes had picked their victim unerringly, deterred by neither clothes, veneer, nor manner.

As he stared with him from frightened female face to frightened female face, Mr. Montagu realized shamefully that his own features were helplessly mirroring the detestation of the boy's, and he changed from very pale to very red himself as woman after woman flushed crimson under his gaze. Yet the boy's face grew calm and his voice was perfectly so as he turned at last from his horrid review and met the eyes of his host.

"I see what you meant, now, by 'painted' women. Well, they'd much _better_ be dead!"

At the tone, cruelly cool as if he planned to see that they were, Mr. Montagu shivered. "Why, _why_ do you hate them like that?" he whispered.

The fierce anger flickered dangerously in the great eyes again.

"Because they're my enemy! Because they and the wicked thing they mean are my prowling, triumphant enemy, and the enemy of all others like me!"

"Oh, my boy, my boy!" pleaded the man of the world, sickly. "You don't realize it, but I can tell you from appearances--some of those women you stared at are here with their _husbands_!"

"So was _your_ wife when she came here," said the boy.

Mr. Montagu fell back in his chair with a gasp. As swiftly as it had leapt into his mind, the frightful implication of the words leapt out again in his amazement at the boy's knowledge of the incident.

But the waiter stepped between them with the order, and in obvious terror now instead of simple aversion, clattered it down with trembling hands.

"Go away! Go away!" commanded Mr. Montagu angrily. "_I'll_ arrange it! Go!" And the waiter escaped.

"How did you know?" he asked; but without waiting for a reply he poured out the boy's wine and his own, and took a long hasty draft.

"Now, how did you?"

"Oh!" cried the boy piteously. "Don't ask me! I shouldn't have said it! I knew I'd let it out if you came here with me! I'll be telling you everything in a minute, and you'll go stark mad when you know!"

The inference rushed again upon Henry Montagu, a worse vague horror than any yet, and he almost sprang from his chair.

"Are you going to tell me my wife was unfaithful to me, and with--with--"

"Fool! Fool!" cried the boy. "I wish to God she _had_ been unfaithful to you! I tried to make her, I can tell you that! Then there'd have been at least half a chance for _me_! But now that she's dead, there's no chance for either of us, even you! Unless--O God!--unless you'll control yourself and think! I beg you again, I beg of you, _think_ again! Go away from here, go now, without asking me anything more, and there's just a shade of a chance for you! I told you there was none if you left the house, but there may be, there may be! Go home, and forget this, and be satisfied your wife loved you, for she did. She kept herself for you _at my expense_! Go now, and they'll let you go. But if you stay here and talk to me, you'll leave this place in manacles! I'm here, _among those women_, and I'm with you! My secret will come out and drag you down, as I planned it should before I began to like you! And you like me, too--I feel it. For _my_ sake, then, for God's sake and for your sake, _won't you go_?"

"No!" cried Mr. Montagu, almost roughly in his eagerness. "I don't judge you, but it's your duty, and in your power, to put me where I can! I harbored you, thinking you were a frightened fugitive, and you weren't. I'm your voluntary host in circumstances of mysterious horror and you ask me to quit you in ignorance! I won't! You sicken me with a doubt about the wife I loved--Who are you? What are you?"

"If you believed I knew as much of her as I said I did," cried the boy, "why don't you believe me when I assure you that she loved you? What more should _you_ demand? I meant everything I said, and more--your wife was nothing but a licensed wanton, _and you knew it_! You ask me who and what I am--so long as she loved you, who are _you_, and what are _you_, to point a finger at her?"

A rush of instinctive fury filled the man, but he felt as dazed at finding himself angry at the beautiful unhappy youth, as if he had known him for years, and he only gasped and stared.

"If you think I'm crazy," cried the boy, "I'll show you, as I showed you once before, that I know what I'm talking about! I'll tell you something that was a secret between you two, and your wife didn't tell me, either! The night you'd been here, after you'd gone home, _after you were locked in your room_, you disputed about this place! She refused to come here again, and she refused to tell you why! But I know why!"

Once more Mr. Montagu gasped and with a thrill of wondering terror.

"Who are you and what are you?" he demanded. "I command you to solve this mystery and solve it now!"

His voice had risen to a shout, but a sudden lump in his throat silenced it, for the boy was weeping again.

"Oh," wept the boy, "if you've liked me at _all_, put it off as long as you can, for you'll make me tell you I hate you, and _why_ I hate you!"

"_Hate_ me?"

It had struck Henry Montagu like a flail in the face, wiping away his anger, his astonishment at the boy's uncanny knowledge, even his astonishment that the word was able to strike him so.

"I--I've suffered enough through you!" he stammered painfully. "And if I've got to suffer more, I insist on doing it now and getting it over with!"

"Don't! don't! It will _never_ be over with!" gulped the boy.

"I'm _through_!" cried Mr. Montagu. "_Who_ are you? _What_ are you?"

At the determined finality of the voice the boy quivered like a helpless thing, and his stuttering ejaculations came as if shaken out of him by the shivering of his body.

"Wh--_who_ am I?"

"_Yes!_"

"Wh--_what_ am I?"

"_Yes!_"

Never yet had he been so awful as in the torment and majesty that gazed like fate at Henry Montagu now, and the frightful fire of the eyes seemed to dry up the tears on his cheeks at its first flare of accusing righteousness.

"_I'm the child that you and your wife refused to have!_"

As the aghast man shrank back before his blighting fury, he leaned farther and farther toward him.

"_Now_ do you know why I hate you as no human thing can hate? _Your wilful waste has made my hideous want!_ Now do you know why I said I'd done a more terrific thing than had ever been done in the world's history before? _I've gotten in!_ At last, at last, I've gotten in, in spite of you, and after she was dead! I've done a greater and more impossible thing than that great Mystery the world adores! I've gotten in despite you, and without even a _woman's_ help! When we spoke of _that_ life once before to-night, I shocked you! Do you believe _now_ that my history is more terrible, or not? He suffered, and suffered, and He died. But He'd _lived_! His torture was a few hours--for mine to-night, I've waited almost as many years as He did, and to what end? _To nothing!_ God, God, do you see _that_?"

He twisted open his hands and held out his bruised wrists before the trembling man's eyes. "For all those years--"

He suddenly drew himself to his full height and threw them passionately above his head in the posture that had haunted Henry Montagu from the first instant's glimpse of him.

"For all those endless years, ever since your marriage-night, I've stood beating, beating, beating at the door of life until my wrists have bled! And you didn't hear me! You couldn't and she wouldn't! You didn't want to! You wouldn't listen! And you--you never have heard that desperate pounding and calling, not even to-night, though even so, with that woman out of the way, I made you _feel_ me! But _she'd_ heard me, the ghoul! She heard me again and again! I made her! I told her what she was, and that you knew it, and I meant it! Her marriage certificate was her license! She gave you a wanton's love, and you gave her just what you got! And I made her understand that! I made her understand it right here in this place! That's why I wanted to come here--I could see only her picture, and I wanted to see a _real_ one of them! Until to-night, I could never see either of you, but I always knew where you were!

"And when you brought her here, I made her look at that enemy of me and my kind that I could always _feel_--those women that she was one of and that she _knew_ she was one of when I screamed it at her in this place! For _I was with you two that night! I was with you till after you'd gone home, you demons!_ That's why she'd never come near the place again, the coward, the miserable coward! That's why I hate her worse than I hate you! There's a pitiful little excuse for the men, because they're _stupider_.

"For the hideous doom of all our hopeless millions, the women are more wickedly to blame, because they must face the fact that we are waiting to get in. God, God, I'd gladly be even a woman, if I could! But you're bad enough--bad enough--bad enough to deserve the fate you face to-night! And now, God help you, you're facing it, just as I said you would! You deserve it because you were put here with a purpose and you flatly wouldn't fulfil it! God only demands that mankind should be made in His image. In a wisdom that you have no right to question. He lets the images go their own way, as you've gone yours. Yet you, and all others like you, the simple, humble image-workers, instead of rejoicing that you have work to do, set your little selves up far greater than Great God, and actually decide whether men shall even _be_!

"You have a lot of hypercritical, self-justifying theories about it--that it's better for them not to live at all than to suffer some of the things that life, even birth itself, can wither them with. But there never yet was any living creature, no matter how smeared and smitten, that told the truth when he said he wished he'd never been born, while we, the countless millions of the lost, pound and shriek for life--forever shriek and hope! That's the worst anguish of the lost--they hope! I've shown what can be done through that anguish, as it's never been shown before. Even the terrible night that woman died, I hoped! I hoped more than ever, for knowing then that for all eternity it was too late, I hoped for _revenge_! And revenge was my right! Yes, every solitary soul has a right to _live_, even if it lives to wreck, kill, madden its parents! And now, oh, God, I've got my revenge when I no longer want it! The way you took me in, the way you wanted me to stay when I'd almost frightened you to death, made me want to spare you! It was my fate that I--I liked you--I--_more_ than liked you. And I tried to save you! Oh, God, God, _how_ I've tried!"

As he stood with his hands thrown forth again and his wretched eyes staring into those of the white-faced man, Henry Montagu met the wild gaze unflinchingly. He had sat dumbstruck and shuddering, but the spasmodic quivering of his body had lessened into calmness, and his whispered, slow words gained in steadiness as they came: "My boy, I admit you've nearly driven me to madness just now. I was close to the border! I can't dispute one shred of reproach, of accusation, of contempt. Your fearful explanation of this night, the awful import of your visit and yourself have shaken me to the center of my being. But its huge consistency is that of a madman. You poor, you pitiful, deluded boy, you tell me to believe you are an unborn soul, while you stand there and exist before my eyes!"

The boy gave a cry of agony--agony so immortal that as he sank into his chair and clutched the table, an echoing moan of it wrenched from the older man.

"I _don't_ exist! Didn't I tell you my secret was more terrible than any living heart had ever held? I'm real to you since I made you let me into your thoughts to-night. I'm real to you, and through your last moment of consciousness through eternity I always will be! But I won't be with you! You don't believe me yet, but the moment you do, I won't be here! And I never can be real to any other creature in the universe--_not even that prostitute who refused to be my mother_! I don't exist, and never can exist!"

"But you do! You do! You do! You're there before me now!" gasped Mr. Montagu through chattering teeth. "How can you deny that you're sitting here with me in this restaurant? I forgive you--I love you, and I forgive you, but, thank God, _I see through you at last_! You're a fanatic, a poor, frenzied maniac on this subject, and you've morbidly spied on and studied me as a typical case of it; through your devilish understanding and divination you've guessed at that conversation between me and my wife, and like the creature I pictured you in my house, a ravening, devouring thing, you've sought to drag me into your hell of madness! But you shan't! I tell you I see through you at last, you pitiful mad creature! You know you're there before my eyes, and just so truly as you are, not one syllable do I believe of what you've told me!"

As the boy sprang with a venomous shout to his feet, all the hate in his terrible being sprang tenfold into his eyes.

"Do you call me 'mad,' and 'creature'? Do you dare deny me, now, after all I've told you? You coward, you _coward_! You've denied me life, but you can't deny this night! The people in this place will let you know presently! I tried to spare you. Though I'd thirsted for my revenge I pleaded with you, _prayed_ to you to spare yourself! If you'd stayed in the house, you might have come to your senses and forgotten me! But what hope for you is there _now_? Do you still believe I exist? Look back at the night! Do you remember the portrait? You commanded me to stop--commanded, as you've always commanded my fate, and I was powerless. To me, that was a parental command--from _you_, you who deliberately _wouldn't_ be my parent! Did you see me wince under it? If you hadn't done it, you'd have found me out right then! I'm not a physical thing, and I couldn't have moved it! I only _said_ I was going to Maurice's! I couldn't have come here if you hadn't brought me! When you wondered, as we were starting out, whether I had a hat, I stooped down in the hall. But you only thought I picked one up! As we came in here, you only _thought_ I checked it! Did you see the man stare as you reached out to take my check away from me? Have I eaten or drunk to-night? I've not, for I'm not a _creature_! And mad, I? Look to yourself, as I told you to look before it was too late! You fool, you've been staring inoffensive women out of countenance, with all the hate from my face printed on yours, and in the eyes of all these people you've been sitting here for half an hour talking to yourself, and ordering wine and food for an empty chair! _You_ won't ever believe you're mad, but every one else will!"

"So help me God," cried Henry Montagu, white and trembling, "you're there! I swear you're there!"

"So help you God, I'm _there_!" cried the boy frightfully, pointing straight at him.

"Right there, in your brain, there, there, and _only_ there! I'm no more flesh and blood than--than I _ever_ was, _because, you murderer, you and your damned wife never would let me be_! Well, do you see through me _now_?"

"No! No!" screamed Mr. Montagu. "I _don't_ see through you! I don't!" But as he leaned forward to clutch at him in his terror, all that he could see before him was a closed door beyond a dozen tables, a disused entranceway diagonally opposite the one that had let them in. "I _don't_ believe you!" he wailed. "Oh, my God, my God, my God, _where are you_?" He turned frantically to the men and women nearest him. "You saw him! There _was_ a boy with me, wasn't there? Wasn't there? Yes, see, there, isn't he going for that door? Oh, my boy, my boy!" And he dashed toward it. He heard the terrible screams of women, and chairs and a table crashed in his wake. He reached it. It was locked.

Desperately sobbing, he hurled himself against it.

It seemed to him as if all the men in the restaurant fell upon him. Strong, merciless hands dragged down and pinioned the wrists with which he had beaten against the door.

"GOVERNMENT GOAT"[11]

[Note 11: Copyright, 1919, by The Pictorial Review Company. Copyright, 1920, by Susan Glaspell Cook.]

BY SUSAN GLASPELL

From _The Pictorial Review_

Joe Doane couldn't get to sleep. On one side of him a family were crying because their man was dead, and on the other side a man was celebrating because he was alive.

When he couldn't any longer stand the wails of the Cadaras, Joe moved from his bedroom to the lounge in the sitting-room. But the lounge in the sitting-room, beside making his neck go in a way no neck wants to go, brought him too close to Ignace Silva's rejoicings in not having been in one of the dories that turned over when the schooner _Lillie-Bennie_ was caught in the squall last Tuesday afternoon and unable to gather all her men back from the dories before the sea gathered them. Joe Cadara was in a boat that hadn't made it--hence the wails to the left of the Doanes, for Joe Cadara left a wife and four children and they had plenty of friends who could cry, too. But Ignace Silva--more's the pity, for at two o'clock in the morning you _like_ to wish the person who is keeping you awake was dead--got back to the vessel. So to-night his friends were there with bottles, for when a man _might_ be dead certainly the least you can do is to take notice of him by getting him drunk.

People weren't sleeping in Cape's End that night. Those who were neither mourning nor rejoicing were being kept awake by mourners or rejoicers. All the vile, diluted whisky that could be bought on the quiet was in use for the deadening or the heightening of emotion. Joe Doane found himself wishing _he_ had a drink. He'd like to stop thinking about dead fishermen--and hearing live ones. Everybody had been all strung up for two days ever since word came from Boston that the _Lillie-Bennie_ was one of the boats "caught."

They didn't know until the _Lillie-Bennie_ came in that afternoon just how many of her men she was bringing back with her. They were all out on Long Wharf to watch her come in and to see who would come ashore--and who wouldn't. Women were there, and lots of children. Some of these sets of a woman and children went away with a man, holding on to him and laughing, or perhaps looking foolish to think they had ever supposed he could be dead. Others went away as they had come--maybe very still, maybe crying. There were old men who came away carrying things that had belonged to sons who weren't coming ashore. It was all a good deal like a movie--only it didn't rest you.

So he _needed_ sleep, he petulantly told things as he rubbed the back of his neck, wondered why lounges were made like that, and turned over. But instead of sleeping, he thought about Joe Cadara. They were friendly thoughts he had about Joe Cadara; much more friendly than the thoughts he was having about Ignace Silva. For one thing, Joe wasn't making any noise. Even when he was alive, Joe had made little noise. He always had his job on a vessel; he'd come up the Front street in his oilskins, turn in at his little red house, come out after a while and hoe in his garden or patch his wood-shed, sit out on the wharf and listen to what Ignace Silva and other loud-mouthed Portuguese had to say--back to his little red house. He--well, he was a good deal like the sea. It came in, it went out. On Joe Cadara's last trip in, Joe Doane met him just as he was starting out. "Well, Joe," says Joe Doane, "off again?" "Off again," said Joe Cadara, and that was about all there seemed to be to it. He could see him going down the street--short, stocky, slow, _dumb_. By dumb he meant--oh, dumb like the sea was dumb--just going on doing it. And now--

All of a sudden he couldn't _stand_ Ignace Silva. "_Hell!_" roared Joe Doane from the window, "don't you know a man's _dead_?" In an instant the only thing you could hear was the sea. In--Out--

Then he went back to his bedroom. "I'm not sleeping either," said his wife--the way people are quick to make it plain they're as bad off as the next one.

At first it seemed to be still at the Cadaras. The children had gone to sleep--so had the friends. Only one sound now where there had been many before. And that seemed to come out of the sea. You got it after a wave broke--as it was dying out. In that little let-up between an in, an out, you knew that Mrs. Cadara had not gone to sleep, you knew that Mrs. Cadara was crying because Joe Cadara was dead in the sea.

So Joe Doane and his wife Mary lay there and listened to Annie Cadara crying for her husband, Joe Cadara.

Finally Mrs. Doane raised on her pillow and sighed. "Well, I suppose she wonders what she'll do now--those four children."

He could see Joe Cadara's back going down the Front street--broad, slow, _dumb_. "And I suppose," he said, as if speaking for something that had perhaps never spoken for itself, "that she feels bad because she'll never see him again."

"Why, of course she does," said his wife impatiently, as if he had contradicted something she had said.

But after usurping his thought she went right back to her own. "I don't see how she will get along. I suppose we'll have to help them some."