Chapter 4

When the latter had gone Lemuel Doret found his wife in the kitchen. She wore a pale-blue wrapper with a soiled scrap of coarse lace at her full throat, her hair was gathered into a disorderly knot, and already there was a dab of paint on either cheek. She had been pretty when he married her, pretty and full of an engaging sparkle, a ready wit; but the charm had gone, the wit had hardened into a habit of sarcasm. They had been married twelve years, and in itself, everything considered, that was remarkable and held a great deal in her favor. She had been faithful. It was only lately, in Nantbrook, that her dissatisfaction had materialized in vague restless hints.

“Frazee says Flavilla is sick,” he told her. “He thinks we ought to get Markley.”

She made a gesture of skepticism. “All those doctors send you to each other,” she proclaimed. “Like as not he'll get half for doing it.”

“She don't look right.”

Bella's voice and attitude grew exasperated. “Of course you know all about children; you've been where you could study on them. And of course I have no sense; a woman's not the person to say when her child is sick or well. Have a doctor if you can pay one, and buy a lot of medicine too. There's some calomel upstairs, but that's no good. I'd like to know where you have all the money! God knows I need a little, to put inside me and out.”

“It's right scarce,” he admitted, resolutely ignoring her tone. “Perhaps Flavilla will be better later in the day; I'll wait.”

He spoke without conviction, denying the impulse to have her cared for at once, in an effort to content and still Bella. However, he failed in both of these aims. Her voice swept into a shrill complaint and abuse of Nantbrook--a place, she asserted, of one dead street, without even a passing trolley car to watch. She had no intention of being buried here for the rest of her life. Turning to a cigarette and yesterday's paper she drooped into a sulky shape of fat and slovenly blue wrapper beside the neglected dishes of their insufficient breakfast.

He went through the empty house to the front again, where at least the sun was warm and bright. The air held a faint dry fragrance that came from the haymaking of the deep country in which Nantbrook lay. Lemuel Doret could see the hotel at a crossing on the left, a small gray block of stone with a flat portico, a heavy gilt beer sign and whitewashed sheds beyond. The barkeeper stood at a door, a huge girth circled by a soiled apron; nearer a bundle of brooms and glittering stacked paint cans marked the local store. It was, he was forced to admit, far from gay; but he found a great contentment in the sunny peace, in the limitless space of the unenclosed sky; the air, the fields, the birds in the trees were free.

As he stood frowning in thought he saw the figure of a strange man walking over the road; Lemuel knew that he was strange by the formality of the clothes. He wore a hard straw hat, collar and diamond-pinned tie, and a suit with a waistcoat. At first Doret's interest was perfunctory, but as the other drew nearer his inspection changed to a painful absorption. Suddenly his attitude grew tense; he had the appearance of a man gazing at an enthralling but dangerous spectacle, such--for example--as a wall that might topple over, crushing anything human within its sweep.

The object of this scrutiny had a pale countenance with a carefully clipped mustache, baggy eyes and a blue-shaved heavy jaw. An indefinable suggestion of haste sat on a progress not unduly hurried. But as he caught sight of Lemuel Doret he walked more and more slowly, returning his fixed attention. When the two men were opposite each other, only a few feet apart, he almost stopped. For a moment their sharpened visions met, parried, and then the stranger moved on. He made a few steps, hesitated, then directly returned.

“Come inside,” he said in a slightly hoarse voice.

“It suits me here,” Doret replied.

The other regarded him steadily. “I've made no mistake,” he asserted. “I could almost say how long you were up for, and a few other little things too. I don't know what you're doing in this dump, but here we both are.”

He waited for nothing more, ascending quickly to the hall. The two made their way into the improvised barber shop.

“You've got me wrong,” Doret still insisted.

“Who is it, Lem?” Bella demanded at the door.

As she spoke an expression of geniality overspread her face, daubed with paint and discontent.

“Why, I'll tell you--I'm June Bowman.”

“That don't mean anything to us,” Lemuel continued. “The best thing you can do is keep right on going.”

“Not that Fourth Ward stew?” Bella asked eagerly.

He nodded.

“Lem's kind of died on his feet,” she explained in a palpable excuse of her husband's ignorance; “he don't read the papers nor nothing. But of course I've heard of you, Mr. Bowman. We're glad to see you.”

“Keep right along,” Lemuel Doret repeated. His face was dark and his mouth hardly more than a pinched line.

“Now, who are you?” Bowman inquired.

“I'll tell you,” Bella put in, “since his manners have gone with everything else. This is Snow Doret. If you know the live men that name will be familiar to you.”

“I seem to remember it,” he admitted.

“If Snow went in the city it's Lemuel here,” Doret told him. His anger seethed like a kettle beginning to boil.

“Well, if Snow ever went I guess I'm in right. The truth is I got to lay off for a little, and this seems first-rate. I can explain it in a couple of words: Things went bad----”

“Wasn't it the election?” Bella asked politely.

“In a way,” he answered with a bow. “You're all right. A certain party, you see, was making some funny cracks--a reform dope; and he got in other certain parties' light, see? Word was sent round, and when a friend and me come on him some talk was passed and this public nuisance got something. It was all regular and paid for----”

“I read about it,” Bella interrupted. “He died in the ambulance.”

“Then I was slipped the news that they were going to elect me the pretty boy, and I had to make a break. Only temporary, till things are fixed. Thus you see me scattered with hayseed. I was walking through for a lift to Lancaster, where there are some good fellows; but when I saw Snow here taking the air I knew there was one nearer.”

“Lemuel; and I'm no good fellow.”

“That's the truth,” his wife added thinly. “Here is the only one in this house.” She touched her abundant self.

“Then I can put up?”

“No,” Lemuel Doret told him. “This is a house of God's.”

Bella laughed in a rising hysterical key.

“Listen to him,” she gasped; “listen to Snow Doret. It's no wonder you might have forgotten him,” she proclaimed; “he's been in the pen for ten and a half years with a bunch off for good conduct. But fifteen years ago--say! He went in for knifing a drug store keeper who held out on a 'coke' deal. If this here's a house of God's I'd like to know what he called the one he had then. I couldn't tell you half of what went on, not half, with fixing drinks and frame-ups and skirts. Why, he run a hop joint with the Chinese and took a noseful of snow at every other breath. That was after his gambling room broke up--it got too raw even for the police. It was brandy with him, too, and there ain't a gutter in his district he didn't lay in. The drug store man wasn't the first he cut neither.”

She stopped from sheer lack of breath.

Curiously all that filled Lemuel Doret's mind was the thought of the glory of God. Everything Bella said was true; but in the might of the Savior it was less than nothing. He had descended into the pit and brought him, Snow, up, filling his ears with the sweet hymns of redemption, the promise of Paradise for the thieves and murderers who acknowledged His splendor and fought His fight. This marvelous charity, the cleansing hope for his blackened soul, swept over him in a warm rush of humble praise and unutterable gratitude. Nothing of the Lord's was lost: “His eye is on the sparrow.”

“Certainly, lay off your coat,” Bella was urging; “it's fierce hot. Lem can rush a can of beer from the hotel. Even he wouldn't go to turn out one of the crowd in a hard fix. I'm awful glad you saw him.”

With June Bowman in his house, engaged in verbal agreements with Bella and spreading comfortably on a chair, Lemuel was powerless. AH his instinct pressed him to send the other on, to refuse--in the commonest self-preservation--shelter. But both the laws of his old life and the commands of the new were against this act of simple precaution. Bowman eyed him with a shrewd appraisement.

“A clever fellow,” he said, nodding; “admire you for coming out here for a while. Well, how about the suds?”

He produced a thick roll of yellow-backed currency and detached a small bill. “I'll finance this campaign.”

Lemuel Doret was confused by the rapidity with which the discredited past was re-created by Bowman's mere presence. He was at the point of refusing to fetch the beer when he saw that there was no explanation possible; they would regard him as merely crabbed, and Bella would indulge her habit of shrill abuse. It wasn't the drink itself that disturbed him but the old position of “rushing the can”--a symbol of so much that he had left forever. Forever; he repeated the word with a silent bitter force. The feel of the kettle in his hand, the thin odor of the beer and slopping foam, seemed to him evidences of acute degeneration; he was oppressed by a mounting dejection. God seemed very far away.

His wife was talking while Bowman listened with an air of sympathetic wisdom.

“It wasn't so bad then,” she said; “I was kind of glad to get away, and Lem was certain everything would open right out. But he's awful hard to do with; he wouldn't take a dollar from parties who had every right to stake him good, and borrowed five from no more than a stranger to buy that secondhand barber chair. What he needed was chloroform to separate these farmers from their dimes and whiskers.” Bowman laughed loudly, and a corresponding color invaded Bella. “Of course no one knew Lem had done time, then. They wouldn't have either, but for the Law and Order. Oh, dear me, no, your child ain't none of your own; they lend it to you like and then sneak up whenever the idea takes them, to see if it's getting a Turkish bath. I guess the people on the street wondered who was our swell automobile friend till they found out.”

“I suppose,” Bowman put in, “they all came round and offered you the helping hand, wanted to see you happy and successful.”

She laughed. “Them?” she demanded. “Them? The man that owns this house said that if he'd known, Lem would never had it; they don't want convicts in this town. This is a moral burg. That's more than the women said to me though--the starved buzzards; if they've spoke a word to me since I never heard it.” Her voice rose in sharp mimicry: “You, Katie, come right up on the porch, child! Don't you know--! See, I'm going by.”

“I could have warned you of all that,” June Bowman asserted; “for the reason they're narrow, don't know anything about living or affairs; hypocritical too; long on churchgoing----”

Doret regarded him solemnly. How blind he was, a mound of corruptible flesh! He put the beer down and turned abruptly away, going up to Flavilla. She seemed better; her face was white but most of the fever had gone. He listened to her harsh breathing with the conviction that she had caught a cold; and immediately after he was back from the store with a bottle of cherry pectoral. She liked the sweet taste of the thick bright-pink sirup and was soon quiet. Lemuel sniffed the mouth of the bottle suspiciously. It was doped, he finally decided, but not enough to hurt her; tasting it, a momentary desire for stinging liquor ran like fire through his nerves. He laughed at it, crushing and throwing aside the longing with a sense of contempt and triumph.

He could hear occasionally Bowman's smooth periods and his wife's eager enjoyment of the discourse. His sense of worldly loneliness deepened; Flavilla seemed far away. All life was inexplicable--yes, and profitless, ending in weariness and death. The hunger for perfection, for God, that had been a constant part of his existence, the longing for peace and security, were almost unbearable. He had had a long struggle; the devil was deeply rooted in him. He could laugh at the broken tyranny of drugs and drink, but the passion for fine steel cutting edges was different, and twisted into every fiber. The rage that even yet threatened to flood him, sweeping away his painfully erected integrity, was different too. These things had made him a murderer.

“... not the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”

He had a sudden muddled vision of another world, a world where sturdy men gave him their hands and in reality fulfilled June Bowman's mocking words. There the houses, the streets of his youth would have been impossible. Ah, he was thinking of another kind of heaven; it was a hop dream.

There was a stir below and he heard the clatter of plates. Dinner was in preparation. “Lem!” his wife called. “Mr. Bowman wants you to go to the butcher's.”

“Call me June,” he put in; adding: “Sure, Lem; the butcher's; we want a tenderloin, cut thick. You can't get any pep on greens; we ain't cattle.”

Doret felt that he would have been infinitely happier with his own thin fare. In a manner he got comfort from a pinch of hunger; somehow the physical deprivation gave him a sense of purification. The other man, purple with the meat and beer, shook out a cigarette from a paper pack.

“Always smoke caporal halves,” he proclaimed.

The blue vapor from the three burning cigarettes rose and mingled. Bella was quiet, reflective; Bowman sat with half-shut speculative eyes; Lemuel Doret was again lost in visions.

“How long are you taking the milk cure?” Bowman asked.

Lemuel made no reply, but his wife smiled bitterly.

“I had an idea,” the other continued; “but it's a little soon to spring anything. And I don't know but you might prefer it here.”

“Try me,” Bella proclaimed; “that's all I want!”

Doret still said nothing of his determination to conquer life in Nantbrook. A swift impulse seized him to take June Bowman by the collar and fling him into the street.

“Just try me!” Bella repeated.

He would be helpless in his, Doret's, hands. It was hard enough to be upright without an insinuating crook in the place. There was a heavy movement of feet in the front of the house, and he went out to meet a customer.

Sliding the sensitive razor blade over a young tanned cheek he pondered moodily on the undesirable fact of June Bowman.

Returning from this exercise of his trade he saw Bella descending the stair with a plate.

“With all your going on over Flavilla,” she told him, “it never came to you that she'd like a piece of steak.”

“But Doctor Frazee told us nothing solid. I took her up two eggs in the morning.”

“Yes, and you'd had two dollars to pay as well if I hadn't showed you different. Flavilla's probably as well as any of us. I wish you would fix yourself a little, Lem. I'm tired of having you about the house in your suspenders.”

He viewed her silently. Bella had on a dress he had never seen before, thin red-spotted yellow silk drawn tightly over a pronounced figure, a red girdle, and high-heeled patent-leather slippers.

“If you're going to look like this,” he admitted, “I'll have to get a move on.”

When they were first in Nantbrook she had worn a denim apron, and that, too, with all the other differences had seemed to express their new life; but now in yellow silk she was back in the old. Lemuel Doret studied his wife with secret doubt; more than the dress had changed. She seemed younger; rather she was adopting a younger manner. In the presence of June Bowman it intensified.

“That idea I spoke about,” the latter advanced: “I've been sizing you up, the both of you, and you look good. Well, I've got hold of a concession on the Atlantic Boardwalk and the necessary cash is in sight.” He turned to Lemuel. “How would you like to run a bowling game? It's on the square and would give you a lead into something bigger. You're wise; why, you might turn into a shore magnate, with Bella here dressed up in stones.”

Doret shook his head. “Treasure on earth,” he thought; “moth and rust.” But it would be hopeless to attempt any explanation. “No,” he said; “we'll play it out here.”

“We will?” Bella echoed him. “Indeed! We will?” Now the emphasis was sharply on the first word. “What's going to keep me?”

“You're my wife,” he replied simply; “we have a child.”

“Times have changed, Snow,” Bowman interrupted. “You ought to read the papers. This is ladies' day. The old harem stuff don't go no longer. They are emancipated.”

“Lemuel,” Doret insisted, a narrowed hard gaze on the other man; “Lemuel Doret.”

“He thinks nobody'll remember,” his wife explained. “Lem's redeemed.”

“Your name's what you say,” Bowman agreed, “but remember this--you can't throw any scare into me. I'm no Fauntleroy, neither. Behave.”

The anger seethed again beneath Lemuel's restraint. It began to be particular, personal, focused on Bowman; and joined to it was a petty dislike for the details of the man's appearance, the jaunty bearing and conspicuous necktie, the gloss of youth over the unmistakable signs of degeneration, the fatty pouches of his eyes and loose throat.

“I wouldn't bother with scaring you,” he told him. “Why should I? You've got no kick. I took you in, didn't I? And all I said was my name. Snow Doret's dead; he died in prison; and this Lemuel's all different----”

“I've heard about that too,” Bowman returned; “but somehow I don't take stock in these miracles.”

“If you ever see me looking like I might be Snow, go quiet,” Lemuel advised. “That's all.”

With clenched hands he abruptly departed. The cords of his neck were swollen and rigid; there was a haze before his eyes. He went up to the refuge of his daughter's room. She was lying still, breathing thickly, with a finger print of scarlet on each cheek.

She was so thin, so wasted, the bed and room so stripped of every comfort, that he dropped forward on his knees, his arms outflung across her body in an inarticulate prayer for faith, for strength and patience.

It was not much he wanted--only food for one child and help for a woman, and a grip on the devil tearing at him in the form of hatred.

He got only a temporary relief, for when he went down Bella and June Bowman were whispering together; he passed the door with his silent tread and saw their heads close. Bella was actually pretty.

An astonishing possibility occurred to him--perhaps Bella would go away with Bowman. An unbidden deep relief at such a prospect invaded him; how happy he could be with Flavilla. They would get a smaller house, which Flavilla would soon learn to keep for him; they would go to church and prayer meeting together, her soprano voice and his bass joined in the praise of the Lord, of the Almighty who raised the dead and his Son, who took the thief to glory.

This speculation was overcome by a troubled mind; both his innate pride in his wife as an institution of his honor, the feeling that he would uphold it at any cost, and his Christianity interrupted the vision of release. He must not let her stumble, and he would see that June Bowman didn't interfere in his home. More beer made its appearance, and the other man grew louder, boastful. He exhibited the roll of money--that was nothing, four times that much could be had from the same source. He was a spender, too, and treated all his friends liberally. Lemuel was to see if there was any wine in the damned jumping-off place; and when would they all go to Atlantic?

“Never,” Doret repeated.

Bowman laughed skeptically.

The rage stirred and increased, blinding Lemuel Doret's heart, stinging his eyes. Bella, watching him, became quieter, and she gave June--she called him June--a warning pressure of her fingers. Her husband saw it with indifference; everything small was lost in the hot tide enveloping him. His hands twitched, but there was no other outward sign of his tumult. He smoked his cigarettes with extreme deliberation.

It was evening again, and they were sitting on the narrow porch. The west was a serene lake of fading light against which the trees made dark blots of foliage. Nantbrook seemed unreal, a place of thin shadow, the future unsubstantial as well; only the past was actual in Lemuel Doret's mind--the gray cold prison, the city at night, locked rooms filled with smoke and lurid lights, avaricious voices in the mechanical sentences of gambling, agonized tones begging for a shot, just a shot, of an addicted drug, a girl crying.

He tried to sing a measure of praise beneath his breath but the tune and words evaded him. He glanced furtively at Bowman's complacent bulk, the flushed face turned fatuously to Bella. Under the other's left arm his coat was drawn smoothly on a cushion of fat.

Later Lemuel stopped at Flavilla's bed, and though she was composed he was vaguely alarmed at what seemed to him an unreal rigidity. She was not asleep, but sunk in a stupor with a glimmer of vision and an elusive pulse. He should not have listened to Bella but had a doctor as Frazee had advised. It appeared now that--with all Flavilla held for him--he had been strangely neglectful. At the same time he was conscious of the steady increase of his hatred for Bowman. This was natural, he told himself; Bowman in a way was the past--all that he, Doret, had put out of his life. At least he had believed that accomplished, yet here it was back again, alive and threatening; drinking beer in his rooms, whispering to his wife, putting the thought of Flavilla from his head.

In the morning even Bella admitted that Flavilla might be sick and a doctor necessary. He took one look at his daughter's burning face, heard the shrill labor of her breathing, and hurried downstairs with a set face. He was standing with Bella in the hall when June Bowman descended.

“Flavilla ain't right,” she told him.

The latter promptly exhibited the wad of money. “Whatever you need,” he said.

“Put it away,” Lemuel replied shortly. “I don't want any of that for Flavilla.”

Bowman studied him. Doret made no effort to mask his bitterness, and the other whistled faintly. Bella laughed, turning from her husband.

“He's cracked,” she declared; “you'll get no decency off him. A body would think I had been in jail and him looking out for her all those ten years and more. I can say thank you, though; we'll need your help, and glad.”

“Put it away,” Lemuel Doret repeated. He was more than ever catlike, alert, bent slightly forward with tense fingers.

Bowman was unperturbed. “I told you about this flash stuff,” he observed. “Nobody's forcing money on you. Get the bend out of you and give me a shave. That'll start you on the pills.”

Lemuel Doret mechanically followed him into the rude barber shop; he was fascinated by the idea of laying the razor across Bowman's throat. The latter extended himself in the chair and Doret slowly, thoroughly, covered his lower face with lather, through which the blade drew with a clean smooth rip. A fever burned in the standing man's brain, he fought constantly against a stiffening of his employed fingers--a swift turn, a cutting twist. Subconsciously he called noiselessly upon the God that had sustained him and, divided between apprehension and the increasing lust to kill, his lips held the form in which they had pronounced that impressive name. He had the sensation of battling against a terrific wind, a remorseless force beating him to submission. His body ached from the violence of the struggle to keep his hand steadily, evenly, busied, following in a delicate sweep the cords of June Bowman's neck, the jugulars.

The other looked up at him and grinned confidently. “Little children,” he said, “love one another.”