A Good Woman (Bromfield)/Part 3/Chapter 12
The suspicion of Mary Conyngham, planted by Mabelle in the mind of Emma, lay there for days, flourishing upon fertile soil until at last it took on the sturdy form of reality and truth. In her pain at Philip's coldness toward her and in her anger at the spectacle of an existence which had become as disorderly and unmanageable as her own house during Naomi's presence in it, the thought of Mary Conyngham seldom left her. It burned her mind as she sat behind the cash-register, while she lay in bed at night alone in the house she had meant always to be Philip's house. It gave her no peace. What right, she asked herself, had Mary Conyngham to steal her boy? Bit by bit, she built up the story from that one shred of gossip dropped by Mabelle.
She saw now that the name of Mary Conyngham explained everything. Mary had never gone to church, and perhaps hadn't any faith in God, and so she had aggravated Philip's strange behavior. It was probably Mary or the thought of her, that put into Philip's head that fantastic idea of going to work in the Mills, in a place which had nearly cost him his life. She must have seen him almost every day. Why, she was even friendly with the Polacks and Dagoes. Who could say what things she hadn't been guilty of down there in the Flats, where no decent person ever went? There was probably truth in the story that Irene Shane slept with that big Russian—what was his name—who had had the boldness to come to the very door when Philip was ill. No, all sorts of orgies might go on in the Flats and no one would ever know. It was awful, degrading of Philip, to have mixed himself up with such people.
And presently she began to suspect that Mary lay at the source of Philip's behavior toward Naomi. A man didn't give up living with his wife so easily unless there was another woman. A man didn't do such things. Men were different from women. "Why," she thought, "I've lived all these years without a man, and never once dreamed of re-marrying. I gave up my life to my son."
It was Jason's fault too (she thought). It was Jason's bad blood in Philip. The boy wouldn't have behaved like that if it hadn't been for his father before him. That was where the weakness lay.
And now Mary probably came to see him at that room over the stables at night, and even in the daytime, because there was nothing to stop her coming and going. No one in the Flats would care, especially now, in the midst of the strike, and the Shanes wouldn't even take notice of such a thing. Shane's Castle had always been a sort of bawdy-house, and with the old woman dead the last trace of respectability had vanished. . . .
She remembered, too, that Mary hadn't been happy with her husband. Being married to a man like that who ran after women like Mamie Rhodes did something to a woman. Why, she herself could remember times when Jason's behavior made her, out of revenge, want to be unfaithful to him; and if it could happen to her (Emma) why, what would be the effect on a godless woman like Mary Conyngham?
For a time she considered boldly the plan of going to Philip himself and forcing him to give up Mary Conyngham. Surely she could discuss a thing like that with her own son, to whom she had been both father and mother. There must be, no matter how deeply it lay buried, still a foundation of that sound and moral character which she had labored so long to create. "If only," she thought, "I could make him feel again as he once felt. If only I could get through to the real Philip, my Philip, my little boy." But he was hard, as hard as flint.
Twice she planned to go alone to the stable of Shane's Castle, and once she got as far as the bridge before she lost courage and turned back. Always a shadow rose up between her and her resolution—the shadow of that day when, hidden by a screen in the corner of the restaurant, she had pled with him passionately, only to find herself beating her head against a wall of flint, to hear him saying, "You mustn't talk like that. It's not fair"; to see the thin jaw set in a hard line. No, she saw that it was impossible to talk to him. He was so strange and unruly that he might turn his back on her forever. The thought of it filled her with terror, and for two nights she lay awake, weeping in a debauch of self-pity.
But one thing was changed. In all the trouble with Philip, her doubts over marrying Moses Slade seemed to have faded away. At times when she felt tired and worn she knelt in her cold bedroom and thanked God for sending him to her. They could be married in two more months, and then . . . then she would have some one to comfort her. She couldn't go to him with her troubles now, lest the weight of them should frighten him. No, she saw that she must bear all her suffering alone until God saw fit to lift the cross from her shoulders.
One afternoon when Moses Slade had left, still breathing fire and thunder against Krylenko, she sat for a long time alone behind the screen, in the restaurant, looking out of the window. Her eyes saw nothing that passed, for she was seeing far beyond such things as shop-fronts and trolley-cars. She was thinking, "What has come over me lately? I haven't any character any more. I'm not like Moses, who goes on fighting like an old war horse. I've let things slide. I haven't faced things as I should. I've humored Philip, and see what's come of it. When I kept hold on the reins everything went well, and now Philip's ruining himself and going straight to the Devil. I should never have allowed Naomi to leave the house. She's wax in his hands, with all her softness—she can never manage him and he needs to be managed just as his father did. If I'd treated his father the way Naomi treats Philip . . . God knows what would have happened."
She began automatically to stack the dishes on the table before her, as if she had gone back to the days when the restaurant had been only a lunch-room and she had herself waited on her customers.
"I must take hold," she told herself. "There's only one thing to do . . . only one thing. . . . I must go and see Mary Conyngham. I must talk to her face to face and have it out. He's my son. I bore him. I gave him life, and I have a right to save him."
A kind of feverish energy took possession of her. It seemed that she could no longer sit there seeing the whole structure of her life going to ruin. She would save Philip. She would die knowing that he was a bishop. She would marry Moses Slade and go to Washington and work there to save the country from chaos, from drink, from strikes. She would rise in the end, triumphant as she had always been. She had been weak: she had rested at the time when she should have worked. She needed to act. She would act, no matter what it cost her. She would save Philip and herself.
In a kind of frenzy she seized her hat and coat and left the restaurant.
It was a warm day when the snow had begun to melt and the pavement was deep with slush. She hurried, wet to the knees, fairly running all the way, so that by the time she reached Mary Conyngham's house her face was scarlet and wet with sweat.
Mary was in, but she was upstairs with the children, and the hired girl bade her wait in the parlor. There she seated herself on a rosewood chair, upholstered in horsehair, to mop her face and set her hat straight. And slowly the room began to have a strange effect upon her. Though the room itself was warm, it was as if she had come into a cool place. The rosewood furniture was dark and cool, and the great marble slab of the heavy mahogany commode. The wax flowers and the glass dome that protected them were cool, and the crystal chandelier and the great silver-bordered mirror. The whole room (queer and old-fashioned, Emma thought indignantly) was a pool of quict . . . a genteel room, a little thread-bare, but nevertheless possessed of an elegance all its own.
It exerted the queerest effect on Emma, dampening her spirits and extinguishing the indignation that a little while before had roared in her bosom like the flames in the belly of one of the furnaces. She began suddenly to feel tired again and filled with despair.
"It's like her to keep an older woman waiting," she thought. "Probably she knows well enough why I've come."
She began to tap the carpet with the toe of her shoe and at last she rose and began to walk about, as if she felt that only by activity could she throw off from her the softening effect of that quiet room. She halted presently before the oval portrait, framed in gilt, of Mary's mother, a very pretty woman, with dark hair and a spirited eye . . . a woman such as Mary might have been if she hadn't married that John Conyngham and had her spirit subdued. Well (thought Emma) she seemed nevertheless to have too much spirit for her own good or the good of any one else.
She was standing thus when Mary came in, dressed in a mauve frock, and looking pale and a little nervous. Emma thought, "She knows why I've come. It's on her conscience. She's afraid of me already."
"I'm sorry, Mrs. Downes," said Mary, "but my sister-in-law has gone out, and I couldn't come down until both children were asleep."
It was odd, but her voice had upon Emma the same effect as the room. It seemed to sap the foundations of her assurance and strength by its very gentleness. It was strange how subdued and quiet Mary seemed, almost as if (Emma thought suspiciously) she had forgotten her early troubles and was now shamelessly and completely happy. Feeling that if she did not begin at once, she would not accomplish her plan, Emma plunged.
"It's about Philip I've come to see you," she said. "I knew that you were interested in him."
Mary admitted the interest shamelessly.
"I don't know what's happened to him. He's so changed . . . not at all the boy he used to be."
"Yes, he's very different. . . . I think maybe he's happier now."
"Oh, he's not happy. No one could be happy in his state of mind. Why, he's even abandoned God. . . . Something, some one has gotten hold of him."
The shadow of a frown crossed Mary's smooth brow. She had the air of waiting . . . waiting. . . . She said, "Perhaps I've chosen the wrong word. I mean that he seems on a more solid foundation."
"Do you call what he's doing solid?"
"If it's what he wants to do."
"He doesn't know his own mind."
"I mean he's more like the real Philip. I think he is the real Philip now."
Emma's fingers began to strum the arm of her chair nervously. "I don't know what you're talking about, but if you mean that the old Philip wasn't real, why, I think you're saying a crazy thing. It's this new one who's queer. Do you mean to insinuate that I, his own mother . . . the one who bore him . . . who gave him life, doesn't know who the real Philip is?"
It was clear that she was "working herself up." Mary did not answer her at once, but when she raised her head, it was to say, with a curious, tense quietness, "No . . . if you want the truth, Mrs. Downes, I don't think you know Philip at all. I think that's really what's the matter. You've never known him."
Emma found herself suddenly choked and speechless. "Do you know what you're saying? I've never had any one say such a thing to me before . . . me, his own mother! Why, do you know what we've been to each other . . . Philip and me?" She plunged into a long recital of their intimacy, of the beautiful relationship that had always existed between them, of the sacrifices she had made. It went on and on, and Mary, listening, thought, "That's how she talks to him. That's why he can't get free of her." Suddenly she hated Emma. And then she heard Emma saying, in a cold voice, "Of course, I suppose in one way you do know him better than I do—in one way."
"What are you trying to say?"
"You know what I mean. You ought to know you . . . you . . . who have stolen him away from me and from his own wife."
Mary's fingers dug suddenly into the horsehair of her chair. She felt a sudden primitive desire to fling herself upon Emma, to pull her hair, to choke her. The old tomboyish spirit, dead for so long, seemed suddenly to breathe and stir with life. She thought quickly, "I mustn't. I mustn't. It's what she'd like me to do—to put myself on a level with herself. And I mustn't, for Philip's sake. It's all bad enough as it is." She grew suddenly rigid with the effort of controlling herself. She managed to say in a quiet voice, "I think you're talking nonsense. I think you're a little crazy."
"Crazy, am I? That's a nice thing to say!"
"I have talked to Philip just once since he came home, and that was on the day I met you in the street. I didn't try to find him. He came to me."
"Do you expect me to believe that?"
"It's the truth. Beyond that I don't care what you believe."
"I want you to leave him alone."
Suddenly Mary stood up. "I was leaving him alone. I meant never to see him, but I won't leave him alone any longer. He would have been mine except for you. He's belonged to me always and he needs me to protect him. No, I won't leave him alone any longer."
All at once she began to cry, and turning, she ran from the room and up the stairs. Emma, left behind on the horsehair sofa, felt suddenly foolish and outwitted. She was certain that Mary meant not to come back, but she remained in the cool, quiet room for a long time, as if her dignity demanded such an action. And at last, baffled and filled with a sense of flatness, she rose and walked out of the house.
The whole visit had been a failure, for it hadn't come properly to a climax. It was ended before it began. But she had (she felt) done her best, all that a mother could do to save her only son. She had laid herself open to insult. . . . A block from Mary's house she discovered that in her agitation she had forgotten her gloves. She halted abruptly, and then resumed her way. They didn't matter. They were old gloves, anyway.
She couldn't bring herself to go back and enter that depressing house again.
Upstairs in the room where the two children were asleep in their cribs, Mary lay on the bed and wept. Until this moment her love had seemed a far-off, distant thing, to be cherished sadly and romantically as hopeless, but now, all at once, it had become unbearably real. She saw Philip in a new way, as some one whom she might touch and care for with all the tenderness that had been wasted upon John Conyngham. She saw him as a lonely man who wanted one thing above all else from a woman, and that was understanding; and it was tenderness that she wanted to give him more than all else on earth. In the midst of her grief and fury, she meant to have him for her own. It seemed to her suddenly that it was only possible to free him from that terrible woman by sacrificing herself. If she gave herself—soul and body and heart—to Philip, she could save him. "He is mine," she kept sobbing, half-aloud. "He is mine . . . my own dear Philip." Why (she asked herself) should she care at all for gossip, for the sacrifice of her own pride, for all the tangle that was certain to follow? He needed her, though she doubted whether the fact had ever occurred to him, and she needed him, and it had been so ever since they were children, and would be so when they were old. All at once she felt a sudden terror of growing old. She seemed to feel the years rushing by her. She knew that she could not go on thus until she died.
And after a little while, when her sobbing had quieted a little, she began to see the thing more coldly. She saw even that Philip was fantastic and hopeless, trying to escape as much from himself as from his mother and from Naomi. She saw even that he was impossible. She doubted whether there was in him the chance of happiness. Yet none of it made any difference, for those were the very reasons perhaps why she loved him. They were the reasons too, perhaps, why at least three women—his mother, his wife and herself—had found themselves in a hopeless tangle over him. It was simply that without knowing it he made demands upon them from which they could not escape. He had even touched Irene Shane in whose cold life men played no part. Mary loved him, she saw now, without reason, without restraint, and she knew that because she loved him she must save him from his own weakness and lead him out of his hopeless muddle into the light.
Because she was a sensible woman, the sudden resolution brought her a certain peace. She coldly took account of all the things that might follow her decision, and knew that she was decided to face them. She had to help him. It was the only thing that mattered.
As she stirred and sat up on the edge of the bed, the youngest child moved and opened its eyes, and Mary, in a sudden burst of joy, went over and kissed it. Bending down, she said, "Your mother, Connie, is a wicked woman." The child laughed, and she laughed too, for there was a sudden peace and delight in her heart.