After eight days Mrs. Gant fell ill; idleness brought her to bed. One night they had the doctor. The next morning Mrs. Gant rose and dressed and locked Zilphia into the house and went to town. Zilphia watched from the window her mother’s black-shawled figure toil slowly down the street, pausing now and then to hold itself erect by the fence. An hour later she returned, in a hired cab, and locked the door and took the key to bed with her.
For three days and nights Zilphia sat beside the bed where the gaunt, manlike woman … the moustaches were heavier now and grizzled faintly … lay rigid, the covers drawn to her chin and her eyes closed. Thus it was that Zilphia could never tell if her mother slept or not. Sometimes she could tell by the breathing, then she would search carefully and infinitesimally among the bed clothing for the keys. On the third day she found them. She dressed and left the house.
The inside of the shop was half finished, reeking of turpentine. She opened the window and took her old chair beside it. When she heard his feet at last on the stairs she found that she was sewing, without any recollection of what the garment was or when she had taken it up. With the needle in her hand she sat looking up at him, blinking a little behind the glasses until he removed them.
“I knowed, once them glasses was off,” he said. “I kept looking for you and looking for you. And when she come in here and I was working I could hear her on the steps a long time, a step at a time then stop, until she was in the door yonder, holding to the door and sweating like a nigger. Even after she had done fainted she wouldn’t let go and faint. She just laid there on the floor sweating and sweating and counting the money out of her purse and telling me to be out of town by sundown.” He stood beside the chair, holding the glasses in his hand. She watched the dark rim of paint under his nails, smelling his odor of turpentine. “I’ll get you out of it. That old woman. That terrible old woman. She’ll kill you yet. I know she is crazy now. I’ve heard. How she’s done you. I’ve talked to folks. When they told me where you lived at I’d walk past the house. I could feel her watching me. Like she was watching me through the window. No hiding; just standing there looking at me and waiting. One night I come into the yard. After midnight it was. The house was dark and I could feel her standing there, looking at the dark where I was and waiting. Watching me like when she fainted that day and wouldn’t faint until I was out of town. She just laid there on the floor sweating, with her eyes shut, telling me to leave the job like it was and be out of town by night. But I’ll get you out of it. Tonight. Now. Not ever again any more.” He stood above her. The dusk was thickening; the final swirl of sparrows swept across the square and into the locust trees about the courthouse. “All the time I was watching you I kept thinking about you wearing glasses, because I used to say I wouldn’t never want a woman that wore glasses. Then one day you looked at me and all of a sudden I was seeing you without the glasses. It was like the glasses was gone and I knew then that, soon as I saw you once without them, it wouldn’t matter to me if you wore glasses or not.…”
They were married by a justice of the peace in the courthouse. Then Zilphia began to hang back.
“No,” he said; “don’t you see, if you go back now, if you risk her seeing you now.…”
“I’ve got to,” Zilphia said.
“What has she ever done for you? What do you owe her? That terrible old woman. Don’t you see, if we risk going there.… Come on, Zilphy. You belong to me now. You said to the judge you would do like I say, Zilphy. Now we are away, if we go back now.…”
“I’ve got to. She’s my mother. I’ve got to.”
It was full twilight when they entered the gate and went up the walk. She slowed, her hand trembled cold in his. “Don’t leave me!” she said. “Don’t leave me!”
“I won’t ever leave you if you won’t ever leave me. But we ought not to … Come on. It’s time yet. I ain’t scared for me. It’s for you. Zilphy.…” They looked toward the house. Mrs. Gant, dressed, in the black shawl and bonnet, stood in the door with the shotgun.
“Zilphy,” she said.
“Don’t go,” he said. “Zilphy.”
“You, Zilphy,” Mrs. Gant said without raising her voice.
“Zilphy,” he said. “If you go in there … Zilphy.”
Zilphia went on and mounted the steps. She moved stiffly. She seemed to have shrunk into herself, collapsing from inside, to have lost height, become awkward.
“Go in the house,” Mrs. Gant said, without turning her head. Zilphia went on. “Go on,” Mrs. Gant said. “Shut the door.” Zilphia entered and turned, beginning to close the door. She saw four or five people halted along the fence, looking back. “Shut it,” Mrs. Gant said. Zilphia shut the door carefully, fumbling a little at the knob. The house was still; in the cramped hall the shadows of the twilight loomed like a herd of motionless elephants. She could hear her heart faintly, but no other sound, no sound from beyond the door which she had closed upon her husband’s face. She never saw it again.
For the next two days and nights he lay hidden without food in a vacant house across the street. Mrs. Gant locked the door, but instead of going back to bed she seated herself, fully dressed save for the oil cloth apron and the needles, in a chair at the front window, the shotgun leaning at her hand. For three days she sat there, rigid, erect, her eyes closed, sweating slowly. On the third day the painter quitted the vacant house and left town. That night Mrs. Gant died, erect and fully dressed in the chair.
IV
For the first six months she believed that he would hear about it and return for her. She set six months to the day. “He will come before then,” she said. “He will have to come before then, because I am being true to him;” now that she was free she dared not even put into thinking the reasons why she should wait for him. For that reason she left the shop half finished, as he had left it, for a symbol of fidelity. “I have been faithful to you,” she said.
The day came and passed. She saw it accomplish, quietly. “Now,” she said, “that’s finished. Thank God. Thank God.” She realized how terrible the waiting and believing had been, the having to believe. Nothing was worth that. “Nothing,” she said, crying quietly in the dark, feeling tranquil and sad, like a little girl at the spurious funeral of a doll; “nothing.”
She had the painting completed. At first the odor of turpentine was terrible to her. It seemed to obliterate time as it had the stains of twenty-five years on the walls. Her life seemed to elongate, like rubber: from one time she seemed to see her hands prolonged into another one, fitting and pinning. Then she could think peacefully, since beyond the safe ritual of her fingers Zilphia Gant and her husband were like dolls, furious and tragic but quite dead.
The shop was doing well. Within a year she had a partner, but she lived alone in the house. She took three or four newspapers, thinking that she might some day see his name in print. After a while she was writing guarded significant letters to agony columns, mentioning incidents which only he could recognize. She began to read all the wedding notices, substituting her name for the bride’s and his for that of the groom. Then she would undress and go to bed.
She would have to be careful about getting into sleep. She was much more careful about that than about getting into her clothes. But even then she sometimes slipped. Then she would lie in the dark, the mock orange bush beyond the window filling the silence with its faintest suggestion of turpentine, beginning to toss lightly from side to side like a surf getting up. She would think about Christ, whispering “Mary did it without a man. She did it;” or, rousing, furious, her hands clenched at her sides, the covers flung back and her opened thighs tossing, she would violate her ineradicable virginity again and again with something evoked out of the darkness immemorial and philoprogenitive: “I will conceive! I’ll make myself conceive!”
One evening she opened the paper and began to read of a wedding in a neighboring state. She made the name substitutions as usual and had already turned the page when she realised that she was smelling tur
pentine. Then she realized that she had not had to make any substitution for the groom’s name.
She cut the story out. The next day she went to Memphis for two days. A week later she began to receive weekly letters bearing the return address of a private detective agency. She stopped reading the papers; her subscriptions lapsed. Every night she dreamed of the painter. His back was toward her now; only by his elbows could she read the familiar action of the pot and brush. There was someone beyond him in the dream whom she could not see, hidden by that back which was less of man’s than goat’s.
She grew plumper, a flabby plumpness in the wrong places. Her eyes behind the shell-rimmed glasses were a muddy olive, faintly protuberant. Her partner said that she was not hygienically over-fastidious. People called her Miss Zilphia; her wedding, that three day sensation, was never mentioned. When on the weekly arrival of the Memphis letters, the postmaster rallied her on her city sweetheart, there was even in this less of insincerity than pity. After another year there was less of both than either.
By means of the letters she knew how they lived. She knew more about each than the other did. She knew when they quarrelled and felt exultation; she knew when they were reconciled and felt raging and impotent despair. Sometimes at night she would become one of the two of them, entering their bodies in turn and crucified anew by her ubiquity, participating in ecstasies the more racking for being vicarious and transcendant of the actual flesh.
One evening she received the letter telling that the wife was pregnant. The next morning she waked a neighbor by running out of the house in her nightdress, screaming. They got the doctor and when she was well again she told that she had mistaken the rat poison for tooth powder. The postmaster told about the letters and the two looked upon her again with interest and curious pity. “Twice,” they said, even though the letters continued to come; “what a shame. Poor girl.”
When she recovered she looked better. She was thinner and her eyes had cleared up, and she slept peacefully at night for a while. By the letters she knew when the wife’s time would be, and the day she went to the hospital. Although she had recovered completely she did not dream any more for some time, though the habit she had formed in her twelfth year of waking herself with her own weeping, returned, and almost every night she lay in the darkness and the mock orange scent, weeping quietly and hopelessly between sleep and slumber. How long must this go on? she said to herself, lying flat and still and for a time tear-flushed of even despair in the darkness and the dying rumor of turpentine; how long?
It went on for a long time. She was gone from the town for three years, then she returned. Ten years later she began to dream again. Then she was walking to and from school twice a day with her daughter’s hand in hers, her manner on the street confident and assured, meeting the town with level and tranquil eye. But at night she still waked herself with her own weeping after the old habit, waking wide-eyed from a sleep in which for some time now she had been dreaming of negro men. “Something is about to happen to me,” she said aloud into the quiet darkness and the scent. Then something did happen to her. One day it had happened, and after that she dreamed hardly at all any more, and then only about food.
V
At last the letter came telling of the birth of a daughter and of the mother’s death. Enclosed was a newspaper clipping. The husband had been killed by a motor car while crossing the street to enter the hospital.
The next day Zilphia went away. Her partner said she would be gone a year, perhaps longer, to recover from her sickness. The letters from the city sweetheart ceased.
She was gone three years. She returned in mourning, with a plain gold band and a child. The child, a girl, had eyes like wood ashes and dark hair. Zilphia told quietly of her second marriage and her husband’s death, and after a time the interest died away.
She opened the house again, but she also fixed a day nursery in the room behind the shop. The window was barred, so she need not worry about the child. “It’s a nice pleasant room,” she said. “Why, I grew up there, myself.” The shop was doing well. The ladies never tired of fondling little Zilphia.
They still called her Miss Zilphia Gant. “Somehow you just can’t conceive of her as a wife. If it were not for the child.…” It was no longer out of tolerance or pity now. She looked better; black became her. She was plump again in the wrong places, but to people in our town that and more is permitted a woman who has served her appointed ends.
She was forty-two. “She is as fat as a partridge,” the town said. “It becomes her; it really does.”
“I should be, from the way I enjoy my food,” she said, pausing to chat with them on the way to and from school with little Zilphia’s hand in hers and her open coat, stirring in the wind, revealing her sewing apron of black oil cloth, and the straight thin glints of needles in her black bosom and the gossamer random festooning of the thread.
Thrift
I
In messes they told of MacWyrglinchbeath how, a first-class air mechanic of a disbanded Nieuport squadron, he went three weeks’ A.W.O.L. He had been given a week’s leave for England while the squadron was being reequipped with British-made machines, and he was last seen in Boulogne, where the lorry set him and his mates down. That night he disappeared. Three weeks later the hitherto unchallenged presence of an unidentifiable first-class air mechanic was discovered in the personnel of a bombing squadron near Boulogne. At the ensuing investigation the bomber gunnery sergeant told how the man had appeared among the crew one morning on the beach, where the flight had landed after a raid. Replacements had come up the day before, and the sergeant said he took the man to be one of the replacements; it appeared that everyone took the man to be one of the new mechanics. He told how the man showed at once a conscientious aptitude, revealing an actual affection for the aeroplane of whose crew he made one, speaking in a slow, infrequent, Scottish voice of the amount of money it represented and of the sinfulness of sending so much money into the air in a single lump.
“He even asked to be put on flying,” the sergeant testified. “He downright courted me till I did it, volunteering for all manner of off-duty jobs for me, until I put him on once or twice. I’d keep him with me, on the toggles, though.”
They did not discover that anything was wrong until pay day. His name was not on the pay officer’s list; the man’s insistence—his was either sublime courage or sublime effrontery—brought his presence to the attention of the squadron commander. But when they looked for him, he was gone.
The next day, in Boulogne, an air mechanic with a void seven-day pass, issued three weeks ago by a now disbanded scout squadron, was arrested while trying to collect three weeks’ pay, which he said was owing to him, from the office of the acting provost marshal himself. His name, he said, was MacWyrglinchbeath.
Thus it was discovered that MacWyrglinchbeath was a simultaneous deserter from two different military units. He repeated his tale—for the fifth time in three days fetched from his cell by a corporal and four men with bayoneted rifles—standing bareheaded to attention before the table where a general now sat, and the operations officer of the bomber squadron and the gunnery sergeant:
“A had gone doon tae thae beach tae sleep, beca’ A kenned they wud want money for-r thae beds in the town. A was ther-re when thae boombers cam’ doon. Sae A went wi’ thae boombers.”
“But why didn’t you go home on your leave?” the general asked.
“A wou’na be spendin’ sic useless money, sir-r.”
The general looked at him. The general had little pig’s eyes, and his face looked as though it had been blown up with a bicycle pump.
“Do you mean to tell me that you spent seven days’ leave and a fortnight more without leave, as the member of the personnel of another squadron?”
“Well, sir-r,” MacWyrglinchbeath said, “naught wud do they but A sud tak’ thae week’s fur-rlough. I didna want it. And wi’ thae big machines A cud get flying pay.”
The general looked at h
im. Rigid, motionless, he could see the general’s red face swell and swell.
“Get that man out of here!” the general said at last.
“ ’Bout face,” the corporal said.
“Get me that squadron commander,” the general said. “At once! I’ll cashier him! Gad’s teeth, I’ll put him in jail for the rest of his life!”
“ ’Bout face!” the corporal said, a little louder. MacWyrglinchbeath had not moved.
“Sir-r,” he said. The general, in mid-voice, looked at him, his mouth still open a little. Behind his mustache he looked like a boar in a covert. “Sir-r,” MacWyrglinchbeath said, “wull A get ma pay for thae thr-r-ree weeks and thae seven hour-rs and for-rty minutes in the air-r?”
It was Ffollansbye, who was to first recommend him for a commission, who knew most about him.
“I give you,” he said, “a face like a ruddy walnut, maybe sixteen, maybe fifty-six; squat, with arms not quite as long as an ape’s, lugging petrol tins across the aerodrome. So long his arms were that he would have to hunch his shoulders and bow his elbows a little so the bottoms of the tins wouldn’t scrape the ground. He walked with a limp—he told me about that. It was just after they came down from Stirling in ’14. He had enlisted for infantry; they had not told him that there were other ways of going in.
“So he began to make inquiries. Can’t you see him, listening to all the muck they told recruits then, about privates not lasting two days after reaching Dover—they told him, he said, that the enemy killed only the English and Irish and Lowlanders; the Highlands having not yet declared war—and such. Anyway, he took it all in, and then he would go to bed at night and sift it out. Finally he decided to go for the Flying Corps; decided with pencil and paper that he would last longer there and so have more money saved. You see, neither courage nor cowardice had ever functioned in him at all; I don’t believe he had either. He was just like a man who, lost for a time in a forest, picks up a fagot here and there against the possibility that he might some day emerge.