Chapter 23

________________________________________________
_ CHAPTER XXIII

Jeffrey, in his working clothes, went down to Mill Street and found Andrea presiding over a shop exhaling the odour of pineapple and entrancing to the eye, with its piled ovals and spheres of red and yellow, its diversities of hue and surface. It was a fruit shop, and God had made the fruit beautiful and Andrea had disposed it so. His wife, too, was there, a round, dark creature in a plaid skirt and a shirt waist with islands of lace over a full bosom, her black hair braided and put round and round her head, and a saving touch of long earrings to tell you she was still all peasant underneath. A soft round-faced boy was in charge, and ran out to tell Jeffrey prices. But they all knew him. Jeffrey felt the puzzle begin all over when Andrea came hurrying out, like a genial host at an inn, hands outstretched, and his wife followed him. They looked even adoring, and again Jeffrey wondered, so droll was their excess of welcome, if he were going to be embraced. The boy, too, was radiant, and, like an acolyte at some ritual, more humbly though exquisitely proffered his own fit portion of worship. Jeffrey, it being the least he could offer, shook hands all round. Then he asked Andrea:

"Who do you think I am? What did Madame Beattie tell you?"

Andrea spread his hands dramatically, palms outward, and implied brokenly that though he understood English he did not speak it to such an extent as would warrant him in trying to explain what was best left alone. He would only repeat a word over and over, always with an access of affection, and when Jeffrey asked:

"Does that mean 'prisoner'?" he owned it did. It seemed to hold for the three the sum of human perfectibility. Jeffrey was The Prisoner, and therefore they loved him. He gave up trying to find out more; it seemed to him he could guess the riddle better if he had a word or two of Andrea's language to help him, and he asked summarily if they couldn't have some lessons together. Wouldn't Andrea come up to the house and talk Italian? Andrea blossomed out in gleam of teeth and incredible shininess of eyes. He would come. That night? Yes, he would come that night. So Jeffrey shook hands again all round and went away, curiously ill at ease until he had turned the corner; the warmth of their adoration seemed burning into his back.

But that night Andrea did not come. The family had assembled, Anne a little timid before new learning, Lydia sitting on the edge of her chair determined to be phenomenal because Jeffrey must be pleased, and even Mary Nellen with writing pads and pencils at the table to scrape up such of the linguistic leavings as they might. At nine o'clock the general attention began to relax, and Lydia widely yawned. Jeffrey, looking at her, caught the soft redness of her mouth and thought, forgetful of Circe's island where he had taken refuge, how sweet the little barbarian was.

But nobody next day could tell him why Andrea had not come, not even Andrea himself. Jeffrey sought him out at the fruit-stand and Andrea again shone with welcome. But he implied, in painfully halting English, that he could not give lessons at all. Nor could any of his countrymen in Addington.

Jeffrey stood upon no ceremony with him.

"Why the devil," said he, "do you talk to me as if you'd begun English yesterday? You forget I've heard you translating bunkum up on the circus-ground."

Andrea's eyes shone the more enchantingly. He was shameless, though. He took nothing back, and even offered Jeffrey an enormous pineapple, with the air of wanting to show his good-will and expecting it to be received with an equal open-heartedness. Jeffrey walked away with the pineapple, beaten, and reflecting soberly, his brow tightened into a knot. Things were going on just outside his horizon, and he wasn't to know. Who did know? Madame Beattie, certainly. The old witch was at the bottom of it. She had, for purposes of her own, wound the foreign population round her finger, and she was going to unwind them when the time came to spin a web. A web of many colours, he knew it would be, doubtless strong in some spots and snarled in others. Madame Beattie was not the person to spin a web of ordinary life.

He went on in his blue working clothes, absently taking off his hat to the ladies he met who looked inquiringly at him and then quite eagerly bowed. Jeff was impatient of these recognitions. The ladies were even too gracious. They were anxious to stand by him in the old Addington way, and as for him, he wanted chiefly to hoe his corn and live unseen. But his feet did not take him home. They led him down the street and up the stairs into Alston Choate's office, and there, hugging his pineapple, he entered, and found Alston sitting by the window in the afternoon light, his feet on a chair and a novel in his hand. This back window of the office looked down over the river, and beyond a line of willows to peaceful flats, and now the low sun was touching up the scene with afternoon peace. Alston, at sight of him, took his legs down promptly. He, too, was more eager in welcome because Jeffrey was a marked figure, and went so seldom up other men's stairs. Alston threw his book on the table, and Jeffrey set his pineapple beside it.

"There's a breeze over here," said Alston, and they took chairs by the window.

For a minute Jeffrey looked out over the low-lying scene. He drew a quick breath. This was the first time he had overlooked the old playground since he had left Addington for his grown-up life.

"We used to sail the old scow down there," he said. "Remember?"

Choate nodded.

"She's down there now in one of the yards, filled with red geraniums."

They sat for a while in the silence of men who find it unexpectedly restful to be together and need not even say so. Yet they were not here at all. They were boys of Addington, trotting along side by side in the inherited games of Addington. Alston offered Jeffrey a smoke, and Jeff refused it.

"See here," said he, "what's Madame Beattie up to?"

Choate turned a startled glance on him. He did not see how Jeffrey, a stranger in his wife's house, should know anything at all was up.

"She's been making things rather lively," he owned. "Who told you?"

"Told me? I was in it, at the beginning. She and I drove out by chance, to hear Moore doing his stunt in the circus-ground. That began it. But now, it seems, she's got some devil's influence over Moore's gang. She's told 'em something queer about me."

"She's told 'em something that makes things infernally uncomfortable for other people," said Choate bluntly. "Did you know she had squads of them--Italians, Poles, Abyssinians, for all I know, playing on dulcimers--she's had them come up at night and visit her in her bedroom. They jabber and hoot and smoke, I believe. She's established an informal club--in that house."

Alston's irritation was extreme. It was true Addington to refer to foreign tongues as jabber, and "that house", Jeffrey saw, was a stiff paraphrase for Esther's dwelling-place. He perceived here the same angry partisanship Reardon had betrayed. This was the jealous fire kindled invariably in men at Esther's name.

"How do you know?" he asked.

Alston hesitated. He looked, not abashed, but worried, as if he did not see precisely the road of good manners in giving a man more news about his wife than the man was able to get by himself.

"Did Esther tell you?" Jeff inquired.

"Yes. She told me."

"When?"

"Several times. She has been very uncomfortable. She has needed counsel."

Choate had gone on piling up what might have been excuses for Esther, from an irritated sense that he was being too closely cross-examined. He had done a good deal of it himself in the way of his profession, and he was aware that it always led to conclusions the victim had not foreseen and was seldom willing to face. And he had in his mind not wholly recognised yet unwelcome feelings about Esther. They were not feelings such as he would have allowed himself if he had known her as a young woman living with her husband in the accepted way. He did not permit himself to state that Esther herself might not, in that case, have mingled for him the atmosphere she breathed about him now. But Jeffrey did not pursue the dangerous road of too great candour. He veered, and asked, as if that might settle a good many questions:

"What's the matter with this town, anyway?"

"Addington?" said Choate. "You find it changed?"

"Changed! I believe you. Addington used to be a perfect picture--like a summer landscape--you know the kind. You walked into the picture the minute you heard the name of Addington. It was full of nice trees and had a stream and cows with yellow light on them. When you got into Addington you could take a long breath."

For the first time in his talk with anybody since he came home Jeff was feeling lubricated. He couldn't express himself carelessly to his father, who took him with a pathetic seriousness, nor to the girls, to whom he was that horribly uncomfortable effigy, a hero. But here was another fellow who, he would have said, didn't care a hang, and Jeff could talk to him.

"There's no such picture now," Alston assured him. "The Addington we knew was Victorian."

"Yes. It hadn't changed in fifty years. What's it changing for now?"

"My dear boy," said Alston seriously, because he had got on one of his own hobbies that he couldn't ride in Addington for fear of knocking ladies off their legs, "don't you know what's changing the entire world? It's the birth of compassion."

"Compassion?"

"Yes. Sympathy, ruth, pity. I looked up the synonyms the other day. But we're at the crude, early stages of it, and it's devilish uncomfortable. Everybody's so sorry for everybody that we can't tell the kitchen maid to scour the knives without explaining."

Jeff was rather bewildered.

"Are we so compassionate as all that?" he asked.

"Not really. It's my impression most of us aren't compassionate at all."

"Amabel is."

"Oh, yes, Amabel and Francis of Assisi and a few others. But the rest of us have caught the patter and it makes us 'feel good'. We wallow in it. We feel warm and self-righteous--comfy, mother says, when she wants to tuck me up at night same as she used to after I'd been in swimming and got licked. Yes, we're compassionate and we feel comfy."

"But what's Weedon Moore got to do with it? Is Weedie compassionate?"

"Oh, Weedie's working Amabel and telling the mill hands they're great fellows and very much abused and ought to own the earth. Weedie wants their votes."

"Then Weedie is up for office? Amabel told me so, but I didn't think Addington'd stand for it. Time was when, if a man like Weedie had put up his head, nobody'd have taken the trouble to bash it. We should have laughed."

"We don't laugh now," said Choate gravely. There was even warning in his voice. "Not since Weedie and his like have told the working class it owns the earth."

"And doesn't it?"

"Yes. In numbers. It can vote itself right into destruction--which is what it's doing."

"And Weedie wants to be mayor."

"God knows what he wants. Mayor, and then governor and--I wouldn't undertake to say where Weedie'd be willing to stop. Not short of an ambassadorship."

"Choate," said Jeffrey cheerfully, "you're an alarmist."

"Oh, no, I'm not. A man like Weedie can get anywhere, because he's no scruples and he can rake in mere numbers to back him. And it's all right. This is a democracy. If the majority of the people want a demagogue to rule over them, they've a perfect right to go to the devil their own way."

"But where's he get his infernal influence? Weedie Moore!"

"He gets it by telling every man what the man wants to hear. He gets hold of the ignorant alien, and tells him he is a king in his own right. He tells him Weedie'll get him shorter and shorter hours, and make him a present of the machinery he runs--or let him break it--and the poor devil believes him. Weedie has told him that's the kind of a country this is. And nobody else is taking the trouble to tell him anything else."

"Well, for God's sake, why don't they?"

"Because we're riddled with compassion, I tell you. If we see a man poorer than we are, we get so apologetic we send him bouquets--our women do."

"Is that what the women here are doing?"

"Oh, yes. If there's a strike over at Long Meadow they put on their furs and go over and call on a few operatives and find eight living in one room, in a happy thrift, and they come back and hold an indignation meeting and 'protest'."

"You're not precisely a sentimentalist, are you?" said Jeff. He was seeing Choate in the new Addington as Choate presented it.

"No, by George! I want to see things clarified and the good old-fashioned virtues come back into their place--justice and common-sense. Compassion is something to die for. But you can't build states out of it alone. It makes me sick--sick, when I see men getting dry-rot."

Jeff's face was a map of dark emotion. His mind went back over the past years. He had not been made soft by the nemesis that laid him by the heels. He had been terribly hardened in some ways, so calloused that it sometimes seemed to him he had not the actual nerve surface for feeling anything. The lambent glow of beauty might fall upon him unheeded; even its lightnings might not penetrate his shell. But that had been better than the dry-rot of an escape from righteous punishment.

"You know, Choate," said he, "I believe the first thing for a man to learn is that he can't dodge penalties."

"I believe you. Though if he dodges, he doesn't get off. That's the other penalty, rot inside the rind. All the palliatives in the world--the lying securities and false peace--all of them together aren't worth the muscle of one man going out to bang another man for just cause. And getting banged!"

Jeff was looking at him quizzically.

"Where do you live," said he, "in the new Addington or the old one?"

Choate answered rather wearily, as if he had asked himself that question and found the answer disheartening.

"Don't know. Guess I'm a non-resident everywhere. I curse about Addington by the hour--the new Addington. But it's come, and come to stay."

"You going to let Moore administer it?"

"If he's elected."

"He can't be elected. We won't have it. What you going to do?"

"Nothing, in politics," said Alston. "They're too vile for a decent man to touch."

Jeffrey thought he had heard the sound of that before. Even in the older days there had been some among the ultra-conservative who refused to pollute their ideals by dropping a ballot. But it hadn't mattered much then. Public government had been as dual in its nature as good and evil, sometimes swaying to the side of one party, sometimes the other; but always, such had been traditionary influence, the best man of a party had been nominated. Then there was no talk of Weedon Moores.

"Do you suppose Weedie's going on with his circus-ground rallies?" he asked.

"They say not."

"Who?"

"Oh, I've kept a pretty close inquiry afoot. I'm told the men won't go."

"Why not?"

"Madame Beattie won't let them."

"The devil she won't! What's the old witch's spell?"

"I don't know. Esther--" he caught himself up--"Mrs. Blake doesn't know. She only knows, as I tell you, the men come to the house, and talk things over. And I hear from reliable sources, Weedie summons them and the men simply won't go. So I assume Madame Beattie forbids it."

"It's not possible." Jeff had withdrawn his gaze from the old playground and sat staring thoughtfully at his legs, stretched to their fullest length. "I rather wish I could talk with her," he said, "Madame Beattie. I don't see how I can though, unless I go there."

"Jeff," said Alston, earnestly, "you mustn't do that."

He spoke unguardedly, and now that the words were out, he would have recalled them. But he made the best of a rash matter, and when Jeff frowned up at him, met the look with one as steady.

"Why mustn't I?" asked Jeff.

It was very quietly said.

"I beg your pardon," Choate answered. "I spoke on impulse."

"Yes. But I think you'd better go on."

Alston kept silence. He was looking out of the window now, pale and immovably obstinate.

"Do you, by any chance," said Jeff, "think Esther is afraid of me?"

Choate faced round upon him, immediately grateful to him.

"That's it," he said. "You've said it. And since it's so, and you recognise it, why, you see, Jeff, you really mustn't, you know."

"Mustn't go there?" said Jeff almost foolishly, the thing seemed to him so queer. "Mustn't see my wife, because she says she is afraid of me?"

"Because she _is_ afraid of you," corrected Choate impulsively, in what he might have told himself was his liking for the right word. But he had a savage satisfaction in saying it. For the instant it made it seem as if he were defending Esther.

"I'd give a good deal," said Jeff slowly, "to hear just how Esther told you she was afraid of me. When was it, for example?"

"It was at no one time," said Choate unwillingly. Yet it seemed to him Jeff did deserve candour at all their hands.

"You mean it's been a good many times?"

"I mean I've been, in a way, her adviser since--"

"Since I've been in jail. That's very good of you, Choate. But do you gather Esther has told other people she is afraid of me, or that she has told you only?"

"Why, man," said Choate impatiently, "I tell you I've been her adviser. Our relations are those of client and counsel. Of course she's said it to nobody but me."

"Not to Reardon," Jeff's inner voice was commenting satirically. "What would you think if you knew she had said it to Reardon, too? And how many more? She has spun her pretty web, and you're a prisoner. So is Reardon. You've each a special web. You are not allowed to meet."

He laughed out, and Alston looked at him in a sudden offence. It seemed to Alston that he had been sacrificing all sorts of delicacies that Jeff might be justly used, and the laugh belittled them both. But Jeff at that instant saw, not Alston, but a new vision of life. It might have been that a tide had rushed in and wiped away even the prints of Esther's little feet. It might have been that a wind blew in at the windows of his mind and beat its great wings in the corners of it and winnowed out the chaff. As he saw life then his judgments softened and his irritations cooled. Nothing was left but the vision of life itself, the uncomprehended beneficence, the consoler, the illimitable beauty we look in the face and do not see. For an instant perhaps he had caught the true proportions of things and knew at last what was worth weeping over and what was matter for a healthy mirth. It was all mirth perhaps, this show of things Lord God had set us in. He had not meant us to take it dumbly. He had hoped we should see at every turn how queer it is, and yet how orderly, and get our comfort out of that. He had put laughter behind every door we open, to welcome us. Grief was there, too, but if we fully understood Lord God and His world, there would be no grief: only patience and a gay waiting on His time. And all this came out of seeing Alston Choate, who thought he was a free man, hobbled by Esther's web.

Jeffrey got up and Alston looked at him in some concern, he was so queer, flushed, laughing a little, and with a wandering eye. At the door he stopped.

"About Weedie," he said. "We shall have to do something to Weedie. Something radical. He's not going to be mayor of Addington. And I rather think you'll have to get into politics. You'd be mayor yourself if you'd get busy."

Jeffrey had no impulse to-day to go and ask Esther if she were afraid of him as he had when Reardon told him the same tale. He wasn't thinking of Esther now. He was hugging his idea to his breast and hurrying with it, either to entrust it to somebody or to wrap it up in the safety of pen and ink while it was so warm. And when he got home he came on Lydia, sitting on the front steps, singing to herself and cuddling a kitten in the curve of her arm. Lydia with no cares, either of the house or her dancing class or Jeff's future, but given up to the idleness of a summer afternoon, was one of the most pleasing sights ever put into the hollow of a lovely world. Jeffrey saw her, as he was to see everything now, through the medium of his new knowledge. He saw to her heart and found how sweet it was, and how full of love for him. He saw Circe's island, and knew, since the international codes hold good, he must remember his allegiance to it. He still owned property there; he must pay his taxes. But this Eden's garden which was Lydia was his chosen home. He was glad to see it so. He must, he knew, hereafter see things as they are. And they would not be tragic to him. They would be curious and funny and dear: for they all wore the mantle of life. He sat down on a lower step, and Lydia looked at him gravely, yet with pleasure, too.

"Lydia," said he, "do you know what they're calling me, these foreigners Madame Beattie's training with?"

She nodded.

"The Prisoner," said Jeff. "That's what I am--The Prisoner."

She hastened to reassure him.

"They don't do it to be hateful. It's in love. That's what they mean it in--love."

Jeff made a little gesture of the hand, as if he tossed off something so lightly won.

"Never mind how they mean it. That's not what I'm coming to. It's that they call me The Prisoner. Well, ten minutes ago it just occurred to me that we're all prisoners. I saw it as it might be a picture of life and all of us moving in it. Alston Choate's a prisoner to Esther. So's Reardon. Only it's not to Esther they're prisoners. It's to the big force behind her, the sorcery of nature, don't you see? Blind nature."

She was looking at him with the terrified patience of one compelled to listen and yet afraid of hearing what threatens the safe crystal of her own bright dream: that apprehensive look of woman, patient in listening, but beseeching the speaker voicelessly not to kill warm personal certainties with the abstractions he thinks he has discovered. Jeffrey did not understand the look. He was enamoured of his abstraction.

"And all the mill hands have been slaves to Weedon Moore because he told them lies, and now they're prisoners to Madame Beattie because she's telling them another kind of lie, God knows what. And Addington is prisoner to catch-words."

"But what are we prisoner to?" Lydia asked sharply, as if these things were terrifying. "Is Farvie a prisoner?"

"Why, father, God bless him!" said Jeff, moved at once, remembering what his father had to fight, "he's prisoner to his fear of death."

"And Anne? and I?"

Jeff sat looking at her in an abstracted thoughtfulness.

"Anne?" he repeated. "You? I don't know. I shouldn't dare to say. I've no rights over Anne. She's so good I'm shy of her. But if I find you're a prisoner, Lydia, I mean you shall be liberated. If nature drives you on as it drives the rest of us to worship something--somebody--blindly, and he's not worth it, you bet your life I'll save you."

She leaned back against the step above, her face suddenly sick and miserable. What if she didn't want to be saved? the sick face asked him. Lydia was a truth-teller. She loved Jeff, and she plainly owned it to herself and felt surprisingly at ease over it. She was born to the dictates of nice tradition, but when that inner warmth told her she loved Jeff, even though he was bound to Esther, she didn't even hear tradition, if it spoke. All she could possibly do for Jeff, who unconsciously appealed to her every instant he looked at her with that deep frown between his brows, seemed little indeed. Should she say she loved him? That would be easy. But were his generalities about life strong enough to push her and her humilities aside? That was hard to bear.

"And," he was saying, "once we know we're prisoners, We can be free."

"How?" said Lydia hopefully. "Can we do the things we like?"

"No, by God! there's only one way of getting free, and that's by putting yourself under the law."

Lydia's heart fell beyond plummet's sounding. She did not want to put herself under any stricter law than that of heart's devotion. She had been listening to it a great deal, of late. They were sweet things it told her, and not wicked things, she thought, but all of humble service and unasked rewards.

Jeff was roaming on, beguiled by his new thoughts and the sound of his own voice.

"It's perfectly true what I used to write in that beggarly prison paper. The only way to be really free is to be bound--by law. It's the big paradox. Do you know what I'm going to do?"

She shook her head. He was probably, her apprehensive look said, going to do something that would take him out of the pretty paradise where she longed to set him galloping on the road to things men ought to have.

"I am going in to tear up the stuff I'm writing about that man I knew there in the prison. What does God Almighty care about him? I'm going to write a book and call it 'Prisoners,' and show how I was a prisoner myself, to money, and luxury, and the game and--" he would not mention Esther, but Lydia knew where his mind stumbled over the thought of her--"and how I got my medicine. And how other fellows will have to take theirs, these fellows Weedie's gulling and Addington, because it's a fool wrapped up in its own conceit and stroking the lion's cub till it's grown big enough to eat us."

He got up and Lydia called to him:

"What is the lion's cub?"

"Why, it's the people. And Weedon Moore is showing it how hungry it is by chucking the raw meat at it and the saucers of blood. And pretty soon it'll eat us and eat Weedie too."

He went in and up the stairs and Lydia fancied she heard the tearing of papers in his room. _

Read next: Chapter 24

Read previous: Chapter 22

Table of content of Prisoner


GO TO TOP OF SCREEN

Post your review
Your review will be placed after the table of content of this book