the worm sat on a wooden chair, an expression of puzzled gravity on his usually whimsical face. the room was a small kitchen. the two screened windows gave a view of a suburban yard, bounded by an alley and beyond the alley other yards; beyond these a row of small frame houses. there were trees; and the scent of a honeysuckle vine.
sue wilde, her slim person enveloped in a checked apron, knelt by the old-fashioned coal range. the lower door was open, the ash-pan drawn half out. there were ashes on the floor about her knees.
henry bates absently drew out his old caked brier pipe; filled and lighted it. meditatively he studied the girl—her apron, the flush on her face, the fascinating lights in her tousled hair—telling himself that the scene was real, that the young rebel soul he had known in the village was this same sue wilde. the scent of the honeysuckle floated thickly to his nostrils. he stared out at the row of little wooden houses. he slowly shook his head; and his teeth closed hard on the pipe stem.
“henry,” she cried softly, throwing out her fine hands, “don't you understand! i had a conscience all the time. that's what was the matter!”
“i think i understand well enough, sue,” said he. “it's the”—he looked again about the kitchen and out the window—“it's the setting! i hadn't pictured you as swinging so far to this extreme though, as you know, there in the village, i have been rather conservative in my feelings about you.”
“i know, henry.” she settled back on her heels. he saw how subdued she was. the tears were not far from her eyes. “i've been all wrong.”
“wrong, sue?”
“absolutely. in all i said and tried to do in the village.” he was shaking his head; but she continued: “i was cutting at the roots of my own life. i disowned every spiritual obligation. i put my faith in nietzsche and the russian crowd, in egotism. henry”'—her eyes unmistakably filled now'; her voice grew unsteady—“once my father came over into the village after me. he tried to get me to come home. i was playing at the crossroads then.”
“yes,” said he shortly, “i remember that time.”
“i had on my boy costume. he came straight to the theater and i had to go out front and talk with him. we quarreled—”
“i know,” said he quickly, “i was there.”
he saw that she was in the grip of an emotional revulsion and wished he could stop her. but he couldn't. suddenly she seemed like a little girl.
“don't you see, henry!” she threw out her hands. “do you think it would be any good—now—to tell me i'm not partly responsible. if i—if—” she caught herself, stiffened up; there was a touch of her old downrightness in the way she came out with, “henry, he wouldn't have—killed himself!” her voice was a whisper. “he wouldn't!”
the worm smoked and smoked. he couldn't tell her that he regarded her father as a hypocritical old crook, and that her early revolt against the home within which the man had always wished to confine her had, as he saw it, grown out of a sound instinct. you couldn't expect her, now, to get all that into any sort of perspective. her revolt dated back to her girlish struggle to get away to school and later, to college. sue was forgetting now how much of this old story she had let him see in their many talks. why, old wilde had tried to change the course of her college studies to head her away from modernism into the safer channels of pietistic tradition. the worm couldn't forgive him for that. and then, the man's dreadful weekly, and his curious gift of using his great emotional power to draw immense sums of money from thousands of faithful readers in small towns and along country lanes, he hadn't killed himself on sue's account.
it was known, now, that the man had lived in an awful fear. it was known that he had the acid right at hand in both office and home, the acid he had finally drunk.... she was speaking.
the worm smoked on.
“i wonder if you really know what happened.”
“what happened?” he repeated, all at sea.
“you must have seen the drift of it—of what i didn't tell you at one time or another.” he saw now that she was talking of her own experiences. he had to make a conscious struggle to bring his mind up out of those ugly depths and listen to her. she went on. “it has been fine, henry, the way i could always talk to you. our friendship—”
she began in another way. “it's the one thing i owe to jacob zanin. he told me the blunt truth—about myself. it did hurt, henry. but even then i knew it for the truth.... you know how he feels about marriage and the home”—she glanced up at the bare kitchen walls—“all that.”
he nodded.
“well, he—henry, he wanted to have an affair with me.” she said this rather hurriedly and low, not at all with the familiar frankness of the village in discussing the old forbidden topics. “he knew i was all confused, that i had got into an impasse. he made me see that i'd been talking and thinking a kind of freedom that i hadn't the courage to go in for, really—in living.”
“courage, sue?”
“yes, courage—or taste—-or something! henry, you know as well as i that the freedom we talk in the village leads straight to—well, to complete unmorality, to—to promiscuity, to anything.”
“perhaps,” said he, watching her and wondering with a little glow suddenly warming his heart, at her lack of guile. he thought of a phrase he had once formulated while hearing this girl talk—-“whom among women the gods would destroy they first make honest.”
“when i was put to the test—and i was put to the test, henry; i found that i was caught in my own philosophy, was drifting down with it—if turned out that i simply didn't believe the things i'd been saying. i even”—she faltered here, but rushed on—“i very nearly rushed into a crazy marriage with peter. just to save myself. oh, i see it now! it would have been as dishonest a marriage as the french-heeledest little suburbanite ever planned.”
“you're severe with yourself,” he said.
she, lips compressed, shook her head.
“i suppose,” he mused aloud, “there's a lot of us radicals who'd be painfully put to it if we were suddenly called on to quit talking and begin really living it out. lord, what would we do!” and mentally he added: “damn few of us would make the honest effort to find ourselves that you're making right now.” then, aloud: “what are you going to do?”
she dropped her eyes. “i'm going to take these ashes down cellar.”
“i'll do that,” said he.
when the small task was accomplished, she said more gently:
“henry, please understand! i count on you. this thing is a tragedy. i'm deep in it. i don't even want to escape it. i'll try not to sink into those morbid thoughts—but he was my father, and he was buried yesterday. his wife, this one, is not my mother, but—but she was his wife. she is crushed, henry. i have never before been close to a human being who was shattered as she is shattered. there are the children—two of them. and no money.”
“no money?”
“father's creditors have seized the paper and the house in stuyvesant square. everything is tied up. there is to be an investigation. my aunt matilda is here—this is her house—-but we can't ask her to support us. henry, here is something you can do! betty is staying at my old rooms. try to see her to-day. could you?”
he nodded. “surely.”
“have her get some one to come in with her—take the place off my hands. every cent of the little i have is needed here. she'll be staying. that marriage of hers didn't work. she couldn't keep away from the village, anyway. and please have her pack up my things and send them out. i only brought a hand-bag. betty will pitch in and do that for me. she's got to. i haven't even paid this month's rent yet. have her send everything except my books—perhaps she could sell those. it would help a little.”
they heard a step on the uncarpeted back stairs. a door swung open. on the bottom step, framed in the shadowed doorway, stood a short round-shouldered woman. lines drooped downward from her curving mouth. her colorless eyes shifted questioningly from the girl to the man and back to the girl again. it was an unimaginative face, rather grim, telling its own story of fifty-odd years of devotion to petty household and neighborhood duties; the face of a woman all of whose girlhood impulses had been suppressed until they were converted into perverse resentments.
the worm, as he rose, hardly aware of the act, knocked the ashes from his pipe into the coal hod. then he saw that her eyes were on those ashes and on his pipe. he thrust the pipe into his pocket. and glancing from the woman to the girl, he momentarily held his breath at the contrast and the thoughts it raised. it was youth and crabbed age. the gulf between them was unbridgeable, of course; but he wondered—it was a new thought—if age need be crabbed. didn't the new sprit of freedom, after all, have as much to contribute to life, as the puritan tradition? were the risks of letting yourself go any greater, after all, than the risks of suppression? weren't the pseudo-freudians at least partly right?
“aunt matilda,” sue was saying (on her feet now)—“this is an old friend, mr. bates.”
the woman inclined her head.
henry bales, his moment of speculation past, felt his spirit sinking. he said nothing, because he could think of nothing that could be said to a woman who looked like that. she brought with her the close air of the stricken chamber at the top of the stairs. by merely opening the door and appearing there she had thrust a powerful element of hostility into the simple little kitchen. her uncompromising eyes drew sue within the tragic atmosphere of the house as effectively and definitely as it thrust himself without it.
sue's next remark was even more illuminating than had been his own curious haste to conceal his pipe.
“oh,” murmured sue, “have we disturbed”—she hesitated, fought with herself, came out with it—-“mother?”
“well, the smoke annoys her.” aunt matilda did not add the word “naturally,” but the tone and look conveyed it. “and she can hear your voices.”
henry bates had to struggle with a rising anger. there were implications in that queerly hostile look that reflected on sue as on himself. but they were and remained unspoken. they could not be met.
the only possible course was to go; and to go with the miserable feeling that he was surrendering sue to the enemy.
he turned to her now, speaking with quiet dignity; little realizing that even this dignity aroused resentment and suspicion in the unreceptive mind behind those eyes on the stairs—that it looked brazen coming from a young man whose sandy hair straggled down over his ears and close to his suspiciously soft collar, whose clothes were old and wrinkled, whose mild studious countenance exhibited nothing of the vigor and the respect for conformity that are expected of young men in suburbs who must go in every morning on the seven-thirty-six and come out every evening on the five-fifty-two, and who, therefore, would naturally be classed with such queer folk as gipsies and actors.
“if you like, sue,” he said, “i'll get betty to hurry so i can bring a suit-case out to-night.”
she waited a brief moment before answering; and in that moment was swept finally within aunt matilda's lines. “oh, no,” she said, speaking with sudden rapidity, “don't do that. to-morrow will do—just send them.”
then aware that she was dismissing him indefinitely, her eyes brimming again (for he had been a good friend), she extended her hand.
the worm gripped it, bowed to the forbidding figure on the stairs and left.
