The Empty Sack Part 56

Perhaps they divined the intention in this intimation from Teddy. At any rate, they didn't question it, or rebel against it. It followed on visits first of one pair and then of the other, both of which had been so normal as almost to pa.s.s as gay. That is, Teddy's spirits had infected theirs, and they had parted from him smiling. That of Jennie and Gussie had been the first of the two, and he had sent them off with a joke.

"My boy, I'm proud of you," had been Lizzie's farewell words to him.

"Walk firmly, with your head erect, and never, never be sorry for anything you've done."

"Good old ma! The best ever! I sure am proud of _you_! What'll you bet that we don't have some good times together yet?"

A psychologist would have said that by suggestion and autosuggestion they strengthened each other and themselves; but whatever the process, the result was evident. Bob had given them the verb "to carry on," so that "carrying on" became at once an objective and a driving force.

Gussie and Gladys went regularly to work; Jennie took care of the house and her mother. The latter task had become the more imperative, for the reason that, after Teddy's request that they should suspend their visits, she began to fail. It was not that she was hurt by it, but rather that she took it as a signal.

In the efforts to be strong, they were helped by the fact that, not long after Teddy's removal to Bitterwell, Edith Ayling had come to see them, all of her own initiative. She had repeated the visit many times, and had Gussie and Gladys go to see her at Cathedral Heights. Jennie had never been able to leave home.

"I didn't say anything about it to you," Edith explained to Bob, after the occasion of her breaking the ice, "because I wanted to do it on my own. Quite apart from you and Jennie, I feel that our lots have become involved and that we Collinghams have some responsibility. I don't say responsibility for what, because I don't know; and yet I feel-" Unable to say what she felt, she elided to the personal. "Jennie I don't get at. She's so silent-so shut away. The mother has never been well enough to see me. But the two younger girls I'm really getting to know very well and to be very fond of. They're intelligent down to the finger-tips, and with a little guidance I'm sure they could do big things."

"What kind of things?"

"I should train Gladys along intellectual lines, and Gussie was born for the stage. I know that Ernest and I could help them, if you thought it all right, and we should love doing it. You must read what he says in his new book, _Salvage_, as to getting people into the tasks for which they are fitted and in which they can be happy. He thinks that a lot of our nonproductiveness comes from the people who'd love doing one thing being compelled to do another, and that if we could only help the individuals we come across to find their natural jobs...."

It was Edith also who unconsciously helped her mother out of the trap in which she had found herself caught.

"Oh, by the way, whom do you think I met in the street the other day? No less a person than Hubert Wray, just back from California. And that reminds me. He told me you had bought his big picture that everyone was talking about last year. Where is it? Why did you never say anything about it?"

Edith was spending a day in May at Collingham Lodge, and was walking with her mother between rows of irises.

"Come in," Junia said. "I'll show you. Then you'll understand."

But not till "Life and Death" had been drawn from its hiding place and propped against the wall was Edith allowed to enter her mother's room.

She advanced slowly, her eyes on the canvas. Junia waited for the shock.

"So that's it," Edith said, at last. "It isn't a thing I should want to live and die with-I never can understand that fancy people have for nudes-but I see it's very fine."

"And is that all you see?"

"All I see? I see it has a meaning, of course, but-"

Junia's throat felt dry.

"Don't you-don't you recognize anybody?"

"Who? The Bra.s.shead woman? I shouldn't know her from Eve."

Junia crept nearer.

"'The Bra.s.shead woman'? Who's she? What are you talking about?"

"Why, the model who sat for it. Hubert told me all about her. He said she wasn't his ideal for the part-rather a poor lot as a woman-but he couldn't get anyone better." She added, on examining the features, "I don't think she's bad, considering what he wanted."

"Doesn't she-doesn't she remind you of-of Bob's wife?"

"About as much as she does of you. Surely that's not the reason why you hid the thing away!"

"I-I did think-I was afraid-that people might see a resemblance-"

Edith made an inarticulate sound intended for derision.

"As a matter of fact, Hubert said it was probably a good thing for him to be obliged to paint some one else than Jennie. He'd been painting her so much that he was in danger of painting her into everything, like Andrea del Sarto with his wife."

"Then you-you don't think that he's painted her in here?"

Edith looked again.

"Well, if you put it that way-and you were crazy to find a likeness-perhaps about the brows-and down here at the curve of the cheek and neck-but no! Not really! This is a carnal woman, and Jennie's a thing of the spirit." She dismissed the subject as of no further importance. "Do tell me. Is there anyone in New York who reglazes these English chintzes?"

So Junia made new plans, waiting for Bob to come home to dinner in order to meet him on the threshold, throw her arms about his neck, and give him the glad facts.

But Bob sent a telephone message that he would not be home to dinner, that he would not be home that night. No one was to worry, and he would turn up at breakfast in the morning.

It was all the information he gave because, by special permission from the warden, and under a solemn promise not to convey anything to the prisoner that would enable him to cheat the law, he was spending the night at Bitterwell.

He was spending it in a low one-storied building some sixty feet long and not more than twenty in width. Its arrangements were simple. On entering, you came into a corridor some six feet wide, running the length of seven little rooms. The seven little rooms were each furnished with a cot, a fixed wash-basin, a table, and a chair. Each had, however, this peculiarity-that the end toward the corridor had no wall. Instead of a wall it had long, strong perpendicular white bars, some two or three inches apart, and running from ceiling to floor. The inmate was thus visible at all times, like an animal in a cage. In the corridor were half a dozen chairs of the kitchen variety, and at the end a little yellow door.

The little yellow door led into a room of which the chief piece of furniture was a chair vaguely suggestive of an armchair in a smoking room, though with some singular attachments. Around it in a semicircle were some eight or ten other chairs similar to those in the corridor. In one corner was a walled-off s.p.a.ce that might have housed a dynamo; in the other a stack of brooms and mops. As a pa.s.sageway gave access to this room, and the yellow door was carefully kept closed, Bob was not required to see within.

Of the seven little rooms four were empty, and three had occupants. At one end was a negro; at the other an Italian; Teddy was in the center.

Outside, there was a guard for the Italian, another for the negro, while for Teddy there were two. They were big, husky fellows, three Irishmen and a Swede, genial, good-natured souls to whom their duties had become a matter of course.

There was something of the matter of course in the whole situation, even to Teddy and Bob. The human mind being ready to accept anything to which it is led by steps sufficiently graded, both young men were attuned to finding themselves as they were. As they were meant that Teddy clung to one of the bars from within, and Bob to the same bar from without. They talked through the open s.p.a.ces, being able to do it quietly because they were so close.

"You don't think I'm afraid, do you, Bob? I should have been afraid if it hadn't been for you. You've bucked me up something-well, there are no words for it."

"Let it go without words, Teddy. Don't try to say it."

"I like to say it," he grinned. "Or, rather, I'd like to say it if I could. I like trying to say it, even when I can't."

That was all for the time; but after some minutes, Teddy's hand stole over Bob's big paw as it held to the bar, so that they held to it together.

It was Bob who broke the silence next.

"I didn't tell you, Teddy-I've only just found it out-that dad's been taking care of Mrs. Flynn and her kiddies and means to go on doing it."

"That's good," the boy sighed. "It takes about the last thing off my mind."

So they talked spasmodically, never saying much, and yet saying all the things for which language has no words. At intervals the Italian showed his sympathy by groaning heavily, which was generally a signal for the negro to begin singing, in a cottony voice, the first verse of "Safe in the Arms of Jesus." Teddy apologized for them as a host for unseemly members of his household.

"They're good guys, all right. That's just their way of letting me know they feel for me. It's funny how kind hearted some mutt will be who's committed a cold-blooded murder."

He had probably been following this train of thought for some minutes when he said, in a reasoning tone:

"What can the law do with fellows of our sort? Look at the thing straight now. We've got good in us, of course; but you can't trust us to hold our horses. I don't blame them for what they're giving me-hardly any. Only, I'll be darned if it doesn't make me surer that all this is only an experiment-a way of finding out how not to do it-so that we can make the next go a better one."