The Happy End Part 7

"Listen to him," she gasped; "listen to Snow Doret. It's no wonder you might have forgotten him," she proclaimed; "he's been in the pen for ten and a half years with a bunch off for good conduct. But fifteen years ago--say! He went in for knifing a drug store keeper who held out on a 'c.o.ke' deal. If this here's a house of G.o.d's I'd like to know what he called the one he had then. I couldn't tell you half of what went on, not half, with fixing drinks and frame-ups and skirts. Why, he run a hop joint with the Chinese and took a noseful of snow at every other breath.

That was after his gambling room broke up--it got too raw even for the police. It was brandy with him, too, and there ain't a gutter in his district he didn't lay in. The drug store man wasn't the first he cut neither."

She stopped from sheer lack of breath.

Curiously all that filled Lemuel Doret's mind was the thought of the glory of G.o.d. Everything Bella said was true; but in the might of the Savior it was less than nothing. He had descended into the pit and brought him, Snow, up, filling his ears with the sweet hymns of redemption, the promise of Paradise for the thieves and murderers who acknowledged His splendor and fought His fight. This marvelous charity, the cleansing hope for his blackened soul, swept over him in a warm rush of humble praise and unutterable grat.i.tude. Nothing of the Lord's was lost: "His eye is on the sparrow."

"Certainly, lay off your coat," Bella was urging; "it's fierce hot. Lem can rush a can of beer from the hotel. Even he wouldn't go to turn out one of the crowd in a hard fix. I'm awful glad you saw him."

With June Bowman in his house, engaged in verbal agreements with Bella and spreading comfortably on a chair, Lemuel was powerless. AH his instinct pressed him to send the other on, to refuse--in the commonest self-preservation--shelter. But both the laws of his old life and the commands of the new were against this act of simple precaution. Bowman eyed him with a shrewd apprais.e.m.e.nt.

"A clever fellow," he said, nodding; "admire you for coming out here for a while. Well, how about the suds?"

He produced a thick roll of yellow-backed currency and detached a small bill. "I'll finance this campaign."

Lemuel Doret was confused by the rapidity with which the discredited past was re-created by Bowman's mere presence. He was at the point of refusing to fetch the beer when he saw that there was no explanation possible; they would regard him as merely crabbed, and Bella would indulge her habit of shrill abuse. It wasn't the drink itself that disturbed him but the old position of "rus.h.i.+ng the can"--a symbol of so much that he had left forever. Forever; he repeated the word with a silent bitter force. The feel of the kettle in his hand, the thin odor of the beer and slopping foam, seemed to him evidences of acute degeneration; he was oppressed by a mounting dejection. G.o.d seemed very far away.

His wife was talking while Bowman listened with an air of sympathetic wisdom.

"It wasn't so bad then," she said; "I was kind of glad to get away, and Lem was certain everything would open right out. But he's awful hard to do with; he wouldn't take a dollar from parties who had every right to stake him good, and borrowed five from no more than a stranger to buy that secondhand barber chair. What he needed was chloroform to separate these farmers from their dimes and whiskers." Bowman laughed loudly, and a corresponding color invaded Bella. "Of course no one knew Lem had done time, then. They wouldn't have either, but for the Law and Order. Oh, dear me, no, your child ain't none of your own; they lend it to you like and then sneak up whenever the idea takes them, to see if it's getting a Turkish bath. I guess the people on the street wondered who was our swell automobile friend till they found out."

"I suppose," Bowman put in, "they all came round and offered you the helping hand, wanted to see you happy and successful."

She laughed. "Them?" she demanded. "Them? The man that owns this house said that if he'd known, Lem would never had it; they don't want convicts in this town. This is a moral burg. That's more than the women said to me though--the starved buzzards; if they've spoke a word to me since I never heard it." Her voice rose in sharp mimicry: "You, Katie, come right up on the porch, child! Don't you know--! See, I'm going by."

"I could have warned you of all that," June Bowman a.s.serted; "for the reason they're narrow, don't know anything about living or affairs; hypocritical too; long on churchgoing----"

Doret regarded him solemnly. How blind he was, a mound of corruptible fles.h.!.+ He put the beer down and turned abruptly away, going up to Flavilla. She seemed better; her face was white but most of the fever had gone. He listened to her harsh breathing with the conviction that she had caught a cold; and immediately after he was back from the store with a bottle of cherry pectoral. She liked the sweet taste of the thick bright-pink sirup and was soon quiet. Lemuel sniffed the mouth of the bottle suspiciously. It was doped, he finally decided, but not enough to hurt her; tasting it, a momentary desire for stinging liquor ran like fire through his nerves. He laughed at it, crus.h.i.+ng and throwing aside the longing with a sense of contempt and triumph.

He could hear occasionally Bowman's smooth periods and his wife's eager enjoyment of the discourse. His sense of worldly loneliness deepened; Flavilla seemed far away. All life was inexplicable--yes, and profitless, ending in weariness and death. The hunger for perfection, for G.o.d, that had been a constant part of his existence, the longing for peace and security, were almost unbearable. He had had a long struggle; the devil was deeply rooted in him. He could laugh at the broken tyranny of drugs and drink, but the pa.s.sion for fine steel cutting edges was different, and twisted into every fiber. The rage that even yet threatened to flood him, sweeping away his painfully erected integrity, was different too. These things had made him a murderer.

"... not the righteous, but sinners to repentance."

He had a sudden muddled vision of another world, a world where st.u.r.dy men gave him their hands and in reality fulfilled June Bowman's mocking words. There the houses, the streets of his youth would have been impossible. Ah, he was thinking of another kind of heaven; it was a hop dream.

There was a stir below and he heard the clatter of plates. Dinner was in preparation. "Lem!" his wife called. "Mr. Bowman wants you to go to the butcher's."

"Call me June," he put in; adding: "Sure, Lem; the butcher's; we want a tenderloin, cut thick. You can't get any pep on greens; we ain't cattle."

Doret felt that he would have been infinitely happier with his own thin fare. In a manner he got comfort from a pinch of hunger; somehow the physical deprivation gave him a sense of purification. The other man, purple with the meat and beer, shook out a cigarette from a paper pack.

"Always smoke caporal halves," he proclaimed.

The blue vapor from the three burning cigarettes rose and mingled.

Bella was quiet, reflective; Bowman sat with half-shut speculative eyes; Lemuel Doret was again lost in visions.

"How long are you taking the milk cure?" Bowman asked.

Lemuel made no reply, but his wife smiled bitterly.

"I had an idea," the other continued; "but it's a little soon to spring anything. And I don't know but you might prefer it here."

"Try me," Bella proclaimed; "that's all I want!"

Doret still said nothing of his determination to conquer life in Nantbrook. A swift impulse seized him to take June Bowman by the collar and fling him into the street.

"Just try me!" Bella repeated.

He would be helpless in his, Doret's, hands. It was hard enough to be upright without an insinuating crook in the place. There was a heavy movement of feet in the front of the house, and he went out to meet a customer.

Sliding the sensitive razor blade over a young tanned cheek he pondered moodily on the undesirable fact of June Bowman.

Returning from this exercise of his trade he saw Bella descending the stair with a plate.

"With all your going on over Flavilla," she told him, "it never came to you that she'd like a piece of steak."

"But Doctor Frazee told us nothing solid. I took her up two eggs in the morning."

"Yes, and you'd had two dollars to pay as well if I hadn't showed you different. Flavilla's probably as well as any of us. I wish you would fix yourself a little, Lem. I'm tired of having you about the house in your suspenders."

He viewed her silently. Bella had on a dress he had never seen before, thin red-spotted yellow silk drawn tightly over a p.r.o.nounced figure, a red girdle, and high-heeled patent-leather slippers.

"If you're going to look like this," he admitted, "I'll have to get a move on."

When they were first in Nantbrook she had worn a denim ap.r.o.n, and that, too, with all the other differences had seemed to express their new life; but now in yellow silk she was back in the old. Lemuel Doret studied his wife with secret doubt; more than the dress had changed.

She seemed younger; rather she was adopting a younger manner. In the presence of June Bowman it intensified.

"That idea I spoke about," the latter advanced: "I've been sizing you up, the both of you, and you look good. Well, I've got hold of a concession on the Atlantic Boardwalk and the necessary cash is in sight." He turned to Lemuel. "How would you like to run a bowling game?

It's on the square and would give you a lead into something bigger.

You're wise; why, you might turn into a sh.o.r.e magnate, with Bella here dressed up in stones."

Doret shook his head. "Treasure on earth," he thought; "moth and rust."

But it would be hopeless to attempt any explanation. "No," he said; "we'll play it out here."

"We will?" Bella echoed him. "Indeed! We will?" Now the emphasis was sharply on the first word. "What's going to keep me?"

"You're my wife," he replied simply; "we have a child."

"Times have changed, Snow," Bowman interrupted. "You ought to read the papers. This is ladies' day. The old harem stuff don't go no longer.

They are emanc.i.p.ated."

"Lemuel," Doret insisted, a narrowed hard gaze on the other man; "Lemuel Doret."

"He thinks n.o.body'll remember," his wife explained. "Lem's redeemed."

"Your name's what you say," Bowman agreed, "but remember this--you can't throw any scare into me. I'm no Fauntleroy, neither. Behave."

The anger seethed again beneath Lemuel's restraint. It began to be particular, personal, focused on Bowman; and joined to it was a petty dislike for the details of the man's appearance, the jaunty bearing and conspicuous necktie, the gloss of youth over the unmistakable signs of degeneration, the fatty pouches of his eyes and loose throat.

"I wouldn't bother with scaring you," he told him. "Why should I? You've got no kick. I took you in, didn't I? And all I said was my name. Snow Doret's dead; he died in prison; and this Lemuel's all different----"