Читать книгу The Prisoner - Alice Brown - Страница 8

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He looked at them, quite unconscious of the turmoil he had wakened in them. Lydia was ready to sound the top note of revolt. Her thoughts were running a definite remonstrance: "Write the life of another man when you should be getting your evidence together and proving your own innocence and the injustice of the law?" Anne was quite ready to believe there must be a cogent reason for writing the life of his fellow criminal, but she wished it were not so. She, too, from long habit of thought, wanted Jeffrey to attend to his own life now he had a chance. The colonel, she knew, through waiting and hoping, had fallen into an attitude of mind as wistful and expectant as hers and Lydia's. The fighting qualities, it seemed, had been ground out of him. The fostering ones had grown disproportionately, and sometimes, she was sure, they made him ache, in a dull way, with ruth for everybody.

"Did the man ask you to write his life?" he inquired.

"No," said Jeffrey. "I asked him if I could. He agreed to it. Said I might use his name. He's no family to squirm under it."

"You feel he was unjustly sentenced," the colonel concluded.

"Oh, no. He doesn't either. He mighty well deserved what he got. Been better perhaps if he'd got more. What I had in mind was to tell how a man came to be a robber."

Lydia winced at the word. Jeffrey had been commonly called a defaulter, and she was imperfectly reconciled to that: certainly not to a branding more ruthless still.

"I've watched him a good deal," said Jeffrey. "We've had some talk together. I can see how he did what he did, and how he'd do it again. It'll be a study in criminology."

"When does he—come out?" Anne hesitated over this. She hardly knew a term without offence.

"Next year."

"But," said she, "you wouldn't want to publish a book about him and have him live it down?"

"Why shouldn't I?" asked Jeffrey, turning on her. "He's willing."

"He can't be willing," Lydia broke in. "It's frightful."

"Well, he is," said Jeffrey. "There's nothing you could do to him he'd mind, if it gave him good advertising."

"What does he want to do," asked the colonel, "when he comes out?"

"Get into the game again. Make big money. And if it's necessary, steal it. Not that he wants to bunco. He's had his dose. He's learned it isn't safe. But he'd make some dashing coup; he couldn't help it. Maybe he'd get nabbed."

"What a horrid person!" said Lydia. "How can you have anything to do with him?"

"Why, he's interesting," said Jeffrey, in a way she found brutal. "He's a criminal. He's got outside."

"Outside what?" she persisted.

"Law. And he wouldn't particularly want to get back, except that it pays. But I'm not concerned with what he does when he gets back. I want to show how it seemed to him outside and how he got there. He's more picturesque than I am, or I'd take myself."

Blessed Anne, who had no grasp, she thought, of abstract values, but knew how to make a man able for his work, met the situation quietly.

"You could have the blue chamber, couldn't he, Farvie? and do your writing there."

Lydia flashed her a reproachful glance. She would have scattered his papers and spilled the ink, rather than have him do a deed like that. If he did it, it was not with her good-will. Jeff had drawn his frown the tighter.

"I don't know whether I can do it," he said. "A man has got to know how to write."

"You wrote some remarkable things for the Nestor," said the colonel, now hesitating. It had been one of the rules he and the girls had concocted for the treatment of a returning prisoner, never to refer to stone walls and iron bars. But surely, he felt, Jeff needed encouragement.

Jeff was ruthless.

"That was all rot," he said.

"What was?" Lydia darted at him. "Didn't you mean what you said?"

"It was idiotic for the papers to take it up," said Jeff. "They got it all wrong. 'There's a man,' they said, 'in the Federal Prison, Jeffrey Blake, the defaulter. Very talented. Has revolutionised the Nestor, the prison organ. Let him out, pardon him, simply because he can write.'"

"As I understand," said his father, "you did get the name of the paper changed."

"Well, now," said Jeff, appealingly, in a candid way, "what kind of name was that for a prison paper? Nestor! 'Who was Nestor?' says the man that's been held up in the midst of his wine-swilling and money-getting. Wise old man, he remembers. First-class preacher. Turn on the tap and he'll give you a maxim. 'Gee!' says he, 'I don't want advice. I know how I got here, and if I ever get out, I'll see to it I don't get in again.'"

Lydia found this talk exceedingly diverting. She disapproved of it. She had wanted Jeff to appear a dashing, large-eyed, entirely innocent young man, his mouth, full of axioms, prepared to be the stay of Farvie's gentle years. But this rude torrent of perverse philosophy bore her along and she liked it, particularly because she felt she should presently contradict and show how much better she knew herself. Anne, too, evidently had an unlawful interest in it, and wanted him to keep on talking. She took that transparent way of furthering the flow by asking a question she could answer herself.

"You called it Prison Talk, didn't you?"

"Yes," said Jeff. "They called it Prison Talk."

"And all our newspapers copied your articles," said Anne, artfully guiding him forward, "the ones you called 'The New Republic.'"

"What d'they want to copy them for?" asked Jeff. "It was a fool thing to do. I'd simply written the letters to the men, to ask 'em if they didn't think the very devil of prison life was that we were outside. Not because we were inside, shut up in a jug. You could bear to be in a jug, if that was all. But you've got to have ties. You've got to have laws and the whole framework that's been built up from the cave man. Or you're desperate, don't you see? You're all alone. And a man will do a great deal not to be alone. If there's nothing for you to do but learn a trade, and be preached at by Nestor, and say to yourself, 'I'm outside'—why there's the devil in it."

He was trying to convince them as he had previously convinced others, those others who had lived with him under the penal law. He looked at Anne much as if she were a State or Federal Board and incidentally at Lydia, as if he would say:

"Here's a very young and insignificant criminal. We'll return to her presently. But she, too, is going to be convinced."

"And I don't say a man hasn't got to be infernally miserable when he's working out his sentence. He has. I don't want you to let up on him. Only I don't want him to get punky, so he isn't fit to come back when his term is over. I don't believe it's going to do much for him merely to keep the laws he's been chucked under, against his will, though he's got to keep 'em, or they'll know the reason why."

Lydia wondered who They were. She thought They might be brutal wardens and assembled before her, in a terrifying battalion, the strait-jackets and tortures she'd found in some of the older English novels.

"So I said to the men: 'We've got to govern ourselves. We haven't got a damned word'"—really abashed he looked at Anne—"I beg your pardon. 'We haven't got a word to say in this government we're under; but say we have. Say the only thing we can do is to give no trouble, fine ourselves, punish ourselves if we do. The worst thing that can happen to us,' I said, 'is to hate law. Well, the best law we've got is prison law. It's the only law that's going to touch us now. Let's love it as if it were our mother. And if it isn't tough enough, let's make it tougher. Let's vote on it, and publish our votes in this paper.'"

"I was surprised," said his father, "that so much plain speaking was allowed."

"Advertising! Of course they allowed us," said Jeff. "It advertised us outside. Advertised the place. Officials got popular. Inside conduct went up a hundred per cent, just as it would in school. Men are only boys. As soon as the fellows got it into their heads we were trying to work out a republic in a jail, they were possessed by it. I wish you could see the letters that were sent in to the paper. You couldn't publish 'em, some of 'em. Too illiterate. But they showed you what was inside the fellows. Sometimes they were as smug as a prayer-meeting."

"Did this man write?" Lydia asked scornfully, with a distaste she didn't propose to lessen. "The one you're going to do the book about?"

"Oh, he's a crook," said Jeff indifferently. "Crook all through. If we'd been trying to build up a monarchy instead of a republic he'd have hatched up a scheme for looting the crown jewels. Or if we'd been founding a true and only church, he'd have suggested a trick for melting the communion plate."

"And you want to write his life!" said Lydia's look.

But Jeff cared nothing about her look. He was, with a retrospective eye, regarding the work he had been doing, work that had perhaps saved his reason as well as bought his freedom. Now he was spreading it out and letting them consider it, not for praise, but because he trusted them. He felt a few rivets giving in the case he had hardened about himself for so long a time. He thought he had got very hard indeed, and was even willing to invite a knock or two, to test his induration. But there was something curiously softening in this little group sitting in the shade of the pleasant room while the sunshine outside played upon growing leaves. He was conscious, wonderingly, that they all loved him very much. His father's letters had told him that. It seemed simple and natural, too, that these young women, who were not his sisters and who gave him, in his rough habit of life, a curious pain with their delicacy and softness—it seemed natural enough that they should, in a way not understood, belong to him. He had got gradually accustomed to it, from their growing up in his father's house from little girls to girls dancing themselves into public favour, and then, again, he had been living "outside" where ordinary conventions did not obtain. He had got used to many things in his solitary thoughts that were never tested by other minds in familiar intercourse. The two girls belonged there among accepted things. He looked up suddenly at his father, and asked the question they had least of all expected to hear:

"Where's Esther?"

The two girls made a movement to go, but he glanced at them frowningly, as if they mustn't break up the talk at this moment, and they hesitated, hand in hand.

"She's living here," said the colonel, "with her grandmother."

"Has that old harpy been over lately?"

"Madame Beattie?"

"Yes."

"Not to my knowledge."

Anne and Lydia exchanged looks. Madame Beattie was a familiar name to them, but they had never heard she was a harpy.

"Was she Esther's aunt?" Lydia inquired, really to give the talk a jog. She was accustomed to shake up her watch when it hesitated.

"Great-aunt," said Jeffrey. "Step-sister to Esther's grandmother. She must be sixty-five where grandmother's a good ten years older."

"She sang," said the colonel, forgetting, as he often did, they seemed so young, that everybody in America must at least have heard tradition of Madame Beattie's voice. "She lived abroad."

"She had a ripping voice," said Jeff. "When she was young, of course. That wasn't all. There was something about her that took them. But she lost her voice, and she married Beattie, and he died. Then she came back here and hunted up Esther."

His face settled into lines of sombre thought, puzzled thought, it seemed to Anne. But to Lydia it looked as if this kidnapping of Madame Beattie from the past and thrusting her into the present discussion was only a pretext for talking about Esther. Of course, she knew, he was wildly anxious to enter upon the subject, and there might be pain enough in it to keep him from approaching it suddenly. Esther might be a burning coal. Madame Beattie was the safe holder he caught up to keep his fingers from it. But he sounded now as if he were either much absorbed in Madame Beattie or very wily in his hiding behind her.

"I've often wondered if she came back. I've thought she might easily have settled on Esther and sucked her dry. No news of her?"

"No news," said the colonel. "It's years since she's been here. Not since—then."

"No," said Jeff. There was a new line of bitter amusement near his mouth. "I know the date of her going, to a dot. The day I was arrested she put for New York. Next week she sailed for Italy." But if Lydia was going to feel more of her hot reversals in the face of his calling plain names, she found him cutting them short with another question: "Seen Esther?"

"No," said the colonel.

A red spot had sprung into his cheek. He looked harassed. Lydia sprang into the arena, to save him, and because she was the one who had the latest news.

"I have," she said. "I've seen her."

She knew what grave surprise was in the colonel's face. But no such thing appeared in Jeff's. He only turned to her as if she were the next to be interrogated.

"How does she look?" he asked.

The complete vision of her stretched at ease eating fruit out of a silver dish, as if she had arranged herself to rouse the most violent emotions in a little seething sister, stirred Lydia to the centre. But not for a million dollars, she reflected, in a comparison clung to faithfully, would she tell how beautiful Esther appeared to even the hostile eye.

"She looked," said she coldly, "perfectly well."

"Where d'you see her?" Jeff asked.

"I went over," said Lydia. Her colour was now high. She looked as if you might select some rare martyrdom for her—quartering or gridironing according to the oldest recipes—and you couldn't make her tell less than the truth, because only the truth would contribute to the downfall of Esther. "I went in without ringing, because Farvie'd been before and they wouldn't let him in."

"Lydia!" the colonel called remindingly.

"I found her reading—and eating." Lydia hadn't known she could be so hateful. Still she was telling the exact truth. "We talked a few minutes and I came away."

"Did she—" at last suddenly and painfully thrown out of his nonchalant run of talk, he stopped.

"She's a horrid woman," said Lydia, crimson with her own daring, and got up and ran out of the room.

Anne looked appealingly at Jeff, in a way of begging him to remember how young Lydia was, and perhaps how spoiled. But he wasn't disturbed. He only said to his father in a perfectly practical way:

"Women never did like her, you know."

So Anne got up and went out, thinking it was the moment for him and his father to pace along together on this road of masculine understanding. She found Lydia by the dining-room window, savagely drying her cheeks. Lydia looked as if she had cried hard and scrubbed the tears off and cried again, there was such wilful havoc in the pink smoothness of her face.

"Isn't he hateful?" she asked Anne, with an incredulous spite in her voice. "How could anybody that belonged to Farvie be so rough? I can't endure him, can you?"

Anne looked distressed. When there were disagreements and cross-purposes they made her almost ill. She would go about with a physical nausea upon her, wishing the world could be kind.

"But he's only just—free," she said.

They were still making a great deal of that word, she and Lydia. It seemed the top of earthly fortune to be free, and abysmal misery to have missed it.

"I can't help it," said Lydia. "What does he want to act so for? Why does he talk about such places, as if anybody could be in them?"

"Prisons?"

"Yes. And talking about going West as if Farvie hadn't just lived to get him back. And about her as if she wasn't any different from what he expected and you couldn't ask her to be anything else."

"But she's his wife," said Anne gently. "I suppose he loves her. Let's hope he does."

"You can, if you want to," said Lydia, with a wet handkerchief making another renovating attack on her face. "I sha'n't. She's a horrid woman."

They parted then, for their household deeds, but all through the morning Lydia had a fire of curiosity burning in her to know what Jeff was doing. He ought, she knew, to be sitting by Farvie, keeping him company, in a passionate way, to make up for the years. The years seemed sometimes like a colossal mistake in nature that everybody had got to make up for—make up to everybody else. Certainly she and Anne and Farvie had got to make up to the innocent Jeff. And equally they had all got to make up to Farvie. But going once noiselessly through the hall, she glanced in and saw the colonel sitting alone by the window, Mary Nellen's Virgil in his hand. He was well back from the glass, and Lydia guessed that it was because he wanted to command the orchard and not himself be seen. She ran up to her own room and also looked. There he was, Jeff, striding round in the shadow of the brick wall, walking like a man with so many laps to do before night. Sometimes he squared his shoulders and walked hard, but as if he knew he was going to get there—the mysterious place for which he was bound. Sometimes his shoulders sagged, and he had to drive himself. Lydia felt, in her throat, the aching misery of youth and wondered if she had got to cry again, and if this hateful, wholly unsatisfactory creature was going to keep her crying. As she watched, he stopped, and then crossed the orchard green directly toward her. She stood still, looking down on him fascinated, her breath trembling, as if he might glance up and ask her what business she had staring down there, spying on him while he did those mysterious laps he was condemned to, to make up perhaps for the steps he had not taken on free ground in all the years.

"Got a spade?" she heard him call.

"Yes." It was Anne's voice. "Here it is."

"Why, it's new," Lydia heard him say.

He was under her window now, and she could not see him without putting her head over the sill.

"Yes," said Anne. "I went down town and bought it."

Anne's voice sounded particularly satisfied. Lydia knew that tone. It said Anne had been able to accomplish some fit and clever deed, to please. It was as if a fountain, bubbling over, had said, "Have I given you a drink, you dog, you horse, you woman with the bundle and the child? Marvellous lucky I must be. I'll bubble some more."

Jeff himself might have understood that in Anne, for he said:

"I bet you brought it home in your hand."

"No takers," said Anne. "I bet I did."

"That heavy spade?"

"It wasn't heavy."

"You thought I'd be spading to keep from growing dotty. Good girl. Give it here."

"But, Jeff!" Anne's voice flew after him as he went. Lydia felt herself grow hot, knowing Anne had taken the big first step that had looked so impossible when they saw him. She had called him Jeff. "Jeff, where are you going to spade?"

"Up," said Jeff. "I don't care where. You always spade up, don't you?"

In a minute Lydia saw Anne, with the sun on her brown hair, the colonel, and Jeff with the shining spade like a new sort of war weapon, going forth to spade "up". Evidently Anne intended to have no spading at random in a fair green orchard. She was one of the conservers of the earth, a thrifty housewife who would have all things well done. They looked happily intent, the three, going out to their breaking ground. Lydia felt the tempest in her going down, and she wished she were with them. But her temper shut her out. She felt like a little cloud driven by some capricious wind to darken the face of earth, and not by her own willingness.

She went down to the noon dinner quite chastened, with the expression Anne knew, of having had a temper and got over it. The three looked as if they had had a beautiful time, Lydia thought humbly. The colour was in their faces. Farvie talked of seed catalogues, and it became evident that Jeff was spading up the old vegetable garden on the orchard's edge. Anne had a soft pink in her cheeks. They had all, it appeared, begun a pleasant game.

Lydia kept a good deal to herself that day. She accepted a task from Anne of looking over table linen and lining drawers with white paper. Mary Nellen was excused from work, and sat at upper windows making a hum of study like good little translating bees. Anne went back and forth from china closet to piles of dishes left ready washed by Mary Nellen, and the colonel, in the library, drowsed off the morning's work. Lydia had a sense of peaceful tasks and tranquil pauses. Her own pulses had quieted with the declining sun, and it seemed as if they might all be settling into a slow-moving ease of life at last.

"Where is he?" suddenly she said to Anne, in the midst of their weaving the household rhythm.

"Jeff?" asked Anne, not stopping. "He's spading in the garden."

"Don't you want to go out?" asked Lydia. She felt as if they had on their hands, not a liberated prisoner, but a prisoner still bound by their fond expectations of him. He must be beguiled, distracted from the memory of his broken fetters.

"No," said Anne. "He'll be tired enough to sleep to-night."

"Didn't he sleep last night?" Lydia asked, that old ache beginning again in her.

"I shouldn't think so," said Anne. "But he's well tired now".

And it was Lydia that night at ten who heard long breaths from the little room when she went softly up the back stairs to speak to Mary Nellen. There was a light on his table. The door was open. He sat, his back to her, his arms on the table, his head on his arms. She heard the long labouring breaths of a creature who could have sobbed if he had not kept a heavy hand on himself. They were, Lydia thought, like the breaths of a dear dog she had known who used to put his nose to the crack of the shut door and sigh into it, "Please let me in." It seemed to her acutely sensitive mind, prepared like a chemical film to take every impression Jeff could cast, as if he were lying prone at the door of the cruel beauty and breathing, "Please let me in." She wanted to put her hands on the bowed head and comfort him. Now she knew how Anne felt, Anne, the little mother heart, who dragged up compassion from the earth and brought it down from the sky for unfriended creatures. And yet all the solace Lydia had to offer was a bitter one. She would only have said:

"Don't cry for her. She isn't worth it. She's a hateful woman."