Heart's Kindred

“Yes,” she answered. “It’s almost the only dress I’ve got,” she added.

He fell to wondering whether it would be possible for her ever to forgive him now, and come to him, and whether it could ever be as it might have been. Sometime, perhaps, when he came back from the war – if he came… It was on his lips to make her know. But always the memory of the night on the trail swept him. “I didn’t know no woman I could tell – nor no other decent man.” And then…

She stood still, looking back at the house.

“I wanted,” she said, “to get that newspaper. Did you see what it said about women – about who’s here?”

He had not seen, but he would not let her go back to the kitchen, nor would he go himself. They went round the house, and found a newsstand, and sat over a little table in an ice-cream place.

“Many Women Arrive in Capital,” the headlines said. “Large Number of Women Arrivals at Hotels. Conjecture Washington May Become Shopping Centre of the East.”

“We noticed this morning – we said so this morning,” Lory remembered.

“I guess it just happened so,” the Inger said. “You’ve all come buying good clothes, I bet.”

She did not smile, but sat looking across the room. The wife of the soda fountain man and two women from outside leaned there, talking.

“Wouldn’t it be funny,” Lory said, “if the women all come here the way I come – unexpected?”

He did not hear her. He was reading eagerly down the first column of the page:

“Answer Still Delayed. President Not Yet Ready to Give Out Statement. Mass Meeting Resolutions produce Profound Effect. Foreign Pressure Increasing. All-Night Cabinet Meeting Likely – ”

“Lord Heavens,” cried the Inger, “why don’t they light in an’ smash ’em – like men?”

She did not hear him. The three women in the corner were looking at her curiously, and she wondered why. As she walked by them toward the door, she thought that she heard one of them whisper:

“She don’t know!”

When she reached the door, she turned back and looked at them.

“Do you live near?” the proprietor’s wife asked her.

“Just since to-day,” the girl said. “I just come – from California.”

“Oh!” the woman comprehended. “Come in again – soon.” And something else she added that sounded like “To-morrow – maybe?”

Lory nodded and they went out.

“The whole place seems to be waitin’ for somethin’,” the Inger was saying. “Why don’t they jump in – why don’t they jump in?”

The girl was not listening. She was looking at the groups of women in the doorways.

The two walked back to the chubby house. It was frowning, for there were no lights in its windows, save a glimmer from the kitchen where the gas jet always burned.

“Not out there,” said the Inger, as they went in the dark passage. “Don’t let’s go where the old man is.”

“I can hear talking,” Lory said only, and threw open the kitchen door.

The supper table was still covered, with its litter of dishes. On the settle the old man was lying, with his head lifted, watching. Beside the stove sat the Inger’s father and Bunchy Haight. No one else was in the room.

VIII

The Inger stepped in front of Lory, and, before the others turned, wheeled to face her.

“Go get your aunt here,” he said, under his voice, and, as she retreated, closed the passage door upon her. Then he turned to the room.

“Well, Dad!” he cried. “Well, Bunchy! Better have another stick or two on the fire, hadn’t we?” he offered.

While the Inger followed his own suggestion, Bunchy watched him, lowering. But the Inger’s father began to talk.

“Bunchy was comin’ along here – he was comin’ along,” he explained, “so I thought I’d come along too. I thought I better come along too – ”

His son glanced at him keenly, wondering at his uncertain manner. As the stove door closed, the Inger inquired with perfect interest:

“How’d you find the place – go to Chicago?”

“Yes, damn you,” said Bunchy, suddenly, and rose, and without warning threw himself upon the Inger.

It took longer than one would have thought, for though the Inger was physically fit and Bunchy was flabby and overfed, he had the strength of blind anger. It cost a distinct effort for the Inger to throw him. He went down with his head on the zinc, and the Inger, with his knee on his chest and his hand on his throat, took breath and regarded him. Bunchy’s little eyes looked up at him like the eyes of a trapped wolf. His thick, raw lips were working.

A profound, ungoverned sense of hatred and loathing filled the Inger. Here was a creature, vile and sordid, to whom Lory Moor was to have been given over, and who was come now seeking his prey. He seemed unspeakable, he seemed, by all the decencies, a thing of which to rid the earth. The Inger shrank from his contact with him, from his hand on that smooth, puffy throat. He felt for him all the “just” horror of which he was capable, and, superadded, an intense physical abomination. All this swept him and possessed him and emptied him of every other feeling.

Then the Inger became conscious that above the sound of their shuffling and breathing, another sound had been growing which now filled the room. It was a dreadful, guttural breathing, unlike that of a man in strife, but rather like that of an animal at its feeding.

The Inger threw up his head and looked. Close by his shoulder, as he knelt there beside the cooking-range, the madman was leaning, watching. Only now, instead of the immovable eyes, his were eyes which blazed and gleamed with a look unimaginable. And the sound that filled the room was the old man’s guttural breath, and with every breath, words, half articulate, were mingled:

“Kill ’im. Kill ’im. Kill ’im. Kill ’im,” he was saying. That was all – the words did not vary, nor the ghastly tone, nor the dreadful breathing. “Kill ’im. Kill ’im. Kill ’im.”

His long, freckled hands were outspread and trembling. His back was crooked and his head thrust forward. His hair fell about his face. He stepped here and there, as he could, his leg chain clanking. And he said over his fearful chant, like an invocation to some devil.

And the Inger, who was feeling the same rage, looked in the old madman’s eyes, and the two understood each other.

All the horror which the sane man had felt at the beast in the other, stared from the Inger’s eyes, as he looked. And abruptly he was wrenched with horror of the beast in himself. With a sense of weakness, as at the going out of something which seemed to drain his veins, to abandon his body like a great breath from his pores, he took his eyes away from that face.

He relaxed his hold on Bunchy and rose.

“Get up,” he said to him, and looked away from him.

Bunchy scrambled to his feet, amazed, blinking, pulling at his collar, casting sidewise glances of vehement suspicion. The Inger merely stood there, not looking at him.

“Listen here,” said the Inger, in a moment. “The girl is here with her folks. If ever the time comes when she’ll marry me, God knows I want her. But for now, I’m out of your way. You can deal with her and her folks, for all of me. Understand?”

Considering the Inger’s obvious advantage, Bunchy by no means understood. His look said so. Neither was the Inger’s father at all comprehending. In his father’s face the genial kindness and the settled sadness had given place to a contagion of rage and passion. The Inger had never seen his father like this. Even in that moment, this look on the kind, careless face filled the son with sick surprise. The old man by the settle, who had stood staring at this strange turn of things, broke into a plaintive whimper.

“Kill ’im – kill ’im – kill ’im …” he besought, like a disappointed, teasing child.

When Bunchy would have spoken, spluttering, he was arrested by a sound at the door. It was Lory and her aunt, whom she had found in talk with women at a neighbor’s; and it was Hiram Folts, whom, returning, they had met at the street door. The Inger greeted them gravely.