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Empty Sack

<h2>CHAPTER XXIII</h2> It was a help to Bob Collingham that his first glance at Jennie decided his attitude for the near future. Whatever his doubts and questionings, he could add nothing to the trials she had to face. Whatever she had done, whatever the net of circumstances in which she had been caught, he must act as if, as far as he himself was concerned, he was satisfied. Whether she loved him or whether she didn't, or whether her duties as a model had or had not made her indifferent to considerations to which most people were sensitive, were questions that must be postponed. This conviction, which flashed on him as he saw her shrinking in the entry, was confirmed when he felt her crumpled in his arms, relieved by his presence and yet frightened by the new conditions which it wrought. It was the same dependent but rebellious little Jennie, clinging to him and yet trying to slip away from him. It was as if she begged for a love which the perversity of her tortured little heart wouldn't allow her to accept. Very well then; he must measure it out to her a little at a time, as you fed a sick person or a starving man, till she got used to it. When she was stronger and he more at peace with himself, they could tackle the personal problems between them. So, when she struggled from his arms, he let her go, following her into the living-room. "Gussie and Gladys are back at work," she said at once, to explain the fact that none of his new connections were there to greet him, "and momma's lying down. She always lies down at this time of day, ever since daddy died." She dropped into one big shabby armchair, motioning him to another. "And there's something else I must tell you. Ever since—this thing happened to Teddy—she hasn't been—well, not right in her mind." The stand he had taken became more imperative. A father's death, a mother's collapse, a brother's crime had put her at the head of her little troop of three, to bear everything alone. He had left behind him an inexperienced girl; he had come back to find a woman already accustomed to rising to emergencies. The change was perceptible in the clearer, slightly older cutting of her features, as well as in the greater authority with which she spoke. Where the contours of her profile had been soft and vague, there was now a delicate chiseling; where there had been hesitation in words, there was now the firmness of one obliged to know her mind. As she sketched her mother's mental state, he sat on the extreme edge of his big chair, straining forward so as to be near her without touching her, his fingers clasped between his knees. She continued to speak nervously, with agitation, and yet lucidly. "She isn't very bad. She's only what you'd call unsettled. It's not that she does anything, but rather that, after all the years when she's worked so hard, she just sits and does nothing. It's as if she was lost in thinking; and when she comes back she says such terribly strange things." "What sort of things?" "For one, that it's no use living any longer—that the world's so bad that the best thing left is to get out of it. She says you can't help the world, or hope to see it improve, because human beings will always reject the principles that would make it any better." He smiled gently. "I've heard people talk like that who weren't considered unsettled in their minds." "Oh, but she doesn't stop there. She tells Teddy he was quite within his rights in taking money from the bank, and when she goes to see him she begs him to be brave and not be sorry for anything he's done." "And is he sorry?" "I don't know that you could call it sorry. He's dazed and bewildered. He knows he took the money and that he killed a man; but he thinks he was placed in a position where he couldn't help it." "And does he say who could have helped it?" As she looked down at that twisting and untwisting of her fingers which was the chief sign of her effort at self-control, her color rose. "He says your father could have helped it; but I don't believe he's right." "No, he isn't right—not as dad himself sees it. I know he's been worried ever since your father left the bank; but he thinks he couldn't help dismissing him. Life isn't very simple for anyone—not for my dad any more than it was for yours. If I could see Teddy—" "Would you go to see him?" "Go to see him? Why, that's what I came back for! I'd like to do it this very afternoon, if you'd tell me first how it all came about. You see, I don't know anything, except the two or three bald facts dad mentioned in his cablegram." It was not easy to tell this story, even to a man whom she knew to be so kind. The fact that he was her husband didn't help her, for the reason that it was because he was her husband that her pride was in revolt. Had he not been her husband, he would have been free to withdraw from this series of catastrophes. Now he could not withdraw. He was tied. Moreover, the sordid tale of domestic want became the more sordid when given fact by fact. It was the intimate story of her life in contrast to the intimate story of his. The homely family dodges for making both ends meet which had been the mere jest of penury between Gussie, Gladys, and herself became ghastly when exposed to a man who had never known the lack of service and luxury, to say nothing of food and drink, since the minute he was born. She felt as if it emptied her of any little dignity she had ever possessed, as if it denuded her of self-respect. She could more easily have confessed sins to him than the shifts to which they had been put to live. Nevertheless, she went through with it, brokenly, with great effort, and yet with a kind of dogged will to drain all the dregs of the cup. "He'll see me as I am," was part of her underlying thought. "He'll know then that I can't go on with this comedy of having married him. Even if I have, we've got to end it somehow." But on his side the reaction was different. He had never heard this sort of tale before. He had never before been in contact with this phase of poverty. He had known poor men in college, and plenty of chaps who were down on their luck; but the daily pinching and paring of whole families just to have enough to eat and to wear was so new as to astonish him. For the minute it made Jennie less an individual than a type. "My God!" he was saying inwardly, "do human beings have to live so close to the edge as all that?" When she had told him of the incident of the cutting off of the gas because they couldn't pay fifteen dollars on account, the turning point of Teddy's tragedy, his exclamation was embarrassing to them both: "Why, I pay twice that for a pair of shoes!" Though she knew he meant it as a protest against the straits to which they had been put, it seemed both to him and to her to make the gulf between them wider. "And you were going through all that," he said, when she had finished her recital, "during the months when I was seeing you two and three times a week at the studio. My God! how I wish you could have told me!" It was the first time that a little smile came quivering to her lips. "You don't tell things like that—not to anyone outside your family. Besides, it isn't worth while. You get used to them." "You weren't used to it—when your mother cried—and Teddy forked out the money." "Not to that very thing—but to things like it. If Teddy hadn't forked out the money, we should have worried through somehow. That's the awful thing about it—that if he hadn't done it we shouldn't have been much worse off than we'd been at other times. A little worse—yes—even a good deal, perhaps; and yet we could have lived through it. I couldn't have told you, because people of our kind don't talk about such things, not even with their neighbors. We just take them for granted." It was this taking it for granted that impressed him with such a sense of the terrible. It left so little room for living, so limited a swing to do anything but scrape. Scraping was the whole of Jennie's history. He could see it as she talked. She had never in her life had fifty dollars to do with as she chose. Perhaps she had never had five. It was not the lack of the money that overwhelmed him, but of any freedom to move, of any scope in which to grow. Forgetting his reserves of the morning, he caught her by both hands, holding them imprisoned in her lap. "But that's all over now, Jennie. You're my wife. You're coming to me—right off—to-day—this very afternoon." "Oh, Bob, I couldn't!" If he was to be "got out of it," she felt it essential to gain time. "I couldn't leave them. Don't you see? There's no one but me to keep house or—or to decide anything. Momma's given up entirely, and Gussie and Gladys are both so young that I couldn't possibly leave them alone." "Then we'll have to manage it some other way." "No; not yet. Let's wait. Let's see." "Waiting and seeing won't change the fact that we're man and wife and that everyone knows it. It's been in the papers—" "Yes, but why did you put it in?" It was her turn to seek information. "To me it was like a thunderbolt." He gave her the contents of his father's cablegram. "I took it for granted that you must have told him." "I shouldn't have done that. I did—I did tell your mother, Bob—but then I couldn't help it." He started back, releasing her hands which he had continued holding. "What? You've seen the old lady?" She nodded. "Yes; she sent for me to go out to Marillo Park." "For Heaven's sake! What made her do that?" She was aware of her opportunity. If she wanted to "get him out of it," now was her chance. She could tell him part of the truth and keep him dangling—or the whole of it and let him go. "Fairer to him—and easier for me" was the thought on which she based her decision. "She—she wanted to thank me for—for not having taken you at your word and married you." "Oh! So you had to tell her that you had. And what did she say to that?" "She was lovely." He beamed with pleasure. "She can be when she takes the notion, just as she can be the other way. She must have liked you." "I—I think she did." "You bet she did! She'd let you see it if she didn't. So that's what smoothed the way for us! I couldn't make it out. You certainly are a little witch, Jennie!" "It isn't as smooth as all that." Springing to her feet, she turned her back on him, moving away toward the window. "Oh, Bob, I wish I didn't have to tell you. You're so good and kind, and I've been so"—it came out with a burst of confession, her arms outstretched, her hands spread palms upward—"I've been so awful! When you know—" "Wait!" He seized her by the shoulders with the force which calms emotion from sheer fright. "Wait, Jennie! I know what you're going to tell me." "Oh, but you can't." "It's—it's something about Wray, isn't it?" She nodded dumbly. "Then we'll put it off. Do you see? That isn't what I came back for. I came back about Teddy, and we must see that through before we think of ourselves. All that'll keep—" "It won't keep if we go and live together." "Then we won't go and live together—not till we see how it's to be done. That's just a detail. In comparison with Teddy, it doesn't matter one way or another. We'll come to it by and by. All we've got to think of now is that there's a boy whose life is hanging by a thread—" "Yes; but I don't want you to be mixed up in it. I want to—to save you from—from the sacrifice—and—and the disgrace." He stood back from her with a hard little laugh. "Good God! Jennie, I wonder if you have the faintest idea of what love is! You can't have. Do you suppose it matters to me what I'm mixed up in so long as it's something that touches you? Listen! Let me explain to you what love is like when it's the kind I feel for you. I"—he braced himself in order to bring out the words forcibly—"I don't care what Wray is to you or what you are to Wray—not yet. I put that away from me till I've gone with you through the things you've got to meet. They'll not be easy for you, but I want to make them as easy as I can. No one can do it but me, because no one cares for you as I do." "Oh, I know that." "Then, if you know it, Jennie, don't force anything else on me when I'm doing my best not to think of it. Let me just love you as well as I know how till we do the things that are right in front of us. After that, if there's a reason why I should hand you over to Wray, or to anybody else, you can tell me, and I'll—" Pansy's scrambling to attention and a sound on the stairs arrested his words as well as Jennie's rising tears. "Momma's coming down," the girl whispered, hurriedly. "She wants to see you. Don't forget that you're not to mind anything she says." To Bob, the moment was one of awed surprise, for the commanding, black-robed figure differed from all his preconceptions, as far as he had any, of Jennie's mother. Advancing rapidly into the room, she took his right hand in hers, laying her left on his head as if in benediction. "So you're my Jennie's husband. I hope you're a good man, for you've found a good woman. Be loving to each other. The time is coming when love is all that will survive. Let me look at you." He stood off, smiling, while she made her inspection. "Love is all there is, anyhow, don't you think, Mrs. Follett?" "Yes; but it gets no chance in this world." "Or it is the only thing that does get a chance?" "It may be the only thing that does get a chance, but that chance is small. There's no hope for the world. Don't think there is, because you'll be disappointed. Each time your disappointment is worse than the last, till you end in despair." It was the strain Jennie felt obliged to interrupt. "Momma, Mr. Collingham is going to see Teddy. Don't you want him to take a message?" "Only the message I've given him myself—that it's only a little way over, and that one of two things must happen then. It will either be sleep, in which nothing will matter, or it will be life, in which he'll be free—understood—supported—instead of being beaten and crushed and mangled, as everyone is here. Tell him that." He felt it his duty to be cheerier. "On the other hand, we may get him off; or if we can't get him off altogether—" "What good would that do—your getting him off? You'd be throwing him back again on a world that doesn't want him." "Oh, but surely the world does—" "Yes; the world does—I'm wrong—it does to the same extent that it wanted his father—to give it every ounce of his strength with a pittance for his pay—to spend and be spent till he's good for nothing more—and then to be thrown aside to starve. It's possible that even now Teddy would be willing to do this if they'd only let him live; but tell him it's not good enough. I've told him, and I don't think he believes me; but you're a man, and perhaps you can make him see it." "Yes, momma dear, he'll do the best he can—" "It won't be the best he can if he tries to keep him here. We've passed on, my boy and I. Only our bodies are still on the earth, and that for just a little while. A year from now and we'll both be safe—so safe!—and yet you'd try to keep us in a world where men make a curse of everything." <hr class="docutils"/> But Teddy himself was less reconciled than his mother to bidding the world good-by. In proportion as his physical strength returned, the fate that had overtaken him became more and more preposterous. To suppose that he had of his own criminal intention stolen money and killed a man was little short of insane. A man had been killed by a pistol he held in his hand; he had taken money because the need was such that he couldn't help himself; but he, Teddy Follett, was neither a thief nor a murderer in any sense involving the exercise of will. He was sure of that. He declared it to himself again and again and again. It was all that gave him fighting force, compelling him to insist, to assert himself, and to protest in season and out of season against being shut up in a cell. The cell was seven feet long and four feet wide. Round the foot of the bunk and along the sides there was a space of some twelve inches. At the foot there was the iron-ribbed door with a grating, and along the sides a slimy and viscous stone wall. Besides the bunk, a bucket, and a shelf there was nothing whatever in the way of furnishings. Under the bed he was privileged to keep the suitcase with his wardrobe, and on the shelf whatever his mother and sisters brought him in the way of food. By day, the only light was through the grating to the corridor; by night, a feeble electric bulb was extinguished at half past nine. The Brig being an ancient prison, and Teddy but one of a long, long line of murderers who had lain on this hard bed, vermin infested everything. While Bob Collingham was on his way to him Teddy was in conversation with the chaplain. For this purpose, the door had been unlocked. The visitor leaned against the door post while the prisoner stood in the narrow space between his bunk and the wall. It was the Protestant chaplain, a tall, spare, sandy-haired man of some fifty-odd, whose yearning, spiritual face had, through long association with his flock, grown tired and disillusioned. Having sought this post from a genuine sympathy with outcast men, he suffered from their rejection. He was so sure of what would help them, and only one in a hundred ever wanted it. Even that one generally laughed at it when he got out of jail. After eighteen years of self-denying work, the worthy man was sadly pessimistic now as to prospects of reform. For the minute he was trying to convince Teddy of the righteousness of punishment. He had been drawn to the boy partly because of his youth and good looks, but mainly on account of his callousness to his crime. He seemed to have no conscience, no notion of the difference between right and wrong. "A moral moron" was what he labeled him. The lack of ethical consciousness was the more astonishing because his antecedents had apparently been good. "You see," he was pointing out, "you can't break the laws by which society protects itself and yet escape the moral and physical results." But in his long, solitary hours Teddy had been thinking this out. "Doesn't that depend upon the laws? If the law's wrong—" "But who's to judge of that?" "Isn't the citizen to judge of that?" The parson smiled—his weary, spiritual smile. "If the citizen was allowed to judge of that—" "If he wasn't," Teddy broke in, with the impetuosity born of his beginning to think for himself, "if he wasn't, there'd be no such country as the United States. Most of the fireworks in American history are over the fine thing it is to beat the law to it when the law isn't just." "Ah, but there's a distinction between individual action and great popular movements." "Great popular movements must be made up of individual actions, mustn't they? If individuals didn't break the laws, each guy on his own account, you wouldn't get any popular movements at all." The chaplain shifted his ground. "All the same, there are certain laws that among all peoples and at all times have been considered fundamental. Human society can't permit a man to steal—" "Then human society shouldn't put a man in a position where he either has to steal or starve to death." There was a repetition of the thin, ghostly smile. "Oh, well, no one who's ordinarily honest and industrious ever—" "Ever starves to death? That's a lie. Excuse me," he added, apologetically, "but that kind of talk just gets my goat. My father practically starved to death—he died from lack of proper nourishment, the doctor said—and there never was a more industrious or an honester man born. He gave everything he had to human society, and when he had no more to give, human society kicked him out. It has the law on its side, too, and because"—he gulped—"I came to his help in the only way I knew how they've chucked me into this black hole." The chaplain found another kind of opening. "So, you see, my boy, there's that. If you don't keep the law—" "They can make you suffer for it," Teddy declared, excitedly. "Of course they can. They've made me suffer—God! how they've made me suffer—more, I believe, than anyone since Jesus Christ! But that's not what we were talking about. You started in to tell me that it's right for me to suffer the way they're making me. That's what I kick against, and I'll keep on kicking till they send me to the chair." "If you could do yourself any good by that—" But just here the dialogue was interrupted by the appearance of Boole, the dapper, debonair young guard who generally announced Teddy's afternoon visitors. "Hello, old cuss! Gent to see you." The chaplain prepared to move on to the neighboring cell. His leave-taking was kindly and with a great pity in it. "We'll go on with this talk again, my boy. When you're able to get the right point of view—" What would happen then was drowned in the clanging of the door behind him, as Teddy stepped out into the corridor. "Who is it? Stenhouse?" he asked, as he walked along with the guard. He had already dropped into the prisoner's habitual tone of hostile friendliness toward the officials with whom he came most in contact, recognizing the fact that had he met any of these men "on the outside" they would have hobnobbed together with the freemasonry of American young men everywhere. On their sides the keepers, apart from the fact that they considered Teddy "a tough lot," had ceased to show him animosity. "It's not the lawyer," Boole answered now. "It's a swell guy with a limp. Looks to me as if he might be the gay young banker sport that the papers say is married to your sister." Teddy felt his heart contracting in a spasm of dread. The one fact he knew of his brother-in-law was that he had sent him Stenhouse, one of the three or four lawyers most famous at the New Jersey bar for saving lives. This detail, too, the boy had learned from Boole. "You'll not get the cur'nt, with him to defend you, believe me. Some bird! If he can't prove you innocent, he'll find a flaw in the law or the indictment or somethin'. Why, they say he once got a guy off, a Pole, the fella was, just on the spellin' of his name." Having been warned by Stenhouse not to discuss his case with anyone, Teddy was discreetly silent. As a matter of fact, he had too much to think of to be inclined to talk. The circumstance that "young Coll" had become a relative was one of which he was just beginning to seize the importance. His bruised mind had been unable at first to apprehend it. Slowly he was coming to the realized knowledge that he was allied to that Olympian race which the Collinghams represented to the Folletts, and that, at least, some of their power was engaged on his behalf. It was confusing. Since the might that had struck him down was also coming to his aid, the issue was no longer clear-cut. To have all the right on one side and all the wrong on the other had simplified life. Now, a right that was partly wrong and a wrong that was partly right had been personified, as it were, in this union through which a Collingham had become a Follett, and a Follett a Collingham. Young Coll was standing where Jennie had stood on the first occasion of Teddy's coming to the visitors' room. He too waited with a smile. The minute he saw the lad appear timidly on the threshold he limped forward with outstretched hand. "Hello, Teddy!" His embarrassment, being a kindly embarrassment, was without awkwardness. "You didn't know I was going to be your brother the last time you saw me, did you?" Teddy said nothing. He was not sullen, but neither was he friendly. A Collingham, even though married to his sister, was probably a person to be feared. Teddy's counsel to himself was to be on his guard against "the nigger in the woodpile." "Perhaps it was my fault that you didn't," Bob went on, with some constraint. "That's the reason why I'm here. I dare say there isn't much I can do for you, old boy, but what little there is I want to do." Teddy eyed him steadily, still without making a reply. Somehow they found chairs. Boole, having once more summed up the visitor, had retreated toward the guard who sat officially at the far end of the room. "Looks like a good cuss," was Boole's whispered confidence. "Kind o' soft—like most o' them swell sports that marries working goyls." Bob was finding himself less and less at his ease. The boy not only came none of the way to meet him, but seemed to hold him as an enemy. By his silence and by the severity of his regard he conveyed the impression that young Coll, and not himself, had done the wrong. It was an attitude for which Bob was not prepared. Neither was he prepared for the defacement of all that had been glowing in the lad's countenance. Jennie had warned him against expecting the ruddy bright-eyed Teddy of the bank, but he hadn't looked for this air of youth blasted out of youthfulness. It was still youth, but youth marred, terrified, haunted, with a fear beyond that of gibbering old age. With his lovingness and quickness of pity, Bob sought for a line by which he could catch on to the lad's interest. "I asked my father to send you the best counsel in New Jersey, and I believe he's picked out Stenhouse." Teddy regarded him grimly. "Yes, he did." It seemed as if he meant to say no more, when, with a sardonic grunt, he went on, "Something like a guy who smashes a machine and then gets the best mechanician in the world to come and patch it up." "Yes—possibly—it may be. Only, there's this to consider—that no one smashes a machine on purpose." "No, I don't suppose he does. Only, it's all the same to the machine whether it's been smashed on purpose or by accident—so long as it'll never run again." Bob considered this. "You might say that of a machine—a dead thing from the start. You can't say it of a human being, who's alive from the beginning. See?" "No, I don't see." "And I don't know that I can explain. I'm only sure that a machine can be done for, and that a human being can't be. You can come to a time when it's no use doing anything more for the one; but you can never reach such a time with the other. With him, you may make mistakes or you may do him a great wrong, but you can't stop trying to put things right again." "And you think you can put things right again for me?" "I don't know what I can do. I haven't an idea. Very likely I can't do anything at all. I merely came back from South America to do what I could." "Did you feel that you had to—because you'd married Jennie?" "That was a reason. It wasn't the only one." "What else was there?" "I'm not sure that I can tell you. A lot of the things we do we do not from reason, but from instinct. But if you don't want me to try to take a hand—" Under the dark streaks that blotted out what had once been Teddy's healthy coloring, a slow flush began to mantle. "I don't want to be—to be bamboozled." "Of course you don't. But how could I bamboozle you?" There was no explanation. Unable to base his distrust on any other ground than that Bob was the son of the man who had dismissed Josiah Follett from the bank, Teddy fell silent again. He could not afford to reject the least good will that came his way, and yet his spirit was too sore to accept it graciously. Some of this young Collingham divined. He began to see that as the boy was suffering and he wasn't, it was not for him to take offense. On the contrary, he must use all his ingenuity to find the way to make his appeal effectively. "All I could do from down there," he said, when Teddy seemed indisposed to speak again, "was to get Stenhouse or some one to take up your case. I mean to see him in the morning and find out how far he's got along with it. But now that I'm here, can't you think of something of your own that you'd like me to do?" Teddy raised his eyes quickly. His look was the dull look of anguish, and yet with sharpness in the glance. "What kind of thing?" "Any kind. Think of the thing that's most on your mind—the thing that worries you more than anything else—and—put it up to me." The somberness deepened in the lad's face, not from resentment, but from heaviness of thought. "Go ahead," Bob urged. "Cough it up. If it's something I can't tackle, I'll tell you so." "What's most on my mind," Teddy began, slowly, gritting his teeth with the effort to get the words out, "what worries me like hell—is ma—and the girls. They—they must be lonesome—something fierce—without me." In his agony of controlling himself he was rubbing his palms between his knees, but Bob put out his great hand and seized him by the wrist. "Look here, old chap! I can't comfort them for your not being there. You know that, of course. But it always helps women to have a man coming and going in the house—to take a lot of things off their hands—and keep them company—and I'll do that. If I can't be everything that you'd be—" "You can be more than I could ever be." "Yes—from the point of view of having a little more money—and freedom—and a car to take them out in—and all that; but if you think I could ever make up to them for you, old sport—but that isn't what you want me to do, is it? You don't want me to be you, but to be something different—only, something that'll make your mother and Jennie and your little sisters buck up again—" Stumbling to his feet, Teddy drew the back of his hand across his eyes. "I—I guess I'd better beat it," he muttered, unsteadily. "They—they don't like you to stay out too long." But Bob forced him gently back into his chair again. "Oh, cheese that, Teddy! Sit down and let's get better acquainted. I want to tell you how Jennie and I made up our minds to get married." <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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