A Crime Against Beauty
THAT beauty of appearance may be linked with moral worthlessness or crime is perhaps the most painful discovery which comes to a sensitive child in the gradual enlightenment of life. We begin by assuming that appearance is a sure and safe guide, and extravagant as such a notion seems to an adult, children are made aware of its falsity only by the rudest of shocks. How keen and how painful these shocks may be is shown by the persistence of the impression which they leave. Out of my youth comes to me a remembrance which illustrates this. It is connected with the most beautiful woman I ever saw, the wife of a fisherman, who lived on the coast of Maine the better part of half a century ago. I was a lad of ten when I had my one sight of her, and with that sight is connected one of the most vivid memories of my life.
My father was a country doctor, and I, his youngest son, drove much with him about the country on the innumerable rides made necessary by the conditions of a country practice. On this October morning he had driven to a settlement called the Rim, where lived in a poverty which must have been often pinching — but which was never, so far as I have seen, without dignity and selfrespect — a score of farmers and fisherfolk. I knew the region well, and I can recall now the gray, dull landscape, the untidy fields where the dead cornstalks and pumpkin vines strewed the ploughed land in a coarser pattern over the fine network of faded weeds, the leafless poplars leaning away from the shore, the scattered heaps of bleached eel-grass and kelp bordering the slatecolored flats on which lay on their sides the dories, tied by long out-hauls to the trees, and the low, unpainted house about which a few ruffled hens scratched fatuously. Nothing could be less æsthetic, and no spot less likely to be the hidingplace of beauty ; yet as we drove slowly down the rough lane to the house my father looked at me with the quiet smile which used just to touch the corners of his mouth, and said : —
“ You like pretty things, my son. You are going to see something that ought to please you.”
With the eagerness of a child I asked what it was, and into my head came visions of shells and Chinese idols or trinkets which the sailors sometimes brought from lands afar, and which I had seen in houses alongshore. I got no other answer than that I should see; but the mystery, trifling as it was, gave at once an air of interest to the surroundings. I remember looking at that low, unpainted house, with its weatherstained shingles, the window in the attic where a broken pane was stuffed with a ragged mass of red-and-yellow flannel, the row of frost-scorched hollyhock and sunflower stalks ranged along the remains of last year’s banking, the squat red chimney from which the smoke eddied up slowly. Some association of ideas suggested that the coming revelation of beauty might be connected with peacock feathers ; but father smiled and shook his head at my question. I fell back upon the remembrance of a great brown owl that the son of a farmer had shown with pride as the spoils of the chase, one day when we had driven a dozen miles inland ; and with this thought I followed now into the house. The door was low, and father was tall, so that I remember looking up to see how much he had to stoop. That and the change from the sunlight to the dusk of the narrow entry-way prevented me from seeing anything else clearly until we were fairly in the kitchen. Then I saw, and boy as I was I knew.
A woman in a slatternly calico gown was frying fish at the stove. She turned toward us, one hand holding the handle of the frying-pan and the other a steel fork ; and her beauty was like the flash of a flame. I remember that I tried afterward, being an introspective child and over-given to self-analysis, to determine why this woman should so have affected me. I am not sure that I put it to myself quite so definitely as this, but I tried in some vague way to account for my sensations. I prided myself, as any boy at that age normally and healthily does, on being superior to spooniness, and I regarded with consuming scorn the admiration with which older lads singled out one girl or another who appeared to me the most ordinary of mortals. I could not then, and I am not sure that I can now, account for the thrill which went through me. I can only say that I was born a beauty-lover, and that here was beauty incarnate.
She was, as I know now, a wonderful creature, with the head and the hair of a Titian beauty. Her skin was white, and her lips glowingly red; she carried herself with a sort of insolent indifference amazing in one of her station. When I have made this inventory, however, and see that gorgeous creature in memory, though I am almost transported back to my boyish breathlessness of admiration, I cannot but realize how utterly words fall short of presenting her. I should seem absurd, I fear, if I declared that the beauty of this woman in a fisherman’s cottage down on the coast of Maine might have come out of a canvas by Paris Bordone or Paolo Veronese, and yet this is literally true.
Certain rare things in this world are so beautiful that it is impossible to speak of them without exciting suspicion. The trail of the serpent of “fine writing” is over so many affected attempts at description that one is discredited at the start when he has to speak of a woman like this slatternly Mrs. Pewit, goddess of the frying-pan. The reader remembers too many florid “ purple passages ” wherein have been set forth the perfections of heroines of novels not by the masters, and he smiles in untouched superiority, even though, as in this case, only simple facts be set down. It is of little matter here, however, since the only point is that I as a boy regarded this woman as supremely beautiful. I stood in a perfect passion of admiration, so completely absorbed that I forgot to take off my cap until my father spoke.
“ This is my son, Mrs. Pewit,” he said. “ He seems to have left his manners at home this morning.”
I realized with a sort of dazed doubleconsciousness that he was quietly smiling at me. I whipped off my cap to the best of my bewildered ability, and stammered an answer to Mrs. Pewit’s greeting. Then I sank into a chair while father asked professional questions about the husband of the goddess, a man of more than double her age, to whom she had been married, I knew afterward, only a short time, and who was now ill in the next room.
Presently father went to his patient, leaving me with Mrs. Pewit. She paid no attention to me at first, but began to lay the table. That she laid it for two I noticed because I feared she intended to invite us to have dinner, as the country folk frequently did if the doctor chanced to call late in the forenoon. I did not care for fried fish, and hoped that father would not accept the invitation, although with precocious calculation I reflected that if we did stay I should have a longer time in which to look my fill at our hostess. Suddenly Mrs. Pewit surprised me by going hastily on tiptoe to the door of the bedroom and listening intently. It is probable that my looks betrayed my surprise, for on glancing up and meeting my eyes she came back to the table she had been laying.
“ I just wanted to hear what he ’s telling the doctor,” she said rather mutteringly. “ He’s awful notional.”
It is easy to understand that the words were meant as an excuse, but had she realized it she needed none. I was so completely subjugated by her loveliness that I had no question of what she did. I accepted her as the embodiment of essential rightness. No pagan ever more completely surrendered himself to beauty than I in my childhood, and now I could only worship. I did not reason about it, and I think that at that time I had never heard Keats’s identification of truth and beauty ; but that which was so wonderful to the eye and to the sense appealed to some inner conviction that a woman so fair must be of no less perfection in goodness.
Father came out of the sickroom after a time, and I thought his face stern. I knew the look of anxiety or of pleasure with which he usually left the bed of a patient, and I could generally tell pretty accurately without his saying anything how it was going with the sick. The expression, he wore now, however, was one associated with the times when he was indignant or flamed up in anger over some flagrant violation of right.
“ Go and wait outside,” he said to me with unusual abruptness.
I was conscious that as I gave one last regretful look at the woman she glanced quickly and sharply at him ; and in reconstructing the scene afterward I very likely put into it a significance of which at the time I could not have been aware. I went out and pulled handfuls of grass for Jenny Lind, the somewhat shrewish mare who seemed to have a vicious pleasure in rewarding my kindness by energetic attempts to snap off my fingers. By the time Jenny Lind and I had got the bit and the breastplate well soiled with the slobbered remains of half-chewed grass father appeared, graver than ever. His silence did not encourage questions, and we were half a mile toward home before I spoke.
“ Father,” I said at last, perhaps partly with a view of exhibiting my poetic perception, but chiefly, I believe, from genuine feeling, “ don’t you think she’s like one of the women in Shakespeare ? ”
His grave face relaxed a little, as he turned and looked at me.
“ Which one ? ” he asked.
I had no answer ready, because I had spoken from a general feeling that a creature so lovely could belong nowhere but in the highest possible world of poetry. I cast about to discover what character she might best be, but nothing seemed entirely appropriate.
“ I don’t know which one,” I answered after a moment; “ but she’s so different from other folks that ” —
I had gone as far in the exposition of my feelings as I was able, and stopped with a confused sensation of having brought rather more of my emotions to the light of day than I had intended. Father flicked the shoulder of Jenny Lind, who resented the hint with an angry flirt of her parsimonious tail.
“She is a very beautiful woman, my son,” he said. “ She is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen or ever expect to see ; but I am afraid she is not a good one. How do you think she would do for Lady Macbeth ? ”
It was years before I learned that while I waited outside with Jenny Lind father had told Mrs. Pewit that he suspected her of tampering with her husband’s medicines if not of actually administering small doses of poison, and that he had left her with the threat that if he did not on the morrow find Mr. Pewit’s sister installed as a nurse he should take legal measures for the old man’s protection. At the time the idea of associating any thought of wrong-doing or crime with that transcendent creature seemed to me unbearable.
“ But, father,” I protested, with the logic of youth, “ she ’s too good-looking for Lady Macbeth.”
He smiled, but did not answer beyond a queer look. Whether he was amused at the hopeless inadequacy of my phrase, or whether he reflected that it was a pity to destroy my illusions, I cannot tell; but at least he did not speak, and we drove home in silence.
All the rest of the day I wandered about in an exalted, and very likely rather moony frame of mind. I had been bred on poetry, and with my temperament it was natural that the vision of the morning should affect me strongly. I dare say I dreamed that night of the woman who in her slatternly frock and sordid surroundings might have smiled down a goddess in proud superiority of beauty; but if I did my slumber was too healthily sound to allow me to remember the fact. I only know that the next day I was smitten to the heart by the news which came, crudely announced by a rough fisherman who stopped on his way to the sheriff’s to tell father: Mrs. Pewit and her lover had smothered the old fisherman in his bed, and had then set sail in the lover’s fishing-smack, it was supposed for the Provinces. The killing of the husband, which at first seemed an entirely gratuitous crime if the guilty couple were to leave the country, was explained by the fact that old Pewit had a pitiful sum of money which he carried in a belt about his body. He had been only too well aware of his wife’s infidelity, and had complained to father of lying helpless in bed and hearing the voice of the lover as the wife entertained him in the kitchen. The tragedy was humble, but it was sufficiently complete.
I do not especially remember the details of what followed. The fugitives were never, so far as I know, brought to justice, and Mrs. Pewit may be still alive in an unholy old age. She would be between seventy and eighty, I suppose ; and if she is still in this world I should like to talk with her, but not to see her.
The tragic circumstances naturally fixed the woman’s beauty in my remembrance, but the impression of loveliness was not what remained most poignantly and indelibly in my mind. To this day I feel the pain of the outrage which was done to my boyish faith by the fact that the most beautiful creature I had ever encountered, the woman who seemed the embodiment of whatever was most exquisite in romance, in poetry, in life, could be so wicked. I can understand now that the sense of æsthetic wrong was what most deeply touched me, although I was of course horrified by the moral crime. In the murder itself, however, was a certain ghastly joy, a tingling sense that in our quiet village real crimes might happen, crimes such as are dealt with in great tragedies. I experienced a delightful elation that the Rim was in our township and not in the next; and that I should always be able to boast that I had seen Mrs. Pewit the very day she killed her husband. I dwelt upon this fact to the boys at school, all of whom regarded me with burning envy, and speculated whether, in case the criminals should be captured, I might not be called upon to go to court as a witness. I gave myself airs, and made the most of my advantages ; but deep down in my heart I was conscious of a dull ache. The proprieties of life had been outraged. I could not argue the matter out, and I only knew that something had gone wrong. I even came in a few days to be so sore over the indefinable ill which I could not name that even the pleasure of boasting of being almost connected with the murder was an insufficient compensation for the pain of keeping the incident in mind. I could not ask any one what was the matter with me, and it was not until my years had been much increased that I understood something of that sorrow of my boyhood. I appreciated that secretly I had mourned over the bitter knowledge that it was possible for sin to make false and vain the divine promise of beauty.
Arlo Bates.