Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

They lived together for seven years. He went back to railroading and stuck with it and even came at last into the hierarchical current of seniority; he was mentally and spiritually, and with only an occasional aberration, physically faithful to her who in her turn was loyal, discreet, undemanding, and thrifty with his money. She bore his name in the boarding houses where they lived at first, then in the rented house in El Paso which they called home and were furnishing as they were able to buy furniture. Although she had never suggested it, he even thought of marrying her, so had the impact of the West which was still young enough then to put a premium on individuality, softened and at last abolished his inherited southern-provincial-Protestant fanaticism regarding marriage and female purity, the biblical Magdalen. There was his father, to be sure. He had not seen him since the night he left home and he did not expect to see him again. He did not think of his father as being dead, being any further removed than the old house in Mississippi where he had seen him last; he simply could not visualise them meeting anywhere else except in Mississippi, to which he could only imagine himself returning as an old man. But he knew what his father’s reaction to his marriage with a once-public woman would be, and up to this time, with all that he had done and failed to do, he had never once done anything which he could not imagine his father also doing, or at least condoning. Then he received the message that his father was dead (He received at the same time an offer from a neighbor for the farm. He did not sell it. At the time he did not comprehend why.) and so that was removed. But it had never actually existed anyway. He had already settled that as a matter purely between him and himself, long ago one night while the dim engine rocked through the darkness over the clucking rail-joints: “Maybe she was not much once, but neither was I. And for a right smart while now she has been better than I know myself to have been.” Perhaps they would have a child after a while. H thought of waiting for that, letting that be the sign. At first that eventuality had never occurred to him—here again was the old mystical fanatic Protestant; the hand of God lying upon the sinner even after the regeneration: the Babylonian interdict by heaven forever against reproduction. He did not know just how much time, just what span of chastity, would constitute purgatorium and absolution, but he would imagine it—some instant, mystical still, when the blight of those nameless and faceless men, the scorched scars of merchandised lust, would be effaced and healed from the organs which she had prostituted.

But that time was past now, not the mystic moment when the absolvement would be discharged, but the hour, the day before the elapse of which he had thought she would have told him she was pregnant and they would have married. It was long past now. It would never be. And one night in that twelfth year, in the boarding house at the other end of his run where he spent the alternate nights, he took out the three-year-old offer for the farm and he knew why he had not accepted it. I’m going home, he told himself—no more than that, not why; not even seeing the face which up to the day he entered school he could not even have described and which now he could not even remember. He made his run back to El Paso the next day and drew the seven years’ accumulation out of the bank and divided it into two equal parts. The woman who had been his wife for seven years glanced once at the money and then stood cursing him. “You are going to get married,” she said. There were no tears; she just cursed him. “What do I want with money? Look at me. Do you think I will lack money? Let me go with you. There will be some town, some place close where I can live. You can come when you want to. Have I ever bothered you?”