The Scarlet Woman

On this episode of Narrated Archives is the story, The Scarlet Woman, by Louis Bromfield, which was published in McClure's magazine in January of 1927 and was awarded one of the prizes for best stories for October 1926 to September 27 by the O. Henry Memorial Prize Committee.

The Scarlet Woman centers on Vergie Winters, a simple milliner in a conventional American town, who falls in love with a respected, up and coming handsome lawyer who later becomes a Senator.

The story is praised for its intense focus on Vergie's struggle against rigid social conventions, highlighting the hypocrisy of small-town values through stark realism and emotional depth.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to a podcast that brings you stories, articles, essays and other bits of literature from bygone eras:  Narrated Archives. I’m Sally Barron, your host and narrator of these jewels.

On this episode of Narrated Archives, we have a story that may be my favorite so far. This story, "The Scarlet Woman"  by Louis Bromfield, published in McClure's magazine in January of 1927 was awarded one of the prizes for best stories by the O. Henry Memorial Prize Committee. 

Louis Bromfield born in 1896 and died in1956, was a Pulitzer Prize winning American author and pioneering conservationist known for his successful novels in the 1920s, like Early Autumn, and later, for his championing of sustainable farming at his famous Malabar, Ohio farm. After serving in WWI and living in France, he returned to the U.S. to become a leading voice for organic methods, soil health and self-sufficient agriculture, leaving a lasting legacy on environmentalism. His Ohio farm is now a state park, preserving his influential ideas on land stewardship for future generations. 

His short story The Scarlet Woman centers on Vergie, a simple milliner in a conventional American town, who falls in love with a respected and up and coming handsome lawyer who later marries someone else and becomes a Senator.

The story is praised for its intense focus on Vergie's struggle against rigid social conventions, highlighting the hypocrisy of small-town values through stark realism and emotional depth.

THE SCARLET WOMAN

I CAN see her now as she used to come down the steps of her narrow house between the printer’s office and the little shop of Rinehart, the German cobbler—little, rickety steps, never in too good repair, especially as she grew older and the cost of everything increased and that mysterious money of hers seemed to go less and less far in the business of meeting the necessities of life. It was a house but one room wide, of wood painted a dun colour; the most ordinary and commonplace of houses which a stranger would not even have noticed—yet until yesterday, when they pulled it down, a house invested with a terrific glamour and importance. It was a house of which no one spoke; a house which the Town, in its passionate desire to forget (which was really only a hypocrisy), raised into such importance that one thought of it when one forgot the monuments which had been raised to the leading citizens of the community (as people said with a curious and non-committal tone which might have meant anything at all) “what it was to-day.” One remembered it even when one forgot the shaft of granite raised in the public square to remind the Town that John Shadwell had been one of its leading citizens.

I can see her now—Vergie Winters—an old woman past eighty, coming painfully down those rickety steps, surrounded always by that wall of solitude which appeared to shut out all the world. Old Vergie Winters, whose dark eyes at eighty carried a look of tranquil, defiant victory. Vergie Winters, of whose house no one spoke; whose door had been stoned by boys who knew nothing of her story but sensed dimly that she was the great pariah of the Town. 

Old Vergie Winters went on and on, long after John Shadwell was in his grave, refusing to give way, living there on the main street of the Town as if she were alone in the vast solitude of a desert. Sometimes she spoke to Rinehart, the cobbler, and sometimes to her neighbour on the other side; and of course in the shops they were forced to sell her things, though in one or two places they had even turned her away—and she had gone without a word, never trying to force her way anywhere.

It all began almost a century ago, before the Civil War, when one day in April Vergie Winters, tall and dark, with great, burning dark eyes set in a cool, pale face, opened the door of her father’s house to John Shadwell, tall and handsome and blond, the youngest lawyer in the Town. It happened so long ago that it seems now to have no more reality than a legend, especially when one remembers Vergie only as an immensely old woman coming painfully down her narrow, crooked steps. But it happened; it must have happened to have made of Vergie Winters so great a character in all the community. It must have been the rare sort of love which comes like a stroke of lightning.

He would have married Vergie Winters, they said (the old ones who remembered the beginnings of Vergie’s story and passed it on to their children and grandchildren) but there was already a girl to whom John Shadwell was betrothed, and in the background a powerful father, and John Shadwell’s career—which Vergie Winters, being only the daughter of a Swiss immigrant farmer, could do nothing to aid.

Long afterward, the Town said, “Look at her! You can see what a drag she would have been on him, with her weird, silent ways. A pity, too, for she was a beautiful girl. A pity she was always bad!”

But they never thought, of course, that if things had been different, Vergie Winters might not have been weird and silent; and now, looking back, one can see that they were quite wrong. It was not Vergie Winters who was a drag on his career. It was the other woman, John Shadwell’s wife, who turned into a strange, whining, melancholy invalid before they had been married two years. And what could John Shadwell do? Desert her? It was not possible. 

And in the way of such invalids she lived for more than forty years, forty dreary years, complaining, hypochondriac, nagging. She outlived even her husband, a great, vigorous, handsome man, who treated her patiently and with gentlemanly respect.

“It was a pity about John Shadwell’s wife,” people said. “And she was such a lady, too.”

And Vergie Winters? She did not break her heart. She did not marry some stupid lout and give up her life to a dull unhappiness. She did not wither away into spinsterhood. She loved John Shadwell, who knows how passionately, how deeply, in the profound depths of that curious, remote soul of hers? She left her parents ( “to set herself up in dressmaking and millinery,” so she said), and took a narrow wooden house on Main Street, where she put up a card in the window and sold hats to the women of the Town. And before two years had passed it was to this narrow house that John Shadwell came, secretly—it must have been with an amazing secrecy, for no one even suspected the visits for more than three years. She made no effort to be more friendly with people about her than was required by the simple routine of her trade. She lived placidly, with a strange, rich contentment, inside the walls of the narrow little house. One met her sometimes, usually after darkness had fallen, walking with her slow, dignified step along the streets of the Town. But she was alone ... always alone.

Only once in all those sixty years was she ever known to leave the house overnight, and that was once, three years after John Shadwell was married, when she went away for a few months, “to visit her aunt in Camden.” It was not long after she returned that John Shadwell, “whose poor wife could never have any children,” adopted a girl baby. His wife, it was said, made no protest so long as the child had a good nurse and did not worry her. She was “so miserable, always ailing. She would give anything in the world for the health some women had.”

“You couldn’t blame her,” said the Town, “for feeling like that. They say she never has a moment’s good, wholesome sleep.”

John Shadwell went to the Legislature, the youngest man in the state to hold such an office; and when the time for reelection came the fight was bitter, and into it some enemy thrust the name of Vergie Winters. So the story spread, and so the name of Vergie Winters went the way of most smalltown milliners. Millinery was a “fast” business and Vergie Winters was a “fast” woman. A committee called upon her and asked her to leave the Town. And John Shadwell did nothing. If he came to her defense, he was ruined at the very beginning of that precious career. So Vergie gave him up, but she did not leave the Town. In the little parlour with the hats in the window she received the committee, and in that calm, aloof way she told them that they could not force her to leave. They could not prove that she had broken any law. She was a free citizen. She even looked at them out of the depths of those dark, candid eyes, and lied.

“John Shadwell,” she said, “is nothing to me. If he has come here once or twice, it is only because he is my lawyer.”

She must protect John Shadwell.

And so she sent them away baffled, even perhaps a little intimidated ... a committee of red-faced, self-righteous townsmen who had known, some of them at least, far worse women than Vergie Winters.

But her trade dwindled. Women no longer came to her for hats, unless they were the shady ladies of the streets. And Vergie Winters never turned them away, perhaps because she needed desperately their trade, perhaps because it never occurred to her, in that terrible solitude to which she had dedicated her life, ever to judge them. They came and sometimes they stayed to talk. A few of them were run out of town, but new ones always took their places. They always went to Vergie Winters for their bonnets.

“She is such a lady. She has such a fine air,” they said. And, “It’s so restful sitting there in her cool parlour.”

But their trade did her no good. “It only goes to show,” said the Town.

It was really the beginning of her colossal solitude. She didn’t go away. She didn’t flee from the threats that sometimes came to her. She was sure of herself. She would not surrender. And she could wait. She effaced herself from the life of John Shadwell. And when the Town began putting two and two together, she was even forced to give up walking through the twilight in the direction of John Shadwell’s house, where from the opposite side of the street she could watch with a furtive eye the little girl who played on the lawn about the iron dogs and deer. She never went out except to buy the few things she needed to eat, and for her trade. It was about this time that a shop run by a Presbyterian elder refused to sell her a spool of thread with which to sew the bright roses on the hats of the ladies of the streets. She did not make a scene; she did not even complain. She went quietly from the shop and never again passed through its doors.

But there were always the scintillating ladies. They came and went; but there were always some in the town, so it must have had some need for them. They could not live without money, yet they always had it, though they toiled not nor spun to pay Vergie Winters for their hats. Some died; one or two were murdered in saloon brawls, but Vergie Winters never turned them away. They were her only friends. One wonders what secrets, what confidences they brought to Vergie Winters, sitting there in her narrow little house. One wonders what a dark history of the Town’s citizens went into the grave when Vergie Winters was carried down those narrow, rickety steps for the last time. But she said nothing. She simply waited.

At last what she hoped—what she must have known—would happen, came to pass. One cold night while Vergie Winters sat sewing on the perky hats a key turned in the lock, and John Shadwell came back to her. He came in the face of scandal, of ruin, because he could not help himself. It had begun in a flash of lightning when Vergie Winters opened the door of her father’s house to let him in, and now John Shadwell found that it went on and on and on.... There was no stifling it.

Who can picture that return? Who can imagine the sudden upleaping in the calm, withdrawn soul of Vergie Winters—who had such faith in this love that she sacrificed all her life to it?

And so for years John Shadwell came, on the occasions when he was not in Washington, to see Vergie Winters in the narrow wooden house. She kept on with her precarious trade, for she would never while he lived accept any money from him. Besides, she could not, for his sake, afford to arouse suspicions. For herself it did not matter; she couldn’t be worse off.

Thus Vergie Winters and John Shadwell passed into middle age, and there came a time when he no longer sought election but instead became a power behind the throne, a man who shaped the careers of other men. He held power in the palm of his hand and no longer depended on votes. He grew careless, and one night he was seen by a stable boy turning his key in the back door of Vergie Winters’s house.

After that there were women who crossed the street in order to avoid passing the window with the fanciful bonnets; and children, hearing their parents whisper as they drove by on a summer evening, came to understand dimly that some evil monster lay hidden behind the neat fringed curtains. 

Once, while John Shadwell was away in Washington, boys stoned the house and broke all the windows; but Vergie Winters said nothing. In the morning a Slovak glazier, who was new to the Town and had never heard of its Scarlet Woman, came and repaired the damage; and after he had gone she was seen coming down the narrow steps, in that terrible pool of solitude, as if nothing at all had happened. So far as any one knew, she never spoke of the affair to John Shadwell. She wanted to save him, it seemed, even from such petty annoyances.

And then as the years passed she sometimes saw from her window—the only safe spot from which she might peep— the figure of John Shadwell’s adopted daughter, grown now into a girl of twenty. A thousand times she must have watched the girl, always in company with John Shadwell’s sister, a large, bony spinster, as the pair came out of the shop on the corner and crossed the street in order that a girl so young and innocent might not have to pass the house of Vergie Winters.

Thus she sat in the narrow, dun-coloured house, working at the festooned bonnets, on the afternoon that John Shadwell’s adopted daughter was married to a son of the Presbyterian elder who refused to sell Vergie Winters a spool of thread. Perhaps on that afternoon she had a visit from one of the ladies of the street, who sat talking to her (she was such a lady) while the girl in her bridal dress walked down the aisle of the Presbyterian church—with no mother sitting in the pew on the right because John Shadwell’s wife had been too much upset by the preparations for the wedding.

And one is certain that on the same night, when the festivities were ended, the figure of a middle-aged man followed the shadows of the alley behind Vergie Winters’s house, and let himself in with a key he had carried for more than twenty years. And one can hear him telling Vergie Winters who was at the wedding, and that there never was a prettier bride, and what music they played, and what there was at the wedding breakfast; and assuring her, as he touched her hand gently, that the bit of lace she had given him had been used in the bridal dress. He had told them he bought it himself.

Then, slowly, the town came to accept the state of affairs as a permanent scandal. One seldom spoke of it any longer. One simply knew that Vergie Winters and John Shadwell had been living together for years. He was rich, he was important, he was a power in politics; and now that his career no longer mattered, he had grown indifferent and a little defiant. So far as John Shadwell was concerned, he was a leading citizen nearly seventy years old, the grandfather of children by his adopted daughter.

But with Vergie Winters? She still went her solitary way, making her few bonnets, now a little old-fashioned and dé mod é for all her sedulous reading of the fashion papers. (One can see her, slightly grayed, putting on her spectacles and peering closely at the pages.) And still, as she sat behind the lace curtains at her window, she saw the figure of John Shadwell’s daughter, remote and upright and a little buxom, crossing the street and going down the opposite side; only instead of being led by John Shadwell’s spinster sister she was leading her own children now. And night after night the figure of John Shadwell, no longer an ardent lover but an old man, following the shadows of the alley (less and less furtively as he grew older) to turn the worn key in the lock and sit there all through the evening with Vergie Winters. What did they do? What did they say to each other in those long winter evenings?

And at last, one night, John Shadwell’s wife, peevish and fretful in her tight-closed bedroom smelling of medicines, sent for him at midnight to read to her, only to be told that he had not come in. Again at two o’clock, and again at three—still he had not come in. Even when the gray light filtered through the elms on to the iron dogs and deer, he had not come back. They knew then that he would never return; for he lay dead in Vergie Winters’s narrow, dun-coloured house, behind the lace curtains and the bonnets. He had belonged to her always, and in that silent, powerful way of hers she had known it from the beginning. In the end he came to Vergie Winters to die....

It made great trouble and embarrassment, and they were forced to wait until midnight of the following day before they were able to take John Shadwell’s body from the house of Vergie Winters. And when they did take it, it went out of the same door that had opened so many times at the touch of the worn key, and along the shadows of the alley through which he had passed in life so many times. But even then they were not able to keep the affair a secret. The Town came to know it, and so shut out the last glimmer of tolerance for Vergie Winters. It was no longer a half-secret. It was a scandal which cast darkness upon the name of one of the men who had made the Town (as people said with a curious and non-committal tone which might have meant anything at all) “what it was today.” The crime was Vergie Winters’s. But she could not have cared very much.... Vergie Winters, sitting there in her terrible solitude behind the lace curtains, while the procession passed her house—first, the band playing “The Dead March from Saul,” and then the cabs containing John Shadwell’s daughter, her husband, and John Shadwell’s grandchildren, and then one by one the cabs carrying the leading citizens.

The next morning she came down the steps as she had always done, in the same clothes, with the same air of abysmal indifference. She had not betrayed him during life, and in death she would give no sign; and she must have known that on that morning every eye she passed was turned upon her with a piercing gaze, “to see how she took it.”

For twenty years longer, Vergie Winters lived in the narrow wooden house, growing poorer and poorer with the passing years. She saw the children of John Shadwell’s adopted daughter grow into men and women and have children of their own. But the scandal had grown stale now, though the legend persisted, and only a few must have remembered hazily that the old woman who sat behind the curtains was a great-grandmother. Until one morning the howling of the cat roused Rinehart, the German cobbler, who broke into the house and found Vergie Winters dead. And when they carried her down the rickety steps on her last journey she went alone, without a band to play “The Dead March from Saul,” and without a procession of carriages to follow her into that far corner of the cemetery (remote from the fine burial ground of the Shadwells) where they laid her to rest.

Yesterday they pulled down Vergie Winters’s house. There is no monument to her memory save the tiny stone at the head of her grave, paid for with the money saved out of what she earned by making bonnets for the street ladies of the Town. But Vergie Winters is not dead. When one passes the gaping hole where the little house once stood, one thinks of Vergie Winters. When one passes the granite shaft raised to John Shadwell, one thinks of Vergie Winters. When one sees a Shadwell grandchild or a Shadwell great-grandchild, one thinks of Vergie Winters. For now that time has begun a little to soften the Town, the memory of Vergie Winters has been kept fresh and green with a strange aroma of vague, indefinable romance. When the names of those who crossed the street to avoid her narrow house are forgotten, the name of Vergie Winters will live. Why? Who can say? Was it because the Town never knew a woman called upon to show a faith so deep, a sacrifice so great, a devotion so overwhelming?

I can see her still, an old woman of eighty, hobbling painfully down the rickety steps of her house, with that curious, proud look upon her worn old face, and in the sharp old eyes another look which said, “Vergie Winters was right! John Shadwell belonged to her, from the very beginning!”

Vergie Winters continued on with the affair in isolation and was shunned by the town's "respectable" citizens. She represents a direct contrast to the rigid, hypocritical social standards of the era and carried the burden of their love.  

The Scarlet Woman was adapted into a film titled, “The Life of Vergie Winters” in 1934.

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