FOR thirty years Christmas dinner had been an event at Shane’s Castle. John Shane, who had no family of his own, who was cut off from friends and relatives, adopted in the seventies the family of his wife, and established the custom of inviting every relative and connection to a great feast with wine, a turkey, a goose and a pair of roast pigs. In the old days before the MacDougal Farm was swallowed up by the growing town, New Year’s dinner at the farmhouse had also been an event. The family came in sleds and sleighs from all parts of the county to gather round the groaning table of Jacob Barr, Julia Shane’s brother-in-law and the companion of John Shane in the paddock now covered by warehouses. But all that was a part of the past. Even the farmhouse no longer existed. Christmas at Cypress Hill was all that remained.
Once there had been as many as thirty gathered about the table, but one by one these had vanished, passing out of this life or migrating to the West when the Mills came and the county grew crowded; for the MacDougals, the Barrs and all their connection were adventurers, true pioneers who became wretched when they were no longer surrounded by a sense of space, by enough air, unclogged by soot and coal gas, for their children to breathe.
On Christmas day there came to Cypress Hill a little remnant of seven. These with Julia Shane and her two daughters were all that remained of a family whose founder had crossed the Appalachians from Maryland to convert the wilderness into fertile farming land. They arrived at the portico with the wrought iron columns in two groups, the first of which was known as The Tolliver Family. It included Cousin Hattie, her husband Charles Tolliver, their daughter Ellen, two sons Fergus and Robert, and Jacob Barr, who made hishome with them and shared with Julia Shane the position of Head of the Family.
They drove up in a sleigh drawn by two horses—good horses, for Jacob Barr and Charles Tolliver were judges of horseflesh—and Mrs. Tolliver got down first, a massive woman, large without being fat, with a rosy complexion and a manner of authority. She wore a black feather boa, a hat trimmed with stubby ostrich plumes perched high on her fine black hair, and a short jacket of astrakhan, slightlydémodéowing to its leg-of-mutton sleeves. After her descended her father, the patriarch Jacob Barr. The carriage rocked beneath his bulk. He stood six feet three in his stocking feet and for all his eighty-two years was bright as a dollar and straight as a poker. A long white beard covered his neckerchief and fell to the third button of his embroidered waistcoat, entangling itself in the heavy watch chain from which hung suspended a nugget of gold, souvenir of his adventure to the Gold Coast in the Forties. He carried a heavy stick of cherry wood and limped, having broken his hip and recovered from it at the age of eighty.
Next Ellen got down, her dark curls transformed into a pompadour as her mother’s concession to a recent eighteenth birthday. She was tall, slim, and handsome despite the awkwardness of the girl not yet turned woman. Her eyes were large and blue and her hands long and beautiful. She had the family nose, prominent and proudly curved, which in Julia Shane had become an eagle’s beak. After her, Fergus, a tall, shy boy of fourteen, and Robert, two years younger, sullen, wilful, red-haired like his venerable grandfather, who in youth was known in the county as The Red Scot. The boys were squabbling and had to be put in order by their mother before entering Cousin Julia’s handsome house. Under her watchful eye there was a prolonged scraping of shoes on the doormat. She managed her family with the air of a field-marshal.
As for Charles Tolliver, he turned over the steaming horses to Hennery, bade the black man blanket them well, talked with him for a moment, and then followed the others into the house. Him Hennery adored, with the adoration of aservant for one who understands servants. In the stables, Hennery put extra zeal into the rubbing down of the animals, his mind carrying all the while the picture of a tall gentleman with graying hair, kindly eyes and a pleasant soft voice.
“Mr. Tolliver,” he told the mulatto woman later in the day, “is one of God’s gentlemen.”
The other group was known as The Barr Family. The passing of years had thinned its ranks until there remained only Eva Barr, the daughter of Samuel Barr and therefore a niece of the vigorous and patriarchal Jacob. Characteristically she made her entrance in a town hack, stopping to haggle with the driver over the fare. Her thin, spinsterish voice rose above the roaring of the Mills until at length she lost the argument, as she always did, and paid reluctantly the prodigious twenty-five cents. She might easily have come by way of the Halsted street trolley for five cents, but this she considered neither safe nor dignified. As she grew older and more eccentric, she had come to exercise extraordinary precautions to safeguard her virginity. She was tall, thin, and dry, with a long nose slightly red at the end, and hair that hung in melancholy little wisps about an equine face; yet she had a double lock put on the door of her room at Haines’ boarding house, and nothing would have induced her to venture alone into the squalid Flats. She was poor and very pious. Into her care fell the destitute of her parish. She administered scrupulously with the hard efficiency of a penurious housekeeper.
Dinner began at two and assumed the ceremonial dignity of a tribal rite. It lasted until the winter twilight, descending prematurely because of the smoke from the Mills, made it necessary for the mulatto woman and her black helpers to bring in the silver candlesticks, place them amid the wreckage of the great feast, and light them to illumine the paneled walls of the somber dining-room. When the raisins and nuts and the coffee in little gilt cups had gone the rounds, the room resounded with the scraping of chairs, and the little party wandered out to distribute itself at will through the big house. Every year the distribution followed the same plan. In one corner of the big drawing-room Irene, in her plaingray dress, and Eva Barr, angular and piercing in durable and shiny black serge, foregathered, drawn by their mutual though very different interest in the poor. Each year the two spinsters fell upon the same arguments; for they disagreed about most fundamental things. The attitude of Irene toward the poor was the Roman attitude, full of paternalism, beneficent, pitying. Eva Barr in her Puritan heart had no room for such sentimental slop. “The poor,” she said, “must be taught to pull themselves out of the rut. It’s sinful to do too much for them.”
Two members of the family, the oldest, Jacob Barr, and the youngest, his grandson, disappeared completely, the one to make his round of the stables and park, the other to vanish into the library where, unawed by the sinister portrait of old John Shane, he poked about, stuffing himself with the candy sent by Willie Harrison as a token of a thrice renewed courtship. The grandfather, smoking what he quaintly called a cheroot, surveyed scrupulously the stable and the house, noting those portions which were falling into disrepair. These he later brought to the attention of Julia Shane; and the old woman, leaning on her stick, listened with an air of profound attention to her brother-in-law only to forget everything he had advised the moment the door closed upon him. Each year it was the same. Nothing changed.
In the far end of the drawing-room by the grand piano, Lily drew Ellen Tolliver and the tall shy brother Fergus to her side. Here Mrs. Tolliver joined them, her eyes bright with flooding admiration for her children. The girl was plainly fascinated by her glamorous cousin. She examined boldly Lily’s black gown from Worth, her pearls, and her shoes from the Rue de la Paix. She begged for accounts of the Opéra in Paris and of Paderewski’s playing with the Colonne Orchestra. There was something pitiful in her eagerness for some contact with the glamorous world beyond the Town.
“I’m going to New York to study, next year,” she told Lily. “I would go this year but Momma says I’m too young. Of course, I’m not. If I had money, I’d go anyway.” And she cast a sudden defiant glance at her powerful mother.
Lily, her face suddenly grave with the knowledge of Judge Weissman’s visit, tried to reassure her. “You’ll have plenty of opportunity, Ellen. You’re still a young girl ... only eighteen.”
“But there’s never any money,” the girl replied, with an angry gleam in her wide blue eyes. “Papa’s always in debt. I’ll never get a chance unless I make it myself.”
In the little alcove by the gallery, Julia Shane leaning on her stick, talked business with Charles Tolliver. This too was a yearly custom; her nephew, the county treasurer, gave her bits of advice on investments which she wrote down with a silver pencil and destroyed when he had gone. She listened and begged his advice because the giving of it encouraged him and gave him confidence. He was a gentle, honest fellow, and in her cold way she loved him, better even than she loved his wife who was her niece by blood. The advice he gave was mediocre and uninspired; besides Julia Shane was a shrewd woman and more than a match in business matters for most men.
When they had finished this little ceremony, the old woman turned the conversation to the Cyclops Mill scandal.
“And what’s to come of it?” she asked. “Are you going to win?”
Charles Tolliver smiled. “We’ve won already. The case was settled yesterday. The Mill owes the state some five hundred thousand with fines.”
Julia Shane again pounded the floor in delight. “A fine Christmas present!” she chuckled. “A fine Christmas present!” And then she did an unaccountable thing. With her thin ringed hand she slapped her nephew on the back.
“You know they came to me,” she said, “to get my influence. I told them to go to the Devil!... I suppose they tried to bribe you.”
The nephew frowned and the gentleness went out of his face. The fine mouth grew stern. “They tried ... carefully though, so carefully they couldn’t be caught at it.”
“It will make you trouble. Judge Weissman is a bad enemy. He’s powerful.”
“I know that. I’ve got to fight him. The farmers are with me.”
“But the Town is not, and it’s the Town which counts nowadays. The day of the farmer is past.”
“No, the Town is not.”
The face of Charles Tolliver grew serious and the blue eyes grave and worried. Julia Shane saw that he was watching his tall daughter who sat now at the piano, preparing to play.
“If you need money at the next election,” she said, “Come to me. I can help you.”
AT the sound of Ellen’s music, the conversation in the long drawing-room ceased save for the two women who sat the far corner—Irene and Eva Barr. They went on talking in an undertone of their work among the poor. The others listened, captivated by the sound, for Ellen played well, far better than any of the little group save Lily and Julia Shane knew. To the others it was simply music; to the old woman and her daughter it was something more. They found in it the fire of genius, the smoldering warmth of a true artist, a quality unreal and transcendental which raised the beautiful old room for a moment out of the monotonous slough of commonplace existence. Ellen, in high-collared shirtwaist and skirt with her dark hair piled high in a ridiculous pompadour, sat very straight bending over the keys from time to time in a caressing fashion. She played first of all a Brahms waltz, a delicate thread of peasant melody raised to the lofty realm of immortality by genius; and from this she swept into a Chopin valse, melancholy but somehow brilliant, and then into a polonaise, so dashing and so thunderous that even Irene and Eva Barr, ignorant of all the beauty of sound that tumbled flood-like into the old room, suspended their peevish talk for a time and sat quite still, caught somehow in the contagious awe of the others.
The thin girl at the piano was not in a drawing-room at all. She sat in some enormous concert hall on a high stage before thousands of people. The faces stretched out before her, row after row, until those who sat far back were misty and blurred, not to be distinguished. When she had finished the polonaise she sat quietly for a moment as though waiting for a storm of applause to arise after a little hush from the great audience. There was a moment of silence and then the voice of Lily was heard, warm and soft, almost caressing.
“It was beautiful, Ellen ... really beautiful. I had no idea you played so well.”
The girl, blushing, turned and smiled at the cousin who lay back so indolently among the cushions of the sofa, so beautiful, so charming in the black gown from Worth. The smile conveyed a world of shy and inarticulate gratitude. The girl was happy because she understood that Lily knew. To the others it was just music.
“Your daughter is an artist, Hattie,” remarked Julia Shane. “You should be proud of her.”
The mother, her stout figure tightly laced, sat very straight in her stiff chair, her work-stained hands resting awkwardly in her lap. Her face beamed with the pride of a woman who was completely primitive, for whom nothing in this world existed save her children.
“And now, Ellen,” she said, “play the McKinley Funeral March. You play it so well.”
The girl’s young face clouded suddenly. “But it’s not McKinley’s Funeral March, Mama,” she protested. “It’s Chopin’s. It’s not the same thing.”
“Well, you know what I mean ... the one you played at the Memorial Service for McKinley.” She turned to Lily, her pride written in every line of her strong face. “You know, Ellen was chosen to play at the services for McKinley. Mark Hanna himself made a speech from the same platform.”
AN irrepressible smile swept Lily’s face. “They couldn’t have chosen better, I’m sure. Do play it, Ellen.”
The girl turned to the piano and a respectful silence fell once more. Slowly she swept into the somber rhythms of theMarch Funèbre, beginning so softly that the music was scarcely audible, climbing steadily toward a climax. From the depths of the old Pleyel she brought such music as is seldom heard. The faces in the drawing-room became grave and thoughtful. Lying among the pillows of the divan, Lily closed her eyes and listened through a wall of darkness. Nearby, her mother, leaning on the ebony stick, bowed her head because her eyes had grown dim with tears, a spectacle which she never permitted this world to witness. Presently the music swung again into a somber retarding rhythm; and then slowly, surely, with a weird, unearthly certainty, it became synchronized with the throbbing of the Mills. The steady beat was identical. Old Julia Shane opened her eyes and stared out of the window into the gathering darkness. The music, all at once, made the pounding of the Mills hideously audible.
When the last note echoing through the old house died away, Eva Barr, fidgeting with her embroidered reticule in search of a handkerchief to wipe her lean red nose, rose and said, “Well, I must go. It’s late and the hack is already here. He charges extra for waiting, you know.”
That was the inevitable sign. The dinner was ended. Grandpa Barr, very rosy from his promenade about the grounds, and the red-haired Robert, much stuffed with Willie Harrison’s courting chocolates, reappeared and the round of farewells was begun.
Before Hennery brought round from the stable the Tolliver’s sleigh, Lily placing her arm about Ellen’s waist, drew her aside and praised her playing. “You must not throw it away,” she said. “It is too great a gift.” She whispered. Her manner became that of a conspirator. “Don’t let them make you settle into the pattern of the Town. It’s what they’ll try to do, but don’t let them. We only live once, Ellen, don’t waste your life. The others ... the ones who aren’t remarkable in any way will try to pull you down from your pedestal to their level. But don’t let them. Fitting the pattern is the end of their existence. ‘Be like every one else,’ is their motto. Don’t give in. And when the time comes, if you want to come and study in Paris with the great Philippe, you can live with me.”
The girl blushed and regarded the floor silently for a moment. “I won’t let them,” she managed to say presently. “Thank you, Cousin Lily.” At the door, she turned sharply, all her shyness suddenly vanished, an air of defiance in its place. “I won’t let them.... You needn’t worry,” she added with a sudden fierceness.
“And next week,” said Lily, “come here and spend the night. I want to hear more music. There’s no music in this Town but the Mills.”
By the fireplace under the flaming Venice of Mr. Turner, Julia Shane talked earnestly with her niece, Mrs. Tolliver, who stood warming her short astrakhan jacket by the gentle blaze.
“And one more thing, Hattie,” said the old woman. “I’ve been planning to give you these for some time but the opportunity never arose. I shan’t live many more years and I want you to have them.”
With an air of secrecy she took from her thin fingers two rings and slipped them into the red, worn hands of her niece. “Don’t tell any one,” she added. “It’s a matter between us.”
Mrs. Tolliver’s hand closed on the rings. She could say nothing, but she kissed Aunt Julia affectionately and the tears came into her eyes because the old woman understood so well the intricate conventions of pride in matters of money. Therings were worth thousands. Hattie Tolliver could not have accepted their value in money.
At the door the little party made its departure with a great deal of healthy hubbub, colliding at the same time with a visitor who had driven up unseen. It was Willie Harrison, come to call upon Lily and to propose a visit to the Mills to look over the new furnaces that were building. In the stream of light from the doorway the caller and Charles Tolliver recognized each other and an awkward moment followed. It was Willie Harrison, overcome with confusion, who bowed politely. Charles Tolliver climbed into his sleigh without making any sign of recognition. The feud between the old and the new, concealed for so many years, was emerging slowly into the open.
THE day after Christmas dawned bright and clear, as clear as any day dawned in the Flats where at sunrise the smoke turned the sun into a great copper disk rising indolently toward the zenith of the heavens. The false warmth of the January thaw, precocious that year, brought gentle zephyrs that turned the icicles on the sweeping eaves of the house into streams of water which added their force to the rivulets already coursing down the long drive to leave the gravel bare and eroded, swelling with the upheaval of the escaping frost. But the false warmth brought no beauty; no trees burgeoned forth in clouds of bright green and no crocuses thrust forth their thin green swords and errant blossoms. The January thaw was but a false hope of the northern winter. When the sun of the early afternoon had destroyed all traces of the snow save drifts which hid beneath the rhododendrons or close against the north wall of the stable, it left behind an expanse of black and dessicated lawn, in spots quite bare even of dying grass. The garden stripped of its winter blanket at last stood revealed, a ravaged fragment of what had once been a glory.
Lily, drawn from the house by the warmth of the sun, wandered along the barren paths like a lovely hamadyrad enticed by deceitful Gods from her winter refuge. She ran from clump to clump of shrubbery, breaking off the tender little twigs in search of the green underbark that was a sign of life. Sometimes she found the green; more often she found only dead, dry wood, bereft of all vitality. In the flower garden she followed the brick path to its beginning in the little arbor covered with wistaria vine. Here too the Mills had taken their toll; the vine was dead save a few thin twining stalks that clung to the arbor. In the border along the walk, she found traces of irises—hardy plants difficult tokill—an occasional thick green leaf of a companula or a foxglove hiding among the shelter of leaves provided by the careful Hennery. But there were great gaps of bare earth where nothing grew, stretches which in her childhood had been buried beneath a lush and flowery growth of sky-blue delphinium, scarlet poppies, fiery tritomas, blushing peonies, foxglove, goosefoot, periwinkle, and cinnamon pinks.... All were gone now, blighted by the capricious and fatal south wind with its burden of gas and soot. It was not alone the flowers which suffered. In the niches clipped by Hennery in the dying walls of arbor vitæ, the bits of white statuary were streaked with black soot, their pure bodies smudged and defiled. The Apollo Belvedere and the Venus of Cydnos were no longer recognizable.
In the course of her tour about the little park, her red hair became loosened and disheveled and her cheeks flushed with her exertion. When she again reentered the house, she discovered that her slippers, high-heeled and delicate, were ruined. She called the mulatto woman and bade her throw them away.
On the stairs she encountered her mother, whom she greeted with a little cry of horror. “The garden, Mama, is ruined.... Nothing remains!”
The expression on the old woman’s face remained unchanged and stony.
“Nothing will grow there any longer,” she said. “Besides, it does not matter. When I die, there will be no one to live in the house. Irene hates it. She wants me to take a house in the Town.”
Lily, her feet clad only in the thinnest of silk-stockings, continued on her way up the long stairs to her room. If Willie Harrison had ever had a chance, even the faintest hope, the January thaw, revealing the stricken garden a fortnight too soon, destroyed it once and for all.
AT three that afternoon Willie’s victoria called to bear Lily and Irene to the Cyclops Mills for the tour which he proposed. Workmen, passing the carriage, regarded the two sisters with curiosity, frowning at the sight of Irene in a carriage they recognized as Harrison’s. A stranger might have believed the pair were a great lady and her housekeeper on the way to market, so different and incongruous were the appearances of the two women. Lily, leaning back against the thick mulberry cushions, sat wrapped in a sable stole. She wore a gray tailored suit and the smallest and smartest of black slippers. Around her white throat, which she wore exposed in defiance of fashions which demanded high, boned collars, she had placed a single string of pearls the size of peas. By the side of her opulent beauty Irene possessed the austerity and plainness of a Gothic saint. As usual she wore a badly cut suit, a plain black hat and flat shoes with large, efficient heels. Her thin hands, clad in knitted woolen gloves, lay listlessly in her lap.
Willie Harrison was waiting for them at the window of the superintendent’s office just inside the gate. They saw him standing there as the victoria turned across the cinders in through the red-painted entrance. He stood peering out of the window in a near-sighted way, his shoulders slightly stooped, his small hands fumbling as usual the ruby clasp of his watch chain. At the sight of him Lily frowned and bit her fine red lip as though she felt that a man so rich, a man so powerful, a man who owned all these furnaces and steel sheds should have an air more conquering and impressive.
Irene said, “Oh, there’s William waiting for us now.” And a second later the victoria halted by the concrete steps and Willie himself came out to greet them, hatless, his thin blond hair waving in a breeze which with the sinking of thesun grew rapidly more chilly. The sun itself, hanging over the roseate tops of the furnaces, had become a shield of deep copper red.
“You’re just in time,” said Willie. “The shifts will be changing in a little while. Shall we start here? I’ll show you the offices.”
They went inside and Willie, whose manner had become a little more confident at the prospect of such a display, led them into a long room where men sat in uniform rows on high stools at long tables. Over each table hung suspended a half-dozen electric lights hooded by green shades. The lights, so Willie told them, were placed exactly to the sixteenth of an inch eight feet and three inches apart. It was part of his theory of precision and regularity.
“This,” said Willie, with a contracted sweep of his arm, “is the bookkeeping department. The files are kept here, the orders and all the paper work.”
At the approach of the visitors, the younger men looked up for an instant fascinated by the presence of so lovely a creature as Lily wandering in to shatter so carelessly the sacred routine of their day. There were men of every age and description, old and young, vigorous and exhausted, men in every stage of service to the ponderous mill gods. The younger ones had a restless air and constantly stole glances in the direction of the visitors. The middle-aged ones looked once or twice at Lily and then returned drearily to their columns of figures. The older ones did not notice her at all. They had gone down for the last time in a sea of grinding routine.
Irene, who knew the Town better than Lily, pointed out among the near-sighted, narrow-chested workers men who were grandsons or great-grandsons of original settlers in the county, descendants of the very men who had cleared away the wilderness to make room for banks and lawyers and mills.
“Let’s go on,” said Lily, “to the Mills. They’re more interesting than this, I’m sure. You know I’ve never been inside a mill-yard.” She spoke almost scornfully, as if she thought the counting room were a poor show indeed. A shadow of disappointment crossed Willie’s sallow face.
After donning a broadcloth coat with an astrakhan collar and a derby hat, he led the way. For a long time they walked among freight cars labeled with names from every part of North America ... Santa Fé, Southern Pacific, Great Northern, Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul.... They passed between great warehouses and vast piles of rusty pig iron still covered with frost, the dirty snow lying unmelted in the crevasses; and at last they came to an open space where rose a vast, shapeless object in the process of being raised toward the sky.
“Here,” said Willie, “are the new furnaces. There are to be six of them. This is the first.”
“I like this better,” said Lily. “There is spirit here ... even among the laborers.”
The structure bore a strange resemblance to the Tower of Babel. Swarthy workmen, swarming over the mass of concrete and steel, shouted to each other above the din of the Mills in barbaric tongues which carried no meaning to the visitors. Workmen, like ants, pushed wheelbarrows filled with concrete, with fire clay or fire bricks. Overhead a giant crane lifted steel girders with an effortless stride and swung them into place. The figures of the workmen swept toward the tower in a constant stream of movement so that the whole took on a fantastic composition, as if the tower, rushing on its way heavenward, were growing taller and taller before their very eyes, as if before they moved away it might pierce the very clouds.
At the sight of Willie Harrison, the foremen grew more officious in manner and shouted their orders with redoubled vigor, as if the strength of their lungs contributed something toward the speed with which the great tower grew. But the workmen moved no more rapidly. On returning to the mounds of sand and fire brick, they even stopped altogether at times to stare calmly like curious animals at the visitors. One or two nodded in recognition of Irene’s “Good-day, Joe,” or “How are you, Boris?”—words which appeared to cloud somewhat Willie’s proud enjoyment of the spectacle. And every man who passed stared long and hard at Lily, standing wrapped in her furs, a little aloof, her eyes bright nevertheless with the wonder of the sight. Neither Lily nor Irene nor Willie spoke more than was necessary, for in order to be heard above the din they were forced to scream.
From the growing tower the little party turned west toward the sunset, walking slowly over a rough roadway made of cinders and slag. Once a cinder penetrated Lily’s frail shoe and she was forced to lean against Willie while she took it off and removed the offending particle. He supported her politely and turned away his face so that he should not offend her by seeing her shapely stockinged foot.
A hundred yards further on they came upon a dozen great vats covered by a single roof of sheet iron. From the vats rose a faint mist, veiling the black bodies of negroes who, shouting as they worked, dipped great plates of steel in and out. An acrid smell filled the air and penetrated the throats of the visitors as they passed rapidly by, causing Lily to take from her hand bag a handkerchief of the thinnest linen which she held against her nose until they were once more beyond the zone of the fumes.
“Those are the tempering vats,” said Willie. “Only negroes work here.”
“But why?” asked Irene.
“Because the other workers won’t,” he said. “The acid eats into their lungs. The negroes come from South Carolina and Georgia to do it. They are willing!”
As they walked the sound of pounding, which appeared to come from the great iron shed lying before them black against the sunset, grew louder and louder, steadily more distinct. In the fading twilight that now surrounded them the Mill yard became a fantastic world inhabited by monsters of iron and steel. Great cranes swung to and fro against the glow of the sky, lifting and tossing into piles huge plates of steel that fell with an unearthly slithering din when an invisible hand, concealed somewhere high among the black vertebræ of the monsters, released a lever. High in the air lights, red and green, or cold piercing blue-white, like eyes appeared one by one peering down at them wickedly. Beyond the cranes in the adjoining yard the black furnaces raised gigantic towers crowned by halos of red flame that rose and fell, palpitating as the molten iron deep in the bowels of the towers churned and boiled with a white infernal heat. Dancing malignant shadows assailed them on every side.
The three visitors, dwarfed by the monsters of steel, made their way across the slag and cinders, deafened by the unearthly noise.
“Yesterday,” shouted William Harrison in his thin voice, “there was a terrible accident yonder in the other yard. A workman fell into a vat of molten iron.”
Irene turned to her companion with horror stricken eyes. “I know,” she said. “It was an Italian named Rizzo. I heard of it this morning. I have been to see his wife and family. There are nine of them.”
William shouted again. “They found nothing of him. He became a part of the iron. He is part of a steel girder by now.”
Out of the evil, dancing shadows a man blackened by smoke leapt suddenly at them. “Look out!” he cried, and thrust them against the wall of a neighboring shed so roughly that Irene fell forward upon her knees. A great bundle of steel plates—tons of them—swung viciously out of the darkness, so close to the little party that the warmth of the metal touched their faces. It vanished instantly, drawn high into the air by some invisible hand. It was as if the monster had rebelled suddenly against its master, as if it sought to destroy Willie Harrison as it had destroyed the Italian named Rizzo.
Willie lost all power of speech, all thought of action. Irene, her face deathly white, leaned against the wall calling upon Lily to support her. It was Lily, strangely enough, who alone managed to control herself. She displayed no fear. On the contrary she was quiet, fiercely quiet as if a deadly anger had taken complete possession of her soul.
“Great God!” she exclaimed passionately. “This is a nightmare!” Willie fumbled helplessly by her side, rubbing the wrists of the younger sister until she raised her head and reassured them.
“I’m all right,” said Irene. “We can go on now.”
But Lily was for taking her home. “You’ve seen enough. I’m not going to have you faint on my hands.”
“I’m all right ... really,” repeated Irene, weakly. “I want to see the rest. I must see it. It’s necessary. It is part of my duty.”
“Don’t be a fool! Don’t try to make a martyr of yourself!”
But Irene insisted and Lily, who was neither frightened nor exhausted, yielded at last, weakened by her own curiosity. At the same moment her anger vanished; she became completely amiable once more.
Willie led them across another open space shut in on the far side by the great shed which had loomed before them throughout the tour. They passed through a low, narrow door and stood all at once in an enormous cavern glowing with red flames that poured from the mouths of a score of enormous ovens. From overhead, among the tangle of cranes and steelwork, showers of brilliant cold light descended from hooded globes. The cavern echoed and reechoed with the sound of a vast hammering, irregular and confused—the very hammering which heard in the House at Cypress Hill took on a throbbing, strongly-marked rhythm. On the floor of the cavern, dwarfed by its very immensity, men stripped to the waist, smooth, hard, glistening and streaked with sweat and smoke, toiled in the red glow from the ovens.
BEFORE one of these the little party halted while Lily, and Irene, who seemed recovered though still deathly pale, listened while Willie described the operation. Into a great box of steel and fire clay were placed block after block of black iron until the box, filled at length, was pushed forward, rolling easily on balls of iron, into the fiery mouth of the oven. After a little time, the box was drawn out again and the blocks of whitehot iron were carried aloft and deposited far off, beside the great machines which rolled and hammered them into smooth steel plates.
While they stood there, workmen of every size and build, of a dozen nationalities, toiled on ignoring them. Lily, it appeared, was not deeply interested in the explanation, for she stood a little apart, her gaze wandering over the interior of the cavern. The adventure—even the breathless escape of a moment before—left her calm and indifferent. In her gaze there was a characteristic indolence, an air of absent-mindedness, which frequently seized her in moments of this sort. Nothing of her apparel was disarranged. Her hat, her furs, her pearls, her suit, were in perfect order. The flying dust and soot had gathered in her long eyelashes, but this only gave her a slightly theatrical appearance; it darkened the lashes and made her violet eyes sparkle the more. Her gaze appraised the bodies of the workmen who stood idle for the moment waiting to withdraw the hot iron from the ovens. They leaned upon the tools of their toil, some on shovels, some on long bars of iron, great chests heaving with the effort of their exertions.
Among them there was one who stood taller than the others, a giant with yellow hair and a massive face with features which were like the features of a heroic bust not yet completed by the sculptor. There was in them something ofthe unformed quality of youth. The man was young; he could not have been much over twenty, and the muscles of his arm and back stood out beneath his fair skin like the muscles on one of Rodin’s bronze men in the Paris salons. Once he raised a great hand to wipe the sweat from his face and, discovering that she was interested in him, he looked at her sharply for an instant and then sullenly turned away leaning on a bar of iron with his powerful back turned to her.
She was still watching the man when Willie approached her and touched her arm gently. It seemed that she was unable to look away from the workman.
“Come over here and sit down,” said Willie, leading her to a bench that stood a little distance away in the shadow of the foreman’s shack. “Irene wants to speak to one of the men.”
Lily followed him and sat down. Her sister, looking pale and tired, began a conversation with a swarthy little Pole who stood near the oven. The man greeted her with a sullen frown and his remarks, inaudible to Lily above the din, appeared to be ill-tempered and sulky as if he were ashamed before his fellows to be seen talking with this lady who came to the cavern accompanied by the master.
“Do you find it a wonderful sight?” began Willie.
Lily smiled. “I’ve seen nothing like it in all my life. I never knew what lay just beyond the garden hedge.”
“It will be bigger than this next year and even bigger the year after.” His eyes brightened and for a moment the droop of his shoulders vanished. “We want some day to see the Mills covering all the Flats. The new furnaces are the beginning of the expansion. We hope to grow bigger and bigger.” He raised his arms in a sudden gesture. “There’s no limit, you know.”
But Lily’s gaze was wandering again back and forth, up and down, round and round the vast cavern as if she were not the least interested in Willie’s excitement over bigness. Irene had left the swarthy little man and was talking now to the tow-headed young giant who leaned upon the iron bar. His face was sulky, though it was plain that he was curiously polite to Irene, who seemed by his side less a woman of fleshand blood than one of paper, so frail and wan was her face. He smiled sometimes in a shy, withdrawn fashion.
Politely Lily turned to her companion. “But you are growing richer and richer, Willie. Before long you will own the Town.”
He regarded her shyly, his thin lips twisted into a hopeful smile. Once more he began to fumble with the ruby clasp of his watch chain.
“I could give you everything in the world,” he said suddenly, as though the words caused him a great effort. “I could give you everything if you would marry me.” He paused and bent over Lily who sat silently turning the rings on her fingers round and round. “Would you, Lily?”
“No.” The answer came gently as if she were loath to hurt him by her refusal, yet it was firm and certain.
Willie bent lower. “I would see that Mother had nothing to do with us.” Lily, staring before her, continued to turn the rings round and round. The young workman with Irene had folded his muscular arms and placed his iron bar against the wall of the oven. He stood rocking back and forth with the easy, balanced grace of great strength. When he smiled, he showed a fine expanse of firm white teeth. Irene laughed in her vague half-hearted way. Lily kept watching ... watching....
“You could even spend half the time in Europe if you liked,” continued Willie. “You could do as you pleased. I would not interfere.” He placed one hand gently on her shoulder to claim her attention, so plainly wandering toward the blond and powerful workman. She seemed not even to be conscious of his hand.
The workmen had begun to move toward the oven now, the young fellow with the others. He carried his iron bar as if it were a straw. He moved with a sort of angry defiance, his head thrown back upon his powerful shoulders. He it was who shouted the orders when the great coffin full of hot iron was drawn forth. He it was who thrust his bar beneath the mass of steel and lifting upward shoved it slowly and easily forward on the balls of iron. His great back bent and themuscles rippled beneath the skin as if they too were made of some marvelous flexible steel.
Willie Harrison took Lily’s hand and put an end to the turning of the rings. “Tell me, Lily,” he said softly, “is it no use? Maybe next year or the year after?”
All at once as though she had heard him for the first time, she turned and placed the other hand gently on top of his, looking up at the same time from beneath the wide brim of her hat. “It’s no use, Willie. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.” She laughed softly. “But you were wrong in your method. You shouldn’t have given me the promise about Europe. When I marry, it will be a man who will not let me leave his side.”
That was all she said to him. The rest, whatever it was, remained hidden, deep within her, behind the dark eyes which found so little interest in Willie Harrison, which saw nothing but the blond giant who moved with such uncanny strength, with such incredibly easy grace about his heroic task. Perhaps if Willie had guessed, even for a moment, what was passing in her mind, he would have blushed, for Willie was, so people said, a nice young man who had led a respectable life. Such things were no doubt incomprehensible to him. Perhaps if she had spoken the truth, if she had bothered herself to explain, she would have said, “I could not marry you. I could give myself to no man but one who caught my fancy, in whom there was strength and the grace of a fine animal. Beauty, Willie, counts for much ... far more than you guess, living always as you do in the midst of all this savage uproar. I am rich. Your money means nothing. And your power! It is not worth the snap of a finger to me.... Ah, if you had a face like that workman ... a face ... a real face, and a body ... a real body like his, then you might ask with hope. It is hopeless, Willie. You do not interest me, though I am not eager to hurt you just the same.”
But she said none of these things, for people seldom say them. On the contrary, she was content to put him off with a bare denial. It is doubtful whether such thoughts even occurred to her, however deep they may have been rooted in her soul; for she was certainly not a woman given to reflection.To any one, it was apparent that she did not examine her motives. She was content, no doubt, to be beautiful, to live where there was beauty, to surround herself with beautiful, luxurious things.
She was prevented from saying anything further by the arrival of Irene who had abandoned her workmen to rejoin Willie and her sister. Willie, crimson and still trembling a little with the effort of his proposal, suggested that they leave. It was already a quarter to six. The workmen vanished suddenly into a little shed. Their shift was finished. They were free now to return to their squalid homes, to visit the corner saloon or the dismal, shuttered brothels of Franklin street, free to go where they would in the desolate area of the Flats for twelve brief hours of life.
THE three visitors made their way back to the office of the superintendent across a mill yard now bright with the cold glare of a hundred arc lights. On the way, Lily turned suddenly to her sister and asked, “Who was the man you were talking to ... the tall one with the yellow hair?”
Irene, moving beside her, cast a sudden glance at her sister and the old terrified look entered her pale eyes. “His name is Krylenko,” she replied in a voice grown subdued and cold. “He is the one who brought me home from Welcome House the other night. He is a bright boy. I’ve taught him English.”
Willie, who had been walking behind them, quickened his pace and came abreast. “Krylenko?” he said. “Krylenko? Why, that’s the fellow who’s been making trouble. They’ve been trying to introduce the union.” He addressed Irene. “Your Welcome House is making trouble I’m afraid, Irene. There’s no good comes of educating these men. They don’t want it.”
Lily laughed. “Come now,” she said, “that’s what your mother says, isn’t it? I can hear her saying it.”
Willie failed to answer her, but a sheepish, embarrassed look took possession of his sallow face, as if the powerful figure of his mother had joined them unawares. And Irene, walking close to Lily, whispered to her sister, “You shouldn’t have said that. It was cruel of you.”
At the office of the superintendent they found Willie’s victoria waiting, the horses covered with blankets against the swift, piercing chill of the winter night. The coachman shivered on the box. The three of them climbed in and Willie bade the man drive to Halsted street where he would get down, leaving the carriage to the ladies. When Lilyprotested, he answered, “But I want to walk up the hill to the Town. I need the exercise.”
They drove along between two streams of mill workers, one entering, one leaving the Mill yards with the change of shifts. The laborers moved in two columns, automatons without identity save that one column was clean and the men held their heads high and the other was black with oil and soot and the heads were bent with a terrible exhaustion. It was a dark narrow street bordered on one side by the tall blank walls of warehouses and on the other by the Mill yard. The smells of the Black Fork, coated with oil and refuse, corrupted the damp air. On the Mill side a high fence made of barbed wire strung from steel posts was in the process of construction. To this Willie called their attention with pride. “You see,” he said, “we are making the Mills impregnable. If the unions come in there will be trouble. It was my idea ... the fence. A stitch in time saves nine.” And he chuckled softly in the darkness.
At Halsted street Willie got down and, removing his hat, bade the sisters a dry and polite good-night. But before the carriage drove on, Lily called out to him, “You’re coming to the ball to-night, aren’t you? Remember, there’s a quadrille and you can’t leave us flat at the last minute.”
“I’m coming,” said William. “Certainly I’m coming.” And he turned away, setting off in the opposite direction toward the Hill and Mrs. Julis Harrison who sat in the ugly house of red sandstone awaiting news of the proposal. He walked neatly, placing his small feet firmly, his hands clasped behind his back, his head bowed thoughtfully. The umbrella, held in the crook of his arm, swung mournfully as he walked. His shoulders drooped wearily. He had shown Lily all his wealth, all his power; and she treated it as if it were nothing at all. In the brownstone house, Mrs. Harrison sat waiting.
The carriage drove up Halsted street past the corner saloon now thronged with mill workers, toward the house at Cypress Hill. In a tenement opposite the wrought iron gates a nostalgic Russian sat on the front stoop squeezing mournfully at a concertina which filled the winter evening with the somber music of the steppes.
Irene, leaning back pale and exhausted on the mulberry cushions, said, “Why did you ask Willie whether he was coming? You know he never misses anything if he can help it.”
“I only wanted to make him feel welcome,” her sister replied absently. “Since this affair over the taxes, Mama and Mrs. Harrison haven’t been very thick.... I feel sorry for Willie. He doesn’t know what it’s all about.”
INSIDE the old house, Irene went to her room, and Lily, instead of seeking out her mother for their usual chat, went quietly upstairs. She ignored even the preparations for the ball. After she had taken off her clothes, she lay for a long time in a hot bath scented with verbena salts, drowsing languidly until the hot water had eliminated every soiling trace of the Mills. Returning to her room, she sat clad in a thin satin wrapper for a long time before the mirror of her dressing table, polishing her pink nails, examining the tiny lines at the corners of her lips,—lines which came from smiling too much. Then she powdered herself all over with scented powder and did up her red hair, fastening it with the pin set in brilliants. And presently, the depression having passed away, she began to sing in her low warm voice,Je sais que vous êtes gentil. It was a full-throated joyous song. At times her voice rose in a crescendo that penetrated the walls of the room where Irene lay in the darkness on her narrow white bed.
As she dressed for dinner, she continued to sing one song after another, most of them piquant and racy, songs of the French cuirassiers. She sangSur la route á Montauban,Toute la longe de la TamiseandAuprés de ma Blonde. The dressing was the languid performance which required an hour or more, for she took the most minute care with every detail. The chemise must not have a wrinkle; the peacock blue stockings must fit as if they were the skin itself; the corsets were drawn until the result, examined for many minutes before the glass, was absolutely perfect. At the last she put on a gown of peacock blue satin with a long train that swept about her ankles, and rang for one of the black servants to hook it. Before the slavey arrived, Lily had discovered a wrinkle beneath the satin and began all over again the process of dressing,until at the end of the second attempt she stood before the mirrorsoignéeand perfect in the soft glow from the open fire by her bed. The tight-fitting gown of peacock blue followed the curves of her figure flawlessly. Then she hung about her fine throat a chain of diamonds set in a necklace of laurel leaves wrought delicately in silver, lighted a cigarette and stood regarding her tall figure by the light of the lamps. Among the old furniture of the dark room she stood superbly dressed, elegant,mondaine. A touch to the hair that covered her small head like a burnished helmet, and she smiled with satisfaction, the face in the mirror smiling back with a curious look of elation, of abundant health, of joy; yet there was in it something too of secrecy and triumph.
IRENE’S room was less vast and shadowy. In place of brocade the windows were curtained with white stuff. In one corner stood aprie dieubefore a little paint and plaster image of the Virgin and child—all blue and pink and gilt,—which Lily had sent her sister from Florence. The bed was small and narrow and the white table standing near by was covered with books and papers neatly arranged—the paraphernalia of Irene’s work among the people of the Flats. Here Lily discovered her when she came in, flushed and radiant, to sit on the edge of the white bed and talk with her sister until the guests arrived.
She found Irene at the white table, the neat piles of books and papers pushed aside to make room for a white tray laden with food, for Irene was having dinner alone in her room. There had been no question of her coming to the ball. “I couldn’t bear it,” she told her mother. “I would be miserable. I don’t want to come. Why do you want to torture me?” She had fallen, of late, into using the most exaggerating words, out of all proportion with truth or dignity. But Julia Shane, accustomed more and more to yielding to the whims of her younger daughter, permitted her to remain away.
“Have you anything to read?” began Lily. “Because if you haven’t, my small trunk is full of books.”
“I’ve plenty, and besides, I’m going out.”
“Where?” asked Lily, suddenly curious.
“To Welcome House. It’s my night to teach. I should think you would have remembered that.” Her voice sounded weary and strained. She turned to her sister with a look of disapproval, so intense that it seemed to accuse Lily of some unspeakable sin.
“I didn’t remember,” Lily replied. “How should I?” And then rising she went to her sister’s side and put one armabout her shoulders, a gesture of affection which appeared to inspire a sudden abhorrence in the woman, for she shivered suddenly at the touch of the warm bare arm. “You shouldn’t go out to-night. You are too tired!”
“I must go,” Irene replied. “They’re counting on me.”
“What are you eating?...” remarked Lily, picking up a bit of cake from the tray, “Peas, potatoes, rice, dessert, milk.... Why you’ve no meat, Irene. You should eat meat. It is what you need more than anything. You’re too pale.”
Irene’s pale brow knitted into a frown. “I’ve given it up,” she said. “I’m not eating meat any longer.”
“And why not?” Lily moved away from her and stood looking down with the faintest of mocking smiles. The transparent cheek of her sister flushed slightly.
“Because I don’t believe in it. I believe it’s wrong.”
“Well, I’m going to speak to Mama about it. It’s nonsense. You’ll kill yourself with such a diet. Really, Irene....” Her voice carried a note of irritation, but she got no further for Irene turned on her suddenly, like a beaten dog which after long abuse snaps suddenly at the offending hand.
“Why can’t you leave me in peace? You and Mama treat me like a child. I am a grown woman. I want to do as I please. I am harming no one but myself ... no one.... I’m sick of it, I tell you. I’m sick of it!”
And suddenly she began to weep, softly and hysterically, her thin shoulders shaking as the sobs tore her body. “I want to go away,” she moaned. “I want to be alone, where I can think and pray. I want to be alone!” Her sobbing was at once pitiful and terrible, the dry, parched sobbing of a misery long pent up. For a moment Lily stood helplessly by her side and then, all at once, she went down on her knees in the peacock blue gown and put her lovely bare arms about her sister, striving to comfort her. The effort failed strangely. Irene only drew away and sobbed the more. “If you would only let me have peace ... I could find it alone!”
Lily said nothing but knelt by her sister’s side kissing and caressing the thin white hands until Irene’s sobbing subsided a little and she fell forward among the books and papers, burying her head in her arms. The misery of the soul and spirit in some way appalled Lily. She watched her sister with a look of bewilderment in her eyes as if she had discovered all at once a world of which she had been ignorant up to now. The spectacle stifled quickly the high spirits of a moment before. The bawdy French ballads were forgotten. She had become suddenly grave and serious, the lines in her beautiful face grown hard. She was sitting on the floor, her head in Irene’s lap, when a knock and the sound of her name roused her.
“Miss Lily,” came the mulatto woman’s voice, “Mis’ Shane says the guests are a-coming and you must come down.”
“All right Sarah.... I’ll be down at once.”
Lily, struggling with the tight satin dress, rose slowly, kissed her sister and said, “Please, dear, stay home to-night and rest.”
But Irene, still sobbing softly as if entranced by the sensual satisfaction of weeping, did not answer her. She remained leaning over the table, her face buried in her arms. But she was more quiet now, with the voluptuous stillness of one who has passed through a great emotional outburst.
Lily, once more before the mirror in her own room, rearranged her ruffled hair listening to the murmur of talk that arose from the well of the stairs. It was not until she had fastened the pin set with brilliants for a second time that she discovered with sudden horror that the peacock blue gown was split and ripped at one side from the arm to the waist. In the sudden outburst of affection for her sister, she had flung herself to her knees abandoning all thought of vanity. The gown was ruined.
From below stairs the murmur grew in volume as carriage after carriage arrived. Lily swore beneath her breath in French, tore off the gown and brought from her closet another of a pale yellow-green, the color of chartreuse. The process of dressing began all over again and in half an hour, after the mulatto woman had called twice and been sent away and the guests had gone in to dinner, Lily stood once more before the mirror, radiant and beautiful. The gown was cut lower thanthe one she had tossed aside, and the yellow-green blended with the tawny red of her hair so that there was something nude and voluptuous in her appearance. The smile returned to her face, a smile which seemed to say, “The Town will see something the like of which it has never seen before.”
Before going down she went to Irene’s room once more, only to find it dark and empty. Clad in the gray suit and the plain black hat Irene had made her way silently to the stairs at the back of the house and thence through the gallery that led past the drawing-room windows into the dead park. The austere and empty chamber appeared to rouse a sudden shame in Lily, for she returned to her room before descending the long stairs and took from the trunk a great fan of black ostrich feathers to shield her bare breasts alike from the stares of the impudent and the disapproving.
The ball was a great success. The orchestra, placed in the little alcove by the gallery, played a quadrille followed by waltzes, two-steps and polkas. Until ten o’clock the carriages made their way along Halsted street past the Mills and the squalid houses through the wrought iron gates into the park; and at midnight they began to roll away again carrying the guests to their homes. Lily, all graciousness and charm, moved among the dancers distributing her favors equitably save in the single instance of Willie Harrison, who looked so downcast and prematurely old in his black evening clothes that she danced with him three times and sat out a waltz, and a polka. And all the Town, ignorant of the truth, whispered that Willie’s chances once more appeared good.
Ellen Tolliver was there, in a dress made at home by her mother, and she spent much of the evening by the side of her aunt Julia who sat in black jet and amethysts at one end of the drawing-room leaning on her stick and looking for all the world like a wicked duchess. At the sound of the music and the sight of the dancers, the old gleam returned for a little time to her tired eyes.
Ellen was younger than the other guests and knew most of them only by sight but she had partners none the less, for she was handsome despite her badly made gown and her absurd pompadour, and she danced with a barbaric and energetic grace.When she was not dancing her demeanor carried no trace of the drooping wall-flower. She regarded the dancers with a expression of defiance and scorn. None could have taken her for a poor relation.
ALITTLE while before midnight Irene, accompanied by Krylenko, returned from the Flats and hurried quietly as a moth through the gallery past the brightly lighted windows and up the stairway to her room. The mill worker left her at the turn of the drive where he stood for a time in the melting snow fascinated by the sound of music and the sight of the dancers through the tall windows. Among them he caught a sudden glimpse of Irene’s sister, the woman who had watched him at work in the mill shed. She danced a waltz with the master of the Mills, laughing as she whirled round and round with a wild exuberance. Amid the others who took their pleasures so seriously, she was a bacchante, pagan, utterly abandoned. The black fan hung from her wrist and the pale yellow-green ball gown left all her breast and throat exposed in a voluptuous glow of beauty. Long after the music stopped and she had disappeared, Krylenko stood in the wet snowbank staring blindly at the window which she had passed again and again. He stood as if hypnotized, as if incapable of action. At length a coachman, passing by, halted for a moment to regard him in astonishment, and so roused him into action. Murmuring something in Russian, he set off down the long drive walking well to one side to keep from under the wheels of the fine carriages which had begun to leave.
The last carriage, containing Willie Harrison and two female cousins, passed through the wrought iron gates a little after one o’clock, leaving Lily, her mother and Ellen Tolliver who, having no carriage of her own, had chosen this night to spend at Cypress Hill, alone amid the wreckage of crumpled flowers and forgotten cotillion favors. With the departure of the last carriage and the finish of the music, the gleam died out of Julia Shane’s eyes. She became again an oldwoman with a tired bent figure, her sharp eyes half closed by dark swellings which seemed to have appeared all at once with the death of the last chord.
“I’m going to bed,” she said, bidding the others good-night. “We can discuss the party in the morning.”
She tottered up the stairs leaving her daughter and grand-niece together in the long drawing-room. When she had gone, Lily rose and put out the lamps and candles one by one until only three candles in a sconce above the piano remained lighted.
“Now,” she said, lying back among the cushions of the divan and stretching her long handsome legs, “play for me ... some Brahms, some Chopin.”
The girl must have been weary but the request aroused all her extraordinary young strength. She sat at the piano silhouetted against the candle light ... the curve of her absurd pompadour, the more ridiculous curve of her corseted figure. From the divan Lily watched her through half-closed eyes. She played first of all two études of Chopin and then a waltz or two of Brahms, superbly and with a fine freedom and spectacular fire, as if she realized that at last she had the audience she desired, a better audience than she would ever have again no matter how celebrated she might become. Above the throbbing of the Mills the thread of music rose triumphant in a sort of eternal beauty, now delicate, restrained, now rising in a tremendous, passionate crescendo. The girl invested it with all the yearnings that are beyond expression, the youth, the passionate resentment and scorn, the blind gropings which swept her baffled young soul. Through the magic of the sound she managed to convey to the woman lying half-buried among the cushions those things which it would have been impossible for her to utter, so high and impregnable was the wall of her shyness and pride. And Lily, watching her, wept silently at the eloquence of the music.
Not once was there a spoken word between them, and at last the girl swung softly and mournfully into the macabre beauties of the Valse Triste, strange and mournful music, not great, even a little mediocre, yet superbly beautiful beneath her slim fingers. She peopled the shadowy room with ghostly unreal figures, of tragedy, of romance, of burning, unimagined desires. The dancing shadows cast by the candles among the old furniture became through the mist of Lily’s tears fantastic, yet familiar, like memories half-revealed that fade before they can be captured and recognized. The waltz rose in a weird unearthly ecstasy, swirling and exultant, the zenith of a joy and a completion yearned for but never in this life achieved ... the something which lies just beyond the reach, sensed but unattainable, something which Ellen sought and came nearest to capturing in her music, which Irene, kneeling on theprie dieubefore the Sienna Virgin, sought in a mystic exaltation, which Lily sought in her own instinctive, half-realized fashion. It was a quest which must always be a lonely one; somehow the music made the sense of loneliness terribly acute. The waltz grew slower once more and softer, taking on a new and melancholy fire, until at last it died away into stillness leaving only the sound of the Mills to disturb the silence of the old room.
After a little pause, Ellen fell forward wearily upon the piano, her head resting upon her arms, and all at once with a faint rustle she slipped gently to the floor, the home-made ball dress crumpled and soiled beneath her slim body. Lily sprang from among the pillows and gathered the girl against her white, voluptuous breasts, for she had fainted.