ALITTLE while later, Lily herself went down the snow covered drive and summoned a passing boy whom she sent into the Flats in search of Irene, since she herself dared not venture among the sullen strikers. After two hours, he returned to say he could find no trace of the sister. So it was not until Irene returned at midnight that she learned her mother was dead. She received the news coldly enough, perhaps because in those days death and suffering meant so little to her; but even Lily must have seen the faint glimmer of triumph that entered her sister’s pale, red-rimmed eyes at the news that she was free at last.
Just before dawn when the searchlights, swinging their gigantic arcs over the Flats, pierced the quiet solitude of Lily’s room and wakened her, she heard through the mist of sleep the voice of Irene praying in her room for mercy upon the soul of their mother. For a second, she raised her head in an attitude of listening and then sank back and quickly fell asleep, her rosy face pillowed on her white bare arm, her bright hair all loose and shining in the sudden flashes of reflected light.
The Town newspapers published long obituaries of Julia Shane, whole columns which gave the history of her family, the history of John Shane, so far as it was known, and the history of Cypress Hill. In death it seemed that Julia Shane reflected credit in some way upon the Town. She gave it a kind of distinction just as the Cyclops Mills or any other remarkable institution gave it distinction. The newspapers treated her as if she were good advertising copy. The obituaries included lists of celebrated people who had been guests at Cypress Hill. Presidents were mentioned, an ambassador, and the Governor who was now a senator. They remarked that Julia Shane was the granddaughter of the man who gave the Town its name. For a single day Cypress Hill regained its lost and splendidprestige. Newcomers in the Town, superintendents and clerks from the idle Mills, learned for the first time the history of Shane’s Castle, all but the scandalous stories about John Shane which were omitted as unsuitable material for an obituary. Besides no one really knew whether they were true or not.
And despite all this vulgar fanfare, it was clear that a great lady had passed, one who in her day had been a sovereign, but one whose day had passed with the coming of the Mills and the vulgar, noisy aristocracy of progress and prosperity.
The obituaries ended with the sentence, “Mrs. Shane is survived by two unmarried daughters, Irene, who resides at Cypress Hill, and Lily who for some ten years has made her home in Paris. Both were with their mother at the time of her passing.”
It was this last sentence which interested the older residents.Lily, who for some ten years has made her home in Paris. Both were with their mother at the time of her passing.How much lay hidden and mysterious in those two lines. Until the publishing of the obituary, the Town had known nothing of Lily’s return.
At five o’clock on the afternoon of the funeral Willie Harrison sat in his mother’s bedroom in the sandstone house giving her a detailed account of the funeral. Outside the snow fell in drifting clouds, driven before a wind which howled wildly among the ornamental cupolas and projections of the ugly house. Inside the air hung warm and stifling, touched by the pallid odor of the sickroom. It was a large square room constructed with a great effect of solidity, and furnished with heavy, expensive furniture upholstered in dark red plush. The walls were tan and the woodwork of birch stained a deep mahogany color. Above the ornate mantelpiece hung an engraved portrait of the founder of the Mills and of the Harrison fortune ... Julis Harrison, coarse, powerful, beetle-browed, his heavy countenance half-buried beneath a thick chin beard. The engraving was surrounded by a wide frame of bright German gilt; it looked down upon the room with the gaze of one who has wrought a great success out of nothing by the sweat of his brow and labor of bulging muscles, as once he had hammered crude metal into links and links into chains in theblacksmith shop which stood upon the spot now occupied by the oldest of the furnaces. It was a massive awkward room, as much like a warehouse as like a boudoir or a bedroom. It suited admirably the face in the portrait and the heavy body of the old woman who lay in the mahogany bed, helpless and ill-tempered beneath a second stroke of paralysis.
The son sat awkwardly on the edge of the red plush sofa near the mother. As he grew older, his manner became more and more uneasy in the presence of the old woman. His hair had grown thinner and on the temples there were new streaks of gray. There was something withered about him, something incomplete and unfinished like an apple that has begun to shrink before it has reached maturity. In the massive room, beneath the gaze of the overwhelming portrait, beside the elephantine bed in which he was conceived and born of the heavy old woman, Willie Harrison was a curiosity, a mouse born of a mountain in labor. He was the son of parents who were both quite masculine.
In a strange fit of forgetfulness he had worn his heavy overshoes into the sacred precincts of his mother’s bedroom and they now lay beside him on the floor where he had placed them timidly when his mother commanded him to remove them lest his feet become overheated and tender, thus rendering him liable to sudden colds. Indeed, since the very beginning of the strike Willie had not been well. The struggle appeared to weigh him down. Day by day he grew paler and more nervous. He rarely smiled, and a host of new fine lines appeared upon his already withered countenance. Yet he had gone through the blowing snow and the bitter cold to the cemetery, partly at the command of his mother who was unable to go and partly because he had hoped to see Lily once more, if only for a moment by the side of an open grave.
And now Mrs. Julis Harrison, lying helpless upon her broad back, waited to hear the account of the funeral. She lay with her head oddly cocked on one side in order to see her son. Her speech came forth mumbled and broken by the paralysis.
“Were there many there?” she asked.
“Only a handful,” replied her son in his thin voice. “Old William Baines ... you know, the old man, the Shane’s family lawyer....”
“Yes,” interrupted his mother. “An old fogy ... who ought to have died ten years ago.”
William Harrison must have been used to interruptions of this sort from his mother. He continued, “One or two church people and the two girls. It was frightfully cold on top of that bald hill. The coffin was covered with snow the moment it was lowered into the grave.”
“Poor Julia,” muttered the woman on the bed. “She lived too long. She lost interest in life.” This remark she uttered with the most mournful of intonations. On the verge of the grave herself, she still maintained a lively interest in deaths and funerals.
“I’m glad you went,” she added presently. “It shows there was no feeling, no matter how bad Julia treated me. It shows that I forgave her. People knew I couldn’t go.”
There was a long pause punctuated by the loud monotonous ticking of the brass clock. Outside the wind whistled among the cornices.
“She must have left a great deal of money,” observed Mrs. Harrison. “More than a couple of millions, I shouldn’t wonder. They haven’t spent anything in the last ten years.”
Willie Harrison lighted a cigarette. “Except Irene,” he said. “She has been giving money to the strikers. Everybody knows that.”
“But that’s her own,” said his mother. “It has nothing to do with what Julia left.” She stirred restlessly. “Please, Willie, will you not smoke in here. I can’t bear the smell of tobacco.”
Willie extinguished the cigarette and finding no place in the whole room where he might dispose of the remains, he thrust them silently into his pocket.
“I asked her at the funeral if it was true,” he said. “And she told me it was none of my business ... that she would give everything she possessed if she saw fit.”
Mrs. Harrison grunted. “It’s that Krylenko,” she observed.“That’s who it is. Don’t tell me she’d give away her money for love of the strikers. No Shane ever gave his fortune to the poor.”
The clock again ticked violently and without interruption for a long time.
“And Lily,” said Mrs. Harrison presently.
Willie began fumbling with the ruby clasp on his watch chain, slipping it backward and forward nervously.
“She’s just the same,” he said. “Just the same.... Younger if anything. It’s surprising how she keeps so young. I asked her to come and see you and she wanted to know if you had asked her to. I said you had and then she smiled a little and asked, ‘Is it for curiosity? You can tell her how I look. You can tell her I’m happy.’ That was all. I don’t suppose she’ll ever come back to the Town again after this time.”
This Mrs. Harrison pondered for a time. At last she said, “I guess it’s just as well she wouldn’t have you. There’s something bad about her. She couldn’t be so young and happy if she was just an old maid. I guess after all you’re better off. They have bad blood in ’em. It comes from old John Shane.”
Willie winced at the bluntness of his mother’s speech and attempted to lead her into other paths. “There was no trouble in the Flats to-day. None of the strikers came into Halsted street. Everything was quiet all day. The superintendent says it was on account of the old woman’s funeral.”
“You see,” said Mrs. Harrison. “It’s that Krylenko. I can’t understand it ... how a frumpish old maid like Irene can twist him around her finger.”
Willie stopped fumbling with his chain. “She’s made a weapon of him to fight us.”
Mrs. Harrison shook her massive head with a negative gesture.
“Oh, no,” she said, speaking slowly and painfully. “It may look like that, but she never thought it out. She isn’t smart enough. Neither of them is, Irene or Lily. I’ve known them since they were little girls. They both do what they can’t help doing. Julia might have done such a thing but I’m certain it never occurred to her. Besides,” she added after a little pause, “she’s dead and buried now.”
“She came to hate us before she died,” persisted Willie.
“Yes ... that’s true enough. I guess she did hate us ... ever since that affair over the taxes.”
Willie clung to his idea. “But don’t you see. It’s all worked out just the same, just as if they had planned it on purpose. It’s the second time they have cost the Mills thousands of dollars.”
This, somehow, Mrs. Harrison found herself unable to deny.
“Tell me,” she said presently. “How did they appear to take it?... Lily and Irene?”
Willie was once more fumbling with the ruby clasp. “I don’t know. Irene wasn’t even dressed in mourning. She had on the same old gray suit and black hat. She looked like a crow. As for Lily, she was able to smile when she spoke to me. But you can’t tell how she feels about anything. She always smiles.”
After this little speech Willie rose and began to move about the room, fingering nervously the sparsely placed ornaments—a picture of himself as an anemic child with long, yellow curls, a heavy brass inkwell, a small copy in marble of the tomb of Scipio Africanus, the single memento of a voyage to Rome. He drifted over toward the window and drew aside the curtain to look out into the storm.
ALL this time his mother, her vast bulk immovable beneath the mountainous sheets, followed him with her eyes. She must have recognized the symptoms, for presently she broke the way.
“Have you anything you want to say?” she asked.
Willie moved back to the bed and for a time stood in silence fingering the carving of the footboard. He cleared his throat as if to speak but only fell silent again. When at last he was able to say what was in his mind, he did so without looking up. He behaved as though the carving held for him the most profound interest.
“Yes,” he said gently, “I want to say that I’m going to get out of the Mills. I hate them. I’ve always hated them. I’m no good at it!” To forestall her interruptions he rushed on with his speech. The sight of his mother lying helpless appeared to endow him with a sudden desperate courage. She was unable to stop him. He even raised his head and faced her squarely. “I don’t like this strike. I don’t like the fighting. I want to be an ordinary, simple man who could walk through Halsted street in safety. I want to be left alone.”
Mrs. Harrison did not raise her head, but all the violent emotion, pent up and stifled by her helplessness, rose and flashed in her eyes. The scorn was thunderous but somehow it failed to overwhelm the faded, middle-aged man at the foot of the gigantic bed.
“I thank God your father cannot hear those words! He would strike you down!”
Still Willie did not flinch. “My father is dead,” he observed quietly. But his smile carried implications and a malice of its own. “My father is dead,” said the smile. “And my mother is helpless. Before long I shall be free ... for the first time in my life ... free ... to do as Iplease ... the slave of no one.”
The smile wavered and clung to his face. Of course he said none of this. What he said was, “It is a dirty business. And I want nothing to do with it ... not even any stock. If it hadn’t been for the Mills, Lily might have married me.”
From the bed arose the scornful sound of a hoarse chuckle, “Oh no, she wouldn’t. You don’t know her! She wouldn’t marry you because you were such a poor thing.”
At this Willie began to tremble. His face became as white as the spotless coverlet, and he grasped the bed rail with such intensity that his thin knuckles showed blue against his skin. It was the old taunt of a mother toward a child whose gentleness and indecision were to her both incomprehensible and worthy only of contempt, a child who had never suited her gigantic ideas of power and wealth.
“And pray tell me what youdointend to do,” she asked with rich sarcasm.
A tremulous quality entered Willie’s voice as he replied. “I want to have a farm where I can raise chickens and ducks and rabbits.”
“Great God!” replied his mother in her deep voice. It was all she said. Moving her head with a terrible effort, she turned her face to the wall away from her son. But Willie, though he still trembled a little in the presence of the old woman and the glowering portrait above his head, had a look of triumph in his pale eyes. It said, “I have won! I have won! I have achieved a victory. I am free at last from the monster which I have always hated.... I am through with the Mills. I am through with Judge Weissman.... I can be bullied no more!”
Outside the wind howled and tore at the eaves and presently there came a suave knock at the door ... the knock of the worldly, white haired butler. “Miss Abercrombie is here to see Mrs. Harrison,” came a suave voice, and before Willie could answer, his mother’s crony, her nose very red from the cold, had pushed her way like a wriggling ferret into the room.
At the sight of Willie, she halted for a moment winking at him in a purely involuntary fashion.
“Your mother is so much better,” she said bridling. “Aren’t you delighted?”
Willie’s answer was an inarticulate grunt.
“I’ve come to hear all about the funeral,” she continued in her bustling manner. “I would have gone myself except for the weather. Now sit down like a good boy and tell me all about.” She too treated him as an anemic child still wearing curls.
Willie shook her hand politely. “My mother will tell you,” he said. “I have told her everything.”
And he slipped from the room leaving the two women, the ferret and the mountain, to put the finishing touches upon the obsequies of Julia Shane.
IN the house at Cypress Hill the two sisters stayed on to await the settlement of the will proceedings.
The state of siege continued unrelieved, and as the winter advanced, as if Nature herself were hostile to the strikers, there came that year no January thaw at all. There was only more snow and unbroken cold so that Irene, instead of finding freedom with the death of her mother, encountered only more duties among the wretched inhabitants of Halsted street. The Harrisons and Judge Weissman evicted a score of families from houses owned by the Mills. Bag and baggage, women and children, were thrust out into the frozen street to find refuge in other squalid houses already far too crowded.
Judge Weissman also saw to it that the strikers were unable to secure a hall in which to meet. When the men attempted to congregate in the streets, they were charged and clubbed by the constabulary. When they sought to meet in vacant lots, Judge Weissman saw to it that the owners ordered them off. When there was a fire, the strikers were charged by the Town papers with having set it. When there was a riot, it was always the strikers who caused it. But there was one charge which the Town found, above all others, unforgivable. The editors accused the workmen of obstructing progress. They charged the strikers with menacing prosperity and injuring the “boom spirit.” The Rotary Club and the Benevolent Order of Elks, the Chamber of Commerce, even the Episcopal church (very high and much given to incense and genuflexions) espoused the cause of prosperity.
The strikers had no newspapers, no money, no voice. They might starve as slowly as they pleased. Krylenko himself was powerless.
Of what took place in the Town itself the two sisters knew nothing. During the day while Irene was absent Lily, cladin a peignoir of black silk, wandered aimlessly about the house in search of ways to divert herself. She suffered profoundly from boredom. In the course of her ramblings she discovered one morning a great wooden box piled high with the yellow backed French novels “skimmed” and cast away by her mother. These occupied her for a time and when she grew tired of reading, she sought to pass the time by writing letters—addressed always to one of three people, Jean, Madame Gigon or Madame Gigon’s cousin, the Baron. Wrapped in her mother’s old-fashioned cloak of sealskin, she made her way to the foot of the drive and paid a passing boy to post them for her. She was careful always that none of them fell in the way of Irene.
She had the mulatto woman lay a fire in the drawing-room and, opening the grand piano which had fallen sadly out of tune, she spent hours in playing fragments of Chopin, Bach and a new composer called Debussy. Mingled with these were odd snatches of music hall waltzes and the bawdy, piquant ballads of the Cuirassiers. Once at the suggestion of Irene she took up knitting socks and mufflers for the families of the strikers, but the work progressed so slowly that at last she gave up in despair and, making a solitary excursion up the hill to the Town, she purchased an enormous bundle of socks and sweaters which she turned over to her sister to distribute among the suffering laborers and their families.
She slept a great deal too, until her opulent beauty showed signs of plumpness and this led her into the habit of walking each morning a dozen times around the border of the barren, deserted park. These perambulations wore a deep path in the snow, and the Mill guards, coming to expect her at a certain hour each day, took up positions inside the barrier to watch the beautiful stranger as she passed, wrapped in the antiquated sealskin coat with leg of mutton sleeves, her eyes cast down modestly. As the month advanced, they grew bolder and stared quite openly. One or two even ventured to whistle at her, but their demonstrations aroused not the slightest response, nor did they interrupt the regular hour of her exercise. They might have been owls hooting among the branches of the dead trees.
The only visitors were Hattie Tolliver and William Baines, the “old fogy” lawyer, who paid a round half-dozen calls bearing a little black bag filled with papers. With Mrs. Tolliver, he shared an attitude of supreme indifference alike toward the strikers and the guards. It appeared that he still lived in a day when there were no mills and no strikers. He was a tall withered old man with drooping white mustaches and a thick mass of vigorous white hair. He went about his business gruffly, wasting no time over details, and no emotion over sentiment. He treated both sisters in the same cold, legal manner.
The will was brief and concocted shrewdly by Julia Shane and old Mr. Baines. Nor was it complicated. The house and all the old woman’s jewels were left to her daughter Lily. There was also a sizable gift for Hattie Tolliver and a strange bequest which came as a surprise to all but old Mr. Baines. It was added in a codicil, so he said, a short time before her death. It provided for a trust fund to support Welcome House and provide a visiting nurse until Mr. Baines and the two daughters deemed these things no longer necessary.
“That,” observed the cynical Mr. Baines drily, as he read the will, “will be as long as the human race exists. I tried to persuade her against it but she would not listen. She always knew what she was doing and just what she wanted, right to the very end.”
Thus Julia Shane placed herself for all time among the enemies of the Mills.
Otherwise the property was divided evenly with an allowance made to Irene for the value of the Cypress Hill holdings.
Then Mr. Baines delivered with considerable ceremony and advice two letters, one addressed to Lily and one to Irene, which had been left in his keeping.
The letter addressed to Lily read, “I am leaving the house to you because Irene hates it. I know that she would only dispose of it at once and give the money to the church. Likewise I am leaving my jewels to you, with the exception of two rings which I gave Hattie Tolliver years ago—the emerald set with diamonds and the single big emerald. No doubt you remember them. There is no use in leaving such things to Irene. She would only sell them and spend the money to buy candles for a saint. And that is not the purpose for which God madejewels. He meant them to adorn beautiful women. Therefore I give them to you.”
And thus the amethysts set in Spanish silver, two emerald rings, seven rings set with diamonds, a ruby necklace, a festoon of pearls, a quantity of earrings of onyx, diamonds, emeralds, and rubies and a long diamond chain passed into the possession of the elder daughter.
“In worldly possessions,” the letter continued, “I have left you both wealthy. There are other possessions over which I had no control. They were left to you by your father and by me—the possessions which one cannot sell nor throw away, the possessions which are a part of you, possessions good and evil, bad and indifferent, the possessions which in the end are you yourself.
“There are some things which it is difficult to discuss, even between a mother and her daughter. I am gone now. I shall not be forced to look at you and feel shame at what you know. Yet I have always wanted to tell you, to explain to you that, after all, I was never so hard, so invincible, so hopelessly brittle as I must have seemed. You see, my dear, there are some things which one cannot control and one of these is the unconscious control over self-control—the thing which does not permit you to speak. Another is pride.
“You see there was never anything in common between your father and me, unless it was love of horses and that, after all, is not much. Before he ever saw me, he must have known more of life than I ever knew. But those things were secret and because of them, perhaps, I fell in love with him—after a fashion. I say ‘after a fashion’ because that is what it was. I was a country girl, the daughter of a farmer ... nothing else, you understand. And you cannot know what that meant in the days when the Town was a village and no one in it ever went outside the state and seldom outside the county. He was fascinating ... more fascinating than you can ever know. I married him on account of that. It was a great match. He was a wonderful lover ... not a lover like the men of the county who make such good husbands, but a lover out of another world. But that, my dear, did not make him a good husband, and in a little while it became clear that I was littlemore to him than a convenience. Even sending me to France didn’t help matters.
“It was a bad affair, but in my day when one married there was no thought of anything but staying married. So what was done was done. There was no unmaking a mistake, even less chance after you and Irene were born. He came of one race and I of another. And never once in our life together did we touch in our sympathies. It was, in short, a marriage founded upon passion alone—a despicable state of affairs which is frequently worse than amarriage de convenance, for in that there is no desire to burn itself out.... You see, I understood the affair of the Governor far better than you ever imagined.
“And so there are things descended to both of you over which I have no control. I can only ask God to be merciful. Be gentle with Irene and thank God that you are made so that life cannot hurt you. She cannot help that which she is. You see I have known and understood more than any one guessed.”
That was all. The ending was as abrupt as the manner of Julia Shane while she lived. Indeed to Lily, reading the letter, it must have seemed that her mother was still alive. She sat thoughtfully for a long time and at last tearing the letter slowly into bits, she tossed it into the drawing-room fire. Of its contents she said nothing to Irene.
The letter to Irene was brief. It read, “I leave you your money outright with no string to it, because the dead have no rights which the living are bound to respect. You may do with it as you like.... You may give it all to your beloved church, though it will be without my approval. You may do anything with it which will bring you happiness. I have prayed to God to make you happy. If you can find happiness by burying yourself, do it before you are an hour older, for life is too short to waste even an hour of happiness. But do not believe that it is such an easy thing to find.
“I have loved you, Irene, always, though I have never been able to understand you. I have suffered for you, silently and alone. I, who am dead, may tell you these things which in life I could not tell you. Only know that I cherished you always even if I did not know how to reach you. There aresome things that one cannot say. At least I—even I, your own mother—could not make you understand because I never really knew you at all. But remember always that I loved you in spite of all the wretched walls which separated even a mother from her daughter. God be with you and guide you.”
Irene, in the stillness of her bare, austere room, wept silently, the tears streaming down her battered, aging face. When she had finished reading she thrust the letter inside her dress against her thin breasts, and a little later when she descended and found the drawing-room empty she tore it into tiny bits to be consumed by the same fire which had secretly destroyed Lily’s letter a little while before.
SHE made no mention of this letter to Lily, but before she left the house late the same afternoon she went to Lily’s room, a thing which she had never done before. She found her sister lying on the bed in her darkened room.
“What is it, Irene?”
Irene standing in the doorway, hesitated for an instant.
“Nothing,” she said presently. “I just stopped to see if you were all right.” Again there was a little pause. “You aren’t afraid ... alone here in the evenings, are you?”
Out of the darkness came the sound of Lily’s laughter.
“Afraid? Lord, no! What is there to be afraid of? I’m all right.” And Irene went away, down the long drive into Halsted street which lay in thick blackness because the strikers had cut the wires of the street lights.
On the same evening Lily had dinner on a lacquer table before the fire in the drawing-room. She ate languidly, leaning back in her rosewood armchair, dividing her attention between the food and the pages of Henri Bordeaux. Save for a chair or two and the great piano, the room was still in camphor, the furniture swathed in linen coverings, the Aubusson carpet rolled up in its corner. Dawdling between the food and the book, she managed to consume an hour and a half before she finished her coffee and cigarette. Despite the aspect of the room there was something pleasant about it, a certain indefinable warmth and sense of space which the library lacked utterly.
The business of the will was virtually settled. She had announced her intention of leaving within a day or two. Two of her bags were already packed. One of them she had not troubled herself to unpack because she had not the faintest need of clothes unless she wished to dress each night for her lonely dinner as if she expected a dozen guests. And being indolent she preferred to lounge about comfortably in the black kimonoembroidered in silver with a design of wistaria. Yet in her lounging there was nothing of sloppiness. She was too much a woman of taste. She was comfortable; but she was trim and smart, from her bronze hair so well done, to the end of her neat silver-slippered toe.
When she had finished her cigarette she rose and went to the piano where she played for a long time, rather sentimentally and without her usual ecstatic dash. She played as if a yearning sadness had descended upon her. It may have been the thought of quitting the old house which had come to the end of the road. In another week its only occupants would be Sarah and Hennery. The others would have vanished.... Irene, Lily, even the black servants. There was no such thing as age or tradition. The Town had no time for such things. There was no longer room for Cypress Hill. It stood in the way of progress. The Town council was eager to buy and destroy it in order to raise on its site a new railway station, more vast and pretentious than any in the state.
It may have been this which made her sad.
Certainly her mood drove her to the depths, for she played such music as the Liebesträume and a pair of sentimental German waltzes. And gradually she played more and more softly until at length her hands slipped from the keyboard to her lap and she sat with bowed head regarding the pink tips of her polished finger-nails.
The curtains were drawn across the windows so that no sound penetrated from the outside. In the grate the fire of cannel coal crackled softly and new flames leapt up.
Presently she returned to her chair and novel, but she did not read. She remained staring into the fire in the same distracted fashion.
SHE was sitting thus when she turned at the sound of shuffling footsteps and saw Sarah coming softly toward her. The countenance of the mulatto carried a vague, indefinable expression of fear. It was gray with terror.
“What is it, Sarah?” asked Lily. “In the name of Heaven what is the matter?”
The woman trembled. “There’s trouble a-brewin’, Miss Lily,” she said. “The park is full of men. They’ve been comin’ in at the gate and they’re all over the place.” The woman hesitated again. “Hennery’s watching now. He sent me to ask if he was to send for the police?”
Lily stood up and fastened the black and silver kimono higher about her throat.
“Who are they?”
“I don’t know, Miss Lily. Hennery thinks mebbe they’re strikers. He’s put out the light at the back, so he can watch ’em without bein’ seen.”
For a moment Lily remained silent and thoughtful. Presently she said, “Put out the lights in here, Sarah. I’ll go and look myself.”
And she went out, leaving the frightened servant to extinguish the lamps.
A moment later, groping her way through the dark hallway to the servants’ quarters, she stumbled suddenly upon the terrified figure of Hennery kneeling down by a window, keeping watch.
“It’s Miss Lily, Hennery,” she said. “Don’t be frightened.”
The window was a blue rectangle against the wall of the hallway. It was a clear night but moonless, although the bright, cold sky was all powdered with glistening stars. Outside in the park, among the dead trunks of the trees, movedscores of figures black against the blue gray snow. Some of them carried lanterns of one sort or another. There were even women among them, women with shawls over their heads, wearing short heavy skirts which cleared the top of the deep snow. Behind them, the searchlights from the mill yard fingered the blue dome of the sky nervously, sweeping now up and down, now across striking the black chimneys and furnace towers, cutting them cleanly in two as if the cold rays of light were knives.
In the hallway the nervous breathing of Hennery became noisy. It was clear that something about the scene ... something which had to do with the silent, cold furnaces, the dead trees and the blackness of the moving figures aroused all the superstitious terror of the negro.
Outside the number of men increased. They appeared to be congregating now, in a spot near the deserted kennels. The lanterns moved among the trees like dancing lights above a swamp.
“It’s all right, Hennery,” said Lily presently. “It’s all right The police would only make matters worse. I suppose Miss Irene told them to meet here in the park. The police won’t let them meet anywhere else. It’s the last place they have.”
“Mebbe,” Hennery muttered, doubtfully. “Mebbe.”
The figure of the mulatto woman appeared shuffling her way along the wall of the corridor.
“The best thing to do,” said Lily softly, “is for you to go to bed and forget about it. Nothing will happen. Just don’t interfere. Forget about it. I’ll go up to my own room.... You might see that all the doors are locked.”
And with that she left the two negroes crouching on the floor of the corridor gazing with a sort of fascination at the spectacle in the barren park.
Upstairs in her own room, she drew up the chaise longue and pulled aside the curtains from the window. The glass ran to the floor so that she was able, lying down, to watch everything that took place in the park. The room was in darkness and the French traveling clock, as if to comfort her, chimed out ten as she flung herself down, covering her long limbs with a silk comforter against the chill that crept in everywhere.
Outside the strange pageant continued to grow in size and animation. Sometimes the searchlight, swinging low in its course, flashed swiftly across the park, revealing for an instant a hundred swarthy faces and as many figures wrapped in heavy coats, bits of old blanket, rags ... anything to shut out the bitter cold. Above each figure hung a little cloud of steaming breath, a soul hovering above a body. There were negroes among them,—the negroes doubtless, whom she had seen working in the choking fumes of the acid vats.
Yet none of the figures held any individuality. They might have been automatons. Figures in a single mob, none of them possessed a distinct personality. All this was welded into one vague mass, which carried a threat of anger and violence. The terror of Hennery was not altogether beyond conception. They kept moving about too in a restless uncertain fashion among the dead trees and deserted borders. In the niches of the dead hedge the figures of the Venus of Cydnos and the Apollo Belvedere gleamed darkly.
And as Lily watched, the light in her dark eyes brightened slowly and steadily. She became like one hypnotized. She began to breathe more quickly as if the old excitement, against which she was so powerless, had entered her blood. The soft white hand holding the back of the chaise longue trembled a little.
Slowly the moving figures gathered into a black throng at the side of the kennels. Somewhere in their midst a light began to glow, increasing slowly in volume until the tongues of red flame showed above the black heads of the mob. They had built a great fire for warmth, and near it some one had set up a barrel for the speakers to stand on. By the light of the flames she was able to see that the first speaker was a little man, rather thin and wiry like a bearded gnome, who danced about a great deal, waving his arms and legs. His manner was explosive. It was impossible to hear above the flames through the heavy glass of the window what he was saying, but clearly it produced an effect. The mob began to churn about and wave its lanterns. Sometimes the sound of shouts and cries vaguely penetrated the darkened room.
At last the little man finished and was lifted down by a scoreof hands. More wood was thrown on the fire and the red flames hungrily chased a shower of sparks high up among the dead branches of the trees. A moment later a second man climbed to the top of the barrel. He was an enormous fellow, a veritable giant who towered far above the mob. At the sight of him the strikers cheered wildly. Lily, from her point of vantage, must have recognized in him something vaguely familiar ... the merest suggestion of memory in the sudden, eloquent gestures, the easy powerful grace with which he balanced himself as he spoke, the same grace she had seen one afternoon in the great shed beneath the hill. More wood was thrown upon the fire. The flames leaped higher and in the wild light, doubt was no longer possible. It was Krylenko who harangued, feverishly and desperately, the threatening sullen mob.
INSIDE the warm room, Lily raised herself slowly and felt her way to the closet where she took down the old sealskin coat with the leg of mutton sleeves. With this thrown about her shoulders, she went back to the window, cautiously unfastened the clasp and stepped out upon the snow covered roof of the wrought iron piazza. The snow was deep and the silver slippered feet sank to the ankles. But of this she seemed to take no notice. As if fascinated, she leaned close against the bricks, sheltering herself from the wind, and stood listening.
Krylenko addressed the strikers in some foreign tongue which might have been Russian or Polish. He spoke in a clear strong voice that rose and fell with the sincerity of an overpowering emotion. It was impossible to know what he was saying, yet the effect was tremendous. The man was a born leader. In that moment he could have led the mob where he would.
And presently he began to speak Italian ... rather haltingly and with an air of desperate frustration. This Lily was able to understand in part. He urged them not to yield. He plead with them to fight to the end. The victory, he said, was within....
Above the crackling of the fire and the voice of the speaker the air was ripped suddenly by a solitary rifle shot. Then another and another in quick succession, until the air became alive and vibrant with the sound of guns. From the throng rose a solitary scream, followed by a groan or two and the confused, animal cries of a mob suddenly stricken by a panic. The figure on the barrel disappeared, engulfed by a swarming mass of terrified humanity. Lanterns were flung to the ground and trampled. One or two exploded in bursts of red flame. The little park was alive with running figures, women in shawls, men in rags. On the gray blue snow by the desertedkennels lay a solitary black figure. By the arbor where the wistaria had once flourished was another which stirred faintly.
Lily, leaning against the dead vines on the house, understood what had happened. The Mill guards, from the security of the barrier, had fired upon the helpless mob. The innocent plan of Irene had been, after all, nothing but a trap.
Something struck the bricks above her head with a sharp spatter and bits of mortar fell into her hair. Quickly she slipped through the tall window back into the room and waited.
The little park was empty now, so empty that if it had not been for the embers in the snow and black still figure lying near by, one might have believed that there had been no mob at all, no fire and no savage cries of terror. Lily remained standing inside the window as if she were unable to move. The dying embers appeared to exert an overpowering fascination ... the dying embers and the still black figure in the snow.
Presently there crept out from the shelter of the kennels a man, bending low to the ground as he moved. Cautiously he made his way to the figure in the snow, halting there for a moment to fumble with the ragged coat for some sign of life, risking his life in full sight of the guards. Another shot rang out and then another, and the man still crouching low to the ground ran toward the shelter of the big house. He came nearer and nearer until, as he crossed the drive, he was no longer a unit in the mob. He became an individual. It was Krylenko.
A second later he disappeared beneath the edge of piazza roof and Lily lay down once more on the chaise longue. She was still trembling. It may have been the cold.
Outside the night once more settled back into a dreadful stillness. The searchlights fingered the sky with a new agitation. The house itself grew still as death. The only sound was the faint, irregular, untraceable creaking which afflicts old houses in the midst of the night. The French traveling clock struck eleven and at the same time a new sound, not at all like the distant unearthly creaking, came faintly through the open door of Lily’s room. It was an indistinct scraping sound as if some one were trying a key in a lock.
LILY sat up, listening. The sound was repeated and presently there followed the noise of a door being opened slowly and cautiously. Lily rose and made her way to the dressing table where she pulled the bell. Once she pulled, and then again and again. There was no response. Either the servants were asleep or too terrified to answer. She gave the bell a final pull and when the only answer was silence, she took from the dressing table an electric torch and from the drawer of her carved desk a tiny pistol with a handle of mother of pearl which had been her mother’s. Then she made her way quietly into the hall until she reached the top of the stairway where she leaned over the rail and flashed the light.
The glare illuminated all the lower hall, lighting up the familiar carved chest, the straight-backed chair, the crystal chandelier, the mirror. Everything was the same save that on the chest with his head bowed and resting on his hands in an attitude of despair, sat Krylenko, hatless, his coat all torn, the blood streaming down the side of his face.
It appeared that he was weak and dazed, for he remained in this same position for a long time, failing to notice even the bright shower of light which, without warning, drenched the hall. When at last he stirred, it was to lean back wearily against the wall and say in a low voice, “I have used the key, Miss Irene.”
At the sound Lily ran down the long stairs, more rapidly than she had descended them in all the years she had lived in the house. She soared above the polished wood, until she stood suddenly by his side. She bent over him and touched his shoulder.
“It is not Miss Irene ... I am Lily,” she said. “Lily ... Miss Irene’s sister.”
With one arm Krylenko wiped the blood from his eyes.
“Then you don’t know me,” he said weakly. “I am not a thief ... breaking in.”
The little revolver Lily placed beside him on the chest, “I know you,” she said. “I have seen you ... you are Krylenko.” She placed one arm beneath his. “Come,” she said, “this is no place for you. There is a divan in the drawing room. Come and lie down there. I’ll fetch some whiskey.”
With an air of great weariness the man managed to gain his feet and, leaning upon her, he made his way preceded by the little circle of white light from Lily’s torch across the polished floor into the drawing-room. Lily was tall but Krylenko towered above her like a giant.
She made him comfortable, piling the brocade pillows carelessly beneath his bloody head. Then she went out and as she left, there rose behind her the sound of a heart breaking sigh, like the cry of a defeated, sobbing child.
After a little while she returned bearing a white basin filled with water, a pair of linen pillow cases and a small silver flask. Presently he sat up.
It was the first time she had seen him since that afternoon in the Mill shed when Willie Harrison, fumbling with the ruby clasp of his watch chain, proposed to her for the last time. He had changed. He was older. Experience had traced its record in the fine lines about his eyes and mouth. The crudeness of the massive head had likewise undergone a change, giving place to a more certain modeling and a new dignity. Where there had once been a certain shapelessness of feature, there was now a firmness of line, a determination in the fine mouth, the strong nose and the high massive forehead.
Lily, tearing the linen pillow cases into long strips, watched him narrowly.
The wavy blond hair, where it was not stained with blood, clung against the damp forehead. Where the coat was torn and the dark flannel shirt ripped from the throat, the powerful muscles of the arm and shoulder lay exposed. The fair skin was as white as Lily’s own soft body. The man’s whole figure carried an air of freedom, of a certain fierce desire to burst through the shabby, stained clothing.
All at once he raised his head and looked about him. The color returned a little way into his face.
“The blinds,” he said, “are they shut?”
“Yes,” said Lily. “You are safe here.”
She had thrown off the old sealskin coat and sat by him clad in the black and silver kimono, seductive, beautiful, perfect, save for the tips of her silver slippers all soaked by the melted snow. The kimono had come open at the neck and left her white soft throat exposed. Krylenko was watching her now in a puzzled fashion. He behaved almost as if she terrified him in some new and indefinable way.
“I let myself in with a key,” he told her. “A key Miss Irene gave me. She told me to use it if ever I had to hide.” He paused for a moment and took a second drink from the flask. “You see, I am safe here because it is the last place they would look for me. They would never look for me in the house of a rich man. They wouldn’t expect to find me in the house of an American, a wealthy lady.”
He looked up at her in a singularly straightforward fashion,
“I suppose,” he said, “you too are on our side.”
Lily dipping a bit of linen into the basin did not reply for a moment. At last she said, “I’d never thought about it one way or another until now. It doesn’t matter, I suppose. But you needn’t fear what I’ll do. I’d rather haveyouhere than the police.”
“If they caught me now,” he continued weakly, “they’d hang me. I wouldn’t have a chance with Judge Weissman and the rest. Any jury in the Town would hang me. You see there were men killed out there in the park ... men on both sides. That fellow over by the fire ... he’s dead. I stopped to make certain. I didn’t kill anybody myself, but that makes no difference. It’s me they’re after. They’ve been waiting for a chance like this.”
He spoke English with a curious lack of accent, for the chaste Irene as a teacher was thorough. He spoke it deliberately and rather carefully to be sure, but without serious faults. His manner was neither shy nor awkward. It was the manner of a man unused to women’s company, of a man who had never before addressed a great lady; for Irene could not properly becalled either a woman or a great lady. She was, rather, the embodiment of an idea.
“You’re safe,” said Lily. “You may depend on it. I, myself, will see to it. I don’t love the police or the Harrisons or Judge Weissman ... I don’t love any of them.” She drew her chair nearer. “Now lie down and I’ll bathe your head.”
He lay down and instantly sat up again. “My head!” he protested. “It’s all bloody.... It’ll spoil everything.” He picked up one of the pillows. “See, I’ve done it already. They’re covered with blood.”
Lily smiled at him in her charming fashion, an imperceptible, secret smile. She behaved as if she were entertaining a great man, an ambassador or a rich banker, as if she were intent only upon making him comfortable, at ease.
“It makes no difference,” she said. “In a few days there will be no one to use the pillows. There are times, you know, when such things don’t matter. Lie down,” she commanded. “One must know when such things are of no account. It is part of knowing how to live.”
Protesting, Krylenko laid his great body back gently and she bent over him, first removing the rings from her finger and placing them in a glittering heap upon the lacquer table. He closed his eyes with a sigh and she washed away with great gentleness the blood from his hair, from the side of his face. Her soft white fingers swept across the tanned face, then lower to where the throat became white and across the smooth, hard muscles of the shoulder until at last there was in her touch more of the caress of a woman than the ministering of a nurse.
“It is not serious,” she said in a low voice. “The bullet only cut the skin.”
She took the strips of linen and bound them with the same gentle, caressing fingers round and round his head. And presently she discovered that he was still watching her in a curious embarrassed fashion. When she had finished the dressing, she bathed the deep cut on his shoulder and bound it carefully.
At length he sat up once more. A sudden change came over him. His blue eyes grew dark, almost clouded.
“You are a good nurse,” he said, and took another drink from the silver flask.
Lily moved about, clearing away the blood stained cloths and the bowl of reddish water. The soft glow of the lamp captured the silver of her kimono and fixed it as she moved with a flashing light. And all the time Krylenko regarded her with a strange look of awe, as if he had never before seen a woman.
“Strange,” she said presently, “that we should meet like this. You, who have never seen me before.”
Krylenko stirred and ran one strong hand awkwardly over the back of the other. “I’ve seen you before ... twice ... No ... three times. Once on that day you came to the Mills, once in the street in your carriage and once”—he looked up—“once in this room, right here. You were with the boss that time ... dancing with him.”
Lily laughed softly. She must have remembered the shameless gown of chartreuse green. “I’ll never be dancing with him again. I doubt if I ever see him.”
Krylenko regarded her quizzically. “But he is rich.... Don’t rich women marry rich men?” And he finished with a puzzled grunt of inquiry.
“Yes,” replied Lily. “It’s because I’m rich that I wouldn’t marry him.” It must have occurred to her then how wide was the chasm which separated her world from Krylenko’s. Still he failed to understand.
“That’s no reason,” she continued, “for marrying him ... a poor thing like that.”
She sat down and drew her chair quite close to the rosewood sofa, laughing at the same time. Clearly the whole adventure struck her as bizarre, ridiculous ... even unreal. Yet she trembled as if she were shivering with cold, and her laugh carried a vague hint of hysteria. She leaned forward and began to stroke his aching head gently.
After a long awkward pause, she said, “Miss Irene will be home any time now.”
“Yes.” And Krylenko gave a sort of grunt. Unmistakably there was a crudeness about him. He was gauche, awkward; yet there was in his manner a quality of power, of domination which had its origin somewhere in the dim ages, when therewere no drawing-rooms and no books of etiquette. He had a manifest self-possession. He did not become obsequious before this great lady as Judge Weissman and other men in stations beneath her had done. He treated her, after all, as his equal. He was even a little arrogant; a trifle scornful of her wealth.
“Miss Irene,” he observed presently, “is a noble woman. You understand she gives up her life to my people. Do you know where she is now?” His voice was raised, his manner excited. “She’s looking after the fellows that got hurt. There was a woman, too. I saw her ... shot through the arm.... Ah, Miss Irene is a saint. You know she could go anywhere in the Flats. No one would touch her.”
The whole speech was touched with a tone of simple adoration. The essence of him was a great, a really profound simplicity.
“She works hard,” said Lily. “She works hard. She cares for nothing else.” By the watch on her white wrist it was midnight. “So that is why she is late,” she added.
“There will be much work for her to-night,” said Krylenko. He kept watching Lily in the same furtive fashion, his gaze wandering to the lovely line of her bare white throat.
Again there was an awkward pause. “You don’t know how much she does,” he said presently. “You don’t know what life is in the Flats. You sit here in a warm house ... with silk and pillows and good food. You don’t know,” he said bitterly. “You don’t know!”
Until now their conversation had been broken, disjointed, awkward, as if circumstance compelled them to talk about something. Now for the first time, a certain fire entered the Russian’s voice. Lily kept silent, watching him with her great burning eyes. She still trembled.
“Maybe you think I like working twelve hours a day in that hot shed like you saw me. Maybe you think I don’t want time to read and think.” The man was working himself into a kind of frenzy. “You don’t know.... You don’t know.... And then they shoot us down like pigs.” He leaned forward and raised at Lily a strong finger. “I come here from Russia. I comehere because I could not live in Russia.... My father ... My father ... He was shot by the Cossacks. I come here because they tell me that in America you are free and have a good life. And what do they give me? They make me work twelve hours in a hot shed. They put me into a filthy house. They say, you must not complain. You must do as we say. We will not pay you more. We will not let you live like a man. You are Hunkies!... You are dirt! You did not have to come here. But all the same, they want us. They send men to Russia to tell us great things about America so we will come here because they need men for the Mills ... men to feed to the furnaces like coal ... to make a few men rich.” He sighed bitterly and buried his face in his hands. “And now they shoot us like the Cossacks shot my father in Russia.... I came here full of hope and peace ... only to be shot like my father in Russia!”
In his excitement he forgot the perfect English Irene had taught him. His blue eyes flashed and his face grew pale once more.
“No.... They can take me.... They can hang me.... Let them! I will not go away.... It is not America or Russia that counts.... It is all humanity!... Christians.... Bah!” He spat suddenly upon the polished floor. And all at once he pitched back again among the pillows, weak and fainting. The bandage slipped from his wounded head over one eye.
Quickly Lily bent over him. She poured more whiskey between his lips and refastened the bandage. Then she settled herself to chafing his strong wrists and rubbing his forehead in the old caressing motion with a delicate, white hand that trembled beyond control. A queer light came into her dark eyes.
Presently he sighed and looked up at her. “I am sorry,” he said, “to bother a fine lady like you. If it had been Miss Irene.” He closed his eyes suddenly. “I have been hungry, you know. We haven’t even enough food in the Flats.” Then he took her hand and pressed it in a naive, grateful fashion. “I am sorry, you know ...” he murmured gently.
She did not move. She remained there stroking his head. “I know.... I understand.... You must lie still. Be quiet,” she said softly. For a long time they remained thus,and presently Krylenko, opening his eyes looked up at her with a puzzled expression. “You are not the same as Miss Irene,” he said in a low voice. “You are different ... very different.”
To this she made no reply. Gently the motion of her hand ceased. A pool of silence enveloped them.You are not the same as Miss Irene.
THE minutes passed and then suddenly, sharply, there arose a loud uproar, the sound of angry knocking and a hand rattling the big outer door. Krylenko sat up white and still. Neither of them moved. The knocking continued, punctuated now by shouts.
“It’s the police!” said Lily, and stood up. “Come with me. Bring the bowl ... the bandages!”
Krylenko stood by helplessly. It was Lily who arranged everything with a sudden clairvoyance which seemed to have overtaken her at the instant of the knocking. She turned the brocade cushions so that the bloody side was concealed and, gathering up the bandages, she led the way through the hall into the corridor where an hour earlier Hennery and the mulatto woman had crouched in fascinated terror. At last she turned into a store room piled high with boxes. Here she led him to a great box in the corner where she halted.
“I’ll hide you here,” she said. “They’ll never find you. It is full of books.” And together, with flying hands, they emptied the box. Krylenko climbed in and assumed a crouching position. He was buried beneath the books which Lily hurled into the box in bunches of three or four, in armfuls. At last he lay completely hidden beneath a great heap of yellow backed novels ... the novels of Paul Marguerite, Marcel Prévost, Paul Bourget, Collette Willy ... the novels that Julia Shane had “skimmed” and cast aside, the novels which to her covenanting bloodl’amourmade so tiresome.
As Lily ran through the corridor the knocking increased in violence, punctuated by shouts of “Hello, in there!” and “Open the door,” uttered in a gruff bass voice. As she ran she wrapped the kimono high about her throat, and as she passed the carved chest she picked up the tiny pearl handled pistol. Then she turned the key quickly and opened the doorstanding with the pistol in one hand and the yellow backed Les Anges Gardiens in the other.
Outside on the snow covered piazza stood a half dozen men in the uniforms of the constabulary. At the apparition of the beautiful woman in the doorway they remained for an instant silent, startled.
“What is it you want?” she asked.
One of the men, a burly fellow with a brutal jaw stepped forward. “We want to search the house. We’re looking for a man.”
“What man?” asked Lily.
“Never mind,” came the gruff answer. “You wouldn’t know him. He’s nothing to you. His name is Krylenko.”
“There’s no one in the house but me and the servants.” Her voice trembled a little before the menacing group on the piazza.
“That’s all right,” said the man. “We’re going to see for ourselves. We saw him come in here.”
He began to edge his way slowly toward the open door and as he moved the pearl handled pistol raised slowly, menacingly, in an even tempo with his slow insolent advance.
“You cannot come in,” said Lily in a slow, firm voice. The pistol was level now with the heart of the intruder. “I’ve told you there is no one here. You might, it seems to me, take the word of a lady. I’ve been here all the evening and I would know....” She raised the yellow backed novel in a brief little gesture. “I’ve been reading. There is no one here but myself.”
The man growled. “That’s all right but we want to look for ourselves.” There was a painful pause. “We’re going to have a look,” he added with determination.
When Lily spoke again there was a new note in her voice, a sudden timbre of determination, a hint of unreasonable, angry, feminine stubborness which appeared to awe the intruder.
“Oh, no, you’re not,” she said. “It is my house. You have no right to enter it. You have no warrant. It is mine. You cannot enter it.” And then, as if by an afterthought she added, “Even my sister is not here. I don’t know this Krylenko. I never saw him.”
The man, it seemed, was baffled. If the woman in the doorway had been the wife of a workman, a simple Italian or Slovak, he undoubtedly would have brushed her aside, shot her if necessary, trampled her under foot the way his comrades had trampled to death the old Polish woman in Halsted street at the foot of the drive. But the woman in the doorway was a lady. She was not a poor foreigner. She was more American than himself. Behind her in the shadows gleamed dully a silver mounted mirror, a chandelier of sparkling crystal. Her fine, beautiful body was clad in a garment of black and silver. On her fingers glittered rings. All these things meant wealth, and wealth meant power. The man, after all, had only the soul of a policeman, a soul at once bullying and servile. For him these symbols might spell ruin. Besides, the woman was hysterically stubborn, strangely unafraid ... so unafraid that her courage carried a hint of suspicious origin. He did not brush her aside nor did he shoot her.
“It’s no use,” she said. “If you return with a warrant, all right. I can do nothing. For the present, it is my house.”
The man turned away and began a low conversation with his companions. He had a sheepish air, and as he talked the door was closed suddenly and locked, shutting him out in the darkness, leaving him no choice in the matter. For a time the little group of men conversed angrily, and presently they went away in defeat down the long drive.
So Lily had placed herself on the side of the strikers ... against the Town, against the Mills. She stood now with all her family, with Irene, with the dead Julia Shane, with Hattie Tolliver and her savage umbrella.