THE visit of Ellen was extended from one night to three. The piano was a beautiful one, far better than the harsh-toned upright in the Tolliver parlor in the Town, and Ellen gladly played for hours with only Lily, lying among the cushions, and old Julia Shane, lost in her own fantastic memories, for an audience.
On the third night, long after twelve o’clock, as Lily and her cousin climbed the long stairway, the older woman said, “I have some clothes, Ellen, that you may have if you like. They have been worn only a few times and they are more beautiful than anything you can find in America.”
The girl did not answer until they had reached Lily’s room and closed the door behind them. Her face was flushed with the silent struggle between a hunger for beautiful things and a fantastic pride, born of respectable poverty. In some way, her cousin sensed the struggle.
“They are yours if you want them,” she said. “You can try them on if you like at any rate.”
Ellen smiled gratefully. “I’d like to,” she said timidly. “Thank you.”
While the girl took off her shirtwaist and skirt, Lily busied herself among the shadows of her closet. When she returned she bore across her arms three gowns, one dull red, one black and one yellow. The girl stood waiting shyly, clad only in her cheap underclothing coarsened and yellowed by many launderings.
“You must take those things off,” said Lily. “I’ll give you others.” And she brought out undergarments of white silk which Ellen put on, shivering a little in the chill of the big room.
Then Lily took the pale yellow gown and slipped it over her cousin’s head. It belonged to no period of fashion. Ithung from the shoulders in loose folds of shining silk, clinging close to the girl’s slim body. There was a silver girdle which fastened over the hips. Ellen turned to regard herself in the mirror.
“But wait,” said Lily, laughing, “you’ve only begun. We’ve got to change your hair and do away with that ridiculous rat. Why do you spoil such beautiful hair with a wad of old wire?”
She took out the pins and let the hair fall in a clear, black shower. It was beautiful hair of the thick, sooty-black color that goes with fair skin and blue eyes. It fell in great coils over the pale yellow gown. Lily, twisting it into loose strands, held it against the light of the lamp.
“Beautiful hair,” she said, “like the hair of Rapunzel.”
Then she twisted it low about Ellen’s head, loosely so that the light, striking the free ends created a kind of halo. With a supreme gesture of scorn, she tossed the “rat” into the scrap basket.
“There,” she said, turning her cousin to face the long mirror. “There.... Behold the great pianist ... the great artist.”
In the magical mirror stood a tall lovely woman. The ridiculous awkward girl had vanished; it was another creature who stood there transfigured and beautiful. And in her frank blue eyes, there was a new look, something of astonishment mingled with determination. The magical mirror had done its work. From that moment the girl became a stranger to the Town. She had come of age and slipped all unconsciously into a new world.
With shining eyes she turned and faced her cousin.
“May I really have the clothes, Lily?”
“Of course, you silly child!”
And Lily smiled because the clothes had never been worn at all. They were completely new.
AT breakfast on the following morning, the mulatto woman laid before Lily’s plate a cablegram. It read simply, “Jean has measles.”
Trunks were packed with desperate haste. The entire household was thrown into an uproar, all save old Julia Shane who continued to move about with the same unruffled calm, with the same acceptancy of whatever came to her. At midnight Lily boarded the express for the East. It was not until the middle of the week, when the drawing-room had been wrapped once more in cheesecloth and scented with camphor, that the Town learned of Lily’s sudden return to Paris. It was impossible, people decided, to calculate the whims of her existence.
Three months after her sudden departure, she sat one early spring afternoon on the terrace of her garden in the Rue Raynouard, when old Madame Gigon, in a bizarre gown of maroon poplin, with the fat and aging Fifi at her heels, brought her a letter from Julia Shane.
Tearing it open, Lily began to read,
“Of course the biggest bit of news is Ellen’s escapade. She has eloped with a completely commonplace young man named Clarence Murdock, a traveling salesman for an electrical company, who I believe was engaged to May Seton ... the Setons who own the corset factory east of the Harrison Mills. They have gone to New York to live and now, I suppose, Ellen will have her chance to go on with her music. Knowing Ellen, I am certain she does not love this absurd man. As for Hattie she is distraught and feels that Ellen has committed some terrible sin. Nothing I can say is able to alter her mind. To be sure, the fellow has nothing to commend him, but I’m willing to let Ellen work it out. She’s no fool. None of our family is that. Hattie thinks it was the gowns you gaveEllen which turned her head. But I suspect that Ellen saw this young drummer simply as a means of escape ... a way out of all her troubles. Of course the Town is in a buzz. Miss Abercrombie says nothing so unrespectable has happened in years. More power to Ellen ...!”
For a moment Lily put down the letter and sat thinking. In the last sentence there was a delicious echo of that wicked chuckle which had marked the departure of the discomfited Judge Weissman and Mrs. Julis Harrison from Cypress Hill ... the merest echo of triumph over another mark in the long score of the old against the new.
For a time Lily sat listening quietly to the distant sounds from the river ... the whistling of the steamer bound for St. Cloud, the faint clop-clop of hoofs in the Rue de Passy and the ugly chug-chug of one of the new motor wagons which were to be seen with growing frequency along the boulevards. Whatever she was thinking, her thoughts were interrupted suddenly by a little boy, very handsome and neat, in a sailor suit, who dragged behind him across the flagged terrace a stuffed toy bear. He climbed into her lap and began playing with the warm fur piece she had thrown over her shoulders.
“Mama,” he cried. “J’ai faim.... Je veux un biscuit!”
Lily gathered him into her arms, pressing his soft face against hers. “Bien, petit ... va chercher la bonne Madame Gigon.”
She seized him more closely and kissed him again and again with all the passion of a savage, miserly possession.
“Je t’aime, Mama ... tellement,” whispered the little fellow, and climbed down to run into the big house in search of kind Madame Gigon and her cakes. The gaze of Lily wandered after his sturdy little body and her dark eyes grew bright with a triumphant love.
When he had disappeared through one of the tall windows, she took up the letter once more and continued her reading.
“Irene,” wrote her mother, “seems more content now that you are gone. I confess that I understand her less and less every day. Sometimes I think she must be not quite well ... a little touched perhaps by a religious mania. She is giving her life, her strength, her soul, to these foreigners in the Flats.What for? Because it brings her peace, I suppose. But still I cannot understand her. There is one man ... Krylenko, by name, I believe, whom she has made into a sort of disciple. I only hope that news of him won’t reach the Town. God knows what sort of a tale they would make out of it. I’m afraid too of her becoming involved in the troubles at the Mills. Some day there will be open warfare in the Flats.”
When Lily had finished reading, she tore the letter slowly into bits after a custom of long standing and tossed the torn fragments into one of the stone urns that bordered the terrace.... Then she rose and pulling her fur cloak closer about her began to walk up and down restlessly as if some profound and stirring memory had taken possession of her. The rain began to fall gently and darkness to descend upon the garden. In the house behind her the servants lighted the lamps. Still she paced up and down tirelessly.
After a time she went down from the terrace to the gravel path of the garden and there continued her walking until the gate in the garden wall opened suddenly and a man stepped in, his erect soldierly figure black against the lamps of the Rue de Passy. It was the Baron, Madame Gigon’s cousin. He came toward her quickly and took her into his arms, embracing her passionately for a long time in silence.
When at last he freed her, a frown crossed his dark face, and he said, “What is it? What is distracting you? Are you troubled about something?”
Lily thrust her arm through his and leaned against him, but she avoided his gaze. “Nothing,” she said. “It’s nothing.”
And thus they walked through the rain until they reached the pavilion designed by Lenôtre which stood at a distance from the house. Here they halted and the Baron, taking from his pocket a key, unlocked the door and they went in silently.
Once inside, he kissed her again and presently he said, “What is it? There is something between us. There is a difference.”
“Nothing,” she murmured stubbornly. “It is nothing. You must be imagining things.”
ALL that Julia Shane had written her daughter was true enough. The escapade of Ellen shocked the Town, not altogether unwillingly however, for it opened a new field for talk and furnished one more evidence of the wildness of a family which had never been content with conformity, a clan which kept bursting its bonds and satisfying in a barbarous fashion its hunger after life.
When Hattie Tolliver, tearful and shaken, came to her aunt for consolation, Julia Shane received her in the vast bedroom she occupied above the Mill yard. The old woman said, “Come, Hattie. You’ve no reason to feel badly. Ellen is a good girl and a wise one. It’s the best thing that could have happened, if you’ll only see it in that light.”
But Mrs. Tolliver, so large, so energetic, so emotional, was hurt. She kept on sobbing. “If only she had told me!... It’s as if she deceived me.”
At which Julia Shane smiled quietly to herself. “Ah, that’s it, Hattie. She couldn’t have told you, because she knew you so well. She knew that you couldn’t bear to have her leave you. The girl was wise. She chose the better way. It’s your pride that’s hurt and the feeling that, after all, there was something stronger in Ellen than her love for you.” She took the red work-stained hand of her niece in her thin, blue-veined one and went on, “We have to come to that, Hattie ... all of us. It’s only natural that a time comes when children want to be free. It’s like the wild animals ... the foxes and the wolves. We aren’t any different. We’re just animals too, helpless in the rough hands of Nature. She does with us as She pleases.”
But Mrs. Tolliver continued to sob helplessly. It was the first time in her life that she had refused to accept in the end what came to her.
“You don’t suppose I wanted Lily to go and live in Paris?You don’t suppose I wanted to be left here with Irene who is like a changeling to me? It’s only what is bound to come. If Lilydidhelp Ellen it was only because all youth is in conspiracy against old age. All children are in a conspiracy against their parents. When we are old, we are likely to forget the things that counted so much with us when we were young. We take them for granted. We see them as very small troubles after all, but that’s because we are looking at them from a long way off. The old are selfish, Hattie ... more selfish than you imagine. They envy even the life and the hunger of the young.”
For a moment the old woman paused, regarding her red-eyed niece silently. “No,” she continued presently, “You don’t understand what I’ve been saying, yet it’s all true ... as true as life itself. Besides, life is hard for our children, Hattie. It isn’t as simple as it was for us. Their grandfathers were pioneers and the same blood runs in their veins, only they haven’t a frontier any longer. They stand ... these children of ours ... with their backs toward this rough-hewn middle west and their faces set toward Europe and the East. And they belong to neither. They are lost somewhere between.”
But Mrs. Tolliver understood none of this. With her there were no shades of feeling, no variations of duty. To her a mother and child were mother and child whether they existed in the heart of Africa or in the Faubourg St. Germain. After tea she went home, secretly nursing her bruised heart. She told her husband that no woman in the world had ever been called upon to endure so much.
As for Charles Tolliver, his lot was not the happiest. At the next election, despite the money which old Julia Shane poured into his campaign, he was defeated. His ruin became a fact. The Mills were too strong. The day of the farmer was past. After floundering about helplessly in an effort to make ends meet, he took at last a place as clerk in one of the banks controlled by his enemy Judge Weissman ... a cup of humiliation which he drank for the sake of his wife and children, goaded by the sheer necessity of providing food and shelter for them. So he paid for his error, not of honesty but of judgment. Because he was honest, he was sacrificed to theMills. He settled himself, a man of forty-five no longer young, behind the brass bars of the Farmer’s Commercial Bank, a name which somehow carried a sense of irony because it had swallowed up more than one farm in its day.
In the Town tremendous changes occurred with the passing of years. There was a panic which threatened the banks. There were menacing rumors of violence and discontent in the Flats; and these things affected the Town enormously, as depressions in the market for wheat and cattle had once affected it. No longer was there any public market. On the Square at the top of Main Street, the old scales for weighing hay and grain were removed as a useless symbol of a buried past, a stumbling block in the way of progress. Opposite the site once occupied by the scales, the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks purchased the Grand Western Hotel and made it into a club house with a great elk’s head in cast iron over the principal doorway. Through its windows, it was possible in passing to see fat men with red faces, coats off and perspiring, while they talked of progress and prosperity and the rising place of the Town among the cities of the state. One by one the old landmarks of the Square vanished, supplanted by “smokehouses,” picture palaces with fronts like frosted pastries, candy shops run by Greeks, a new element in the growing alien population of the Town. On the far side of the square the tower of the courthouse, itself a monument to graft, was at last completed to the enrichment of Judge Weissman and other politicians who had to do with the contract.
In the early evening after the sun had disappeared, the figure of the Judge himself might be seen, ambulating about the square, hugging the shadows; for the heat was bad for a man so red-faced and apoplectic. For all his avoidance of the sun, he walked arrogantly, with the air of one proud of his work. When he had tired of the promenade, it was his custom to return to the Elks’ club to squeeze his body between the arms of a rocking chair and sit watching the passers-by and the noisy bustle of trade. At such moments one might hear the sound of money dripping into tills as one heard the distant sound of the Mills which in the evening penetrated as far as the square itself. He gloated openly over the prosperity to which he hadcontributed so much. He went his way, petty, dishonest, corrupt ... traits which even his enemies forgave him because he had “done so much to make the Town what it was.” Not since the piggish obstinacy of Charles Tolliver had he been thwarted, and even in the matter of the taxes the sympathy of the Town had been on his side, because the decision in the case had delayed the building of new furnaces for more than two years and thus halted the arrival of hundreds of new alien workers who would have made the Town the third largest in the state. Charles Tolliver, most people believed, had been piggish and obstinate. He had put himself between his own Town and its booming prosperity.
IN the Flats, as the years passed, new tides of immigrants swept in, filling the abominable dirty houses to suffocation, adding to the garbage and refuse which already clogged the sluggish waters of the Black Fork. The men worked twelve hours and sometimes longer in the Mills. The women wore shawls over their heads and bore many children, most of whom died amid the smoke and filth. Here the Town overlooked one opportunity. With a little effort it might have saved the lives of these babies to feed to the Mills later on; but it was simpler to import more cheap labor from Europe. Let those die who could not live.
And none of these new residents learned to speak English. They clung to their native tongues. They were simply colonists transplanted, unchanged and unchanging, from Poland, Ukrainia, South Italy and the Balkans—nothing more, nothing less. The Town had nothing to do with them. They were pariahs, outcasts, “Hunkies,” “Dagos,” and the Town held it against them that they did not learn English and join in the vast chorus of praise to prosperity.
But trouble became more frequent nowadays. Willie Harrison no longer dared take his exercise by walking alone up the hill to the Town. The barricade of barbed wire was complete now. It surrounded the Mills on all sides, impregnable, menacing. It crowded the dead hedges of arbor vitæ that enclosed the park at Shane’s Castle. There had been no need for it yet. It was merely waiting.
Welcome House, the tentative gesture of a troubled civic conscience, went down beneath the waves of prosperity. Volunteer citizens no longer ventured into the troubled area of the Flats. Money ceased to flow in for its support. It dropped at length from the rank of an institution supported by a community to the rank of a school supported by one woman andone man. The woman was Irene Shane. The man was Stepan Krylenko. The woman was rich. The man was a Mill worker who toiled twelve hours a day and gave six hours more to the education of his fellow workers.
The years and the great progress had been no more kind to Irene than they had been to the Town. She aged ... dryly, after the fashion of spinsters who have diverted the current of life from its wide course into a single narrow channel of feverish activity. She grew thinner and more pale. There were times when the blue veins showed beneath the transparent skin like the rivers of a schoolboy’s map. Her pale blond hair lost its luster and grew thin and straight, because she had not time and even less desire to care for it. Her hands were red and worn with the work she did in helping the babies of the Flats to live. She dressed the same, always in a plain gray suit and ugly black hat, which she replaced when they became worn and shabby. But in replacing them, she ignored the changing styles. The models remained the same, rather outmoded and grotesque, so that in the Town they rewarded her for her work among the poor by regarding her as queer and something of a figure of fun.
Yet she retained a certain virginal look, and in her eye there was a queer exalted light. Since life is impossible without compensations of one sort or another, it is probable that Irene had her share of these. She must have found peace in her work and satisfaction in the leader she molded from the tow haired boy who years before had shouted insults at her through the wrought iron gates of Shane’s Castle.
For Krylenko had grown into a remarkable man. He spoke English perfectly. He worked with Irene, a leader among his own people. He taught the others. He read Jean Jacques Rousseau, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, and even Voltaire ... books which Irene bought him in ignorance of their flaming contents. At twenty-five Stepan Krylenko was a leader in the district, and in the Town there were men of property who had heard vaguely of him as a disturber, an anarchist, a madman, a Socialist, a criminal.
Although Irene seldom penetrated the Town any longer and her mother never left the confines of Shane’s Castle, theiraffairs still held an interest for those who had known Cypress Hill in the days of its vanished splendor. For women who had long since ceased to take any part in the life of a community, the names of old Julia Shane and her two daughters came up with startling frequency at the dinners and lunches and tea parties in the Town. It may have been that in a community where life was so noisy, so banal, so strenuous, so redolent of prosperity, the Shanes and the old house satisfied some profound and universal hunger for the mysterious, the beautiful, the bizarre, even the mystic. Certainly in the midst of so materialistic a community the Shanes were exotic and worthy of attention. And always in the background there was the tradition of John Shane and the memories of things which it was whispered had happened in Shane’s Castle. It was Lily who aroused the most talk, perhaps because she was even more withdrawn and mysterious than her mother and sister, because it was so easy to imagine things about her.... Lily who could come back and bring all the Town once more to Shane’s Castle; Lily, the generous, the good-natured, the beautiful Lily.
Mrs. Julis Harrison discussed them; and her son, the rejected Willie; and Miss Abercrombie, who with the passing of years had developed an affection of the nerves which made her face twitch constantly so that always, even in the midst of the most solemn conversations, she had the appearance of winking in a lascivious fashion. It was a trial which she bore, with a truly noble fortitude.
ON the evening of the day that Mrs. Harrison called for the last time at Cypress Hill, Miss Abercrombie was invited to dine with her in the ugly sandstone house on the Hill. The call was Mrs. Harrison’s final gesture in an effort to patch up the feud which had grown so furiously since the affair over the taxes. Of its significance Miss Abercrombie had been told in advance, so it must have been with a beating, expectant heart that she arrived at the Harrison mansion.
The two women dined alone in a vast dining-room finished in golden oak, beneath a gigantic brass chandelier fitted with a score of pendant brass globes. They sat at either end of a table so long that shouting was almost a necessity.
“William is absent,” explained Mrs. Harrison in a loud, deep voice. “There is a big corporation from the east that wants to buy the Mills. It wants to absorb them at a good price with a large block of stock for William and me. Of course, I oppose it ... with all my strength. As I told William, the Millsarethe Harrisons ... I will never see them out of the family ... Judge Weissman has gone east with William to see that he does nothing rash. Neither of them ought to be away, I told Willie, with all this trouble brewing in the Flats.” Here she paused for a long breath. “Why, only this afternoon, some of those Polish brats threw stones at my victoria, right at the foot of Julia’s drive.... Imagine that in the old days!”
This long and complicated speech, she made with but a single pause for breath. She had grown even more stout, and her stupendous masculine spirit had suffered a certain weakening. A light stroke of paralysis she had passed over heroically, dismissing it by sheer force of her tremendous will. The misfortune left no trace save a slight limp as she dragged her bodyacross the floor and settled it heavily in the plush covered arm chair at one end of the table.
The butler—Mrs. Harrison used a butler as the symbol of her domination in the Town, wearing him as a sort of crest—noiselessly brought the thick mushroom soup, his eye gleaming at the sight of the two women. He was an old man with white hair and the appearance of a gentleman.
“How dreadful!” exclaimed Miss Abercrombie, and then unable longer to restrain herself, she said, “Tell me! Do tell me about Julia!”
Mrs. Harrison drank from her water glass, set it down slowly and then said impressively, “She did not receive me!”
“I feared so,” rejoined Miss Abercrombie, winking with nervous impatience.
“It is the end! No one can say that I have not done my part toward a reconciliation.” This statement she uttered with all the majesty of an empress declaring war. “And to think,” she added mournfully, “that such an old friendship should come to such an end.”
“It’s just the way I feel,” replied Miss Abercrombie. “And you know, my friendship was even older. I knew her before you. Why, I can remember when she was only a farmer girl.” Here her illness forced her to wink as if there were something obscene in her simple statement.
“Well,” said Mrs. Harrison, “I don’t suppose any one in the Town was ever closer to Julia than I was. D’you know? That mulatto woman actually turned me away to-day, and I must say her manner was insolent. She said Julia was not feeling well enough to see me. Imagine, not well enough to seeme, her oldest friend!” This statement the sycophantic Miss Abercrombie allowed to pass unchallenged. “Heaven knows,” continued Mrs. Harrison. “It was only friendship that prompted me. I certainly would not go prying about for the sake of curiosity. You know that, Pearl. Why, I wasn’t allowed to set my foot inside the door. You’d have thought I was diseased.”
After this a silence descended during which the room vibrated with unsaid things. At the memory of her reception,Mrs. Harrison’s face grew more and more flushed. The gentlemanly butler removed the soup and brought on whitefish nicely browned and swimming in butter.
“It’s a queer household,” remarked Miss Abercrombie, with an air of hinting at unspeakable things and feeling her way cautiously toward a letting down of all bars. Undoubtedly it was unfortunate that they had disputed the position of “oldest friend.” In a way it tied both their hands.
“It has always been queer,” replied the hostess. “Even since the house was built.”
Again a pregnant silence, and then Miss Abercrombie with another unwilled and obscene wink added, “I must say I can’t understand Irene’s behavior.” About this effort, there was something oblique and yet effective. It marked another step.
“Or Lily’s,” rejoined Mrs. Harrison, taking a third step.
“They say,” said Miss Abercrombie, pulling fishbones from her mouth, “that there is a common mill worker who is very attentive to Irene. Surely she can’t be considering marriage withhim.”
“No, from what I hear, sheisn’t,” observed Mrs. Harrison. After this dark hint she paused for a moment tottering upon the edge of new revelations with the air of a swimmer about to dive into cold water. At last she plunged.
“They say,” she murmured in a lowered voice, “that there is more between them than most people guess ... more than is proper.”
Miss Abercrombie leaned forward. “You know,” she said, “that’s funny. I’ve heard the same thing.”
“Well, I heard it from Thomas, the coachman. Of course, I reproved him for even hinting at such things. I must say he only hinted ... very delicately. He was discreet. If I hadn’t guessed there was something of the sort going on, I should never have known what he was driving at.”
Miss Abercrombie bridled and leaned back for the butler to remove her fish plate. “Imagine!” she said, “Imagine a child of yours being the subject of gossip among servants!”
Her hostess gave a wicked chuckle. “You’ve forgotten John Shane. When he was alive, his behavior was the talk ofevery one. But how could you have forgotten the talk that went the rounds? It was common property ... common property.”
Miss Abercrombie sighed deeply. “I know ... I know. Julia’s life has not been happy.” And into the sigh she put a thousand implications of the superior happiness of virgins.
“Of course,” said Mrs. Harrison, “he was insane. There’s no doubt about it. People may talk, but facts are facts. John Shane was insane ... certainly toward the end he was insane.”
The butler brought the roast fowl, and until his back was turned once more both women kept silence. When he had gone out of the room, they found themselves striving for first place in the race. Both spoke at once but Mrs. Harrison overwhelmed the sycophantic Abercrombie.
“Of course,” she said, “I think Julia herself is a little queer at times. I’ve noticed it for years ... ever since ... well ... ever since Lily went to Paris to live.”
“Yes,” observed Miss Abercrombie, moving toward something more definite. “Ever since the Governor’s garden party. All that was very queer ... very queer.”
Here again they found themselves halted by the immensity of the unspoken. Mrs. Harrison veered aside.
“The house has gone to ruin. Even the gate is hanging by one hinge. Nothing is kept up any longer.”
“Have you seen this lover of Irene’s?” asked Miss Abercrombie, calling a spade a spade and endeavoring to keep to one thing at a time.
“I’ve seen him once ... William pointed him out to me at the Mills. He’s one of the men who have been making trouble there.”
“Is he good looking?” asked Miss Abercrombie.
“Yes and no,” replied her companion.
“Well, what does that mean?”
“Well, he’s tall and has a handsome face ... a little evil perhaps. The real trouble is that I should call him common. Yes, common is the word I should use, decidedly common.”
Miss Abercrombie raised her eyebrows and smiled. “But, my dear, after all he is nothing but a workman.”
“Yes,” replied Mrs. Harrison, “heis.” In a manner which put an end to all doubt in the matter.
“Do you really think,” asked Miss Abercrombie, “that there is anything in it?”
Mrs. Harrison poised her fork and gave her guest a knowing look. “Well, of course I can’t see what he sees in her ... pale and haggard as she is. Now with him it’s different. He’s ... well.” She halted suddenly, adding, “This fowl is tough, Pearl ... I’m sorry it happened when you were dining with me.” And then, “I suppose it’s money he’s after. She must be very rich.”
The butler, after bringing more rich food, disappeared again and this time, Miss Abercrombie, casting to the winds all restraint, rose and said, “I’m going to bring my chair nearer, Belle. I can’t talk all the way from this end of the table.”
And she moved her chair and plate to a more strategic position so that when the butler returned, he found the two women sitting quite close to each other, their heads together, their voices lowered to the most confidential of pitches. Fragments of their talk reached an ear long trained to eavesdropping upon old women.
“But Lily is the one,” drifted to the ear. “I’d really like to know the truth about her. Of course blood is thicker than water. They say she....” Mrs. Harrison rattled the ice in her glass, thus destroying the remainder of the sentence.
So they sat until near midnight—two old women, one of them at the end of a life barren of love, the other abandoned by love forever and cast aside, a slowly decaying mass of fat—pawing over the affairs of two women for whom the force of love in some manifestation or other was still a radiant reality. They knew nothing; they possessed only suspicions and fragments of gossip, but out of these they succeeded in patching together a mosaic which glowed with all the colors of the most glamorous sin and the most romantic passion.
AND at the same moment in the house at Cypress Hill, Julia Shane lay propped up in her bed reading a French novel. It was an enormous bed with a vast dusty canopy supported by two ironical wood-gilt cupids who hung suspended from the ceiling; and Julia Shane, reading by the light of her night lamp, appeared lost in it like a woman tossing on the waves of the sea. To-night, feeling more ill than usual, she had her dinner in bed, wrapped in a peignoir of mauve ribbon and valenciennes, her bony neck exposed above the linen of her night dress.
She read, as usual, with the aid of a silver mounted reading glass which tossed the sentences in enormous capitals well into the range of her fading vision. On the table beside her stood one of the gilt coffee cups, a mute witness to the old woman’s disobedience of the doctor’s orders. Beside it lay two paper backed French novels and on the floor in the shadow of the table a half dozen more tossed aside carelessly, some lying properly, others open and sprawled, exposing the ragged edges of the hastily cut pages.
In the fashion of the ill and aging, she lived nowadays in memories ... memories of her girlhood when she had ridden John Shane’s wildest mare Doña Rita recklessly about the paddock of the farm, memories of Mademoiselle Violette de Vaux and the picnics with French and English girls in a neatly kept wood at Sèvres, memories of Cypress Hill in the days immediately after her return when John Shane was still more the passionate lover than the husband. As she grew older, the memories became clearer and more vivid, but they were neither vivid nor diverse enough to occupy all her time. What remained she divided between the game of patience and the French novels which Lily supplied faithfully, shipping them from Paris in lots of a dozen at a time.
The old woman had evolved her own scheme of reading, a plan which Irene condemned by the word “skimming,” but which satisfied Julia Shane because it revealed the plot without an unnecessary waste of time over long, involved descriptions of scenery and minute analyses of incomprehensible Gallic passions. Under the skimming system she read a few pages at the beginning and then turned to the end to learn the outcome of the tale. After this, she plunged into the middle of the book and read a page or two here and there until her curiosity was satisfied and her interest flagged. And at last the book was tossed aside to be carried off by the mulatto woman, who never failed to go through each volume carefully as though by looking at the words frequently enough she would be able at length to unlock the secrets of foreign tongues. The books which lay on the floor beside the bed had been “skimmed.” They lay prostrate and sprawled like the dead soldiers of an army. The titles served as an index of the old woman’s favorite authors. They appeared some in black ink, some in red, some even in blue ... Paul Marguerite, Marcel Prévost, Pierre Loti, Paul Bourget, Collette Willy and, strange to relate, Anatole France represented byL’Ile des Penguinswhich, it seemed, had baffled the “skimming” system, for of all the lot it was the only volume in which every page had been cut.
After she grew weary, she tossed asideLes Anges Gardienswhich she had been reading and sat leaning back with her eyes closed. Perhaps she pondered the doings of the four evil governesses in the Prévost tale; perhaps she turned her thoughts to the Town and Mrs. Julis Harrison whom she had sent away because she “was not in a mood to be bored.” It is even possible that she knew at this very moment that in the sandstone house of the Harrisons, they were discussing her affairs. She was too wise and too worldly not to have known what Belle Harrison would say of her. Yet she appeared calm and content enough, completely indifferent to the opinions of her acquaintances, of the Town—indeed of all the world. She had reached the time when such things are no longer of any importance.
So great was her indifference that in more than three months she had left the house only once and then to follow the coffinof Jacob Barr to the cemetery on the hill. The old man was dead at last, after an illness which had drained with a bitter, heart-breaking slowness all the vigor of his strong and energetic body. On the day of the funeral the foreign women in Halsted street caught a swift glimpse of the mistress of Cypress Hill as she drove through on her way to the cemetery. They must have guessed that it was an event of great importance which drew her from her seclusion; and indeed it was such an event, for it was the funeral of the oldest member of the family, the last of all his generation save Julia Shane.
And after the funeral Julia Shane returned and shut herself in, resolved to see no one but Irene and her niece, Hattie Tolliver.
WHATEVER her thoughts and memories may have been, they were interrupted presently by the knock of the mulatto woman who came to bear away the gilt coffee cup and pile of ravaged novels. The sound of the woman’s shuffling approach aroused Julia Shane who opened her eyes and said, “Here, Sarah. Give me a hand. I’ve slipped down.”
Sarah helped lift her once more into a sitting posture. The old woman raised herself scornfully as if there was between her indomitable spirit and her wrecked body no bond of any sort, as if she had only contempt for the body as a thing unworthy of her, a thing which had failed her, over which she had neither control nor responsibility.
The mulatto woman bent to pick up the scattered novels, and as she stood up, her mistress, chuckling, said, “My God. They’re tiresome, Sarah. They never write about anything butl’amour. You’d think there was nothing else in the world. Evenl’amourgets to be a bore after a time.”
The mulatto woman waited obediently. “Yes, Mis’ Shane. I guess you’re right,” she said presently. At which the old woman smiled.
“And Sarah,” the mistress continued. “When Miss Irene comes in, tell her I should like to see her. It’s important.”
The servant hesitated for an instant. “But Miss Irene don’t come in till after midnight, Mis’ Shane.” She spoke with the manner of concealing something. In her soft voice there was a thin trace of insinuating suspicion, almost of servile accusation. “That foreign fella brings her home,” she added.
“It’s all right,” replied the old woman. “I shall be awake.” And then in a cold voice she added, “I’m sure it’s good of him to bring her home. I shouldn’t want her wandering about alone at that hour of the night. It’s very thoughtful of him.”
At midnight, true to her word, she was still awake. She had even managed to gain her feet painfully and to make her way with unsteady step across the room to the drawer which held her cigarettes. These too the doctor had forbidden her.
On the way back to her vast bed, she passed by the window and, drawing aside the curtain for a moment, she looked out over the hot panorama of glowing furnaces and tall black chimneys. As she stood there, she saw entering the wrought iron gates two figures sharply outlined against the glare of the white arc light in Halsted Street. The woman was Irene. She was accompanied by Krylenko.
Quietly the old woman extinguished the candle on the table beside her. The room became a vault of darkness. Beneath her window at the turn in the drive, the pair halted and stood talking in voices so low that what they said was inaudible even through the open window. After a time Irene seated herself wearily on the horseblock. Her frail body sagged with fatigue. She leaned against the cast iron Cupid who held in one outstretched hand an iron ring. Krylenko bent over her and his hands, with the curious, eloquent gestures of an alien, pantomimed their tale against the distant arc light. Above them in the recessed window the mother, clinging all the while to the heavy curtains for support, watched silently. She could hear nothing. She could only keep watch. At length Irene arose and lifting the ugly black hat from her head, ran her finger through her loose hair all damp with the terrible heat. Now was the moment. The old woman, awaiting proof, leaned against the table by her side.
But there was no proof. There was no embrace, not even the faintest exchange of intimacies. Krylenko chastely took Irene’s hand, bade her good-night and turned with his swinging powerful stride down the long drive. Irene, passing along the gallery by the drawing room, slipped her key into the lock and entered the house.
Above stairs she found her mother sitting up in bed, lost again in the midst ofLes Anges Gardiens. Still carrying the worn hat in her hand, the daughter came over to the bed. With the increasing illness of the old woman, Irene’s manner had become more gentle. She even smiled a tired smile.
“What?” she said playfully. “Are you still awake? Skimming again, I see.”
Yet her manner was not the manner of a daughter with a mother. Rather it was that of a casual friend. It was too playful, too forced. The chasm of thirty years and more was not to be bridged by any amount of strained cordiality.
Julia Shane put down her reading glass. “I couldn’t sleep, so I tried to read,” she said.
Irene drew up a chair and sat by the bed. She appeared worn and exhausted, as though the August heat had drained to the dregs all her intense, self-inspired vitality.
“How are you feeling?”
“Better ... much better except for the ache in my back.”
Irene’s face grew serious. “You’ve been smoking again,” she said, “after the doctor forbade you.” The old woman, quite prepared to lie, started to protest, shaking her head in negation. “It’s no use, Mama ... I saw you ... I saw the glow of your cigarette at the window.”
(So Irene knew that she had been watched, and there was no need to protest.) The old woman sat still for a moment twisting the silver reading glass round and round, her brow contracted in an angry frown as though she resented bitterly the decay of body which gave any one authority over her. (That Julia Shane should ever take orders from a doctor or stand reproved by her own daughter!) It was this angry emotion that stood revealed and transparent in every line of her face, in the very defiance of her thin body. At length the frown melted slowly away.
“What sort of a man is he, Irene?” she asked looking straight into her daughter’s tired eyes. Irene moved uneasily.
“What man?” she asked, “I don’t know who you mean.”
“That foreigner ... I don’t remember his name. You’ve never told me.... You might have told your mother.” There was a note of peevishness in her voice which sounded queer and alien, almost a portent.
“Oh, Krylenko,” said Irene, twisting her black hat with her thin hands. “Krylenko.” Then she waited for a moment. “He’s a fine man ... a wonderful man. He has given up everything for his people.”
“But they are notyourpeople,” observed her mother looking at her sharply.
“They are my people,” replied Irene softly. “All of them down to the last baby. If they are not my people, who are?”
The old woman, opposed once more by the inevitable wall of Irene’s obsessions, frowned. “You are wealthy,” she said. “You were born to a position.”
In Irene’s smile there was a shade of bitterness. “In this Town?” she inquired scornfully. “Oh! No! Position in this Town! That’s almost funny.” She leaned forward a little, pressing her hand against her forehead. “My people?” she said in a hushed voice. “My people.... Why, I don’t even know where my father came from.”
The mother, half-buried among the heavy pillows raised herself slowly as if a wave of new vigor had taken possession of her worn-out body. “Get me a cigarette, Irene.”
The girl opened her lips to protest, but her mother silenced her. “Please, Irene, do as I say. It can’t possibly matter what I do now.”
“Please, Mama,” began Irene once more. “The doctor has forbidden it.” Then Julia Shane gave her daughter a terrible look pregnant with all the old arrogance and power.
“Will you do as I say, Irene, or must I send for Sarah? She at least still obeys me.”
For a second, authority hung in the balance. It was the authority of a lifetime grounded upon a terrific force of will and sustained by the eternal and certain precedent of obedience. It was the old woman who won the struggle. It was her last victory. The daughter rose and obediently brought the cigarettes, even holding the candle to light it. She held the flame at arm’s length with a gesture of supreme distaste as if she had been ordered to participate in some unspeakable sin. After she had replaced the candle, her mother puffed thoughtfully for a time.
“Your father,” she said presently, “was born in Marseilles. His mother was Spanish and his father Irish. He came to this country because he had to run away. That’s all I know. He might have told me more if he had not died suddenly. It’s not likely that any of us will ever know his story, no matter how hard we try. Life isn’t a story book, you know.In life there are some things that we never know, even about our own friends, our own children. Each man’s soul is a secret, which even himself is not able to reveal.”
For an instant the light of triumph swept Irene’s pale countenance. “You see!” she said. “I am just like the rest ... like Stepan Krylenko and all the others. My father was a foreigner.”
The mother’s lips curved in a sudden, scornful smile. “But he was a gentleman, Irene.... That is something. And your mother was an American. Her grandfather was the first settler in the wilderness.... The Town was named for him. Have you no pride?”
“No,” replied Irene, “to be proud is a vice.... I have killed it. I am not proud. I am like all the others.” And yet there was a fierce pride in her voice, a smug, fierce, pride in not being proud.
“You are perverse,” said her mother. “You are beyond me. You talk like a fool....” Irene raised her head to speak but the will of the old woman swept her back. “I know,” she continued. “You think it is saintly. Does it ever occur to you that it might only be smugness?”
The old eyes flashed with anger and resentment, emotions which merely shattered themselves against the barrier of Irene’s smiling and fanatic sense of righteousness. A look of obstinacy entered her face. (She regarded herself as superior to Julia Shane! Incredible!)
“You amaze me, Irene. Your hardness is beyond belief. If you could be soft for a moment, gentle and generous ... like Lily.”
The daughter’s hands tightened about the battered old hat.
“It’s always Lily,” she said bitterly. “It’s always Lily.... Lily this and Lily that. She’s everywhere. Every one praises her ... even Cousin Hattie.” The stubborn look of smugness again descended upon her face. “Well, let them praise her ... I know that it is I who am right, I who am good in the sight of God.” And then for the first time in all the memory of Julia Shane, a look of anger, cold and unrelenting came into the eyes of her daughter. “Lily! Lily!” she cried scornfully, “I hate Lily.... May God forgive me!”
THEN for a long time a silence descended upon the room. Julia Shane crushed out the embers of her cigarette and fell once more to turning the silver mounted reading glass round and round, regarding it fixedly with the look of one hypnotized. At last she turned again to her daughter.
“Are you going to marry him?” she asked.
“No, of course not.”
“I should be satisfied, if he is as fine as you say he is. I would rather see you married before I die, Irene.”
The daughter shook her head stubbornly. “I shall never marry any one.”
The old woman smiled shrewdly. “You are wrong, my girl. You are wrong. I haven’t had a very happy time, but I wouldn’t have given it up. It is a part of life, knowing love and having children.... Love can be so many things, but at least it is part of life ... the greatest part of all. Without it life is nothing.”
For a long time Irene remained silent. She kept her eyes cast down and when she spoke again it was without raising them. “But Lily ...” she began shrewdly. “She has never married.” It was the old retort, always Lily. Her mother saw fit to ignore it, perhaps because, knowing what she knew, it was impossible to answer it.
“You’ve been seeing a great deal of this Krylenko,” she said. “It’s been going on for years ... since before Lily was here the last time. That’s years ago.”
Irene looked up suddenly and a glint of anger lighted her pale eyes. “Who’s been talking to you about me?... I know. It’s Cousin Hattie. She was here to-day. Oh, why can’t people let me alone? I harm no one. I want to be left in peace.”
Then Julia Shane, perhaps because she already knew too well the antipathy between her coldly virginal daughter and her niece whose whole life was her children, deliberately lied.
“Cousin Hattie did not even mention it.” She turned her eyes away from the light. “I would like to see you married, Irene,” she repeated. It was clear that for some reason the old hope, forgotten since that tumultuous visit of the Governor, was revived again. It occupied the old woman’s mind to the exclusion of all else.
“There is nothing between us, Mama,” said Irene. “Nothing at all. Can’t you see. We’ve been friends all along. I taught him to read English. I got him books.” Her voice wavered a little and her hands trembled. It was as if she had become a little girl again, the same girl who, in a white muslin dress with a blue sash, sobbed alone on the sofa in the library beneath John Shane’s portrait. “I’ve made him what he is,” she continued. “Don’t you see. I’m proud of him. When I found him, he was nothing ... only a stupid Ukrainian boy who was rebellious and rude to me. And now he works with me. He’s willing to sacrifice himself for those people. We understand each other. All we want is to be left alone, Don’t you understand? I’m just proud of him because I’ve made him what he is. I’m nothing,” she stammered. “I’m nothing to him in that way at all. That would spoil everything ... like something evil, intruding upon us.”
The pale tired face glowed with a kind of religious fervor. For an instant there was something maternal and exalted in her look. All the plainness vanished, replaced suddenly by a feverish beauty. The plain, exhausted old maid had disappeared.
“Why haven’t you told me this before?” asked the old woman.
“You never asked me.... You never wanted to know what I was doing. You were always interested in Lily. How could you ever have thought I’d marry him? I’m years older.” Suddenly she extended her arms with a curious exhibitive gesture like a gesture Lily sometimes made when she was looking her loveliest. “Look at me. I’m old and battered and ugly. How could he ever love me in that way? He is young.”
The thin hands dropped listlessly into her lap and lay against the worn black serge. She fell silent, all exhausted by the emotion. Her mother stared at her with the look of one who has just penetrated the soul of a stranger. Irene, it appeared, was suddenly revealed to her.
“Why, you know he’s never looked at a woman,” Irene continued in a lowered voice. “He’s lived in the Flats all these years and he’s never looked at a woman. Do you know what that means in the Flats?” Her voice dropped still lower. “Of course, you don’t know, because you know nothing about the Flats,” she added with a shade of bitterness.
At this her mother smiled. “The rest of the world is not so different, Irene.”
But Irene ignored her. “He’s worked hard all these years to make himself worth while and to help his people. He’s never had time to be bad.” Her mother smiled faintly again. Perhaps she smiled at the spinsterish word by which Irene chose to designate fornication.
“He’s pure,” continued Irene. “He’s fine and noble and pure. I want to keep him so.”
“You are making of him a saint,” observed the old woman drily.
“He is a saint! That’s just what he is,” cried Irene. “And you mock him, you and Lily.... Oh, I know ... I know you both. He’s been driven from the Mills for what he’s done for the people in the Flats. He’s been put on a black list so he can never get work in any other Mill. He told me so to-night. That’s what he was telling me when you stood watching us.” A look of supreme triumph came into her face once more. “But it’s too late!” she cried. “It’s too late.... They’ve voted to strike. It begins to-morrow. Stepan is the one behind it.”
It was as if a terrible war, long hanging in the balance, had suddenly become a reality. Julia Shane, propped among the pillows, turned restlessly and sighed.
“What fools men are!” she said, almost to herself. “What fools!” And then to Irene. “It won’t be easy, Irene. It’ll be cruel. You’d best go to bed now, dear. You look desperately tired. You’ll have plenty of work before you.”
Irene pressed a cold, distant kiss on the ivory cheek of her mother and turned to leave.
“Shall I put out the light?”
“Yes, please.”
The room subsided into darkness and Irene, opening the door, suddenly heard her mother’s voice.
“Oh, Irene.” The voice was weary, listless. “I’ve written for Lily to come home. The doctor told me to-day that I could not possibly live longer than Christmas. I forced it out of him. There was no use in having nonsense. I wanted to know.”
And Irene, instead of going to her own room, returned and knelt by the side of her mother’s bed. The hardness melted and she sobbed, perhaps because the old woman who faced death with such proud indifference was so far beyond the need of prayer and comfort.
Yet when the smoky dawn appeared at last, it found Irene in her own chaste room still kneeling in prayer before the pink and blue Sienna Virgin.
“Oh, Blessed Virgin,” she prayed, from the summit of her complacency. “Forgive my mother her sins of pride and her lack of charity. Forgive my sister her weakness of the flesh. Enter into their hearts and make them good women. Make them worthy to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Enter into the heart of my sister and cleanse her. Make her a good woman ... a pure woman, loving only those things which are holy. Cleanse her of the lusts of the flesh!”
Her pale eyes were wet with tears. Although she prayed to a plaster Virgin in pink gilt, she used the sonorous rolling words drawn all unconsciously from the memories of a Presbyterian childhood. And the Lily for whom she prayed ... the Lily who had been sent for ... was there in the old house just as she was always in the Town and in the memories of those who knew her beauty, her tolerance and her charm. There were, indeed, times when Krylenko, caught perhaps in the memory of a night when he stood in the melting snow peering into the windows of Shane’s Castle, spoke of her; and these were times when Irene turned away from him, frightened by the shadow of something in his eyes.
IT became known as the Great Strike and it served to mark an epoch. Long afterward people in the Town said, “It was the year of the Great Strike” as they said, “It was the year of the Spanish-American War” or “the year that Bryan was a candidate for the first time.” Willie Harrison found a use for his enclosures of barbed wire and his heavily barricaded gates. As the strike progressed and the violence increased, other machines of warfare were set up ... such things as machine guns and searchlights which at night fingered the Flats and the sky above with shafts of white light, rigid and unbending as steel.
In one sense the strike was a Godsend. When the Mills shut down there were no more fires in the ovens and the furnaces; no more soot fell in clouds like infernal snow over the low eminence of Cypress Hill and the squalid expanse of the Flats. For the first time in a score of years the sun became clearly visible. Instead of rising and setting as a ball of hot copper immersed in smoke, it appeared and disappeared quite clear and white, a sun such as God intended it to be. But even more remarkable was the blanket of silence which descended upon all the district. With the banking of the fires, there was no more hammering, and in place of the titanic clamor there was a stillness so profound and so unusual that people noticed it as people notice a sudden clap of loud thunder and remark upon it to each other. The silence became noisy.
In the house at Cypress Hill the world of Julia Shane narrowed from the castle itself to a single room and at last to the vast Italian bed. It was seldom that she gathered sufficient strength to struggle to her feet and make her way, leaning on the ebony and silver stick, to the window where the Mill yards and the Flats lay spread out beneath her gaze. During those last months she knew again the stillness whichenveloped the Cypress Hill of her youth. But there was a difference; the green marshes were gone forever, buried beneath the masses of cinders, clay and refuse upon which the Mills raised their sheds and towers and the Flats its flimsy, dirty, matchwood houses, all smoke stained and rotting at the eaves. The lush smell of damp growing things was replaced by the faint odor of crowded, sweating humanity. Not one slim cat-tail, not one feathery willow remained in all the desert of industry. There was, however, a sound which had echoed over the swamps almost a hundred years earlier, a sound which had not been heard since the days when Julia Shane’s grandfather built about what was now the public square of the Town a stockade to protect the first settlers from the redskins. It was the sound of guns. Sometimes as she sat at the window, there arose a distant rat-tat-tat like the noise of a typewriter but more staccato and savage, followed by a single crack or two. She discovered at length the origin of the sound. In the Mill yard beneath her window a target had been raised, and at a little distance off men lay on their stomachs pointing rifles mounted upon tripods. Sometimes they fired at rusty buckets and old tin cans because these things did not remain stupid and inanimate like the target, but jumped and whirled about in the most tortured fashion when the bullets struck them, as though they had lives which might be destroyed. It made the game infinitely more fascinating and spirited. The men who indulged in this practise were, she learned from Hennery, the hired guards whom the Harrisons and Judge Weissman had brought in to protect the Mills, riff-raff and off-scourings from the slums of New York, Chicago, Pittsburgh and Cleveland.
There came a day, after the sights and sounds of the Mill yard had become a matter of indifference to the old woman, when the doctor forbade her to leave her bed if she wished to survive the day set for Lily’s arrival. It was October, and the park remained unchanged save that the atmosphere was less hot and the sun shone more clearly; for the trees and shrubs on the low hill were long since dead and far beyond the stage of sending out new leaves to fall at the approach of winter. It was bald now and very old. The brick house, dominatingall the horizon, stood out day after day gaunt and blackened by soot against the brilliant October sky.
Lily had been delayed. Before leaving Paris she wrote to her mother and Irene that it was necessary for her to take a small boy, the son of a friend, to England. After placing him in school there, she wrote, she would sail at once for America and come straight to Cypress Hill. There were also matters of business which might delay her; but she would not arrive later than the middle of November. So Julia Shane set herself to battling with Death, bent upon beating Him off until she had seen Lily once more.