IN those days, because it was difficult and dangerous for any one to visit Cypress Hill and because, after all, no one had any particular reason to visit it, there was at the old house, only one caller beside the doctor. This was Hattie Tolliver, whose strength had given way a little to an increasing stoutness but whose pride and spirit flagged not at all. To the police and the hired guards at the Mills, she became as familiar a figure as the doctor himself. She came on foot, since all service on the clanging trolley cars of Halsted street was long since suspended, her large powerful body clad in black clothes of good quality, a basket suspended over one arm and the inevitable umbrella swinging from the other. She walked with a sort of fierce disdain directed with calculated ostentation alike at the Mill guards, the police, and the dwellers of the Flats who viewed her bourgeois approach with a sullen hostility. The basket contained delicacies concocted by her own skilled and housewifely hand ... the most golden of custards, the most delicate of rennets, fragile biscuits baked without sugar—in short, every sort of thing which might please the palate of an invalid accustomed to excellent food.
In effect, Cypress Hill fell slowly into a state of siege. Surrounded on three sides by the barrier of barbed wire, the sole means of egress was the long drive turning into Halsted street. Here there was danger, for disorders occurred frequently at the very wrought iron gates, now rusted and broken. Stones were hurled by the strikers and shots fired by the police. The wagons of the Town no longer delivered goods at a spot so isolated and dangerous, and the duties of supplying the place with food came gradually to be divided between Irene and Hattie Tolliver, whose lack of friendliness and understanding toward each other approached an open hatred. They alone of the little garrison went in and out of the wrought iron gates;for Hennery and the mulatto woman were far too terrified by the disorders outside ever to venture into the Town.
On the day of Lily’s letter Hattie Tolliver, bearing a well-laden basket, arrived and went at once to Aunt Julia’s room. She brooked no interference from the mulatto woman.
After bidding Sarah place the contents of the basket in a cool place she swept by the servant with a regal swish of black skirts.
Upstairs in the twilight Julia Shane lay in the enormous bed, flat on her back staring at the ceiling. At the approach of her niece she raised herself a little and asked in a feeble voice to be propped up. It was as though the approach of her vigorous rosy-faced niece endowed her with a sudden energy.
“And how are you?” asked Hattie Tolliver when she had smoothed the pillows with an expert hand and made the old woman more comfortable than she had been in many days.
“The same ... just the same,” was the monotonous answer. “Lily is a long time in coming.”
Cousin Hattie went to the windows and flung back the curtains. “Light and air will do you good,” she said. “There’s nothing like light and air.” And then turning, “Why don’t you make Sarah keep the windows open?”
Julia Shane sat up more straightly, breathing in the crisp air. “I tell her to ... but she doesn’t like air,” she said weakly.
“You let her bully you! She needs some one to manage her. I’m surprised Irene doesn’t put her in her place.”
The old woman smiled. “Irene,” she said. “Irene.... Why she’s too meek ever to get on with servants. It’s no use ... her trying anything.”
“I’ve brought you a custard and some cakes,” continued her niece, at the same time flicking bits of dust from the dressing table with her handkerchief and setting the pillows of the chaise longue in order with a series of efficient pats. “There’s going to be trouble ... real trouble before long. The strikers are getting bolder.”
“They’re getting more hungry too, Irene says,” replied the old woman. “Perhaps that’s why.”
Cousin Hattie came over to the bed now and sat herselfdown, at the same time taking out a pillow-case which she set herself to hemming. “You know what they’re saying in the Town,” she remarked. “They’re saying that Irene is helping the strike by giving the strikers money.”
To this the old woman made no reply and Cousin Hattie continued. “I don’t see the sense in that. The sooner every one gets to work, the better. It isn’t safe in Halsted street any longer. I’m surprised at Irene helping those foreigners against the Harrisons. I didn’t think she had the spirit to take sides in a case like this.”
Julia Shane moved her weary body into a more comfortable position. “She doesn’t take sides. She only wants to help the women and children.... I suppose she’s right after all.... They are like the rest of us.”
At this Cousin Hattie gave a grunt of indignation. “They didn’t have to come to this country. I’m sure nobody wants ’em.”
“The Mills want them,” said her aunt. “The Mills want them and the Mills want more and more all the time.”
“But I don’t see why we have to suffer because the Mills want foreigners. There ought to be some law against it.”
As though there seemed to be no answer to this, Julia Shane turned on her side and remarked. “I had a letter from Lily to-day.”
Her niece put down the pillow case and regarded her with shining eyes. Her heavy body became alive and vibrant. “What did she say? Was there any news of Ellen? Shall I read it?”
“No, go on with your work. If you prop me a little higher and give me my glass, I’ll read it.”
This operation completed, she read the letter through. It was not until Ellen’s name occurred that Cousin Hattie displayed any real interest. At the sound of her daughter’s name, the woman put down her sewing and assumed an attitude of passionate listening.
“Ellen,” ran the letter, “is doing splendidly. She is contented here and is working hard under Philippe. She plays better than ever ... if that is possible, and plans to make her début in London next year. She has every reason to make agreat success. I am leaving her in my house when I come to America. She gets on beautifully with Madame Gigon. That was my greatest worry, for Madame Gigon has grown worse as she has grown older. But she has taken a fancy to Ellen ... fortunately, so everything is perfect. Tell Cousin Hattie that one day she will be proud of her daughter.”
Julia Shane, when she had finished, put down the letter, and regarded her niece. “You see, Hattie,” she said, “there is no need to worry. Everything is going splendidly. Ellen couldn’t be in better hands. Lily knows her way about the world a great deal better than most. Some day your daughter will be famous.”
There came no response from her niece. Mrs. Tolliver sat upright and thoughtful. Presently she took up the pillow case and set to work again.
“These débuts,” she said. “They cost money, don’t they?”
“Yes,” replied her aunt.
“Well where is Ellen to get it? Clarence’s life insurance must all be gone by this time.”
“I suppose Lily has found a way. Lily is clever. Besides Ellen isn’t altogether helpless.”
Again there was a thoughtful pause and the old woman said, “I don’t think you’d be pleased if Ellenwasa great success.”
“I don’t know. I’d be more pleased if I had her nearer to me. I don’t like the idea of her being in Paris. It’s not a healthy place. It’s the wickedest city in the world.”
“Come, Hattie. You mustn’t forget Ellen was made to live in the world. You brought her up to be successful and famous. It’s your fault if you have reason to be proud of her.”
Into this single sentence or two Julia Shane managed to condense a whole epic. It was an epic of maternal sacrifices, of a household kept without servants so that the children might profit by the money saved, of plans which had their beginning even before the children were born, of hopes and ambitions aroused skilfully by a woman who now sat deserted, hemming a pillow-case to help dispel her loneliness. She had, in effect, brought about her own sorrow. They were gone now, Ellen to Paris, Fergus and Robert to New York. It was in their veryblood. All this was written, after all, in the strong proud face bent low over the pillow-case ... an epic of passionate maternity.
“We have to expect these things of our children,” continued Aunt Julia. “I’m old enough to know that it’s no new story, and I’ve lived long enough to know that we have no right to demand of them the things which seem to us the only ones worth while. Every one of us is different from the others. There are no two in the least alike. And no one ever really knows any one else. There is always a part which remains secret and hidden, concealed in the deepest part of the soul. No husband ever knows his wife, Hattie, and no wife ever really knows her husband. There is always something just beyond that remains aloof and untouched, mysterious and undiscoverable because we ourselves do not know just what it is. Sometimes it is shameful. Sometimes it is too fine, too precious, ever to reveal. It is quite beyond revelation even if we chose to reveal it....”
AT the close of this long speech, the old woman fell into a fit of coughing and her niece rose quickly to bring more medicine and water. If Hattie Tolliver had understood even for a moment these metaphysical theories, they were forgotten in the confusion of the coughing fit. It is more than probable that she understood nothing of the speech and probable that she was too far lost in thoughts of Ellen to have heard it. In any case, she was, like most good mothers and housewives, a pure realist who dealt in terms of the material. At least she gave no sign, and when the coughing fit was over, she returned at once to the main thread of the conversation.
“These careers,” she said, “may be all right but I think that Ellen might be happier if she had something more sound ... like a husband and children and a home.”
It was useless to argue with her. Like all women whose domestic life has been happy and successful, she could not be convinced that there was anything in the world more desirable than the love of a good husband and children. With her it was indeed something even stronger—a tribal instinct upon which life itself is founded. She was a fundamental person beside whom Irene and Lily, even her own daughter Ellen, were sports in the biological sense. They were removed by at least two generations from the soil. In them the struggle for life had become transvalued into a pursuit of the arts, of religion, of pleasure itself.
In the gathering twilight, Hattie Tolliver brought a lamp and lighted it to work by. Julia Shane watched her silently for a time, observing the strong neck, the immaculate full curve of her niece’s figure, the certainty with which the strong worn fingers moved about their delicate work.
“You remember,” she said, “that Lily mentioned a boy ... a young boy, in her letter?”
“Yes,” replied Hattie Tolliver, without glancing from her work. “The child of a friend. I thought she might have passed him by to come home to her mother.... Funny how children can forget you.”
Julia Shane stirred softly in the deep bed. “I thought you might be thinking that,” she said. “I thought it would be better to tell you the truth. I wanted you to know anyway. The truth is, Hattie, that the child is her own. She is more interested in him than in me, and that’s natural enough and quite proper.”
The strong fingers paused abruptly in their work and lay motionless against the white linen. Hattie Tolliver’s face betrayed her amazement; yet clearly she was a little amused.
“Charles always said there was something mysterious about Lily,” she said. “But I never guessed she’d been secretly married.”
The old woman, hesitating, coughed before she replied, as though the supremely respectable innocence of her niece somehow made her inarticulate. At last she summoned strength.
“But she’s never been married, Hattie. There never was any ceremony.”
“Then how ...” In Mrs. Tolliver’s face the amazement spread until her countenance was one great interrogation.
“Children,” interrupted her aunt in a voice filled with tremulous calm, “can be born without marriage certificates. They have nothing to do with legal processes.”
For a long time the niece kept silent, fingering the while the half finished pillow case. It appeared that she found some new and marvelous quality in it. She fingered the stuff as though she were in the act of purchasing it across a counter. At last she raised her head.
“Then it was true ... that old story?” she asked.
“What story?”
“The one they told in the Town ... about Lily’shavingto go away to Paris.”
“Yes.... But no one ever really knew. They only guessed. They knew nothing at all. And they know nothing more to-day.” The old woman paused for a second as though to give her words emphasis. “I’m trusting you never to tell,Hattie. I wanted you to know because if ever it was necessary, I wanted Lily to come to you for help. It never will be. It isn’t likely.”
Hattie Tolliver sat up very stiff and red. “Tell!” she said, “Tell! Who should I ever tell in the Town? Why should I tell any of them?” The tribal instinct rose in triumph. It was a matter of her family against the Mills, the Town, all the world if necessary. Torture could not have dragged from her the truth.
Yet Hattie Tolliver was not unmoved by the confession. It may even have been that she herself long ago had suspicions of the truth which had withered and died since from too much doubt. To a woman of her nature the news of a thousand strikes, of murder and of warfare was as nothing beside the thing Julia Shane revealed. For a long time she said nothing at all, but her strong fingers spoke for her. They worked faster and more skilfully than ever, as if all her agitation was pouring itself out through their tips. The fingers and the flying needle said, “That this should have happened in our family! I can’t believe it. Perhaps Aunt Julia is so sick that her mind is weakened. Surely she must imagine this tale. Such things happen only to servant girls. All this is unreal. It cannot be true. Lily could not be so happy, so buoyant if this were true. Sinners can only suffer and be miserable.”
All this time she remained silent, breathing heavily, and when at last she spoke, it was to ask, “Who was the man?” in so terrible a voice that the old woman on the bed started for a moment and then averted her face lest her niece see the ghost of a smile which slipped out unwilled.
“It was the Governor,” the aunt replied at last.
And then, “Why would he not marry her?” in a voice filled with accumulations of hatred and scorn for the ravishers of women.
This time Julia Shane did not smile. Her pride,—the old fierce and arrogant pride—was touched.
“Oh,” she replied, “it was not that. It was Lily who refused to marry him. He begged her ... on his knees he begged her. I saw him. He would have been glad enough to have her.”
And this led only to a “Why?” to which the old woman answered that she did not know except that Lily had said she wished to be herself and go her own way, that she was content and would not marry him even if he became president. “Beyond that, I do not know,” she said. “That is where a mother does not know even her own daughter. I don’t believe Lily knows herself. Can you tell why it is that Ellen must go on studying and studying, why she cannot help it? Can I know why Irene wants only to be left in peace to go her own way? No, we never really know any one.”
All this swept over the head of Hattie Tolliver. She returned to one thing. “It would not have been a bad match. He is a senator now.”
It had grown quite dark during their talk and from inside the barrier of the Mills the searchlights began to operate, at first furtively and in jerky fashion and then slowly with greater and greater deliberation, sweeping in gigantic arcs the sky and the squalid area of the Flats. A dozen times in their course the hard white beams swept the walls of the barren old house, penetrating even the room where Julia Shane lay slowly dying. The flashes of light came suddenly, bathing in an unearthly glow and with a dazzling clarity the walls and the furniture. At last, as the beams swept the face of the ormulu clock, Hattie Tolliver, rising, folded her pillow case and thrust it into the black bag she carried.
“I must go now,” she said. “Charlie will be wanting his supper.”
The old woman asked her to bend down while she kissed her. It was the first time she had ever made such a request and she passed over the extraordinary event by hastily begging her niece to draw the curtains.
“The lights make me nervous,” she said. “I don’t know why, but they are worse than the noise the Mills used to make.”
And when this operation was completed she summoned her niece again to her side. “Would you like to see a picture of Lily’s boy?”
Hattie Tolliver nodded.
“It is in the top drawer of the chiffonier. Will you fetch it to me?”
Her niece brought the picture and for a time the two women regarded it silently. It was the photograph of a handsome child, singularly like Lily although there was something of the Governor’s rather florid good looks, particularly about the high sweeping forehead.
“He is a fine child, isn’t he?” the old woman remarked. “I never expected to have a grandchild named Shane.”
Still regarding the picture with a sort of fascination, Mrs. Tolliver replied, “He is a darling, isn’t he? Does she call him that?”
“Of course. What would she call him?”
“Yes, he is a fine lad. He looks like our family.” And then after a long pause she added, “I’m glad you told me all the story. I’m glad Lily did what she did deliberately. I should hate to think that any of us would be weak enough to let a man take advantage of her. That makes a great difference.”
After she had put on her small black hat trimmed with worn and stubby ostrich plumes, she turned for the last time. “If you have another of those pictures, Aunt Julia, I would like to have one. I’d like to show it to Charles. He’s always admired Lily. It’s funny what a way she has with men.”
There was no sting in the remark. It was a simple declaration, spoken as though the truth of it had occurred to her for the first time. She was too direct and vigorous to be feline.
As she closed the door the voice of her aunt trailed weakly after. “You needn’t worry about Ellen. All her strength and character is your strength and character, Hattie. She can take care of herself.”
The niece turned in the doorway, her thick strong figure blocking the shower of dim light from the hall. “No,” she said. “It’s not as though Lily were bad. She isn’t bad. I’ve always had an idea that she knew what she was about. I suppose she has her own ideas on life. Perhaps she lives up to them. I can’t say they’re my ideas.” For a second she leaned against the frame of the door, searching with an air of physical effort for words to express her thoughts. “No, she isn’t bad,” she continued. “No one who ever knew her can sayshe is a bad woman. I can’t explain what I mean, but I suppose she believes in what she does.”
And with this wise and mysterious observation Mrs. Tolliver returned to the world of the concrete—her own world—swept down the long stairway and into the kitchen where she reclaimed her basket, and left the house without waiting for the hostile mulatto woman to open the door.
PERHAPS because she was so dazed and fascinated by the story which Julia Shane had poured into her astonished ears, she walked in a sort of dream to the foot of the long drive where she found herself suddenly embroiled in a waking nightmare. On all sides of her there rose a great tumult and shouting. Stones were thrown. Cries rang out in barbaric tongues. Men struggled and fought, and above the men on foot rose the figures of the constabulary mounted on wild and terrified horses who charged and curvetted as their masters struck about them with heavy clubs.
Through all this, Hattie Tolliver passed with an air of the most profound detachment and scorn, somewhat in the manner of a great sea-going freighter riding the waves of an insignificant squall. She carried her head high, despising the Irish constabulary as profoundly as she despised the noisy alien rabble. Clearly it was none of her affair. This embroiled rabble had nothing to do with her, nothing to do with her family, nothing to do with her world. The riot was as nothing beside the tale that kept running through her mind, blinding her senses to all the struggle that took place at her very side.
And then, suddenly and without warning, the crack of a pistol tore the air; then another and another, and there fell at the feet of Hattie Tolliver, completely blocking her overwhelming progress, the body of a swarthy man with heavy black mustaches. Before she was able to move, one of the constabulary, rushing up, kicked the prostrate body of the groaning man.
But he did not kick twice, for he was repulsed a second later by the savage thrust in the stomach from the umbrella of Mrs. Tolliver who, rushing to the attack, cried out, “Get away, you filthy brute!... You dirty coward!”
And the trooper, seeing no doubt that she was not one of theforeigners, retired sheepishly before the menace of the angry mob to join his fellows.
The basket and umbrella were cast aside and Mrs. Tolliver, bending over the writhing man, searched for the wound. When she looked up again she found, standing over her, the gigantic steel worker who she knew was Irene’s friend. She did not know his name.
“Here,” she said, with the manner of a field marshal. “Help me get this fellow into the house over there.”
Without a word, Krylenko bent down, picked up the stricken workman and bore him, laid across his brawny shoulders, into the corner saloon whither Hattie Tolliver with her recovered basket and umbrella followed him, surrounded by a protecting phalanx of excited and gibbering strikers.
The saloon was empty, for all the hangers-on had drifted long before into the streets to watch the riot from a safe distance. But the electrical piano kept up its uncanny uproar playing over and over again, Bon-Bon Buddy, the Chocolate Drop and I’m Afraid to go Home in the Dark.
There on the bar, among the empty glasses, Krylenko laid the unconscious striker and Hattie Tolliver, with the scissors she had used but a moment before in hemstitching a pillow-case, cut away the soiled shirt and dressed the wound. When her work was done she ordered Krylenko to take down one of the swinging doors and on this the strikers bore the wounded man to his own house.
When the little procession had vanished around a corner, Mrs. Tolliver brushed her black clothes, gathered up her basket and umbrella and set out up the hill to the Town. It was the first time she had ever set foot inside an establishment which sold intoxicating liquors.
Behind her in the darkened room at Cypress Hill, the sound of shots and cries came distantly to Julia Shane as through a high impenetrable wall, out of another world. At the moment she was alive in a world of memories, a world as real and as tangible as the world of the Mills and the Flats, for the past may be quite as real as the present. It is a vast country full of trees and houses, animals and friends, where people may go on having adventures as long as they live. And the soundsshe heard in her world bore no relation to the sounds in sordid Halsted street. They were the sounds of pounding hoofs on hard green turf, and the cries of admiration from a little group of farmers and townspeople who leaned on the rail of John Shane’s paddock while his wife, with a skilful hand sent his sleek hunter Doña Rita over the bars—first five, then six and last of all and marvelous to relate, a clean seven!
A stained and dusty photograph slipped from her thin fingers and lost itself among the mountainous bedclothing which she found impossible to keep in order. It was the portrait of a youngish man with a full black beard and eyes that were wild, passionate, adventurous ... the portrait of John Shane, the lover, as he returned to his wife at the school of Mademoiselle Violette de Vaux at St. Cloud on the outskirts of Paris.
AS Julia Shane grew weaker, it was Cousin Hattie Tolliver who “took hold” of the establishment at Shane’s Castle. It was always Mrs. Tolliver, capable and housewifely, who “took hold” in a family crisis. She managed funerals, weddings and christenings. Cousins came to die at her shabby house in the Town. She gathered into her large strong hands the threads of life and death that stretched themselves through a family scattered from Paris to Australia. Her relatives embroiled themselves in scrapes, they grew ill, they lost or made fortunes, they succumbed to all the weaknesses to which the human flesh is prone; and always, at the definitive moment, they turned to Hattie Tolliver as to a house built upon a rock.
Irene, so capable in succoring the miserable inhabitants of the Flats, grew helpless when death peered in at the tall windows of Shane’s Castle. Besides, she had her own work to do. As the strike progressed she came to spend days and nights in the squalid houses of Halsted street, returning at midnight to inquire after her mother. She knew nothing of managing a house and Hattie Tolliver knew these things intimately. More than that, Mrs. Tolliver enjoyed “taking hold”; and she extracted, beyond all doubt, a certain faintly malicious satisfaction in taking over the duties which should have fallen upon Irene, while Irene spent her strength, her very life, in helping people unrelated to her, people who were not even Americans.
So it was Hattie Tolliver, wearing a spotless apron and bearing a dustcloth, who opened the door when Hennery, returning from his solitary and heroic venture outside the gates, drove Lily up from the dirty red brick station, bringing this time no great trunks covered with gay labels of Firenze and Sorrento but a pair of black handbags and a small trunk neatly strapped. It may have been that Hennery, as Irene hintedbitterly, made that perilous journey through the riots of Halsted street only because it was Mis’ Lily who was returning. Certainly no other cause had induced him to venture outside the barren park.
The encounter, for Hattie Tolliver, was no ordinary one. From her manner it was clear that she was opening the door to a woman ... her own cousin ... who had lived in sin, who had borne a child out of wedlock. Indeed the woman might still be living in sin. Paris was a Babylon where it was impossible to know any one’s manner of living. Like all the others, Mrs. Tolliver had lived all her life secure in the belief that she knew Lily. She remembered the day of her cousin’s birth ... a snowy blustering day. She knew Lily throughout her childhood. She knew her as a woman. “Lily,” she undoubtedly told herself, “was thus and so. If any one knows Lily, I know her.” And then all this knowledge had been upset suddenly by a single word from Lily’s mother. It was necessary to create a whole new pattern. The woman who stood on the other side of the door was not Lily at all—at least not the old Lily—but a new woman, a stranger, whom she did not know. There might be, after all, something in what Aunt Julia said about never really knowing any one.
All this her manner declared unmistakably during the few strained seconds that she stood in the doorway facing her cousin. For an instant, while the two women, the worldly and the provincial, faced each other, the making of family history hung in the balance. It was Mrs. Tolliver who decided the issue. Suddenly she took her beautiful cousin into her arms, encircling her in an embrace so warm and so filled with defiance of all the world that Lily’s black hat, trimmed with camelias, was knocked awry.
“Your poor mother!” were Cousin Hattie’s first words. “She is very low indeed. She has been asking for you.”
And so Lily won another victory in her long line of conquests, a victory which she must have known was a real triumph in which to take a profound pride.
Then while Lily took off her hat and set her fine hair in order, her cousin poured out the news of the last few days. Itwas news of a sort that warmed the heart of Mrs. Tolliver ... news of Julia Shane’s illness delivered gravely with a vast embroidery of detail, a long account of the mulatto woman’s insolence and derelictions which increased as the old woman grew weaker; and, last of all, an eloquent and denunciatory account of Irene’s behavior.
“She behaves,” said Mrs. Tolliver, “as though a daughter had no obligations toward her own mother.” Her face grew scarlet with indignation at this flouting of family ties. “She spends all her time in the Flats among those foreigners and never sees her own mother more than a minute or two a day. There she lies, a sick and dying woman, grieving because her daughter neglects her. You’d think Irene loved the strikers more ... especially one young fellow who is the leader,” she added darkly.
Lily, knowing her mother, must have guessed that Cousin Hattie’s account suffered from a certain emotional exaggeration. The picture of old Julia Shane, grieving because her daughter neglected her, was not a convincing one. The old woman was too self reliant for that sort of behavior. She expected too little from the world.
But Lily said nothing. She unstrapped her bag and brought out a fresh handkerchief and a bottle of scent. Then she raised her lovely head and looked sharply at her cousin. “I suppose it’s this same Krylenko,” she said. “D’you think she’s in love with him?”
“No,” replied Mrs. Tolliver shrewdly, “I don’t think she loves anybody or anything but her own soul. She’s like a machine. She has an idea she loves the strikers but that’s only because she thinks she’s saving her soul by good works. I suppose it makes her happy. Only yesterday I told her, thinking it would be a hint, that charity begins at home.” For a moment Mrs. Tolliver waited thoughtfully, and then she added, “You know, sometimes Irene looks at her mother as if she wanted her to make haste with her dying. I’ve noticed the look—more than once.”
And so they talked for a time, as people always talked of Irene, as if she were a stranger, a curiosity, something which stood outside the realm of human understanding. And out ofthe ruin of Irene’s character, Hattie Tolliver rose phoenix-like, triumphant, as the heroine who had seen Irene’s duty and taken it upon herself.
“You know, I’m nursing your mother,” she continued. “She wouldn’t have a nurse because she couldn’t bear to have a stranger in the house. She has that one idea now ... seeing no one but the doctor and her own family. Now that you’ve come, I suppose she won’t even see the doctor any more. She’s asleep now, so I came down-stairs to put the house into some sort of order. Heaven knows what it would have been like if the drawing-room had been open too. That mulatto woman,” she added bitterly, “hasn’t touched a thing in weeks.”
Silently, thoughtfully, Lily pushed open the double doors into the drawing-room.
“It’s not been opened since you left,” continued Mrs. Tolliver. “Not even for the Christmas party. But that wasn’t necessary because there aren’t many of us left. You could put all of us into the library. There’s only Eva Barr and Charles and me. The old ones are all dead and the young ones have gone away.” For a moment she paused, for Lily appeared not to be listening. Then she added softly, “But I guess you know all that. I’d forgotten Ellen was living with you.”
For the time being, the conversation ended while the two women, Lily in her smart suit from the Rue de la Paix and Hattie Tolliver in shiny black alpaca with apron and dustcloth, stood in the doorway reverently surveying the vast old room, so dead now and so full of memories. The rosewood chairs, shrouded like ghosts, appeared dimly in the light that filtered through the curtained windows. In the far end, before the long mirror, the piano with its shapeless covering resembled some crouching, prehistoric animal. Above the mantelpiece, the flaming Venice of Mr. Turner glowed vaguely beneath layers of dust. Cobwebs hung from the crystal chandeliers and festooned the wall sconces; and beneath the piano the Aubusson carpet, rolled into a long coil, waited like a python. The room was the mute symbol of something departed from the Town.
Silently the two women regarded the spectacle and whenLily at length turned away, her dark eyes were shining with tears. She was inexpressibly lovely, all softened now by the melancholy sight.
“I suppose it will never be opened again,” observed Mrs Tolliver in a solemn voice. “But I mean to clean it thoroughly the first time I have an opportunity. Just look at the dust.” And with her competent finger she traced her initials on the top of a lacquer table.
For a moment Lily made no reply. At last she said, “No. I suppose it is closed for good.”
“You wouldn’t come back here to live?” probed her cousin with an air of hopefulness.
“No. Why should I?” And a second later Lily added, “But how quiet it is. You can almost hear the stillness.”
Mrs. Tolliver closed the door, seizing at the same time the opportunity to polish the knobs on the hallway side. “Yes, it’s a relief not to hear the Mills. But there are other noises now ... riots and machine guns, and at night there are searchlights. Only last night the police clubbed an old woman to death at the foot of the drive. She was a Polish woman ... hadn’t been harming any one. I wonder you didn’t see the blood. It’s smeared on the gates. Irene can tell you all about it.” For a moment she polished thoughtfully; then she straightened her vigorous body and said, “But I got back at them. I gave one of the hired policeman a poke he won’t soon forget. It’s a crime the way they behave.... It’s murder. No decent community would allow it.” And she told Lily the story of the rescue at the corner saloon.
As Lily made her way up the long stairway, Mrs. Tolliver paused in her work to watch the ascending figure until it reached the top. Her large honest face was alive with interest, her eyes shining as if she now really saw Lily for the first time, as if the old Lily had been simply an illusion. The beautiful stranger climbed the stairs languidly, the long, lovely lines of her body showing through the trim black suit. Her red hair glowed in the dim light of the hallway. She was incredibly young and happy, so unbelievably fresh and lovely that Mrs. Tolliver, after Lily had disappeared at the turn of the stair, moved away shaking her head and making the cluckingsound which primitive women use to indicate a disturbance of their suspicions.
And when she returned to dusting the library under the handsome, malignant face of John Shane she worked in silence, abandoning her usual habit of humming snatches of old ballads. After the Ball was Over and The Baggage Coach Ahead were forgotten. Presently, when she had finished polishing the little ornaments of jade and crystal, she fell to regarding the portrait with a profound interest. She stood thus, with her arms akimbo, for many minutes regarding the man in the picture as if he too had become a stranger to her. She discovered, it appeared, something more than a temperamental and clever old reprobate who had been indulgent toward her. Her manner was that of a person who stands before a suddenly opened door in the presence of magnificent and incomprehensible wonders.
Lily found her there when she came down-stairs.
“You know,” observed Mrs. Tolliver, “I must be getting old. I have such funny thoughts lately ... the kind of thoughts a normal healthy woman doesn’t have.”
ROOM by room, closet by closet, Mrs. Tolliver and Lily put the big house in order. They even set Hennery to cleaning the cellar, and themselves went into the attic where they poked about among old boxes and trunks filled with clothing and photographs, bits of yellow lace and brocade for which no use had ever been found. There were photographs of Lily and Irene as little girls in tarlatan dresses much ornamented with artificial pansies and daisies; pictures of John Shane on the wrought iron piazza, surrounded by men who were leaders in state politics; dim photographs of Julia Shane in an extremely tight riding habit with a bustle, and a hat set well forward over the eyes; pictures of the annual family gatherings at Christmas time with all its robust members standing in the snow outside the house at Cypress Hill. There were even pictures of Mrs. Tolliver’s father, Jacob Barr, on the heavy hack he sometimes rode, and one of him surrounded by his eight vigorous children.
From the sentimental Mrs. Tolliver, this collection wrenched a tempest of sighs. To Lily she said. “It’s like raising the dead. I just can’t believe the changes that have occurred.”
The arrival of Lily brought a certain repose to the household. The mulatto woman who behaved so sulkily under the shifting dominations of the powerful Mrs. Tolliver and the anemic Irene, began slowly to regain her old respectful attitude. It appeared that she honored Miss Lily with the respect which servants have for those who understand them. Where the complaints of Irene and the stormy commands of Mrs. Tolliver had wrought nothing, the amiable smiles and the interested queries of Lily accomplished miracles. For a time the household regained the air of order and dignity which it had known in the days of Julia Shane’s domination. Lily was unable toexplain her success. After all, there was nothing new in the process. Servants had always obeyed her in the same fashion. She charmed them whether they were her own or not.
Although her arrival worked many a pleasant change in the house and appeared to check for a time the inward sweeping waves of melancholy, there was one thing which she was unable, either consciously or unconsciously, to alter in any way. This was the position of Irene. The sister remained an outsider. It was as if the old dwelling were a rooming house and she were simply a roomer, detached, aloof ... a roomer in whom no one was especially interested. She was, in fact, altogether incomprehensible. Lily, to be sure, made every effort to change the condition of affairs; but her efforts, it appeared, only drove her sister more deeply into the shell of taciturnity and indifference. The first encounter of the two sisters, for all the kisses and warmth of Lily, was an awkward and soulless affair to which Irene submitted listlessly. So apparent was the strain of the encounter that Mrs. Tolliver, during the course of the morning’s work, found occasion to refer to it.
“You mustn’t mind Irene’s behavior,” she said. “She has been growing queerer and queerer.” And raising her eyebrows significantly she continued, “You know, sometimes I think she’s a little cracked. Religion sometimes affects people in that way, especially the sort of popery Irene practises.”
And then she told of finding Irene, quite by accident, prostrate before the pink-gilt image of the Virgin, her hair all disheveled, her eyes streaming with tears.
Once Mrs. Tolliver had reconciled herself to Lily’s secret, her entire manner toward her cousin suffered a change. The awe which had once colored her behavior disappeared completely. She was no longer the provincial, ignorant of life outside the Town, face to face with an experienced woman of the world. She was one mother with an understanding for another. Before many days had passed the pair worked and gossiped side by side, not only as old friends might have gossiped but as old friends who are quite the same age, whose interests are identical. In her manner there was no evidence of any strangeness save in the occasional moments when shewould cease working abruptly to regard her lovely cousin with an expression of complete bewilderment, which did not vanish until Lily, attracted by her cousin’s steady gaze, looked up and caused Mrs. Tolliver to blush as if it were herself who had sinned.
IT was Lily who in the end mentioned the affair. She spoke of it as they sat at lunch in the paneled dining room.
“Mama,” she said suddenly, “tells me that you know all about Jean.”
“Yes,” replied Mrs. Tolliver, in a queer unearthly voice. “She told me.”
“I’m glad, because I wanted to tell you before, only she wouldn’t let me. She said you wouldn’t understand.”
There was an awesome little pause and Mrs. Tolliver, her fork poised, said, “I don’t quite understand, Lily. I must say it’s puzzling. But I guessed you knew what you were doing. It wasn’t as if you were a common woman who took lovers.” She must have seen the faint tinge of color that swept over Lily’s face, but she continued in the manner of a virtuous woman doing her duty, seeing a thing in the proper light, being fair and honest. “I guessed there was some reason. Of course, I wouldn’t want a daughter of mine to do such a thing. I would rather see her in her grave.”
Her manner was emphatic and profound. It was clear that however she might forgive Lily in the eyes of the world, she had her own opinions which none should ever know but herself and Lily.
Lily blushed, the color spreading over her lovely face to the soft fringe of her hair. “You needn’t worry, Cousin Hattie,” she said. “Ellen would never do such a thing. You see, Ellen is complete. She doesn’t need anything but herself. She’s not like me at all. She isn’t weak. She would never do anything because she lost her head.”
Ellen’s mother, who had stopped eating, regarded her with a look of astonishment. “But your mother said you hadn’t lost your head. She said it was you who wouldn’t marry the Governor.”
Lily’s smile persisted. She leaned over to touch her cousin’s hand, gently as though pleading with her to be tolerant.
“It’s true,” she said. “Some of what mother told you. It’s true about my refusing to marry him. You see the trouble is that I’m not afraid when I should be. I’m not afraid of the things I should be afraid of. When there is danger, I can’t run away. If I could run away I’d be saved, but I can’t. Something makes me see it through. It’s something that betrays me ... something that is stronger than myself. That’s what happened with the Governor. It was I who was more guilty than he. It is I who played with fire. If I was not unwilling, what could you expect of him ... a man. Men love the strength of women as a refuge from their own weakness.” She paused and her face grew serious. “When it was done, I was afraid ... not afraid, you understand of bearing a child or even afraid of what people would say of me. I was afraid of losing myself, because I knew I couldn’t always love him.... I knew it. I knew it. I knew that something had betrayed me. I couldn’t give up all my life to a man because I’d given an hour of it to him. I was afraid of what he would become. Can you understand that? That was the only thing I was afraid of ... nothing else but that. It was I who was wrong in the very beginning.”
But Mrs. Tolliver’s expression of bewilderment failed to dissolve before this disjointed explanation. “No,” she said, “I don’t understand.... I should think you would have wanted a home and children and a successful husband. He’s been elected senator, you know, and they talk of making him president.”
Lily’s red lip curved in a furtive, secret, smile. “And what’s that to me?” she asked. “They can make him what they like. A successful husband isn’t always the best. I could see what they would make him. That’s why I couldn’t face being his wife. I wasn’t a girl when it happened. I was twenty-four and I knew a great many things. I wasn’t a poor innocent seduced creature. But it wasn’t so much that I thought it out. I couldn’t help myself. I couldn’t marry him. Something inside me wouldn’tlet me. A part of me was wise. You see, only half of me loved him ... my body, shall we say, desired him. That is not enough for a lifetime. The body changes.” For a second she cast down her eyes as if in shame and Mrs. Tolliver, who never before had heard such talk, looked away, out of the tall window across the snow covered park.
“Besides,” Lily continued, after a little silence, “I have a home and I have a child. Both of them are perfect. I am a very happy woman, Cousin Hattie ... much happier than if I had married him. I know that from what he taught me ... in that one hour.”
Mrs. Tolliver regarded her now with a curious, prying, look. Plainly it was a miracle she had found in a woman who had sinned and still was happy. “But you have no husband,” she said presently, with the air of presenting a final argument.
“No,” replied Lily, “I have no husband.”
“But that must mean something.”
“Yes, I suppose it does mean something.”
And then the approach of the mulatto woman put an end to the talk for the time being. When she had disappeared once more, it was Mrs. Tolliver who spoke. “You know,” she said, “I sometimes think Irene would be better off if such a thing had happened to her. It isn’t natural, the way she carries on. It’s morbid. I’ve told her so often enough.”
“But it couldn’t have happened to Irene. She will never marry. You see Irene’s afraid of men ... in that way. Such a thing I’m sure would drive her mad.” And Lily bowed her lovely head for a moment. “We must be good to Irene. She can’t help being as she is. You see she believes all love is a kind of sin. Love, I mean, of the sort you and I have known.”
At this speech Mrs. Tolliver grew suddenly tense. Her large, honest face became scarlet with indignation. “But it isn’t the same,” she protested. “What I knew and what you knew. They’re very different things. My love was consecrated.”
Lily’s dark eyes grew thoughtful. “It would have been the same if I had married the Governor. People would have said that we loved each other as you and Cousin Charles love eachother. They wouldn’t have known the truth. One doesn’t wash one’s dirty linen in public.”
Her cousin interrupted her abruptly. “It is not the same. I could not have had children by Charlie until I was married to him. I mean there could have been nothing like that between us beforehand.”
“That’s only because you were stronger than me,” said Lily. “You see I was born as I am. That much I could not help. There are times when I cannot save myself. You are more fortunate. Irene is like me. That is the reason she behaves as she does. After all, it is the same thing in us both.”
But Mrs. Tolliver, it was plain to be seen, understood none of this. It was quite beyond her simple code of conduct. Her life bore witness to her faith in the creed that breaking the rules meant disaster.
“I know,” continued Lily, “that I was lucky to have been rich. If I had been poor it would have been another matter. I should have married him. But because I was rich, I was free. I was independent to do as I wished, independent ... like a man, you understand. Free to do as I pleased.” All at once she leaned forward impulsively. “Tell me, Cousin Hattie ... it has not made me hard, has it? It has not made me old and evil? It has not made people dislike me?”
Mrs. Tolliver regarded her for a moment as if weighing arguments, seeking reasons, why Lily seemed content and happy despite everything. At length, finding no better retort, she said weakly, “How could they dislike you? No one ever knew anything about it.”
A look of triumph shone in Lily’s dark eyes. “Ah, that’s it!” she cried. “That’s it! They didn’t know anything, so they don’t dislike me. If they had known they would have found all sorts of disagreeable things in me. They would have said, ‘We cannot speak to Lily Shane. She is an immoral woman.’ They would have made me into a hard and unhappy creature. They would have created the traits which they believed I should possess. It is the knowing that counts and not the act itself. It is the old story. It is worse to be found out in a little sin than to commit secretly a big one. There isonly one thing that puzzles them.” She raised her slim, soft hands in a little gesture of badinage. “Do you know what it is? They can’t understand why I have never married and why I am not old and rattly as a spinster should be. It puzzles them that I am young and fresh.”
For a time Mrs. Tolliver considered the dark implications of this speech. But she was not to be downed. “Just the same, I don’t approve, Lily,” she said. “I don’t want you to think for a minute that I approve. If my daughter had done it, it would have killed me. It’s not right. One day you will pay for it, in this world or the next.”
At this threat Lily grew serious once more and the smoldering light of rebellion came into her eyes. She was leaning back in her old indolent manner. It was true that there was about her something inexpressibly voluptuous and beautiful which alarmed her cousin. It was a dangerous, flaunting beauty, undoubtedly wicked to the Presbyterian eyes of Mrs. Tolliver. And she was young too. At that moment she might have been taken for a woman in her early twenties.
After a time she raised her head. “But I am happy,” she said, defiantly, “completely happy.”
“I wish,” said Mrs. Tolliver with a frown, “that you wouldn’t say such things. I can’t bear to hear you.”
And presently the talk turned once more to Irene. “She is interested in this young fellow called Krylenko,” said Mrs. Tolliver. “And your mother is willing to have her marry him, though I can’t see why. I would rather see her die an old maid than be married to a foreigner.”
“He is clever, isn’t he?” asked Lily.
“I don’t know about that. He made all this trouble about the strike. Everything would be peaceful still if he hadn’t stirred up trouble. Maybe that’s being clever. I don’t know.”
“But he must be clever if he could do all that. He must be able to lead the workers. I’m glad he did it, myself. The Harrison crowd has ruled the roost long enough. It’ll do them good to have a jolt ... especially when it touches their pocketbooks. I saw him once, myself. He looks like a powerful fellow. I should say that some day you will hear great things of him.”
Mrs. Tolliver sniffed scornfully. “Perhaps ... perhaps. If he is, it will be because Irene made him great. All the same I can’t see her marrying him ... a common immigrant ... a Russian!”
“You needn’t worry. She won’t. She could never marry him. To her he isn’t a man at all. He’s a sort of idea ... a plaster saint!” And for the first time in all her discussion of Irene a shade of hard scorn colored her voice.
FOR an hour longer they sat talking over the coffee while Lily smoked indolently cigarette after cigarette beneath the disapproving eye of her cousin. They discussed the affairs of the household, the news in the papers of Mrs. Julis Harrison’s second stroke, of Ellen, and Jean from whom Lily had a letter only that morning.
“Has the Governor ever asked for him?” inquired Mrs. Tolliver, with the passionate look of a woman interested in details.
“No,” said Lily, “I have not heard from him in years. He has never seen the boy. You see Jean is mine alone because even if the Governor wanted him he dares not risk a scandal. He is as much my own as if I had created him alone out of my own body. He belongs to me and to me alone, do you see? I can make him into what I will. I shall make him into a man who will know everything and be everything. He shall be stronger than I and cleverer. He is handsome enough. He is everything to me. A queen would be proud to have him for her son.”
As she spoke a light kindled in her eyes and a look of exultation spread over her face. It was an expression of passionate triumph.
“You see,” she added, “it is a wonderful thing to have some one who belongs to you alone, who loves you alone and no one else. He owns me and I own him. There is no one else who counts. If we were left alone on a desert island, we would be content.” The look faded slowly and gave place to a mocking smile that arched the corners of her red lips. “If I had married the Governor, the boy might have become anything.... I should have seen him becoming crude and common under my very eyes. I should have hated his father and I could have done nothing. As it is,his father is only a memory ... pleasant enough, a handsome man who loved me, but never owned me ... even for an instant ... not even the instant of my child’s conception!”
During this speech the manner of Mrs. Tolliver became more and more agitated. With each bold word a new wave of color swept her large face, until at the climax of Lily’s confession she was struck mute, rendered incapable of either thought or action. It was a long time before she recovered even a faint degree of her usual composure. At last she managed to articulate, “I don’t see, Lily, how you can say such things. I really don’t. The words would burn my throat!”
Her cousin’s smile was defiant, almost brazen. “You see, Cousin Hattie, I have lived among the French. With them such things are no more than food and drink ... except perhaps that they prefer love to everything else,” she added, with a mischievous twinkle in her dark eyes.
“And besides,” continued Mrs. Tolliver, “I don’t know what you mean. I’m sure Charles has neverownedme.”
“No, my dear,” said Lily, “He never has. On the contrary it is you who have always owned him. It is always one thing or the other. The trouble is that at first women like to be owned.” She raised her hand. “Oh, I know. The Governor would have owned me sooner or later. There are some men who are like that. You know them at once. I know how my father owned my mother and you know as well as I that she was never a weak, clinging woman. If she had been as rich as I, she would have left him ... long ago. She could not because he owned her.”
“But that was different,” parried Mrs. Tolliver. “He was a foreigner.”
They were treading now upon that which in the family had been forbidden ground. No one discussed John Shane with his wife or children because they had kept alive for more than thirty years a lie, a pretense. John Shane had been accepted silently and unquestioningly as all that a husband should be. Now the manner of Mrs. Tolliver brightened visibly at the approach of an opening for which she had waited more years than she was able to count.
“But he was a man and she was a woman,” persisted Lily. “I know that most American women own their husbands, but the strange thing is that I could never have married a man whom I could own. You see that is the trouble with marriage. It is difficult to be rid of a husband.”
Mrs. Tolliver shifted nervously and put down her coffee cup. “Really, Lily,” she said, “I don’t understand you. You talk as though being married was wrong.” Her manner, for the first time, had become completely cold and disapproving. She behaved as though at any moment she might rise and turn her back forever upon Lily.
“Oh, don’t think, Cousin Hattie, that people get married because they like being tied together by law. Most people get married because it is the only way they can live together and still be respected by the community. Most people would like to change now and then. It’s true. They’re like that in their deepest hearts ... far down where no one ever sees.”
She said this so passionately that Mrs. Tolliver was swept into silence. Books the good woman never read because there was no time; and even now with her children gone, she did not read because it was too late in life to develop a love for books. Immersed always in respectability, such thoughts as these had never occurred to her; and certainly no one had ever talked thus in her presence.
“I don’t understand,” she was able to articulate weakly after a long pause. “I don’t understand.” And then as if she saw opportunity escaping from her into spaces from which it might never be recovered, she said, “Tell me, Lily. Have you ever had any idea from where your father came?”
The faint glint of amusement vanished from her cousin’s eyes and her face grew thoughtful. “No. Nothing save that his mother was Spanish and his father Irish. He was born in Marseilles.”
“And where’s that?” asked Mrs. Tolliver, aglow with interest.
“It’s in the south of France. It’s a great city and an evil one ... one of the worst in the world. Mamma says we’ll never know the truth. I think perhaps she is right.”
After this the conversation returned to the minutiae of thehousehold for a time and, at length, as the bronze clock struck three the two women rose and left the room to make their way upstairs to the chamber of the dying old woman. In the hall, Lily turned, “I’ve never talked like this to any one,” she said. “I’d never really thought it all out before. I’ve told you more than I’ve ever told any one, Cousin Hattie ... even my mother.”
Upstairs Mrs. Tolliver opened the door of the darkened room, Lily followed her on tiptoe. In the gray winter light, old Julia Shane lay back among the pillows sleeping peacefully.
“Will you wake her for her medicine?” whispered Lily.
“Of course,” replied her cousin, moving to the bedside, where she shook the old woman gently and softly called her name.
“Aunt Julia! Aunt Julia!” she called again and again. But there was no answer as Mrs. Tolliver’s powerful figure bent over the bed. She felt for the weakened pulse and then passed her vigorous hand over the face, so white now and so transparent. Then she stood back and regarded the bony, relentless old countenance and Lily drew nearer until her warm full breasts brushed her cousin’s shoulder. The hands of the two women clasped silently in a sort of fearful awe.
“She has gone away,” said Mrs. Tolliver, “in her sleep. It could not have been better.”
And together the two women set about preparing Julia Shane for the grave, forgetful of all the passionate talk of an hour before. In the face of death, it counted for nothing.