standing there, he watched the great cranes at work lifting, with a
weird animal intelligence, their tons of metal, picking up a burden in
one place and setting it down in another. The air smelled of hot metal
and the pungent tang of coal-smoke. Beneath him the stream, no longer
water, but a flowing mass of oil and acids and corrosion, moved smoothly
along: in a stream so polluted even ice could not freeze along the
banks. Beyond the mills and piled low on the top of its patrician hill
the mass of Shane’s Castle showed itself against the leaden sky. It had
been red brick once, but long ago it had turned black. There were only
dead trees in the park surrounding it.
It all stood out sharp and clear--the houses, the river, the furnaces,
the great engines, the lonely, quiet homes on the hills; and suddenly he
knew what it was that made the difference. The Town seemed a new,
strange place because of that queer thing which had happened to him at
Megambo. The scales had fallen from his eyes. He remembered how suddenly
he had seen the lake, the forest, the birds, in a new way, as if
outlined by light; and that odd, sensual feeling of strength, of vigor,
of life, overwhelmed him again, as it had done while he stood naked in
the moonlight listening to the ominous drums. For a moment he fancied
that he heard them once more, but it was only the pounding of the Mills.
It was new to him after having been away for so long; the sound hadn’t
yet come to be a part of the silence which one did not hear because it
was always there.
As he turned away he caught a glimpse of a pale, tall figure all in gray
turning a corner down one of the sodden streets of the mill-workers.
After a moment he recognized it slowly: it was Irene Shane, the daughter
of Old Julia--the daughter who had given all her life and her money to
work among the poor of the Flats. He remembered her then--she was the
one who had started a club-house and a school where the foreigners, the
Hunkies and Dagoes, might learn to speak English and their wives might
learn to save the babies who died like flies. She carried it on herself,
with only the aid of a Russian mill-hand, because people in the Town
wouldn’t give money. He remembered his mother’s having mentioned it in a
letter. “The Church was against it,” she wrote, “because it took time
and money away from foreign missions.”
He looked after the thin figure until it disappeared into one of the
houses, and then turned away. As he walked he found himself thinking of
Mary Watts. His mother had written that Mary Watts had something to do
with the club-house, until she married the new superintendent of the
mills. He must ask his mother what had become of Mary Watts. Of course,
she was Mary Conyngham now.... It was odd, but she was the only person
in the Town that he wanted to see. At last he had thought of some one.
On his way up the hill once more, he passed, near the establishment of
McTavish, the undertaker, the tall, powerful, middle-aged figure of the
Reverend Castor bound upon some errand. He was a rather handsome man, a
little pompous but with a kind face, who was quite bald and wore the
hair which the Lord had spared him very long and wound about his head,
in a way calculated to conceal his baldness. People said he was a good
man, and a fiery preacher with a wife who had been a complaining invalid
for fifteen years and rarely left her bed. Philip scarcely knew him,
though it was he who had married himself and Naomi and blessed them when
they left for Africa. The clergyman did not see him now and Philip
slipped by unnoticed.
From behind the glass of the Funeral Parlor, he knew that McTavish and
his cronies had seen him. They sat in there hugging the stove, a group
of middle-aged and elderly men who played checkers or rummy and gossiped
all day. It was a great place for news, since most deaths were reported
at once to the fat, good-natured McTavish. Every one was buried by
McTavish; he was the one who laid the hill-ants to rest deep in the
gravel of the seventh of these glacial hills. McTavish never went to
church and the big iron stove was known, even on Sunday, as the nucleus
of a band of shocking atheists and mockers. McTavish seemed to
understand at once whether the one he had come to bury was loved or
whether it was simply a relative from whom you were likely to inherit.
He was a bachelor who had no life save that which centered about the
iron stove; yet he knew the Town in a way that no one else knew it
because he was always near to the root of all things.
Philip knew that the group about the stove were saying, “There goes Emma
Downes’ boy who went to Africa for a missionary. He was always a queer
one--not a bit like Emma.”
And then they would launch into talk about the old story of Jason Downes
and his fantastic disappearance into the depths of China, where he had
escaped in the end the last ministrations of McTavish. They knew
everything, those old men. Each one was a walking history of the Town.
Philip, half a block off now, began to feel that sense of life which
somehow sustained them. He began to feel people, ambitions, jealousies,
loves and hatreds, stirring all about him in a strange, complicated
maze.
Naomi was waiting for him, dressed to go out. She had put on a thick
blue veil because, Philip suspected, she did not want to be recognized.
“Your Ma wants us to eat at the restaurant,” she said, and together they
set out in silence.
Miraculously they met no one on the way, and once inside the big, white,
clean restaurant, Emma led them to the table where, shielded by a screen
from draughts, she always ate. The restaurant began to fill with
customers--clerks, lawyers, mill-employees, shopkeepers, farmers and
their wives in from the country for the day--all lured by the excellent
food supplied by Emma. After a time the tables were all filled and
people stood waiting their turn. It was marvelous, the success of Emma.
Dishes clattered, orders were shouted, the cash-register clanked and
banged unceasingly. She was proud of the place and happy there: it was
clear that she could not imagine living away from such a hubbub and din.
While they were eating the stewed dried corn which she gave her
customers in place of the usual insipid canned variety, she asked, “What
did you do this morning, Philip?”
“I went for a walk.”
“Where?”
“In the Flats.”
“You might have chosen a handsomer part of the Town. You might have gone
out to see the new Park.”
He didn’t tell her about the locomotives. Once he had kept it a secret
because she would have forbidden him to return to them. Now, he kept his
secret for some other reason: he did not know quite what it was. He only
knew that Emma and Naomi must not know of it. It would only make them
believe that he was completely crazy.
Presently, when they had reached the squash pie, he asked, “What’s
become of Mary Watts?” And at the same moment he felt himself blushing
horribly, for in some way the memory of the imprisonment in the
storeroom returned to claim him unawares, and make him feel a shameful
little boy unable to look his mother in the eye. Only he understood now:
he knew what lay beneath the ancient, veiled accusations....
“Oh, she’s had a sad time,” said Emma. “You know she married the
superintendent of the Mills--John Conyngham--a man fifteen years older
than she was, and every one thought it was a good match. But he
died--three weeks ago--while you were on the ocean, leaving her with two
small children. They’ve some money, but not very much. The Watts house
was sold when old Watts died--to pay his debts. She’s living with
Conyngham’s sister, who’s quite well off. They’re in the old Stuart
house in Park Avenue. Old Stuart lost all his money hanging on to too
much land, so they bought the house off him. I guess Conyngham wasn’t a
very good husband--I used to see his bicycle sitting in front of Mamie
Rhodes’ house. There couldn’t have been much good in that--men like
Mamie Rhodes too well.”
She knew it all, the story in all its details, even to Mamie Rhodes, at
whose name women in the Town were wont to bristle. No one _knew_
anything about Mamie: it was just that she was much too young for her
years, and did something to men--nobody knew just what it was--that made
her very popular.
“And what was he like?” asked Philip.
“Conyngham,” said Emma, “John Conyngham? He was handsome, but I never
liked his looks. I’d never trust a man that looked like that.”
What she meant was that there was something about John Conyngham that
reminded her of the derelict Mr. Downes, and that the sight of him had
always disturbed her in a terrifying way. She couldn’t bear to look at
him.
“He died of pneumonia,” she said above the clatter of the dishes and the
prosperous banging of the cash-register. “They say he caught it coming
home in the rain from Mamie Rhodes’ on Thanksgiving night.”
Philip listened and the dull red still burned under the dark skin. He
was aware that the two women were watching him, secretly, as they might
watch a man who was a little unbalanced: they had been doing so without
cessation since his return. They were a little like two purring cats
watching prey all innocent of their intentions.
6
It was impossible, of course, for the three of them to continue playing
the game of hide-and-seek, pretending that Philip and Naomi had not
returned or that Philip was too ill to go out; it was impossible for
Naomi to go about forever disguised by a thick veil. Even Emma’s eternal
policy of allowing things to work themselves out appeared after a month
to be productive of no result, for Philip’s “mental condition” showed no
signs of improvement. He remained, rocklike, in his determination, while
the two women watched, stricken with uneasy fears because the Philip
whom they had once known so well that they could anticipate and control
his every impulse, now seemed a creature filled with vague and
mysterious moods and ideas that lay quite beyond the borders of their
understanding.
Their watching became at times unbearable to him, for it gave him the
suffocating sense of being a maniac who was not to be trusted alone. He
took to spending more and more time away from the house, either walking
the country roads or wandering through the black Flats where he was safe
from encountering any one or anything, save the gray figure of Irene
Shane, going her tireless rounds. Once he had a glimpse of the old lady
herself--Irene’s mother--riding by wrapped in sables on the last ride
she was ever to take.
A sense of waiting, more definite, more intense, than the tension of the
long day at Megambo, settled over the slate-colored house. It was broken
on the fourth Sunday after Philip’s return when the three of them
lunched, as usual on boiled mutton, at Uncle Elmer’s. It was a gloomy
lunch, tainted by the sense of Philip’s sin. The gloom enveloped all of
them, save Aunt Mabelle and her ten-year-old daughter, Ethel, who showed
already signs of resembling her mother in feebleness of character and
inertia of mind. The room was, through a lack of windows, dark, and
under the fog of smoke that enveloped the Town it became even more
cavernous and dreary; but Elmer Niman never permitted his wife to waste
gas in illumination. One groped for food in the dark, while Elmer talked
of the low pressure occasioned by the sad waste of gas in the Town.
The break came only after considerable preparation on the part of Emma.
She said, quite casually, “I saw Reverend Castor yesterday. He came into
the restaurant to see me.”
“He’s not looking as well,” put in Aunt Mabelle. “It must be a strain to
have an invalid wife. It’s not natural for a man to live like that.”
Elmer interrupted her, feeling perhaps that she was bound toward one of
those physiological observations which she sometimes uttered blandly and
to the consternation of all her world.
“He is a good man. We are fortunate in having him.”
“God will reward him for his patience,” observed Emma.
“I talked to him day before yesterday,” said Naomi. “I think I may go to
sing in the choir while we are on our holiday.”
Vaguely Philip began to sense the existence of a plot, conceived and
carried out with the express purpose of forcing him to do something he
had no desire to do. It seemed to him that they had rehearsed the
affair.
“There is an empty place on the alto side,” observed Emma. “They could
use a good strong voice like yours.”
“Of course,” said Naomi, “it’s so long since I’ve sung--not since I used
to lead the singing at the revival meetings.”
“And Philip--he used to sing.”
“He never does now. He wouldn’t help me teach the natives at Megambo.”
Philip, listening, fancied that he caught a sympathetic glance from Aunt
Mabelle. She was silly and stupid, but sometimes it seemed to him that
she had flashes of uncanny intuition: she had, after all, had great
experience with the tactics of Elmer and his sister. She sat opposite
Philip, eating far too much, lost in cowlike tranquillity. She was still
bearing patiently the burden which by some error in calculation had been
expected hourly for more than a month. Only yesterday she had said, “I
expect little Jimmy will have all his teeth and be two years old when he
is born!”--a remark that was followed by an awkward silence. Married to
another man she would undoubtedly have had ten or fifteen children, for
she was born to such a rôle.
“That’s how I met Elmer,” she said brightly, “singing in the choir. I
used to sing alto, and he sang bass. He sat right behind me and his
foot....”
“Mabelle!” said Elmer.
She veered aside from the history of a courtship which always engaged
her with a passionate interest. “Well, I’ve always noticed that lots of
things begin in church choirs. There was that Bunsen woman who ran off
with....”
Emma trod upon her, once more throttling her flow of reminiscences.
“That’s right, Naomi,” she said, “it’ll help pass the time while you’re
waiting.” And then, polishing her spoon with her napkin (an action which
she always performed ostentatiously as an implication upon the character
of Mabelle’s housekeeping) she said, “By the way, he’s planned a Sunday
night service which is to be given over entirely to you and
Naomi--Philip. Think of that. It’s quite an honor.” (She would sit well
down in front that night where she could breathe in all the glory.) “I
told him, of course, that you’d be delighted to do it.”
“Yes,” said Naomi, “he spoke to me about it. We’ll tell our
experiences.” The prospect of so much glory kindled a light in the pale
eyes--the light of memories of revival meetings when she had been the
great moving force.
Then Philip spoke for the first time. “I won’t do it--I’m through with
all that.”
There was a horrible silence, broken only by the clatter of a fork
dropped by little Ethel on her plate.
“What do you mean?”
“I told you all that before. I thought you must have understood by now.
I can’t go on saying it forever.”
“But, Philip ... you can’t refuse a good man like the Reverend Castor.
You can’t when he’s been so kind. He always prayed for you and Naomi
every Sunday, publicly, as if you were our special missionaries.”
There was only silence from Philip. The dark jaw had hardened suddenly.
“When we were all looking forward to it so much,” added Emma.
Then suddenly there came to him a faint suspicion--shadowy and somewhat
shameful--of what it was all about. They were looking forward to an orgy
of public notice and glory, to sitting bathed in the reflected light
while he talked about Africa to a congregation of faithful admirers. He
even suspected that this was the reason they were so determined to ship
him back to Africa. They would find glory in his sufferings. He was
angry suddenly, even hostile.
“You can tell him I won’t do it.”
“But, Philip, you must tell him yourself.”
“I don’t want to see him.”
Here Uncle Elmer took a hand, using the familiar tactics. “Of course, I
can understand that--Philip’s not wanting to see him.” He grimaced
suddenly at Emma to let him manage it. “I’ll speak to Reverend Castor
myself. I’ll explain about Philip’s condition.”
For a second Philip grew hot with anger; he even pushed back his chair
from the table as if to rise and leave. It was, oddly enough, Aunt
Mabelle who restrained him. He fancied he caught a sudden twinkle in her
round eyes, and the anger subsided.
Another painful silence followed, in which Rose, the negro
maid-of-all-work, placed the Floating Island violently before Aunt
Mabelle to be served. The room grew darker and darker, and presently
Uncle Elmer said, “I suppose, Philip, if you intend to stay here you’ll
be looking for some sort of work. It will mean, of course, starting life
all over again.”
“Yes.”
“Of course you could teach--a young man with a good education like
yours. It cost your mother a lot of work and trouble to educate you.”
“Yes.”
“But if you can’t get such work right away, I could make a place in the
factory for you. Of course,” and here Uncle Elmer smiled his most
condescending smile, “of course, with your kind of training you wouldn’t
be much good at first. You’d have to learn the business from the ground
up. You could begin in the shipping department.”
It was the first time any of them had admitted even a chance of his not
returning to Africa; but they did not mean to yield, for Emma said,
“That perhaps would help him over this nervous trouble.”
And then Philip shattered everything with an unexpected announcement. It
was as if a bomb had exploded in the dust and shadows beneath the table.
“I’ve already got a job,” said Philip. “I’m going to work to-night at
midnight.”
“To-night--at midnight?” asked Emma. “What on earth do you mean?”
“I’m going to work in the Mills. I’ve got a job.”
“The Mills! You’re crazy. What do you mean--the Mills?”
“I mean the Mills,” said Philip, looking at his plate. “It’s all been
settled.”
Suddenly Naomi began to cry, at first silently, and then more and more
noisily, as if all the dammed emotions of months had given way. Emma
rose to comfort her, and Aunt Mabelle, murmuring, “Oh, dear! Oh, dear!”
helplessly pushed the water-pitcher across the table. Little Ethel,
conscious of the strain of the whole meal, and frightened by the
outburst of hysterics, began to cry too, so that Aunt Mabelle became
occupied in comforting her.
Philip, able to stand it no longer, rose and, flinging back his chair,
said, “Damn!” in a loud voice, and walked out of the house. His swearing
moved Naomi to new outbursts. She began to cry about the
Englishwoman--the source of all her troubles.
It was all horrible, and it was the last time that Philip ever entered
his uncle’s house.
When he returned late that night he found them all waiting for him in
the parlor, ready to attack once more, but they accomplished nothing. He
went upstairs and changed his clothes. When he came down, he was dressed
for the Mills in an old pair of trousers, an old coat and a flannel
shirt. Aunt Mabelle, round and sloppy, was standing in the ghoulish
light of the green lamp. The others were all seated in the parlor
gloomily, as if brooding over the problem of a daughter gone astray.
From the shadows, Aunt Mabelle seized his arm, “Is it true? Is Naomi
going to have a little baby?”
Philip looked at her with a sudden astonishment. “No,” he said savagely.
“Who gave you such an idea?”
Aunt Mabelle seemed to shrink into herself, all softness and apology. “I
didn’t know ... I just couldn’t understand a woman carrying on like that
if she wasn’t.”
7
It was more than an hour before the midnight shift began at the Mills,
and during that hour Philip walked, sometimes running, along the empty
streets, through the falling snow, all unconscious of the cold. He was
for a time like a madman living in an unreal world, where all values
were confused, all emotions fantastic and without base: in his tired
brain everything was confused--his love for his mother, his hatred for
his uncle, his pity for Naomi, and his resentment at all three of them
for the thing they were trying to do. He wanted to run away where he
might never see any of them again, yet to run away seemed to him a
cowardly thing which solved nothing. Besides, if he ran away, he would
never see Mary Conyngham, and Mary had in some odd fashion become fixed
in his mind, an unescapable part of the whole confusion. He _must_ see
Mary Conyngham, sometime, in some way.
He was afraid to stay, depressed by the feeling that whenever he
returned to the house, he was certain to find them there--waiting,
watching him. Why, a man could be driven to insanity by people like that
who treated him always as if he were mad.
But worst of all, he had no longer any faith in God: there was nothing
of that miraculous essence which seemed to take from one’s shoulders all
the burden of doubt and responsibility. He couldn’t say any longer, “I
will leave it to God. He will devise a way. Whatever happens, He will
be right. I must accept His way.” He knew, sharply, completely, for the
first time, that a faith must be born in himself, that he had taken up
his own life to mold in his own fashion: there was no longer that easy
refuge in a God, Who would arrange everything. If he had trusted to God
now he would have been on his way to Africa, disposed of, not by God,
but by the hands of his mother and Naomi and Uncle Elmer.
He could be a coward and weak no longer.
After he had gone a long way he found himself on a height that seemed
strange to him, in that part of the Town which lay just above the Flats.
It was not strange, of course, for he had stood on the same spot a
hundred times before. It was strange only because he was in an odd
fashion a new person, born again, a different Philip from the one who
had stood there as a boy.
The sight that lay spread out below him suddenly brought a kind of
peace: he stopped running, and grew calm and, watching it, he succumbed
slowly to its spell. By night, the hard, angular lines of that smoky
world melted into a blue mystery, pierced and spotted here and there by
lights--the great blue-white lights of the arc-lights in the Mill yards,
the leaping scarlet flames that crowned the black furnaces, the yellow
lights plumed with steam of the great locomotives moving backward and
forward like shuttles weaving a vast carpet with the little
signal-lights, red and yellow and mauve and green, set like jewels in a
complicated design. In the darkness the grim blacks and grays took on
color. Color and light lay reflected from the canopy of smoke and steam
that hung above the whole spectacle. Piercing the glow of light, rose
the black columns of the chimneys and furnaces.
Above it all rose the endless sound of pounding, like the distant
booming of a gigantic surf, pierced now and again by the raucous,
barbaric squeals of a locomotive.
Halted and given poise by the sight, he stood for a long time looking
down into the very center of the roaring hive, forgetting himself
suddenly and all his fantastic troubles; and slowly an odd thing
happened to him. He felt strong: he wasn’t any longer puzzled and
afraid. It was as if there lay in the turbulent scene some intoxicating
sense of power which took the place of his missing faith. The spectacle
beneath him became alive with a tremendous sense of vitality and force
that he had not found in all his mystical groping toward God. This thing
that lay below him was real, he knew, real in a solid, earthly fashion,
created by men in the face of hostile Nature, free of any weak
dependence upon a Power which at best had only a doubtful existence. Yet
the awful power of this world created by the feeble hand of man was in
an odd fashion like the power of the lake, the forest, the sounds of
life on the hill at Megambo.
Hazily there came to him the feeling that here lay his salvation, and
presently he was overcome by an intense desire to plunge deep into the
very midst of the whirling maelstrom of noise and heat and light and
power.
Hurrying, he descended the hill, crossing the little river of oil and
corruption, passing a great open space covered with cinders, beneath the
white glare of lights hanging high above him, until he came at last to a
high fence and a gate where he explained who he was and showed his
card. He had an odd feeling that he should have said simply, “I have
come here to save myself,” as if the Italian gatekeeper would have known
what he meant.