rolling hills. They sat down side by side presently on the stone wall of
the bridge that crossed the brook. The water here was clear and clean.
It turned to oil further on, after it had passed through the Flats. For
a time they sat in silence, watching the sun slipping down behind the
distant woods that crowned Trimble’s Hill. In the far distance the
valley had turned misty and blue.
Presently Mary sighed suddenly, and asked, “And your wife? What’s to be
done about her? She’s a missionary, too, and she still believes, doesn’t
she?”
A shadow crossed Philip’s face. “Yes, that’s the trouble. It’s made such
an awful mess. She’s always lived out there. She’s never known any other
life, and she doesn’t know how to get on here. That’s the trouble.
Sometimes I think she ought to go back ... alone, without me. She’d be
happier there.”
For a moment there was a silence, and Philip fancied that she began to
say something, and then halted abruptly; but he couldn’t be certain. It
may have only been the noise of the brook. He looked at her sharply, but
she rose and turned her back.
“We’d better start back,” she said. “It will be getting dark.”
For a long time they walked side by side in silence--an odd silence in
which they seemed to be talking to each other all the while. It was Mary
who actually spoke.
“But you don’t mean to go on forever in the Mills? Have you thought what
you want to do?”
Again he waited for a long time before answering her. It must have
seemed to Mary that he was being shy and cautious with her, that despite
the pouring out of his story, there was still a great deal that he had
kept hidden away. He had the air of a man who was afraid of confidences.
At last he said, “I don’t know whether I ought to speak of it, but I do
know what I want to do. It sounds ridiculous, but what I want to do is
... is ... paint.” He blurted it out as if it required an immense
effort, as if he were confessing a sin.
“Pictures?” asked Mary. “Do you know anything about it?”
“No ... not very much. I’ve always wanted to, in a way. A long time ago,
when I was a boy, I used to spend all my time drawing things.” His voice
fell a little. “But as I grew older, it seemed foolish ... and the other
thing came up ... and I did that instead. You see, I’ve been drawing a
bit lately. I’ve been drawing in the Flats--the engines and cranes and
chimneys. They always ... well, they fascinated me as far back as I can
remember.” When she did not answer, he said, “You remember ... I used to
draw when I was a kid....”
For a time she considered this sudden, fantastic outburst, and presently
she said, “Yes, I remember. I still have the picture you made of Willie,
the pony ... and the tree-house....” And then after another pause. “Have
you thought about a teacher?”
“No ... but ... don’t think I’m conceited, Mary ... I don’t want a
teacher. I want to work it out for myself. I’ve got an idea.”
She asked him if she might see some of the drawings.
“I haven’t shown them to any one,” he said. “I don’t want to yet ...
because they aren’t good enough. When I do a good one ... the kind I
know is right and what I meant it to be, I’ll give it to you.”
His secret, he realized suddenly, was out--the secret he had meant to
tell no one, because he was in a strange way ashamed of it. It seemed so
silly for any one in the Town to think of painting.
The odd, practical streak in Mary asserted itself. “Have you got paints?
You can’t get them here in the Town.”
“No ... I haven’t needed them. But I’ll want them soon. I want to begin
soon.”
“I’m going to Cleveland on Monday,” she said. “I’ll get them there ...
everything you need. You’d never find them here.”
And then, since he had let escape his secret, he told her again of the
morning by the lake at Megambo, and the sudden, fierce desire to put
down what he saw in the procession of black women carrying water to the
young plantations. He tried to tell her how in a way it had given him a
queer sense of religious ecstasy.
It was almost dark now, and the fragrance of the garden on the outskirts
of the Town filled the air.
Mary smiled suddenly. “You know,” she said, “I don’t think you really
hated Africa at all. It wasn’t Africa you hated. You loved it. And I
don’t think you mean to stay here all your life. Some day you’ll be
going back.”
He left her in the shadows as the older of her children, a tow-headed
girl of three, came down the path to meet her, calling out her name.
On returning to the slate-colored house, he opened the door to find
Naomi awaiting him.
“Supper is ready,” she said. “I sent Essie to the restaurant for it, so
you wouldn’t have to walk up there.”
He thanked her, and she answered, “I thought you’d be tired after
walking so long.”
“Thank you. I did take a long walk. I wanted to get into the open
country.”
While they ate, sitting opposite each other, beneath the glow of the
dome painted with wild-roses, he noticed that she was changed. She
seemed nervous and uneasy: she kept pressing him to eat more. She was
flushed and even smiled at him once or twice. He tried to answer the
smile, but his face seemed made of lead. The effort gave him pain.
Suddenly he thought, “My God! She is trying to be nice to me!” And he
was frightened without knowing why. It was almost as if, for a moment,
the earth had opened and he saw beneath his feet a chasm, vague and
horrible, and sinister.
He thought, “What can have changed her?” For lately there had grown up
between them a slow and insinuating enmity that was altogether new.
There were moments when he had wanted to turn away and not see her at
all.
She poured more coffee for him, and he became aware suddenly that his
nerves were on edge, that he was seeing everything with a terrible
clarity--the little freckles on the back of her hand, the place where
the cup was chipped, the very figures and tiny discolorations of the
ornate wallpaper.
“Your mother won’t be home till late,” she said. “She’s gone to report
her talk with Mr. Slade to the ladies of the Union.”
He wondered why she had told him something which he already knew. But he
was kind to her, and tried not to seem different, in any way, from what
he had always been. He was sorry for Naomi more than ever since her life
had become such an empty, colorless thing.
At last he was finished, and thanking her again, he left her helping
Essie to clear away the table, and went upstairs with a strange feeling
that she had stayed behind to help only because she didn’t want to be
alone with him.
Undressing, he lay for a long time in the darkness, unable to sleep
because of the acuteness which seemed to attack all his senses. He heard
every small noise in the street--the cries of the children playing in
the glare of the arc-lights, the barking of dogs, the distant tinkle of
a piano. Slowly, because he was very tired, the sounds grew more and
more distant, and he fell asleep.
He slept profoundly, as a man drowned in the long exhaustion of the
Mills. He was awakened by something touching him gently at first, as if
it were part of a dream. It touched him again and then again, and slowly
he drifted back to consciousness. Being a man of nerves, he awakened
quickly, all at once. There was no slow drowsiness and clinging mists of
slumber.
He opened his eyes, but the room was in complete blackness, and he saw
nothing. It must have been late, for even the sounds of the street had
died away, to leave only the long pounding of the Mills that was like
the silence. Somewhere, close at hand, there was a sound of breathing.
For a second he thought, “I have died in my sleep.”
Then the thing touched him again. It was a bit of metal, cold and rigid,
not longer than a finger. And in a sudden flash he knew what it was--a
metal hair-curler. The thing brushed his forehead. He knew then,
quickly. It was Naomi come to him to be his wife. She was bending over
him. The darkness hid her face. She made no sound. It was unreal, like
something out of a dream.
13
In the Mills Philip had come to know the men who worked at his oven, one
by one, slowly, for they were at first suspicious of him as a native
from the Hills who came to work among them. It was Krylenko more than
any of them who broke down the barrier which shut him away from all
those others. Krylenko, he came presently to understand, was a
remarkable fellow. He was young, not perhaps more than twenty-five or
six, a giant even among the big Poles, who worked with the strength of
three ordinary men. There was a magnificence about his great body, with
its supple muscles flowing beneath the blond, white skin. Naked to the
waist, and leaning on his great bar of iron, there were times when he
seemed a statue cut in the finest Parian marble. It was this odd,
physical splendor that gave him a prestige and the power of leadership,
which would have come to nothing in a stupid man; but Krylenko was
intelligent, and hidden within the intelligence there lay a hard kernel
of peasant shrewdness. He knew what it was he wanted and he was not to
be turned aside; he was, Philip had come to understand, partly the
creation of Irene Shane, that pale, transparent wraith, who spent all
her days between the Flats and the great, gloomy house known as Shane’s
Castle. She had found him in her night class, a big Russian boy with a
passion for learning things, and she had taken him to help her. She had
perhaps discerned the odd thing about Krylenko, which set him apart from
the others, that he had a vision. He had no ambition for himself, but
his queer, mystical mind was constantly illuminated by wonderful plans
of what he might do for his people. By this, he did not mean his own
country people, but all the hordes of workers who dwelt in the rows of
black houses and spent half their lives in the Mills. To him they were,
quite simply, brothers--all the Poles, the Lithuanians, the Italians,
the Croats, even the negroes who came up from the South to die slowly
working over the acid vats. In his own Slavic way he had caught a sense
of that splendor of the Mills which sometimes overwhelmed Philip. Only
Krylenko saw, what was quite true, that the people in the Flats
belonged to another world from those on the Hill. They made up a nation
within a nation, a hostile army surrounded and besieged.
He meant to help his people to freedom, even by doing battle, if
circumstance demanded it. At times there was about him the splendor of
the ancient prophets.
It was for this reason that he stayed in the pounding-sheds, as a simple
foreman, refusing to go elsewhere, though he could have had after a time
one of the easy places in the shipping-rooms. He might have been one of
those men who, “working their way from the bottom of the ladder,” turned
to oppress his own people. There were plenty of shrewd, hard-headed,
pitiless men like that--men such as Frick and Carnegie, who had
interests in these very Mills. Only he wasn’t concerned for himself. He
had a queer, stupid, pig-headed idea of helping the men about him; and
he was one of those fantastic men to whom Justice was also God.
He had his own way of going about it; and he was not a sentimentalist.
He knew that to get things in this world, one had to fight; and so he
had gone quietly about organizing men, one here, one there, into the
dreaded unions. It had to be done secretly, because he would have been
sent away, blacklisted and put outside the pale if the faintest
suspicion of his activity reached the ears even of the terrified little
clerks who talked so big. There were meetings sometimes in the room over
Hennessey’s saloon, with men who wandered into town on one train and out
on the next. It was a slow business, for one had to go carefully. But
even with all the care there were whispers of strange things going on
beneath the rumbling surface of the Flats. There were rumors which
disturbed the peace of the stockbrokers, and stirred with uneasiness the
people on the Hill--the bankers, the lawyers, the little
shopkeepers--all the parasite ants whose prosperity rested upon the
sweat of the Flats. There were, too, spies among the workers.
They even said on the Hill that old Julia Shane and that queer daughter
of hers had a finger in the pie, which was more than true, for they did
know what was happening. In their mad, fantastic way they had even given
money.
There was always a strange current of fear and suspicion running beneath
the surface, undermining here and there in places that lay below ground.
In the first weeks Philip had become aware slowly of the sinister
movement. He came to understand the suspicions against him. And then
abruptly, bit by bit, perhaps because of his own taste for solitude and
his way of going off to sit alone in a corner eating his own lunch,
Krylenko had showed signs of friendliness, stifled and hindered in the
beginning by the strangeness which set apart a dweller in the Flats from
one on the Hill. One by one, the other men came to drop their suspicions
and presently Philip found himself joining in their coarse jokes, even
picking up snatches of their outlandish tongues. He came, in a way, to
be one of them, and the effect of the communion filled him with a sense
of expansion, almost as if he could feel himself growing. In a life
dedicated to loneliness, he felt for the first time that warm, almost
sensual feeling of satisfaction in companionship. He came to understand
the men who worked at his own oven--Sokoleff, who drank whisky as if it
were water, and sweated it all out as fast as he drank it, Krylenko
himself, who was in love with an Italian girl who couldn’t marry him
until her orphaned brothers and sisters were grown, and Finke, the black
little Croat who sometimes lost his head and talked wildly about
revolution. And a dozen others--simple, coarse men, whose lives seemed
plain and direct, filled too with suffering, though it was of a physical
sort concerned with painful work, and childbirth, and empty stomachs,
and so unlike that finer torture which Philip himself suffered.
And presently he found that the Mills were saving him--even his brain:
the grimness, the bitter tang of the black life in the Flats, presented
a savage reality which was to him like a spar in the open sea. There was
no reality, he thought sometimes, even in his marriage to Naomi. It was
all shadowy and unreal, filled with sound and fury which seemed baseless
and even silly, when one thought of this other life of fire and steel.
His own existence had been a futile, meaningless affair of vapors,
swooning and ecstasies.
And then on the morning after Naomi had come to him, Krylenko fixed it
for him to join the Union. To Philip it was a move that took on a
significance out of proportion with the reality: it had an importance
which for the others was lacking. He had entered the sinister conspiracy
against his own people on the Hill; it marked the closing of a door
behind him. He was certain now never to turn back.
All night and all morning he scarcely spoke to Krylenko and Finke and
Sokoleff. He worked beside them, silent and sweating, his mind and soul
in a confused state of alternate satisfaction and torment. Once or
twice, he caught himself smiling into the depths of the burning ovens,
like an idiot. He was smiling because of what had happened there in the
dark in his room, with the pleasure of a boy come at last of age. It
filled him with an odd, warm feeling of satisfaction and power. He was
at last a man, like those others, Finke and Sokoleff and even Krylenko,
who took such things as part of the day’s routine, as they took eating
and drinking. For them, a thing so commonplace couldn’t mean what it
meant to him. It couldn’t give them that strange feeling of being
suddenly set free after a long imprisonment. It couldn’t mean a fever
bred of long restraint that was vanished. And slowly through the long
hours by the hot ovens his nerves grew relaxed and his mind cleared. The
memory of the hot, tormenting nights at Megambo seemed distant and vague
now. He was, as he had said to Mary Conyngham, being slowly born again.
Something tremendous had happened to him. He was aware of a new strength
and of a power over women, even women like his mother, and Naomi,
terrified and hysterical in the darkness. He was free. A great light
like a rocket had burst in the darkness.
At noon when the whistles blew, Krylenko, tucking in his shirt, said,
“Come on and have a drink.... We gotta celebrate, all of us.”
For a moment Philip hesitated. He had never drunk anything, even beer,
but now there seemed a difference. What the hell difference did it make
if you drank or not? These men about him all drank. It was the only
pleasure they had, most of them, except what they found in the dismal,
shuttered houses of Franklin Street. There was a reason now to drink.
They would think he was celebrating his entrance into the Union, and
all the time he’d be celebrating the other thing which they knew nothing
about, which they wouldn’t even understand.
“Yes,” he said, “I’ll go.”
Hennessey’s saloon stood at the corner of Halstead Street and the Erie
tracks, just at the foot of the hill crowned by Shane’s Castle. It was
open night and day, and always filled with smoke and noise and drunken
singing. Noise was its great characteristic--the grinding, squeaking
sound of brakes on the endless freight-trains that passed the door, the
violent, obscene voices of protesting drunks, the pounding of the Mills,
and the ceaseless hammering of the tinny mechanical piano that swallowed
nickels faster and faster as the patrons grew drunker and drunker. The
only silence seemed to hang in a cloud about Mike Hennessey, the owner,
a gigantic Irishman, with a beefy red face and carroty hair. He wasn’t
the original Hennessey. The founder, his father, was long since dead. In
his day the famous Hennessey’s had been only a crossroads saloon. There
were no mills and furnaces. His customers were farmers. This silent Mike
Hennessey knew his business: he watched men get drunker and drunker
while the cash-register banged and jangled. He never spoke. He was
afraid of no man, and he had a very special scorn for the Dagoes and
their way of using knives to fight. He paid five hundred dollars a month
to the mayor, which made the police both blind and deaf to the noise and
lights of the saloon which had no closing hours, and a thousand more to
veil in purity his row of shuttered houses in Franklin Street. There was
a hard, flinty look in his cold blue eyes, that said: “I know the price
of everything in this bedlam of a Town. Every man and woman has a
price.”
But the hard blue eyes which never changed, widened ever so slightly for
a brief second as the swinging doors opened and Philip came in with
Finke and Krylenko and Sokoleff.
They sat at a table in the corner, where the mechanical piano growled
and jangled. It was the full tide of drinking in the saloon, the hour
when one shift of workers had left and another, dog-tired and black with
soot, had only arrived. Most of them came unwashed from the Mills and
their black faces together with the drifting smoke and clatter of sound
gave the place the aspect of some chamber in Hell. The four companions
began by drinking whisky, all of them but Philip perfectly straight.
They would, Krylenko said, drink beer afterward to finish up.
The whisky, even diluted, burned and then warmed him. Finke and Sokoleff
drank steadily, one glass after another, until the alcohol presently
killed their weariness and Sokoleff began to grow hilarious and Finke to
talk of revolution. For them the bad liquor took the place of rest, of
sleep, of food, of cleanliness, even of decency. In the Flats it was
useless to search for any decent thing, because comfort, food and warmth
were not to be found there. Finke and Sokoleff had learned long ago that
they lay only at the bottom of a glass filled many times with the
rot-gut whisky that Hennessey sold.
Krylenko only drank a little and then said he must go, as he had to see
Giulia before he went to bed. The great Ukrainian had washed himself
carefully all over with cold water at the Mills, while the other three
waited, Finke and Sokoleff standing by and making Rabelaisian jokes
about his preparations for the courtship. Krylenko took it with
good-natured tolerance, but there was an odd, shining look in his small,
clear blue eyes.
Philip, sitting in a faint, warm haze, remembered the scene with
pleasure, conscious that he belonged to them now. He was a member of the
Union, one of them at last, but more than that he had become like them a
man. He was drinking with them to celebrate.
Krylenko, taking leave of them, touched Philip on the shoulder. “You
better go home now and get some sleep.”
“No,” said Philip; “I’m going to stay a while.”
The big Russian’s great hand closed on his shoulder with a powerful but
gentle pressure. “Look here, Philip,” he said, “you ain’t like these
two. You can’t stand it. You better go home now. They’re just a pair of
hogs. Nothing hurts ’em.”
But Philip felt hazy enough to be stubborn and a little shrewd. He sided
with Finke and Sokoleff, who kept protesting noisily. He meant to have
one more drink--beer this time--and then he’d go.
Krylenko, shaking his big yellow head, went off to see Giulia, and, as
Philip watched his great shoulders plowing their way through the mob,
something odd happened to him. It was as if a light had gone out;
instead of feeling jolly and a bit wild, he was seized in the grip of
melancholy. He wanted suddenly to weep. He remembered what Krylenko had
said about hogs, and, staring in a queer daze at Finke and Sokoleff, he
saw them by some fantastic trick of the mind as two pigs with smutty
faces thrusting their noses into the big drinking-glasses. He wanted
suddenly to rise and wash himself all over with cold water as Krylenko
had done--to wash away the smoke, the smell of sweat and the noise that
filled the room. He didn’t want to talk any more or listen to the lewd
jokes which Finke and Sokoleff kept on making about Krylenko’s
courtship. He sat silently and stared into space.
And as the fumes of the alcohol filled his brain, the impulse to wash
himself grew stronger and stronger. He came to feel vaguely that there
were other things beside the soot and sweat that he wanted to wash away,
and slowly he knew what it was. He wanted to wash away with cold water
the memory of the night before, the fantastic memory of what had
happened with Naomi.
Finke and Sokoleff had forgotten him. The one had gone off to stand by
the bar talking red revolution, and the other was shouting wildly to
stop “that Gott-damned piano.” The room seemed to expand and then
contract, growing vast and cavernous like the Mill shed and then
pressing in upon him, squeezing the horrible noise tight against his
ear-drums. He felt sick and filled with disgust. Suddenly he knew that
he was drunk and he knew that he hadn’t meant to be. It had happened
without his knowing it. He was drunk, and last night he had slept with a
harlot. Oh, he knew now. It sickened him. It might just as well have
been a harlot, one of those women out of Hennessey’s shuttered houses.
It would have been better, because he wouldn’t have to go back to a
woman like that: he’d never see her again. And he wouldn’t have that
queer little knot, like a cramp in a weary muscle, that was almost
hatred for Naomi.
The drunker he got, the clearer it all seemed. And then suddenly his
tired brain gave way. He fell forward and buried his face in his hands.
He knew now and he began to weep drunkenly. He knew now, because he had
learned in a strange way during the darkness of the slate-colored house.
He knew why it was that he had had to see Mary Conyngham; he knew why he
had walked with her into the open country. He was in love with Mary
Conyngham; he had been in love with her ever since he could remember.
And it was Naomi who shared his bed.
Disgust enveloped him in physical sickness, and the old desire to wash
himself in cold water returned passionately. What Krylenko had said was
true. “You ain’t like these two--just a couple of hogs.” Krylenko knew
with that shining look in his blue eyes. Krylenko had his Giulia, and
he, Philip, had nothing ... less than nothing, for he had bound himself
in a terrible, sickening fashion to Naomi. It was all horrible. He was
drunk and he wanted suddenly to die.
Some one touched his shoulder, and he raised his head. It was Hennessey,
looking down at him out of the cold blue eyes.
“Look here,” he said. “You’re drunk enough. Get out of here and go home.
Your Ma is Emma Downes, and I don’t want to get mixed up with a hell-cat
like her.”