each train brought in criminals shipped from the slums of a dozen cities
to protect the sheds and furnaces. In the beginning it was neither the
strikers, nor the men who owned the Mills, but the Town itself which
suffered. Business in the shops bordering the diseased area fell off;
but, far worse than that, there began to occur one after another, with
terrifying regularity, a whole series of crimes. Houses were broken
into, a woman was attacked at twilight in the raw, new park, two fat
business men were held up and beaten, and the Farmers’ and Industrial
Bank, the institution of the corrupt Judge Weissman, was robbed and then
quickly failed under mysterious circumstance. It was the gunmen brought
in to make war on the strikers who committed the crimes, but it was the
strikers who were accused. Save for Philip and Mary Conyngham, and
perhaps McTavish, they had no friends on the Hills. The Shanes could not
be counted, since they stood apart in an isolation of their own. A
panic-stricken community began to imagine innumerable horrors. The
newspapers wrote editorials predicting anarchy and dissolution. They
talked of the “sacred rights of property” and used clouds of similar
high-sounding phrases. Moses Slade, seeing perhaps a chance to harvest
new crops of votes by “standing by his community in such a crisis,”
returned to head a sort of vigilance committee whose purpose was to
fasten all crime upon the strikers.
By this heroic act he soon rose high in the esteem of Emma, so high
indeed that it seemed to wipe out all her doubts concerning her
marriage. It was an action of which she approved with all her spirit.
She herself went about talking of “dirty foreigners” and the need of
making laws to exclude them from a nation favored by God, until Moses
took her aside and advised her not to talk in such a vein, because the
very strength of the Mills depended on new hordes of cheap labor. If
they throttled immigration, labor would rule. Didn’t she understand a
simple thing like that?
She understood. Moses Slade seemed to her a paragon. “Why,” she told
Philip, “he understands all the laws of economics.”
Philip, restless and convalescent, listened to her in silence. He even
met the Honorable Moses Slade, who eyed him suspiciously as a cat and
asked about his future plans.
“I haven’t any,” said Philip. “I don’t know what I mean to do,” and so
put Moses Slade once more upon a bed of pins and needles concerning
Emma’s qualifications as a bride.
The omnipresence of the Congressman’s name in Emma’s conversation had
begun to alarm Philip. He saw presently that she meant to tell him
something, and after a time he came to guess what it was. He saw that
she was breaking a way through his prejudices and her own; and in that
odd sense of detachment born of the fever he faced the idea with
disgust. It was not only that he disliked Mr. Slade; it seemed to him
that there was something disgraceful in the idea of his mother marrying
again after so many years. It was in a strange way a disloyalty to
himself. Moses Slade was a new ally in the forces against him. The idea
came to torment him for hours at a time, when he was not pondering what
was to be done about Naomi, how he could escape from her without hurting
her too deeply.
The two women, Naomi and his mother, hovered over him with the
solicitude of two women for a man whom they had snatched from death. In
these first days when he came downstairs to sit in the parlor there was
always one of them with him. Naomi left him only long enough to nurse
the twins. She was, as Mabelle observed, very fortunate, as she was able
to feed them both, and there were not many women, Mabelle remarked with
a personal pride, who could say the same. And under Mabelle’s guidance
Naomi adopted the same methods: the moment the twins set up a wail they
were fed into a state of coma. Mabelle had great pride in them, as if
she had played in some way a part in their very creation. She was always
in the house now, for Emma’s request and Elmer’s commands were of no
avail against her instinct for human companionship. With the twins
crying and little Jimmy running about, the house seemed overrun with
children. And little Jimmy had turned into what Mabelle described as “a
whiner.”
“I don’t know what to do about him,” she said. Her method was to cuff
him over the head, thus changing the whine instantly into a deafening
squall.
Naomi used her own convalescence as an excuse for clinging to the
soiled flowered kimono and the green mob-cap.
It was a state of affairs which could not long endure and the climax
arose on the afternoon when Emma, returning unexpectedly, found a scene
which filled her with horror. In his chair by the window sat Philip,
looking white and sick. Behind him on the sofa Naomi in wrapper and
mob-cap fed the twins. Little Jimmy sat on the floor pulling photographs
out of the album at the back of the family Bible. Draping the backs of
the mahogany chairs hung white objects that were unmistakably diapers.
Two of the objects were even hung to dry upon the very frame of Jason
Downes’ enlarged photograph!
For a moment Emma simply stood in the doorway in a state of paralysis.
At the sight of her Naomi sat up defiantly and Mabelle smiled blandly.
Philip, wearily, did not even turn to witness the picture. And then,
quickly, like a bird of prey, Emma swooped upon the diapers, gathering
them up in a neat roll. Then she turned on Naomi.
“It’s the last time I want this to happen in my house.” She seized the
family Bible from Jimmy, who began to squall, setting off the twins like
matches brought too close to a fire. “I won’t have it looking like a
bawdy-house,” she cried. “With you sitting here all day in a wrapper,
like a chippy waiting for trade.” Words that she would have denied
knowing came to her lips in a stream.
This time Naomi did not weep. She sprang up from the sofa as if to
attack Emma. “Take care what you say! Take care what you say! You old
hypocrite!”
Emma turned suddenly to Philip. “You hear what she called me!”
And Naomi, like an echo, cried, “You heard what filthy names she called
me.”
Mabelle, terrified, rolled her cowlike eyes, and tried to stifle Jimmy’s
screams. Philip did not even turn. He felt suddenly sick.
Naomi was saying, “If I hadn’t all the work to do.... If I had the right
kind of husband--”
Emma interrupted. “I took care of my child and did all the work as well.
I never complained or made excuses.”
“You didn’t have twins.... Sometimes my back fairly breaks. Oh, if I had
the right kind of husband, I wouldn’t be in your dreary old house!”
Emma turned again, “Philip ... Philip....”
But Philip was gone. She saw him, hatless and without an overcoat,
running through the snow that had begun to come down slowly and softly
as a white eiderdown.
3
He only stopped running when he grew so weak that he could no longer
make an effort. He had gone, without knowing why, in the direction of
the Mills, and presently he found himself, with a savage pain just
beneath his heart, sitting on the steps of McTavish’s undertaking
parlors. It was almost dark, and the air was cold and still; he felt it
creeping about him as the heat went out of his body. He knew that if he
caught cold he would die and suddenly he wanted to live, horribly. It
was as if that sickening scene had in some way released him from the
bondage of the two women. They seemed all at once to belong to another
world in which he played no rôle, a world strange and horrible and
fantastic. Even the twins did not seem to be his children, but creatures
born somehow of the two women and all they stood for in his tired mind.
They were two squalling tomato-colored infants in whom he could take no
interest--a judgment sent by fate as a punishment for his own weakness
and indecision. He grew bitter for the first time and out of the
bitterness there was born a new strength.
Sitting there in the softly falling snow, he resolved to go his own way.
He couldn’t desert Naomi and his children, but he could tell her that he
was through with her once and for all. And he saw suddenly the whole
sickening depth of the tangle--that it was her fault no more than his,
that she had suffered as much as himself, that perhaps in the end she
would suffer more, because (he knew it with a kind of disgust) she loved
him with all her soul and body.
Beating his arms against his body, he rose and turned the handle of the
door. McTavish was inside, alone, sitting by the stove. At the sound of
the handle turning, he looked up and grinned.
“Hello, Philip,” he said, and then quickly, “What the hell are you doing
out without a coat or hat?”
Philip grinned, and the very grin hurt his face, as if it had been
frozen by the cold. “I came out in a hurry ... I wanted to borrow a coat
and hat off you.”
McTavish rose and stretched his great arms, yawning, watching Philip
all the while. “Driven out?” he asked at last, with a sharp look.
“Yes,” said Philip quietly. “Driven out.” He knew suddenly that McTavish
understood. He remembered all at once what he had said, “I knew your Ma
before you were born. You can’t tell me anything about her.”
“Here,” suddenly the undertaker was pouring whisky. “Here, drink this.
I’ll get you a coat.”
He disappeared into that portion of the establishment where the dead
were kept, and returned in a moment bearing a coat and hat. The curious,
pungent odor of the place clung to him.
“Here,” he said. “It’s all I’ve got. You couldn’t wear my clothes. You’d
be drowned in them.” He laid the coat and hat on a chair by the stove.
“These ought to about fit you. They belonged to Jim Baxter, who got
bumped off at the grade-crossing while comin’ home drunk last week. His
wife has never come for ’em. I guess he won’t need a coat where he is
now.” He sat down and took Philip’s wrist, feeling the flow of blood.
“Feel better now? Your heart seems all right.”
“I’ve always been strong as an ox.”
“It ain’t the same after you’ve had a fever.”
They sat in silence for a moment and then McTavish asked, “You don’t
mind wearin’ a dead man’s clothes?”
“No,” said Philip. “No.” Anything was better than going back to the
slate-colored house.
“When you’re in my business, you get over squeamish feelings like that.
Dead men and live ones are all the same, except you know the dead ones
are mebbe missing a lot of fun.”
“No ... I don’t mind, Mr. McTavish.” Philip looked up suddenly.
“There’s one thing you could do for me. You could send word around to
the house that I’m not coming home to-night.”
A grin lighted up the big face. “Sure I will.... I’ll take the word
myself.” After a pause, “Where will you go?”
“I don’t know ... somewhere.” He rose and put on Jim Baxter’s coat and
hat. “I’m going down to the Flats now.”
“Your friends have been raising hell down there.”
“Yes ... that’s why I want to go down there now.... They’ll think I’m
dead.”
“No ... they won’t think that. That Dago friend ... Krylenko ... is that
his name? He’s been asking for you, and Mary Watts ... Mary Conyngham
she is now, she’s been asking, too ... almost every day.”
He must have seen the sudden light come into Philip’s eye, for he said
suddenly, turning to the window, “There’s a good girl ... a brave one,
too.”
“Yes,” said Philip.
“She’s the kind of a wife a man ought to have. There aren’t many like
her.”
“No.”
There was a long silence and McTavish said, “They can’t win down there
... everything’s against ’em. It’ll be over in two months and a lot of
’em never be able to get work within ten miles of a mill ever again.”
Philip said nothing. He thrust his hands deep into the pockets of Jim
Baxter’s coat.
“They tried it too soon. They weren’t strong enough. They’ll win some
day, but the time isn’t yet.”
Philip looked at him sharply. “I’m on their side. I know what it’s like
down there. Nobody else knows, except Irene Shane and Mary Conyngham.”
“Does your Ma know it?” asked McTavish, with a grin.
“She must know it. She pretends not to.”
“And the Reverend Castor?”
“No ... I suppose he doesn’t.”
Philip thanked him abruptly, and went out of the door. When he had gone,
McTavish poked up the fire, and sat staring into it. “I’m a regular old
woman in some ways,” he thought, “trying to meddle in people’s affairs.
But it needs a whole army to cope with Em.”
4
Outside, the world of the Flats lay spread out before him no longer
alive with flame and clamor, but still now and cold and dead beneath the
softly falling snow. There was no glow of fire; no wheel turned. Only
the locomotives shrieked and puffed backward and forward over the
shining rails. The streets were alive with people: they stood in little
groups in the snow. On the bridge a little knot of them surrounded a
speaker unknown to him, who harangued them in three tongues, urging them
not to lose faith. At Hennessey’s corner the lights cast a glow over the
fallen snow--it was really white now that there was no longer any
soot--and the tinny piano sent forth its showers of brassy notes into
air that was no longer filled with the pounding of gigantic hammers. And
the saloon was filled to the doors. Now and then a drunken Pole or Croat
fell through the doors into the street. He saw what McTavish meant. They
weren’t strong enough yet. They were so weak that Hennessey alone could
defeat them: his banging cash register could swallow up their strength.
He was a better friend of the Mill owners than all the men brought in to
break the strike.
As he followed the path that lay among the garbage heaps by the side of
the oily brook, it occurred to him that it was odd how strong he felt on
this first sally from the house. He was strong, and suddenly so content
that he forgot even the scene from which he had fled, running like a
madman. It was as if he gained strength from treading the very soil of
the Flats, as if it came to him from the contact of all these human
creatures battling for existence. And among them he was lost, alone as
he had been on those rare happy hours at Megambo when he had gone off
into the jungle at the peril of his life. The snow fell all about him,
silently, into the oil-muffled brook.
Crossing a vacant lot where the rubbish lay hidden beneath a carpet of
snow, he came at last to the familiar doorway which he had not seen
since the night six months before when he stood hidden in its shadow
listening to the voice of Mary Conyngham. Feeling his way along the dark
passageway, smelling of coal-gas and cabbage, he came at last to
Krylenko’s door. He knocked and the familiar voice called out something
in Russian.
Pushing open the door, he saw Krylenko sitting on the edge of his iron
bed with his head in his hands. There was no light in the room, but only
the reflection of a rubbish fire some one had built in the yard outside
the house. For a moment Philip stood leaning against the door, and when
Krylenko did not raise his head, he said, “It’s me ... Philip Downes.”
When he saw Krylenko’s face, he knew that the strike was lost. Even in
the reflected firelight, he seemed years older. He was thin, with deep
lines on either side of his mouth.
“Oh, it’s you, Feeleep.... I thought it was the old woman.”
He rose and put a match to the gas and then peered closely into Philip’s
face, with the look of a man waking from a deep sleep.
“It’s you.... Sit down.”
Philip knew the room well. It was small and square, with no furniture
save a bed, two pine chairs and a washstand. Above the bed there was a
shelf made by Krylenko himself to hold the dangerous books that Irene
Shane and her mother had given him ... John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx
and a single volume of Nietzsche.
“And how do you feel ... huh?” asked Krylenko, seating himself once more
on the bed.
“All right. Look at me.”
“Kind-a skinny.”
“You, too.”
“Yeah! Look at me!” Krylenko said bitterly. “Look at me.... A bum! A
failure! No job! Nothing.”
“It’s not as bad as that.”
“It will be.” He looked up. “Did yuh pass Hennessey’s place?”
“Yes.”
“Well, you see what it is ... trying to make a lot of pigs fight. All
they want is to quit work and get drunk. That’s all it means to them.”
“It’s not over yet.”
“It will be ... I’m gonna fight it to the end. They’re startin’ to
operate the B chain to-night ... a lot of niggers from the South that
ain’t organized.” He got up and went over to the window, standing with
his back to Philip. “We can make trouble for another month or two and
then I’m finished, and me ... I’m out of a job for good ... down ... on
the blacklist. You know what that means.”
It was an eloquent back, big, brawny and squared with defiance, despite
all the tone of despair in his voice. The rumpled, yellow hair fairly
bristled with vitality and battle. Philip thought, “He’s not done yet.
He’s going on. He’s got something to believe in ... to fight for. For
him it’s only begun. He’s got a giant to fight ... and I’m fighting only
two women.”
Suddenly Krylenko turned. “Look,” he said. “Look,” pointing out of the
window. “That’s what they’re up to now. They’ve bought up all the loose
houses and they’re turning the strikers out in the snow ... on a night
like this, God damn ’em. Look!”
Philip looked. Across the street in the falling snow lay a pitiful heap
of odds and ends of some Slovak household ... pots, kettles, battered
chairs, blankets, a mattress or two. A woman and four small children,
none of them more than six, stood drearily watching.
“And it’s a hell of a thing to do.... A free country, hell! It belongs
to a lot of crooked rich men.” Suddenly, he thrust his big fist through
the pane of glass and the tinkling fragments fell into the snow in the
yard. “We’re finished this time ... but we’ve only begun!” He laughed.
“The windows don’t matter. They bought this house, too. A lot of
niggers are movin’ in to-morrow.”
The blood was running from his cut knuckles and he bound them round
silently with a red cotton handkerchief. Presently, he said, “You’re
looking for your paints and pictures.... They ain’t here.... Mrs.
Conyngham took ’em away.”
“Mrs. Conyngham!”
“Yeah.... She came and got ’em herself. She’s fixed up a place for you
up at Shane’s Castle ... in the stable. I was to tell you and I forgot.
She did it when she heard about the Mills buyin’ up this row of houses.
It’s in the stable and you’re to go up there whenever you want. There’s
a stove and everything.”
He spoke in agitation, as though the paints, the pictures, were nothing
compared to his own troubles. A little thing, of no use! Suddenly he
turned, “And you, what are you goin’ to do?”
“When?”
“Now you’re finished, too. They’ve done with you, too. You’re one of
’em. Don’t forget that.”
Yes, that was a thing he hadn’t thought of. There must be people in the
Town who hated him the way they hated the Shanes, and perhaps Mary
Conyngham ... as renegades, traitors. And while he waited there in the
squalid room, watching Krylenko sitting with his head buried in his
hands, there came to him for the first time a curious, intoxicating
sense of satisfaction in being one of that odd little band--Krylenko,
the saintly Irene, the dying old woman in Shane’s Castle, and Mary
Conyngham. The wind had begun to rise, and with it little gusts of snow
swirled in through the broken window. He thought suddenly, “We are the
leaven in the lump.” He was not quite certain what he meant by that; he
only knew that the lump was concerned vaguely with that mass of
materialism and religion which made the character of the Town ... a
religion tamed and shopworn and subdued to commercial needs, a faith
worn down to the level of convenience. Groping, it seemed to him that he
was beginning to emerge at last, to be born as a soul, an individual.
“I mean to paint,” he said suddenly.
“That won’t feed you ... and your children.”
“No ... I’ll manage somehow.” Nothing seemed impossible ... nothing in
the world ... if he could only shake himself free. He thought, without
any reason, “Krylenko is no more one of the mill workers than I am. If
he were really one of them, he would be drunk now in Hennessey’s place.
There is something which sets him apart.... He isn’t one of them either.
He’s as unhappy as I am.”
Looking up, he asked suddenly, “And what about Giulia? Are you going to
marry her?”
Without raising his hand, Krylenko answered, “No ... that’s finished
now. If we’d won, it would have been all right. But now ... it’s no good
... I’ll be nothing but a tramp and bum.”
He spoke in a strange, dead voice, as if he were saying, “It’s a snowy
night,” as if something had died in him.
“No ...” he repeated. “That’s all finished. But you ... you’ve got
everything before you ... and that girl ... Mrs. Conyngham....” He
looked up suddenly, “She has faith in you ... that’s something.” He
looked at the great, nickeled watch he carried. “I’ve gotta go now.
I’ve got to see about putting up tents for all of ’em who’ve been thrown
out of their houses. It’s a hell of a night to live in a tent.” Rising,
he took up his black felt hat. “What are you going to do?”
Philip wakened suddenly out of a haze of thought. “Me! I want to stay
here to-night.”
“Here in this room?”
“Yes.”
“All right.... Turn in there.” He pointed to the rickety iron bed. “I’ll
be out most of the night, gettin’ coal and blankets. See you later.”
When he had gone, Philip felt suddenly ill again, and hopelessly weary.
He lay down on the bed wrapped in Jim Baxter’s overcoat, and in a moment
fell asleep.
At two, when Krylenko finally returned, there was a little drift of snow
by the broken window. Going over to the bed, he stood for a time looking
down at Philip, and then, with a great gentleness, he lifted him, and,
drawing out the blanket, laid it over him, carefully tucking in the edge
to keep out the cold. When he had finished, he lay down, keeping well
over to the edge in order not to disturb Philip. It was all done with
the tenderness of a strong man fostering the weak, of a great, clumsy
father protecting a little boy.
5
In the morning Philip awakened to find Krylenko already gone. It was
still snowing as he went out into the empty street and made his way
toward the shed where there was always hot coffee for the strikers and
their families. He stood there among them, drinking his coffee and
feeling the old sense of satisfaction of being in a world stripped bare
to those things which lay at the foundations of life. This was solid,
with a rawness that bit into the soul. He took out a pencil and on a bit
of newspaper began to sketch fragments of the scene about him--a Croat
woman who was feeding coffee to her three small children out of a clumsy
teacup, a gigantic, bearded Slovak and his wizened, tubercular wife, a
baby wrapped in the ragged remains of a pair of overalls, a thin, white,
shivering girl, with the face of a Madonna. They were simply sketches,
reduced to the very skeletons of drawing, yet they were in a way
eloquent and moving. He felt intoxicatingly sure of his hand, and he saw
all at once that they were the best things he had ever done. Set down on
the face of columns of printing, they caught the cold misery and the
dumb bravery of these puzzled, wretched people, suffering silently in
the midst of a hostile, foreign country. Looking at the sketches, he saw
that by some ironic chance he had chosen to draw directly upon an
editorial condemning them. He began to read. The fragment was torn, and
so had no beginning. “ ...sacred rights of property must be protected
against the attacks of men little better than brutes who have come,
infected with poison of socialism and anarchy, to undermine the
institutions of a great, free and glorious nation favored by God. These
wretches must be treated as they deserve, without consideration, as
beasts bent upon tearing down our most sacred institutions and
destroying our God-given prosperity.”
It was signed in bold black type with the name MOSES SLADE. He was
quite safe in his attack, thought Philip: foreign-born mill workers had
no votes.
A hand touched Philip’s shoulder and a voice said, “Give me that.” It
was Krylenko. “I can use it,” he said. “I know just where it belongs.”
He gave it to Krylenko without a word.
From the steaming coffee-shed he made his way through a street filled
with people and bordered with pitiful little heaps of shabby household
goods like that which he had seen from Krylenko’s window the night
before. He passed Hennessey’s place and, crossing the railroad tracks,
came within the area of the Mills. It was silent here. Even the trolleys
had ceased to run since one car had had its windows shattered. Beyond
this he came to the great iron fence that shut in the park of Shane’s
Castle. At the gates he turned in, following the drive that ran between
rows of dead and dying Norway spruce up to the house that crowned the
hill. It was silent in the park and the falling snow half veiled the
distant gables and odd Gothic windows of the big house. Among the dead
trees it occurred to him that there was a peace here which did not exist
elsewhere in the whole Town. It was an enchanted place where a battered
old woman, whom he had seen but once or twice, lay dying.
Following the drive, he passed the wrought-iron portico and the little
cast-iron Eros who held a ring in his outstretched hand and served as a
hitching-post. The towering cedars that gave the place a name--Cypress
Hill--which all the world had long ago forgotten, loomed black and
melancholy against the sky. And, turning the corner, he came suddenly
within sight of the stables.
Before the door an old negro swept away the falling snow with a worn and
stubby broom. He did not hear the approach of Philip, for he was deaf
and the snow muffled the sound of footsteps. It was only when Philip
said “Good-morning” that he turned his head and, grinning, said, “You
must be Mr. Downes.”
“Yes.”
“The room’s all ready for you.”
The old man, muttering to himself, led the way. At the top of the
stairs, he said, “If I’d knowed you was a-comin’ I’d a-had a fire.”