from the police, and he’s gone now.”
Then he was silent while Philip opened the note and read in the
powerful, sprawling hand of Krylenko:
“_I’ve had to clear out. If they caught me now, they’d frame
something and send me up. And I’m not through fighting yet. The
strike’s bust, and there’s no good in staying. But I’m coming back.
I’ll write you from where I go._
“_Krylenko._”
He read it again and then he heard Hennery saying, “It was a turrible
night, Mr. Downes ... I guess it was one of those nights when all kinds
of slimy things are out walkin’. They’re up and gone too ... both of
them ... the girls, Miss Lily and Miss Irene. And they ain’t comin’
back, so Miss Lily says. She went away, before it was light, on the New
York flier. Oh, it was a turrible night, Mr. Downes ... I’ve seen things
happenin’ here for forty years, but nothin’ like last night ... nothin’
ever.”
He began to moan and call on the Lord, and Philip remembered suddenly
that the half-finished drawing of Lily Shane had disappeared. She had
carried it off then, without a word. And slowly she again began to take
possession of his imagination. For a moment he tried to picture her
house in Paris where his drawing of her would be hung. She had gone away
without giving him another thought.
Hennery was saying over and over again, “It was a turrible night ...
something must-a happened in the house too. The Devil sure was on the
rampage.”
He stood there, staring out of the window, suffering from a curious,
sick feeling of having been deserted. “By what? By whom?” he asked
himself. “Not by Lily Shane, surely, on whom I had no claims ... whom I
barely knew.” Yet it was Lily Shane who had deserted him. It was as if
she had closed a door behind her, shutting him back into the world of
Elmer and his mother and Jason Downes. The thing he had glimpsed for a
moment was only an illusion....
19
When Hennery had gone off muttering to himself, Philip put on his coat
and went out, for the room had become suddenly unendurable to him. He
did not know why, but all at once he hated it, this room where he had
been happy for the first time since he was a child. It turned suddenly
cold and desolate and hauntingly empty. Running down the stairs, he
hurried across the soiled snow, avoiding the dark stain by the decaying
arbor. He went by that same instinct which always drove him when he was
unhappy towards the furnaces and the engines, and at Hennessey’s corner
he turned toward the district where the tents stood. They presented an
odd, bedraggled appearance now, still housing the remnant of workers who
had fought to the end, all that little army which had met the night
before in the park of Shane’s Castle. Here and there a deserted tent had
collapsed in the dirty snow. Piles of rubbish and filth cluttered the
muddy field on every side. Men, women and children stood in little
groups, frightened and helpless and bedraggled, all the spirit gone out
of them. There was no more work for them now. Wherever they went, no
mill would take them in. They had no homes, no money, no food....
Lost among them, he came presently to feel less lonely, for it was here
that he belonged--in this army of outcasts--a sort of pariah in the
world that should have been his own.
At the door of one of the tents, he recognized Sokoleff. The Ukranian
had let his beard grow and he held a child of two in his arms--a child
with great hollow eyes and blue lips. Sokoleff, who was always drunk and
laughing, was sober now, with a look of misery in his eyes. Philip shook
his free hand in silence, and then said, “You heard about Krylenko?”
“No, I ain’t heard nothin’. I’ve been waitin’ for him. I gotta tell him
a piece of bad news.”
“He’s gone away.”
“Where’s he gone?”
Philip told him, and, after a silence, Sokoleff said, “I suppose he had
to beat it. I suppose he had to ... but what are we gonna do ... the
ones that’s left. He’s the only one with a brain. The rest of us ain’t
good for nothin’. We ain’t even got money to get drunk on.”
“He won’t forget you.”
“Oh, it’s all right for him. He ain’t got nobody ... no children or a
wife. He ain’t even got a girl ... now.”
For a moment the single word “now,” added carelessly after a pause,
meant nothing to Philip, and then suddenly a terrible suspicion took
possession of him. He looked at Sokoleff. “What d’you mean ... now?”
“Ain’t you heard it?”
“What?”
“It was his girl, Giulia ... that was killed last night.”
Philip felt sick. In a low voice he asked, “And he didn’t know it?”
“I was to tell him, but nobody’s seen him. I’m damned glad he’s went
away now. I won’t have the goddamned dirty job. He’ll be crazy ... crazy
as hell.”
And then Philip saw her again as he had seen her the night before, lying
face down in the snow ... Krylenko’s Giulia.
“She oughtn’t to have went up there,” Sokoleff was saying. “But she was
nuts on him ... she thought that he was the best guy on earth, and she
wanted to hear his speech....” The bearded Slovak spat into the snow. “I
guess that was the last thing she ever heard. She musta died happy....
That’s better than livin’ like this.”
And Krylenko had been hiding in Shane’s Castle all night while Giulia
lay dead in the snow outside.
The sick baby began to cry, and Sokoleff stroked its bare head with a
calloused paw covered by black hair.
All at once Philip was happy again; even in the midst of all the misery
about him, he was gloriously, selfishly happy, because he knew that,
whatever happened, he had known what Krylenko had lost now forever. He
thought suddenly, “The jungle at Megambo was less cruel and savage than
this world about me.”
20
To Jason Downes the tragedy in the park of Shane’s Castle had only one
significance--that it tarnished all the glory of his astonishing return.
When the papers appeared in the morning, the first pages were filled
with the news of “the riot precipitated by strikers last night.” It
recounted the death of a Pole and of Giulia Rizzo, and announced
triumphantly that the strike was broken at last. And far back, among the
advertisements of Peruna and Lydia Pinkham’s Compound, there appeared a
brief paragraph or two announcing the return of Jason Downes, and
touching upon the remarkable story of his accident and consequent loss
of memory. There were, doubtless, people who never saw it at all.
But he made the most of his return, walking the round of all the
cigar-stores and poker-rooms which he had haunted in his youth. He even
went to Hennessey’s saloon, beginning to thrive again on the money of
the strike-breakers. But he found no great triumph, for he discovered
only one or two men who had ever known him and to the others he was only
Emma Downes’ husband, whom they barely noticed in the excitement of
discussing the riots of the night before. Even his dudishness had dated
during those long twenty-six years: he must have heard the titters that
went up from poolroom loafers at the sight of the faun-colored vest, the
waxed mustaches and the tan derby. He was pushed aside at bars and
thrust into the corner in the poolrooms.
Half in desperation, he went at last to find an audience in the group of
old men who sat all day about the stove of McTavish’s
undertaking-parlors. They were old: they would remember who he was. But
even there the clamor of the tragedy drowned his tale. He found the
place filled with Italians--the father and the seven orphaned brothers
and sisters of Giulia Rizzo. The father wept and wrung his hands. The
older children joined him, and the four youngest huddled dumbly in a
corner. It was Jason’s own son, Philip, who was trying to quiet them. He
nodded to his father, gave him a sudden glance of contempt, and then
disappeared with McTavish into the back room where the undertaker had
prepared Giulia for her last rest. For a moment Jason hung about
hopefully, and then, confused and depressed by the ungoverned emotions
of the Italians, he slipped out of the door, and up the street toward
the Peerless Restaurant. He was like a bedraggled bantam rooster which
had lost its proud tail-feathers, but as he approached the restaurant he
grew a bit more jaunty: there was always Em who thought him
wonderful....
Behind the partition of the undertaking-rooms, Philip and McTavish stood
looking down at Giulia. The blood had been washed away and her face was
white like marble against the dark coil of her hair. She was clothed in
a dress of black silk.
“It was her best dress,” said McTavish. “The old man brought it up here
this morning.”
Philip asked, “Are they going to bury her in the Potters Field? Old
Rizzo hasn’t got a cent, with all these children to feed.”
“No, I’ve arranged that. I fixed it up with the priest. She had to be
buried in consecrated ground ... and ... and I bought enough for her. I
ain’t got any family, so I might as well spend my money on something.”
21
Philip saw his father at the restaurant, but there was little
conversation between them, and Emma kept talking about the riot of the
night before, observing that, “now that the police had tried something
besides coddling a lot of dirty foreigners, the strike was over in a
hurry.”
At this remark, Philip rose quietly and went out without another word to
either of them. At home he found the druggist’s wife sitting with the
twins. Naomi, she said, was out. She had gone to see Mabelle. Mrs.
Stimson wanted more details of his father’s return, and also news of
what had happened at Shane’s Castle. After answering a dozen questions,
he went away quickly.
At four o’clock his father came and saw the twins, diddling them both on
his feet until they cried and Mrs. Stimson said, with the air of a
snapping-turtle, “I’m going to leave them with you. Naomi ought to have
been home two hours ago, and I’ve got a household of my own to look
after.” (Even for her poor Jason appeared to have lost his fascination.)
At seven when Philip came in to sit with the twins while Naomi went to
choir practice, he found little Naomi crying and his father asleep in
the Morris-chair by the gas stove. Jason had removed his collar and
wrapped himself in a blanket. With him, sleeping was simply a way of
filling in time between the high spots in existence: he slept when he
was bored, and he slept when he was forced to wait.
Holding the baby against him, and patting its back softly, Philip
approached his father and touched him with the toe of his shoe. “Pa!” he
said. “Pa! Wake up!”
Jason awakened with all the catlike reluctance of a sensual nature,
stretching himself and yawning and closing his eyes. He would have
fallen asleep a second time but for the insistence of Philip’s toe, the
desperate crying of the child, and Philip’s voice saying, “Wake up! Wake
up!” There was something in the very prodding of the toe which indicated
a contempt or at least a lack of respect. Jason noticed it and scowled.
“I just fell asleep for a minute,” he said. “It couldn’t have been
long.” But all the cocksureness had turned into an air of groveling
apology.
“Where’s Naomi?”
“She went off to Mabelle’s.” He took a pair of cigars from the yellow
waistcoat and asked, “Have a cigar?”
“No. Not now.” Philip continued to pat the baby’s fat back. Suddenly he
felt desperate, suffocated and helpless. The cry of the child hurt him.
He said, “She’s been at Mabelle’s all day.”
“I do believe she said she’d be back after choir practice.” He lighted
the cigar and regarded the end of it thoughtfully. Philip began to walk
up and down, and presently his father said, without looking at him, “You
ain’t living with Naomi, are you? I mean here in this house? You ain’t
sleeping with her?”
“No ... I’m not.”
“I thought so. Your Ma was trying to make me believe you was.” He cocked
his head on one side. “But I smelled a rat ... I smelled a rat. I knew
something was wrong.”
Philip continued his promenade in silence.
“How’d you ever come to hook up with Naomi?”
“Because I wanted to ... I suppose.”
Jason considered the answer thoughtfully. “No, I don’t believe you did.
I ain’t very bright, but I know some things. No man in his right mind
would hook up to anything as pious as Naomi....” He saw that Philip’s
head tossed back and his jaw hardened, as if he were going to speak.
“Now, don’t get mad at your Pa ... your poor old Pa ... I know you don’t
think much of ’im, but he’s kind-a proud of you, just the same. And he
don’t blame you for not living with Naomi. Why, the thought of it makes
me kind-a seasick.”
Again a silence filled by little Naomi’s heartbroken crying.
“Why, she ought to be home now looking after her children instead of
gadding about with preachers and such. Your Ma was always pious, too,
but she was a good housekeeper. She never allowed religion to interfere
with her bein’ practical.”
Philip, distracted, unhappy, conscience-stricken, and a little
frightened at Naomi’s queer avoidance of him, was aware, too, that his
father was saying one by one things he’d thought himself a hundred
times. It occurred to him that Jason wasn’t perhaps as empty and cheap
as he seemed. It was almost as if an affection were being born out of
Jason’s hopeless efforts toward an understanding. If only little Naomi
would stop squalling....
His father was saying, “No, I’m proud of you, my boy. D’you know why?”
“No.”
“Because of the way you stand up to your Ma. It takes a strong man to do
that, unless you learn the trick. I’ve learned the trick. I just let her
slide off now like water off a duck’s back. I just say, ‘Yes, yes,’ to
her and then do as I damned please. Oh, I learned a lot since I last
saw her ... a hell of a lot. There’s a lotta women like her ...
especially American women--that don’t know their place.”
The baby stopped screaming, sobbed for a moment, and then began again.
“It wasn’t her piousness that drove me away. I could have managed that.
It was her way of meddlin’.”
Philip stopped short and turned, looking at his father. “Then you _were_
running away from us when you fell and hit your head?”
“I wasn’t runnin’ away from _you_.”
Philip stood in front of the chair. “And you didn’t lose your memory at
all, did you?”
Jason looked up at him with an expression of astonishment. “No ... of
course not. D’you mean to say she never told you the truth ... even you
... my own son?”
“No ... I guess she was trying to protect you ... and made me believe my
father wasn’t the kind to run away.” (The cries of the baby had begun to
beat upon his brain like the steel hammers of the Mill.)
“Protect me, hell! It was to protect herself. She didn’t want the Town
to think that any man would desert her. Oh, I know your Ma, my boy. And
it would have took a hero or a nincompoop to have stuck with her in
those days.” He knocked the ash from his cigar, and shook his head
sadly. “But I oughtn’t to have run away on your account. If I’d ’a’
stuck it out, you wouldn’t have got mixed up in the missionary business
or with Naomi either. You wouldn’t be walkin’ up and down with that
squallin’ brat--at any rate, it wouldn’t be Naomi’s brat. I guess the
missionary business was her way of gettin’ even with me through you.”
He shook his head again. “Your Ma’s a queer woman. She’s got as much
energy as a steam engine, but she never knows where she’s goin’, and she
always thinks she’s the only one with any sense. And my, ain’t she hard
... and unforgivin’ ... hard as a cocoanut!”
“She forgave you and took you back.”
“But she’s been aching to do that for years. That’s the kind of thing
she likes.” His chest swelled under the yellow vest. “Besides, I always
had a kind of an idea that she preferred me to any other man she’s ever
seen. Your Ma’s a passionate woman, Philip. She’s kind of ashamed of it,
but deep down she’s a passionate woman. If she’d had me about all these
years she wouldn’t have been so obnoxious, I guess.”
The baby had ceased crying now, and, thrusting its soft head against the
curve of Philip’s throat, was lying very still. The touch of the downy
little ball against his skin filled him with pity and a sudden, warm
happiness. The poor little thing was trusting him, reaching out in its
helpless way. He didn’t even mind the things that his father was saying
of his mother. He scarcely heard them....
“I thought,” said Jason, “that we’d cooked up that story about my memory
for the Town and for old pie-faced Elmer. I thought she’d tell you the
truth, but I guess she don’t care much for the truth if it ain’t
pleasant.”
Philip continued to pat little Naomi, more and more gently, as she began
to fall asleep. In a low voice he asked, “You’re going to stay now that
you’ve come back, aren’t you?”
“No, I gotta go back to Australia.”
Philip looked at his father sharply. “You aren’t going back to stay, are
you?”
“I gotta look after my property, haven’t I?”
“Why did you ever come back at all?”
Jason considered the question. “I suppose it was curiosity ... I wanted
to see my own son, and well ... I wanted to see what had happened to
your Ma after all these years, and then it is sort of fun to be a
returned prodigal. Nothing has happened to your Ma. She’s just the same.
She accused me of bein’ drunk this morning when I’d only had a glass.
She carried on something awful.”
“Have you told her you’re going back to stay?”
“No ... I’ve just told her I’m going back.” He looked at Philip
suddenly. “I suppose you think I’m lyin’ about all that property in
Australia. Well, I ain’t. I’ll send you pictures of it when I get back
... I ought to have brought them. I can’t guess why I didn’t.”
He rose and put on his coat. “I’d better be movin’ on now, or she’ll be
sayin’ I’ve been hangin’ around bars. Have you eaten yet?”
“Yes ... at the railroad lunch counter.”
“That’s a hell of a life for a married man.”
He stood for a moment looking at little Naomi, who lay asleep on
Philip’s shoulder. Then, shyly, he put out his finger and touched the
downy head gently. “They’re fine babies,” he said. “I wouldn’t have
thought a poor creature like Naomi could have had ’em.”
Philip laid the child gently beside her brother and stood looking down
at them.
“Philip,” his father began. Philip turned, and, as if the burning gaze
of his son’s eyes extinguished his desire to speak, Jason looked away
quickly, and said, “Well, good-night.” He turned shyly, and Philip,
aware that he was trying to pierce through the wall that separated them,
felt suddenly sorry for him, and said, “Yes, Pa. What was it you meant
to say?”
Jason coughed and then with an effort said, “Don’t be too unhappy ...
and if there’s somebody else ... I mean another girl ... why, don’t
torture yourself too much about it. Your Ma has made you like that....
But she’s got queer ideas. We ain’t alive very long, you know, and there
ain’t any reason why we should make our brief spell miserable.”
Philip didn’t answer him. He was looking down again at the children,
silent, with the old, queer, pinched look about the eyes, as if he were
ill again. He saw suddenly that his father wasn’t such a fool, after
all, and he was human. He was standing there with his hat in his two
hands, looking childish and subdued and very shy.
Philip heard him saying, with another nervous cough, “Well, good-night,
Philip.”
“Good-night.”
The door closed and Philip sank down wearily into a chair, resting his
head on the edge of the crib. Presently he fell asleep thus.
22
On that night the singing at choir practice reached a peak of frenzy.
While Philip sat sleeping beside the crib, Naomi was pounding her heart
out on the stained celluloid keys of the tinny piano in the Infants’
Classroom. She played wildly, with a kind of shameless abandon, as if
she wanted to pour out her whole story of justification; and the others,
taking fire from her spirit, sang as they had never sung before.
During the afternoon, the old Naomi--the stubborn, sure Naomi of
Megambo--had come to life again in some mysterious fashion. She even put
on the new foulard dress in a gesture of defiance to show them--Philip
and his mother--that, however “funny-looking” it might be, she was proud
of it. And then neither of them had seen her wearing it, Philip because
she was avoiding him, and Emma because chance had not brought them
together. She had gone up to Mabelle’s bent upon telling her that she
had come to the end of her endurance. She had meant to ask Mabelle’s
advice, because Mabelle was very shrewd about such matters.
And then when she found herself seated opposite Mabelle she discovered
that she couldn’t bring herself to say what she meant to say. She
couldn’t humble her pride sufficiently to tell even Mabelle how Philip
treated her. She had finally gone home and then returned a second time,
but it was no use. She couldn’t speak of it: she was too proud. And she
knew, too, that whatever happened she must protect Philip. It wasn’t,
she told herself, as if he were himself, as he had been at Megambo. He
was sick. He really wasn’t responsible. She cried when she thought how
she loved him now; if he would only notice her, she would let him
trample her body in the dust. Mabelle’s near-sighted blue eyes noted
nothing. She went on rocking and rocking, talking incessantly of clothes
and food and a soothing syrup that would make little Naomi sleep better
at night.
During the day she had formed a dozen wild projects. She would go back
to Megambo. She would return to her father, who was seventy now, and
would welcome her help. She would run off to a cousin who lived in
Tennessee. She would join another cousin who was an Evangelist in Texas:
she could play the piano and lead the singing for him. In any of these
places she would find again the glory she had known as Naomi Potts,
“youngest missionary of God”; she wouldn’t any longer be a nobody,
unwanted, always pushed aside and treated as of no consequence.
But always there were the twins to be considered. How could she run off
and forget them? And if she did run away, Emma and perhaps even Philip
would use it as a chance to rid themselves of her forever. She fancied
that she saw now how Emma had used her, willing all the while to cast
her off when she was no longer of any service. She told herself again
and again, as if she could not bring herself to believe it, that she
loved the twins--that she loved them despite her aching back and the
hours she was kept awake by their crying. But she remembered that she
had never been tired at Megambo: no amount of work had tired her. She
hadn’t wanted the twins: she’d only gone to Philip because Mabelle and
Emma told her that she must and because Mabelle said that men liked
children, and that going to Philip would give her a hold over him. And
now ... see what had come of it! Philip scarcely noticed her. Before she
lived with him, it hadn’t mattered to her, but now--now she always
carried a weight about inside her. Her heart leaped if he took the least
notice of her.
No, she saw it all clearly. She must run away. She couldn’t go on,
chained down like a slave. But if she ran away, she’d lose Philip for
ever, and if she stayed, he might come back to her. The children
belonged to both of them. They were a bond you could never break, the
proof that once, for a little time, he belonged to her. She saw that he,
too, was chained after a fashion. He belonged to her in a way he
belonged to no other woman. In the sight of the Lord any other woman
would always be a strumpet and a whore.
At last, as it was growing dark, she found herself sitting on a bench in
the park before the new monument to General Sherman. It was raining and
her coat was soaked and her shoes wet through. The rain ran in little
trickles from her worn black hat. It was as if she had wakened suddenly
from a dream. She wasn’t certain how she came to be sitting on the wet
bench with the heavy rain melting the snow all about her. She thought,
“I must have been crazy for a time. I can’t go on like this. I’ve got to
talk to some one. I’ve got to ... I’ve got to!” She began to cry, and
then she thought, “I’ll speak to the Reverend Castor to-night after
choir practice. He’ll help me and he’s a good man. He’ll never tell any
one. He’s always been so kind. It was silly of me to think things about
him. I was silly to be afraid of him. I’ll talk to him. I’ve got to talk
to some one. He’ll understand.”