In the Flats, as the years passed, new tides of immigrants swept in,
filling the abominable dirty houses to suffocation, adding to the
garbage and refuse which already clogged the sluggish waters of the
Black Fork. The men worked twelve hours and sometimes longer in the
Mills. The women wore shawls over their heads and bore many children,
most of whom died amid the smoke and filth. Here the Town overlooked one
opportunity. With a little effort it might have saved the lives of these
babies to feed to the Mills later on; but it was simpler to import more
cheap labor from Europe. Let those die who could not live.
And none of these new residents learned to speak English. They clung to
their native tongues. They were simply colonists transplanted, unchanged
and unchanging, from Poland, Ukrainia, South Italy and the
Balkans--nothing more, nothing less. The Town had nothing to do with
them. They were pariahs, outcasts, “Hunkies,” “Dagos,” and the Town held
it against them that they did not learn English and join in the vast
chorus of praise to prosperity.
But trouble became more frequent nowadays. Willie Harrison no longer
dared take his exercise by walking alone up the hill to the Town. The
barricade of barbed wire was complete now. It surrounded the Mills on
all sides, impregnable, menacing. It crowded the dead hedges of arbor
vitæ that enclosed the park at Shane’s Castle. There had been no need
for it yet. It was merely waiting.
Welcome House, the tentative gesture of a troubled civic conscience,
went down beneath the waves of prosperity. Volunteer citizens no longer
ventured into the troubled area of the Flats. Money ceased to flow in
for its support. It dropped at length from the rank of an institution
supported by a community to the rank of a school supported by one woman
and one man. The woman was Irene Shane. The man was Stepan Krylenko.
The woman was rich. The man was a Mill worker who toiled twelve hours a
day and gave six hours more to the education of his fellow workers.
The years and the great progress had been no more kind to Irene than
they had been to the Town. She aged ... dryly, after the fashion of
spinsters who have diverted the current of life from its wide course
into a single narrow channel of feverish activity. She grew thinner and
more pale. There were times when the blue veins showed beneath the
transparent skin like the rivers of a schoolboy’s map. Her pale blond
hair lost its luster and grew thin and straight, because she had not
time and even less desire to care for it. Her hands were red and worn
with the work she did in helping the babies of the Flats to live. She
dressed the same, always in a plain gray suit and ugly black hat, which
she replaced when they became worn and shabby. But in replacing them,
she ignored the changing styles. The models remained the same, rather
outmoded and grotesque, so that in the Town they rewarded her for her
work among the poor by regarding her as queer and something of a figure
of fun.
Yet she retained a certain virginal look, and in her eye there was a
queer exalted light. Since life is impossible without compensations of
one sort or another, it is probable that Irene had her share of these.
She must have found peace in her work and satisfaction in the leader she
molded from the tow haired boy who years before had shouted insults at
her through the wrought iron gates of Shane’s Castle.
For Krylenko had grown into a remarkable man. He spoke English
perfectly. He worked with Irene, a leader among his own people. He
taught the others. He read Jean Jacques Rousseau, John Stuart Mill, Karl
Marx, and even Voltaire ... books which Irene bought him in ignorance of
their flaming contents. At twenty-five Stepan Krylenko was a leader in
the district, and in the Town there were men of property who had heard
vaguely of him as a disturber, an anarchist, a madman, a Socialist, a
criminal.
Although Irene seldom penetrated the Town any longer and her mother
never left the confines of Shane’s Castle, their affairs still held an
interest for those who had known Cypress Hill in the days of its
vanished splendor. For women who had long since ceased to take any part
in the life of a community, the names of old Julia Shane and her two
daughters came up with startling frequency at the dinners and lunches
and tea parties in the Town. It may have been that in a community where
life was so noisy, so banal, so strenuous, so redolent of prosperity,
the Shanes and the old house satisfied some profound and universal
hunger for the mysterious, the beautiful, the bizarre, even the mystic.
Certainly in the midst of so materialistic a community the Shanes were
exotic and worthy of attention. And always in the background there was
the tradition of John Shane and the memories of things which it was
whispered had happened in Shane’s Castle. It was Lily who aroused the
most talk, perhaps because she was even more withdrawn and mysterious
than her mother and sister, because it was so easy to imagine things
about her.... Lily who could come back and bring all the Town once more
to Shane’s Castle; Lily, the generous, the good-natured, the beautiful
Lily.
Mrs. Julis Harrison discussed them; and her son, the rejected Willie;
and Miss Abercrombie, who with the passing of years had developed an
affection of the nerves which made her face twitch constantly so that
always, even in the midst of the most solemn conversations, she had the
appearance of winking in a lascivious fashion. It was a trial which she
bore, with a truly noble fortitude.