It became known as the Great Strike and it served to mark an epoch. Long
afterward people in the Town said, “It was the year of the Great Strike”
as they said, “It was the year of the Spanish-American War” or “the year
that Bryan was a candidate for the first time.” Willie Harrison found a
use for his enclosures of barbed wire and his heavily barricaded gates.
As the strike progressed and the violence increased, other machines of
warfare were set up ... such things as machine guns and searchlights
which at night fingered the Flats and the sky above with shafts of white
light, rigid and unbending as steel.
In one sense the strike was a Godsend. When the Mills shut down there
were no more fires in the ovens and the furnaces; no more soot fell in
clouds like infernal snow over the low eminence of Cypress Hill and the
squalid expanse of the Flats. For the first time in a score of years the
sun became clearly visible. Instead of rising and setting as a ball of
hot copper immersed in smoke, it appeared and disappeared quite clear
and white, a sun such as God intended it to be. But even more remarkable
was the blanket of silence which descended upon all the district. With
the banking of the fires, there was no more hammering, and in place of
the titanic clamor there was a stillness so profound and so unusual that
people noticed it as people notice a sudden clap of loud thunder and
remark upon it to each other. The silence became noisy.
In the house at Cypress Hill the world of Julia Shane narrowed from the
castle itself to a single room and at last to the vast Italian bed. It
was seldom that she gathered sufficient strength to struggle to her feet
and make her way, leaning on the ebony and silver stick, to the window
where the Mill yards and the Flats lay spread out beneath her gaze.
During those last months she knew again the stillness which enveloped
the Cypress Hill of her youth. But there was a difference; the green
marshes were gone forever, buried beneath the masses of cinders, clay
and refuse upon which the Mills raised their sheds and towers and the
Flats its flimsy, dirty, matchwood houses, all smoke stained and rotting
at the eaves. The lush smell of damp growing things was replaced by the
faint odor of crowded, sweating humanity. Not one slim cat-tail, not one
feathery willow remained in all the desert of industry. There was,
however, a sound which had echoed over the swamps almost a hundred years
earlier, a sound which had not been heard since the days when Julia
Shane’s grandfather built about what was now the public square of the
Town a stockade to protect the first settlers from the redskins. It was
the sound of guns. Sometimes as she sat at the window, there arose a
distant rat-tat-tat like the noise of a typewriter but more staccato and
savage, followed by a single crack or two. She discovered at length the
origin of the sound. In the Mill yard beneath her window a target had
been raised, and at a little distance off men lay on their stomachs
pointing rifles mounted upon tripods. Sometimes they fired at rusty
buckets and old tin cans because these things did not remain stupid and
inanimate like the target, but jumped and whirled about in the most
tortured fashion when the bullets struck them, as though they had lives
which might be destroyed. It made the game infinitely more fascinating
and spirited. The men who indulged in this practise were, she learned
from Hennery, the hired guards whom the Harrisons and Judge Weissman had
brought in to protect the Mills, riff-raff and off-scourings from the
slums of New York, Chicago, Pittsburgh and Cleveland.
There came a day, after the sights and sounds of the Mill yard had
become a matter of indifference to the old woman, when the doctor
forbade her to leave her bed if she wished to survive the day set for
Lily’s arrival. It was October, and the park remained unchanged save
that the atmosphere was less hot and the sun shone more clearly; for the
trees and shrubs on the low hill were long since dead and far beyond the
stage of sending out new leaves to fall at the approach of winter. It
was bald now and very old. The brick house, dominating all the horizon,
stood out day after day gaunt and blackened by soot against the
brilliant October sky.
Lily had been delayed. Before leaving Paris she wrote to her mother and
Irene that it was necessary for her to take a small boy, the son of a
friend, to England. After placing him in school there, she wrote, she
would sail at once for America and come straight to Cypress Hill. There
were also matters of business which might delay her; but she would not
arrive later than the middle of November. So Julia Shane set herself to
battling with Death, bent upon beating Him off until she had seen Lily
once more.