All this time his mother, her vast bulk immovable beneath the
mountainous sheets, followed him with her eyes. She must have recognized
the symptoms, for presently she broke the way.
“Have you anything you want to say?” she asked.
Willie moved back to the bed and for a time stood in silence fingering
the carving of the footboard. He cleared his throat as if to speak but
only fell silent again. When at last he was able to say what was in his
mind, he did so without looking up. He behaved as though the carving
held for him the most profound interest.
“Yes,” he said gently, “I want to say that I’m going to get out of the
Mills. I hate them. I’ve always hated them. I’m no good at it!” To
forestall her interruptions he rushed on with his speech. The sight of
his mother lying helpless appeared to endow him with a sudden desperate
courage. She was unable to stop him. He even raised his head and faced
her squarely. “I don’t like this strike. I don’t like the fighting. I
want to be an ordinary, simple man who could walk through Halsted street
in safety. I want to be left alone.”
Mrs. Harrison did not raise her head, but all the violent emotion, pent
up and stifled by her helplessness, rose and flashed in her eyes. The
scorn was thunderous but somehow it failed to overwhelm the faded,
middle-aged man at the foot of the gigantic bed.
“I thank God your father cannot hear those words! He would strike you
down!”
Still Willie did not flinch. “My father is dead,” he observed quietly.
But his smile carried implications and a malice of its own. “My father
is dead,” said the smile. “And my mother is helpless. Before long I
shall be free ... for the first time in my life ... free ... to do as I
please ... the slave of no one.”
The smile wavered and clung to his face. Of course he said none of this.
What he said was, “It is a dirty business. And I want nothing to do with
it ... not even any stock. If it hadn’t been for the Mills, Lily might
have married me.”
From the bed arose the scornful sound of a hoarse chuckle, “Oh no, she
wouldn’t. You don’t know her! She wouldn’t marry you because you were
such a poor thing.”
At this Willie began to tremble. His face became as white as the
spotless coverlet, and he grasped the bed rail with such intensity that
his thin knuckles showed blue against his skin. It was the old taunt of
a mother toward a child whose gentleness and indecision were to her both
incomprehensible and worthy only of contempt, a child who had never
suited her gigantic ideas of power and wealth.
“And pray tell me what you _do_ intend to do,” she asked with rich
sarcasm.
A tremulous quality entered Willie’s voice as he replied. “I want to
have a farm where I can raise chickens and ducks and rabbits.”
“Great God!” replied his mother in her deep voice. It was all she said.
Moving her head with a terrible effort, she turned her face to the wall
away from her son. But Willie, though he still trembled a little in the
presence of the old woman and the glowering portrait above his head, had
a look of triumph in his pale eyes. It said, “I have won! I have won! I
have achieved a victory. I am free at last from the monster which I have
always hated.... I am through with the Mills. I am through with Judge
Weissman.... I can be bullied no more!”
Outside the wind howled and tore at the eaves and presently there came a
suave knock at the door ... the knock of the worldly, white haired
butler. “Miss Abercrombie is here to see Mrs. Harrison,” came a suave
voice, and before Willie could answer, his mother’s crony, her nose very
red from the cold, had pushed her way like a wriggling ferret into the
room.
At the sight of Willie, she halted for a moment winking at him in a
purely involuntary fashion.
“Your mother is so much better,” she said bridling. “Aren’t you
delighted?”
Willie’s answer was an inarticulate grunt.
“I’ve come to hear all about the funeral,” she continued in her bustling
manner. “I would have gone myself except for the weather. Now sit down
like a good boy and tell me all about.” She too treated him as an anemic
child still wearing curls.
Willie shook her hand politely. “My mother will tell you,” he said. “I
have told her everything.”
And he slipped from the room leaving the two women, the ferret and the
mountain, to put the finishing touches upon the obsequies of Julia
Shane.