Part 11

The old woman, opposed once more by the inevitable wall of Irene’s obsessions, frowned. “You are wealthy,” she said. “You were born to a position.”

In Irene’s smile there was a shade of bitterness. “In this Town?” she inquired scornfully. “Oh! No! Position in this Town! That’s almost funny.” She leaned forward a little, pressing her hand against her forehead. “My people?” she said in a hushed voice. “My people.... Why, I don’t even know where my father came from.”

The mother, half-buried among the heavy pillows raised herself slowly as if a wave of new vigor had taken possession of her worn-out body. “Get me a cigarette, Irene.”

The girl opened her lips to protest, but her mother silenced her. “Please, Irene, do as I say. It can’t possibly matter what I do now.”

“Please, Mama,” began Irene once more. “The doctor has forbidden it.” Then Julia Shane gave her daughter a terrible look pregnant with all the old arrogance and power.

“Will you do as I say, Irene, or must I send for Sarah? She at least still obeys me.”

For a second, authority hung in the balance. It was the authority of a lifetime grounded upon a terrific force of will and sustained by the eternal and certain precedent of obedience. It was the old woman who won the struggle. It was her last victory. The daughter rose and obediently brought the cigarettes, even holding the candle to light it. She held the flame at arm’s length with a gesture of supreme distaste as if she had been ordered to participate in some unspeakable sin. After she had replaced the candle, her mother puffed thoughtfully for a time.

“Your father,” she said presently, “was born in Marseilles. His mother was Spanish and his father Irish. He came to this country because he had to run away. That’s all I know. He might have told me more if he had not died suddenly. It’s not likely that any of us will ever know his story, no matter how hard we try. Life isn’t a story book, you know. In life there are some things that we never know, even about our own friends, our own children. Each man’s soul is a secret, which even himself is not able to reveal.”

For an instant the light of triumph swept Irene’s pale countenance. “You see!” she said. “I am just like the rest ... like Stepan Krylenko and all the others. My father was a foreigner.”

The mother’s lips curved in a sudden, scornful smile. “But he was a gentleman, Irene.... That is something. And your mother was an American. Her grandfather was the first settler in the wilderness.... The Town was named for him. Have you no pride?”

“No,” replied Irene, “to be proud is a vice.... I have killed it. I am not proud. I am like all the others.” And yet there was a fierce pride in her voice, a smug, fierce, pride in not being proud.

“You are perverse,” said her mother. “You are beyond me. You talk like a fool....” Irene raised her head to speak but the will of the old woman swept her back. “I know,” she continued. “You think it is saintly. Does it ever occur to you that it might only be smugness?”

The old eyes flashed with anger and resentment, emotions which merely shattered themselves against the barrier of Irene’s smiling and fanatic sense of righteousness. A look of obstinacy entered her face. (She regarded herself as superior to Julia Shane! Incredible!)

“You amaze me, Irene. Your hardness is beyond belief. If you could be soft for a moment, gentle and generous ... like Lily.”

The daughter’s hands tightened about the battered old hat.

“It’s always Lily,” she said bitterly. “It’s always Lily.... Lily this and Lily that. She’s everywhere. Every one praises her ... even Cousin Hattie.” The stubborn look of smugness again descended upon her face. “Well, let them praise her ... I know that it is I who am right, I who am good in the sight of God.” And then for the first time in all the memory of Julia Shane, a look of anger, cold and unrelenting came into the eyes of her daughter. “Lily! Lily!” she cried scornfully, “I hate Lily.... May God forgive me!”

XXXVI

Then for a long time a silence descended upon the room. Julia Shane crushed out the embers of her cigarette and fell once more to turning the silver mounted reading glass round and round, regarding it fixedly with the look of one hypnotized. At last she turned again to her daughter.

“Are you going to marry him?” she asked.

“No, of course not.”

“I should be satisfied, if he is as fine as you say he is. I would rather see you married before I die, Irene.”

The daughter shook her head stubbornly. “I shall never marry any one.”

The old woman smiled shrewdly. “You are wrong, my girl. You are wrong. I haven’t had a very happy time, but I wouldn’t have given it up. It is a part of life, knowing love and having children.... Love can be so many things, but at least it is part of life ... the greatest part of all. Without it life is nothing.”

For a long time Irene remained silent. She kept her eyes cast down and when she spoke again it was without raising them. “But Lily ...” she began shrewdly. “She has never married.” It was the old retort, always Lily. Her mother saw fit to ignore it, perhaps because, knowing what she knew, it was impossible to answer it.

“You’ve been seeing a great deal of this Krylenko,” she said. “It’s been going on for years ... since before Lily was here the last time. That’s years ago.”

Irene looked up suddenly and a glint of anger lighted her pale eyes. “Who’s been talking to you about me?... I know. It’s Cousin Hattie. She was here to-day. Oh, why can’t people let me alone? I harm no one. I want to be left in peace.”

Then Julia Shane, perhaps because she already knew too well the antipathy between her coldly virginal daughter and her niece whose whole life was her children, deliberately lied.

“Cousin Hattie did not even mention it.” She turned her eyes away from the light. “I would like to see you married, Irene,” she repeated. It was clear that for some reason the old hope, forgotten since that tumultuous visit of the Governor, was revived again. It occupied the old woman’s mind to the exclusion of all else.

“There is nothing between us, Mama,” said Irene. “Nothing at all. Can’t you see. We’ve been friends all along. I taught him to read English. I got him books.” Her voice wavered a little and her hands trembled. It was as if she had become a little girl again, the same girl who, in a white muslin dress with a blue sash, sobbed alone on the sofa in the library beneath John Shane’s portrait. “I’ve made him what he is,” she continued. “Don’t you see. I’m proud of him. When I found him, he was nothing ... only a stupid Ukrainian boy who was rebellious and rude to me. And now he works with me. He’s willing to sacrifice himself for those people. We understand each other. All we want is to be left alone, Don’t you understand? I’m just proud of him because I’ve made him what he is. I’m nothing,” she stammered. “I’m nothing to him in that way at all. That would spoil everything ... like something evil, intruding upon us.”

The pale tired face glowed with a kind of religious fervor. For an instant there was something maternal and exalted in her look. All the plainness vanished, replaced suddenly by a feverish beauty. The plain, exhausted old maid had disappeared.

“Why haven’t you told me this before?” asked the old woman.

“You never asked me.... You never wanted to know what I was doing. You were always interested in Lily. How could you ever have thought I’d marry him? I’m years older.” Suddenly she extended her arms with a curious exhibitive gesture like a gesture Lily sometimes made when she was looking her loveliest. “Look at me. I’m old and battered and ugly. How could he ever love me in that way? He is young.”

The thin hands dropped listlessly into her lap and lay against the worn black serge. She fell silent, all exhausted by the emotion. Her mother stared at her with the look of one who has just penetrated the soul of a stranger. Irene, it appeared, was suddenly revealed to her.

“Why, you know he’s never looked at a woman,” Irene continued in a lowered voice. “He’s lived in the Flats all these years and he’s never looked at a woman. Do you know what that means in the Flats?” Her voice dropped still lower. “Of course, you don’t know, because you know nothing about the Flats,” she added with a shade of bitterness.

At this her mother smiled. “The rest of the world is not so different, Irene.”

But Irene ignored her. “He’s worked hard all these years to make himself worth while and to help his people. He’s never had time to be bad.” Her mother smiled faintly again. Perhaps she smiled at the spinsterish word by which Irene chose to designate fornication.

“He’s pure,” continued Irene. “He’s fine and noble and pure. I want to keep him so.”

“You are making of him a saint,” observed the old woman drily.

“He is a saint! That’s just what he is,” cried Irene. “And you mock him, you and Lily.... Oh, I know ... I know you both. He’s been driven from the Mills for what he’s done for the people in the Flats. He’s been put on a black list so he can never get work in any other Mill. He told me so to-night. That’s what he was telling me when you stood watching us.” A look of supreme triumph came into her face once more. “But it’s too late!” she cried. “It’s too late.... They’ve voted to strike. It begins to-morrow. Stepan is the one behind it.”

It was as if a terrible war, long hanging in the balance, had suddenly become a reality. Julia Shane, propped among the pillows, turned restlessly and sighed.

“What fools men are!” she said, almost to herself. “What fools!” And then to Irene. “It won’t be easy, Irene. It’ll be cruel. You’d best go to bed now, dear. You look desperately tired. You’ll have plenty of work before you.”

Irene pressed a cold, distant kiss on the ivory cheek of her mother and turned to leave.

“Shall I put out the light?”

“Yes, please.”

The room subsided into darkness and Irene, opening the door, suddenly heard her mother’s voice.

“Oh, Irene.” The voice was weary, listless. “I’ve written for Lily to come home. The doctor told me to-day that I could not possibly live longer than Christmas. I forced it out of him. There was no use in having nonsense. I wanted to know.”

And Irene, instead of going to her own room, returned and knelt by the side of her mother’s bed. The hardness melted and she sobbed, perhaps because the old woman who faced death with such proud indifference was so far beyond the need of prayer and comfort.

Yet when the smoky dawn appeared at last, it found Irene in her own chaste room still kneeling in prayer before the pink and blue Sienna Virgin.

“Oh, Blessed Virgin,” she prayed, from the summit of her complacency. “Forgive my mother her sins of pride and her lack of charity. Forgive my sister her weakness of the flesh. Enter into their hearts and make them good women. Make them worthy to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Enter into the heart of my sister and cleanse her. Make her a good woman ... a pure woman, loving only those things which are holy. Cleanse her of the lusts of the flesh!”

Her pale eyes were wet with tears. Although she prayed to a plaster Virgin in pink gilt, she used the sonorous rolling words drawn all unconsciously from the memories of a Presbyterian childhood. And the Lily for whom she prayed ... the Lily who had been sent for ... was there in the old house just as she was always in the Town and in the memories of those who knew her beauty, her tolerance and her charm. There were, indeed, times when Krylenko, caught perhaps in the memory of a night when he stood in the melting snow peering into the windows of Shane’s Castle, spoke of her; and these were times when Irene turned away from him, frightened by the shadow of something in his eyes.

XXXVII

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.

XXXVIII

In those days, because it was difficult and dangerous for any one to visit Cypress Hill and because, after all, no one had any particular reason to visit it, there was at the old house, only one caller beside the doctor. This was Hattie Tolliver, whose strength had given way a little to an increasing stoutness but whose pride and spirit flagged not at all. To the police and the hired guards at the Mills, she became as familiar a figure as the doctor himself. She came on foot, since all service on the clanging trolley cars of Halsted street was long since suspended, her large powerful body clad in black clothes of good quality, a basket suspended over one arm and the inevitable umbrella swinging from the other. She walked with a sort of fierce disdain directed with calculated ostentation alike at the Mill guards, the police, and the dwellers of the Flats who viewed her bourgeois approach with a sullen hostility. The basket contained delicacies concocted by her own skilled and housewifely hand ... the most golden of custards, the most delicate of rennets, fragile biscuits baked without sugar--in short, every sort of thing which might please the palate of an invalid accustomed to excellent food.

In effect, Cypress Hill fell slowly into a state of siege. Surrounded on three sides by the barrier of barbed wire, the sole means of egress was the long drive turning into Halsted street. Here there was danger, for disorders occurred frequently at the very wrought iron gates, now rusted and broken. Stones were hurled by the strikers and shots fired by the police. The wagons of the Town no longer delivered goods at a spot so isolated and dangerous, and the duties of supplying the place with food came gradually to be divided between Irene and Hattie Tolliver, whose lack of friendliness and understanding toward each other approached an open hatred. They alone of the little garrison went in and out of the wrought iron gates; for Hennery and the mulatto woman were far too terrified by the disorders outside ever to venture into the Town.

On the day of Lily’s letter Hattie Tolliver, bearing a well-laden basket, arrived and went at once to Aunt Julia’s room. She brooked no interference from the mulatto woman.

After bidding Sarah place the contents of the basket in a cool place she swept by the servant with a regal swish of black skirts.

Upstairs in the twilight Julia Shane lay in the enormous bed, flat on her back staring at the ceiling. At the approach of her niece she raised herself a little and asked in a feeble voice to be propped up. It was as though the approach of her vigorous rosy-faced niece endowed her with a sudden energy.

“And how are you?” asked Hattie Tolliver when she had smoothed the pillows with an expert hand and made the old woman more comfortable than she had been in many days.

“The same ... just the same,” was the monotonous answer. “Lily is a long time in coming.”

Cousin Hattie went to the windows and flung back the curtains. “Light and air will do you good,” she said. “There’s nothing like light and air.” And then turning, “Why don’t you make Sarah keep the windows open?”

Julia Shane sat up more straightly, breathing in the crisp air. “I tell her to ... but she doesn’t like air,” she said weakly.

“You let her bully you! She needs some one to manage her. I’m surprised Irene doesn’t put her in her place.”

The old woman smiled. “Irene,” she said. “Irene.... Why she’s too meek ever to get on with servants. It’s no use ... her trying anything.”

“I’ve brought you a custard and some cakes,” continued her niece, at the same time flicking bits of dust from the dressing table with her handkerchief and setting the pillows of the chaise longue in order with a series of efficient pats. “There’s going to be trouble ... real trouble before long. The strikers are getting bolder.”

“They’re getting more hungry too, Irene says,” replied the old woman. “Perhaps that’s why.”

Cousin Hattie came over to the bed now and sat herself down, at the same time taking out a pillow-case which she set herself to hemming. “You know what they’re saying in the Town,” she remarked. “They’re saying that Irene is helping the strike by giving the strikers money.”

To this the old woman made no reply and Cousin Hattie continued. “I don’t see the sense in that. The sooner every one gets to work, the better. It isn’t safe in Halsted street any longer. I’m surprised at Irene helping those foreigners against the Harrisons. I didn’t think she had the spirit to take sides in a case like this.”

Julia Shane moved her weary body into a more comfortable position. “She doesn’t take sides. She only wants to help the women and children.... I suppose she’s right after all.... They are like the rest of us.”

At this Cousin Hattie gave a grunt of indignation. “They didn’t have to come to this country. I’m sure nobody wants ’em.”

“The Mills want them,” said her aunt. “The Mills want them and the Mills want more and more all the time.”

“But I don’t see why we have to suffer because the Mills want foreigners. There ought to be some law against it.”

As though there seemed to be no answer to this, Julia Shane turned on her side and remarked. “I had a letter from Lily to-day.”

Her niece put down the pillow case and regarded her with shining eyes. Her heavy body became alive and vibrant. “What did she say? Was there any news of Ellen? Shall I read it?”