Part 9

Not once was there a spoken word between them, and at last the girl swung softly and mournfully into the macabre beauties of the Valse Triste, strange and mournful music, not great, even a little mediocre, yet superbly beautiful beneath her slim fingers. She peopled the shadowy room with ghostly unreal figures, of tragedy, of romance, of burning, unimagined desires. The dancing shadows cast by the candles among the old furniture became through the mist of Lily’s tears fantastic, yet familiar, like memories half-revealed that fade before they can be captured and recognized. The waltz rose in a weird unearthly ecstasy, swirling and exultant, the zenith of a joy and a completion yearned for but never in this life achieved ... the something which lies just beyond the reach, sensed but unattainable, something which Ellen sought and came nearest to capturing in her music, which Irene, kneeling on the _prie dieu_ before the Sienna Virgin, sought in a mystic exaltation, which Lily sought in her own instinctive, half-realized fashion. It was a quest which must always be a lonely one; somehow the music made the sense of loneliness terribly acute. The waltz grew slower once more and softer, taking on a new and melancholy fire, until at last it died away into stillness leaving only the sound of the Mills to disturb the silence of the old room.

After a little pause, Ellen fell forward wearily upon the piano, her head resting upon her arms, and all at once with a faint rustle she slipped gently to the floor, the home-made ball dress crumpled and soiled beneath her slim body. Lily sprang from among the pillows and gathered the girl against her white, voluptuous breasts, for she had fainted.

XXIX

The visit of Ellen was extended from one night to three. The piano was a beautiful one, far better than the harsh-toned upright in the Tolliver parlor in the Town, and Ellen gladly played for hours with only Lily, lying among the cushions, and old Julia Shane, lost in her own fantastic memories, for an audience.

On the third night, long after twelve o’clock, as Lily and her cousin climbed the long stairway, the older woman said, “I have some clothes, Ellen, that you may have if you like. They have been worn only a few times and they are more beautiful than anything you can find in America.”

The girl did not answer until they had reached Lily’s room and closed the door behind them. Her face was flushed with the silent struggle between a hunger for beautiful things and a fantastic pride, born of respectable poverty. In some way, her cousin sensed the struggle.

“They are yours if you want them,” she said. “You can try them on if you like at any rate.”

Ellen smiled gratefully. “I’d like to,” she said timidly. “Thank you.”

While the girl took off her shirtwaist and skirt, Lily busied herself among the shadows of her closet. When she returned she bore across her arms three gowns, one dull red, one black and one yellow. The girl stood waiting shyly, clad only in her cheap underclothing coarsened and yellowed by many launderings.

“You must take those things off,” said Lily. “I’ll give you others.” And she brought out undergarments of white silk which Ellen put on, shivering a little in the chill of the big room.

Then Lily took the pale yellow gown and slipped it over her cousin’s head. It belonged to no period of fashion. It hung from the shoulders in loose folds of shining silk, clinging close to the girl’s slim body. There was a silver girdle which fastened over the hips. Ellen turned to regard herself in the mirror.

“But wait,” said Lily, laughing, “you’ve only begun. We’ve got to change your hair and do away with that ridiculous rat. Why do you spoil such beautiful hair with a wad of old wire?”

She took out the pins and let the hair fall in a clear, black shower. It was beautiful hair of the thick, sooty-black color that goes with fair skin and blue eyes. It fell in great coils over the pale yellow gown. Lily, twisting it into loose strands, held it against the light of the lamp.

“Beautiful hair,” she said, “like the hair of Rapunzel.”

Then she twisted it low about Ellen’s head, loosely so that the light, striking the free ends created a kind of halo. With a supreme gesture of scorn, she tossed the “rat” into the scrap basket.

“There,” she said, turning her cousin to face the long mirror. “There.... Behold the great pianist ... the great artist.”

In the magical mirror stood a tall lovely woman. The ridiculous awkward girl had vanished; it was another creature who stood there transfigured and beautiful. And in her frank blue eyes, there was a new look, something of astonishment mingled with determination. The magical mirror had done its work. From that moment the girl became a stranger to the Town. She had come of age and slipped all unconsciously into a new world.

With shining eyes she turned and faced her cousin.

“May I really have the clothes, Lily?”

“Of course, you silly child!”

And Lily smiled because the clothes had never been worn at all. They were completely new.

XXX

At breakfast on the following morning, the mulatto woman laid before Lily’s plate a cablegram. It read simply, “Jean has measles.”

Trunks were packed with desperate haste. The entire household was thrown into an uproar, all save old Julia Shane who continued to move about with the same unruffled calm, with the same acceptancy of whatever came to her. At midnight Lily boarded the express for the East. It was not until the middle of the week, when the drawing-room had been wrapped once more in cheesecloth and scented with camphor, that the Town learned of Lily’s sudden return to Paris. It was impossible, people decided, to calculate the whims of her existence.

Three months after her sudden departure, she sat one early spring afternoon on the terrace of her garden in the Rue Raynouard, when old Madame Gigon, in a bizarre gown of maroon poplin, with the fat and aging Fifi at her heels, brought her a letter from Julia Shane.

Tearing it open, Lily began to read,

“Of course the biggest bit of news is Ellen’s escapade. She has eloped with a completely commonplace young man named Clarence Murdock, a traveling salesman for an electrical company, who I believe was engaged to May Seton ... the Setons who own the corset factory east of the Harrison Mills. They have gone to New York to live and now, I suppose, Ellen will have her chance to go on with her music. Knowing Ellen, I am certain she does not love this absurd man. As for Hattie she is distraught and feels that Ellen has committed some terrible sin. Nothing I can say is able to alter her mind. To be sure, the fellow has nothing to commend him, but I’m willing to let Ellen work it out. She’s no fool. None of our family is that. Hattie thinks it was the gowns you gave Ellen which turned her head. But I suspect that Ellen saw this young drummer simply as a means of escape ... a way out of all her troubles. Of course the Town is in a buzz. Miss Abercrombie says nothing so unrespectable has happened in years. More power to Ellen ...!”

For a moment Lily put down the letter and sat thinking. In the last sentence there was a delicious echo of that wicked chuckle which had marked the departure of the discomfited Judge Weissman and Mrs. Julis Harrison from Cypress Hill ... the merest echo of triumph over another mark in the long score of the old against the new.

For a time Lily sat listening quietly to the distant sounds from the river ... the whistling of the steamer bound for St. Cloud, the faint clop-clop of hoofs in the Rue de Passy and the ugly chug-chug of one of the new motor wagons which were to be seen with growing frequency along the boulevards. Whatever she was thinking, her thoughts were interrupted suddenly by a little boy, very handsome and neat, in a sailor suit, who dragged behind him across the flagged terrace a stuffed toy bear. He climbed into her lap and began playing with the warm fur piece she had thrown over her shoulders.

“Mama,” he cried. “J’ai faim.... Je veux un biscuit!”

Lily gathered him into her arms, pressing his soft face against hers. “Bien, petit ... va chercher la bonne Madame Gigon.”

She seized him more closely and kissed him again and again with all the passion of a savage, miserly possession.

“Je t’aime, Mama ... tellement,” whispered the little fellow, and climbed down to run into the big house in search of kind Madame Gigon and her cakes. The gaze of Lily wandered after his sturdy little body and her dark eyes grew bright with a triumphant love.

When he had disappeared through one of the tall windows, she took up the letter once more and continued her reading.

“Irene,” wrote her mother, “seems more content now that you are gone. I confess that I understand her less and less every day. Sometimes I think she must be not quite well ... a little touched perhaps by a religious mania. She is giving her life, her strength, her soul, to these foreigners in the Flats. What for? Because it brings her peace, I suppose. But still I cannot understand her. There is one man ... Krylenko, by name, I believe, whom she has made into a sort of disciple. I only hope that news of him won’t reach the Town. God knows what sort of a tale they would make out of it. I’m afraid too of her becoming involved in the troubles at the Mills. Some day there will be open warfare in the Flats.”

When Lily had finished reading, she tore the letter slowly into bits after a custom of long standing and tossed the torn fragments into one of the stone urns that bordered the terrace.... Then she rose and pulling her fur cloak closer about her began to walk up and down restlessly as if some profound and stirring memory had taken possession of her. The rain began to fall gently and darkness to descend upon the garden. In the house behind her the servants lighted the lamps. Still she paced up and down tirelessly.

After a time she went down from the terrace to the gravel path of the garden and there continued her walking until the gate in the garden wall opened suddenly and a man stepped in, his erect soldierly figure black against the lamps of the Rue de Passy. It was the Baron, Madame Gigon’s cousin. He came toward her quickly and took her into his arms, embracing her passionately for a long time in silence.

When at last he freed her, a frown crossed his dark face, and he said, “What is it? What is distracting you? Are you troubled about something?”

Lily thrust her arm through his and leaned against him, but she avoided his gaze. “Nothing,” she said. “It’s nothing.”

And thus they walked through the rain until they reached the pavilion designed by Lenôtre which stood at a distance from the house. Here they halted and the Baron, taking from his pocket a key, unlocked the door and they went in silently.

Once inside, he kissed her again and presently he said, “What is it? There is something between us. There is a difference.”

“Nothing,” she murmured stubbornly. “It is nothing. You must be imagining things.”

XXXI

All that Julia Shane had written her daughter was true enough. The escapade of Ellen shocked the Town, not altogether unwillingly however, for it opened a new field for talk and furnished one more evidence of the wildness of a family which had never been content with conformity, a clan which kept bursting its bonds and satisfying in a barbarous fashion its hunger after life.

When Hattie Tolliver, tearful and shaken, came to her aunt for consolation, Julia Shane received her in the vast bedroom she occupied above the Mill yard. The old woman said, “Come, Hattie. You’ve no reason to feel badly. Ellen is a good girl and a wise one. It’s the best thing that could have happened, if you’ll only see it in that light.”

But Mrs. Tolliver, so large, so energetic, so emotional, was hurt. She kept on sobbing. “If only she had told me!... It’s as if she deceived me.”

At which Julia Shane smiled quietly to herself. “Ah, that’s it, Hattie. She couldn’t have told you, because she knew you so well. She knew that you couldn’t bear to have her leave you. The girl was wise. She chose the better way. It’s your pride that’s hurt and the feeling that, after all, there was something stronger in Ellen than her love for you.” She took the red work-stained hand of her niece in her thin, blue-veined one and went on, “We have to come to that, Hattie ... all of us. It’s only natural that a time comes when children want to be free. It’s like the wild animals ... the foxes and the wolves. We aren’t any different. We’re just animals too, helpless in the rough hands of Nature. She does with us as She pleases.”

But Mrs. Tolliver continued to sob helplessly. It was the first time in her life that she had refused to accept in the end what came to her.

“You don’t suppose I wanted Lily to go and live in Paris? You don’t suppose I wanted to be left here with Irene who is like a changeling to me? It’s only what is bound to come. If Lily _did_ help Ellen it was only because all youth is in conspiracy against old age. All children are in a conspiracy against their parents. When we are old, we are likely to forget the things that counted so much with us when we were young. We take them for granted. We see them as very small troubles after all, but that’s because we are looking at them from a long way off. The old are selfish, Hattie ... more selfish than you imagine. They envy even the life and the hunger of the young.”

For a moment the old woman paused, regarding her red-eyed niece silently. “No,” she continued presently, “You don’t understand what I’ve been saying, yet it’s all true ... as true as life itself. Besides, life is hard for our children, Hattie. It isn’t as simple as it was for us. Their grandfathers were pioneers and the same blood runs in their veins, only they haven’t a frontier any longer. They stand ... these children of ours ... with their backs toward this rough-hewn middle west and their faces set toward Europe and the East. And they belong to neither. They are lost somewhere between.”

But Mrs. Tolliver understood none of this. With her there were no shades of feeling, no variations of duty. To her a mother and child were mother and child whether they existed in the heart of Africa or in the Faubourg St. Germain. After tea she went home, secretly nursing her bruised heart. She told her husband that no woman in the world had ever been called upon to endure so much.

As for Charles Tolliver, his lot was not the happiest. At the next election, despite the money which old Julia Shane poured into his campaign, he was defeated. His ruin became a fact. The Mills were too strong. The day of the farmer was past. After floundering about helplessly in an effort to make ends meet, he took at last a place as clerk in one of the banks controlled by his enemy Judge Weissman ... a cup of humiliation which he drank for the sake of his wife and children, goaded by the sheer necessity of providing food and shelter for them. So he paid for his error, not of honesty but of judgment. Because he was honest, he was sacrificed to the Mills. He settled himself, a man of forty-five no longer young, behind the brass bars of the Farmer’s Commercial Bank, a name which somehow carried a sense of irony because it had swallowed up more than one farm in its day.

In the Town tremendous changes occurred with the passing of years. There was a panic which threatened the banks. There were menacing rumors of violence and discontent in the Flats; and these things affected the Town enormously, as depressions in the market for wheat and cattle had once affected it. No longer was there any public market. On the Square at the top of Main Street, the old scales for weighing hay and grain were removed as a useless symbol of a buried past, a stumbling block in the way of progress. Opposite the site once occupied by the scales, the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks purchased the Grand Western Hotel and made it into a club house with a great elk’s head in cast iron over the principal doorway. Through its windows, it was possible in passing to see fat men with red faces, coats off and perspiring, while they talked of progress and prosperity and the rising place of the Town among the cities of the state. One by one the old landmarks of the Square vanished, supplanted by “smokehouses,” picture palaces with fronts like frosted pastries, candy shops run by Greeks, a new element in the growing alien population of the Town. On the far side of the square the tower of the courthouse, itself a monument to graft, was at last completed to the enrichment of Judge Weissman and other politicians who had to do with the contract.

In the early evening after the sun had disappeared, the figure of the Judge himself might be seen, ambulating about the square, hugging the shadows; for the heat was bad for a man so red-faced and apoplectic. For all his avoidance of the sun, he walked arrogantly, with the air of one proud of his work. When he had tired of the promenade, it was his custom to return to the Elks’ club to squeeze his body between the arms of a rocking chair and sit watching the passers-by and the noisy bustle of trade. At such moments one might hear the sound of money dripping into tills as one heard the distant sound of the Mills which in the evening penetrated as far as the square itself. He gloated openly over the prosperity to which he had contributed so much. He went his way, petty, dishonest, corrupt ... traits which even his enemies forgave him because he had “done so much to make the Town what it was.” Not since the piggish obstinacy of Charles Tolliver had he been thwarted, and even in the matter of the taxes the sympathy of the Town had been on his side, because the decision in the case had delayed the building of new furnaces for more than two years and thus halted the arrival of hundreds of new alien workers who would have made the Town the third largest in the state. Charles Tolliver, most people believed, had been piggish and obstinate. He had put himself between his own Town and its booming prosperity.

XXXII

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.