Part 6

As for Charles Tolliver, he turned over the steaming horses to Hennery, bade the black man blanket them well, talked with him for a moment, and then followed the others into the house. Him Hennery adored, with the adoration of a servant for one who understands servants. In the stables, Hennery put extra zeal into the rubbing down of the animals, his mind carrying all the while the picture of a tall gentleman with graying hair, kindly eyes and a pleasant soft voice.

“Mr. Tolliver,” he told the mulatto woman later in the day, “is one of God’s gentlemen.”

The other group was known as The Barr Family. The passing of years had thinned its ranks until there remained only Eva Barr, the daughter of Samuel Barr and therefore a niece of the vigorous and patriarchal Jacob. Characteristically she made her entrance in a town hack, stopping to haggle with the driver over the fare. Her thin, spinsterish voice rose above the roaring of the Mills until at length she lost the argument, as she always did, and paid reluctantly the prodigious twenty-five cents. She might easily have come by way of the Halsted street trolley for five cents, but this she considered neither safe nor dignified. As she grew older and more eccentric, she had come to exercise extraordinary precautions to safeguard her virginity. She was tall, thin, and dry, with a long nose slightly red at the end, and hair that hung in melancholy little wisps about an equine face; yet she had a double lock put on the door of her room at Haines’ boarding house, and nothing would have induced her to venture alone into the squalid Flats. She was poor and very pious. Into her care fell the destitute of her parish. She administered scrupulously with the hard efficiency of a penurious housekeeper.

Dinner began at two and assumed the ceremonial dignity of a tribal rite. It lasted until the winter twilight, descending prematurely because of the smoke from the Mills, made it necessary for the mulatto woman and her black helpers to bring in the silver candlesticks, place them amid the wreckage of the great feast, and light them to illumine the paneled walls of the somber dining-room. When the raisins and nuts and the coffee in little gilt cups had gone the rounds, the room resounded with the scraping of chairs, and the little party wandered out to distribute itself at will through the big house. Every year the distribution followed the same plan. In one corner of the big drawing-room Irene, in her plain gray dress, and Eva Barr, angular and piercing in durable and shiny black serge, foregathered, drawn by their mutual though very different interest in the poor. Each year the two spinsters fell upon the same arguments; for they disagreed about most fundamental things. The attitude of Irene toward the poor was the Roman attitude, full of paternalism, beneficent, pitying. Eva Barr in her Puritan heart had no room for such sentimental slop. “The poor,” she said, “must be taught to pull themselves out of the rut. It’s sinful to do too much for them.”

Two members of the family, the oldest, Jacob Barr, and the youngest, his grandson, disappeared completely, the one to make his round of the stables and park, the other to vanish into the library where, unawed by the sinister portrait of old John Shane, he poked about, stuffing himself with the candy sent by Willie Harrison as a token of a thrice renewed courtship. The grandfather, smoking what he quaintly called a cheroot, surveyed scrupulously the stable and the house, noting those portions which were falling into disrepair. These he later brought to the attention of Julia Shane; and the old woman, leaning on her stick, listened with an air of profound attention to her brother-in-law only to forget everything he had advised the moment the door closed upon him. Each year it was the same. Nothing changed.

In the far end of the drawing-room by the grand piano, Lily drew Ellen Tolliver and the tall shy brother Fergus to her side. Here Mrs. Tolliver joined them, her eyes bright with flooding admiration for her children. The girl was plainly fascinated by her glamorous cousin. She examined boldly Lily’s black gown from Worth, her pearls, and her shoes from the Rue de la Paix. She begged for accounts of the Opéra in Paris and of Paderewski’s playing with the Colonne Orchestra. There was something pitiful in her eagerness for some contact with the glamorous world beyond the Town.

“I’m going to New York to study, next year,” she told Lily. “I would go this year but Momma says I’m too young. Of course, I’m not. If I had money, I’d go anyway.” And she cast a sudden defiant glance at her powerful mother.

Lily, her face suddenly grave with the knowledge of Judge Weissman’s visit, tried to reassure her. “You’ll have plenty of opportunity, Ellen. You’re still a young girl ... only eighteen.”

“But there’s never any money,” the girl replied, with an angry gleam in her wide blue eyes. “Papa’s always in debt. I’ll never get a chance unless I make it myself.”

In the little alcove by the gallery, Julia Shane leaning on her stick, talked business with Charles Tolliver. This too was a yearly custom; her nephew, the county treasurer, gave her bits of advice on investments which she wrote down with a silver pencil and destroyed when he had gone. She listened and begged his advice because the giving of it encouraged him and gave him confidence. He was a gentle, honest fellow, and in her cold way she loved him, better even than she loved his wife who was her niece by blood. The advice he gave was mediocre and uninspired; besides Julia Shane was a shrewd woman and more than a match in business matters for most men.

When they had finished this little ceremony, the old woman turned the conversation to the Cyclops Mill scandal.

“And what’s to come of it?” she asked. “Are you going to win?”

Charles Tolliver smiled. “We’ve won already. The case was settled yesterday. The Mill owes the state some five hundred thousand with fines.”

Julia Shane again pounded the floor in delight. “A fine Christmas present!” she chuckled. “A fine Christmas present!” And then she did an unaccountable thing. With her thin ringed hand she slapped her nephew on the back.

“You know they came to me,” she said, “to get my influence. I told them to go to the Devil!... I suppose they tried to bribe you.”

The nephew frowned and the gentleness went out of his face. The fine mouth grew stern. “They tried ... carefully though, so carefully they couldn’t be caught at it.”

“It will make you trouble. Judge Weissman is a bad enemy. He’s powerful.”

“I know that. I’ve got to fight him. The farmers are with me.”

“But the Town is not, and it’s the Town which counts nowadays. The day of the farmer is past.”

“No, the Town is not.”

The face of Charles Tolliver grew serious and the blue eyes grave and worried. Julia Shane saw that he was watching his tall daughter who sat now at the piano, preparing to play.

“If you need money at the next election,” she said, “Come to me. I can help you.”

XX

At the sound of Ellen’s music, the conversation in the long drawing-room ceased save for the two women who sat the far corner--Irene and Eva Barr. They went on talking in an undertone of their work among the poor. The others listened, captivated by the sound, for Ellen played well, far better than any of the little group save Lily and Julia Shane knew. To the others it was simply music; to the old woman and her daughter it was something more. They found in it the fire of genius, the smoldering warmth of a true artist, a quality unreal and transcendental which raised the beautiful old room for a moment out of the monotonous slough of commonplace existence. Ellen, in high-collared shirtwaist and skirt with her dark hair piled high in a ridiculous pompadour, sat very straight bending over the keys from time to time in a caressing fashion. She played first of all a Brahms waltz, a delicate thread of peasant melody raised to the lofty realm of immortality by genius; and from this she swept into a Chopin valse, melancholy but somehow brilliant, and then into a polonaise, so dashing and so thunderous that even Irene and Eva Barr, ignorant of all the beauty of sound that tumbled flood-like into the old room, suspended their peevish talk for a time and sat quite still, caught somehow in the contagious awe of the others.

The thin girl at the piano was not in a drawing-room at all. She sat in some enormous concert hall on a high stage before thousands of people. The faces stretched out before her, row after row, until those who sat far back were misty and blurred, not to be distinguished. When she had finished the polonaise she sat quietly for a moment as though waiting for a storm of applause to arise after a little hush from the great audience. There was a moment of silence and then the voice of Lily was heard, warm and soft, almost caressing.

“It was beautiful, Ellen ... really beautiful. I had no idea you played so well.”

The girl, blushing, turned and smiled at the cousin who lay back so indolently among the cushions of the sofa, so beautiful, so charming in the black gown from Worth. The smile conveyed a world of shy and inarticulate gratitude. The girl was happy because she understood that Lily knew. To the others it was just music.

“Your daughter is an artist, Hattie,” remarked Julia Shane. “You should be proud of her.”

The mother, her stout figure tightly laced, sat very straight in her stiff chair, her work-stained hands resting awkwardly in her lap. Her face beamed with the pride of a woman who was completely primitive, for whom nothing in this world existed save her children.

“And now, Ellen,” she said, “play the McKinley Funeral March. You play it so well.”

The girl’s young face clouded suddenly. “But it’s not McKinley’s Funeral March, Mama,” she protested. “It’s Chopin’s. It’s not the same thing.”

“Well, you know what I mean ... the one you played at the Memorial Service for McKinley.” She turned to Lily, her pride written in every line of her strong face. “You know, Ellen was chosen to play at the services for McKinley. Mark Hanna himself made a speech from the same platform.”

XXI

An irrepressible smile swept Lily’s face. “They couldn’t have chosen better, I’m sure. Do play it, Ellen.”

The girl turned to the piano and a respectful silence fell once more. Slowly she swept into the somber rhythms of the _March Funèbre_, beginning so softly that the music was scarcely audible, climbing steadily toward a climax. From the depths of the old Pleyel she brought such music as is seldom heard. The faces in the drawing-room became grave and thoughtful. Lying among the pillows of the divan, Lily closed her eyes and listened through a wall of darkness. Nearby, her mother, leaning on the ebony stick, bowed her head because her eyes had grown dim with tears, a spectacle which she never permitted this world to witness. Presently the music swung again into a somber retarding rhythm; and then slowly, surely, with a weird, unearthly certainty, it became synchronized with the throbbing of the Mills. The steady beat was identical. Old Julia Shane opened her eyes and stared out of the window into the gathering darkness. The music, all at once, made the pounding of the Mills hideously audible.

When the last note echoing through the old house died away, Eva Barr, fidgeting with her embroidered reticule in search of a handkerchief to wipe her lean red nose, rose and said, “Well, I must go. It’s late and the hack is already here. He charges extra for waiting, you know.”

That was the inevitable sign. The dinner was ended. Grandpa Barr, very rosy from his promenade about the grounds, and the red-haired Robert, much stuffed with Willie Harrison’s courting chocolates, reappeared and the round of farewells was begun.

Before Hennery brought round from the stable the Tolliver’s sleigh, Lily placing her arm about Ellen’s waist, drew her aside and praised her playing. “You must not throw it away,” she said. “It is too great a gift.” She whispered. Her manner became that of a conspirator. “Don’t let them make you settle into the pattern of the Town. It’s what they’ll try to do, but don’t let them. We only live once, Ellen, don’t waste your life. The others ... the ones who aren’t remarkable in any way will try to pull you down from your pedestal to their level. But don’t let them. Fitting the pattern is the end of their existence. ‘Be like every one else,’ is their motto. Don’t give in. And when the time comes, if you want to come and study in Paris with the great Philippe, you can live with me.”

The girl blushed and regarded the floor silently for a moment. “I won’t let them,” she managed to say presently. “Thank you, Cousin Lily.” At the door, she turned sharply, all her shyness suddenly vanished, an air of defiance in its place. “I won’t let them.... You needn’t worry,” she added with a sudden fierceness.

“And next week,” said Lily, “come here and spend the night. I want to hear more music. There’s no music in this Town but the Mills.”

By the fireplace under the flaming Venice of Mr. Turner, Julia Shane talked earnestly with her niece, Mrs. Tolliver, who stood warming her short astrakhan jacket by the gentle blaze.

“And one more thing, Hattie,” said the old woman. “I’ve been planning to give you these for some time but the opportunity never arose. I shan’t live many more years and I want you to have them.”

With an air of secrecy she took from her thin fingers two rings and slipped them into the red, worn hands of her niece. “Don’t tell any one,” she added. “It’s a matter between us.”

Mrs. Tolliver’s hand closed on the rings. She could say nothing, but she kissed Aunt Julia affectionately and the tears came into her eyes because the old woman understood so well the intricate conventions of pride in matters of money. The rings were worth thousands. Hattie Tolliver could not have accepted their value in money.

At the door the little party made its departure with a great deal of healthy hubbub, colliding at the same time with a visitor who had driven up unseen. It was Willie Harrison, come to call upon Lily and to propose a visit to the Mills to look over the new furnaces that were building. In the stream of light from the doorway the caller and Charles Tolliver recognized each other and an awkward moment followed. It was Willie Harrison, overcome with confusion, who bowed politely. Charles Tolliver climbed into his sleigh without making any sign of recognition. The feud between the old and the new, concealed for so many years, was emerging slowly into the open.

XXII

The day after Christmas dawned bright and clear, as clear as any day dawned in the Flats where at sunrise the smoke turned the sun into a great copper disk rising indolently toward the zenith of the heavens. The false warmth of the January thaw, precocious that year, brought gentle zephyrs that turned the icicles on the sweeping eaves of the house into streams of water which added their force to the rivulets already coursing down the long drive to leave the gravel bare and eroded, swelling with the upheaval of the escaping frost. But the false warmth brought no beauty; no trees burgeoned forth in clouds of bright green and no crocuses thrust forth their thin green swords and errant blossoms. The January thaw was but a false hope of the northern winter. When the sun of the early afternoon had destroyed all traces of the snow save drifts which hid beneath the rhododendrons or close against the north wall of the stable, it left behind an expanse of black and dessicated lawn, in spots quite bare even of dying grass. The garden stripped of its winter blanket at last stood revealed, a ravaged fragment of what had once been a glory.

Lily, drawn from the house by the warmth of the sun, wandered along the barren paths like a lovely hamadyrad enticed by deceitful Gods from her winter refuge. She ran from clump to clump of shrubbery, breaking off the tender little twigs in search of the green underbark that was a sign of life. Sometimes she found the green; more often she found only dead, dry wood, bereft of all vitality. In the flower garden she followed the brick path to its beginning in the little arbor covered with wistaria vine. Here too the Mills had taken their toll; the vine was dead save a few thin twining stalks that clung to the arbor. In the border along the walk, she found traces of irises--hardy plants difficult to kill--an occasional thick green leaf of a companula or a foxglove hiding among the shelter of leaves provided by the careful Hennery. But there were great gaps of bare earth where nothing grew, stretches which in her childhood had been buried beneath a lush and flowery growth of sky-blue delphinium, scarlet poppies, fiery tritomas, blushing peonies, foxglove, goosefoot, periwinkle, and cinnamon pinks.... All were gone now, blighted by the capricious and fatal south wind with its burden of gas and soot. It was not alone the flowers which suffered. In the niches clipped by Hennery in the dying walls of arbor vitæ, the bits of white statuary were streaked with black soot, their pure bodies smudged and defiled. The Apollo Belvedere and the Venus of Cydnos were no longer recognizable.

In the course of her tour about the little park, her red hair became loosened and disheveled and her cheeks flushed with her exertion. When she again reentered the house, she discovered that her slippers, high-heeled and delicate, were ruined. She called the mulatto woman and bade her throw them away.

On the stairs she encountered her mother, whom she greeted with a little cry of horror. “The garden, Mama, is ruined.... Nothing remains!”

The expression on the old woman’s face remained unchanged and stony.

“Nothing will grow there any longer,” she said. “Besides, it does not matter. When I die, there will be no one to live in the house. Irene hates it. She wants me to take a house in the Town.”

Lily, her feet clad only in the thinnest of silk-stockings, continued on her way up the long stairs to her room. If Willie Harrison had ever had a chance, even the faintest hope, the January thaw, revealing the stricken garden a fortnight too soon, destroyed it once and for all.

XXIII

At three that afternoon Willie’s victoria called to bear Lily and Irene to the Cyclops Mills for the tour which he proposed. Workmen, passing the carriage, regarded the two sisters with curiosity, frowning at the sight of Irene in a carriage they recognized as Harrison’s. A stranger might have believed the pair were a great lady and her housekeeper on the way to market, so different and incongruous were the appearances of the two women. Lily, leaning back against the thick mulberry cushions, sat wrapped in a sable stole. She wore a gray tailored suit and the smallest and smartest of black slippers. Around her white throat, which she wore exposed in defiance of fashions which demanded high, boned collars, she had placed a single string of pearls the size of peas. By the side of her opulent beauty Irene possessed the austerity and plainness of a Gothic saint. As usual she wore a badly cut suit, a plain black hat and flat shoes with large, efficient heels. Her thin hands, clad in knitted woolen gloves, lay listlessly in her lap.

Willie Harrison was waiting for them at the window of the superintendent’s office just inside the gate. They saw him standing there as the victoria turned across the cinders in through the red-painted entrance. He stood peering out of the window in a near-sighted way, his shoulders slightly stooped, his small hands fumbling as usual the ruby clasp of his watch chain. At the sight of him Lily frowned and bit her fine red lip as though she felt that a man so rich, a man so powerful, a man who owned all these furnaces and steel sheds should have an air more conquering and impressive.

Irene said, “Oh, there’s William waiting for us now.” And a second later the victoria halted by the concrete steps and Willie himself came out to greet them, hatless, his thin blond hair waving in a breeze which with the sinking of the sun grew rapidly more chilly. The sun itself, hanging over the roseate tops of the furnaces, had become a shield of deep copper red.

“You’re just in time,” said Willie. “The shifts will be changing in a little while. Shall we start here? I’ll show you the offices.”

They went inside and Willie, whose manner had become a little more confident at the prospect of such a display, led them into a long room where men sat in uniform rows on high stools at long tables. Over each table hung suspended a half-dozen electric lights hooded by green shades. The lights, so Willie told them, were placed exactly to the sixteenth of an inch eight feet and three inches apart. It was part of his theory of precision and regularity.

“This,” said Willie, with a contracted sweep of his arm, “is the bookkeeping department. The files are kept here, the orders and all the paper work.”

At the approach of the visitors, the younger men looked up for an instant fascinated by the presence of so lovely a creature as Lily wandering in to shatter so carelessly the sacred routine of their day. There were men of every age and description, old and young, vigorous and exhausted, men in every stage of service to the ponderous mill gods. The younger ones had a restless air and constantly stole glances in the direction of the visitors. The middle-aged ones looked once or twice at Lily and then returned drearily to their columns of figures. The older ones did not notice her at all. They had gone down for the last time in a sea of grinding routine.

Irene, who knew the Town better than Lily, pointed out among the near-sighted, narrow-chested workers men who were grandsons or great-grandsons of original settlers in the county, descendants of the very men who had cleared away the wilderness to make room for banks and lawyers and mills.

“Let’s go on,” said Lily, “to the Mills. They’re more interesting than this, I’m sure. You know I’ve never been inside a mill-yard.” She spoke almost scornfully, as if she thought the counting room were a poor show indeed. A shadow of disappointment crossed Willie’s sallow face.

After donning a broadcloth coat with an astrakhan collar and a derby hat, he led the way. For a long time they walked among freight cars labeled with names from every part of North America ... Santa Fé, Southern Pacific, Great Northern, Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul.... They passed between great warehouses and vast piles of rusty pig iron still covered with frost, the dirty snow lying unmelted in the crevasses; and at last they came to an open space where rose a vast, shapeless object in the process of being raised toward the sky.

“Here,” said Willie, “are the new furnaces. There are to be six of them. This is the first.”

“I like this better,” said Lily. “There is spirit here ... even among the laborers.”

The structure bore a strange resemblance to the Tower of Babel. Swarthy workmen, swarming over the mass of concrete and steel, shouted to each other above the din of the Mills in barbaric tongues which carried no meaning to the visitors. Workmen, like ants, pushed wheelbarrows filled with concrete, with fire clay or fire bricks. Overhead a giant crane lifted steel girders with an effortless stride and swung them into place. The figures of the workmen swept toward the tower in a constant stream of movement so that the whole took on a fantastic composition, as if the tower, rushing on its way heavenward, were growing taller and taller before their very eyes, as if before they moved away it might pierce the very clouds.