Part 9

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.

Although Irene seldom penetrated the Town any longer and her mother never left the confines of Shane’s Castle, their affairs still held an interest for those who had known Cypress Hill in the days of its vanished splendor. For women who had long since ceased to take any part in the life of a community, the names of old Julia Shane and her two daughters came up with startling frequency at the dinners and lunches and tea parties in the Town. It may have been that in a community where life was so noisy, so banal, so strenuous, so redolent of prosperity, the Shanes and the old house satisfied some profound and universal hunger for the mysterious, the beautiful, the bizarre, even the mystic. Certainly in the midst of so materialistic a community the Shanes were exotic and worthy of attention. And always in the background there was the tradition of John Shane and the memories of things which it was whispered had happened in Shane’s Castle. It was Lily who aroused the most talk, perhaps because she was even more withdrawn and mysterious than her mother and sister, because it was so easy to imagine things about her.... Lily who could come back and bring all the Town once more to Shane’s Castle; Lily, the generous, the good-natured, the beautiful Lily.

Mrs. Julis Harrison discussed them; and her son, the rejected Willie; and Miss Abercrombie, who with the passing of years had developed an affection of the nerves which made her face twitch constantly so that always, even in the midst of the most solemn conversations, she had the appearance of winking in a lascivious fashion. It was a trial which she bore, with a truly noble fortitude.

XXXIII

On the evening of the day that Mrs. Harrison called for the last time at Cypress Hill, Miss Abercrombie was invited to dine with her in the ugly sandstone house on the Hill. The call was Mrs. Harrison’s final gesture in an effort to patch up the feud which had grown so furiously since the affair over the taxes. Of its significance Miss Abercrombie had been told in advance, so it must have been with a beating, expectant heart that she arrived at the Harrison mansion.

The two women dined alone in a vast dining-room finished in golden oak, beneath a gigantic brass chandelier fitted with a score of pendant brass globes. They sat at either end of a table so long that shouting was almost a necessity.

“William is absent,” explained Mrs. Harrison in a loud, deep voice. “There is a big corporation from the east that wants to buy the Mills. It wants to absorb them at a good price with a large block of stock for William and me. Of course, I oppose it ... with all my strength. As I told William, the Mills _are_ the Harrisons ... I will never see them out of the family ... Judge Weissman has gone east with William to see that he does nothing rash. Neither of them ought to be away, I told Willie, with all this trouble brewing in the Flats.” Here she paused for a long breath. “Why, only this afternoon, some of those Polish brats threw stones at my victoria, right at the foot of Julia’s drive.... Imagine that in the old days!”

This long and complicated speech, she made with but a single pause for breath. She had grown even more stout, and her stupendous masculine spirit had suffered a certain weakening. A light stroke of paralysis she had passed over heroically, dismissing it by sheer force of her tremendous will. The misfortune left no trace save a slight limp as she dragged her body across the floor and settled it heavily in the plush covered arm chair at one end of the table.

The butler--Mrs. Harrison used a butler as the symbol of her domination in the Town, wearing him as a sort of crest--noiselessly brought the thick mushroom soup, his eye gleaming at the sight of the two women. He was an old man with white hair and the appearance of a gentleman.

“How dreadful!” exclaimed Miss Abercrombie, and then unable longer to restrain herself, she said, “Tell me! Do tell me about Julia!”

Mrs. Harrison drank from her water glass, set it down slowly and then said impressively, “She did not receive me!”

“I feared so,” rejoined Miss Abercrombie, winking with nervous impatience.

“It is the end! No one can say that I have not done my part toward a reconciliation.” This statement she uttered with all the majesty of an empress declaring war. “And to think,” she added mournfully, “that such an old friendship should come to such an end.”

“It’s just the way I feel,” replied Miss Abercrombie. “And you know, my friendship was even older. I knew her before you. Why, I can remember when she was only a farmer girl.” Here her illness forced her to wink as if there were something obscene in her simple statement.

“Well,” said Mrs. Harrison, “I don’t suppose any one in the Town was ever closer to Julia than I was. D’you know? That mulatto woman actually turned me away to-day, and I must say her manner was insolent. She said Julia was not feeling well enough to see me. Imagine, not well enough to see _me_, her oldest friend!” This statement the sycophantic Miss Abercrombie allowed to pass unchallenged. “Heaven knows,” continued Mrs. Harrison. “It was only friendship that prompted me. I certainly would not go prying about for the sake of curiosity. You know that, Pearl. Why, I wasn’t allowed to set my foot inside the door. You’d have thought I was diseased.”

After this a silence descended during which the room vibrated with unsaid things. At the memory of her reception, Mrs. Harrison’s face grew more and more flushed. The gentlemanly butler removed the soup and brought on whitefish nicely browned and swimming in butter.

“It’s a queer household,” remarked Miss Abercrombie, with an air of hinting at unspeakable things and feeling her way cautiously toward a letting down of all bars. Undoubtedly it was unfortunate that they had disputed the position of “oldest friend.” In a way it tied both their hands.

“It has always been queer,” replied the hostess. “Even since the house was built.”

Again a pregnant silence, and then Miss Abercrombie with another unwilled and obscene wink added, “I must say I can’t understand Irene’s behavior.” About this effort, there was something oblique and yet effective. It marked another step.

“Or Lily’s,” rejoined Mrs. Harrison, taking a third step.

“They say,” said Miss Abercrombie, pulling fishbones from her mouth, “that there is a common mill worker who is very attentive to Irene. Surely she can’t be considering marriage with _him_.”

“No, from what I hear, she _isn’t_,” observed Mrs. Harrison. After this dark hint she paused for a moment tottering upon the edge of new revelations with the air of a swimmer about to dive into cold water. At last she plunged.

“They say,” she murmured in a lowered voice, “that there is more between them than most people guess ... more than is proper.”

Miss Abercrombie leaned forward. “You know,” she said, “that’s funny. I’ve heard the same thing.”

“Well, I heard it from Thomas, the coachman. Of course, I reproved him for even hinting at such things. I must say he only hinted ... very delicately. He was discreet. If I hadn’t guessed there was something of the sort going on, I should never have known what he was driving at.”

Miss Abercrombie bridled and leaned back for the butler to remove her fish plate. “Imagine!” she said, “Imagine a child of yours being the subject of gossip among servants!”

Her hostess gave a wicked chuckle. “You’ve forgotten John Shane. When he was alive, his behavior was the talk of every one. But how could you have forgotten the talk that went the rounds? It was common property ... common property.”

Miss Abercrombie sighed deeply. “I know ... I know. Julia’s life has not been happy.” And into the sigh she put a thousand implications of the superior happiness of virgins.

“Of course,” said Mrs. Harrison, “he was insane. There’s no doubt about it. People may talk, but facts are facts. John Shane was insane ... certainly toward the end he was insane.”

The butler brought the roast fowl, and until his back was turned once more both women kept silence. When he had gone out of the room, they found themselves striving for first place in the race. Both spoke at once but Mrs. Harrison overwhelmed the sycophantic Abercrombie.

“Of course,” she said, “I think Julia herself is a little queer at times. I’ve noticed it for years ... ever since ... well ... ever since Lily went to Paris to live.”

“Yes,” observed Miss Abercrombie, moving toward something more definite. “Ever since the Governor’s garden party. All that was very queer ... very queer.”

Here again they found themselves halted by the immensity of the unspoken. Mrs. Harrison veered aside.

“The house has gone to ruin. Even the gate is hanging by one hinge. Nothing is kept up any longer.”

“Have you seen this lover of Irene’s?” asked Miss Abercrombie, calling a spade a spade and endeavoring to keep to one thing at a time.

“I’ve seen him once ... William pointed him out to me at the Mills. He’s one of the men who have been making trouble there.”

“Is he good looking?” asked Miss Abercrombie.

“Yes and no,” replied her companion.

“Well, what does that mean?”

“Well, he’s tall and has a handsome face ... a little evil perhaps. The real trouble is that I should call him common. Yes, common is the word I should use, decidedly common.”

Miss Abercrombie raised her eyebrows and smiled. “But, my dear, after all he is nothing but a workman.”

“Yes,” replied Mrs. Harrison, “he _is_.” In a manner which put an end to all doubt in the matter.

“Do you really think,” asked Miss Abercrombie, “that there is anything in it?”

Mrs. Harrison poised her fork and gave her guest a knowing look. “Well, of course I can’t see what he sees in her ... pale and haggard as she is. Now with him it’s different. He’s ... well.” She halted suddenly, adding, “This fowl is tough, Pearl ... I’m sorry it happened when you were dining with me.” And then, “I suppose it’s money he’s after. She must be very rich.”

The butler, after bringing more rich food, disappeared again and this time, Miss Abercrombie, casting to the winds all restraint, rose and said, “I’m going to bring my chair nearer, Belle. I can’t talk all the way from this end of the table.”

And she moved her chair and plate to a more strategic position so that when the butler returned, he found the two women sitting quite close to each other, their heads together, their voices lowered to the most confidential of pitches. Fragments of their talk reached an ear long trained to eavesdropping upon old women.

“But Lily is the one,” drifted to the ear. “I’d really like to know the truth about her. Of course blood is thicker than water. They say she....” Mrs. Harrison rattled the ice in her glass, thus destroying the remainder of the sentence.

So they sat until near midnight--two old women, one of them at the end of a life barren of love, the other abandoned by love forever and cast aside, a slowly decaying mass of fat--pawing over the affairs of two women for whom the force of love in some manifestation or other was still a radiant reality. They knew nothing; they possessed only suspicions and fragments of gossip, but out of these they succeeded in patching together a mosaic which glowed with all the colors of the most glamorous sin and the most romantic passion.

XXXIV

And at the same moment in the house at Cypress Hill, Julia Shane lay propped up in her bed reading a French novel. It was an enormous bed with a vast dusty canopy supported by two ironical wood-gilt cupids who hung suspended from the ceiling; and Julia Shane, reading by the light of her night lamp, appeared lost in it like a woman tossing on the waves of the sea. To-night, feeling more ill than usual, she had her dinner in bed, wrapped in a peignoir of mauve ribbon and valenciennes, her bony neck exposed above the linen of her night dress.

She read, as usual, with the aid of a silver mounted reading glass which tossed the sentences in enormous capitals well into the range of her fading vision. On the table beside her stood one of the gilt coffee cups, a mute witness to the old woman’s disobedience of the doctor’s orders. Beside it lay two paper backed French novels and on the floor in the shadow of the table a half dozen more tossed aside carelessly, some lying properly, others open and sprawled, exposing the ragged edges of the hastily cut pages.

In the fashion of the ill and aging, she lived nowadays in memories ... memories of her girlhood when she had ridden John Shane’s wildest mare Doña Rita recklessly about the paddock of the farm, memories of Mademoiselle Violette de Vaux and the picnics with French and English girls in a neatly kept wood at Sèvres, memories of Cypress Hill in the days immediately after her return when John Shane was still more the passionate lover than the husband. As she grew older, the memories became clearer and more vivid, but they were neither vivid nor diverse enough to occupy all her time. What remained she divided between the game of patience and the French novels which Lily supplied faithfully, shipping them from Paris in lots of a dozen at a time.

The old woman had evolved her own scheme of reading, a plan which Irene condemned by the word “skimming,” but which satisfied Julia Shane because it revealed the plot without an unnecessary waste of time over long, involved descriptions of scenery and minute analyses of incomprehensible Gallic passions. Under the skimming system she read a few pages at the beginning and then turned to the end to learn the outcome of the tale. After this, she plunged into the middle of the book and read a page or two here and there until her curiosity was satisfied and her interest flagged. And at last the book was tossed aside to be carried off by the mulatto woman, who never failed to go through each volume carefully as though by looking at the words frequently enough she would be able at length to unlock the secrets of foreign tongues. The books which lay on the floor beside the bed had been “skimmed.” They lay prostrate and sprawled like the dead soldiers of an army. The titles served as an index of the old woman’s favorite authors. They appeared some in black ink, some in red, some even in blue ... Paul Marguerite, Marcel Prévost, Pierre Loti, Paul Bourget, Collette Willy and, strange to relate, Anatole France represented by _L’Ile des Penguins_ which, it seemed, had baffled the “skimming” system, for of all the lot it was the only volume in which every page had been cut.

After she grew weary, she tossed aside _Les Anges Gardiens_ which she had been reading and sat leaning back with her eyes closed. Perhaps she pondered the doings of the four evil governesses in the Prévost tale; perhaps she turned her thoughts to the Town and Mrs. Julis Harrison whom she had sent away because she “was not in a mood to be bored.” It is even possible that she knew at this very moment that in the sandstone house of the Harrisons, they were discussing her affairs. She was too wise and too worldly not to have known what Belle Harrison would say of her. Yet she appeared calm and content enough, completely indifferent to the opinions of her acquaintances, of the Town--indeed of all the world. She had reached the time when such things are no longer of any importance.