A Good Woman (Bromfield)/Part 2/Chapter 13
In the Mills Philip had come to know the men who worked at his oven, one by one, slowly, for they were at first suspicious of him as a native from the Hills who came to work among them. It was Krylenko more than any of them who broke down the barrier which shut him away from all those others. Krylenko, he came presently to understand, was a remarkable fellow. He was young, not perhaps more than twenty-five or six, a giant even among the big Poles, who worked with the strength of three ordinary men. There was a magnificence about his great body, with its supple muscles flowing beneath the blond, white skin. Naked to the waist, and leaning on his great bar of iron, there were times when he seemed a statue cut in the finest Parian marble. It was this odd, physical splendor that gave him a prestige and the power of leadership, which would have come to nothing in a stupid man; but Krylenko was intelligent, and hidden within the intelligence there lay a hard kernel of peasant shrewdness. He knew what it was he wanted and he was not to be turned aside; he was, Philip had come to understand, partly the creation of Irene Shane, that pale, transparent wraith, who spent all her days between the Flats and the great, gloomy house known as Shane's Castle. She had found him in her night class, a big Russian boy with a passion for learning things, and she had taken him to help her. She had perhaps discerned the odd thing about Krylenko, which set him apart from the others, that he had a vision. He had no ambition for himself, but his queer, mystical mind was constantly illuminated by wonderful plans of what he might do for his people. By this, he did not mean his own country people, but all the hordes of workers who dwelt in the rows of black houses and spent half their lives in the Mills. To him they were, quite simply, brothers—all the Poles, the Lithuanians, the Italians, the Croats, even the negroes who came up from the South to die slowly working over the acid vats. In his own Slavic way he had caught a sense of that splendor of the Mills which sometimes overwhelmed Philip. Only Krylenko saw, what was quite true, that the people in the Flats belonged to another world from those on the Hill. They made up a nation within a nation, a hostile army surrounded and besieged.
He meant to help his people to freedom, even by doing battle, if circumstance demanded it. At times there was about him the splendor of the ancient prophets.
It was for this reason that he stayed in the pounding-sheds, as a simple foreman, refusing to go elsewhere, though he could have had after a time one of the easy places in the shipping-rooms. He might have been one of those men who, "working their way from the bottom of the ladder," turned to oppress his own people. There were plenty of shrewd, hard-headed, pitiless men like that—men such as Frick and Carnegie, who had interests in these very Mills. Only he wasn't concerned for himself. He had a queer, stupid, pig-headed idea of helping the men about him; and he was one of those fantastic men to whom Justice was also God.
He had his own way of going about it; and he was not a sentimentalist. He knew that to get things in this world, one had to fight; and so he had gone quietly about organizing men, one here, one there, into the dreaded unions. It had to be done secretly, because he would have been sent away, blacklisted and put outside the pale if the faintest suspicion of his activity reached the ears even of the terrified little clerks who talked so big. There were meetings sometimes in the room over Hennessey's saloon, with men who wandered into town on one train and out on the next. It was a slow business, for one had to go carefully. But even with all the care there were whispers of strange things going on beneath the rumbling surface of the Flats. There were rumors which disturbed the peace of the stockbrokers, and stirred with uneasiness the people on the Hill—the bankers, the lawyers, the little shopkeepers—all the parasite ants whose prosperity rested upon the sweat of the Flats. There were, too, spies among the workers.
They even said on the Hill that old Julia Shane and that queer daughter of hers had a finger in the pie, which was more than true, for they did know what was happening. In their mad, fantastic way they had even given money.
There was always a strange current of fear and suspicion running beneath the surface, undermining here and there in places that lay below ground. In the first weeks Philip had become aware slowly of the sinister movement. He came to understand the suspicions against him. And then abruptly, bit by bit, perhaps because of his own taste for solitude and his way of going off to sit alone in a corner eating his own lunch, Krylenko had showed signs of friendliness, stifled and hindered in the beginning by the strangeness which set apart a dweller in the Flats from one on the Hill. One by one, the other men came to drop their suspicions and presently Philip found himself joining in their coarse jokes, even picking up snatches of their outlandish tongues. He came, in a way, to be one of them, and the effect of the communion filled him with a sense of expansion, almost as if he could feel himself growing. In a life dedicated to loneliness, he felt for the first time that warm, almost sensual feeling of satisfaction in companionship. He came to understand the men who worked at his own oven—Sokoleff, who drank whisky as if it were water, and sweated it all out as fast as he drank it, Krylenko himself, who was in love with an Italian girl who couldn't marry him until her orphaned brothers and sisters were grown, and Finke, the black little Croat who sometimes lost his head and talked wildly about revolution. And a dozen others—simple, coarse men, whose lives seemed plain and direct, filled too with suffering, though it was of a physical sort concerned with painful work, and childbirth, and empty stomachs, and so unlike that finer torture which Philip himself suffered.
And presently he found that the Mills were saving him—even his brain: the grimness, the bitter tang of the black life in the Flats, presented a savage reality which was to him like a spar in the open sea. There was no reality, he thought sometimes, even in his marriage to Naomi. It was all shadowy and unreal, filled with sound and fury which seemed bascless and even silly, when one thought of this other life of fire and steel. His own existence had been a futile, meaningless affair of vapors, swooning and ecstasies.
And then on the morning after Naomi had come to him, Krylenko fixed it for him to join the Union. To Philip it was a move that took on a significance out of proportion with the reality: it had an importance which for the others was lacking. He had entered the sinister conspiracy against his own people on the Hill; it marked the closing of a door behind him. He was certain now never to turn back.
All night and all morning he scarcely spoke to Krylenko and Finke and Sokoleff. He worked beside them, silent and sweating, his mind and soul in a confused state of alternate satisfaction and torment. Once or twice, he caught himself smiling into the depths of the burning ovens, like an idiot. He was smiling because of what had happened there in the dark in his room, with the pleasure of a boy come at last of age. It filled him with an odd, warm feeling of satisfaction and power. He was at last a man, like those others, Finke and Sokoleff and even Krylenko, who took such things as part of the day's routine, as they took eating and drinking. For them, a thing so commonplace couldn't mean what it meant to him. It couldn't give them that strange feeling of being suddenly set free after a long imprisonment. It couldn't mean a fever bred of long restraint that was vanished. And slowly through the long hours by the hot ovens his nerves grew relaxed and his mind cleared. The memory of the hot, tormenting nights at Megambo seemed distant and vague now. He was, as he had said to Mary Conyngham, being slowly born again. Something tremendous had happened to him. He was aware of a new strength and of a power over women, even women like his mother, and Naomi, terrified and hysterical in the darkness. He was free. A great light like a rocket had burst in the darkness.
At noon when the whistles blew, Krylenko, tucking in his shirt, said, "Come on and have a drink. . . . We gotta celebrate, all of us."
For a moment Philip hesitated. He had never drunk anything, even beer, but now there seemed a difference. What the hell difference did it make if you drank or not? These men about him all drank. It was the only pleasure they had, most of them, except what they found in the dismal, shuttered houses of Franklin Street. There was a reason now to drink. They would think he was celebrating his entrance into the Union, and all the time he'd be celebrating the other thing which they knew nothing about, which they wouldn't even understand.
"Yes," he said, "I'll go."
Hennessey's saloon stood at the corner of Halstead Street and the Erie tracks, just at the foot of the hill crowned by Shane's Castle. It was open night and day, and always filled with smoke and noise and drunken singing. Noise was its great characteristic—the grinding, squeaking sound of brakes on the endless freight-trains that passed the door, the violent, obscene voices of protesting drunks, the pounding of the Mills, and the ceaseless hammering of the tinny mechanical piano that swallowed nickels faster and faster as the patrons grew drunker and drunker. The only silence seemed to hang in a cloud about Mike Hennessey, the owner, a gigantic Irishman, with a beefy red face and carroty hair. He wasn't the original Hennessey. The founder, his father, was long since dead. In his day the famous Hennessey's had been only a crossroads saloon. There were no mills and furnaces. His cusfomers were farmers. This silent Mike Hennessey knew his business: he watched men get drunker and drunker while the cash-register banged and jangled. He never spoke. He was afraid of no man, and he had a very special scorn for the Dagoes and their way of using knives to fight. He paid five hundred dollars a month to the mayor, which made the police both blind and deaf to the noise and lights of the saloon which had no closing hours, and a thousand more to veil in purity his row of shuttered houses in Franklin Street. There was a hard, flinty look in his cold blue eyes, that said: "I know the price of everything in this bedlam of a Town. Every man and woman has a price."
But the hard blue eyes which never changed, widened ever so slightly for a brief second as the swinging doors opened and Philip came in with Finke and Krylenko and Sokoleff.
They sat at a table in the corner, where the mechanical piano growled and jangled. It was the full tide of drinking in the saloon, the hour when one shift of workers had left and another, dog-tired and black with soot, had only arrived. Most of them came unwashed from the Mills and their black faces together with the drifting smoke and clatter of sound gave the place the aspect of some chamber in Hell. The four companions began by drinking whisky, all of them but Philip perfectly straight. They would, Krylenko said, drink beer afterward to finish up.
The whisky, even diluted, burned and then warmed him. Finke and Sokoleff drank steadily, one glass after another, until the alcohol presently killed their weariness and Sokoleff began to grow hilarious and Finke to talk of revolution. For them the bad liquor took the place of rest, of sleep, of food, of cleanliness, even of decency. In the Flats it was useless to search for any decent thing, because comfort, food and warmth were not to be found there. Finke and Sokoleff had learned long ago that they lay only at the bottom of a glass filled many times with the rot-gut whisky that Hennessey sold.
Krylenko only drank a little and then said he must go, as he had to see Giulia before he went to bed. The great Ukrainian had washed himself carefully all over with cold water at the Mills, while the other three waited, Finke and Sokoleff standing by and making Rabelaisian jokes about his preparations for the courtship. Krylenko took it with good-natured tolerance, but there was an odd, shining look in his small, clear blue eyes.
Philip, sitting in a faint, warm haze, remembered the scene with pleasure, conscious that he belonged to them now. He was a member of the Union, one of them at last, but more than that he had become like them a man. He was drinking with them to celebrate.
Krylenko, taking leave of them, touched Philip on the shoulder. "You better go home now and get some sleep."
"No," said Philip; "I'm going to stay a while."
The big Russian's great hand closed on his shoulder with a powerful but gentle pressure. "Look here, Philip," he said, "you ain't like these two. You can't stand it. You better go home now. They're just a pair of hogs. Nothing hurts 'em."
But Philip felt hazy enough to be stubborn and a little shrewd. He sided with Finke and Sokoleff, who kept protesting noisily. He meant to have one more drink—beer this time—and then he'd go.
Krylenko, shaking his big yellow head, went off to see Giulia, and, as Philip watched his great shoulders plowing their way through the mob, something odd happened to him. It was as if a light had gone out; instead of feeling jolly and a bit wild, he was seized in the grip of melancholy. He wanted suddenly to weep. He remembered what Krylenko had said about hogs, and, staring in a queer daze at Finke and Sokoleff, he saw them by some fantastic trick of the mind as two pigs with smutty faces thrusting their noses into the big drinking-glasses. He wanted suddenly to rise and wash himself all over with cold water as Krylenko had done—to wash away the smoke, the smell of sweat and the noise that filled the room. He didn't want to talk any more or listen to the lewd jokes which Finke and Sokoleff kept on making about Krylenko's courtship. He sat silently and stared into space.
And as the fumes of the alcohol filled his brain, the impulse to wash himself grew stronger and stronger. He came to feel vaguely that there were other things beside the soot and sweat that he wanted to wash away, and slowly he knew what it was. He wanted to wash away with cold water the memory of the night before, the fantastic memory of what had happened with Naomi.
Finke and Sokoleff had forgotten him. The one had gone off to stand by the bar talking red revolution, and the other was shouting wildly to stop "that Gott-damned piano." The room seemed to expand and then contract, growing vast and cavernous like the Mill shed and then pressing in upon him, squeezing the horrible noise tight against his ear-drums. He felt sick and filled with disgust. Suddenly he knew that he was drunk and he knew that he hadn't meant to be. It had happened without his knowing it. He was drunk, and last night he had slept with a harlot. Oh, he knew now. It sickened him. It might just as well have been a harlot, one of those women out of Hennessey's shuttered houses. It would have been better, because he wouldn't have to go back to a woman like that: he'd never see her again. And he wouldn't have that queer little knot, like a cramp in a weary muscle, that was almost hatred for Naomi.
The drunker he got, the clearer it all seemed. And then suddenly his tired brain gave way. He fell forward and buried his face in his hands. He knew now and he began to weep drunkenly. He knew now, because he had learned in a strange way during the darkness of the slate-colored house. He knew why it was that he had had to see Mary Conyngham; he knew why he had walked with her into the open country. He was in love with Mary Conyngham; he had been in love with her ever since he could remember. And it was Naomi who shared his bed.
Disgust enveloped him in physical sickness, and the old desire to wash himself in cold water returned passionately. What Krylenko had said was true. "You ain't like these two—just a couple of hogs." Krylenko knew with that shining look in his blue eyes. Krylenko had his Giulia, and he, Philip, had nothing . . . less than nothing, for he had bound himself in a terrible, sickening fashion to Naomi. It was all horrible. He was drunk and he wanted suddenly to die.
Some one touched his shoulder, and he raised his head. It was Hennessey, looking down at him out of the cold blue eyes.
"Look here," he said. "You're drunk enough. Get out of here and go home. Your Ma is Emma Downes, and I don't want to get mixed up with a hell-cat like her."
For a second Philip was blinded by rage. He wanted to kill Hennessey for the insult to his mother. He tried to get up, but he only knocked his glass on the floor, and then fell down beside it. He tried again to rise, and then Hennessey, cursing, bent over and picked him up as if he'd been a child, and carried him, plowing through the heat and confusion, out the swinging doors. In the open air, he placed him on his feet, holding him upright for a moment till he got a sense of his balance. Then, giving him a little push," he said, "There now. Run along home to your Ma like a good little boy. Tell her not to let her little tin Jesus come back again to Hennessey's place if she don't want him messed up too much to be a good missionary."