A Good Woman (Bromfield)/Part 3/Chapter 16
Emma was herself forced to go in at last and send away the newspaper man, for Jason would have kept him there the rest of the night, telling a story which became more and more embroidered with each rash recounting. And when, at last, the reporter had gone, the others came in and sat about while Jason continued his talk. But the evening died slowly, perhaps because of Elmer's suspicions, or Naomi's curious depression, or Philip's own disgust and low spirits. Jason found himself talking presently against a curious, foreboding silence, of which he took no notice. Only Emma and Mabelle were still listening.
It was Elmer who at last broke up the party, pushing the rotund and breathless Mabelle before him. In the door Mabelle turned, and, shaking her head a little coquettishly, said, "Well, good-night, Jason. Good-night, Emma. I feel like I was saying 'good-night' to a honeymoon couple." And the bawdy look came into her eyes. "There'll never be any second honeymoon for Elmer and me. We've got our family now and that's all done."
Still tittering, she was dragged off by her husband. When she had gone, Jason said, "Mabelle is a cute one, ain't she, and a funny one too, to be married to a mausoleum like Elmer."
"Now, Jason, it's all patched up between you and Elmer. There's no use beginning all over again."
Naomi and Philip had put on their wraps, and were standing by the door, when Jason suddenly slapped his son on the back. "We've got to get better acquainted, son. You'll like your Pa when you know him better. Nobody can resist him." He winked at Emma, who turned crimson. "Ain't it so, Em. Least of all, the ladies." And then to Philip again, "I'll come and see you in the morning."
Philip turned quickly. "No, I'll come and fetch you myself. You wouldn't find the way."
"I want to see the twins the first thing."
"I'll come for you."
He had resolved that his father was not to come to the stable. He saw that Emma hadn't even told his father that he wasn't living with his wife. The stable had suddenly become to him a kind of temple, a place dedicated to that part of him which had escaped. There were things there which his father wouldn't understand, and could only defile. The stable belonged to him alone. It was apart from all the others—his father, his mother, Naomi, Uncle Elmer and Aunt Mabelle.
Emma was standing before Naomi, holding her coat open, so that she might examine the dress underneath. She was saying, "You must come up some afternoon, Naomi, and I'll help you make the dress right. It hangs all wrong at the back, and it's all bunchy around the armholes, You could make it all right, but, as it is, it's . . . it's sort of funny-looking."
All the way back to the Flats neither of them spoke at all: Philip, because there was a black anger and rebellion burning in him, and Naomi, because if she had tried to speak, she would have wept. She felt as though she were dead, as if in a world made up of Philip and his father and Emma she no longer had any existence. She was only a burden who annoyed them all. And the dress . . . it was only sort of "funny-looking."
He left Naomi at the door of the flat with an abrupt "good-night." It was after midnight, and the moon was rising behind the hill crowned by Shane's Castle, throwing a blue light on the mist that hung above the Flats. In the far distance the mist was all rosy with the light from four new furnaces that had begun once more to work. The strike was slipping slowly into defeat, and he understood that it meant nothing to him any longer. He had almost forgotten Krylenko.
As he passed through the rusted gates of the park, there drifted toward him from among the trunks of the dead trees, a faint, pungent odor that was hauntingly familiar and, as he climbed the drive between the dead trees, it grew stronger and stronger, until at last he recognized, in a sudden flash of memory which brought back all the hot panorama of the lake and the forest at Megambo, that it was the smell of gunpowder, the smell that clung to his rifle when he had stood there by the barricade beside Lady Millicent killing those poor niggers. It was a faint, ghostly smell that sometimes died away altogether and sometimes came in strong waves on a warm breeze filled with the dampness of the melting snow.
At the top of the hill, the big house lay dead and blind, without a sign of life, and, as he turned the corner, he saw that near the stable lay the remnants of a fire which had burnt to a heap of embers. His foot touched something that was wet and slippery. He looked down to discover a great stain of black on the snow. For a moment he stared at the stain, fascinated, and suddenly he knew what it was. It was a great stain of blood.
In the distance, among the trees, he discerned a light, and after a moment he discovered a little group of men . . . three or four . . . carrying a lantern, which they held high from time to time, as if searching for something. And then, all at once, as he moved forward again, he almost stepped upon a woman who lay in the snow at the entrance to the rotting arbor covered with the vines of the dying wistaria. She lay face down with one arm above her head in a posture that filled him for a moment with a sense of having lived through this same experience before, of having seen this same woman lying face down . . . dead . . . for she was unmistakably dead. He knelt beside her, and, turning the body on its side, he remembered suddenly. She lay like the black virgin they had found dead across the path in the tall grass at Megambo . . . the one they had left to the leopards.
Trembling, he peered at the white face in the moonlight. The woman was young, and across one side of the face there was a little trickle of blood that came from a hole in the temple. She was dressed in rags, and her feet were wrapped in rolls of sacking. She was the wife or daughter of some striker. It occurred to him suddenly that there was something pitifully lonely in the sight of the body left there, forgotten, by the embers in the dead park; it had the strangest effect upon him. He rose and tried to call to the little group of searchers, but no sound came from his throat, and he began suddenly to cry. Leaning against one of the pillars of the arbor, he waited until his body had ceased to tremble. It was a strange, confused feeling, as if the whole spectacle of humanity were suddenly revealed in all its pathos, its meanness, its grandeur, and its cruelty. It was a brilliant flash of understanding, but it passed almost at once, leaving him weak and sick. And then, after a moment, he found his voice again, and shouted. The little party halted, and looked about, and he shouted a second time. Then they came toward him, and he saw that two of them carried shotguns and that one of them was McTavish.
The woman was dead. They picked her up and laid her carefully on one of the blackened marble benches of the garden, and McTavish told him what had happened. In the Town they had forbidden the strikers to hold meetings, hoping thus to break the strike, but the Shanes, Irene and Lily (for the old woman was dead), had sent word to Krylenko that they might meet in the dead park. And so the remnant of those who had held out in the face of cold and starvation had come here to listen to Krylenko harangue them from a barrel by the light of a great fire before the stables. There had been shouting and disorder, and then some one inside the Mill barrier—one of the hooligans (they hadn't yet discovered who did it) turned a machine-gun on the mob around the fire. It had only lasted an instant—the sharp, vicious, staccato sound, but it had taken its toll.
"It's a dirty business," concluded McTavish in disgust. He wasn't jolly to-night. All the old, cynical good-humor had gone out of him, as if he, too, had seen what Philip saw in that sudden flash as he leaned against the decaying arbor.
They took a shutter from the windows of the stable and, placing the body of the girl upon it, set off down the hill between the dead walls of the pine-trees. For a long time Philip stood in the soiled, trampled snow, looking after them, until a turn in the drive hid the lantern from view behind the pine-trees.