A Good Woman (Bromfield)/Part 3/Chapter 19
When Hennery had gone off muttering to himself, Philip put on his coat and went out, for the room had become suddenly unendurable to him. He did not know why, but all at once he hated it, this room where he had been happy for the first time since he was a child. It turned suddenly cold and desolate and hauntingly empty. Running down the stairs, he hurried across the soiled snow, avoiding the dark stain by the decaying arbor. He went by that same instinct which always drove him when he was unhappy towards the furnaces and the engines, and at Hennessey's corner he turned toward the district where the tents stood. They presented an odd, bedraggled appearance now, still housing the remnant of workers who had fought to the end, all that little army which had met the night before in the park of Shane's Castle. Here and there a deserted tent had collapsed in the dirty snow. Piles of rubbish and filth cluttered the muddy field on every side. Men, women and children stood in little groups, frightened and helpless and bedraggled, all the spirit gone out of them. There was no more work for them now. Wherever they went, no mill would take them in. They had no homes, no money, no food. . . .
Lost among them, he came presently to feel less lonely, for it was here that he belonged—in this army of outcasts—a sort of pariah in the world that should have been his own.
At the door of one of the tents, he recognized Sokoleff. The Ukranian had let his beard grow and he held a child of two in his arms—a child with great hollow eyes and blue lips. Sokoleff, who was always drunk and laughing, was sober now, with a look of misery in his eyes. Philip shook his free hand in silence, and then said, "You heard about Krylenko?"
"No, I ain't heard nothin'. I've been waitin' for him. I gotta tell him a piece of bad news."
"He's gone away."
"Where's he gone?"
Philip told him, and, after a silence, Sokoleff said, "I suppose he had to beat it. I suppose he had to . . . but what are we gonna do . . . the ones that's left. He's the only one with a brain. The rest of us ain't good for nothin'. We ain't even got money to get drunk on."
"He won't forget you."
"Oh, it's all right for him. He ain't got nobody . . . no children or a wife. He ain't even got a girl . . . now."
For a moment the single word "now," added carelessly after a pause, meant nothing to Philip, and then suddenly a terrible suspicion took possession of him. He looked at Sokoleff. "What d'you mean . . . now?"
"Ain't you heard it?"
"What?"
"It was his girl, Giulia . . . that was killed last night."
Philip felt sick. In a low voice he asked, "And he didn't know it?"
"I was to tell him, but nobody's seen him. I'm damned glad he's went away now. I won't have the goddamned dirty job. He'll be crazy . . . crazy as hell."
And then Philip saw her again as he had seen her the night before, lying face down in the snow . . . Krylenko's Giulia.
"She oughtn't to have went up there," Sokoleff was saying. "But she was nuts on him . . . she thought that he was the best guy on earth, and she wanted to hear his speech. . . ." The bearded Slovak spat into the snow. "I guess that was the last thing she ever heard. She musta died happy. . . . That's better than livin' like this."
And Krylenko had been hiding in Shane's Castle all night while Giulia lay dead in the snow outside.
The sick baby began to cry, and Sokoleff stroked its bare head with a calloused paw covered by black hair.
All at once Philip was happy again; even in the midst of all the misery about him, he was gloriously, selfishly happy, because he knew that, whatever happened, he had known what Krylenko had lost now forever. He thought suddenly, "The jungle at Megambo was less cruel and savage than this world about me."