A Good Woman (Bromfield)/Part 3/Chapter 4
Outside, the world of the Flats lay spread out before him no longer alive with flame and clamor, but still now and cold and dead beneath the softly falling snow. There was no glow of fire; no wheel turned. Only the locomotives shrieked and puffed backward and forward over the shining rails. The streets were alive with people: they stood in little groups in the snow. On the bridge a little knot of them surrounded a speaker unknown to him, who harangued them in three tongues, urging them not to lose faith. At Hennessey's corner the lights cast a glow over the fallen snow—it was really white now that there was no longer any soot—and the tinny piano sent forth its showers of brassy notes into air that was no longer filled with the pounding of gigantic hammers. And the saloon was filled to the doors. Now and then a drunken Pole or Croat fell through the doors into the street. He saw what McTavish meant. They weren't strong enough yet. They were so weak that Hennessey alone could defeat them: his banging cash register could swallow up their strength. He was a better friend of the Mill owners than all the men brought in to break the strike.
As he followed the path that lay among the garbage heaps by the side of the oily brook, it occurred to him that it was odd how strong he felt on this first sally from the house. He was strong, and suddenly so content that he forgot even the scene from which he had fled, running like a madman. It was as if he gained strength from treading the very soil of the Flats, as if it came to him from the contact of all these human creatures battling for existence. And among them he was lost, alone as he had been on those rare happy hours at Megambo when he had gone off into the jungle at the peril of his life. The snow fell all about him, silently, into the oil-muffled brook.
Crossing a vacant lot where the rubbish lay hidden beneath a carpet of snow, he came at last to the familiar doorway which he had not seen since the night six months before when he stood hidden in its shadow listening to the voice of Mary Conyngham. Feeling his way along the dark passageway, smelling of coalgas and cabbage, he came at last to Krylenko's door. He knocked and the familiar voice called out something in Russian.
Pushing open the door, he saw Krylenko sitting on the edge of his iron bed with his head in his hands. There was no light in the room, but only the reflection of a rubbish fire some one had built in the yard outside the house. For a moment Philip stood leaning against the door, and when Krylenko did not raise his head, he said, "It's me . . . Philip Downes."
When he saw Krylenko's face, he knew that the strike was lost. Even in the reflected firelight, he seemed years older. He was thin, with deep lines on either side of his mouth.
"Oh, it's you, Feeleep. . . . I thought it was the old woman."
He rose and put a match to the gas and then peered closely into Philip's face, with the look of a man waking from a deep sleep.
"It's you. . . . Sit down."
Philip knew the room well. It was small and square, with no furniture save a bed, two pine chairs and a washstand. Above the bed there was a shelf made by Krylenko himself to hold the dangerous books that Irene Shane and her mother had given him . . . John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx and a single volume of Nietzsche.
"And how do you feel . . . huh?" asked Krylenko, seating himself once more on the bed.
"All right. Look at me."
"Kind-a skinny."
"You, too."
"Yeah! Look at me!" Krylenko said bitterly. "Look at me. . . . A bum! A failure! No job! Nothing."
"It's not as bad as that."
"It will be." He looked up. "Did yuh pass Hennessey's place?"
"Yes."
"Well, you see what it is . . . trying to make a lot of pigs fight. All they want is to quit work and get drunk. That's all it means to them."
"It's not over yet."
"It will be . . . I'm gonna fight it to the end. They're startin' to operate the B chain to-night . . . a lot of niggers from the South that ain't organized." He got up and went over to the window, standing with his back to Philip. "We can make trouble for another month or two and then I'm finished, and me . . . I'm out of a job for good . . . down . . . on the blacklist. You know what that means."
It was an eloquent back, big, brawny and squared with defiance, despite all the tone of despair in his voice. The rumpled, yellow hair fairly bristled with vitality and battle. Philip thought, "He's not done yet. He's going on. He's got something to believe in . . . to fight for. For him it's only begun. He's got a giant to fight . . . and I'm fighting only two women."
Suddenly Krylenko turned. "Look," he said. "Look," pointing out of the window. "That's what they're up to now. They've bought up all the loose houses and they're turning the strikers out in the snow . . . on a night like this, God damn 'em. Look!"
Philip looked. Across the street in the falling snow lay a pitiful heap of odds and ends of some Slovak household . . . pots, kettles, battered chairs, blankets, a mattress or two. A woman and four small children, none of them more than six, stood drearily watching.
"And it's a hell of a thing to do. . . . A free country, hell! It belongs to a lot of crooked rich men." Suddenly, he thrust his big fist through the pane of glass and the tinkling fragments fell into the snow in the yard. "We're finished this time . . . but we've only begun!" He laughed. "The windows don't matter. They bought this house, too. A lot of niggers are movin' in to-morrow."
The blood was running from his cut knuckles and he bound them round silently with a red cotton handkerchief. Presently, he said, "You're looking for your paints and pictures. . . . They ain't here. . . . Mrs. Conyngham took 'em away."
"Mrs. Conyngham!"
"Yeah. . . . She came and got 'em herself. She's fixed up a place for you up at Shane's Castle . . . in the stable. I was to tell you and I forgot. She did it when she heard about the Mills buyin' up this row of houses. It's in the stable and you're to go up there whenever you want. There's a stove and everything."
He spoke in agitation, as though the paints, the pictures, were nothing compared to his own troubles. A little thing, of no use! Suddenly he turned, "And you, what are you goin' to do?"
"When?"
"Now you're finished, too. They've done with you, too. You're one of 'em. Don't forget that."
Yes, that was a thing he hadn't thought of. There must be people in the Town who hated him the way they hated the Shanes, and perhaps Mary Conyngham . . . as renegades, traitors. And while he waited there in the squalid room, watching Krylenko sitting with his head buried in his hands, there came to him for the first time a curious, intoxicating sense of satisfaction in being one of that odd little band—Krylenko, the saintly Irene, the dying old woman in Shane's Castle, and Mary Conyngham. The wind had begun to rise, and with it little gusts of snow swirled in through the broken window. He thought suddenly, "We are the leaven in the lump." He was not quite certain what he meant by that; he only knew that the lump was concerned vaguely with that mass of materialism and religion which made the character of the Town . . . a religion tamed and shopworn and subdued to commercial needs, a faith worn down to the level of convenience. Groping, it seemed to him that he was beginning to emerge at last, to be born as a soul, an individual.
"I mean to paint," he said suddenly.
"That won't feed you . . . and your children."
"No . . . I'll manage somehow." Nothing seemed impossible . . . nothing in the world . . . if he could only shake himself free. He thought, without any reason, "Krylenko is no more one of the mill workers than I am. If he were really one of them, he would be drunk now in Hennessey's place. There is something which sets him apart. . . . He isn't one of them either. He's as unhappy as I am."
Looking up, he asked suddenly, "And what about Giulia? Are you going to marry her?"
Without raising his hand, Krylenko answered, "No that's finished now. If we'd won, it would have been all right. But now . . . it's no good . . . I'll be nothing but a tramp and bum."
He spoke in a strange, dead voice, as if he were saying, "It's a snowy night," as if something had died in him.
"No . . ." he repeated. "That's all finished. But you . . . you've got everything before you . . . and that girl . . . Mrs. Conyngham. . . ." He looked up suddenly, "She has faith in you . . . that's something." He looked at the great, nickeled watch he carried. "I've gotta go now. I've got to see about putting up tents for all of 'em who've been thrown out of their houses. It's a hell of a night to live in a tent." Rising, he took up his black felt hat. "What are you going to do?"
Philip wakened suddenly out of a haze of thought. "Me! I want to stay here to-night."
"Here in this room?"
"Yes."
"All right. . . Turn in there." He pointed to the rickety iron bed. "I'll be out most of the night, gettin' coal and blankets. See you later."
When he had gone, Philip felt suddenly ill again, and hopelessly weary. He lay down on the bed wrapped in Jim Baxter's overcoat, and in a moment fell asleep.
At two, when Krylenko finally returned, there was a little drift of snow by the broken window. Going over to the bed, he stood for a time looking down at Philip, and then, with a great gentleness, he lifted him, and, drawing out the blanket, laid it over him, carefully tucking in the edge to keep out the cold. When he had finished, he lay down, keeping well over to the edge in order not to disturb Philip. It was all done with the tenderness of a strong man fostering the weak, of a great, clumsy father protecting a little boy.