A Good Woman (Bromfield)/Part 3/Chapter 5
In the morning Philip awakened to find Krylenko already gone. It was still snowing as he went out into the empty street and made his way toward the shed where there was always hot coffee for the strikers and their families. He stood there among them, drinking his coffee and feeling the old sense of satisfaction of being in a world stripped bare to those things which lay at the foundations of life. This was solid, with a rawness that bit into the soul. He took out a pencil and on a bit of newspaper began to sketch fragments of the scene about him—a Croat woman who was feeding coffee to her three small children out of a clumsy teacup, a gigantic, bearded Slovak and his wizened, tubercular wife, a baby wrapped in the ragged remains of a pair of overalls, a thin, white, shivering girl, with the face of a Madonna. They were simply sketches, reduced to the very skeletons of drawing, yet they were in a way eloquent and moving. He felt intoxicatingly sure of his hand, and he saw all at once that they were the best things he had ever done. Set down on the face of columns of printing, they caught the cold misery and the dumb bravery of these puzzled, wretched people, suffering silently in the midst of a hostile, foreign country. Looking at the sketches, he saw that by some ironic chance he had chosen to draw directly upon an editorial condemning them. He began to read. The fragment was torn, and so had no beginning. ". . . sacred rights of property must be protected against the attacks of men little better than brutes who have come, infected with poison of socialism and anarchy, to undermine the institutions of a great, free and glorious nation favored by God. These wretches must be treated as they deserve, without consideration, as beasts bent upon tearing down our most sacred institutions and destroying our God-given prosperity."
It was signed in bold black type with the name Moses Slade. He was quite safe in his attack, thought Philip: foreign-born mill workers had no votes.
A hand touched Philip's shoulder and a voice said, "Give me that." It was Krylenko. "I can use it," he said. "I know just where it belongs."
He gave it to Krylenko without a word.
From the steaming coffee-shed he made his way through a street filled with people and bordered with pitiful little heaps of shabby household goods like that which he had seen from Krylenko's window the night before. He passed Hennessey's place and, crossing the railroad tracks, came within the area of the Mills. It was silent here. Even the trolleys had ceased to run since one car had had its windows shattered. Beyond this he came to the great iron fence that shut in the park of Shane's Castle. At the gates he turned in, following the drive that ran between rows of dead and dying Norway spruce up to the house that crowned the hill. It was silent in the park and the falling snow half veiled the distant gables and odd Gothic windows of the big house. Among the dead trees it occurred to him that there was a peace here which did not exist elsewhere in the whole Town. It was an enchanted place where a battered old woman, whom he had seen but once or twice, lay dying.
Following the drive, he passed the wrought-iron portico and the little cast-iron Eros who held a ring in his outstretched hand and served as a hitching-post. The towering cedars that gave the place a name—Cypress Hill—which all the world had long ago forgotten, loomed black and melancholy against the sky. And, turning the corner, he came suddenly within sight of the stables.
Before the door an old negro swept away the falling snow with a worn and stubby broom. He did not hear the approach of Philip, for he was deaf and the snow muffled the sound of footsteps. It was only when Philip said "Good-morning" that he turned his head and, grinning, said, "You must be Mr. Downes."
"Yes."
"The room's all ready for you."
The old man, muttering to himself, led the way. At the top of the stairs, he said, "If I'd knowed you was a-comin' I'd a-had a fire."
The place was all swept and in order and in one corner stood all the things which Mary Conyngham had carried there from Krylenko's room. The sight of them touched him with emotion, as if something of Mary herself clung to them. He wanted to see her more than he wanted anything in the world. He stood looking out of the window while the old nigger waited, watching him. He was sure that in some way she could wipe out the sickening memory of that awful scene. The window gave out over the Mills, which lay spread out, cold and desolate and silent, save for the distant K section, where smoke had begun to drift from the chimneys. He would paint the scene from this window, in all its dreary bleakness—in grays and whites and cold blues, with the faintest tinge of pink. It was like a hell in which the fires had suddenly burned to cold ashes. No, he must see Mary. He had to see her. He couldn't go on like this. It wasn't possible for any human creature to be thirsty for so long—thirsty for peace and honesty and understanding.
He began to see himself in the mawkish light of one who suffered and was put upon, and what had been impossible before began in the light of self-pity to seem possible.
He had (he knew) to go back to the slate-colored house. Turning, he said to the old nigger, "I'm coming back," and then halting, he asked, "How's Mrs. Shane?"
"She ain't no better, sir. She's dying, and nothin' kin save her." Suddenly the black face lighted up. "But Miss Lily's come back. She came back last night."
"Yes?"
"You don't know Miss Lily, mebbe."
"No. . . . I've seen her years ago riding through the Town."
"Then you don't know what she's like. . . . The old Missie can die now that Miss Lily's come home. She jus' couldn't die without seein' Miss Lily."
Philip scarcely heard him. He was thinking about his own troubles, and Lily Shane was a creature who belonged to another world whose borders would never touch his own. Even as a boy, looking after her as she rode in the mulberry victoria up Park Avenue, it never occurred to him that he would ever come nearer to her. There was something magnificent about her that set her apart from all the others in the Town. And there was always the wicked glamour that enveloped one who, it was whispered, had had a child out of wedlock and then declined to marry its father.
How could Lily Shane ever touch the world of Uncle Elmer and Naomi and Emma and Mabelle? No, she did not exist for him. She was like one of the actresses he had followed furtively along Main Street as a boy, because a mysterious, worldly glamour clung to those ladies who appeared in town one night and disappeared the next into the great world. No creature could have been more remote than these coryphées from the slate-colored house and the prayer-meetings of the Reverend Castor.