The Green Bay Tree (Bromfield, Frederick A. Stokes Company, printing 11)/Chapter 37
IT became known as the Great Strike and it served to mark an epoch. Long afterward people in the Town said, "It was the year of the Great Strike" as they said, "It was the year of the Spanish-American War" or "the year that Bryan was a candidate for the first time." Willie Harrison found a use for his enclosures of barbed wire and his heavily barricaded gates. As the strike progressed and the violence increased, other machines of warfare were set up . . . such things as machine guns and searchlights which at night fingered the Flats and the sky above with shafts of white light, rigid and unbending as steel.
In one sense the strike was a Godsend. When the Mills shut down there were no more fires in the ovens and the furnaces; no more soot fell in clouds like infernal snow over the low eminence of Cypress Hill and the squalid expanse of the Flats. For the first time in a score of years the sun became clearly visible. Instead of rising and setting as a ball of hot copper immersed in smoke, it appeared and disappeared quite clear and white, a sun such as God intended it to be. But even more remarkable was the blanket of silence which descended upon all the district. With the banking of the fires, there was no more hammering, and in place of the titanic clamor there was a stillness so profound and so unusual that people noticed it as people notice a sudden clap of loud thunder and remark upon it to each other. The silence became noisy.
In the house at Cypress Hill the world of Julia Shane narrowed from the castle itself to a single room and at last to the vast Italian bed. It was seldom that she gathered sufficient strength to struggle to her feet and make her way, leaning on the ebony and silver stick, to the window where the Mill yards and the Flats lay spread out beneath her gaze. During those last months she knew again the stillness which enveloped the Cypress Hill of her youth. But there was a difference; the green marshes were gone forever, buried beneath the masses of cinders, clay and refuse upon which the Mills raised their sheds and towers and the Flats its flimsy, dirty, matchwood houses, all smoke stained and rotting at the eaves. The lush smell of damp growing things was replaced by the faint odor of crowded, sweating humanity. Not one slim cat-tail, not one feathery willow remained in all the desert of industry. There was, however, a sound which had echoed over the swamps almost a hundred years earlier, a sound which had not been heard since the days when Julia Shane's grandfather built about what was now the public square of the Town a stockade to protect the first settlers from the redskins. It was the sound of guns. Sometimes as she sat at the window, there arose a distant rat-tat-tat like the noise of a typewriter but more staccato and savage, followed by a single crack or two. She discovered at length the origin of the sound. In the Mill yard beneath her window a target had been raised, and at a little distance off men lay on their stomachs pointing rifles mounted upon tripods. Sometimes they fired at rusty buckets and old tin cans because these things did not remain stupid and inanimate like the target, but jumped and whirled about in the most tortured fashion when the bullets struck them, as though they had lives which might be destroyed. It made the game infinitely more fascinating and spirited. The men who indulged in this practise were, she learned from Hennery, the hired guards whom the Harrisons and Judge Weissman had brought in to protect the Mills, riff-raff and off-scourings from the slums of New York, Chicago, Pittsburgh and Cleveland.
There came a day, after the sights and sounds of the Mill yard had become a matter of indifference to the old woman, when the doctor forbade her to leave her bed if she wished to survive the day set for Lily's arrival. It was October, and the park remained unchanged save that the atmosphere was less hot and the sun shone more clearly; for the trees and shrubs on the low hill were long since dead and far beyond the stage of sending out new leaves to fall at the approach of winter. It was bald now and very old. The brick house, dominating all the horizon, stood out day after day gaunt and blackened by soot against the brilliant October sky.
Lily had been delayed. Before leaving Paris she wrote to her mother and Irene that it was necessary for her to take a small boy, the son of a friend, to England. After placing him in school there, she wrote, she would sail at once for America and come straight to Cypress Hill. There were also matters of business which might delay her; but she would not arrive later than the middle of November. So Julia Shane set herself to battling with Death, bent upon beating Him off until she had seen Lily once more.