The Green Bay Tree (Bromfield, Frederick A. Stokes Company, printing 11)/Chapter 41
AS Julia Shane grew weaker, it was Cousin Hattie Tolliver who "took hold" of the establishment at Shane's Castle. It was always Mrs. Tolliver, capable and housewifely, who "took hold" in a family crisis. She managed funerals, weddings and christenings. Cousins came to die at her shabby house in the Town. She gathered into her large strong hands the threads of life and death that stretched themselves through a family scattered from Paris to Australia. Her relatives embroiled themselves in scrapes, they grew ill, they lost or made fortunes, they succumbed to all the weaknesses to which the human flesh is prone; and always, at the definitive moment, they turned to Hattie Tolliver as to a house built upon a rock.
Irene, so capable in succoring the miserable inhabitants of the Flats, grew helpless when death peered in at the tall windows of Shane's Castle. Besides, she had her own work to do. As the strike progressed she came to spend days and nights in the squalid houses of Halsted street, returning at midnight to inquire after her mother. She knew nothing of managing a house and Hattie Tolliver knew these things intimately. More than that, Mrs. Tolliver enjoyed "taking hold"; and she extracted, beyond all doubt, a certain faintly malicious satisfaction in taking over the duties which should have fallen upon Irene, while Irene spent her strength, her very life, in helping people unrelated to her, people who were not even Americans.
So it was Hattie Tolliver, wearing a spotless apron and bearing a dustcloth, who opened the door when Hennery, returning from his solitary and heroic venture outside the gates, drove Lily up from the dirty red brick station, bringing this time no great trunks covered with gay labels of Firenze and Sorrento but a pair of black handbags and a small trunk neatly strapped. It may have been that Hennery, as Irene hinted bitterly, made that perilous journey through the riots of Halsted street only because it was Mis' Lily who was returning. Certainly no other cause had induced him to venture outside the barren park.
The encounter, for Hattie Tolliver, was no ordinary one. From her manner it was clear that she was opening the door to a woman . . . her own cousin . . . who had lived in sin, who had borne a child out of wedlock. Indeed the woman might still be living in sin. Paris was a Babylon where it was impossible to know any one's manner of living. Like all the others, Mrs. Tolliver had lived all her life secure in the belief that she knew Lily. She remembered the day of her cousin's birth . . a snowy blustering day. She knew Lily throughout her childhood. She knew her as a woman. "Lily," she undoubtedly told herself, "was thus and so. If any one knows Lily, I know her." And then all this knowledge had been upset suddenly by a single word from Lily's mother. It was necessary to create a whole new pattern. The woman who stood on the other side of the door was not Lily at all—at least not the old Lily—but a new woman, a stranger, whom she did not know. There might be, after all, something in what Aunt Julia said about never really knowing any one.
All this her manner declared unmistakably during the few strained seconds that she stood in the doorway facing her cousin. For an instant, while the two women, the worldly and the provincial, faced each other, the making of family history hung in the balance. It was Mrs. Tolliver who decided the issue. Suddenly she took her beautiful cousin into her arms, encircling her in an embrace so warm and so filled with defiance of all the world that Lily's black hat, trimmed with camelias, was knocked awry.
"Your poor mother!" were Cousin Hattie's first words. "She is very low indeed. She has been asking for you."
And so Lily won another victory in her long line of conquests, a victory which she must have known was a real triumph in which to take a profound pride.
Then while Lily took off her hat and set her fine hair in order, her cousin poured out the news of the last few days. It was news of a sort that warmed the heart of Mrs. Tolliver . . . news of Julia Shane's illness delivered gravely with a vast embroidery of detail, a long account of the mulatto woman's insolence and derelictions which increased as the old woman grew weaker; and, last of all, an eloquent and denunciatory account of Irene's behavior.
"She behaves," said Mrs. Tolliver, "as though a daughter had no obligations toward her own mother." Her face grew scarlet with indignation at this flouting of family ties. "She spends all her time in the Flats among those foreigners and never sees her own mother more than a minute or two a day. There she lies, a sick and dying woman, grieving because her daughter neglects her. You'd think Irene loved the strikers more . . . especially one young fellow who is the leader," she added darkly.
Lily, knowing her mother, must have guessed that Cousin Hattie's account suffered from a certain emotional exaggeration. The picture of old Julia Shane, grieving because her daughter neglected her, was not a convincing one. The old woman was too self reliant for that sort of behavior. She expected too little from the world.
But Lily said nothing. She unstrapped her bag and brought out a fresh handkerchief and a bottle of scent. Then she raised her lovely head and looked sharply at her cousin. "I suppose it's this same Krylenko," she said. "D'you think she's in love with him?"
"No," replied Mrs. Tolliver shrewdly, "I don't think she loves anybody or anything but her own soul. She's like a machine. She has an idea she loves the strikers but that's only because she thinks she's saving her soul by good works. I suppose it makes her happy. Only yesterday I told her, thinking it would be a hint, that charity begins at home." For a moment Mrs. Tolliver waited thoughtfully, and then she added, "You know, sometimes Irene looks at her mother as if she wanted her to make haste with her dying. I've noticed the look—more than once."
And so they talked for a time, as people always talked of Irene, as if she were a stranger, a curiosity, something which stood outside the realm of human understanding. And out of the ruin of Irene's character, Hattie Tolliver rose phoenix-like, triumphant, as the heroine who had seen Irene's duty and taken it upon herself.
"You know, I'm nursing your mother," she continued. "She wouldn't have a nurse because she couldn't bear to have a stranger in the house. She has that one idea now . . . seeing no one but the doctor and her own family. Now that you've come, I suppose she won't even see the doctor any more. She's asleep now, so I came down-stairs to put the house into some sort of order. Heaven knows what it would have been like if the drawing-room had been open too. That mulatto woman," she added bitterly, "hasn't touched a thing in weeks."
Silently, thoughtfully, Lily pushed open the double doors inte the drawing-room.
"It's not been opened since you left," continued Mrs. Tolliver. "Not even for the Christmas party. But that wasn't necessary because there aren't many of us left. You could put all of us into the library. There's only Eva Barr and Charles and me. The old ones are all dead and the young ones have gone away." For a moment she paused, for Lily appeared not to be listening. Then she added softly, "But I guess you know all that. I'd forgotten Ellen was living with you."
For the time being, the conversation ended while the two women, Lily in her smart suit from the Rue de la Paix and Hattie Tolliver in shiny black alpaca with apron and dustcloth, stood in the doorway reverently surveying the vast old room, so dead now and so full of memories. The rosewood chairs, shrouded like ghosts, appeared dimly in the light that filtered through the curtained windows. In the far end, before the long mirror, the piano with its shapeless covering resembled some crouching, prehistoric animal. Above the mantelpiece, the flaming Venice of Mr. Turner glowed vaguely beneath layers of dust. Cobwebs hung from the crystal chandeliers and festooned the wall sconces; and beneath the piano the Aubusson carpet, rolled into a long coil, waited like a python. The room was the mute symbol of something departed from the Town.
Silently the two women regarded the spectacle and when Lily at length turned away, her dark eyes were shining with tears. She was inexpressibly lovely, all softened now by the melancholy sight.
"I suppose it will never be opened again," observed Mrs. Tolliver in a solemn voice. "But I mean to clean it thoroughly the first time I have an opportunity. Just look at the dust." And with her competent finger she traced her initials on the top of a lacquer table.
For a moment Lily made no reply. At last she said, "No. I suppose it is closed for good."
"You wouldn't come back here to live?" probed her cousin with an air of hopefulness.
"No. Why should I?" And a second later Lily added, "But how quiet it is. You can almost hear the stillness."
Mrs. Tolliver closed the door, seizing at the same time the opportunity to polish the knobs on the hallway side. "Yes, it's . . . a relief not to hear the Mills. But there are other noises now . . . riots and machine guns, and at night there are searchlights. Only last night the police clubbed an old woman to death at the foot of the drive. She was a Polish woman . . . hadn't been harming any one. I wonder you didn't see the blood. It's smeared on the gates. Irene can tell you all about it." For a moment she polished thoughtfully; then she straightened her vigorous body and said, "But I got back at them. I gave one of the hired policeman a poke he won't soon forget. It's a crime the way they behave. . . . It's murder. No decent community would allow it." And she told Lily the story of the rescue at the corner saloon.
As Lily made her way up the long stairway, Mrs. Tolliver paused in her work to watch the ascending figure until it reached the top. Her large honest face was alive with interest, her eyes shining as if she now really saw Lily for the first time, as if the old Lily had been simply an illusion. The beautiful stranger climbed the stairs languidly, the long, lovely lines of her body showing through the trim black suit. Her red hair glowed in the dim light of the hallway. She was incredibly young and happy, so unbelievably fresh and lovely that Mrs. Tolliver, after Lily had disappeared at the turn of the stair, moved away shaking her head and making the clucking sound which primitive women use to indicate a disturbance of their suspicions.
And when she returned to dusting the library under the handsome, malignant face of John Shane she worked in silence, abandoning her usual habit of humming snatches of old ballads. After the Ball Was Over and The Baggage Coach Ahead were forgotten. Presently, when she had finished polishing the little ornaments of jade and crystal, she fell to regarding the portrait with a profound interest. She stood thus, with her arms akimbo, for many minutes regarding the man in the picture as if he too had become a stranger to her. She discovered, it appeared, something more than a temperamental and clever old reprobate who had been indulgent toward her. Her manner was that of a person who stands before a suddenly opened door in the presence of magnificent and incomprehensible wonders.
Lily found her there when she came down-stairs.
"You know," observed Mrs. Tolliver, "I must be getting old. I have such funny thoughts lately . . . the kind of thoughts a normal healthy woman doesn't have."