PART THREE THE STABLE

1

At the back of the great Shane house there clustered a little group of buildings arranged in plantation style. There were a laundry, a kennel, an office and a stable with a double row of box-stalls. The whole was overgrown with dying vines and was connected with the big white-trimmed brick house by a sort of gallery, roofed but open on the sides. The buildings were empty now, since the old woman had taken to her canopied bed, save for the pair of fat old horses who never went out any more and now stood fat and sleek, groomed carefully each day by the old negro who acted as groom and general factotum. One daughter had given up her life to the poor and the other to the great world and no one cared any longer if the hinges rusted on the stable doors and the great wrought-iron gates sagged at the entrance to the park. Ghosts haunted the place—the ghost of the wicked old John Shane who had built the Castle, the ghosts of all the great who had stayed at the Castle in the glamorous days before the coming of the black Mills. Old Julia Shane lay dying, aloof, proud, rich and scornful. Nobody cared....

When the strike came the whole park fell into a state of siege, walled in on the one side by the Mills and on the other by the filthy houses of the steelworkers. The warfare raged just outside its borders. Sometimes in the night a shot sounded in the darkness. But neither side invaded the territory: it remained in some mysterious way neutral and sacred, as if the lingering spirit of the old woman who lay dying in the smoke-blackened house held the world at bay. The doctor came twice daily, making his way bravely through the black district of the strike; once each day, the old nigger Hennery went timorously across the Halstead Street bridge to fetch food. Irene Shane and sometimes Hattie Tolliver, a cousin who came to “take hold,” went in and out. Otherwise the place lay deserted and in solitude, waiting.

Early in December, when the first blackened snow lay among the dead trees of the park, Irene Shane and Mary Conyngham visited the stables. It was the first time Irene had gone there since she was a young girl and kept a pony called Istar. To Mary Conyngham it was a strange place never before visited. They were accompanied by the old nigger Hennery.

Above the stalls of the fat horses there was a room once occupied by a coachman, which now lay empty save for a table, two or three chairs, an iron stove and a bed. At each end of the room there was a big window partly covered by the vines that overran the whole building. It was here that the two women and the old negro came.

Irene, dressed in her shabby gray clothes, opened the door of the harness-closet, looked inside, and then regarded the room with a sweeping glance. “This ought to serve, very well,” she said.

Mary was pleased. “It’s perfect, I should think.”

“Put those newspapers in the stove, Hennery, and light them,” said Irene. “He can’t work here unless there’s some means of heat.”

The papers went up in a burst of flame. The stove worked perfectly.

The two women looked at each other. “Will you tell him, then?” asked Mary.

“Yes ... Krylenko will tell him. I don’t know him at all.”

Suddenly Mary kissed the older woman on the cheek. It was an odd, grotesque gesture, which failed of all response. It was like kissing a piece of marble to kiss a woman like Irene Shane.

“Thank you, Irene,” she said.

Irene ignored the speech, and turned to the old negro. “Clean the room out, Hennery. There’s a Mr. Downes coming here to paint now and then.”

“What? Pitchers?” asked Hennery.

“Yes, pictures. He’s to come and go as he likes. You needn’t worry about him.”

They left him raising clouds of dust with a worn stable-broom. It did not strike him that there was anything extraordinary in the arrangement. He had come to Shane’s Castle a buck nigger of eighteen, when John Shane was a bachelor. He was sixty-five now. Anything, he knew, might happen at Shane’s Castle. Life there possessed a sort of subterranean excitement.

As he swept he kept thinking that Miss Lily was already on her way home from Paris, coming to see her Mammy die. She hadn’t been home in seven years. When Miss Lily came home, everything was changed. All the excitement seemed to rise above the surface, and all life changed and became a tingling, splendiferous affair. Even the presence of death in the Castle couldn’t dampen the effect of Miss Lily.

2

With that first fall of snow the fever began to lose a little its hold upon the twice-stricken community. As it waned the new terror came to take its place—a terror that, like the fever, rose out of the black of the Flats.

Bristling barriers of ugly barbed-wire sprang up overnight and for days each train brought in criminals shipped from the slums of a dozen cities to protect the sheds and furnaces. In the beginning it was neither the strikers, nor the men who owned the Mills, but the Town itself which suffered. Business in the shops bordering the diseased area fell off; but, far worse than that, there began to occur one after another, with terrifying regularity, a whole series of crimes. Houses were broken into, a woman was attacked at twilight in the raw, new park, two fat business men were held up and beaten, and the Farmers’ and Industrial Bank, the institution of the corrupt Judge Weissman, was robbed and then quickly failed under mysterious circumstance. It was the gunmen brought in to make war on the strikers who committed the crimes, but it was the strikers who were accused. Save for Philip and Mary Conyngham, and perhaps McTavish, they had no friends on the Hills. The Shanes could not be counted, since they stood apart in an isolation of their own. A panic-stricken community began to imagine innumerable horrors. The newspapers wrote editorials predicting anarchy and dissolution. They talked of the “sacred rights of property” and used clouds of similar high-sounding phrases. Moses Slade, seeing perhaps a chance to harvest new crops of votes by “standing by his community in such a crisis,” returned to head a sort of vigilance committee whose purpose was to fasten all crime upon the strikers.

By this heroic act he soon rose high in the esteem of Emma, so high indeed that it seemed to wipe out all her doubts concerning her marriage. It was an action of which she approved with all her spirit. She herself went about talking of “dirty foreigners” and the need of making laws to exclude them from a nation favored by God, until Moses took her aside and advised her not to talk in such a vein, because the very strength of the Mills depended on new hordes of cheap labor. If they throttled immigration, labor would rule. Didn’t she understand a simple thing like that?

She understood. Moses Slade seemed to her a paragon. “Why,” she told Philip, “he understands all the laws of economics.”

Philip, restless and convalescent, listened to her in silence. He even met the Honorable Moses Slade, who eyed him suspiciously as a cat and asked about his future plans.

“I haven’t any,” said Philip. “I don’t know what I mean to do,” and so put Moses Slade once more upon a bed of pins and needles concerning Emma’s qualifications as a bride.

The omnipresence of the Congressman’s name in Emma’s conversation had begun to alarm Philip. He saw presently that she meant to tell him something, and after a time he came to guess what it was. He saw that she was breaking a way through his prejudices and her own; and in that odd sense of detachment born of the fever he faced the idea with disgust. It was not only that he disliked Mr. Slade; it seemed to him that there was something disgraceful in the idea of his mother marrying again after so many years. It was in a strange way a disloyalty to himself. Moses Slade was a new ally in the forces against him. The idea came to torment him for hours at a time, when he was not pondering what was to be done about Naomi, how he could escape from her without hurting her too deeply.

The two women, Naomi and his mother, hovered over him with the solicitude of two women for a man whom they had snatched from death. In these first days when he came downstairs to sit in the parlor there was always one of them with him. Naomi left him only long enough to nurse the twins. She was, as Mabelle observed, very fortunate, as she was able to feed them both, and there were not many women, Mabelle remarked with a personal pride, who could say the same. And under Mabelle’s guidance Naomi adopted the same methods: the moment the twins set up a wail they were fed into a state of coma. Mabelle had great pride in them, as if she had played in some way a part in their very creation. She was always in the house now, for Emma’s request and Elmer’s commands were of no avail against her instinct for human companionship. With the twins crying and little Jimmy running about, the house seemed overrun with children. And little Jimmy had turned into what Mabelle described as “a whiner.”

“I don’t know what to do about him,” she said. Her method was to cuff him over the head, thus changing the whine instantly into a deafening squall.

Naomi used her own convalescence as an excuse for clinging to the soiled flowered kimono and the green mob-cap.

It was a state of affairs which could not long endure and the climax arose on the afternoon when Emma, returning unexpectedly, found a scene which filled her with horror. In his chair by the window sat Philip, looking white and sick. Behind him on the sofa Naomi in wrapper and mob-cap fed the twins. Little Jimmy sat on the floor pulling photographs out of the album at the back of the family Bible. Draping the backs of the mahogany chairs hung white objects that were unmistakably diapers. Two of the objects were even hung to dry upon the very frame of Jason Downes’ enlarged photograph!

For a moment Emma simply stood in the doorway in a state of paralysis. At the sight of her Naomi sat up defiantly and Mabelle smiled blandly. Philip, wearily, did not even turn to witness the picture. And then, quickly, like a bird of prey, Emma swooped upon the diapers, gathering them up in a neat roll. Then she turned on Naomi.

“It’s the last time I want this to happen in my house.” She seized the family Bible from Jimmy, who began to squall, setting off the twins like matches brought too close to a fire. “I won’t have it looking like a bawdy-house,” she cried. “With you sitting here all day in a wrapper, like a chippy waiting for trade.” Words that she would have denied knowing came to her lips in a stream.

This time Naomi did not weep. She sprang up from the sofa as if to attack Emma. “Take care what you say! Take care what you say! You old hypocrite!”

Emma turned suddenly to Philip. “You hear what she called me!”

And Naomi, like an echo, cried, “You heard what filthy names she called me.”

Mabelle, terrified, rolled her cowlike eyes, and tried to stifle Jimmy’s screams. Philip did not even turn. He felt suddenly sick.

Naomi was saying, “If I hadn’t all the work to do.... If I had the right kind of husband—”

Emma interrupted. “I took care of my child and did all the work as well. I never complained or made excuses.”

“You didn’t have twins.... Sometimes my back fairly breaks. Oh, if I had the right kind of husband, I wouldn’t be in your dreary old house!”

Emma turned again, “Philip ... Philip....”

But Philip was gone. She saw him, hatless and without an overcoat, running through the snow that had begun to come down slowly and softly as a white eiderdown.

3

He only stopped running when he grew so weak that he could no longer make an effort. He had gone, without knowing why, in the direction of the Mills, and presently he found himself, with a savage pain just beneath his heart, sitting on the steps of McTavish’s undertaking parlors. It was almost dark, and the air was cold and still; he felt it creeping about him as the heat went out of his body. He knew that if he caught cold he would die and suddenly he wanted to live, horribly. It was as if that sickening scene had in some way released him from the bondage of the two women. They seemed all at once to belong to another world in which he played no rôle, a world strange and horrible and fantastic. Even the twins did not seem to be his children, but creatures born somehow of the two women and all they stood for in his tired mind. They were two squalling tomato-colored infants in whom he could take no interest—a judgment sent by fate as a punishment for his own weakness and indecision. He grew bitter for the first time and out of the bitterness there was born a new strength.

Sitting there in the softly falling snow, he resolved to go his own way. He couldn’t desert Naomi and his children, but he could tell her that he was through with her once and for all. And he saw suddenly the whole sickening depth of the tangle—that it was her fault no more than his, that she had suffered as much as himself, that perhaps in the end she would suffer more, because (he knew it with a kind of disgust) she loved him with all her soul and body.

Beating his arms against his body, he rose and turned the handle of the door. McTavish was inside, alone, sitting by the stove. At the sound of the handle turning, he looked up and grinned.

“Hello, Philip,” he said, and then quickly, “What the hell are you doing out without a coat or hat?”

Philip grinned, and the very grin hurt his face, as if it had been frozen by the cold. “I came out in a hurry ... I wanted to borrow a coat and hat off you.”

McTavish rose and stretched his great arms, yawning, watching Philip all the while. “Driven out?” he asked at last, with a sharp look.

“Yes,” said Philip quietly. “Driven out.” He knew suddenly that McTavish understood. He remembered all at once what he had said, “I knew your Ma before you were born. You can’t tell me anything about her.”

“Here,” suddenly the undertaker was pouring whisky. “Here, drink this. I’ll get you a coat.”

He disappeared into that portion of the establishment where the dead were kept, and returned in a moment bearing a coat and hat. The curious, pungent odor of the place clung to him.

“Here,” he said. “It’s all I’ve got. You couldn’t wear my clothes. You’d be drowned in them.” He laid the coat and hat on a chair by the stove. “These ought to about fit you. They belonged to Jim Baxter, who got bumped off at the grade-crossing while comin’ home drunk last week. His wife has never come for ’em. I guess he won’t need a coat where he is now.” He sat down and took Philip’s wrist, feeling the flow of blood. “Feel better now? Your heart seems all right.”

“I’ve always been strong as an ox.”

“It ain’t the same after you’ve had a fever.”

They sat in silence for a moment and then McTavish asked, “You don’t mind wearin’ a dead man’s clothes?”

“No,” said Philip. “No.” Anything was better than going back to the slate-colored house.

“When you’re in my business, you get over squeamish feelings like that. Dead men and live ones are all the same, except you know the dead ones are mebbe missing a lot of fun.”

“No ... I don’t mind, Mr. McTavish.” Philip looked up suddenly. “There’s one thing you could do for me. You could send word around to the house that I’m not coming home to-night.”

A grin lighted up the big face. “Sure I will.... I’ll take the word myself.” After a pause, “Where will you go?”

“I don’t know ... somewhere.” He rose and put on Jim Baxter’s coat and hat. “I’m going down to the Flats now.”

“Your friends have been raising hell down there.”

“Yes ... that’s why I want to go down there now.... They’ll think I’m dead.”

“No ... they won’t think that. That Dago friend ... Krylenko ... is that his name? He’s been asking for you, and Mary Watts ... Mary Conyngham she is now, she’s been asking, too ... almost every day.”

He must have seen the sudden light come into Philip’s eye, for he said suddenly, turning to the window, “There’s a good girl ... a brave one, too.”

“Yes,” said Philip.

“She’s the kind of a wife a man ought to have. There aren’t many like her.”

“No.”

There was a long silence and McTavish said, “They can’t win down there ... everything’s against ’em. It’ll be over in two months and a lot of ’em never be able to get work within ten miles of a mill ever again.”

Philip said nothing. He thrust his hands deep into the pockets of Jim Baxter’s coat.

“They tried it too soon. They weren’t strong enough. They’ll win some day, but the time isn’t yet.”

Philip looked at him sharply. “I’m on their side. I know what it’s like down there. Nobody else knows, except Irene Shane and Mary Conyngham.”

“Does your Ma know it?” asked McTavish, with a grin.

“She must know it. She pretends not to.”

“And the Reverend Castor?”

“No ... I suppose he doesn’t.”

Philip thanked him abruptly, and went out of the door. When he had gone, McTavish poked up the fire, and sat staring into it. “I’m a regular old woman in some ways,” he thought, “trying to meddle in people’s affairs. But it needs a whole army to cope with Em.”

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 coal-gas 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.

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.

6

It was the Reverend Castor himself who greeted Philip on the doorstep when he reached home at last. Philip would have avoided him, but the clergyman was coming down the path as he turned into it and so there was no escape.

He greeted Philip with a smile, saying, “Well, it’s good to see you about again, my boy. We had a bad time over you ... thought you weren’t going to make the grade.”

Philip grinned. “I’m not so easy to be rid of.” He felt a sudden refreshing sense of superiority over the preacher, strange in all his experience. It was simply that he had no longer any awe of him as a man of God.

The Reverend Castor coughed and answered, “Oh! My dear boy. We didn’t want to be rid of you. That’s the last thing....” He protested nervously and added, “I just dropped in for a moment to see how your wife was doing ... and the twins. You ought to be proud, my boy, of two such fine babies ... two. Most people are thankful for one.”

“I would have been, too.”

“You don’t mean you aren’t delighted with what God has sent you?”

“No ... of course not ... I was only making a joke.” It hardly seemed honest, Philip thought, to give God the credit for the twins.

“I suppose we’ll be having Mrs. Downes back with us in the choir soon.... Since Mrs. Timpkins has moved to Indianapolis I’ve asked your wife to be the leader and the librarian of the music.”

“Yes ... she ought to be back soon. She seems strong again.”

There was an awkward silence, and the Reverend Castor’s kindly blue eyes turned suddenly aside. He started to speak and then halted abruptly and seized Philip’s hand a second time. “Well, good-by. I must be off.”

He was gone quickly, and for a moment Philip stood looking after him, puzzled by his strange, nervous manner. He was sorry for this poor man, whom he had always disliked. It was a sorrow he could not explain, save that his life must be a hell with a wife like his, and all the women of the parish on his neck. He did his duty, the Reverend Castor. He never shirked. It was good of him to call on Naomi. She would like such attention from the head of her church. It would bring back to her, Philip thought, some of the old glory and importance that had waned steadily since the night they had got down from the train, shivering, and fearful of what lay before them.

And she would be pleased at being asked to lead the choir and take care of the music. It was odd what little things brought happiness to her. She had need of the little things, for he meant to hurt her. He was certain now that it was the only way out. It would be easier for her to face the truth.

He found her sitting in the parlor where the Reverend Castor had left her. She was dressed for the first time since the twins were born, and she had been crying. As he entered, she came over to him and, putting her arms about his neck, pressed her head against Jim Baxter’s overcoat, and said, “I’m ashamed, Philip ... I want to die. I couldn’t help it yesterday. It’s the way I feel! I feel so tired.”

The whole action disturbed him horribly. She had never done such a thing before; she had never done more than kiss him chastely. He freed himself and, still holding her hands, said, “I understand. It’s all over now and I understand.”

She began to cry again helplessly, pitifully. “You’ll forgive me? You’ll forgive me?”

“There’s nothing to forgive. I understand it.” He pushed her gently into a chair, and sat down beside her, silently, wondering how he could bring himself to say what he had to say.

“It’s because I’m so unhappy, Philip.... I’ve been unhappy ever since we left Megambo ... ever since that Englishwoman stopped there. I wish to God we’d never seen her.”

“Let’s not think about her. She had nothing to do with it.”

“And it’s so awful in this dreary house. I’m nothing here, Philip.... I’m less than a hired girl. Your Ma hates me....” He tried to speak, but she cried out passionately, “I can’t go on living here ... I can’t ... I can’t.”

As he sat there, all his horror of scenes, of that wretched scene in the same room the evening before, swept over him. It was like a physical sickness rising into his throat and choking him. He was confused, too, with a sense of impotent rage.

“And after you ran away she told Mabelle she was never to enter the house again.... Now I haven’t any one.”

No, she hadn’t any one, but she didn’t know yet how alone she really was.

“Naomi,” he said quietly. “Naomi ... listen to me ... try to control yourself.”

“Yes.... Yes.... I’m trying to.” Her pale, homely face was even paler with weeping. Her eyes were swollen beneath the transparent lashes and her nose was red.

“Naomi ... would you like to have a house of your own?”

“Oh, Philip ... yes.”

“I don’t mean a whole house, but a place to live ... two or three rooms where you’d be away from my mother.”

“Yes ... yes. I’d do better. I’d take care of things ... if I had a chance in my own place. Oh, Philip—if you’d only be kind to me.”

He stroked her hand suddenly, but it was only because he pitied her. “I try to be kind, Naomi.”

“You’ve been so hard to me ... just like a stone—ever since we left Megambo. Oh, I knew it ... I knew even when....” She broke off suddenly, without finishing. Philip looked away, sick with misery. He pitied her, but he could not love her. She went on and on. “Out there I had something to live for ... I had my work. I loved it. It was the only life I’d ever known. It was everything. And here ... there’s nothing. I don’t know how to live here.”

“There are the children,” he said in a quiet voice.

“Yes ... but that’s not what I mean. It’s my soul I’m thinking of. It’s rotting away here....”

“Mine was rotting at Megambo.” She did not answer him, and he said, “There’s church work to do, and now Reverend Castor wants you to lead the choir.”

“But it’s not the same, and they’re all jealous of me ... all those women ... jealous because I’m more important because I’ve been a missionary, and jealous because Reverend Castor shows me favors. Oh, I know. I don’t belong here, and they don’t want me here. Oh, I don’t know what’s to become of me!”

There was a long silence, in which they sat there, dumbly trying to find some way out of the hopeless muddle, trying to patch together something which was now in tatters, if it had ever existed at all. Philip’s thin jaw was set in that hard, stubborn line that made even his mother afraid.

“Naomi,” he said presently, “I’ll get you a place to live. It won’t be much, for I haven’t much money, but you’ll be free ... to do what you please. Only ... only, Naomi ... I ... I....” Suddenly, his head fell forward, and he buried his face in his hands. In a voice that was hardly audible he said, “I don’t want to live with you any longer. It’s ... it’s all over.”

For a long time there was no sound in the room, save the ticking of the great onyx clock beneath the picture of Jason Downes. Naomi didn’t even sob; but presently she said, in a voice like the voice of a deaf person, “Philip, you mean you’re going to leave me?”

“No,” he said slowly. “No ... it’s not that exactly. I shan’t leave you. I’ll come and see you every day and the children—only I won’t sleep in the house. I’m going to sleep where I work.”

In the same dead voice she asked, “You’re not going back to the Mills?”

“No, I’m not going back to the Mills ... they wouldn’t have me now. I’m going to paint....”

“Pictures?”

“Yes ... pictures. That’s what I’ve always wanted to do and now ... now, nothing can stop me.” There was in his voice a sudden cold rasp, as of steel, which must have terrified her. He thought, “I’ve got to do it, if I’m to live. I’ve got to do it.”

She said, “But you could have a good congregation. You could preach.”

“No, that’s the last thing I could do. I’m through with all that.”

“Oh, my God! Oh, my God!”

He raised his head, and saw that she was biting her handkerchief. “Naomi,” he said. “Naomi,” and the sound of her name seemed to precipitate a sudden climax. She fell on her knees and beat them with her fists.

“You won’t do that, Philip. You can’t ... you can’t leave me for everybody to mock at. Say that you won’t ... I was wrong in the beginning, but now I’ll do anything. I’ll lie down and let you walk over my body!”

“Naomi,” he said. “Please! For God’s sake!”

“Oh, don’t you see! It’s different now ... I love you. Don’t you see that makes it different?”

“It can’t make it different, Naomi. I can’t pretend what isn’t true ... it’s a thing a man can’t do.”

Suddenly she stopped sobbing and looked up at him, her face all white and contorted. “You can’t say that! You can’t mean it! It isn’t true!”

“It’s true, Naomi. I can’t help myself. I wish to God I could!”

“And you didn’t love me ... even ... even then?”

He made a heroic effort. “No ... not even then.”

She flung herself on the floor, pressing her face against the carpet, moaning and moaning. Kneeling down, he picked her up bodily and laid her on the sofa. Bending over her—

“Naomi ... listen to me. It’s not my fault. It’s not yours. It’s all a muddle. Nobody’s to blame.”

Then she sat up suddenly. “Yes, there is. It’s your mother who’s to blame. She made me marry you. It all began with that. I didn’t want to ... I didn’t want to marry any one, but I wanted to have a mission of my own. She did it. She’s to blame, and now she hates me. She thinks I’ve stolen you from her.”

She buried her face in the cushions and lay sobbing. After a time, Philip said, “Naomi ... listen to me. You didn’t steal me from her.”

“Who did then?” said Naomi’s muffled voice.

“I don’t know. It just happened. I suppose it’s one of the things that happen in life. I’ve grown up now. I’ve grown up since we went to Megambo. That’s all. I know my own mind now.”

“Oh, you’re hard, Philip ... harder than flint.” She sat up slowly. “I’ll do anything for you. You can wipe your feet on me. I can’t let you go now ... I can’t ... I can’t!” She began suddenly to laugh. “I’ll do anything! I’ll prove to you I can keep house as well as your mother. I’ll show you how I can care for the children. They’re your children, too. I’ll learn to cook ... I’ll do anything!”

He did not answer her. He simply sat staring out of the window like an image carven of stone. And he was saying to himself all the while, “I can’t yield. I daren’t do it. I can’t—not now.” And all the while he felt a kind of disgust for the nakedness of this love of Naomi’s. It was a shameful thing. And during all their life together he had thought her incapable of such love.

She kept moaning and saying, over and over again, “I’ve got nothing now. I’m all alone ... I’ve got nothing now.”

He rose, and laid a hand on her shoulder. “I’m going now, Naomi. I’m not going to the restaurant. I’ll come back this afternoon. It’ll be all right. We’ll work it out somehow.”

She looked up at him. “You’ve changed your mind?”

“No, I don’t mean that. No, it’s better this way.”

“I’ll show you, Philip, what a good wife I can be.”

He picked up his hat, Jim Baxter’s hat, and suddenly he thought, “The old Philip is dead—as dead as Jim Baxter. I’ve dared to do it.”

Aloud he said, “Let’s not talk any more now. I’ll be back in an hour or two when you feel better.”

Then he went away, and outside the house, among the lilacs, he was suddenly sick.

7

He found a tiny flat of three rooms over a drugstore halfway up the hill from the railway station. It had been occupied by the family of a salesman who traveled for a house which manufactured false teeth. He had been promoted to a western territory where, with the great boom in the silver mines, the market for gold teeth had risen enormously.

He was a little fat man, with enormous black mustaches, all aglow with his promotion. “It’s the best gold tooth territory in America,” he told Philip.

The apartment rented for thirty dollars a month. The bubbling salesman would leave the furniture behind for two hundred and fifty dollars. Philip could move in the day after to-morrow.

He left the place, his whole body warmed by the satisfaction of having acted, of having done something definite. But the thing was not settled yet, because his mother still remained to be told.

He found her in the kitchen of the restaurant, superintending the preparation of mince-meat according to a recipe of her own which eliminated all intoxicating liquors. Standing over the negress who did the work, she was the essence of vigor and authority, her face crimsoned by the heat of the place, her hair all in disorder.

“Ma,” he said to her. “I have something I want to discuss with you.”

After bidding the negress wait until she returned, she followed him quickly, surprised and troubled by the look in his eye and the set of his jaw. The talk took place at the table behind the screen where Moses Slade came every day to eat.

“It’s about Naomi, Ma ... I’ve taken some rooms for her to live in. She won’t trouble you any longer. We’ll move out on Tuesday.”

She looked at him for a moment in astonishment. “But, Philip,” she said, “you ought to have consulted me. You mustn’t do that. We can’t even think of it.”

“The rent is paid. I’ve bought furniture.”

“Where did you get the money?”

“I used what Grandpa left me.”

“I thought you’d pledged the interest on that to the mission.”

“I’ve taken it back. I took it back before I was sick.”

She didn’t say anything for a long while. She saw suddenly that he was changed, more hardened even than she had feared. He didn’t even come to her any longer for advice. He had shut her out altogether. At last she said, “But, Philip, what will people think—when I’ve a house big enough for you all?”

“I don’t care any longer what people think. I can’t go through any more scenes like yesterday. Besides, a man has a right to his own house.”

“But, Philip ... my house is your house. I’ve worked all these years and sacrificed.... Oh, you don’t know what it’s meant sometimes. I wouldn’t even let Uncle Elmer help me—so that you’d have the house for your own. It wasn’t for myself.... I could have got along somehow.”

He looked away from her at the mustard-pot in the center of the table. “You know that you can’t get on with Naomi—and she hates living in your house.”

“I can try ... we can both try. If only she’d take a little interest and not make the place into a pigstye.”

“You know she won’t change.”

“Philip, I’ll do anything.... I’ll put up with Naomi ... I won’t say a word, only don’t leave me now after all the years when I’m an old woman.”

She saw the stubborn jaw set in a hard line. The sight of it stirred a sudden, turbulent emotion: it was his father’s jaw over again, terrifying in its identity. What had she done to deserve such treatment from these two men to whom she had given up all her life without once a thought of herself? She had worked for them, sacrificed....

Philip was saying, “It won’t make any difference. Even if you and Naomi never spoke to each other. You’d be hating each other all the time. Don’t you see? That’s what I can’t stand.”

She reached over and touched his hand. “Philip ... once you used to come to me with everything, and now ... now you treat me like a stranger ... me, your own mother. Why don’t you come to me? I want to share your life, to be a part of it. It’s all I live for. You’re all I’ve got.”

He felt her trying to capture him once more. What she said was true ... you couldn’t deny it. She had given her whole life to him. Every word she spoke hurt him.

“I don’t know, Ma. Nothing has happened except maybe that I’m grown up now. I’m a man. I’ve got to decide things for myself.”

It was that hard, brutal jaw which she couldn’t overcome. It had thwarted her always. With Jason, when his jaw was set thus, it was as if his heart had turned to stone.

“Where did you go last night?”

He told her, and the answer frightened her. In the Flats, in a Dago’s boarding-house, her son had passed a night.

“Where did that coat come from?”

“It belonged to Jim Baxter, who was killed at the grade-crossing last week. I borrowed it from McTavish.”

“So you’ve been seeing him.”

“Yes, he told you I wouldn’t come home, didn’t he?”

“Yes,” she said, with a sudden flash of anger. “Yes ... he told me. I wish you wouldn’t see so much of him, Philip. He’s a wicked man.”

He made no response to this sudden, feeble sally of the old authority. He had, she discovered with awe, that old trick of his father’s—of not answering in an argument unless he had something to say. It was an unfair method, because it always kept the argument upon the level of reason, excluding all the force of the emotions.

“And I’m not coming home any more to sleep, Ma. That’s all finished.”

He must have seen the look of fear in her eyes. It was that look he had seen there whenever, for a moment, she seemed to lose control of that solid world she had built up.

“But, Philip ... it’s your house ... your own home. You’ve never had any other.” He said nothing, and she asked, “Where are you going to sleep?”

Slowly, and then carefully, so that it would hurt her as little as possible, he told her about the stable at Shane’s Castle, and his plan of painting. She listened, half believing that she could not be in her right mind, that what she heard was only part of a nightmare. She kept interrupting him, saying, “But, Philip, you never told me ... I didn’t know,” and when he had finished, she said abruptly, “That wasn’t the plan I had for you, Philip; I’ve been talking with Reverend Castor and he thinks we could arrange to get you a good congregation.”

“No ... that’s all finished. It’s no use even talking of it.”

She went on, ignoring him. “And if that didn’t please you, I thought ... well, you could take the restaurant because, well ...” she looked away from him, “you see, I’m thinking of getting married.”

She saw his face grow red with anger. “Not to that humbug, Moses Slade!”

“Yes, Philip. But it’s wrong of you to call him a humbug. He’s a distinguished man, a good man, who stands for the best in the community.”

“He’s a hypocrite and a humbug!”

An uncontrollable rage took possession of him. It was impossible that he was to have Moses Slade, the humbug who had written that editorial about the strike, for a stepfather. No, it was outlandish, too impossible, that a good woman like his mother should be taken in by that lecherous old rip.

“Philip,” she was saying. “You don’t understand. I’ve been alone always ... except for you—ever since your father died. It would be a good marriage, a distinguished marriage, and I wouldn’t be alone in my old age.”

“You couldn’t marry him. You couldn’t marry a fat old man like that.”

He fancied that he saw her wince. “It isn’t a question of love, Philip, at our age. It’s companionship. I’m very fond of him, and he’s been thoughtful—so thoughtful all the time you were sick.”

“It’s disgusting!”

It was odd, what had happened—that he found himself for the first time in his life taking a high hand with his mother. It was an intoxicating sensation.

“If I give him up, I’ll be giving up a great opportunity for good. As a Congressman’s wife, there’s no end to the things I could accomplish....” She began to cry. “But I’ll give him up ... I’ll give him up if you won’t turn your back on your poor mother. I’d do anything for you, Philip. You’re all I’ve got, and I hoped for so much—to see you one of the great men of the church, a Christian leader, fighting on the side of God.”

“It’s no good, Ma. I won’t go back to that.”

One of the waitresses appeared suddenly from behind the screen. “Mrs. Downes ...” she began.

“Go away! Go away! I’ll talk to you later.”

The girl disappeared.

“And that isn’t all, Ma. I’m not going to live with Naomi any more. I’m through with that. I meant what I said when I was sick.”

“Philip—listen to me, Philip!”

“No ... I’ll come to see her and the children. But I’m through.”

“What will people think? What will they say?”

“You can tell them I’ve got a night job.... Nobody’ll know, except Aunt Mabelle, where Naomi is going to live. Nobody will see me come or go. It’s in Front Street.”

“Front Street! Why, that’s on the edge of the Flats! You can’t do that!”

He looked at her for a long time in despairing silence. “My God, Ma! Can’t you see? Can’t you understand? From now on, I’m going to stand on my own. I’m going to work things out. I’ve got to get out of this mess.... I’ve got to.”

He rose abruptly, and put on his hat.

“Philip,” she asked, drying her eyes, “where are you going now?”

“I’m going to buy blankets for myself.”

“Philip, listen to me. For God’s sake, listen! Don’t ruin everything. I’ve a right to something. I’m your mother. Doesn’t that mean anything?”

He turned for a moment hesitating, and then quickly said, “Ma, don’t talk like that, it isn’t fair.”

Without another word, he put on his hat and hurried out of the restaurant.

Once outside, the cold air cleared his head, and he was thankful that he had been hard as a stone. Again he was sorry for Emma in a vague, inexplicable fashion; she could never understand what it was that made him hard. She couldn’t see why he had to behave thus.

“I wish to God,” he thought bitterly, “that I’d had a mother who wasn’t a fine woman. Life would have been so much easier. And I can’t hurt her ... I can’t. I love her.”

And suddenly he saw that in all their talk together nothing had really been settled. Nothing had been changed or decided.

8

He went that night to sleep in the room above the stable, and on the following Tuesday Naomi and the twins moved into the three rooms above the drugstore in Front Street. Emma stayed home from the restaurant all day, going and coming to and from the newly established household. She did and thought of everything, so that Naomi in the end gave up, and, sitting on the imitation-tapestry davenport, simply watched her mother-in-law arrange the new household. Mabelle was there, too, with little Jimmy, in the way most of the time, or making suggestions which Emma ignored. She was a creature whose feelings were not easily hurt and all Emma’s bitter remarks seemed to have left no trace. When they had left Naomi with the three rooms in order, she even walked home with Emma, dragging the tired and whining Jimmy behind her.

As she hurried through the darkness after Emma’s tall, robust form, she panted, “Well, things might go better now. I always think young people ought to start out in a house of their own.”

“Yes,” said Emma, certain from the remark that Naomi hadn’t told Mabelle the whole truth.

“It’s funny what a change has come over Philip. He’s much nicer than he used to be.”

“What on earth do you mean by that, Mabelle?”

Here Jimmy set up a yell—“I don’t wanna walk! I wanna be carried!”

“All right, dear, only you mustn’t cry. Little men don’t cry.”

“Well, I do. I’m tired. I don’t wanna walk!”

“All right, dear.” She bent down and picked up the child. He continued to whine, but at least their progress was not retarded.

“If he were my child, Mabelle,” said Emma, “I’d just leave him sitting on the curb till he got good and ready to walk. I never had any trouble with Philip. He’s always been obedient and respectful.”

“But Jimmy’s delicate, and I’d rather carry him than have him whine.”

“He’s whining in any case,” said Emma, acidly.

Mabelle was puffing now beneath her burden and the long steps of Emma. But she managed to say, “What I mean about Philip is ... that he’s more masterful now. He’s a man. He’s the kind of a man that women have a right to be afraid of.”

Emma snorted. “Don’t talk such rot, Mabelle. If you’d read less trash.”

“It’s funny about him taking up with the Shanes.”

Naomi had told her, then, about the stable. And Mabelle was a sieve: whatever you told her poured right on through. “He hasn’t taken up with the Shanes. He’s simply using their stable to work in. That’s not the same thing. Why, he barely knows them—except that half-crazy old maid, Irene. And he doesn’t know the others at all.”

“Then it must be that Mary Conyngham. She’s friends with them.”

“Mary Conyngham!” repeated Emma. “Mary Conyngham! Why, he hasn’t seen her in years!” But the shock of the name turned her suddenly thoughtful, so that she walked at a slower pace, mercifully for Mabelle.

“Well, he might have seen her,” persisted Mabelle. “She’s mixed up with Irene Shane’s school for the Dagoes and Hunkies. They all belong to the same crowd ... all thinking they can make something out of a lot of bums.” For a moment she was so completely winded that she could not speak. When she recovered her breath, she said, “I remembered the other night that they’d been sweet on each other once.”

Still Emma walked furiously in silence, and presently Mabelle said, “Of course, I didn’t say anything about her to Naomi. She might be upset just now.”

“No,” said Emma, “and don’t say anything to her about it or to any one else. It’s nonsense.”

“Well, I didn’t know. I was just interested in Philip, and Naomi, and in his queer behavior, and I always find that when a man goes off his head like that, there’s a woman about somewhere.”

“I forbid you, Mabelle, to speak of it to any one.” She halted and took Mabelle by the shoulder. “You understand? That’s the way silly talk gets started.”

Mabelle was silent as they resumed their way, but presently she said, “That Lily Shane ... she’s come home to see the old woman die.”

“They’re a bad lot, all of ’em,” said Emma, “and I guess she’s the Jezebel of the lot.”

“I hate to see a good boy like Philip getting mixed up with people like that.”

“He’s not getting mixed up, I tell you.”

“What am I to tell people about him, Em, if they ask me?”

“Tell them that he’s going to be an artist. You might say, too, that he has a fine talent, and later he’s going to New York to study.”

She had thought it all out. There was only one method—“to take the bull by the horns.” If Philip wasn’t one day to be a bishop, he might be a great artist and paint great religious pictures like the man who did the Sistine Madonna or the Flight into Egypt.

The voice of Jimmy interrupted her thoughts. “Aren’t we nearly home? I’m hungry!”

“Yes, dearie. That’s your house right there.... See the one with the red light in the window?”

“I don’t like Aunt Em. I wish she’d go away.”

“Shh! Jimmy! Shh! He’s tired, Em, that’s all—the poor little thing.”

They reached the house with the red light in the window, and bade each other good-night.

“Remember what I said,” was Emma’s final word.

After she left the gate, only one thought occupied the mind of Emma, the thought that it was Mary Conyngham who had stolen Philip from them both—from herself and Naomi. “Mary Conyngham, of course,” she told herself. “What a fool I’ve been not to think of her before! It would be like her and her superior ways. The Watts always thought nobody good enough for ’em but the Shanes—that bawdy old woman and her two daughters—one a lunatic and the other a harlot. Yes, Mary Conyngham could carry on to her heart’s content there in the Flats, and no one would know of it. The Shanes would only help her. Shane’s Castle had been like a bawdy-house in the days when old John Shane was still living.”

She was in a savage humor, born partly of her irritation at Naomi’s helplessness, and partly of disgust at Mabelle’s feeble-minded chatter; and now she had found an object on which to pin it. It was Mary Conyngham who lay at the root of everything: it explained why Mary had stopped her that day to ask about Philip.

“Mabelle,” she thought, “is a dangerous woman, going about and saying things like that when she knows nothing.”

Mabelle was a constructive gossip. Having nothing to keep her occupied, she sat about all day thinking up things, putting two and two together, pinning odd pieces of stories together to construct a whole, but she did have (thought Emma) an uncanny way of scenting out scandal; her only fault was that she sometimes told the story before in fact it had happened. She came upon a scrap, the merest suspicion of some dubious story, and presently after days of morbid brooding it reappeared, trimmed and garnished to perfection, with such an air of reality about it that if it wasn’t true, it might easily have been.

It was the uncanny faculty of Mabelle’s that really troubled Emma. Her suspicion of Mary Conyngham frightened her even while it gave her satisfaction. It occurred to her that Philip was now quite beyond control, as his father had sometimes been. Anything might happen. She dared not think of it. For a moment she felt the quick shadow of foreboding, of some tragedy that lay ahead, beyond the power of anything to prevent.

She shook it off quickly, thinking, “That is nonsense. I can still bring Philip to his senses.”

Inside the house, she prepared her own supper, and spent an hour in clearing up her own house, putting from sight every trace of Naomi.

At nine o’clock Moses Slade came to call. He was in a furious temper. He brought with him a labor periodical, called The Beacon.

“It was marked,” he said, “and sent to me through the mail.”

Opening it, he showed her the desecration of his most admired editorial. It was a fragment of the local newspaper, stained and torn, which read, “ ...sacred rights of property must be protected against the attacks of men little better than brutes, etc., etc.,” and signed in large black letters MOSES SLADE. On the face of the printing some irreverent hand had made a series of drawings in pencil—a Croat woman feeding her three small children with coffee out of a clumsy tin cup, a gigantic, bearded Slovak and his wizened, tubercular wife, a baby wrapped in the remains of a ragged pair of overalls, a thin, shivering girl with the face of a Madonna. The whole had been photographed and reproduced.

Underneath them was a line which read, “These are the brutes of the Honorable Moses Slade who have endangered our most sacred institutions and destroyed our God-given prosperity.” And beside it was a caricature of Slade himself, gross, overdressed, with flowing locks and a leering expression, beneath which was written: “Puzzle—find the beast on these two pages.”

He banged the table with his hamlike fist. “By God, I’ll find out who did it, and make him pay for his impudence! I’m not a force in this Town for nothing!”

Emma turned faintly pale, but she only said, “It’s shameful, I think, Moses, but what can you expect from such people? They have no respect for our institutions ... our excellent Congressmen.”

But she knew well enough who had made the drawing.

9

In the flat in Front Street, Philip put the last chair in place, washed his face and hands at the sink in the kitchen, and went in to look at the sleeping twins. They lay side by side, fat, rosy, healthy children, such as women like Naomi or Mabelle were certain to bear. He was alone in the room, and, after a time, he bent down and touched the fine, soft dark hair that covered their small, round heads. They were like him, and so, he supposed, like his father, with eyes that one day would be the same clear blue. It struck him suddenly that there was something ruthless in the operation of Nature which took no account of all the structure of habits and laws of man. It took no account of the fact that he had never loved Naomi, or that neither of them had really wanted these children. Nature had wanted children, and it did not matter how they were created, so long as the act of creation occurred. All man’s ideas of love, of lawful wedlock, of sentimentality, had nothing to do with it. And it was impossible to imagine stronger, healthier children.

He fell to stroking the soft head of the little girl, and, slowly, in her sleep, she stirred and, groping with a fat, pink hand, found one of his fingers, and clutched it tightly. Something in the touch of the soft, plump hand melted him suddenly. She was so soft, so helpless, reaching out trustfully. And for the first time he felt a sudden quick pride and delight. These were his children; he knew that he loved them, despite everything, Naomi and his mother and all the trouble he had been through. They were his to care for and protect and set on their way in life. That was a wonderful thing. When he thought of it, he was frightened; and yet (he reflected) he would perhaps understand far better than most fathers how to help them. He had learned, he thought, bitterly, by his own blundering.

The little girl still clung tightly to his finger, and presently he found himself smiling, without knowing it. He was, oddly enough, suddenly happy, and conscious that no matter what fate befell him, it was good to be alive. He wasn’t sorry any longer that he had helped to bring into existence these two fat, funny little morsels of life. He almost laughed, and then, bending down, he kissed first one and then the other on the tops of their round, dark little heads. They were his: he was a father. And it had happened without his wanting it, almost without his understanding how it had happened.

He was still bending over them when the door opened and, with a sense of falling spirits, he heard Naomi come in. Ever since that horrible day in his mother’s parlor, she had made an effort to dress completely and neatly, but somehow it was impossible for her to accomplish it entirely. Little wisps of sandy hair fell down over the back of her high tight collar. Her white petticoat, showing itself an inch or two below her skirts, dragged on the floor. There was a smudge of the dust left behind by the dental salesman’s wife on one side of her face. She might set herself in order a dozen times a day, but always, in some mysterious way, she was in disarray. At Megambo, it hadn’t made any difference: in a place like that such things were lost in the whole cataclysm of disorder. But here in a civilized place, it was different. It was as if Naomi could not cope with the problems of decent living.

At the sound of the opening door, Philip straightened up quickly, as if ashamed to be found thus, caressing his children. But Naomi had seen him, and smiled—an odd, twisted, pitiful smile, which was like a knife turned in his flesh, for behind it lay a whole regiment of ghosts, of implications. It was as if he saw suddenly what happiness there might be in life, if he himself had been different, if Naomi had been a different woman, if he had only been able to love her. He couldn’t change: he saw again how ruthless a thing Nature could be. Some one had meddled with her plans, and so the misery resulted. It was not that he thought these things: the whole impression happened far more quickly than any process of thought. It was a sudden, pitiful flash of illumination. What hurt him most was the faint hint of bitterness in her smile, a hint almost of mockery, a shadow which had crossed her pale, freckled face without her knowing it. But until now, he hadn’t thought her capable of suffering in that way.

It frightened him by making him feel weak and yielding.

Perhaps if she had been a more clever woman, she could in that moment have changed the whole course of his life. Long afterward when he thought of the scene (and it always remained one of his clearest memories of her) he saw that it could have been done. But then he saw that if she had been a more clever woman he might have loved her in the beginning.

She came over and stood by his side. “What are we to call them, Philip? We’ve never even spoken of it.” She said it in a flat voice, as if they had been puppies or kittens, and not children—his children—at all.

“I don’t know.”

“I’ve been thinking about the girl. Your mother would like to call her Emma, but I’d like it if you’d call her Naomi.”

He knew before she had finished what she had meant to say, and he knew, too, that he hated both names. To go on for the rest of his life, even as an old man, calling his child “Emma” or “Naomi”....

“She’s your child, too, Naomi. You have a choice in the matter.”

“I wanted you to be pleased.” There was a humbleness in her voice which made him feel ill.

“And the boy—have you thought of him?”

“I want to call him Philip, of course.”

(No, he couldn’t do that: it was like wishing them bad luck.)

“No, I hate the name of Philip. You can call the girl Naomi. You bore her, and you’ve more of a right to name her than Ma has. But—no, we won’t call the boy Philip. We’ll think of something else.”

“I’d like to have her called Naomi ... and then you’d think of me sometimes, Philip.”

He looked at her sharply. “But I do think of you. Why should you say that?”

“Oh, I don’t know ... just in case anything happened to me. That’s why I’d like to call him Philip.”

“No ... no ... any other name.”

He took up his hat. “What are you going to do with the twins on Sundays and choir practice nights?”

“I don’t know. I’d thought of asking Mabelle to stay with them ... but she lives such a long way off. Maybe I’d just better give it up.”

“No, you mustn’t do that. I’ll come and stay with them. I’d like to.”

“You don’t mind my leading the choir, Philip?”

“No, of course not.”

“Because I want you to be pleased. I want it to be a new start now, here in this new house.”

He didn’t answer, and after an awkward pause, she said, “I wouldn’t go at all, but I think Reverend Castor needs me. He’s got so many worries. Yesterday when I was talking to him, he began all at once to cry ... not out loud, but the tears just came into his eyes. His wife’s an awful woman. He’s been telling me about her. And now that Mrs. Timpkins has moved away, there’s no one to take the choir who knows anything about music.”

“Of course, go by all means.”

He was glad for two reasons, because he knew she liked the importance of leading the choir, and because he would have these evenings alone with the children—his children—who had been born in reality as he stood looking down at them a moment before.

“Good-night, Naomi,” he said abruptly.

“Philip....”

“Yes.”

“Philip, you won’t stay?”

“No, Naomi.... It wouldn’t look right.”

There was a pause.

“Sometimes you’re like your mother, Philip.”

He went out and in his agitation found himself halfway down the flimsy pine stairway before he remembered his overcoat. When he returned and opened the door of the little flat, he heard the sound of sobbing, a horrible choked sound, coming from the bedroom. She had not made a scene. She had not wept until he was gone, for she was trying to please him.

10

It was a clear night, and very cold, when the moonlight painted the snow and the black houses of the Flats with a luminous blue light. As he walked, the hard-packed snow creaked and whined beneath his heels. The stars, for all their brilliance, seemed infinitely remote. As he walked, a little cloud of frozen breath trailed behind him.

By the railroad-tracks and in the narrow streets that bordered them, the Flats were empty. The houses stood silent and black. The fires, the little piles of household goods, were gone now, and with them the miserable, shivering women and children. At Hennessey’s corner there was the usual blaze of light, the jagged clamor of the mechanical piano, and the sound of drunken voices behind the swinging-doors. The lights, the sounds, hurt him in an inexplicable fashion, filling him with an acute and painful sense of loneliness.

It was an emotion which changed, as he entered the park, to one of vague fear. Inside the rusted gates the park lay frozen and solitary in the brilliant moonlight. The deep shadows were blue along the drive, black where the outline of a dead tree fell across the snow. The bits of statuary—the Venus of Cnidos, the Apollo Belvedere, the cast-iron Cupid—all had little caps and collars of frozen snow. The windows of the big house lay shuttered and dark, save for a room in the corner where little bars of yellow light filtered out. It was perhaps the room where Lily Shane sat waiting for her mother to die.

As he turned the corner on the stable side, there came to him all at once a feeling that he was not alone in the park. There were other creatures there, too, not human perhaps, but the ghosts of all the men and women who had been there in the gaudy days of the Castle when the trees were still alive, and the garden neatly kept, and the stable filled with horses. There had always been a mystery about the place, and for him, who had never seen the place while it was alive, it was a mystery enveloped in a romantic glamour. He understood suddenly how people are able to invest a place with the character of their own existence. It was the wicked old John Shane, dead so long that he had become a legend, and his dying widow, who owned this silent frozen park filled with dead trees.... It would still be theirs and theirs alone long after they had turned to dust, until at last the house was pulled down and the park buried beneath clamorous steel sheds and roaring furnaces. And even then ... as long as there remained alive one person who remembered them, the place would be known as Shane’s Hill, where once the Castle stood. It was an odd sort of immortality....

He saw, too, that the slate-colored house was like his mother: she had stamped it forever as her own, and that the huts at Megambo were oddly like Naomi, who had been so happy in them. And he saw suddenly why he had hated both places and how in a way they explained both his mother and Naomi, and the power they both possessed of making him wretched. This cold park and the silent house, peopled by creatures that were dead, seemed a dark and sinister place, yet it had, too, a sense of splendor, of barren grandeur, that for more than half a century had dominated the Town. It existed still in the very midst of the clamorous Mills.

The stable was silent, save for the sound of the fat horses tramping in their stalls, and in his room overhead the stove still burned, filling the room with warmth. It was a plain enough room, empty save for the iron cot where he slept, a table, two chairs and his painting materials. Yet for him a pleasant place. He had for the first time in all his life a sense of coming home. It was his; and it suited him with its barren emptiness. It was like the cell of a monk, bare and cold, and free of everything which might distract from a contemplation of the great mystery.

He did not trouble to light the kerosene lamp. The cold moonlight flooded in through the window, casting in black filigrees on the bare floor the shadow of the drooping vines that fell across the panes. Against the walls and ceiling the flames in the belly of the stove cast another pattern, different, outlined of warm and glowing light.

For a long time he stood there, his hands clasped behind him, looking out of the window, seized once more by the enchantment of the beauty with which the night invested all the expanse of the Flats. Far off, under the shadow of one of the seven hills, the flames of the furnaces in the Jupiter plant raised an arc of glowing light. He saw in his imagination all the spectacle that existed there—the bodies of the black men, the dancing shadows cast by the glaring lights, the angry hiss and bubble of boiling white-hot metal. He could smell the curious, pungent odor of burning coke. He saw the movement, the unearthly splendor, the immense energy that filled the whole scene.

Just beneath the hill, the sheds and furnaces lay in black shadows. There were fires there, built by the Mill guards, that burned like the red eyes of giants asleep in the velvety darkness. There was the sudden wild screech of an express locomotive, and a long serpent-like monster, lighted from within like a firefly, rushed through the darkness.

He was glad suddenly to be alone, for the solitude brought him a strange peace like the peace that had come to him at times when he went alone at dawn along the borders of the lake at Megambo. It was the peace of complete aloofness, of detachment from all that troubled him—a mysterious exaltation like death perhaps, in which no one could share. No, not even Mary Conyngham.... Mary Conyngham.... He found himself repeating the name idly in his brain. Now, in this moment of solitude, even Mary Conyngham did not trouble him. It was as if he were free suddenly of his body and existed only as a spirit.

Presently, he put his hand across his eyes, pressing them with a kind of anguish. He knew that he believed again; he knew that he had always believed. He had never lost his faith. It was only that until now he had followed a bogus God. It was only that he didn’t believe in that harsh, commonplace, ugly God of Naomi and Emma and the Reverend Castor. It was a different sort of God—One who was concerned with a kind of beauty and splendor which they did not know ... the beauty of all that scene outspread below him, of that savage energy which cast a distant glow against the sky; it was the beauty of those two children, his children, called into existence because He willed it, the sinister beauty of the park and of people like old John Shane and his widow who lived on even after they were dead and dying, the beauty even of that coffee-shed filled with shivering women and children, and the fires in the street. He was the God, too, of those black women pouring the water of the burning lake over the belly of an obscene idol—a God concerned with the whole glowing tragic spectacle of living.

Presently his hands dropped to his side once more, and, looking out of the window, he saw that the park was no longer empty. There was some one there—a woman—walking up and down in the moonlight. She was wrapped in furs and she was no ghost, for in the cold air, the moonlight and the frost of her breath made a little halo about her uncovered head. She was walking round and round the ruined dead English garden, which must have had its own ghosts of larkspurs and foxgloves and lavender and mint and primulas—all the ghosts of flowers long dead, killed by the soot of the Mills.

And then all at once, he divined who the woman must be. She was Lily Shane, walking in the moonlight.

She turned at last, and, going carelessly through the deep snow, returned to the big, darkened house.

Philip lay down on the iron cot, and toward morning he fell asleep. But in the long hours while he lay there, watching the pattern of warm light on the ceiling, he became aware slowly of a whole new world born of a strange, mystical understanding, that had come to him as he stood by the window in the brilliant moonlight ... a world which belonged to him alone, which none could intrude upon or destroy. He fell asleep in peace, aware vaguely that for a time he had escaped from Naomi and Uncle Elmer, from Mabelle—even from his own mother.

It was at noon on the following day that old Julia Shane fell into a sleep from which she did not awaken. The old nigger, standing in the snow by the stable door, told him the news. The old man wept like a little child. “It’s the end of something, Mr. Downes,” he said. “It’s all over now, and I expect I ain’t got much longer on this earth, myself. It ain’t the same no longer.”

All that day Philip stayed in the room above the stable, struggling passionately, with his stubborn jaw set like a steel trap, over paints and canvas, trying to capture, while the mood was still on him, the strange things he had seen in the dead park and the desert of silent Mills beyond. But in the end, when it grew too dark to work any longer, there was only a mass of blacks and grays, blues and whites, upon the canvas.

At eight o’clock, he went to the Flats to sit with the twins while Naomi went to choir practice.

11

The choir met in the room of the church which was given over on the Sabbath to “the infant class” of the Sunday School for children under six. It was a large, barren room, with large chromos of Biblical scenes decorating the walls—the soldiers of Moses returning from the Promised Land, Moses smiting the Rock, the same as an Infant being discovered in the Bulrushes by a Princess dressed in garments as gaudy and inaccurate as those of a music-hall Cleopatra, Noah and his family receiving the Dove and Olive Branch. In the center of the room two dozen lilliputian chairs sat ranged in a circle, save on the occasions of choir practice, when a dozen adult chairs were brought in from the main Sunday School room to accommodate members of the choir.

Naomi arrived early, and, admitting herself with the private key that was her badge of office, turned on the gas and seated herself at the upright piano. There was no piano in the flat by the railroads, and she fell at once to playing, in order to recover her old careless facility. She had no sense of music; yet music was to her only what wine is to some temperaments: it served to unlock the doors of the restraining prison which forever shut her in. She played relentlessly in showers of loud, banging notes, heedless of discord and strange harmonies; and the longer she played, the more shameless and abandoned became the character of her playing. To-night she played from a none too sure memory The Ninety and Nine and Throw Out the Life Line (her favorites) and then I’m a Pilgrim, I’m a Stranger, which always made her want to cry, and then with a strong arm and a loud pedal she swept into Ancient of Days, which filled her with the strangest, emotional grandeur. There was a splendor in it which made her feel noble and heroic: it filled her with a sense of beauty and power. She saw herself vaguely as a barbarian queen, like Sheba, riding on an elephant, surrounded by guards and servitors. The image in her mind bore a strange resemblance to her memory of a highly painted artificial blonde, clad principally in sequins and crimson satin, whom she had once seen riding an elephant in the circus parade—a lady advertised as “the ten-thousand-dollar beauty.” But always when she had finished Ancient of Days, and the last note had died away, she was left with a melancholy feeling of depression and a sense of wickedness. The world about her became after one of these musical debauches a sad and unbearable place.

To-night, alone in the bare, unattractive room, she poured into the music all the pent-up emotions of days ... all her hatred of Emma, her fear of the new life on which she had embarked, but, most of all, that curious passionate half-wicked feeling she had for Philip. Beneath the spell of Ancient of Days this emotion for him seemed to become purified and free of all restraint. She poured into the banging, careless chords all the things which she could never bring herself to tell him—how the sight of him standing by the crib had made her feel suddenly ill with warm voluptuous feeling, how there were times when she wanted to lie down before him and beat her head on the floor to show him how she felt, how she wakened out of a sound sleep in the midst of the night with her hands aching to touch his face and his dark hair. In the splendor of the hymn it was as if all those things were realized. For a time she was that fantastic, barbaric queen of her imagination and Philip was her lover, dressed like one of the soldiers in the chromo of the return from the Promised Land, and sometimes in an overwhelming wave of wickedness she saw him as she had seen him on the night of the drums, standing half naked by the light of the dying fire.

It was thus that she saw him to-night, and, as if she meant to preserve the wild romantic feeling, she played and sang the whole hymn over again in her loud, flat voice. She was wildly happy, for in the end it seemed that Philip really belonged to her, and that they were alone once more by the lake at Megambo. They weren’t even missionaries and Swanson wasn’t there. And he loved her.

When she had finished, the spell clung to her until the last chord, held deliberately by the use of the loud pedal, died away, leaving her weak and exhausted, and prey suddenly to the horrible, sickening depression. She let her head fall forward on the piano. She wanted to cry, but she couldn’t cry, because people would be coming in at any moment. And suddenly she felt the touch of a hand on her shoulder and a voice saying, “That was splendid, Mrs. Downes! That’s the sort of music that will bring them to the Lord!”

It was the Reverend Castor. He had come in quietly, without a sound, and had been sitting there all the while listening to her while she desecrated the sanctity of a hymn with all her fleshly emotions. She tried to gain control of herself, and, without looking up, mopped her eyes and nose with her handkerchief. But it was no good: when she looked up he saw that she had been crying. She was blushing with shame, and the color made her seem almost pretty.

“Why, you’ve been crying!” he said.

She choked, recovered herself, and answered, “Yes ... I ... I can’t help it.... It always makes me cry—that hymn.”

He laid a big, bony, masculine hand on her shoulder. “But you mustn’t cry ... Mrs. Downes. You mustn’t cry.... It’s something to be joyful over.”

She looked (he thought) so young and pitiful and unhappy. If it were only possible to comfort her, to take her on his knee as if she were a little child. It was no more than that, this feeling toward her. He wanted to comfort her. But you couldn’t do that, of course, especially if you were a preacher.