A good woman

by Louis Bromfield

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.