Philip had spent the morning of that same day among the tents where the strikers lived in the melting snow. He had made sketches, a fragment here, a fragment there—tiny glimpses that were in their own way more eloquent than the lifting of the whole curtain. They were a weekly affair now, done regularly on a fragment of some denunciating speech or editorial. They appeared weekly in the Labor Journal. Now he chose an editorial in which the Chairman of the Board of Mill Directors made a speech filled with references to Christ and appeals to end the strike and return to an era of Peace on Earth; now it was an address from the Governor of the State—a timid man, a bit of a fool, and destined one day to be President of the Nation. Moses Slade suffered twice more, for his pompous bombastic speeches made irresistible subjects for burlesque. But, as the weeks passed, Philip found himself less and less interested in making propaganda for the workers, and more and more concerned with the purity of his line. The room above the stable came to be papered in sketches made on bits of newsprint or fragments of butchers’ brown paper. A frenzy of work took possession of him, and for whole days at a time he never left the place, even to see his children. There were even times when he forgot the very existence of Mary Conyngham. But he did go faithfully twice a week to stay with the twins so that Naomi might go to choir practice. It was, he knew, the only pleasure which lay in his power to give her.
The importance of the thing appeared to make her happy, and to diminish the aching sense of strain that was never absent when they were together. She began, little by little, to grow used to a husband whose only activities were those of a nursemaid, but she still tried pathetically to please him. She made a heroic effort to dress neatly and keep the house in order (although there were times when he spent his whole visit to the twins in putting closets in order and gathering the soiled clothing into piles), and she never spoke any more of his coming back to her. The only fault seemed to be a jealousy which she could not conquer.
She kept asking him questions, disguised in a pitiful air of casualness, about what the Shanes’ house was like, and whether he thought Lily Shane as beautiful a woman as she was supposed to be. Once she even asked about Mary Conyngham. He always answered her in the same fashion—that he had never been inside the Shanes’ house, and did not know Lily Shane, and had spoken to Mary Conyngham but once since he had come home. Sometimes he fancied that it was more than mere jealousy that prompted her questions: he thought, too, there was something in them of wistful curiosity about a world filled with people she would never know. She still had the power of rousing a pity which weakened him like an illness.
He did tell her at last that he had seen Lily Shane three or four times walking in the park, once in the moonlight, and that he thought she was a beautiful woman; but he never told her how the figure of Lily Shane was inextricably a part of that strange illuminating vision that came to him as he stood by the vine-clad window. It was, he believed, the sort of thing no one would understand, not even Mary. Naomi would only think him crazy and go at once to tell his mother. They would begin all over again humoring him as a madman or a child. No, he did not know Lily Shane, and yet he did know her, in a strange, unearthly, mystical fashion, as if she stood as a symbol of all that strange, sensuous world of which he had had a single illuminating intuition as he stood by the window. It was a world in which all life was lived on a different plane, in which tragedies occurred and people were happy and unhappy, but it was a world in which success and happiness and tragedy and sorrow were touched by grandeur. There was in it nothing sordid or petty, for there were in it no people like Uncle Elmer and Naomi and Mabelle. One could enter it if one knew how to live. That, he saw, was a thing he must learn—how to live, to free himself of all that nastiness and intolerance and pettiness of which he had suddenly become aware. He had to escape from all those things which the old Philip, the one who was dead, had accepted, in the blindness of a faith in a nasty God, as the ultimate in living.
This new Philip, prey to a sickening awareness, had been working all the morning in the Flats and ate with Krylenko at the tent where the homeless strikers were fed soup and coffee and bread, and, on returning to the stable, he lay down on the iron bed and fell asleep. He did not know how long he lay there, but he was awakened presently by a curious feeling, half a dream, that some one had come into the room with him. Lying quietly, still half-lost in a mist of sleep, he became slowly aware that some one was walking softly about beyond the screen. Rising, he pushed it aside and, stepping out, saw who it was. Standing in the shadow near the window, peering at the drawings, was Lily Shane, hatless, with her honey-colored hair done in a knot at the back of her neck, her furs thrown back over her shoulders. At the sound of his step, she turned slowly and said, “Oh! I thought there was no one here. I thought I was alone.”
It was a soft voice, gentle and musical, exactly the right voice for such a figure and face. At the sound of it, he was aware suddenly that he must appear ridiculous—coatless, with his hair all rumpled. It was the first time he had ever spoken to such a woman, and something in her manner—the complete calm and assurance, the quiet, almost insolent lack of any apology, made him feel a gawky little boy.
“I ... I was asleep,” he said, desperately patting down his hair.
She smiled. “I didn’t look behind the screen. Hennery told me you hadn’t come in.” But there was a contradiction behind the smile, a ghost of a voice which said, “I did look behind the screen. I knew you were there.”
And suddenly, for the first time, Philip was stricken by an awful speculation as to how he looked when asleep. He knew that he was blushing. He said, “It doesn’t matter. It’s your stable, after all.”
“I didn’t mean to disturb you. I’ve stayed longer than I meant to ... but—you see ...”—she made a gesture toward the drawings—“I found all these more fascinating than I expected. I knew about you. My sister told me ... but I didn’t find what I expected. They’re so much better.... You see, it’s always the same. I couldn’t believe it of the Town. Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?”