“Krylenko.”
He read it again and then he heard Hennery saying, “It was a turrible night, Mr. Downes ... I guess it was one of those nights when all kinds of slimy things are out walkin’. They’re up and gone too ... both of them ... the girls, Miss Lily and Miss Irene. And they ain’t comin’ back, so Miss Lily says. She went away, before it was light, on the New York flier. Oh, it was a turrible night, Mr. Downes ... I’ve seen things happenin’ here for forty years, but nothin’ like last night ... nothin’ ever.”
He began to moan and call on the Lord, and Philip remembered suddenly that the half-finished drawing of Lily Shane had disappeared. She had carried it off then, without a word. And slowly she again began to take possession of his imagination. For a moment he tried to picture her house in Paris where his drawing of her would be hung. She had gone away without giving him another thought.
Hennery was saying over and over again, “It was a turrible night ... something must-a happened in the house too. The Devil sure was on the rampage.”
He stood there, staring out of the window, suffering from a curious, sick feeling of having been deserted. “By what? By whom?” he asked himself. “Not by Lily Shane, surely, on whom I had no claims ... whom I barely knew.” Yet it was Lily Shane who had deserted him. It was as if she had closed a door behind her, shutting him back into the world of Elmer and his mother and Jason Downes. The thing he had glimpsed for a moment was only an illusion....
19
When Hennery had gone off muttering to himself, Philip put on his coat and went out, for the room had become suddenly unendurable to him. He did not know why, but all at once he hated it, this room where he had been happy for the first time since he was a child. It turned suddenly cold and desolate and hauntingly empty. Running down the stairs, he hurried across the soiled snow, avoiding the dark stain by the decaying arbor. He went by that same instinct which always drove him when he was unhappy towards the furnaces and the engines, and at Hennessey’s corner he turned toward the district where the tents stood. They presented an odd, bedraggled appearance now, still housing the remnant of workers who had fought to the end, all that little army which had met the night before in the park of Shane’s Castle. Here and there a deserted tent had collapsed in the dirty snow. Piles of rubbish and filth cluttered the muddy field on every side. Men, women and children stood in little groups, frightened and helpless and bedraggled, all the spirit gone out of them. There was no more work for them now. Wherever they went, no mill would take them in. They had no homes, no money, no food....
Lost among them, he came presently to feel less lonely, for it was here that he belonged—in this army of outcasts—a sort of pariah in the world that should have been his own.
At the door of one of the tents, he recognized Sokoleff. The Ukranian had let his beard grow and he held a child of two in his arms—a child with great hollow eyes and blue lips. Sokoleff, who was always drunk and laughing, was sober now, with a look of misery in his eyes. Philip shook his free hand in silence, and then said, “You heard about Krylenko?”
“No, I ain’t heard nothin’. I’ve been waitin’ for him. I gotta tell him a piece of bad news.”