“I was to tell him, but nobody’s seen him. I’m damned glad he’s went away now. I won’t have the goddamned dirty job. He’ll be crazy ... crazy as hell.”
And then Philip saw her again as he had seen her the night before, lying face down in the snow ... Krylenko’s Giulia.
“She oughtn’t to have went up there,” Sokoleff was saying. “But she was nuts on him ... she thought that he was the best guy on earth, and she wanted to hear his speech....” The bearded Slovak spat into the snow. “I guess that was the last thing she ever heard. She musta died happy.... That’s better than livin’ like this.”
And Krylenko had been hiding in Shane’s Castle all night while Giulia lay dead in the snow outside.
The sick baby began to cry, and Sokoleff stroked its bare head with a calloused paw covered by black hair.
All at once Philip was happy again; even in the midst of all the misery about him, he was gloriously, selfishly happy, because he knew that, whatever happened, he had known what Krylenko had lost now forever. He thought suddenly, “The jungle at Megambo was less cruel and savage than this world about me.”
20
To Jason Downes the tragedy in the park of Shane’s Castle had only one significance—that it tarnished all the glory of his astonishing return. When the papers appeared in the morning, the first pages were filled with the news of “the riot precipitated by strikers last night.” It recounted the death of a Pole and of Giulia Rizzo, and announced triumphantly that the strike was broken at last. And far back, among the advertisements of Peruna and Lydia Pinkham’s Compound, there appeared a brief paragraph or two announcing the return of Jason Downes, and touching upon the remarkable story of his accident and consequent loss of memory. There were, doubtless, people who never saw it at all.
But he made the most of his return, walking the round of all the cigar-stores and poker-rooms which he had haunted in his youth. He even went to Hennessey’s saloon, beginning to thrive again on the money of the strike-breakers. But he found no great triumph, for he discovered only one or two men who had ever known him and to the others he was only Emma Downes’ husband, whom they barely noticed in the excitement of discussing the riots of the night before. Even his dudishness had dated during those long twenty-six years: he must have heard the titters that went up from poolroom loafers at the sight of the faun-colored vest, the waxed mustaches and the tan derby. He was pushed aside at bars and thrust into the corner in the poolrooms.
Half in desperation, he went at last to find an audience in the group of old men who sat all day about the stove of McTavish’s undertaking-parlors. They were old: they would remember who he was. But even there the clamor of the tragedy drowned his tale. He found the place filled with Italians—the father and the seven orphaned brothers and sisters of Giulia Rizzo. The father wept and wrung his hands. The older children joined him, and the four youngest huddled dumbly in a corner. It was Jason’s own son, Philip, who was trying to quiet them. He nodded to his father, gave him a sudden glance of contempt, and then disappeared with McTavish into the back room where the undertaker had prepared Giulia for her last rest. For a moment Jason hung about hopefully, and then, confused and depressed by the ungoverned emotions of the Italians, he slipped out of the door, and up the street toward the Peerless Restaurant. He was like a bedraggled bantam rooster which had lost its proud tail-feathers, but as he approached the restaurant he grew a bit more jaunty: there was always Em who thought him wonderful....