He wondered why she had told him something which he already knew. But he was kind to her, and tried not to seem different, in any way, from what he had always been. He was sorry for Naomi more than ever since her life had become such an empty, colorless thing.
At last he was finished, and thanking her again, he left her helping Essie to clear away the table, and went upstairs with a strange feeling that she had stayed behind to help only because she didn’t want to be alone with him.
Undressing, he lay for a long time in the darkness, unable to sleep because of the acuteness which seemed to attack all his senses. He heard every small noise in the street—the cries of the children playing in the glare of the arc-lights, the barking of dogs, the distant tinkle of a piano. Slowly, because he was very tired, the sounds grew more and more distant, and he fell asleep.
He slept profoundly, as a man drowned in the long exhaustion of the Mills. He was awakened by something touching him gently at first, as if it were part of a dream. It touched him again and then again, and slowly he drifted back to consciousness. Being a man of nerves, he awakened quickly, all at once. There was no slow drowsiness and clinging mists of slumber.
He opened his eyes, but the room was in complete blackness, and he saw nothing. It must have been late, for even the sounds of the street had died away, to leave only the long pounding of the Mills that was like the silence. Somewhere, close at hand, there was a sound of breathing. For a second he thought, “I have died in my sleep.”
Then the thing touched him again. It was a bit of metal, cold and rigid, not longer than a finger. And in a sudden flash he knew what it was—a metal hair-curler. The thing brushed his forehead. He knew then, quickly. It was Naomi come to him to be his wife. She was bending over him. The darkness hid her face. She made no sound. It was unreal, like something out of a dream.
13
In the Mills Philip had come to know the men who worked at his oven, one by one, slowly, for they were at first suspicious of him as a native from the Hills who came to work among them. It was Krylenko more than any of them who broke down the barrier which shut him away from all those others. Krylenko, he came presently to understand, was a remarkable fellow. He was young, not perhaps more than twenty-five or six, a giant even among the big Poles, who worked with the strength of three ordinary men. There was a magnificence about his great body, with its supple muscles flowing beneath the blond, white skin. Naked to the waist, and leaning on his great bar of iron, there were times when he seemed a statue cut in the finest Parian marble. It was this odd, physical splendor that gave him a prestige and the power of leadership, which would have come to nothing in a stupid man; but Krylenko was intelligent, and hidden within the intelligence there lay a hard kernel of peasant shrewdness. He knew what it was he wanted and he was not to be turned aside; he was, Philip had come to understand, partly the creation of Irene Shane, that pale, transparent wraith, who spent all her days between the Flats and the great, gloomy house known as Shane’s Castle. She had found him in her night class, a big Russian boy with a passion for learning things, and she had taken him to help her. She had perhaps discerned the odd thing about Krylenko, which set him apart from the others, that he had a vision. He had no ambition for himself, but his queer, mystical mind was constantly illuminated by wonderful plans of what he might do for his people. By this, he did not mean his own country people, but all the hordes of workers who dwelt in the rows of black houses and spent half their lives in the Mills. To him they were, quite simply, brothers—all the Poles, the Lithuanians, the Italians, the Croats, even the negroes who came up from the South to die slowly working over the acid vats. In his own Slavic way he had caught a sense of that splendor of the Mills which sometimes overwhelmed Philip. Only Krylenko saw, what was quite true, that the people in the Flats belonged to another world from those on the Hill. They made up a nation within a nation, a hostile army surrounded and besieged.
He meant to help his people to freedom, even by doing battle, if circumstance demanded it. At times there was about him the splendor of the ancient prophets.
It was for this reason that he stayed in the pounding-sheds, as a simple foreman, refusing to go elsewhere, though he could have had after a time one of the easy places in the shipping-rooms. He might have been one of those men who, “working their way from the bottom of the ladder,” turned to oppress his own people. There were plenty of shrewd, hard-headed, pitiless men like that—men such as Frick and Carnegie, who had interests in these very Mills. Only he wasn’t concerned for himself. He had a queer, stupid, pig-headed idea of helping the men about him; and he was one of those fantastic men to whom Justice was also God.