In the Town tremendous changes occurred with the passing of years. There was a panic which threatened the banks. There were menacing rumors of violence and discontent in the Flats; and these things affected the Town enormously, as depressions in the market for wheat and cattle had once affected it. No longer was there any public market. On the Square at the top of Main Street, the old scales for weighing hay and grain were removed as a useless symbol of a buried past, a stumbling block in the way of progress. Opposite the site once occupied by the scales, the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks purchased the Grand Western Hotel and made it into a club house with a great elk’s head in cast iron over the principal doorway. Through its windows, it was possible in passing to see fat men with red faces, coats off and perspiring, while they talked of progress and prosperity and the rising place of the Town among the cities of the state. One by one the old landmarks of the Square vanished, supplanted by “smokehouses,” picture palaces with fronts like frosted pastries, candy shops run by Greeks, a new element in the growing alien population of the Town. On the far side of the square the tower of the courthouse, itself a monument to graft, was at last completed to the enrichment of Judge Weissman and other politicians who had to do with the contract.
In the early evening after the sun had disappeared, the figure of the Judge himself might be seen, ambulating about the square, hugging the shadows; for the heat was bad for a man so red-faced and apoplectic. For all his avoidance of the sun, he walked arrogantly, with the air of one proud of his work. When he had tired of the promenade, it was his custom to return to the Elks’ club to squeeze his body between the arms of a rocking chair and sit watching the passers-by and the noisy bustle of trade. At such moments one might hear the sound of money dripping into tills as one heard the distant sound of the Mills which in the evening penetrated as far as the square itself. He gloated openly over the prosperity to which he had contributed so much. He went his way, petty, dishonest, corrupt ... traits which even his enemies forgave him because he had “done so much to make the Town what it was.” Not since the piggish obstinacy of Charles Tolliver had he been thwarted, and even in the matter of the taxes the sympathy of the Town had been on his side, because the decision in the case had delayed the building of new furnaces for more than two years and thus halted the arrival of hundreds of new alien workers who would have made the Town the third largest in the state. Charles Tolliver, most people believed, had been piggish and obstinate. He had put himself between his own Town and its booming prosperity.
XXXII
IN the Flats, as the years passed, new tides of immigrants swept in, filling the abominable dirty houses to suffocation, adding to the garbage and refuse which already clogged the sluggish waters of the Black Fork. The men worked twelve hours and sometimes longer in the Mills. The women wore shawls over their heads and bore many children, most of whom died amid the smoke and filth. Here the Town overlooked one opportunity. With a little effort it might have saved the lives of these babies to feed to the Mills later on; but it was simpler to import more cheap labor from Europe. Let those die who could not live.
And none of these new residents learned to speak English. They clung to their native tongues. They were simply colonists transplanted, unchanged and unchanging, from Poland, Ukrainia, South Italy and the Balkans—nothing more, nothing less. The Town had nothing to do with them. They were pariahs, outcasts, “Hunkies,” “Dagos,” and the Town held it against them that they did not learn English and join in the vast chorus of praise to prosperity.
But trouble became more frequent nowadays. Willie Harrison no longer dared take his exercise by walking alone up the hill to the Town. The barricade of barbed wire was complete now. It surrounded the Mills on all sides, impregnable, menacing. It crowded the dead hedges of arbor vitæ that enclosed the park at Shane’s Castle. There had been no need for it yet. It was merely waiting.
Welcome House, the tentative gesture of a troubled civic conscience, went down beneath the waves of prosperity. Volunteer citizens no longer ventured into the troubled area of the Flats. Money ceased to flow in for its support. It dropped at length from the rank of an institution supported by a community to the rank of a school supported by one woman and one man. The woman was Irene Shane. The man was Stepan Krylenko. The woman was rich. The man was a Mill worker who toiled twelve hours a day and gave six hours more to the education of his fellow workers.
The years and the great progress had been no more kind to Irene than they had been to the Town. She aged ... dryly, after the fashion of spinsters who have diverted the current of life from its wide course into a single narrow channel of feverish activity. She grew thinner and more pale. There were times when the blue veins showed beneath the transparent skin like the rivers of a schoolboy’s map. Her pale blond hair lost its luster and grew thin and straight, because she had not time and even less desire to care for it. Her hands were red and worn with the work she did in helping the babies of the Flats to live. She dressed the same, always in a plain gray suit and ugly black hat, which she replaced when they became worn and shabby. But in replacing them, she ignored the changing styles. The models remained the same, rather outmoded and grotesque, so that in the Town they rewarded her for her work among the poor by regarding her as queer and something of a figure of fun.
Yet she retained a certain virginal look, and in her eye there was a queer exalted light. Since life is impossible without compensations of one sort or another, it is probable that Irene had her share of these. She must have found peace in her work and satisfaction in the leader she molded from the tow haired boy who years before had shouted insults at her through the wrought iron gates of Shane’s Castle.
For Krylenko had grown into a remarkable man. He spoke English perfectly. He worked with Irene, a leader among his own people. He taught the others. He read Jean Jacques Rousseau, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, and even Voltaire ... books which Irene bought him in ignorance of their flaming contents. At twenty-five Stepan Krylenko was a leader in the district, and in the Town there were men of property who had heard vaguely of him as a disturber, an anarchist, a madman, a Socialist, a criminal.