A Good Woman (Bromfield)/Part 2/Chapter 19
In the Flats the number of deaths began to mount one by one with the passing of each day. When disease appeared in any of the black, decaying houses, it had its way, taking now a child, now a wife, now a husband, for bodies that were overworked and undernourished had small chance of life in a region where the very air stank and the only stream was simply an open sewer. Doctors came and went, sometimes too carelessly, for there was small chance of pay, and to the people on the Hill the life of a worker was worth little. The creatures of the Flats were somehow only a sort of mechanical animal which produced and produced and went on producing.
The churches went on sending missionaries and money to the most remote corners of the earth; the clergymen prayed for the safety of their own flocks, while their congregations sat frightened and resentful, believing that somehow the people in the Flats had caused the catastrophe. It could not be (they reasoned) that God would send such a calamity upon a Town so God-fearing.
Irene Shane and Mary Conyngham closed their school because there was no longer any time to teach when people were ill and dying to right and left. Mary sat night after night at the beds of the dying. She saw one of Finke's thirteen children die and then another and another. She listened to his cursing and drunken talk of revolution, and all the while she knew bitterly enough that those of the family who remained would be happier because they would have more to eat.
The Mills went on pounding and pounding; they were building new furnaces and new sheds. There seemed no end to it. It did not matter if people in the Flats died like flies, because there were always more where they came from—hordes of men and women and children who came filled with glorified hopes to this new country.
One day Mary read in the papers that the man who owned the Mills, himself a German immigrant, had built himself a marble palace on Fifth Avenue and would now divide his time between Pittsburgh and New York. He was becoming a gentleman: he had engaged an expert, a cultivated man of taste, to fill his New York house with pictures brought from Europe. The Town Gazette printed an editorial drawing a moral from the career of the great magnate. See what could be done in this great land of God-given opportunity! A man who had begun as an immigrant. But it said nothing of the foundations on which the marble palace rested. It appeared to have arisen miraculously with the aid and sanction of God, innocent of all connection with the stinking Flats.
Mary, watching the spectacle about her, felt her heart turning to stone. If she was to be saved from bitterness, it would only be, she believed, through the touching faith of the ignorant wretches about her. She came to feel a sympathy for the cursing of a man like Finke: she herself even wanted at times to curse. She understood the sullen drunkenness of men like Sokoleff. What else was there for them to do? Something—perhaps a sense of dull misery, perhaps a terror of death—had slowly softened their resentment toward herself and Irene Shane. Once they had been looked upon as intruders come down from the Hills to poke about in filthy hallways and backyards filled with piles of rubbish and rows of privies. But it was no lenger possible to doubt them. The two women, gently bred and fastidious, slept night after night at the school in the midst of the Flats. They sat up night after night by the beds of the dying.
There were times when Mary wondered why Irene Shane poured out all her strength in succoring these wretched people. She sensed deep in Irene a strange kind of unearthly mysticism which made her seem at times stubborn and irritable. It was a mysticism strangely akin to that groping hunger which had always tormented Philip. The likeness came to her suddenly one night as she sat by the bed of one of Finke's dying children. It seemed to her a strange and inexplicable likeness in people so different. Yet it was true—they were both concerned with shadowy problems of faith and service to God which never troubled the more practical Mary. And Irene, she fancied, was prey to a sense of atonement, as if she must in some way answer to God for the wickedness of a father long dead and a sister who was, as the Town phrased it, "not all she should have been." There was, too, that hard, bitter old woman who lay dying and never left Shane's Castle—old Julia Shane, the queen ant of all the swarming hive.
As for herself, Mary knew well enough why she had come to work in the Flats: she had come in order to bury herself in some task so mountainous and hopeless that it would help her to forget the aching hurt made by John Conyngham's behavior with Mamie Rhodes. It required a cure far more vigorous even than a house and two children to make her forget a thing like that.
She had been, people said, a fool to put up with such behavior. But what was she to do? There were the children and there was her own devotion to John Conyngham, a thing which he had thrown carelessly aside. It wasn't even as if you suffered in secret: in the Town a thing like that couldn't be kept a secret. The very newsboys knew of it. She had found a sort of salvation in working with Irene Shane. People said she was crazy, a woman with two small children, to go about working among Hunkies and Dagoes; but she took good care of her children, too, and she supplied the people in the Flats with what no amount of such mystical devotion as Irene Shane could supply: she had a sound practical head.
She was an odd girl (she thought) when you came to consider it, with a kind of curse on her. She had to have some one to whom she could give herself up completely, pouring out all the soul in a fantastic devotion. John Conyngham had tired of it, perhaps (she sometimes thought) because he was a cold, hard, sensual man who had no need for such a thing. A woman like Mamie Rhodes (she thought bitterly) suited him better. If she had been married to Philip, who needed it so pathetically. . . .
In the long nights of vigil, she thought round and round in circles, over the same paths again and again. . . . And before many nights had passed she found herself coming back always to the thing she knew and tried constantly to forget . . . that it had been Philip whom she loved always, since those very first days in the tree-house. It seemed to her that at twenty-eight her life, save for her children, was already at an end. She was a widow with only memories of an unhappy married life behind her and nothing to hope for in the future. Philip was married and, so Krylenko told her, about to have a child of his own. She didn't even know whether he even thought of her. And yet, she told herself, fiercely, she did know. He had belonged to her always, and she knew it more than ever while they had sat on the bridge, during that solitary walk into the open country.
Philip was hers, and he was such a fool that he would never know it. He was always lost in mooning about things that didn't matter. She could save him: she could set straight his muddles and moonings. He needed some one who thought less of God and more of making a good pie and keeping his socks darned.
She herself had never thought much about God save when her children were born and her husband died, and even then she had been only brushed by a consciousness of some vast and overwhelming personal force. Life, even with its pain, seemed a satisfactory affair: there was always so much to be done, and it wasn't God that Philip needed but pies and socks and a woman who believed in him.
She knew every day whether he was better or worse and she found herself, for the first time in all her life, praying to God to spare his life. She didn't know whether there was a God or whether He would listen to one who only petitioned when she was in need, but she prayed none the less, believing that if there was any God, He would understand why it was she turned to Him. If He did not understand, she told herself rebelliously, then He was not worthy of existing as God.
She did not go to the slate-colored house, though she did ask for news on one occasion when she met Emma in the street. She understood that Emma had resented her friendship for Philip, even when they were children, and so avoided seeming to show any great interest. But she heard, nevertheless, sometimes from Krylenko who had even gone to the door to inquire, and sometimes from the doctor, but most of the time it was McTavish who kept her informed.
McTavish was the only person whom she suspected of guessing her secret.
After she had stopped day after day at his undertaking-parlors, he looked at her sharply one day out of his humorous little blue eyes, and said, "If Philip gets better, we've got to help him." Then he hesitated for a moment and added, "Those two women are very bad for him."
He was, she understood, feeling his way. When she agreed, by not protesting, he went on, "You ought to have married him, Mary, when you had a chance."
"I never had a chance."
"I thought perhaps you had. . . . I understand. She began her dirty work too soon."
Mary knew well enough whom he meant by "she." It struck her that he seemed to hate Emma Downes with an extraordinary intensity.
"Still it may work out yet," he said. "Sometimes things like that are a little better for waiting."
She did not answer him, but spoke about the weather, and thanked him and said good-by, but she felt a sudden warmth take possession of all her body. "Still it may work out yet." He never spoke of it again, but when she came in on her way up the hill, he always looked at her in the same eloquent fashion. It was odd, too, that the look seemed to comfort her: it made her feel less alone.
It was from Krylenko that she first heard news of the catastrophe that was coming: he told her and Irene Shane, perhaps because he had confidence in them, but more, perhaps, because he knew that in the end they were the only ones beyond the borders of the Flats to whom he might look for sympathy. The news frightened her at first because there had never been any strike in the Town and because she knew that there was certain to be violence and suffering and perhaps even death. She understood that the spirit which moved the big Ukranian was an eternal force of the temper which had made bloodshed and revolution since the beginning of time. It shone in his blue eyes—the light of fanaticism for a cause. The thing, he said, had been brewing for a long time: any one with half an intelligence could have seen it coming. And Mary knew more than most, for she knew of the hasty, secret meetings in the room over Hennessey's saloon with men who came into the Town and out again like shadows. She watched the curious light in Krylenko's eyes in turn kindle a light in the pale eyes of an unecstatic old maid like Irene Shane. She felt the thing spreading all about her like a fire in the thick underbrush of a forest. It seemed to increase as the plague of typhoid began to abate. In some mysterious way it even penetrated the secure world settled upon the Seven Hills.
She had, too, a trembling sense of treason toward those whom the Town would have called her own people—but her heart leaped on the day when Krylenko told her that Philip, too, was on their side. He was, the Ukranian said, a member of the new Union: they had celebrated his joining months ago at Hennessey's saloon. It made Philip seem nearer to her, as if he belonged not at all to the two women who guarded him. Krylenko told her on the day when every one was certain that Philip was dying, and it served to soften the numb pain which seemed to blind her to all else in the world.
In the afternoon of the same day, Irene Shane said to her, "My mother is dying, and I've cabled to my sister, Lily, to come home."