The Green Bay Tree (Bromfield, Frederick A. Stokes Company, printing 11)/Chapter 45
A LITTLE while later, Lily herself went down the snow covered drive and summoned a passing boy whom she sent into the Flats in search of Irene, since she herself dared not venture among the sullen strikers. After two hours, he returned to say he could find no trace of the sister. So it was not until Irene returned at midnight that's he learned her mother was dead. She received the news coldly enough, perhaps because in those days death and suffering meant so little to her; but even Lily must have seen the faint glimmer of triumph that entered her sister's pale, red-rimmed eyes at the news that she was free at last.
Just before dawn when the searchlights, swinging their gigantic arcs over the Flats, pierced the quiet solitude of Lily's room and wakened her, she heard through the mist of sleep the voice of Irene praying in her room for mercy upon the soul of their mother. For a second, she raised her head in an attitude of listening, and then sank back and quickly fell asleep, her rosy face pillowed on her white bare arm, her bright hair all loose and shining in the sudden flashes of reflected light.
The Town newspapers published long obituaries of Julia Shane, whole columns which gave the history of her family, the history of John Shane, so far as it was known, and the history of Cypress Hill. In death it seemed that Julia Shane reflected credit in some way upon the Town. She gave it a kind of distinction just as the Cyclops Mills or any other remarkable institution gave it distinction. The newspapers treated her as if she were good advertising copy. The obituaries included lists of celebrated people who had been guests at Cypress Hill. Presidents were mentioned, an ambassador, and the Governor who was now a senator. They remarked that Julia Shane was the granddaughter of the man who gave the Town its name. For a single day Cypress Hill regained its lost and splendid prestige. Newcomers in the Town, superintendents and clerks from the idle Mills, learned for the first time the history of Shane's Castle, all but the scandalous stories about John Shane which were omitted as unsuitable material for an obituary. Besides no one really knew whether they were true or not.
And despite all this vulgar fanfare, it was clear that a great lady had passed, one who in her day had been a sovereign, but one whose day had passed with the coming of the Mills and the vulgar, noisy aristocracy of progress and prosperity.
The obituaries ended with the sentence, "Mrs. Shane is survived by two unmarried daughters, Irene, who resides at Cypress Hill, and Lily who for some ten years has made her home in Paris. Both were with their mother at the time of her passing."
It was this last sentence which interested the older residents. Lily, who for some ten years has made her home in Paris. Both were with their mother at the time of her passing. How much lay hidden and mysterious in those two lines. Until the publishing of the obituary, the Town had known nothing of Lily's return.
At five o'clock on the afternoon of the funeral Willie Harrison sat in his mother's bedroom in the sandstone house giving her a detailed account of the funeral. Outside the snow fell in drifting clouds, driven before a wind which howled wildly among the ornamental cupolas and projections of the ugly house. Inside the air hung warm and stifling, touched by the pallid odor of the sickroom. It was a large square room constructed with a great effect of solidity, and furnished with heavy, expensive furniture upholstered in dark red plush. The walls were tan and the woodwork of birch stained a deep mahogany color. Above the ornate mantelpiece hung an engraved portrait of the founder of the Mills and of the Harrison fortune . . . Julis Harrison, coarse, powerful, beetle-browed, his heavy countenance half-buried beneath a thick chin beard. The engraving was surrounded by a wide frame of bright German gilt; it looked down upon the room with the gaze of one who has wrought a great success out of nothing by the sweat of his brow and labor of bulging muscles, as once he had hammered crude metal into links and links into chains in the blacksmith shop which stood upon the spot now occupied by the oldest of the furnaces. It was a massive awkward room, as much like a warehouse as like a boudoir or a bedroom. It suited admirably the face in the portrait and the heavy body of the old woman who lay in the mahogany bed, helpless and ill-tempered beneath a second stroke of paralysis.
The son sat awkwardly on the edge of the red plush sofa near the mother. As he grew older, his manner became more and more uneasy in the presence of the old woman. His hair had grown thinner and on the temples there were new streaks of gray. There was something withered about him, something incomplete and unfinished like an apple that has begun to shrink before it has reached maturity. In the massive room, beneath the gaze of the overwhelming portrait, beside the elephantine bed in which he was conceived and born of the heavy old woman, Willie Harrison was a curiosity, a mouse born of a mountain in labor. He was the son of parents who were both quite masculine.
In a strange fit of forgetfulness he had worn his heavy overshoes into the sacred precincts of his mother's bedroom and they now lay beside him on the floor where he had placed them timidly when his mother commanded him to remove them lest his feet become overheated and tender, thus rendering him liable to sudden colds. Indeed, since the very beginning of the strike Willie had not been well. The struggle appeared to weigh him down. Day by day he grew paler and more nervous. He rarely smiled, and a host of new fine lines appeared upon his already withered countenance. Yet he had gone through the blowing snow and the bitter cold to the cemetery, partly at the command of his mother who was unable to go and partly because he had hoped to see Lily once more, if only for a moment by the side of an open grave.
And now Mrs. Julis Harrison, lying helpless upon her broad back, waited to hear the account of the funeral. She lay with her head oddly cocked on one side in order to see her son. Her speech came forth mumbled and broken by the paralysis.
"Were there many there?" she asked.
"Only a handful," replied her son in his thin voice. "Old William Baines . . . you know, the old man, the Shane's family lawyer. . . ."
"Yes," interrupted his mother. "An old fogy . . . who ought to have died ten years ago."
William Harrison must have been used to interruptions of this sort from his mother. He continued, "One or two church people and the two girls. It was frightfully cold on top of that bald hill. The coffin was covered with snow the moment it was lowered into the grave."
"Poor Julia," muttered the woman on the bed. "She lived too long. She lost interest in life." This remark she uttered with the most mournful of intonations. On the verge of the grave herself, she still maintained a lively interest in deaths and funerals.
"I'm glad you went," she added presently. "It shows there was no feeling, no matter how bad Julia treated me. It shows that I forgave her. People knew I couldn't go."
There was a long pause punctuated by the loud monotonous ticking of the brass clock. Outside the wind whistled among the cornices.
"She must have left a great deal of money," observed Mrs. Harrison. "More than a couple of millions, I shouldn't wonder. They haven't spent anything in the last ten years."
Willie Harrison lighted a cigarette. "Except Irene," he said. "She has been giving money to the strikers. Everybody knows that."
"But that's her own," said his mother. "It has nothing to do with what Julia left." She stirred restlessly. "Please, Willie, will you not smoke in here. I can't bear the smell of tobacco."
Willie extinguished the cigarette and finding no place in the whole room where he might dispose of the remains, he thrust them silently into his pocket.
"I asked her at the funeral if it was true," he said. "And she told me it was none of my business . . . that she would give everything she possessed if she saw fit."
Mrs. Harrison grunted, "It's that Krylenko," she observed. "That's who it is. Don't tell me she'd give away her money for love of the strikers. No Shane ever gave his fortune to the or."
The clock again ticked violently and without interruption for a long time.
"And Lily," said Mrs. Harrison presently.
Willie began fumbling with the ruby clasp on his watch chain, slipping it backward and forward nervously.
"She's just the same," he said. "Just the same. . . . Younger if anything. It's surprising how she keeps so young. I asked her to come and see you and she wanted to know if you had asked her to. I said you had and then she smiled a little and asked, 'Is it for curiosity? You can tell her how I look. You can tell her I'm happy.' That was all. I don't suppose she'll ever come back to the Town again after this time."
This Mrs. Harrison pondered for a time. At last she said, "I guess it's just as well she wouldn't have you. There's something bad about her. She couldn't be so young and happy if she was just an old maid. I guess after all you're better off. They have bad blood in 'em. It comes from old John Shane."
Willie winced at the bluntness of his mother's speech and attempted to lead her into other paths. "There was no trouble in the Flats to-day. None of the strikers came into Halsted street. Everything was quiet all day. The superintendent says it was on account of the old woman's funeral."
"You see," said Mrs. Harrison. "It's that Krylenko. I can't understand it . . . how a frumpish old maid like Irene can twist him around her finger."
Willie stopped fumbling with his chain. "She's made a weapon of him to fight us."
Mrs. Harrison shook her massive head with a negative gesture.
"Oh, no," she said, speaking slowly and painfully. "It may look like that, but she never thought it out. She isn't smart enough. Neither of them is, Irene or Lily. I've known them since they were little girls. They both do what they can't help doing. Julia might have done such a thing but I'm certain it mever occurred to her. Besides," she added after a little pause, "she's dead and buried now."
"She came to hate us before she died," persisted Willie.
"Yes . . . that's true enough. I guess she did hate us . . . ever since that affair over the taxes."
Willie clung to his idea. "But don't you see. It's all worked out just the same, just as if they had planned it on purpose. It's the second time they have cost the Mills thousands of dollars."
This, somehow, Mrs. Harrison found herself unable to deny.
"Tell me," she said presently. "How did they appear to take it? . . . Lily and Irene?"
Willie was once more fumbling with the ruby clasp. "I don't know. Irene wasn't even dressed in mourning. She had on the same old gray suit and black hat. She looked like acrow. As for Lily, she was able to smile when she spoke to me. But you can't tell how she feels about anything. She always smiles."
After this little speech Willie rose and began to move about the room, fingering nervously the sparsely placed ornaments—a picture of himself as an anemic child with long, yellow curls, a heavy brass inkwell, a small copy in marble of the tomb of Scipio Africanus, the single memento of a voyage to Rome. He drifted over toward the window and drew aside the curtain to look out into the storm.