Page:The Green Bay Tree (1926).pdf/182

 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.