“Addio!” he said. “I shall look for you. For the present I must remain here, with the Committee.”
When Janet reached Faber Street she halted on the corner of Stanley to stare into the window of the glorified drugstore. But she gave no heed to the stationery, the cameras and candy displayed there, being in the emotional state that reduces to unreality objects of the commonplace, everyday world. Presently, however, she became aware of a man standing beside her.
“Haven't we met before?” he asked. “Or—can I be mistaken?”
Some oddly familiar quizzical note in his voice stirred, as she turned to him, a lapsed memory. The hawklike yet benevolent and illuminating look he gave her recalled the man at Silliston whom she had thought a carpenter though he was dressed now in a warm suit of gray wool, and wore a white, low collar.
“In Silliston!” she exclaimed. “Why—what are you doing here?”
“Well—this instant I was just looking at those notepapers, wondering which I should choose if I really had good taste. But it's very puzzling—isn't it?—when one comes from the country. Now that saffron with the rough edges is very—artistic. Don't you think so?”
She looked at him and smiled, though his face was serious.
“You don't really like it, yourself,” she informed him.
“Now you're reflecting on my taste,” he declared.
“Oh no—it's because I saw the fence you were making. Is it finished yet?”
“I put the last pineapple in place the day before Christmas. Do you remember the pineapples?”
She nodded. “And the house? and the garden?”
“Oh, those will never be finished. I shouldn't have anything more to do.”
“Is that—all you do?” she asked.
“It's more important than anything else. But you have you been back to Silliston since I saw you? I've been waiting for another call.”
“You haven't even thought of me since,” she was moved to reply in the same spirit.
“Haven't I?” he exclaimed. “I wondered, when I came up here to Hampton, whether I mightn't meet you—and here you are! Doesn't that prove it?”
She laughed, somewhat surprised at the ease with which he had diverted her, drawn her out of the tense, emotional mood in which he had discovered her. As before, he puzzled her, but the absence of any flirtatious suggestion in his talk gave her confidence. He was just friendly.
“Sometimes I hoped I might see you in Hampton,” she ventured.
“Well, here I am. I heard the explosion, and came.”
“The explosion! The strike!” she exclaimed; suddenly enlightened. “Now I remember! You said something about Hampton being nitro-glycerine—human nitro-glycerine. You predicted this strike.”
“Did I? perhaps I did,” he assented. “Maybe you suggested the idea.”
“I suggested it! Oh no, I didn't—it was new to me, it frightened me at the time, but it started me thinking about a lot of things that had never occurred to me.”
“You might have suggested the idea without intending to, you know. There are certain people who inspire prophecies—perhaps you are one.”
His tone was playful, but she was quick to grasp at an inference—since his glance was fixed on the red button she wore.
“You meant that I would explode, too!”
“Oh no—nothing so terrible as that,” he disclaimed. “And yet most of us have explosives stored away inside of us—instincts, impulses and all that sort of thing that won't stand too much bottling-up.”
“Yes, I've joined the strike.” She spoke somewhat challengingly, though she had an uneasy feeling that defiance was somewhat out of place with him. “I suppose you think it strange, since I'm not a foreigner and haven't worked in the mills. But I don't see why that should make any difference if you believe that the workers haven't had a chance.”
“No difference,” he agreed, pleasantly, “no difference at all.”
“Don't you sympathize with the strikers?” she insisted. “Or—are you on the other side, the side of the capitalists?”
“I? I'm a spectator—an innocent bystander.”
“You don't sympathize with the workers?” she cried.
“Indeed I do. I sympathize with everybody.”
“With the capitalists?”
“Why not?”
“Why not? Because they've had everything their own way, they've exploited the workers, deceived and oppressed them, taken all the profits.” She was using glibly her newly acquired labour terminology.
“Isn't that a pretty good reason for sympathizing with them?” he inquired.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I should think it might be difficult to be happy and have done all that. At any rate, it isn't my notion of happiness. Is it yours?”
For a moment she considered this.
“No—not exactly,” she admitted. “But they seem happy,” she insisted vehemently, “they have everything they want and they do exactly as they please without considering anybody except themselves. What do they care how many they starve and make miserable? You—you don't know, you can't know what it is to be driven and used and flung away!”
Almost in tears, she did not notice his puzzled yet sympathetic glance.
“The operatives, the workers create all the wealth, and the capitalists take it from them, from their wives and children.”
“Now I know what you've been doing,” he said accusingly. “You've been studying economics.”
Her brow puckered.
“Studying what?”
“Economics—the distribution of wealth. It's enough to upset anybody.”
“But I'm not upset,” she insisted, smiling in spite of herself at his comical concern.
“It's very exciting. I remember reading a book once on economics and such things, and I couldn't sleep for a week. It was called 'The Organization of Happiness,' I believe, and it described just how the world ought to be arranged—and isn't. I thought seriously of going to Washington and telling the President and Congress about it.”
“It wouldn't have done any good,” said Janet.
“No, I realized that.”
“The only thing that will do any good is to strike and keep on striking until the workers own the mills—take everything away from the capitalists.”
“It's very simple,” he agreed, “much simpler than the book I read. That's what they call syndicalism, isn't it?”
“Yes.” She was conscious of his friendliness, of the fact that his skepticism was not cynical, yet she felt a strong desire to convince him, to vindicate her new creed. “There's a man named Rolfe, an educated man who's lived in Italy and England, who explains it wonderfully. He's one of the I.W.W. leaders—you ought to hear him.”
“Rolfe converted you? I'll go to hear him.”
“Yes—but you have to feel it, you have to know what it is to be kept down and crushed. If you'd only stay here awhile.”
“Oh, I intend to,” he replied.
She could not have said why, but she felt a certain relief on hearing this.
“Then you'll see for yourself!” she cried. “I guess that's what you've come for, isn't it?”
“Well, partly. To tell the truth, I've come to open a restaurant.”
“To open a restaurant!” Somehow she was unable to imagine him as the proprietor of a restaurant. “But isn't it rather a bad time?” she gasped.
“I don't look as if I had an eye for business—do I? But I have. No, it's a good time—so many people will be hungry, especially children. I'm going to open a restaurant for children. Oh, it will be very modest, of course—I suppose I ought to call it a soup kitchen.”
“Oh!” she exclaimed, staring at him. “Then you really—” the sentence remained unfinished. “I'm sorry,” she said simply. “You made me think—”
“Oh, you mustn't pay any attention to what I say. Come 'round and see my establishment, Number 77 Dey Street, one flight up, no elevator. Will you?”
She laughed tremulously as he took her hand.
“Yes indeed, I will,” she promised. And she stood awhile staring after him. She was glad he had come to Hampton, and yet she did not even know his name.
CHAPTER XVI
She had got another place—such was the explanation of her new activities Janet gave to Hannah, who received it passively. And the question dreaded about Ditmar was never asked. Hannah had become as a child, performing her tasks by the momentum of habituation, occasionally talking simply of trivial, every-day affairs, as though the old life were going on continuously. At times, indeed, she betrayed concern about Edward, wondering whether he were comfortable at the mill, and she washed and darned the clothes he sent home by messenger. She hoped he would not catch cold. Her suffering seemed to have relaxed. It was as though the tortured portion of her brain had at length been seared. To Janet, her mother's condition when she had time to think of it—was at once a relief and a new and terrible source of anxiety.
Mercifully, however, she had little leisure to reflect on that tragedy, else her own sanity might have been endangered. As soon as breakfast was over she hurried across the city to the Franco-Belgian Hall, and often did not return until nine o'clock at night, usually so tired that she sank into bed and fell asleep. For she threw herself into her new labours with the desperate energy that seeks forgetfulness, not daring to pause to think about herself, to reflect upon what the future might hold for her when the strike should be over. Nor did she confine herself to typewriting, but, as with Ditmar, constantly assumed a greater burden of duty, helping Czernowitz—who had the work of five men—with his accounts, with the distribution of the funds to the ever-increasing number of the needy who were facing starvation. The money was paid out to them in proportion to the size of their families; as the strike became more and more effective their number increased until many mills had closed; other mills, including the Chippering, were still making a desperate attempt to operate their looms, and sixteen thousand operatives were idle. She grew to know these operatives who poured all day long in a steady stream through Headquarters; she heard their stories, she entered into their lives, she made decisions. Some, even in those early days of the strike, were frauds; were hiding their savings; but for the most part investigation revealed an appalling destitution, a resolution to suffer for the worker's cause. A few complained, the majority were resigned; some indeed showed exaltation and fire, were undaunted by the task of picketing in the cold mornings, by the presence of the soldiery. In this work of dealing with the operatives Janet had the advice and help of Anna Mower, a young woman who herself had been a skilled operative in the Clarendon Mill, and who was giving evidence of unusual qualities of organization and leadership. Anna, with no previous practise in oratory, had suddenly developed the gift of making speeches, the more effective with her fellow workers because unstudied, because they flowed directly out of an experience she was learning to interpret and universalize. Janet, who heard her once or twice, admired and envied her. They became friends.
The atmosphere of excitement in which Janet now found herself was cumulative. Day by day one strange event followed another, and at times it seemed as if this extraordinary existence into which she had been plunged were all a feverish dream. Hither, to the absurd little solle de reunion of the Franco-Belgian Hall came notables from the great world, emissaries from an uneasy Governor, delegations from the Legislature, Members of the Congress of the United States and even Senators; students, investigators, men and women of prominence in the universities, magazine writers to consult with uncouth leaders of a rebellion that defied and upset the powers which hitherto had so serenely ruled, unchallenged. Rolfe identified these visitors, and one morning called her attention to one who he said was the nation's foremost authority on social science. Janet possessed all unconsciously the New England reverence for learning, she was stirred by the sight of this distinguished-looking person who sat on the painted stage, fingering his glasses and talking to Antonelli. The two men made a curious contrast. But her days were full of contrasts of which her mood exultingly approved. The politicians were received cavalierly. Toward these, who sought to act as go-betweens in the conflict, Antonelli was contemptuous; he behaved like the general of a conquering army, and his audacity was reflected in the other leaders, in Rolfe, in the Committee itself.
That Committee, a never-ending source of wonder to Janet, with its nine or ten nationalities and interpreters, was indeed a triumph over the obstacles of race and language, a Babel made successful; in a community of Anglo-Saxon traditions, an amazing anomaly. The habiliments of the west, the sack coats and sweaters, the slouch hats and caps, the so-called Derbies pulled down over dark brows and flashing eyes lent to these peasant types an incongruity that had the air of ferocity. The faces of most of them were covered with a blue-black stubble of beard. Some slouched in their chairs, others stood and talked in groups, gesticulating with cigars and pipes; yet a keen spectator, after watching them awhile through the smoke, might have been able to pick out striking personalities among them. He would surely have noticed Froment, the stout, limping man under whose white eyebrows flashed a pair of livid blue and peculiarly Gallic eyes; he held the Belgians in his hand: Lindtzki, the Pole, with his zealot's face; Radeau, the big Canadian in the checked Mackinaw; and Findley, the young American-less by any arresting quality of feature than by an expression suggestive of practical wisdom.
Imagine then, on an afternoon in the middle phase of the strike, some half dozen of the law-makers of a sovereign state, top-hatted and conventionally garbed in black, accustomed to authority, to conferring favours instead of requesting them, climbing the steep stairs and pausing on the threshold of that hall, fingering their watch chains, awaiting recognition by the representatives of the new and bewildering force that had arisen in an historic commonwealth. A “debate” was in progress. Some of the debaters, indeed, looked over their shoulders, but the leader, who sat above them framed in the sylvan setting of the stage, never so much as deigned to glance up from his newspaper. A half-burned cigar rolled between his mobile lips, he sat on the back of his neck, and yet he had an air Napoleonic; Nietzschean, it might better be said—although it is safe to assert that these moulders of American institutions knew little about that terrible philosopher who had raised his voice against the “slave morals of Christianity.” It was their first experience with the superman.... It remained for the Canadian, Radeau, when a lull arrived in the turmoil, to suggest that the gentlemen be given chairs.
“Sure, give them chairs,” assented Antonelli in a voice hoarse from speech-making. Breath-taking audacity to certain spectators who had followed the delegation hither, some of whom could not refrain from speculating whether it heralded the final scrapping of the machinery of the state; amusing to cynical metropolitan reporters, who grinned at one another as they prepared to take down the proceedings; evoking a fierce approval in the breasts of all rebels among whom was Janet. The Legislative Chairman, a stout and suave gentleman of Irish birth, proceeded to explain how greatly concerned was the Legislature that the deplorable warfare within the state should cease; they had come, he declared, to aid in bringing about justice between labour and capital.
“We'll get justice without the help of the state,” remarked Antonelli curtly, while a murmur of approval ran through the back of the hall.
That was scarcely the attitude, said the Chairman, he had expected. He knew that such a strike as this had engendered bitterness, there had been much suffering, sacrifice undoubtedly on both sides, but he was sure, if Mr. Antonelli and the Committee would accept their services here he was interrupted.
Had the mill owners accepted their services?
The Chairman cleared his throat.
The fact was that the mill owners were more difficult to get together in a body. A meeting would be arranged—“When you arrange a meeting, let me know,” said Antonelli.
A laugh went around the room. It was undoubtedly very difficult to keep one's temper under such treatment. The Chairman looked it.
“A meeting would be arranged,” he declared, with a long-suffering expression. He even smiled a little. “In the meantime—”
“What can your committee do?” demanded one of the strike leaders, passionately—it was Findley. “If you find one party wrong, can your state force it to do right? Can you legislators be impartial when you have not lived the bitter life of the workers? Would you arbitrate a question of life and death? And are the worst wages paid in these mills anything short of death? Do you investigate because conditions are bad? or because the workers broke loose and struck? Why did you not come before the strike?”
This drew more approval from the rear. Why, indeed? The Chairman was adroit, he had pulled himself out of many tight places in the Assembly Chamber, but now he began to perspire, to fumble in his coat tails for a handkerchief. The Legislature, he maintained, could not undertake to investigate such matters until called to its attention....
Later on a tall gentleman, whom heaven had not blessed with tact, saw fit to deplore the violence that had occurred; he had no doubt the leaders of the strike regretted it as much as he, he was confident it would be stopped, when public opinion would be wholly and unreservedly on the side of the strikers.
“Public opinion!” savagely cried Lindtzki, who spoke English with only a slight accent. “If your little boy, if your little girl come to you and ask for shoes, for bread, and you say, 'I have no shoes, I have no bread, but public opinion is with us,' would that satisfy you?”
This drew so much applause that the tall law-maker sat down again with a look of disgust on his face.... The Committee withdrew, and for many weeks thereafter the state they represented continued to pay some four thousand dollars daily to keep its soldiers on the streets of Hampton....
In the meanwhile Janet saw much of Rolfe. Owing to his facile command of language he was peculiarly fitted to draft those proclamations, bombastically worded in the French style, issued and circulated by the Strike Committee—appeals to the polyglot army to withstand the pangs of hunger, to hold out for the terms laid down, assurances that victory was at hand. Walking up and down the bibliotheque, his hands behind his back, his red lips gleaming as he spoke, he dictated these documents to Janet. In the ecstasy of this composition he had a way of shaking his head slowly from side to side, and when she looked up she saw his eyes burning, down at her. A dozen times a day, while she was at her other work, he would come in and talk to her. He excited her, she was divided between attraction and fear of him, and often she resented his easy assumption that a tie existed between them—the more so because this seemed to be taken for granted among certain of his associates. In their eyes, apparently, she was Rolfe's recruit in more senses than one. It was indeed a strange society in which she found herself, and Rolfe typified it. He lived on the plane of the impulses and intellect, discarded as inhibiting factors what are called moral standards, decried individual discipline and restraint. And while she had never considered these things, the spectacle of a philosophy—embodied in him—that frankly and cynically threw them overboard was disconcerting. He regarded her as his proselyte, he called her a Puritan, and he seemed more concerned that she should shed these relics of an ancestral code than acquire the doctrines of Sorel and Pouget. And yet association with him presented the allurement of a dangerous adventure. Intellectually he fascinated her; and still another motive—which she partially disguised from herself—prevented her from repelling him. That motive had to do with Ditmar. She tried to put Ditmar from her mind; she sought in desperation, not only to keep busy, but to steep and lose herself in this fierce creed as an antidote to the insistent, throbbing pain that lay ambushed against her moments of idleness. The second evening of her installation at Headquarters she had worked beyond the supper hour, helping Sanders with his accounts. She was loath to go home. And when at last she put on her hat and coat and entered the hall Rolfe, who had been talking to Jastro, immediately approached her. His liquid eyes regarded her solicitously.
“You must be hungry,” he said. “Come out with me and have some supper.”
But she was not hungry; what she needed was air. Then he would walk a little way with her—he wanted to talk to her. She hesitated, and then consented. A fierce hope had again taken possession of her, and when they came to Warren Street she turned into it.
“Where are you going?” Rolfe demanded.
“For a walk,” she said. “Aren't you coming?”
“Will you have supper afterwards?”
“Perhaps.”
He followed her, puzzled, yet piqued and excited by her manner, as with rapid steps she hurried along the pavement. He tried to tell her what her friendship meant to him; they were, he declared, kindred spirits—from the first time he had seen her, on the Common, he had known this. She scarcely heard him, she was thinking of Ditmar; and this was why she had led Rolfe into Warren Street they might meet Ditmar! It was possible that he would be going to the mill at this time, after his dinner! She scrutinized every distant figure, and when they reached the block in which he lived she walked more slowly. From within the house came to her, faintly, the notes of a piano—his daughter Amy was practising. It was the music, a hackneyed theme of Schubert's played heavily, that seemed to arouse the composite emotion of anger and hatred, yet of sustained attraction and wild regret she had felt before, but never so poignantly as now. And she lingered, perversely resolved to steep herself in the agony.
“Who lives here” Rolfe asked.
“Mr. Ditmar,” she answered.
“The agent of the Chippering Mill?”
She nodded.
“He's the worst of the lot,” Rolfe said angrily. “If it weren't for him, we'd have this strike won to-day. He owns this town, he's run it to suit himself, He stiffens up the owners and holds the other mills in line. He's a type, a driver, the kind of man we must get rid of. Look at him—he lives in luxury while his people are starving.”
“Get rid of!” repeated Janet, in an odd voice.
“Oh, I don't mean to shoot him,” Rolfe declared. “But he may get shot, for all I know, by some of these slaves he's made desperate.”
“They wouldn't dare shoot him,” Janet said. “And whatever he is, he isn't a coward. He's stronger than the others, he's more of a man.”
Rolfe looked at her curiously.
“What do you know about him?” he asked.
“I—I know all about him. I was his stenographer.”
“You! His stenographer! Then why are you herewith us?”
“Because I hate him!” she cried vehemently. “Because I've learned that it's true—what you say about the masters—they only think of themselves and their kind, and not of us. They use us.”
“He tried to use you! You loved him!”
“How dare you say that!”
He fell back before her anger.
“I didn't mean to offend you,” he exclaimed. “I was jealous—I'm jealous of every man you've known. I want you. I've never met a woman like you.”
They were the very words Ditmar had used! She did not answer, and for a while they walked along in silence, leaving Warren Street and cutting across the city until they canoe in sight of the Common. Rolfe drew nearer to her.
“Forgive me!” he pleaded. “You know I would not offend you. Come, we'll have supper together, and I will teach you more of what you have to know.”
“Where?” she asked.
“At the Hampton—it is a little cafe where we all go. Perhaps you've been there.”
“No,” said Janet.
“It doesn't compare with the cafes of Europe—or of New York. Perhaps we shall go to them sometime, together. But it is cosy, and warm, and all the leaders will be there. You'll come—yes?”
“Yes, I'll come,” she said....
The Hampton was one of the city's second-class hotels, but sufficiently pretentious to have, in its basement, a “cafe” furnished in the “mission” style of brass tacks and dull red leather. In the warm, food-scented air fantastic wisps of smoke hung over the groups; among them Janet made out several of the itinerant leaders of Syndicalism, loose-tied, debonnair, giving a tremendous impression of freedom as they laughed and chatted with the women. For there were women, ranging from the redoubtable Nellie Bond herself down to those who may be designated as camp-followers. Rolfe, as he led Janet to a table in a corner of the room, greeted his associates with easy camaraderie. From Miss Bond he received an illuminating smile. Janet wondered at her striking good looks, at the boldness and abandon with which she talked to Jastro or exchanged sallies across the room. The atmosphere of this tawdry resort, formerly frequented by shop girls and travelling salesmen, was magically transformed by the presence of this company, made bohemian, cosmopolitan, exhilarating. And Janet, her face flushed, sat gazing at the scene, while Rolfe consulted the bill of fare and chose a beefsteak and French fried potatoes. The apathetic waiter in the soiled linen jacket he addressed as “comrade.” Janet protested when he ordered cocktails.
“You must learn to live, to relax, to enjoy yourself,” he declared.
But a horror of liquor held her firm in her refusal. Rolfe drank his, and while they awaited the beefsteak she was silent, the prey of certain misgivings that suddenly assailed her. Lise, she remembered, had sometimes mentioned this place, though preferring Gruber's: and she was struck by the contrast between this spectacle and the grimness of the strike these people had come to encourage and sustain, the conflict in the streets, the suffering in the tenements. She glanced at Rolfe, noting the manner in which he smoked cigarettes, sensually, as though seeking to wring out of each all there was to be got before flinging it down and lighting another. Again she was struck by the anomaly of a religion that had indeed enthusiasms, sacrifices perhaps, but no disciplines. He threw it out in snatches, this religion, while relating the histories of certain persons in the room: of Jastro, for instance, letting fall a hint to the effect that this evangelist and bliss Bond were dwelling together in more than amity.
“Then you don't believe in marriage?” she demanded, suddenly.
Rolfe laughed.
“What is it,” he exclaimed, “but the survival of the system of property? It's slavery, taboo, a device upheld by the master class to keep women in bondage, in superstition, by inducing them to accept it as a decree of God.”
“Did the masters themselves ever respect it, or any other decrees of God they preached to the slaves? Read history, and you will see. They had their loves, their mistresses. Read the newspapers, and you will find out whether they respect it to-day. But they are very anxious to have you and me respect it and all the other Christian commandments, because they will prevent us from being discontented. They say that we must be satisfied with the situation in this world in which God has placed us, and we shall have our reward in the next.”
She shivered slightly, not only at the ideas thus abruptly enunciated, but because it occurred to her that those others must be taking for granted a certain relationship between herself and Rolfe.... But presently, when the supper arrived, these feelings changed. She was very hungry, and the effect of the food, of the hot coffee was to dispel her doubt and repugnance, to throw a glamour over the adventure, to restore to Rolfe's arguments an exciting and alluring appeal. And with renewed physical energy she began to experience once more a sense of fellowship with these free and daring spirits who sought to avenge her wrongs and theirs.
“For us who create there are no rules of conduct, no conventions,” Rolfe was saying, “we do not care for the opinions of the middle class, of the bourgeois. With us men and women are on an equality. It is fear that has kept the workers down, and now we have cast that off—we know our strength. As they say in Italy, il mondo e a chi se lo piglia, the world belongs to him who is bold.”
“Italian is a beautiful language,” she exclaimed.
“I will teach you Italian,” he said.
“I want to learn—so much!” she sighed.
“Your soul is parched,” he said, in a commiserating tone. “I will water it, I will teach you everything.” His words aroused a faint, derisive echo: Ditmar had wish to teach her, too! But now she was strongly under the spell of the new ideas hovering like shining, gossamer spirits just beyond her reach, that she sought to grasp and correlate. Unlike the code which Rolfe condemned, they seemed not to be separate from life, opposed to it, but entered even into that most important of its elements, sex. In deference to that other code Ditmar had made her his mistress, and because he was concerned for his position and the security of the ruling class had sought to hide the fact.... Rolfe, with a cigarette between his red lips, sat back in his chair, regarding with sensuous enjoyment the evident effect of his arguments.
“But love?” she interrupted, when presently he had begun to talk again. She strove inarticulately to express an innate feminine objection to relationships that were made and broken at pleasure.
“Love is nothing but attraction between the sexes, the life-force working in us. And when that attraction ceases, what is left? Bondage. The hideous bondage of Christian marriage, in which women promise to love and obey forever.”
“But women—women are not like men. When once they give themselves they do not so easily cease to love. They—they suffer.”
He did not seem to observe the bitterness in her voice.
“Ah, that is sentiment,” he declared, “something that will not trouble women when they have work to do, inspiring work. It takes time to change our ideas, to learn to see things as they are.” He leaned forward eagerly. “But you will learn, you are like some of those rare women in history who have had the courage to cast off traditions. You were not made to be a drudge....”
But now her own words, not his, were ringing in her head—women do not so easily cease to love, they suffer. In spite of the new creed she had so eagerly and fiercely embraced, in which she had sought deliverance and retribution, did she still love Ditmar, and suffer because of him? She repudiated the suggestion, yet it persisted as she glanced at Rolfe's red lips and compared him with Ditmar. Love! Rolfe might call it what he would—the life-force, attraction between the sexes, but it was proving stronger than causes and beliefs. He too was making love to her; like Ditmar, he wanted her to use and fling away when he should grow weary. Was he not pleading for himself rather than for the human cause he professed? taking advantage of her ignorance and desperation, of her craving for new experience and knowledge? The suspicion sickened her. Were all men like that? Suddenly, without apparent premeditation or connection, the thought of the stranger from Silliston entered her mind. Was he like that?... Rolfe was bending toward her across the table, solicitously. “What's the matter?” he asked.
Her reply was listless.
“Nothing—except that I'm tired. I want to go home.”
“Not now,” he begged. “It's early yet.”
But she insisted....
CHAPTER XVII
The next day at the noon hour Janet entered Dey Street. Cheek by jowl there with the tall tenements whose spindled-pillared porches overhung the darkened pavements were smaller houses of all ages and descriptions, their lower floors altered to accommodate shops; while in the very midst of the block stood a queer wooden building with two rows of dormer windows let into its high-pitched roof. It bore a curious resemblance to a town hall in the low countries. In front of it the street was filled with children gazing up at the doorway where a man stood surveying them—the stranger from Silliston. There was a rush toward him, a rush that drove Janet against the wall almost at his side, and he held up his hands in mock despair, gently impeding the little bodies that strove to enter. He bent over them to examine the numerals, printed on pasteboard, they wore on their breasts. His voice was cheerful, yet compassionate.
“It's hard to wait, I know. I'm hungry myself,” he said. “But we can't all go up at once. The building would fall down! One to one hundred now, and the second hundred will be first for supper. That's fair, isn't it?”
Dozens of hands were raised.
“I'm twenty-nine!”
“I'm three, mister!”
“I'm forty-one!”
He let them in, one by one, and they clattered up the stairs, as he seized a tiny girl bundled in a dark red muffler and set her on the steps above him. He smiled at Janet.
“This is my restaurant,” he said.
But she could not answer. She watched him as he continued to bend over the children, and when the smaller ones wept because they had to wait, he whispered in their ears, astonishing one or two into laughter. Some ceased crying and clung to him with dumb faith. And after the chosen hundred had been admitted he turned to her again.
“You allow visitors?”
“Oh dear, yes. They'd come anyway. There's one up there now, a very swell lady from New York—so swell I don't know what to say to her. Talk to her for me.”
“But I shouldn't know what to say, either,” replied Janet. She smiled, but she had an odd desire to cry. “What is she doing here?”
“Oh, thrashing 'round, trying to connect with life—she's one of the unfortunate unemployed.”
“Unemployed?”
“The idle rich,” he explained. “Perhaps you can give her a job—enlist her in the I.W.W.”
“We don't want that kind,” Janet declared.
“Have pity on her,” he begged. “Nobody wants them—that's why they're so pathetic.”
She accompanied him up the narrow stairway to a great loft, the bareness of which had been tempered by draped American flags. From the trusses of the roof hung improvised electric lights, and the children were already seated at the four long tables, where half a dozen ladies were supplying them with enamelled bowls filled with steaming soup. They attacked it ravenously, and the absence of the talk and laughter that ordinarily accompany children's feasts touched her, impressed upon her, as nothing else had done, the destitution of the homes from which these little ones had come. The supplies that came to Hampton, the money that poured into Headquarters were not enough to allay the suffering even now. And what if the strike should last for months! Would they be able to hold out, to win? In this mood of pity, of anxiety mingled with appreciation and gratitude for what this man was doing, she turned to speak to him, to perceive on the platform at the end of the room a lady seated. So complete was the curve of her back that her pose resembled a letter u set sidewise, the gap from her crossed knee to her face being closed by a slender forearm and hand that held a lorgnette, through which she was gazing at the children with an apparently absorbed interest. This impression of willowy flexibility was somehow heightened by large, pear-shaped pendants hanging from her ears, by a certain filminess in her black costume and hat. Flung across the table beside her was a long coat of grey fur. She struck an odd note here, presented a strange contrast to Janet's friend from Silliston, with his rough suit and fine but rugged features.
“I'm sorry I haven't a table for you just at present,” he was saying. “But perhaps you'll let me take your order,”—and he imitated the obsequious attitude of a waiter. “A little fresh caviar and a clear soup, and then a fish—?”
The lady took down her lorgnette and raised an appealing face.
“You're always joking, Brooks,” she chided him, “even when you're doing things like this! I can't get you to talk seriously even when I come all the way from New York to find out what's going on here.”
“How hungry children eat, for instance?” he queried.
“Dear little things, it's heartrending!” she exclaimed. “Especially when I think of my own children, who have to be made to eat. Tell me the nationality of that adorable tot at the end.”
“Perhaps Miss Bumpus can tell you,” he ventured. And Janet, though distinctly uncomfortable and hostile to the lady, was surprised and pleased that he should have remembered her name. “Brooks,” she had called him. That was his first name. This strange and sumptuous person seemed intimate with him. Could it be possible that he belonged to her class? “Mrs. Brocklehurst, Miss Bumpus.”
Mrs. Brocklehurst focussed her attention on Janet, through the lorgnette, but let it fall immediately, smiling on her brightly, persuasively.
“How d'ye do?” she said, stretching forth a slender arm and taking the girl's somewhat reluctant hand. “Do come and sit down beside me and tell me about everything here. I'm sure you know—you look so intelligent.”
Her friend from Silliston shot at Janet an amused but fortifying glance and left them, going down to the tables. Somehow that look of his helped to restore in her a sense of humour and proportion, and her feeling became one of curiosity concerning this exquisitely soigneed being of an order she had read about, but never encountered—an order which her newly acquired views declared to be usurpers and parasites. But despite her palpable effort to be gracious perhaps because of it—Mrs. Brocklehurst had an air about her that was disconcerting! Janet, however, seemed composed as she sat down.
“I'm afraid I don't know very much. Maybe you will tell me something, first.”
“Why, certainly,” said Mrs. Brocklehurst, sweetly when she had got her breath.
“Who is that man?” Janet asked.
“Whom do you mean—Mr. Insall?”
“Is that his name? I didn't know. I've seen him twice, but he never told me.”
“Why, my dear, do you mean to say you haven't heard of Brooks Insall?”
“Brooks Insall.” Janet repeated the name, as her eyes sought his figure between the tables. “No.”
“I'm sure I don't know why I should have expected you to hear of him,” declared the lady, repentantly. “He's a writer—an author.” And at this Janet gave a slight exclamation of pleasure and surprise. “You admire writers? He's done some delightful things.”
“What does he write about?” Janet asked.
“Oh, wild flowers and trees and mountains and streams, and birds and humans—he has a wonderful insight into people.”
Janet was silent. She was experiencing a swift twinge of jealousy, of that familiar rebellion against her limitations.
“You must read them, my dear,” Mrs. Brocklehurst continued softly, in musical tones. “They are wonderful, they have such distinction. He's walked, I'm told, over every foot of New England, talking to the farmers and their wives and—all sorts of people.” She, too, paused to let her gaze linger upon Insall laughing and chatting with the children as they ate. “He has such a splendid, 'out-door' look don't you think? And he's clever with his hands he bought an old abandoned farmhouse in Silliston and made it all over himself until it looks as if one of our great-great-grandfathers had just stepped out of it to shoot an Indian only much prettier. And his garden is a dream. It's the most unique place I've ever known.”
Janet blushed deeply as she recalled how she had mistaken him for a carpenter: she was confused, overwhelmed, she had a sudden longing to leave the place, to be alone, to think about this discovery. Yet she wished to know more.
“But how did he happen to come here to Hampton—to be doing this?” she asked.
“Well, that's just what makes him interesting, one never can tell what he'll do. He took it into his head to collect the money to feed these children; I suppose he gave much of it himself. He has an income of his own, though he likes to live so simply.”
“This place—it's not connected with any organization?” Janet ejaculated.
“That's the trouble, he doesn't like organizations, and he doesn't seem to take any interest in the questions or movements of the day,” Mrs. Brocklehurst complained. “Or at least he refuses to talk about them, though I've known him for many years, and his people and mine were friends. Now there are lots of things I want to learn, that I came up from New York to find out. I thought of course he'd introduce me to the strike leaders, and he tells me he doesn't know one of them. Perhaps you know them,” she added, with sudden inspiration.
“I'm only an employee at Strike Headquarters,” Janet replied, stiffening a little despite the lady's importuning look—which evidently was usually effective.
“You mean the I.W.W.?”
“Yes.”
Meanwhile Insall had come up and seated himself below them on the edge of the platform.
“Oh, Brooks, your friend Miss Bumpus is employed in the Strike Headquarters!” Mrs. Brocklehurst cried, and turning to Janet she went on. “I didn't realize you were a factory girl, I must say you don't look it.”
Once more a gleam of amusement from Insall saved Janet, had the effect of compelling her to meet the affair somewhat after his own manner. He seemed to be putting the words into her mouth, and she even smiled a little, as she spoke.
“You never can tell what factory girls do look like in these days,” she observed mischievously.
“That's so,” Mrs. Brocklehurst agreed, “we are living in such extraordinary times, everything topsy turvy. I ought to have realized—it was stupid of me—I know several factory girls in New York, I've been to their meetings, I've had them at my house—shirtwaist strikers.”
She assumed again the willowy, a position, her fingers clasped across her knee, her eyes supplicatingly raised to Janet. Then she reached out her hand and touched the I.W.W. button. “Do tell me all about the Industrial Workers, and what they believe,” she pleaded.
“Well,” said Janet, after a slight pause, “I'm afraid you won't like it much. Why do you want to know?”
“Because I'm so interested—especially in the women of the movement. I feel for them so, I want to help—to do something, too. Of course you're a suffragist.”
“You mean, do I believe in votes for women? Yes, I suppose I do.”
“But you must,” declared Mrs. Brocklehurst, still sweetly, but with emphasis. “You wouldn't be working, you wouldn't be striking unless you did.”
“I've never thought about it,” said Janet.
“But how are you working girls ever going to raise wages unless you get the vote? It's the only way men ever get anywhere—the politicians listen to them.” She produced from her bag a gold pencil and a tablet. “Mrs. Ned Carfax is here from Boston—I saw her for a moment at the hotel she's been here investigating for nearly three days, she tells me. I'll have her send you suffrage literature at once, if you'll give me your address.”
“You want a vote?” asked Janet, curiously, gazing at the pearl earrings.
“Certainly I want one.”
“Why?”
“Why?” repeated Mrs. Brocklehurst.
“Yes. You must have everything you want.”
Even then the lady's sweet reasonableness did not desert her. She smiled winningly, displaying two small and even rows of teeth.
“On principle, my dear. For one reason, because I have such sympathy with women who toil, and for another, I believe the time has come when women must no longer be slaves, they must assert themselves, become individuals, independent.”
“But you?” exclaimed Janet.
Mrs. Brocklehurst continued to smile encouragingly, and murmured “Yes?”
“You are not a slave.”
A delicate pink, like the inside of a conch shell, spread over Mrs. Brocklehurst's cheeks.
“We're all slaves,” she declared with a touch of passion. “It's hard for you to realize, I know, about those of us who seem more fortunate than our sisters. But it's true. The men give us jewels and automobiles and clothes, but they refuse to give us what every real woman craves—liberty.”
Janet had become genuinely interested.
“But what kind of liberty?”
“Liberty to have a voice, to take part in the government of our country, to help make the laws, especially those concerning working-women and children, what they ought to be.”
Here was altruism, truly! Here were words that should have inspired Janet, yet she was silent. Mrs. Brocklehurst gazed at her solicitously.
“What are you thinking?” she urged—and it was Janet's turn to flush.
“I was just thinking that you seemed to have everything life has to give, and yet—and yet you're not happy.”
“Oh, I'm not unhappy,” protested the lady. “Why do you say that?”
“I don't know. You, too, seem to be wanting something.”
“I want to be of use, to count,” said Mrs. Brocklehurst,—and Janet was startled to hear from this woman's lips the very echo of her own desires.
Mrs. Brocklehurst's feelings had become slightly complicated. It is perhaps too much to say that her complacency was shaken. She was, withal, a person of resolution—of resolution taking the form of unswerving faith in herself, a faith persisting even when she was being carried beyond her depth. She had the kind of pertinacity that sever admits being out of depth, the happy buoyancy that does not require to feel the bottom under one's feet. She floated in swift currents. When life became uncomfortable, she evaded it easily; and she evaded it now, as she gazed at the calm but intent face of the girl in front of her, by a characteristic inner refusal to admit that she had accidentally come in contact with something baking. Therefore she broke the silence.
“Isn't that what you want—you who are striking?” she asked.
“I think we want the things that you've got,” said Janet. A phrase one of the orators had used came into her mind, “Enough money to live up to American standards”—but she did not repeat it. “Enough money to be free, to enjoy life, to have some leisure and amusement and luxury.” The last three she took from the orator's mouth.
“But surely,” exclaimed Mrs. Brocklehurst, “surely you want more than that!”
Janet shook her head.
“You asked me what we believed, the I.W.W., the syndicalists, and I told you you wouldn't like it. Well, we believe in doing away with you, the rich, and taking all you have for ourselves, the workers, the producers. We believe you haven't any right to what you've got, that you've fooled and cheated us out of it. That's why we women don't care much about the vote, I suppose, though I never thought of it. We mean to go on striking until we've got all that you've got.”
“But what will become of us?” said Mrs. Brocklehurst. “You wouldn't do away with all of us! I admit there are many who don't—but some do sympathize with you, will help you get what you want, help you, perhaps, to see things more clearly, to go about it less—ruthlessly.”
“I've told you what we believe,” repeated Janet.
“I'm so glad I came,” cried Mrs. Brocklehurst. “It's most interesting! I never knew what the syndicalists believed. Why, it's like the French Revolution—only worse. How are you going to get rid of us? cut our heads off?”
Janet could not refrain from smiling.
“Let you starve, I suppose.”
“Really!” said Mrs. Brocklehurst, and appeared to be trying to visualize the process. She was a true Athenian, she had discovered some new thing, she valued discoveries more than all else in life, she collected them, though she never used them save to discuss them with intellectuals at her dinner parties. “Now you must let me come to Headquarters and get a glimpse of some of the leaders—of Antonelli, and I'm told there's a fascinating man named Rowe.”
“Rolfe,” Janet corrected.
“Rolfe—that's it.” She glanced down at the diminutive watch, set with diamonds, on her wrist, rose and addressed Insall. “Oh dear, I must be going, I'm to lunch with Nina Carfax at one, and she's promised to tell me a lot of things. She's writing an article for Craven's Weekly all about the strike and the suffering and injustice—she says it's been horribly misrepresented to the public, the mill owners have had it all their own way. I think what you're doing is splendid, Brooks, only—” here she gave him an appealing, rather commiserating look—“only I do wish you would take more interest in—in underlying principles.”
Insall smiled.
“It's a question of brains. You have to have brains to be a sociologist,” he answered, as he held up for her the fur coat. With a gesture of gentle reproof she slipped into it, and turned to Janet.
“You must let me see more of you, my dear,” she said. “I'm at the best hotel, I can't remember the name, they're all so horrible—but I'll be here until to-morrow afternoon. I want to find out everything. Come and call on me. You're quite the most interesting person I've met for a long time—I don't think you realize how interesting you are. Au revoir!” She did not seem to expect any reply, taking acquiescence for granted. Glancing once more at the rows of children, who had devoured their meal in an almost uncanny silence, she exclaimed, “The dears! I'm going to send you a cheque, Brooks, even if you have been horrid to me—you always are.”
“Horrid!” repeated Insall, “put it down to ignorance.”
He accompanied her down the stairs. From her willowy walk a sophisticated observer would have hazarded the guess that her search for an occupation had included a course of lessons in fancy dancing.
Somewhat dazed by this interview which had been so suddenly forced upon her, Janet remained seated on the platform. She had the perception to recognize that in Mrs. Brocklehurst and Insall she had come in contact with a social stratum hitherto beyond the bounds of her experience; those who belonged to that stratum were not characterized by the possession of independent incomes alone, but by an attitude toward life, a manner of not appearing to take its issues desperately. Ditmar was not like that. She felt convicted of enthusiasms, she was puzzled, rather annoyed and ashamed. Insall and Mrs. Brocklehurst, different though they were, had this attitude in common.... Insall, when he returned, regarded her amusedly.
“So you'd like to exterminate Mrs. Brocklehurst?” he asked.
And Janet flushed. “Well, she forced me to say it.”
“Oh, it didn't hurt her,” he said.
“And it didn't help her,” Janet responded quickly.
“No, it didn't help her,” Insall agreed, and laughed.
“But I'm not sure it isn't true,” she went on, “that we want what she's got.” The remark, on her own lips, surprised Janet a little. She had not really meant to make it. Insall seemed to have the quality of forcing one to think out loud.
“And what she wants, you've got,” he told her.
“What have I got?”
“Perhaps you'll find out, some day.”
“It may be too late,” she exclaimed. “If you'd only tell me, it might help.”
“I think it's something you'll have to discover for yourself,” he replied, more gravely than was his wont.
She was silent a moment, and then she demanded: “Why didn't you tell me who you were? You let me think, when I met you in Silliston that day, that you were a carpenter. I didn't know you'd written books.”
“You can't expect writers to wear uniforms, like policemen—though perhaps we ought to, it might be a little fairer to the public,” he said. “Besides, I am a carpenter, a better carpenter than a writer..”
“I'd give anything to be an author!” she cried.
“It's a hard life,” he assured her. “We have to go about seeking inspiration from others.”
“Is that why you came to Hampton?”
“Well, not exactly. It's a queer thing about inspiration, you only find it when you're not looking for it.”
She missed the point of this remark, though his eyes were on her. They were not like Rolfe's eyes, insinuating, possessive; they had the anomalistic quality, of being at once personal and impersonal, friendly, alight, evoking curiosity yet compelling trust.
“And you didn't tell me,” he reproached her, “that you were at I.W.W. Headquarters.”
A desire for self-justification impelled her to exclaim: “You don't believe in Syndicalism—and yet you've come here to feed these children!”
“Oh, I think I understand the strike,” he said.
“How? Have you seen it? Have you heard the arguments?”
“No. I've seen you. You've explained it.”
“To Mrs. Brocklehurst?”
“It wasn't necessary,” he replied—and immediately added, in semi-serious apology: “I thought it was admirable, what you said. If she'd talked to a dozen syndicalist leaders, she couldn't have had it put more clearly. Only I'm afraid she doesn't know the truth when she hears it.”
“Now you're making fun of me!”
“Indeed I'm not,” he protested.
“But I didn't give any of the arguments, any of the—philosophy,” she pronounced the word hesitatingly. “I don't understand it yet as well as I should.”
“You are it,” he said. “It's not always easy to understand what we are—it's generally after we've become something else that we comprehend what we have been.”
And while she was pondering over this one of the ladies who had been waiting on the table came toward Insall.
“The children have finished, Brooks,” she informed him. “It's time to let in the others.”
Insall turned to Janet. “This is Miss Bumpus—and this is Mrs. Maturin,” he said. “Mrs. Maturin lives in Silliston.”
The greeting of this lady differed from that of Mrs. Brocklehurst. She, too, took Janet's hand.
“Have you come to help us?” she asked.
And Janet said: “Oh, I'd like to, but I have other work.”
“Come in and see us again,” said Insall, and Janet, promising, took her leave....
“Who is she, Brooks?” Mrs. Maturin asked, when Janet had gone.
“Well,” he answered, “I don't know. What does it matter?”
Mrs. Maturin smiled.
“I should say that it did matter,” she replied. “But there's something unusual about her—where did you find her?”
“She found me.” And Insall explained. “She was a stenographer, it seems, but now she's enlisted heart and soul with the syndicalists,” he added.
“A history?” Mrs. Maturin queried. “Well, I needn't ask—it's written on her face.”
“That's all I know,” said Insall.
“I'd like to know,” said Mrs. Maturin. “You say she's in the strike?”
“I should rather put it that the strike is in her.”
“What do you mean, Brooks?”
But Insall did not reply.
Janet came away from Dey Street in a state of mental and emotional confusion. The encounter with Mrs. Brocklehurst had been upsetting; she had an uneasy feeling of having made a fool of herself in Insall's eyes; she desired his approval, even on that occasion when she had first met him and mistaken him for a workman she had been conscious of a compelling faculty in him, of a pressure he exerted demanding justification of herself; and to-day, because she was now pledged to Syndicalism, because she had made the startling discovery that he was a writer of some renown, she had been more than ever anxious to vindicate her cause. She found herself, indeed, wondering uneasily whether there were a higher truth of which he was in possession. And the fact that his attitude toward her had been one of sympathy and friendliness rather than of disapproval, that his insight seemed to have fathomed her case, apprehended it in all but the details, was even more disturbing—yet vaguely consoling. The consolatory element in the situation was somehow connected with the lady, his friend from Silliston, to whom he had introduced her and whose image now came before her the more vividly, perhaps, in contrast with that of Mrs. Brocklehurst. Mrs. Maturin—could Janet have so expressed her thought! had appeared as an extension of Insall's own personality. She was a strong, tall, vital woman with a sweet irregularity of feature, with a heavy crown of chestnut hair turning slightly grey, quaintly braided, becomingly framing her face. Her colour was high. The impression she conveyed of having suffered was emphasized by the simple mourning gown she wore, but the dominant note she had struck was one of dependability. It was, after all, Insall's dominant, too. Insall had asked her to call again; and the reflection that she might do so was curiously comforting. The soup kitchen in the loft, with these two presiding over it, took on something of the aspect of a sanctuary....
Insall, in some odd manner, and through the medium of that frivolous lady, had managed to reenforce certain doubts that had been stirring in Janet—doubts of Rolfe, of the verity of the doctrine which with such abandon she had embraced. It was Insall who, though remaining silent, just by being there seemed to have suggested her manner of dealing with Mrs. Brocklehurst. It had, indeed, been his manner of dealing with Mrs. Brocklehurst. Janet had somehow been using his words, his method, and thus for the first time had been compelled to look objectively on what she had deemed a part of herself. We never know what we are, he had said, until we become something else! He had forced her to use an argument that failed to harmonize, somehow, with Rolfe's poetical apologetics. Stripped of the glamour of these, was not Rolfe's doctrine just one of taking, taking? And when the workers were in possession of all, would not they be as badly off as Mrs. Brocklehurst or Ditmar? Rolfe, despite the inspiring intellectual creed he professed, lacked the poise and unity that go with happiness. He wanted things, for himself: whereas she beheld in Insall one who seemed emancipated from possessions, whose life was so organized as to make them secondary affairs. And she began to wonder what Insall would think of Ditmar.
These sudden flashes of tenderness for Ditmar startled and angered her. She had experienced them before, and always had failed to account for their intrusion into a hatred she cherished. Often, at her desk in the bibliotheque, she had surprised herself speculating upon what Ditmar might be doing at that moment; and it seemed curious, living in the same city with him, that she had not caught a glimpse of him during the strike. More than once, moved by a perverse impulse, she had ventured of an evening down West Street toward the guard of soldiers in the hope of catching sight of him. He had possessed her, and the memory of the wild joy of that possession, of that surrender to great strength, refused to perish. Why, at such moments, should she glory in a strength that had destroyed her and why, when she heard him cursed as the man who stood, more than any other, in the way of the strikers victory, should she paradoxically and fiercely rejoice? why should she feel pride when she was told of the fearlessness with which he went about the streets, and her heart stop beating when she thought of the possibility of his being shot? For these unwelcome phenomena within herself Janet could not account. When they disturbed and frightened her, she plunged into her work with the greater zeal....
As the weeks went by, the strain of the strike began to tell on the weak, the unprepared, on those who had many mouths to feed. Shivering with the cold of that hardest of winters, these unfortunates flocked to the Franco-Belgian Hall, where a little food or money in proportion to the size of their families was doled out to them. In spite of the contributions received by mail, of the soup kitchens and relief stations set up by various organizations in various parts of the city, the supply little more than sufficed to keep alive the more needy portion of the five and twenty thousand who now lacked all other means of support. Janet's heart was wrung as she gazed at the gaunt, bewildered faces growing daily more tragic, more bewildered and gaunt; she marvelled at the animal-like patience of these Europeans, at the dumb submission of most of them to privations that struck her as appalling. Some indeed complained, but the majority recited in monotonous, unimpassioned tones their stories of suffering, or of ill treatment by the “Cossacks” or the police. The stipends were doled out by Czernowitz, but all through the week there were special appeals. Once it was a Polish woman, wan and white, who carried her baby wrapped in a frayed shawl.