“Wahna littel money for milk,” she said, when at length their attention was drawn to her.
“But you get your money, every Saturday,” the secretary informed her kindly.
She shook her head.
“Baby die, 'less I have littel milk—I show you.”
Janet drew back before the sight of the child with its sunken cheeks and ghastly blue lips.... And she herself went out with the woman to buy the milk, and afterwards to the dive in Kendall Street which she called home—in one of those “rear” tenements separated from the front buildings by a narrow court reeking with refuse. The place was dank and cold, malodorous. The man of the family, the lodgers who lived in the other room of the kennel, were out on the streets. But when her eyes grew used to the darkness she perceived three silent children huddled in the bed in the corner....
On another occasion a man came running up the stairs of the Hall and thrust his way into a meeting of the Committee—one of those normally happy, irresponsible Syrians who, because of a love for holidays, are the despair of mill overseers. Now he was dazed, breathless, his great eyes grief-stricken like a wounded animal's.
“She is killidd, my wife—de polees, dey killidd her!”
It was Anna Mower who investigated the case. “The girl wasn't doing nothing but walk along Hudson Street when one of those hirelings set on her and beat her. She put out her hand because she thought he'd hit her—and he gave her three or four with his billy and left her in the gutter. If you'd see her you'd know she wouldn't hurt a fly, she's that gentle looking, like all the Syrian women. She had a 'Don't be a scab' ribbon on—that's all she done! Somebody'll shoot that guy, and I wouldn't blame 'em.” Anna stood beside Janet's typewriter, her face red with anger as she told the story.
“And how is the woman now?” asked Janet.
“In bed, with two ribs broken and a bruise on her back and a cut on her head. I got a doctor. He could hardly see her in that black place they live.”...
Such were the incidents that fanned the hatred into hotter and hotter flame. Daily reports were brought in of arrests, of fines and imprisonments for picketing, or sometimes merely for booing at the remnant of those who still clung to their employment. One magistrate in particular, a Judge Hennessy, was hated above all others for giving the extreme penalty of the law, and even stretching it. “Minions, slaves of the capitalists, of the masters,” the courts were called, and Janet subscribed to these epithets, beheld the judges as willing agents of a tyranny from which she, too, had suffered. There arrived at Headquarters frenzied bearers of rumours such as that of the reported intention of landlords to remove the windows from the tenements if the rents were not paid. Antonelli himself calmed these. “Let the landlords try it!” he said phlegmatically....
After a while, as the deadlock showed no signs of breaking, the siege of privation began to tell, ominous signs of discontent became apparent. Chief among the waverers were those who had come to America with visions of a fortune, who had practised a repulsive thrift in order to acquire real estate, who carried in their pockets dog-eared bank books recording payments already made. These had consented to the strike reluctantly, through fear, or had been carried away by the eloquence and enthusiasm of the leaders, by the expectation that the mill owners would yield at once. Some went back to work, only to be “seen” by the militant, watchful pickets—generally in their rooms, at night. One evening, as Janet was walking home, she chanced to overhear a conversation taking place in the dark vestibule of a tenement.
“Working to-day?”
“Yah.”
“Work to-morrow?”
Hesitation. “I d'no.”
“You work, I cut your throat.” A significant noise. “Naw, I no work.”
“Shake!”
She hurried on trembling, not with fear, but exultingly. Nor did she reflect that only a month ago such an occurrence would have shocked and terrified her. This was war.... On her way to Fillmore Street she passed, at every street corner in this district, a pacing sentry, muffled in greatcoat and woollen cap, alert and watchful, the ugly knife on the end of his gun gleaming in the blue light of the arc. It did not occur to her, despite the uniform, that the souls of many of these men were divided also, that their voices and actions, when she saw them threatening with their bayonets, were often inspired by that inner desperation characteristic of men who find themselves unexpectedly in false situations. Once she heard a woman shriek as the sharp knife grazed her skirt: at another time a man whose steps had been considerably hurried turned, at a safe distance, and shouted defiantly:
“Say, who are you working for? Me or the Wool Trust?”
“Aw, get along,” retorted the soldier, “or I'll give you yours.”
The man caught sight of Janet's button as she overtook him. He was walking backward.
“That feller has a job in a machine shop over in Barrington, I seen him there when I was in the mills. And here he is tryin' to put us out—ain't that the limit?”
The thud of horses' feet in the snow prevented her reply. The silhouettes of the approaching squad of cavalry were seen down the street, and the man fled precipitately into an alleyway....
There were ludicrous incidents, too, though never lacking in a certain pathos. The wife of a Russian striker had her husband arrested because he had burned her clothes in order to prevent her returning to the mill. From the police station he sent a compatriot with a message to Headquarters. “Oye, he fix her! She no get her jawb now—she gotta stay in bed!” this one cried triumphantly.
“She was like to tear me in pieces when I brought her the clothes,” said Anna Mower, who related her experience with mingled feelings. “I couldn't blame her. You see, it was the kids crying with cold and starvation, and she got so she just couldn't stand it. I couldn't stand it, neither.”
Day by day the element who wished to compromise and end the strike grew stronger, brought more and more pressure on the leaders. These people were subsidized, Antonelli declared, by the capitalists....
CHAPTER XVIII
A more serious atmosphere pervaded Headquarters, where it was realized that the issue hung in the balance. And more proclamations, a la Napoleon, were issued to sustain and hearten those who were finding bread and onions meagre fare, to shame the hesitating, the wavering. As has been said, it was Rolfe who, because of his popular literary gift, composed these appeals for the consideration of the Committee, dictating them to Janet as he paced up and down the bibliotheque, inhaling innumerable cigarettes and flinging down the ends on the floor. A famous one was headed “Shall Wool and Cotton Kings Rule the Nation?” “We are winning” it declared. “The World is with us! Forced by the unshaken solidarity of tens of thousands, the manufacturers offer bribes to end the reign of terror they have inaugurated.... Inhuman treatment and oppressive toil have brought all nationalities together into one great army to fight against a brutal system of exploitation. In years and years of excessive labour we have produced millions for a class of idle parasites, who enjoy all the luxuries of life while our wives have to leave their firesides and our children their schools to eke out a miserable existence.” And this for the militia: “The lowest aim of life is to be a soldier! The 'good' soldier never tries to distinguish right from wrong, he never thinks, he never reasons, he only obeys—”
“But,” Janet was tempted to say, “your syndicalism declares that none of us should think or reason. We should only feel.” She was beginning to detect Rolfe's inconsistencies, yet she refrained from interrupting the inspirational flow.
“The soldier is a blind, heartless, soulless, murderous machine.” Rolfe was fond of adjectives. “All that is human in him, all that is divine has been sworn away when he took the enlistment oath. No man can fall lower than a soldier. It is a depth beyond which we cannot go.”
“All that is human, all that is divine,” wrote Janet, and thrilled a little at the words. Why was it that mere words, and their arrangement in certain sequences, gave one a delicious, creepy feeling up and down the spine? Her attitude toward him had become more and more critical, she had avoided him when she could, but when he was in this ecstatic mood she responded, forgot his red lips, his contradictions, lost herself in a medium she did not comprehend. Perhaps it was because, in his absorption in the task, he forgot her, forgot himself. She, too, despised the soldiers, fervently believed they had sold themselves to the oppressors of mankind. And Rolfe, when in the throes of creation, had the manner of speaking to the soldiers themselves, as though these were present in the lane just below the window; as though he were on the tribune. At such times he spoke with such rapidity that, quick though she was, she could scarcely keep up with him. “Most of you, Soldiers, are workingmen!” he cried. “Yesterday you were slaving in the mills yourselves. You will profit by our victory. Why should you wish to crush us? Be human!”
Pale, excited, he sank down into the chair by her side and lit another cigarette.
“They ought to listen to that!” he exclaimed. “It's the best one I've done yet.”
Night had come. Czernowitz sat in the other room, talking to Jastro, a buzz of voices came from the hall through the thin pine panels of the door. All day long a sixty-mile gale had twisted the snow of the lane into whirling, fantastic columns and rattled the windows of Franco-Belgian Hall. But now the wind had fallen.... Presently, as his self-made music ceased to vibrate within him, Rolfe began to watch the girl as she sat motionless, with parted lips and eyes alight, staring at the reflection of the lamp in the blue-black window.
“Is that the end?” she asked, at length.
“Yes,” he replied sensitively. “Can't you see it's a climax? Don't you think it's a good one?”
She looked at him, puzzled.
“Why, yes,” she said, “I think it's fine. You see, I have to take it down so fast I can't always follow it as I'd like to.”
“When you feel, you can do anything,” he exclaimed. “It is necessary to feel.”
“It is necessary to know,” she told him.
“I do not understand you,” he cried, leaning toward her. “Sometimes you are a flame—a wonderful, scarlet flame I can express it in no other way. Or again, you are like the Madonna of our new faith, and I wish I were a del Sarto to paint you. And then again you seem as cold as your New England snow, you have no feeling, you are an Anglo-Saxon—a Puritan.”
She smiled, though she felt a pang of reminiscence at the word. Ditmar had called her so, too.
“I can't help what I am,” she said.
“It is that which inhibits you,” he declared. “That Puritanism. It must be eradicated before you can develop, and then—and then you will be completely wonderful. When this strike is over, when we have time, I will teach you many things—develop you. We will read Sorel together he is beautiful, like poetry—and the great poets, Dante and Petrarch and Tasso—yes, and d'Annunzio. We shall live.”
“We are living, now,” she answered. The look with which she surveyed him he found enigmatic. And then, abruptly, she rose and went to her typewriter.
“You don't believe what I say!” he reproached her.
But she was cool. “I'm not sure that I believe all of it. I want to think it out for myself—to talk to others, too.”
“What others?”
“Nobody in particular—everybody,” she replied, as she set her notebook on the rack.
“There is some one else!” he exclaimed, rising.
“There is every one else,” she said.
As was his habit when agitated, he began to smoke feverishly, glancing at her from time to time as she fingered the keys. Experience had led him to believe that he who finds a woman in revolt and gives her a religion inevitably becomes her possessor. But more than a month had passed, he had not become her possessor—and now for the first time there entered his mind a doubt as to having given her a religion! The obvious inference was that of another man, of another influence in opposition to his own; characteristically, however, he shrank from accepting this, since he was of those who believe what they wish to believe. The sudden fear of losing her—intruding itself immediately upon an ecstatic, creative mood—unnerved him, yet he strove to appear confident as he stood over her.
“When you've finished typewriting that, we'll go out to supper,” he told her.
But she shook her head.
“Why not?”
“I don't want to,” she replied—and then, to soften her refusal, she added, “I can't, to-night.”
“But you never will come with me anymore. Why is it?”
“I'm very tired at night. I don't feel like going out.” She sought to temporize.
“You've changed!” he accused her. “You're not the same as you were at first—you avoid me.”
The swift gesture with which she flung over the carriage of her machine might have warned him.
“I don't like that Hampton Hotel,” she flashed back. “I'm—I'm not a vagabond—yet.”
“A vagabond!” he repeated.
She went on savagely with her work..
“You have two natures,” he exclaimed. “You are still a bourgeoise, a Puritan. You will not be yourself, you will not be free until you get over that.”
“I'm not sure I want to get over it.”
He leaned nearer to her.
“But now that I have found you, Janet, I will not let you go.”
“You've no rights over me,” she cried, in sudden alarm and anger. “I'm not doing this work, I'm not wearing myself out here for you.”
“Then—why are you doing it?” His suspicions rose again, and made him reckless.
“To help the strikers,” she said.... He could get no more out of her, and presently, when Anna Mower entered the room, he left it....
More than once since her first visit to the soup kitchen in Dey Street Janet had returned to it. The universe rocked, but here was equilibrium. The streets were filled with soldiers, with marching strikers, terrible things were constantly happening; the tension at Headquarters never seemed to relax. Out in the world and within her own soul were strife and suffering, and sometimes fear; the work in which she sought to lose herself no longer sufficed to keep her from thinking, and the spectacle—when she returned home—of her mother's increasing apathy grew more and more appalling. But in Dey Street she gained calmness, was able to renew something of that sense of proportion the lack of which, in the chaos in which she was engulfed, often brought her to the verge of madness. At first she had had a certain hesitation about going back, and on the occasion of her second visit had walked twice around the block before venturing to enter. She had no claim on this man. He was merely a chance acquaintance, a stranger—and yet he seemed nearer to her, to understand her better than any one else she knew in the world. This was queer, because she had not explained herself; nor had he asked her for any confidences. She would have liked to confide in him—some things: he gave her the impression of comprehending life; of having, as his specialty, humanity itself; he should, she reflected, have been a minister, and smiled at the thought: ministers, at any rate, ought to be like him, and then one might embrace Christianity—the religion of her forefathers that Rolfe ridiculed. But there was about Insall nothing of religion as she had grown up to apprehend the term.
Now that she had taken her courage in her hands and renewed her visits, they seemed to be the most natural proceedings in the world. On that second occasion, when she had opened the door and palpitatingly climbed to the loft, the second batch of children were finishing their midday meal,—rather more joyously, she thought, than before,—and Insall himself was stooping over a small boy whom he had taken away from the table. He did not notice her at once, and Janet watched them. The child had a cough, his extreme thinness was emphasized by the coat he wore, several sizes too large for him.
“You come along with me, Marcus, I guess I can fit you out,” Insall was saying, when he looked up and saw Janet.
“Why, if it isn't Miss Bumpus! I thought you'd forgotten us.”
“Oh no,” she protested. “I wanted to come.”
“Then why didn't you?”
“Well, I have come,” she said, with a little sigh, and he did not press her further. And she refrained from offering any conventional excuse, such as that of being interested in the children. She had come to see him, and such was the faith with which he inspired her—now that she was once more in his presence—that she made no attempt to hide the fact.
“You've never seen my clothing store, have you?” he asked. And with the child's hand in his he led the way into a room at the rear of the loft. A kit of carpenter's tools was on the floor, and one wall was lined with box-like compartments made of new wood, each with its label in neat lettering indicating the articles contained therein. “Shoes?” he repeated, as he ran his eye down the labels and suddenly opened a drawer. “Here we are, Marcus. Sit down there on the bench, and take off the shoes you have on.”
The boy had one of those long faces of the higher Jewish type, intelligent, wistful. He seemed dazed by Insall's kindness. The shoes he wore were those of an adult, but cracked and split, revealing the cotton stocking and here and there the skin. His little blue hands fumbled with the knotted strings that served for facings until Insall, producing a pocket knife, deftly cut the strings.
“Those are summer shoes, Marcus—well ventilated.”
“They're by me since August,” said the boy.
“And now the stockings,” prompted Insall. The old ones, wet, discoloured, and torn, were stripped off, and thick, woollen ones substituted. Insall, casting his eye over the open drawer, chose a pair of shoes that had been worn, but which were stout and serviceable, and taking one in his hand knelt down before the child. “Let's see how good a guesser I am,” he said, loosening the strings and turning back the tongue, imitating good-humouredly the deferential manner of a salesman of footwear as he slipped on the shoe. “Why, it fits as if it were made for you! Now for the other one. Yes, your feet are mates—I know a man who wears a whole size larger on his left foot.” The dazed expression remained on the boy's face. The experience was beyond him. “That's better,” said Insall, as he finished the lacing. “Keep out of the snow, Marcus, all you can. Wet feet aren't good for a cough, you know. And when you come in to supper a nice doctor will be here, and we'll see if we can't get rid of the cough.”
The boy nodded. He got to his feet, stared down at the shoes, and walked slowly toward the door, where he turned.
“Thank you, Mister Insall,” he said.
And Insall, still sitting on his heels, waved his hand.
“It is not to mention it,” he replied. “Perhaps you may have a clothing store of your own some day—who knows!” He looked up at Janet amusedly and then, with a spring, stood upright, his easy, unconscious pose betokening command of soul and body. “I ought to have kept a store,” he observed. “I missed my vocation.”
“It seems to me that you missed a great many vocations,” she replied. Commonplaces alone seemed possible, adequate. “I suppose you made all those drawers yourself.”
He bowed in acknowledgment of her implied tribute. With his fine nose and keen eyes—set at a slightly downward angle, creased at the corners—with his thick, greying hair, despite his comparative youth he had the look one associates with portraits of earlier, patriarchal Americans.... These calls of Janet's were never of long duration. She had fallen into the habit of taking her lunch between one and two, and usually arrived when the last installment of youngsters were finishing their meal; sometimes they were filing out, stopping to form a group around Insall, who always managed to say something amusing—something pertinent and good-naturedly personal. For he knew most of them by name, and had acquired a knowledge of certain individual propensities and idiosyncrasies that delighted their companions.
“What's the trouble, Stepan—swallowed your spoon?” Stepan was known to be greedy. Or he would suddenly seize an unusually solemn boy from behind and tickle him until the child screamed with laughter. It was, indeed, something of an achievement to get on terms of confidence with these alien children of the tenements and the streets who from their earliest years had been forced to shift for themselves, and many of whom had acquired a precocious suspicion of Greeks bearing gifts. Insall himself had used the phrase, and explained it to Janet. That sense of caveat donor was perhaps their most pathetic characteristic. But he broke it down; broke down, too, the shyness accompanying it, the shyness and solemnity emphasized in them by contact with hardship and poverty, with the stark side of life they faced at home. He had made them—Mrs. Maturin once illuminatingly remarked—more like children. Sometimes he went to see their parents,—as in the case of Marcus—to suggest certain hygienic precautions in his humorous way; and his accounts of these visits, too, were always humorous. Yet through that humour ran a strain of pathos that clutched—despite her smile—at Janet's heartstrings. This gift of emphasizing and heightening tragedy while apparently dealing in comedy she never ceased to wonder at. She, too, knew that tragedy of the tenements, of the poor, its sordidness and cruelty. All her days she had lived precariously near it, and lately she had visited these people, had been torn by the sight of what they endured. But Insall's jokes, while they stripped it of sentimentality of which she had an instinctive dislike—made it for her even more poignant. One would have thought, to have such an insight into it, that he too must have lived it, must have been brought up in some dirty alley of a street. That gift, of course, must be a writer's gift.
When she saw the waifs trooping after him down the stairs, Mrs. Maturin called him the Pied Piper of Hampton.
As time went on, Janet sometimes wondered over the quiet manner in which these two people, Insall and Mrs. Maturin, took her visits as though they were matters of course, and gave her their friendship. There was, really, no obvious excuse for her coming, not even that of the waifs for food—and yet she came to be fed. The sustenance they gave her would have been hard to define; it flowed not so much from what they said, as from what they were; it was in the atmosphere surrounding them. Sometimes she looked at Mrs. Maturin to ask herself what this lady would say if she knew her history, her relationship with Ditmar—which had been her real reason for entering the ranks of the strikers. And was it fair for her, Janet, to permit Mrs. Maturin to bestow her friendship without revealing this? She could not make up her mind as to what this lady would say. Janet had had no difficulty in placing Ditmar; not much trouble, after her first surprise was over, in classifying Rolfe and the itinerant band of syndicalists who had descended upon her restricted world. But Insall and Mrs. Maturin were not to be ticketed. What chiefly surprised her, in addition to their kindliness, to their taking her on faith without the formality of any recommendation or introduction, was their lack of intellectual narrowness. She did not, of course, so express it. But she sensed, in their presence, from references casually let fall in their conversation, a wider culture of which they were in possession, a culture at once puzzling and exciting, one that she despaired of acquiring for herself. Though it came from reading, it did not seem “literary,” according to the notion she had conceived of the term. Her speculations concerning it must be focussed and interpreted. It was a culture, in the first place, not harnessed to an obvious Cause: something like that struck her. It was a culture that contained tolerance and charity, that did not label a portion of mankind as its enemy, but seemed, by understanding all, to forgive all. It had no prejudices; nor did it boast, as the Syndicalists boasted, of its absence of convention. And little by little Janet connected it with Silliston.
“It must be wonderful to live in such a place as that,” she exclaimed, when the Academy was mentioned. On this occasion Insall had left for a moment, and she was in the little room he called his “store,” alone with Mrs. Maturin, helping to sort out a batch of garments just received.
“It was there you first met Brooks, wasn't it?” She always spoke of him as Brooks. “He told me about it, how you walked out there and asked him about a place to lunch.” Mrs. Maturin laughed. “You didn't know what to make of him, did you?”
“I thought he was a carpenter!” said Janet. “I—I never should have taken him for an author. But of course I don't know any other authors.”
“Well, he's not like any of them, he's just like himself. You can't put a tag on people who are really big.”
Janet considered this. “I never thought of that. I suppose not,” she agreed.
Mrs. Maturin glanced at her. “So you liked Sflliston,” she said.
“I liked it better than any place I ever saw. I haven't seen many places, but I'm sure that few can be nicer.”
“What did you like about it, Janet?” Mrs. Maturin was interested.
“It's hard to say,” Janet replied, after a moment. “It gave me such a feeling of peace—of having come home, although I lived in Hampton. I can't express it.”
“I think you're expressing it rather well,” said Mrs. Maturin.
“It was so beautiful in the spring,” Janet continued, dropping the coat she held into the drawer. “And it wasn't just the trees and the grass with the yellow dandelions, it was the houses, too—I've often wondered why those houses pleased me so much. I wanted to live in every one of them. Do you know that feeling?” Mrs. Maturin nodded. “They didn't hurt your eyes when you looked at them, and they seemed to be so much at home there, even the new ones. The new ones were like the children of the old.”
“I'll tell the architect. He'll be pleased,” said Mrs. Maturin.
Janet flushed.
“Am I being silly?” she asked.
“No; my dear,” Mrs. Maturin replied. “You've expressed what I feel about Silliston. What do you intend to do when the strike is over?”
“I hadn't thought.” Janet started at the question, but Mrs. Maturin did not seem to notice the dismay in her tone. “You don't intend to—to travel around with the I. W. W. people, do you?”
“I—I hadn't thought,” Janet faltered. It was the first time Mrs. Maturin had spoken of her connection with Syndicalism. And she surprised herself by adding: “I don't see how I could. They can get stenographers anywhere, and that's all I'm good for.” And the question occurred to her—did she really wish to?
“What I was going to suggest,” continued Mrs. Maturin, quietly, “was that you might try Silliston. There's a chance for a good stenographer there, and I'm sure you are a good one. So many of the professors send to Boston.”
Janet stood stock still. Then she said: “But you don't know anything about me, Mrs. Maturin.”
Kindliness burned in the lady's eyes as she replied: “I know more now—since you've told me I know nothing. Of course there's much I don't know, how you, a stenographer, became involved in this strike and joined the I. W. W. But you shall tell me or not, as you wish, when we become better friends.”
Janet felt the blood beating in her throat, and an impulse to confess everything almost mastered her. From the first she had felt drawn toward Mrs. Maturin, who seemed to hold out to her the promise of a woman's friendship—for which she had felt a life-long need: a woman friend who would understand the insatiate yearning in her that gave her no rest in her search for a glittering essence never found, that had led her only to new depths of bitterness and despair. It would destroy her, if indeed it had not already done so. Mrs. Maturin, Insall, seemed to possess the secret that would bring her peace—and yet, in spite of something urging her to speak, she feared the risk of losing them. Perhaps, after all, they would not understand! perhaps it was too late!
“You do not believe in the Industrial Workers of the World,” was what she said.
Mrs. Maturin herself, who had been moved and excited as she gazed at Janet, was taken by surprise. A few moments elapsed before she could gather herself to reply, and then she managed to smile.
“I do not believe that wisdom will die with them, my dear. Their—their doctrine is too simple, it does not seem as if life, the social order is to be so easily solved.”
“But you must sympathize with them, with the strikers.” Janet's gesture implied that the soup kitchen was proof of this.
“Ah,” replied Mrs. Maturin, gently, “that is different to understand them. There is one philosophy for the lamb, and another for the wolf.”
“You mean,” said Janet, trembling, “that what happens to us makes us inclined to believe certain things?”
“Precisely,” agreed Mrs. Maturin, in admiration. “But I must be honest with you, it was Brooks who made me see it.”
“But—he never said that to me. And I asked him once, almost the same question.”
“He never said it to me, either,” Mrs. Maturin confessed. “He doesn't tell you what he believes; I simply gathered that this is his idea. And apparently the workers can only improve their condition by strikes, by suffering—it seems to be the only manner in which they can convince the employers that the conditions are bad. It isn't the employers' fault.”
“Not their fault!” Janet repeated.
“Not in a large sense,” said Mrs. Maturin. “When people grow up to look at life in a certain way, from a certain viewpoint, it is difficult, almost impossible to change them. It's—it's their religion. They are convinced that if the world doesn't go on in their way, according to their principles, everything will be destroyed. They aren't inhuman. Within limits everybody is more than willing to help the world along, if only they can be convinced that what they are asked to do will help.”
Janet breathed deeply. She was thinking of Ditmar.
And Mrs. Maturin, regarding her, tactfully changed the subject.
“I didn't intend to give you a lecture on sociology or psychology, my dear,” she said. “I know nothing about them, although we have a professor who does. Think over what I've said about coming to Silliston. It will do you good—you are working too hard here. I know you would enjoy Silliston. And Brooks takes such an interest in you,” she added impulsively. “It is quite a compliment.”
“But why?” Janet demanded, bewildered.
“Perhaps it's because you have—possibilities. You may be typewriting his manuscripts. And then, I am a widow, and often rather lonely—you could come in and read to me occasionally.”
“But—I've never read anything.”
“How fortunate!” said Insall, who had entered the doorway in time to hear Janet's exclamation. “More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read.”
Mrs. Maturin laughed. But Insall waved his hand deprecatingly.
“That isn't my own,” he confessed. “I cribbed it from a clever Englishman. But I believe it's true.”
“I think I'll adopt her,” said Mrs. Maturin to Insall, when she had repeated to him the conversation. “I know you are always convicting me of enthusiasms, Brooks, and I suppose I do get enthusiastic.”
“Well, you adopt her—and I'll marry her,” replied Insall, with a smile, as he cut the string from the last bundle of clothing.
“You might do worse. It would be a joke if you did—!”
His friend paused to consider this preposterous possibility. “One never can tell whom a man like you, an artist, will marry.”
“We've no business to marry at all,” said Insall, laughing. “I often wonder where that romantic streak will land you, Augusta. But you do have a delightful time!”
“Don't begrudge it me, it makes life so much more interesting,” Mrs. Maturin begged, returning his smile. “I haven't the faintest idea that you will marry her or any one else. But I insist on saying she's your type—she's the kind of a person artists do dig up and marry—only better than most of them, far better.”
“Dig up?” said Insall.
“Well, you know I'm not a snob—I only mean that she seems to be one of the surprising anomalies that sometimes occur in—what shall I say?—in the working-classes. I do feel like a snob when I say that. But what is it? Where does that spark come from? Is it in our modern air, that discontent, that desire, that thrusting forth toward a new light—something as yet unformulated, but which we all feel, even at small institutions of learning like Silliston?”
“Now you're getting beyond me.”
“Oh no, I'm not,” Mrs. Maturin retorted confidently. “If you won't talk about it, I will, I have no shame. And this girl has it—this thing I'm trying to express. She's modern to her finger tips, and yet she's extraordinarily American—in spite of her modernity, she embodies in some queer way our tradition. She loves our old houses at Silliston—they make her feel at home—that's her own expression.”
“Did she say that?”
“Exactly. And I know she's of New England ancestry, she told me so. What I can't make out is, why she joined the I.W.W. That seems so contradictory.”
“Perhaps she was searching for light there,” Insall hazarded. “Why don't you ask her?”
“I don't know,” replied Mrs. Maturin, thoughtfully. “I want to, my curiosity almost burns me alive, and yet I don't. She isn't the kind you can ask personal questions of—that's part of her charm, part of her individuality. One is a little afraid to intrude. And yet she keeps coming here—of course you are a sufficient attraction, Brooks. But I must give her the credit of not flirting with you.”
“I've noticed that, too,” said Insall, comically.
“She's searching for light,” Mrs. Maturin went on, struck by the phrase. “She has an instinct we can give it to her, because we come from an institution of learning. I felt something of the kind when I suggested her establishing herself in Silliston. Well, she's more than worth while experimenting on, she must have lived and breathed what you call the 'movie atmosphere' all her life, and yet she never seems to have read and absorbed any sentimental literature or cheap religion. She doesn't suggest the tawdry. That part of her, the intellectual part, is a clear page to be written upon.”
“There's my chance,” said Insall.
“No, it's my chance—since you're so cynical.”
“I'm not cynical,” he protested.
“I don't believe you really are. And if you are, there may be a judgment upon you,” she added playfully. “I tell you she's the kind of woman artists go mad about. She has what sentimentalists call temperament, and after all we haven't any better word to express dynamic desires. She'd keep you stirred up, stimulated, and you could educate her.”
“No, thanks, I'll leave that to you. He who educates a woman is lost. But how about Syndicalism and all the mysticism that goes with it? There's an intellectual over at Headquarters who's been talking to her about Bergson, the life-force, and the World-We-Ourselves-Create.”
Mrs. Maturin laughed.
“Well, we go wrong when we don't go right. That's just it, we must go some way. And I'm sure, from what I gather, that she isn't wholly satisfied with Syndicalism.”
“What is right?” demanded Insall.
“Oh, I don't intend to turn her over to Mr. Worrall and make a sociologist and a militant suffragette out of her. She isn't that kind, anyhow. But I could give her good literature to read—yours, for instance,” she added maliciously.
“You're preposterous, Augusta,” Insall exclaimed.
“I may be, but you've got to indulge me. I've taken this fancy to her—of course I mean to see more of her. But—you know how hard it is for me, sometimes, since I've been left alone.”
Insall laid his hand affectionately on her shoulder.
“I remember what you said the first day I saw her, that the strike was in her,” Mrs. Maturin continued. “Well, I see now that she does express and typify it—and I don't mean the 'labour movement' alone, or this strike in Rampton, which is symptomatic, but crude. I mean something bigger—and I suppose you do—the protest, the revolt, the struggle for self-realization that is beginning to be felt all over the nation, all over the world today, that is not yet focussed and self-conscious, but groping its way, clothing itself in any philosophy that seems to fit it. I can imagine myself how such a strike as this might appeal to a girl with a sense of rebellion against sordidness and lack of opportunity—especially if she has had a tragic experience. And sometimes I suspect she has had one.”
“Well, it's an interesting theory,” Insall admitted indulgently.
“I'm merely amplifying your suggestions, only you won't admit that they are yours. And she was your protegee.” “And you are going to take her off my hands.” “I'm not so sure,” said Mrs. Maturin.
CHAPTER XIX
The Hampton strike had reached the state of grim deadlock characteristic of all stubborn wars. There were aggressions, retaliations on both sides, the antagonism grew more intense. The older labour unions were accused by the strikers of playing the employers' game, and thus grew to be hated even more than the “capitalists.” These organizations of the skilled had entered but half-heartedly into a struggle that now began to threaten, indeed, their very existence, and when it was charged that the Textile Workers had been attempting to secure recruits from the ranks of the strikers, and had secretly offered the millowners a scale of demands in the hope that a sufficient number of operatives would return to work, and so break the strike; a serious riot was barely averted. “Scab-hunting agencies,” the unions were called. One morning when it was learned that the loom-fixers, almost to a man, had gone back to the mills, a streetcar was stopped near the power house at the end of Faber Street, and in a twinkling, before the militia or police could interfere, motorman, conductor, and passengers were dragged from it and the trolley pole removed. This and a number of similar aggressive acts aroused the mill-owners and their agents to appeal with renewed vigour to the public through the newspapers, which it was claimed they owned or subsidized. Then followed a series of arraignments of the strike leaders calculated to stir the wildest prejudices and fears of the citizens of Hampton. Antonelli and Jastro—so rumour had it—in various nightly speeches had advised their followers to “sleep in the daytime and prowl like wild animals at night”; urged the power house employees to desert and leave the city in darkness; made the declaration, “We will win if we raise scaffolds on every street!” insisted that the strikers, too, should have “gun permits,” since the police hirelings carried arms. And the fact that the mill-owners replied with pamphlets whose object was proclaimed to be one of discrediting their leaders in the eyes of the public still further infuriated the strikers. Such charges, of course, had to be vehemently refuted, the motives behind them made clear, and counter-accusations laid at the door of the mill-owners.
The atmosphere at Headquarters daily grew more tense. At any moment the spark might be supplied to precipitate an explosion that would shake the earth. The hungry, made more desperate by their own sufferings or the spectacle of starving families, were increasingly difficult to control: many wished to return to work, others clamoured for violence, nor were these wholly discouraged by a portion of the leaders. A riot seemed imminent—a riot Antonelli feared and firmly opposed, since it would alienate the sympathy of that wider public in the country on which the success of the strike depended. Watchful, yet apparently unconcerned, unmoved by the quarrels, the fierce demands for “action,” he sat on the little stage, smoking his cigars and reading his newspapers.
Janet's nerves were taut. There had been times during the past weeks when she had been aware of new and vaguely disquieting portents. Inexperience had led her to belittle them, and the absorbing nature of her work, the excitement due to the strange life of conflict, of new ideas, into which she had so unreservedly flung herself, the resentment that galvanized her—all these had diverted her from worry. At night, hers had been the oblivious slumber of the weary.... And then, as a desperate wayfarer, pressing on, feels a heavy drop of rain and glances up to perceive the clouds that have long been gathering, she awoke in the black morning hours, and fear descended upon her. Suddenly her brain became hideously active as she lay, dry-upped, staring into the darkness, striving to convince herself that it could not be. But the thing had its advocate, also, to summon ingeniously, in cumulative array, those omens she had ignored: to cause her to piece together, in this moment of torture, portions of the knowledge of sexual facts that prudery banishes from education, a smattering of which reaches the ears of such young women as Janet in devious, roundabout ways. Several times, in the month just past, she had had unwonted attacks of dizziness, of faintness, and on one occasion Anna Mower, alarmed, had opened the window of the bibliotheque and thrust her into the cold air. Now, with a pang of fear she recalled what Anna had said:—“You're working too hard—you hadn't ought to stay here nights. If it was some girls I've met, I'd know what to think.”
Strange that the significance of this sentence had failed to penetrate her consciousness until now! “If it was some girls I've met, I'd know what to think!” It had come into her mind abruptly; and always, when she sought to reassure herself, to declare her terror absurd, it returned to confront her. Heat waves pulsed through her, she grew intolerably warm, perspiration started from her pores, and she flung off the blankets. The rain from the roofs was splashing on the bricks of the passage.... What would Mr. Insall say, if he knew? and Mrs. Maturin? She could never see them again. Now there was no one to whom to turn, she was cut off, utterly, from humanity, an outcast. Like Lise! And only a little while ago she and Lise had lain in that bed together! Was there not somebody—God? Other people believed in God, prayed to him. She tried to say, “Oh God, deliver me from this thing!” but the words seemed a mockery. After all, it was mechanical, it had either happened or it hadn't happened. A life-long experience in an environment where only unpleasant things occurred, where miracles were unknown, had effaced a fleeting, childhood belief in miracles. Cause and effect were the rule. And if there were a God who did interfere, why hadn't he interfered before this thing happened? Then would have been the logical time. Why hadn't he informed her that in attempting to escape from the treadmill in which he had placed her, in seeking happiness, she had been courting destruction? Why had he destroyed Lise? And if there were a God, would he comfort her now, convey to her some message of his sympathy and love? No such message, alas, seemed to come to her through the darkness.
After a while—a seemingly interminable while—the siren shrieked, the bells jangled loudly in the wet air, another day had come. Could she face it—even the murky grey light of this that revealed the ashes and litter of the back yard under the downpour? The act of dressing brought a slight relief; and then, at breakfast, a numbness stole over her—suggested and conveyed, perchance, by the apathy of her mother. Something had killed suffering in Hannah; perhaps she herself would mercifully lose the power to suffer! But the thought made her shudder. She could not, like her mother, find a silly refuge in shining dishes, in cleaning pots and pans, or sit idle, vacant-minded, for long hours in a spotless kitchen. What would happen to her?... Howbeit, the ache that had tortured her became a dull, leaden pain, like that she had known at another time—how long ago—when the suffering caused by Ditmar's deception had dulled, when she had sat in the train on her way back to Hampton from Boston, after seeing Lise. The pain would throb again, unsupportably, and she would wake, and this time it would drive her—she knew not where.
She was certain, now, that the presage of the night was true....
She reached Franco-Belgian Hall to find it in an uproar. Anna Mower ran up to her with the news that dynamite had been discovered by the police in certain tenements of the Syrian quarter, that the tenants had been arrested and taken to the police station where, bewildered and terrified, they had denied any knowledge of the explosive. Dynamite had also been found under the power house, and in the mills—the sources of Hampton's prosperity. And Hampton believed, of course, that this was the inevitable result of the anarchistic preaching of such enemies of society as Jastro and Antonelli if these, indeed, had not incited the Syrians to the deed. But it was a plot of the mill-owners, Anna insisted—they themselves had planted the explosive, adroitly started the rumours, told the police where the dynamite was to be found. Such was the view that prevailed at Headquarters, pervaded the angrily buzzing crowd that stood outside—heedless of the rain—and animated the stormy conferences in the Salle de Reunion.
The day wore on. In the middle of the afternoon, as she was staring out of the window, Anna Mower returned with more news. Dynamite had been discovered in Hawthorne Street, and it was rumoured that Antonelli and Jastro were to be arrested.
“You ought to go home and rest, Janet,” she said kindly.
Janet shook her head.
“Rolfe's back,” Anna informed her, after a moment. “He's talking to Antonelli about another proclamation to let people know who's to blame for this dynamite business. I guess he'll be in here in a minute to dictate the draft. Say, hadn't you better let Minnie take it, and go home?”
“I'm not sick,” Janet repeated, and Anna reluctantly left her.
Rolfe had been absent for a week, in New York, consulting with some of the I.W.W. leaders; with Lockhart, the chief protagonist of Syndicalism in America, just returned from Colorado, to whom he had given a detailed account of the Hampton strike. And Lockhart, next week, was coming to Hampton to make a great speech and look over the ground for himself. All this Rolfe told Janet eagerly when he entered the bibliotheque. He was glad to get back; he had missed her.
“But you are pale!” he exclaimed, as he seized her hand, “and how your eyes burn! You do not take care of yourself when I am not here to watch you.” His air of solicitude, his assumption of a peculiar right to ask, might formerly have troubled and offended her. Now she was scarcely aware of his presence. “You feel too much—that is it you are like a torch that consumes itself in burning. But this will soon be over, we shall have them on their knees, the capitalists, before very long, when it is known what they have done to-day. It is too much—they have overreached themselves with this plot of the dynamite.”
“You have missed me, a little?”
“I have been busy,” she said, releasing her hand and sitting down at her desk and taking up her notebook.
“You are not well,” he insisted.
“I'm all right,” she replied.
He lit a cigarette and began to pace the room—his customary manner of preparing himself for the creative mood. After a while he began to dictate—but haltingly. He had come here from Antonelli all primed with fervour and indignation, but it was evident that this feeling had ebbed, that his mind refused to concentrate on what he was saying. Despite the magnificent opportunity to flay the capitalists which their most recent tactics afforded him, he paused, repeated himself, and began again, glancing from time to time reproachfully, almost resentfully at Janet. Usually, on these occasions, he was transported, almost inebriated by his own eloquence; but now he chafed at her listlessness, he was at a loss to account for the withdrawal of the enthusiasm he had formerly been able to arouse. Lacking the feminine stimulus, his genius limped. For Rolfe there had been a woman in every strike—sometimes two. What had happened, during his absence, to alienate the most promising of all neophytes he had ever encountered?
“The eyes of the world are fixed on the workers of Hampton! They must be true to the trust their fellows have placed in them! To-day the mill-owners, the masters, are at the end of their tether. Always unscrupulous, they have descended to the most despicable of tactics in order to deceive the public. But truth will prevail!...” Rolfe lit another cigarette, began a new sentence and broke it off. Suddenly he stood over her. “It's you!” he said. “You don't feel it, you don't help me, you're not in sympathy.”
He bent over her, his red lips gleaming through his beard, a terrible hunger in his lustrous eyes—the eyes of a soul to which self-denial was unknown. His voice was thick with uncontrolled passion, his hand was cold.
“Janet, what has happened? I love you, you must love me—I cannot believe that you do not. Come with me. We shall work together for the workers—it is all nothing without you.”
For a moment she sat still, and then a pain shot through her, a pain as sharp as a dagger thrust. She drew her hand away.
“I can't love—I can only hate,” she said.
“But you do not hate me!” Rolfe repudiated so gross a fact. His voice caught as in a sob. “I, who love you, who have taught you!”
She dismissed this—what he had taught her—with a gesture which, though slight, was all-expressive. He drew back from her.
“Shall I tell you who has planned and carried out this plot?” he cried. “It is Ditmar. He is the one, and he used Janes, the livery stable keeper, the politician who brought the dynamite to Hampton, as his tool. Half an hour before Janes got to the station in Boston he was seen by a friend of ours talking to Ditmar in front of the Chippering offices, and Janes had the satchel with him then. Ditmar walked to the corner with him.”
Janet, too, had risen.
“I don't believe it,” she said.
“Ah, I thought you wouldn't! But we have the proof that dynamite was in the satchel, we've found the contractor from whom it was bought. I was a fool—I might have known that you loved Ditmar.”
“I hate him!” said Janet.
“It is the same thing,” said Rolfe.
She did not answer.... He watched her in silence as she put on her hat and coat and left the room.
The early dusk was gathering when she left the hall and made her way toward the city. The huge bottle-shaped chimneys of the power plant injected heavy black smoke into the wet air. In Faber Street the once brilliant signs above the “ten-foot” buildings seemed dulled, the telegraph poles starker, nakeder than ever, their wires scarcely discernible against the smeared sky. The pedestrians were sombrely garbed, and went about in “rubbers”—the most depressing of all articles worn by man. Sodden piles of snow still hid the curb and gutters, but the pavements were trailed with mud that gleamed in the light from the shop windows. And Janet, lingering unconsciously in front of that very emporium where Lisehad been incarcerated, the Bagatelle, stared at the finery displayed there, at the blue tulle dress that might be purchased, she read, for $22.99. She found herself repeating, in meaningless, subdued tones, the words, “twenty-two ninety-nine.” She even tried—just to see if it were possible—to concentrate her mind on that dress, on the fur muffs and tippets in the next window; to act as if this were just an ordinary, sad February afternoon, and she herself once more just an ordinary stenographer leading a monotonous, uneventful existence. But she knew that this was not true, because, later on, she was going to do something—to commit some act. She didn't know what this act would be. Her head was hot, her temples throbbed....
Night had fallen, the electric arcs burned blue overhead, she was in another street—was it Stanley? Sounds of music reached her, the rumble of marching feet; dark, massed figures were in the distance swimming toward her along the glistening line of the car tracks, and she heard the shrill whistling of the doffer boys, who acted as a sort of fife corps in these parades—which by this time had become familiar to the citizens of Hampton. And Janet remembered when the little red book that contained the songs had arrived at Headquarters from the west and had been distributed by thousands among the strikers. She recalled the words of this song, though the procession was as yet too far away for her to distinguish them:—