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Title: The Dwelling Place of Light, V3
Author: Winston Churchill
Release Date: January, 2003 [Etext #3648]
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[The actual date this file first posted = 07/03/01]
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[NOTE: This author is a cousin of Sir Winston Churchill the Prime Minister
of England during World War II.]
THE DWELLING-PLACE OF LIGHT
By WINSTON CHURCHILL
VOLUME 3.
CHAPTER XV
Occasionally the art of narrative may be improved by borrowing the method
of the movies. Another night has passed, and we are called upon to
imagine the watery sunlight of a mild winter afternoon filtering through
bare trees on the heads of a multitude. A large portion of Hampton
Common is black with the people of sixteen nationalities who have
gathered there, trampling down the snow, to listen wistfully and eagerly
to a new doctrine of salvation. In the centre of this throng on the
bandstand--reminiscent of concerts on sultry, summer nights--are the
itinerant apostles of the cult called Syndicalism, exhorting by turns in
divers tongues. Antonelli had spoken, and many others, when Janet,
impelled by a craving not to be denied, had managed to push her way
little by little from the outskirts of the crowd until now she stood
almost beneath the orator who poured forth passionate words in a language
she recognized as Italian. Her curiosity was aroused, she was unable to
classify this tall man whose long and narrow face was accentuated by a
pointed brown beard, whose lips gleamed red as he spoke, whose slim hands
were eloquent. The artist as propagandist--the unsuccessful artist with
more facility than will. The nose was classic, and wanted strength; the
restless eyes that at times seemed fixed on her were smouldering windows
of a burning house: the fire that stirred her was also consuming him.
Though he could have been little more than five and thirty, his hair was
thinned and greying at the temples. And somehow emblematic of this
physiognomy and physique, summing it up and expressing it in terms of
apparel, were the soft collar and black scarf tied in a flowing bow.
Janet longed to know what he was saying. His phrases, like music, played
on her emotions, and at last, when his voice rose in crescendo at the
climax of his speech, she felt like weeping.
"Un poeta!" a woman beside her exclaimed.
"Who is he?" Janet asked.
"Rolfe," said the woman.
"But he's an Italian?"
The woman shrugged her shoulders. "It is his name that is all I know."
He had begun to speak again, and now in English, with an enunciation, a
distinctive manner of turning his phrases new to such gatherings in
America, where labour intellectuals are little known; surprising to
Janet, diverting her attention, at first, from the meaning of his words.
"Labour," she heard, "labour is the creator of all wealth, and wealth
belongs to the creator. The wage system must be abolished. You, the
creators, must do battle against these self-imposed masters until you
shall come into your own. You who toil miserably for nine hours and
produce, let us say, nine dollars of wealth--do you receive it? No, what
is given you is barely enough to keep the slave and the slave's family
alive! The master, the capitalist, seizes the rightful reward of your
labour and spends it on luxuries, on automobiles and fine houses and
women, on food he can't eat, while you are hungry. Yes, you are slaves,"
he cried, "because you submit like slaves."
He waited, motionless and scornful, for the noise to die down. "Since I
have come here to Hampton, I have heard some speak of the state, others
of the unions. Yet the state is your enemy, it will not help you to gain
your freedom. The legislature has shortened your hours,--but why?
Because the politicians are afraid of you, and because they think you
will be content with a little. And now that the masters have cut your
wages, the state sends its soldiers to crush you. Only fifty cents, they
say--only fifty cents most of you miss from your envelopes. What is
fifty cents to them? But I who speak to you have been hungry, I know
that fifty cents will buy ten loaves of bread, or three pounds of the
neck of pork, or six quarts of milk for the babies. Fifty cents will
help pay the rent of the rat-holes where you live." Once more he was
interrupted by angry shouts of approval. "And the labour unions, have
they aided you? Why not? I will tell you why--because they are the
servile instruments of the masters. The unions say that capital has
rights, bargain with it, but for us there can be only one bargain,
complete surrender of the tools to the workers. For the capitalists are
parasites who suck your blood and your children's blood. From now on
there can be no compromise, no truce, no peace until they are
exterminated. It is war." War! In Janet's soul the word resounded like
a tocsin. And again, as when swept along East Street with the mob, that
sense of identity with these people and their wrongs, of submergence with
them in their cause possessed her. Despite her ancestry, her lot was
cast with them. She, too, had been precariously close to poverty, had
known the sordidness of life; she, too, and Lise and Hannah had been
duped and cheated of the fairer things. Eagerly she had drunk in the
vocabulary of that new and terrible philosophy. The master class must be
exterminated! Was it not true, if she had been of that class, that
Ditmar would not have dared to use and deceive her? Why had she never
thought of these things before?... The light was beginning to fade, the
great meeting was breaking up, and yet she lingered. At the foot of the
bandstand steps, conversing with a small group of operatives that
surrounded him, she perceived the man who had just spoken. And as she
stood hesitating, gazing at him, a desire to hear more, to hear all of
this creed he preached, that fed the fires in her soul, urged her
forward. Her need, had she known it, was even greater than that of these
toilers whom she now called comrades. Despite some qualifying reserve
she felt, and which had had to do with the redness of his lips, he
attracted her. He had a mind, an intellect, he must possess stores of
the knowledge for which she thirsted; he appeared to her as one who had
studied and travelled, who had ascended heights and gained the wider view
denied her. A cynical cosmopolitanism would have left her cold, but
here, apparently, was a cultivated man burning with a sense of the
world's wrongs. Ditmar, who was to have led her out of captivity, had
only thrust her the deeper into bondage.... She joined the group,
halting on the edge of it, listening. Rolfe was arguing with a man about
the labour unions, but almost at once she knew she had fixed his
attention. From time to time, as he talked, his eyes sought hers boldly,
and in their dark pupils were tiny points of light that stirred and
confused her, made her wonder what was behind them, in his soul. When he
had finished his argument, he singled her out.
"You do not work in the mills?" he asked.
"No, I'm a stenographer--or I was one."
"And now?"
"I've given up my place."
"You want to join us?"
"I was interested in what you said. I never heard anything like it
before."
He looked at her intently.
"Come, let us walk a little way," he said. And she went along by his
side, through the Common, feeling a neophyte's excitement in the
freemasonry, the contempt for petty conventions of this newly achieved
doctrine of brotherhood. "I will give you things to read, you shall be
one of us."
"I'm afraid I shouldn't understand them," Janet replied. "I've read so
little."
"Oh, you will understand," he assured her, easily. "There is too much
learning, too much reason and intelligence in the world, too little
impulse and feeling, intuition. Where do reason and intelligence lead
us? To selfishness, to thirst for power-straight into the master class.
They separate us from the mass of humanity. No, our fight is against
those who claim more enlightenment than their fellowmen, who control the
public schools and impose reason on our children, because reason leads to
submission, makes us content with our station in life. The true
syndicalist is an artist, a revolutionist!" he cried.
Janet found this bewildering and yet through it seemed to shine for her a
gleam of light. Her excitement grew. Never before had she been in the
presence of one who talked like this, with such assurance and ease. And
the fact that he despised knowledge, yet possessed it, lent him glamour.
"But you have studied!" she exclaimed.
"Oh yes, I have studied," he replied, with a touch of weariness, "only to
learn that life is simple, after all, and that what is needed for the
social order is simple. We have only to take what belongs to us, we who
work, to follow our feelings, our inclinations."
"You would take possession of the mills?" she asked.
"Yes," he said quickly, "of all wealth, and of the government. There
would be no government--we should not need it. A little courage is all
that is necessary, and we come into our own. You are a stenographer, you
say. But you--you are not content, I can see it in your face, in your
eyes. You have cause to hate them, too, these masters, or you would not
have been herein this place, to-day. Is it not so?"
She shivered, but was silent.
"Is it not so?" he repeated. "They have wronged you, too, perhaps,--they
have wronged us all, but some are too stupid, too cowardly to fight and
crush them. Christians and slaves submit. The old religion teaches that
the world is cruel for most of us, but if we are obedient and humble we
shall be rewarded in heaven." Rolfe laughed. "The masters approve of
that teaching. They would not have it changed. But for us it is war.
We'll strike and keep on striking, we'll break their machinery, spoil
their mills and factories, and drive them out. And even if we do not win
at once, it is better to suffer and die fighting than to have the life
ground out of us--is it not?"
"Yes, it is better!" she agreed. The passion in her voice did not escape
him.
"Some day, perhaps sooner than we think, we shall have the true
Armageddon, the general strike, when the last sleeping toiler shall have
aroused himself from his lethargy to rise up and come into his
inheritance." He seemed to detach himself from her, his eyes became more
luminous.
"`Like unseen music in the night,'--so Sorel writes about it. They may
scoff at it, the wise ones, but it will come. `Like music in the night!'
You respond to that!"
Again she was silent. They had walked on, through familiar streets that
now seemed strange.
"You respond--I can tell," he said. "And yet, you are not like these
others, like me, even. You are an American. And yet you are not like
most of your countrywomen."
"Why do you say that?"
"I will tell you. Because they are cold, most of them, and trivial, they
do not feel. But you--you can feel, you can love and hate. You look
calm and cold, but you are not--I knew it when I looked at you, when you
came up to me."
She did not know whether to resent or welcome his clairvoyance, his
assumption of intimacy, his air of appropriation. But her curiosity was
tingling.
"And you?" she asked. "Your name is Rolfe, isn't it?"
He assented. "And yours?"
She told him.
"You have been in America long--your family?"
"Very long," she said. "But you speak Italian, and Rolfe isn't an
Italian name."
"My father was an Englishman, an artist, who lived in Italy--my mother a
peasant woman from Lombardy, such as these who come to work in the mills.
When she was young she was beautiful--like a Madonna by an old master."
"An old master?"
"The old masters are the great painters who lived in Italy four hundred
years ago. I was named after one of them--the greatest. I am called
Leonard. He was Leonardo da Vinci."
The name, as Rolfe pronounced it, stirred her. And art, painting! It
was a realm unknown to her, and yet the very suggestion of it evoked
yearnings. And she recalled a picture in the window of Hartmann's book-
store, a coloured print before which she used to stop on her way to and
from the office, the copy of a landscape by a California artist. The
steep hillside in the foreground was spread with the misty green of olive
trees, and beyond--far beyond--a snow-covered peak, like some high altar,
flamed red in the sunset. She had not been able to express her feeling
for this picture, it had filled her with joy and sadness. Once she had
ventured to enter and ask its price--ten dollars. And then came a
morning when she had looked for it, and it was gone.
"And your father--did he paint beautiful pictures, too?"
"Ah, he was too much of a socialist. He was always away whey I was a
child, and after my mother's death he used to take me with him. When I
was seventeen we went to Milan to take part in the great strike, and
there I saw the soldiers shooting down the workers by the hundreds,
putting them in prison by the thousands. Then I went to live in England,
among the socialists there, and I learned the printer's trade. When I
first came to this country I was on a labour paper in New York, I set up
type, I wrote articles, and once in a while I addressed meetings on the
East Side. But even before I left London I had read a book on
Syndicalism by one of the great Frenchmen, and after a while I began to
realize that the proletariat would never get anywhere through socialism."
"The proletariat?" The word was new to Janet's ear.
"The great mass of the workers, the oppressed, the people you saw here
to-day. Socialism is not for them. Socialism--political socialism--
betrays them into the hands of the master class. Direct action is the
thing, the general strike, war,--the new creed, the new religion that
will bring salvation. I joined the Industrial Workers of the World that
is the American organization of Syndicalism. I went west, to Colorado
and California and Oregon, I preached to the workers wherever there was
an uprising, I met the leaders, Ritter and Borkum and Antonelli and
Jastro and Nellie Bond, I was useful to them, I understand Syndicalism as
they do not. And now we are here, to sow the seed in the East. Come,"
he said, slipping his arm through hers, "I will take you to Headquarters,
I will enlist you, you shall be my recruit. I will give you the cause,
the religion you need."
She longed to go, and yet she drew back, puzzled. The man fired and
fascinated her, but there were reservations, apprehensions concerning
him, felt rather than reasoned. Because of her state of rebellion, of
her intense desire to satisfy in action the emotion aroused by a sense of
wrong, his creed had made a violent appeal, but in his voice, in his
eyes, in his manner she had been quick to detect a personal, sexual note
that disturbed and alarmed her, that implied in him a lack of unity.
"I can't, to-night," she said. "I must go home--my mother is all alone.
But I want to help, I want to do something."
They were standing on a corner, under a street lamp. And she averted her
eyes from his glance.
"Then come to-morrow," he said eagerly. "You know where Headquarters is,
in the Franco-Belgian Hall?"
"What could I do?" she asked.
"You? You could help in many ways--among the women. Do you know what
picketing is?"
"You mean keeping the operatives out of the mills?"
"Yes, in the morning, when they go to work. And out of the Chippering
Mill, especially. Ditmar, the agent of that mill, is the ablest of the
lot, I'm told. He's the man we want to cripple."
"Cripple!" exclaimed Janet.
"Oh, I don't mean to harm him personally." Rolfe did not seem to notice
her tone. "But he intends to crush the strike, and I understand he's
importing scabs here to finish out an order--a big order. If it weren't
for him, we'd have an easier fight; he stiffens up the others. There's
always one man like that, in every place. And what we want to do is to
make him shut down, especially."
"I see," said Janet.
"You'll come to Headquarters?" Rolfe repeated.
"Yes, I'll come, to-morrow," she promised.
After she had left him she walked rapidly through several streets, not
heeding her direction--such was the driving power of the new ideas he had
given her. Certain words and phrases he had spoken rang in her head, and
like martial music kept pace with her steps. She strove to remember all
that he had said, to grasp its purport; and because it seemed recondite,
cosmic, it appealed to her and excited her the more. And he, the man
himself, had exerted a kind of hypnotic force that partially had
paralyzed her faculties and aroused her fears while still in his
presence: her first feeling in escaping had been one of relief--and then
she began to regret not having gone to Headquarters. Hadn't she been
foolish? In the retrospect, the elements in him that had disturbed her
were less disquieting, his intellectual fascination was enhanced: and in
that very emancipation from cant and convention, characteristic of the
Order to which he belonged, had lain much of his charm. She had
attracted him as a woman, there was no denying that. He, who had studied
and travelled and known life in many lands, had discerned in her, Janet
Bumpus, some quality to make him desire her, acknowledge her as a
comrade! Tremblingly she exulted in the possession of that quality--
whatever it might be. Ditmar, too, had perceived it! He had not known
how to value it. With this thought came a flaming suggestion--Ditmar
should see her with this man Rolfe, she would make him scorch with the
fires of jealousy. Ditmar should know that she had joined his enemies,
the Industrial Workers of the World. Of the world! Her shackles had
been cast off at last!... And then, suddenly, she felt tired. The
prospect of returning to Fillmore Street, to the silent flat--made the
more silent by her mother's tragic presence--overwhelmed her. The ache
in her heart began to throb again. How could she wait until the dawn of
another day?...
In the black hours of the morning, with the siren dinning in her ears a
hoarse call to war, Janet leaped from her bed and began to dress. There
is a degree of cold so sharp that it seems actually to smell, and as she
stole down the stairs and out of the door she shivered, assailed by a
sense of loneliness and fear. Yet an insistent voice urged her on,
whispering that to remain at home, inactive, was to go mad; salvation and
relief lay in plunging into the struggle, in contributing her share
toward retribution and victory. Victory! In Faber Street the light of
the electric arcs tinged the snow with blue, and the flamboyant
advertisements of breakfast foods, cigarettes and ales seemed but the
mockery of an activity now unrealizable. The groups and figures
scattered here and there farther down the street served only to
exaggerate its wide emptiness. What could these do, what could she
accomplish against the mighty power of the mills? Gradually, as she
stood gazing, she became aware of a beating of feet upon the snow; over
her shoulder she caught the gleam of steel. A squad of soldiers muffled
in heavy capes and woolen caps was marching along the car-tracks. She
followed them. At the corner of West Street, in obedience to a sharp
command she saw them halt, turn, and advance toward a small crowd
gathered there. It scattered, only to collect again when the soldiers
had passed on. Janet joined them. She heard men cursing the soldiers.
The women stood a little aside; some were stamping to keep warm, and one,
with a bundle in her arms which Janet presently perceived to be a child,
sank down on a stone step and remained there, crouching, resigned.
"We gotta right to stay here, in the street. We gotta right to live, I
guess." The girl's teeth were chattering, but she spoke with such
vehemence and spirit as to attract Janet's attention. "You worked in the
Chippering, like me--yes?" she asked.
Janet nodded. The faded, lemon-coloured shawl the girl had wrapped about
her head emphasized the dark beauty of her oval face. She smiled, and
her white teeth were fairly dazzling. Impulsively she thrust her arm
through Janet's.
"You American--you comrade, you come to help?" she asked.
"I've never done any picketing."
"I showa you."
The dawn had begun to break, revealing little by little the outlines of
cruel, ugly buildings, the great mill looming darkly at the end of the
street, and Janet found it scarcely believable that only a little while
ago she had hurried thither in the mornings with anticipation and joy in
her heart, eager to see Ditmar, to be near him! The sight of two
policemen hurrying toward them from the direction of the canal aroused
her. With sullen murmurs the group started to disperse, but the woman
with the baby, numb with cold, was slow in rising, and one of the
policemen thrust out his club threateningly.
"Move on, you can't sit here," he said.
With a lithe movement like the spring of a cat the Italian girl flung
herself between them--a remarkable exhibition of spontaneous
inflammability; her eyes glittered like the points of daggers, and, as
though they had been dagger points, the policeman recoiled a little. The
act, which was absolutely natural, superb, electrified Janet, restored in
an instant her own fierceness of spirit. The girl said something
swiftly, in Italian, and helped the woman to rise, paying no more
attention to the policeman. Janet walked on, but she had not covered
half the block before she was overtaken by the girl; her anger had come
and gone in a flash, her vivacity had returned, her vitality again found
expression in an abundant good nature and good will. She asked Janet's
name, volunteering the information that her own was Gemma, that she was a
"fine speeder" in the Chippering Mill, where she had received nearly
seven dollars a week. She had been among the first to walk out.
"Why did you walk out?" asked Janet curiously.
"Why? I get mad when I know that my wages is cut. I want the money--I
get married."
"Is that why you are striking?" asked Janet curiously.
"That is why--of course."
"Then you haven't heard any of the speakers? They say it is for a cause-
-the workers are striking for freedom, some day they will own the mills.
I heard a man named Rolfe yesterday--"
The girl gave her a radiant smile.
"Rolfe! It is beautiful, what Rolfe said. You think so? I think so. I
am for the cause, I hate the capitalist. We will win, and get more
money, until we have all the money. We will be rich. And you, why do
you strike?"
"I was mad, too," Janet replied simply.
"Revenge!" exclaimed the girl, glittering again. "I understan'. Here
come the scabs! Now I show you."
The light had grown, but the stores were still closed and barred. Along
Faber Street, singly or in little groups, anxiously glancing around them,
behind them, came the workers who still clung desperately to their jobs.
Gemma fairly darted at two girls who sought the edge of the sidewalk,
seizing them by the sleeves, and with piteous expressions they listened
while she poured forth on them a stream of Italian. After a moment one
tore herself away, but the other remained and began to ask questions.
Presently she turned and walked slowly away in the direction from which
she had come.
"I get her," exclaimed Gemma, triumphantly.
"What did you say?" asked Janet.
"Listen--that she take the bread from our mouths, she is traditore--scab.
We strike for them, too, is it not so?"
"It is no use for them to work for wages that starve. We win the strike,
we get good wages for all. Here comes another--she is a Jewess--you try,
you spik."
Janet failed with the Jewess, who obstinately refused to listen or reply
as the two walked along with her, one on either side. Near West Street
they spied a policeman, and desisted. Up and down Faber Street,
everywhere, the game went on: but the police were watchful, and once a
detachment of militia passed. The picketing had to be done quickly, in
the few minutes that were to elapse before the gates should close.
Janet's blood ran faster, she grew excited, absorbed, bolder as she
perceived the apologetic attitude of the "scabs" and she began to despise
them with Gemma's heartiness; and soon she had lost all sense of surprise
at finding herself arguing, pleading, appealing to several women in turn,
fluently, in the language of the industrial revolution. Some--because
she was an American--examined her with furtive curiosity; others
pretended not to understand, accelerating their pace. She gained no
converts that morning, but one girl, pale, anemic with high cheek bones
evidently a Slav--listened to her intently.
"I gotta right to work," she said.
"Not if others will starve because you work," objected Janet.
"If I don't work I starve," said the girl.
"No, the Committee will take care of you--there will be food for all.
How much do you get now?"
"Four dollar and a half."
"You starve now," Janet declared contemptuously. "The quicker you join
us, the sooner you'll get a living wage."
The girl was not quite convinced. She stood for a while undecided, and
then ran abruptly off in the direction of West Street. Janet sought for
others, but they had ceased coming; only the scattered, prowling
picketers remained.
Over the black rim of the Clarendon Mill to the eastward the sky had
caught fire. The sun had risen, the bells were ringing riotously,
resonantly in the clear, cold air. Another working day had begun.
Janet, benumbed with cold, yet agitated and trembling because of her
unwonted experience of the morning, made her way back to Fillmore Street.
She was prepared to answer any questions her mother might ask; as they
ate their dismal breakfast, and Hannah asked no questions, she longed to
blurt out where she had been, to announce that she had cast her lot with
the strikers, the foreigners, to defend them and declare that these were
not to blame for the misfortunes of the family, but men like Ditmar and
the owners of the mills, the capitalists. Her mother, she reflected
bitterly, had never once betrayed any concern as to her shattered
happiness. But gradually, as from time to time she glanced covertly at
Hannah's face, her resentment gave way to apprehension. Hannah did not
seem now even to be aware of her presence; this persistent apathy filled
her with a dread she did not dare to acknowledge.
"Mother!" she cried at last.
Hannah started. "Have you finished?" she asked.
"Yes."
"You've b'en out in the cold, and you haven't eaten much." Janet fought
back her tears. "Oh yes, I have," she managed to reply, convinced of the
futility of speech, of all attempts to arouse her mother to a realization
of the situation. Perhaps--though her heart contracted at the thought
perhaps it was a merciful thing! But to live, day after day, in the
presence of that comfortless apathy!... Later in the morning she went
out, to walk the streets, and again in the afternoon; and twice she
turned her face eastward, in the direction of the Franco-Belgian Hall.
Her courage failed her. How would these foreigners and the strange
leaders who had come to organize them receive her, Ditmar's stenographer?
She would have to tell them she was Ditmar's stenographer; they would
find it out. And now she was filled with doubts about Rolfe. Had he
really thought she could be of use to them! Around the Common, in front
of the City Hall men went about their affairs alertly, or stopped one
another to talk about the strike. In Faber Street, indeed, an air of
suppressed excitement prevailed, newsboys were shouting out extras; but
business went on as though nothing had happened to disturb it. There
was, however, the spectacle, unusual at this time of day, of operatives
mingling with the crowd, while policemen stood watchfully at the corners;
a company of soldiers marched by, drawing the people in silence to the
curb. Janet scanned the faces of these idle operatives; they seemed for
the most part either calm or sullen, wanting the fire and passion of the
enthusiasts who had come out to picket in the early hours of the day; she
sought vainly for the Italian girl with whom she had made friends.
Despondency grew in her, a sense of isolation, of lacking any one, now,
to whom she might turn, and these feelings were intensified by the air of
confidence prevailing here. The strike was crushed, injustice and wrong
had triumphed--would always triumph. In front of the Banner office she
heard a man say to an acquaintance who had evidently just arrived in
town:--
"The Chippering? Sure, that's running. By to-morrow Ditmar'll have a
full force there. Now that the militia has come, I guess we've got this
thing scotched..."
Just how and when that order and confidence of Faber Street began to be
permeated by disquietude and alarm, Janet could not have said. Something
was happening, somewhere--or about to happen. An obscure, apparently
telepathic process was at work. People began to hurry westward, a few
had abandoned the sidewalk and were running; while other pedestrians,
more timid, were equally concerned to turn and hasten in the opposite
direction. At the corner of West Street was gathering a crowd that each
moment grew larger and larger, despite the efforts of the police to
disperse it. These were strikers, angry strikers. They blocked the
traffic, halted the clanging trolleys, surged into the mouth of West
Street, booing and cursing at the soldiers whose threatening line of
bayonets stretched across that thoroughfare half-way down toward the
canal, guarding the detested Chippering Mill. Bordering West Street,
behind the company's lodging-houses on the canal, were certain low
buildings, warehouses, and on their roofs tense figures could be seen
standing out against the sky. The vanguard of the mob, thrust on by
increasing pressure from behind, tumbled backward the thin cordon of
police, drew nearer and nearer the bayonets, while the soldiers grimly
held their ground. A voice was heard on the roof, a woman in the front
rank of the mob gave a warning shriek, and two swift streams of icy water
burst forth from the warehouse parapet, tearing the snow from the
cobbles, flying in heavy, stinging spray as it advanced and mowed the
strikers down and drove them like flies toward Faber Street. Screams of
fright, curses of defiance and hate mingled with the hissing of the water
and the noise of its impact with the ground--like the tearing of heavy
sail-cloth. Then, from somewhere near the edge of the mob, came a
single, sharp detonation, quickly followed by another--below the watchmen
on the roof a window crashed. The nozzles on the roof were raised, their
streams, sweeping around in a great semi-circle, bowled down the rioters
below the tell-tale wisps of smoke, and no sooner had the avalanche of
water passed than the policemen who, forewarned, had sought refuge along
the walls, rushed forward and seized a man who lay gasping on the snow.
Dazed, half drowned, he had dropped his pistol. They handeuffed him and
dragged him away through the ranks of the soldiers, which opened for him
to pass. The mob, including those who had been flung down, bruised and
drenched, and who had painfully got to their feet again, had backed
beyond the reach of the water, and for a while held that ground, until
above its hoarse, defiant curses was heard, from behind, the throbbing of
drums.
"Cossacks! More Cossacks!"
The cry was taken up by Canadians, Italians, Belgians, Poles, Slovaks,
Jews, and Syrians. The drums grew louder, the pressure from the rear was
relaxed, the throng in Faber Street began a retreat in the direction of
the power plant. Down that street, now in double time, came three
companies of Boston militia, newly arrived in Hampton, blue-taped,
gaitered, slouch-hatted. From columns of fours they wheeled into line,
and with bayonets at charge slowly advanced. Then the boldest of the
mob, who still lingered, sullenly gave way, West Street was cleared, and
on the wider thoroughfare the long line of traffic, the imprisoned
trolleys began to move again....
Janet had wedged herself into the press far enough to gain a view down
West Street of the warehouse roofs, to see the water turned on, to hear
the screams and the curses and then the shots. Once more she caught the
contagious rage of the mob; the spectacle had aroused her to fury; it
seemed ignominious, revolting that human beings, already sufficiently
miserable, should be used thus. As she retreated reluctantly across the
car tracks her attention was drawn to a man at her side, a Slovak. His
face was white and pinched, his clothes were wet. Suddenly he stopped,
turned and shook his fist at the line of soldiers.
"The Cossack, the politzman belong to the boss, the capitalist!" he
cried. "We ain't got no right to live. I say, kill the capitalist--kill
Ditmar!"
A man with a deputy's shield ran toward them.
"Move on!" he said brutally. "Move on, or I'll roil you in." And Janet,
once clear of the people, fled westward, the words the foreigner had
spoken ringing in her ears. She found herself repeating them aloud,
"Kill Ditmar!" as she hurried through the gathering dusk past the power
house with its bottle-shaped chimneys, and crossed the little bridge over
the stream beside the chocolate factory. She gained the avenue she had
trod with Eda on that summer day of the circus. Here was the ragpicker's
shop, the fence covered with bedraggled posters, the deserted grand-stand
of the base-ball park spread with a milky-blue mantle of snow; and
beyond, the monotonous frame cottages all built from one model. Now she
descried looming above her the outline of Torrey's Hill blurred and
melting into a darkening sky, and turned into the bleak lane where stood
the Franco-Belgian Hall--Hampton Headquarters of the Industrial Workers
of the World. She halted a moment at sight of the crowd of strikers
loitering in front of it, then went on again, mingling with them
excitedly beside the little building. Its lines were simple and
unpretentious, and yet it had an exotic character all its own, differing
strongly from the surrounding houses: it might have been transported from
a foreign country and set down here. As the home of that odd,
cooperative society of thrifty and gregarious Belgians it had stimulated
her imagination, and once before she had gazed, as now, through the
yellowed, lantern-like windows of the little store at the women and
children waiting to fill their baskets with the day's provisions. In the
middle of the building was an entrance leading up to the second floor.
Presently she gathered the courage to enter. Her heart was pounding as
she climbed the dark stairs and thrust open the door, and she stood a
moment on the threshold almost choked by the fumes of tobacco, bewildered
by the scene within, confused by the noise. Through a haze of smoke she
beheld groups of swarthy foreigners fiercely disputing among themselves--
apparently on the verge of actual combat, while a sprinkling of silent
spectators of both sexes stood at the back of the hall. At the far end
was a stage, still set with painted, sylvan scenery, and seated there,
alone, above the confusion and the strife, with a calmness, a detachment
almost disconcerting, was a stout man with long hair and a loose black
tie. He was smoking a cigar and reading a newspaper which he presently
flung down, taking up another from a pile on the table beside him.
Suddenly one of the groups, shouting and gesticulating, surged toward him
and made an appeal through their interpreter. He did not appear to be
listening; without so much as lowering his newspaper he spoke a few words
in reply, and the group retired, satisfied. By some incomprehensible
power he dominated. Panting, fascinated, loath to leave yet fearful,
Janet watched him, breathing now deeply this atmosphere of smoke, of
strife, and turmoil. She found it grateful, for the strike, the battle
was in her own soul as well. Momentarily she had forgotten Rolfe, who
had been in her mind as she had come hither, and then she caught sight of
him in a group in the centre of the hall. He saw her, he was making his
way toward her, he was holding her hands, looking down into her face with
that air of appropriation, of possession she remembered. But she felt no
resentment now, only a fierce exultation at having dared.
"You've come to join us!" he exclaimed. "I thought I'd lost you."
He bent closer to her that she might hear.
"We are having a meeting of the Committee," he said, and she smiled.
Despite her agitation, this struck her as humorous. And Rolfe smiled
back at her. "You wouldn't think so, but Antonelli knows how to manage
them. He is a general. Come, I will enlist you, you shall be my
recruit."
"But what can I do?" she asked.
"I have been thinking. You said you were a stenographer--we need
stenographers, clerks. You will not be wasted. Come in here."
Behind her two box-like rooms occupying the width of the building had
been turned into offices, and into one of these Rolfe led her. Men and
women were passing in and out, while in a corner a man behind a desk sat
opening envelopes, deftly extracting bills and post-office orders and
laying them in a drawer. On the wall of this same room was a bookcase
half filled with nondescript volumes.
"The Bibliotheque--that's French for the library of the Franco-Belgian
Cooperative Association," explained Rolfe. "And this is Comrade Sanders.
Sanders is easier to say than Czernowitz. Here is the young lady I told
you about, who wishes to help us--Miss Bumpus."
Mr. Sanders stopped counting his money long enough to grin at her.
"You will be welcome," he said, in good English. "Stenographers are
scarce here. When can you come?"
"To-morrow morning," answered Janet.
"Good," he said. "I'll have a machine for you. What kind do you use?"
She told him. Instinctively she took a fancy to this little man, whose
flannel shirt and faded purple necktie, whose blue, unshaven face and
tousled black hair seemed incongruous with an alert, business-like, and
efficient manner. His nose, though not markedly Jewish, betrayed in him
the blood of that vital race which has triumphantly survived so many
centuries of bondage and oppression.
"He was a find, Czernowitz--he calls himself Sanders," Rolfe explained,
as they entered the hall once more. "An Operative in the Patuxent,
educated himself, went to night school--might have been a capitalist like
so many of his tribe if he hadn't loved humanity. You'll get along with
him."
"I'm sure I shall," she replied.
Rolfe took from his pocket a little red button with the letters I.W.W.
printed across it. He pinned it, caressingly, on her coat.
"Now you are one of us!" he exclaimed. "You'll come to-morrow?"
"I'll come to-morrow," she repeated, drawing away from him a little.
"And--we shall be friends?"
She nodded. "I must go now, I think."
"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 distinguishedlooking 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 longsuffering
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 bibliottheque, 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 campfollowers.
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 personel 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.
"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.
"Yon 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 syndiealists 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-huntmg
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:--
"The People's flag is deepest red,
It shrouded oft our martyred dead,
And ere their limbs grew stiff and cold,
Their life-blood dyed its every fold."
The song ceased, and she stood still, waiting for the procession to reach
her. A group of heavy Belgian women were marching together. Suddenly,
as by a simultaneous impulse, their voices rang out in the
Internationale--the terrible Marseillaise of the workers:--
"Arise, ye prisoners of starvation!
Arise, ye wretched of the earth!"
And the refrain was taken up by hundreds of throats:--
"'Tis the final conflict,
Let each stand in his place!"
The walls of the street flung it back. On the sidewalk, pressed against
the houses, men and women heard it with white faces. But Janet was
carried on.... The scene changed, now she was gazing at a mass of human
beings hemmed in by a line of soldiers. Behind the crowd was a row of
old-fashioned brick houses, on the walls of which were patterned, by the
cold electric light, the branches of the bare elms ranged along the
sidewalk. People leaned out of the windows, like theatregoers at a play.
The light illuminated the red and white bars of the ensign, upheld by the
standard bearer of the regiment, the smaller flags flaunted by the
strikers--each side clinging hardily to the emblem of human liberty. The
light fell, too, harshly and brilliantly, on the workers in the front
rank confronting the bayonets, and these seemed strangely indifferent, as
though waiting for the flash of a photograph. A little farther on a
group of boys, hands in pockets, stared at the soldiers with bravado.
From the rear came that indescribable "booing" which those who have heard
never forget, mingled with curses and cries:--
"Vive la greve!"
"To hell with the Cossacks!"
"Kahm on--shoot!"
The backs of the soldiers, determined, unyielding, were covered with
heavy brown capes that fell below the waist. As Janet's glance wandered
down the line it was arrested by the face of a man in a visored woollen
cap--a face that was almost sepia, in which large white eyeballs struck a
note of hatred. And what she seemed to see in it, confronting her, were
the hatred and despair of her own soul! The man might have been a
Hungarian or a Pole; the breadth of his chin was accentuated by a wide,
black moustache, his attitude was tense,--that of a maddened beast ready
to spring at the soldier in front of him. He was plainly one of those
who had reached the mental limit of endurance.
In contrast with this foreigner, confronting him, a young lieutenant
stood motionless, his head cocked on one side, his hand grasping the club
held a little behind him, his glance meeting the other's squarely, but
with a different quality of defiance. All his faculties were on the
alert. He wore no overcoat, and the uniform fitting close to his figure,
the broad-brimmed campaign hat of felt served to bring into relief the
physical characteristics of the American Anglo-Saxon, of the
individualist who became the fighting pioneer. But Janet, save to
register the presence of the intense antagonism between the two, scarcely
noticed her fellow countryman.... Every moment she expected to see the
black man spring,--and yet movement would have marred the drama of that
consuming hatred....
Then, by one of those bewildering, kaleidoscopic shifts to which crowds
are subject, the scene changed, more troops arrived, little by little the
people were dispersed to drift together again by chance--in smaller
numbers--several blocks away. Perhaps a hundred and fifty were scattered
over the space formed by the intersection of two streets, where three or
four special policemen with night sticks urged them on. Not a riot, or
anything approaching it. The police were jeered, but the groups,
apparently, had already begun to scatter, when from the triangular
vestibule of a saloon on the corner darted a flame followed by an echoing
report, a woman bundled up in a shawl screamed and sank on the snow. For
an instant the little French-Canadian policeman whom the shot had missed
gazed stupidly down at her....
As Janet ran along the dark pavements the sound of the shot and of the
woman's shriek continued to ring in her ears. At last she stopped in
front of the warehouse beyond Mr. Tiernan's shop, staring at the darkened
windows of the flat--of the front room in which her mother now slept
alone. For a minute she stood looking at these windows, as though
hypnotized by some message they conveyed--the answer to a question
suggested by the incident that had aroused and terrified her. They drew
her, as in a trance, across the street, she opened the glass-panelled
door, remembering mechanically the trick it had of not quite closing,
turned and pushed it to and climbed the stairs. In the diningroom the
metal lamp, brightly polished, was burning as usual, its light falling on
the chequered red table-cloth, on her father's empty chair, on that
somewhat battered heirloom, the horsehair sofa. All was so familiar, and
yet so amazingly unfamiliar, so silent! At this time Edward should be
reading the Banner, her mother bustling in and out, setting the table for
supper. But not a dish was set. The ticking of the ancient clock only
served to intensify the silence. Janet entered, almost on tiptoe, made
her way to the kitchen door, and looked in. The stove was polished, the
pans bright upon the wall, and Hannah was seated in a corner, her hands
folded across a spotless apron. Her scant hair was now pure white, her
dress seemed to have fallen away from her wasted neck, which was like a
trefoil column.
"Is that you, Janet? You hain't seen anything of your father?"
The night before Janet had heard this question, and she had been puzzled
as to its meaning--whether in the course of the day she had seen her
father, or whether Hannah thought he was coming home.
"He's at the mill, mother. You know he has to stay there."
"I know," replied Hannah, in a tone faintly reminiscent of the old
aspersion. "But I've got everything ready for him in case he should
come--any time--if the strikers hain't killed him."
"But he's safe where he is."
"I presume they will try to kill him, before they get through," Hannah
continued evenly. "But in case he should come at any time, and I'm not
here, you tell him all those Bumpus papers are put away in the drawer of
that old chest, in the corner. I can't think what he'd do without those
papers. That is," she added, "if you're here yourself."
"Why shouldn't you be here?" asked Janet, rather sharply.
"I dunno, I seem to have got through." She glanced helplessly around the
kitchen. "There don't seem to be much left to keep me alive.... I guess
you'll be wanting your supper, won't you? You hain't often home these
days--whatever it is you're doing. I didn't expect you."
Janet did not answer at once.
"I--I have to go out again, mother," she said.
Hannah accepted the answer as she had accepted every other negative in
life, great and small.
"Well, I guessed you would."
Janet made a step toward her.
"Mother!" she said, but Hannah gazed at her uncomprehendingly. Janet
stooped convulsively, and kissed her. Straightening up, she stood
looking down at her mother for a few moments, and went out of the room,
pausing in the dining-room, to listen, but Hannah apparently had not
stirred. She took the box of matches from its accustomed place on the
shelf beside the clock, entered the dark bedroom in the front of the
flat, closing the door softly behind her. The ghostly blue light from a
distant arc came slanting in at the window, glinting on the brass knobs
of the chest of drawers-another Bumpus heirloom. She remembered that
chest from early childhood; it was one of the few pieces that, following
them in all their changes of residence, had been faithful to the end: she
knew everything in it, and the place for everything. Drawing a match
from the box, she was about to turn on the gas--but the light from the
arc would suffice. As she made her way around the walnut bed she had a
premonition of poignant anguish as yet unrealized, of anguish being held
at bay by a stronger, fiercer, more imperative emotion now demanding
expression, refusing at last to be denied. She opened the top drawer of
the chest, the drawer in which Hannah, breaking tradition, had put the
Bumpus genealogy. Edward had never kept it there. Would the other
things be in place? Groping with her hands in the left-hand corner, her
fingers clasped exultantly something heavy, something wrapped carefully
in layers of flannel. She had feared her father might have taken it to
the mill! She drew it out, unwound the flannel, and held to the light an
old-fashioned revolver, the grease glistening along its barrel. She
remembered, too, that the cartridges had lain beside it, and thrusting
her hand once more into the drawer found the box, extracting several, and
replacing the rest, closed the drawer, and crept through the dining-room
to her bedroom, where she lit the gas in order to examine the weapon--
finally contriving, more by accident than skill, to break it. The
cartridges, of course, fitted into the empty cylinder. But before
inserting them she closed the pistol once more, cocked it, and held it
out. Her arm trembled violently as she pulled the trigger. Could she do
it? As though to refute this doubt of her ability to carry out an act
determined upon, she broke the weapon once more, loaded and closed it,
and thrust it in the pocket of her coat. Then, washing the grease from
her hands, she put on her gloves, and was about to turn out the light
when she saw reflected in the glass the red button of the I.W.W. still
pinned on her coat. This she tore off, and flung on the bureau.
When she had kissed her mother, when she had stood hesitatingly in the
darkness of the familiar front bedroom in the presence of unsummoned
memories of a home she had believed herself to resent and despise, she
had nearly faltered. But once in the street, this weakness suddenly
vanished, was replaced by a sense of wrong that now took complete and
furious possession of her, driving her like a gale at her back. She
scarcely felt on her face the fine rain that had begun to fall once more.
Her feet were accustomed to the way. When she had turned down West
Street and almost gained the canal, it was with a shock of surprise that
she found herself confronted by a man in a long cape who held a rifle and
barred her path. She stared at him as at an apparition.
"You can't get by here," he said. "Don't you know that?"
She did not reply. He continued to look at her, and presently asked, in
a gentler tone:--
"Where did you wish to go, lady?"
"Into the mill," she replied, "to the offices."
"But there can't anybody go through here unless they have a pass. I'm
sorry, but that's the order."
Her answer came so readily as to surprise her.
"I was Mr. Ditmar's private stenographer. I have to see him."
The sentry hesitated, and then addressed another soldier, who was near
the bridge.
"Hi, sergeant!" he called. The sergeant came up--a conscientious Boston
clerk who had joined the militia from a sense of duty and a need for
exercise. While the sentry explained the matter he gazed at Janet. Then
be said politely:--
"I'm sorry, Miss, but I can't disobey orders."
"But can't you send word to Mr. Ditmar, and tell him I want to see him?"
she asked.
"Why, I guess so," he answered, after a moment. "What name shall I say?"
"Miss Bumpus."
"Bumpus," he repeated. "That's the gatekeeper's name."
"I'm his daughter--but I want to see Mr. Ditmar."
"Well," said the sergeant, "I'm sure it's all right, but I'll have to
send in anyway. Orders are orders. You understand?"
She nodded as he departed. She saw him cross the bridge like a ghost
through the white mist rising from the canal. And through the mist she
could make out the fortresslike mass of the mill itself, and the blurred,
distorted lights in the paymaster's offices smeared on the white curtain
of the vapour.
"Nasty weather," the sentry remarked, in friendly fashion. He appeared
now, despite his uniform, as a good-natured, ungainly youth.
Janet nodded.
"You'd ought to have brought an umbrella," he said. "I guess it'll rain
harder, before it gets through. But it's better than ten below zero,
anyhow."
She nodded again, but he did not seem to resent her silence. He talked
about the hardship of patrolling in winter, until the sergeant came back.
"It's all right, Miss Bumpus," he said, and touched his hat as he
escorted her to the bridge. She crossed the canal and went through the
vestibule without replying to the greeting of the night-watchman, or
noticing his curious glance; she climbed the steel-clad stairway, passed
the paymaster's offices and Mr. Orcutt's, and gained the outer office
where she had worked as a stenographer. It was dark, but sufficient
light came through Ditmar's open door to guide her beside the rail. He
had heard her step, and as she entered his room he had put his hands
heavily on his desk, in the act of rising from his chair.
"Janet!" he said, and started toward her, but got no farther than the
corner of the desk. The sight of her heaving breast, of the peculiar
light that flashed from beneath her lashes stopped him suddenly. Her
hands were in her pockets. "What is it?" he demanded stupidly.
But she continued to stand there, breathing so heavily that she could not
speak. It was then that he became aware of an acute danger. He did not
flinch.
"What is it?" he repeated.
Still she was silent. One hand was thrust deeper into its pocket, he saw
a shudder run through her, and suddenly she burst into hysterical
weeping, sinking into a chair. He stood for some moments helplessly
regarding her before he gained the presence of mind to go to the door and
lock it, returning to bend over her.
"Don't touch me!" she said, shrinking from him.
"For God's sake tell me what's the matter," he begged.
She looked up at him and tried to speak, struggling against the sobs that
shook her.
"I--I came here to--to kill you--only I can't do it."
"To kill me!" he said, after a pause. In spite of the fact that he had
half divined her intention, the words shocked him. Whatever else may be
said of him, he did not lack courage, his alarm was not of a physical
nature. Mingled with it were emotions he himself did not understand,
caused by the unwonted sight of her loss of self-control, of her anger,
and despair. "Why did you want to kill me?"
And again he had to wait for an answer.
"Because you've spoiled my life--because I'm going to have a child!"
"What do you mean? Are you?... it can't be possible."
"It is possible, it's true--it's true. I've waited and waited, I've
suffered, I've almost gone crazy--and now I know. And I said I'd kill
you if it were so, I'd kill myself--only I can't. I'm a coward." Her
voice was drowned again by weeping.
A child! He had never imagined such a contingency! And as he leaned
back against the desk, his emotions became chaotic. The sight of her,
even as she appeared crazed by anger, had set his passion aflame--for the
intensity and fierceness of her nature had always made a strong appeal to
dominant qualities in Ditmar's nature. And then--this announcement!
Momentarily it turned his heart to water. Now that he was confronted by
an exigency that had once vicariously yet deeply disturbed him in a
similar affair of a friend of his, the code and habit of a lifetime
gained an immediate ascendency--since then he had insisted that this
particular situation was to be avoided above all others. And his mind
leaped to possibilities. She had wished to kill him--would she remain
desperate enough to ruin him? Even though he were not at a crisis in his
affairs, a scandal of this kind would be fatal.
"I didn't know," he said desperately, "I couldn't guess. Do you think I
would have had this thing happen to you? I was carried away--we were
both carried away--"
"You planned it!" she replied vehemently, without looking up. "You
didn't care for me, you only--wanted me."
"That isn't so--I swear that isn't so. I loved you I love you."
"Oh, do you think I believe that?" she exclaimed.
"I swear it--I'll prove it!" he protested. Still under the influence of
an acute anxiety, he was finding it difficult to gather his wits, to
present his case. "When you left me that day the strike began--when you
left me without giving me a chance--you'll never know how that hurt me."
"You'll never know how it hurt me!" she interrupted.
"Then why, in God's name, did you do it? I wasn't myself, then, you
ought to have seen that. And when I heard from Caldwell here that you'd
joined those anarchists--"
"They're no worse than you are--they only want what you've got," she
said.
He waved this aside. "I couldn't believe it--I wouldn't believe it until
somebody saw you walking with one of them to their Headquarters. Why did
you do it?"
"Because I know how they feel, I sympathize with the strikers, I want
them to win--against you!" She lifted her head and looked at him, and in
spite of the state of his feelings he felt a twinge of admiration at her
defiance.
"Because you love me!" he said.
"Because I hate you," she answered.
And yet a spark of exultation leaped within him at the thought that love
had caused this apostasy. He had had that suspicion before, though it
was a poor consolation when he could not reach her. Now she had made it
vivid. A woman's logic, or lack of logic--her logic.
"Listen!" he pleaded. "I tried to forget you--I tried to keep myself
going all the time that I mightn't think of you, but I couldn't help
thinking of you, wanting you, longing for you. I never knew why you left
me, except that you seemed to believe I was unkind to you, and that
something had happened. It wasn't my fault--" he pulled himself up
abruptly.
"I found out what men were like," she said. "A man made my sister a
woman of the streets--that's what you've done to me."
He winced. And the calmness she had regained, which was so
characteristic of her, struck him with a new fear.
"I'm not that kind of a man," he said.
But she did not answer. His predicament became more trying.
"I'll take care of you," he assured her, after a moment. "If you'll only
trust me, if you'll only come to me I'll see that no harm comes to you."
She regarded him with a sort of wonder--a look that put a fine edge of
dignity and scorn to her words when they came.
"I told you I didn't want to be taken care of--I wanted to kill you, and
kill myself. I don't know why I can't what prevents me." She rose.
"But I'm not going to trouble you any more--you'll never hear of me
again."
She would not trouble him, she was going away, he would never hear of her
again! Suddenly, with the surge of relief he experienced, came a pang.
He could not let her go--it was impossible. It seemed that he had never
understood his need of her, his love for her, until now that he had
brought her to this supreme test of self-revelation. She had wanted to
kill him, yes, to kill herself--but how could he ever have believed that
she would stoop to another method of retaliation? As she stood before
him the light in her eyes still wet with tears--transfigured her.
"I love you, Janet," he said. "I want you to marry me."
"You don't understand," she answered. "You never did. If I had married
you, I'd feel just the same--but it isn't really as bad as if we had been
married."
"Not as bad!" he exclaimed.
"If we were married, you'd think you had rights over me," she explained,
slowly. "Now you haven't any, I can go away. I couldn't live with you.
I know what happened to me, I've thought it all out, I wanted to get away
from the life I was leading--I hated it so, I was crazy to have a chance,
to see the world, to get nearer some of the beautiful things I knew were
there, but couldn't reach.... And you came along. I did love you, I
would have done anything for you--it was only when I saw that you didn't
really love me that I began to hate you, that I wanted to get away from
you, when I saw that you only wanted me until you should get tired of me.
That's your nature, you can't help it. And it would have been the same
if we were married, only worse, I couldn't have stood it any more than I
can now--I'd have left you. You say you'll marry me now, but that's
because you're sorry for me--since I've said I'm not going to trouble you
any more. You'll be glad I've gone. You may--want me now, but that
isn't love. When you say you love me, I can't believe you."
"You must believe me! And the child, Janet,--our child--"
"If the world was right," she said, "I could have this child and nobody
would say anything. I could support it--I guess I can anyway. And when
I'm not half crazy I want it. Maybe that's the reason I couldn't do what
I tried to do just now. It's natural for a woman to want a child--
especially a woman like me, who hasn't anybody or anything."
Ditmar's state of mind was too complicated to be wholly described. As
the fact had been gradually brought home to him that she had not come as
a supplicant, that even in her misery she was free, and he helpless,
there revived in him wild memories of her body, of the kisses he had
wrung from her--and yet this physical desire was accompanied by a
realization of her personality never before achieved. And because he had
hitherto failed to achieve it, she had escaped him. This belated,
surpassing glimpse of what she essentially was, and the thought of the
child their child--permeating his passion, transformed it into a feeling
hitherto unexperienced and unimagined. He hovered over her, pitifully,
his hands feeling for her, yet not daring to touch her.
"Can't you see that I love you?" he cried, "that I'm ready to marry you
now, to-night. You must love me, I won't believe that you don't after--
after all we have been to each other."
But even then she could not believe. Something in her, made hard by the
intensity of her suffering, refused to melt. And her head was throbbing,
and she scarcely heard him.
"I can't stay any longer," she said, getting to her feet. "I can't bear
it."
"Janet, I swear I'll care for you as no woman was ever cared for. For
God's sake listen to me, give me a chance, forgive me!" He seized her
arm; she struggled, gently but persistently, to free herself from his
hold.
"Let me go, please." All the passionate anger had gone out of her, and
she spoke in a monotone, as one under hypnosis, dominated by a resolution
which, for the present at least, he was powerless to shake.
"But to-morrow?" he pleaded. "You'll let me see you to-morrow, when
you've had time to think it over, when you realize that I love you and
want you, that I haven't meant to be cruel--that you've misjudged me--
thought I was a different kind of a man. I don't blame you for that, I
guess something happened to make you believe it. I've got enemies. For
the sake of the child, Janet, if for nothing else, you'll come back to
me! You're--you're tired tonight, you're not yourself. I don't wonder,
after all you've been through. If you'd only come to me before! God
knows what I've suffered, too!"
"Let me go, please," she repeated, and this time, despairingly, he obeyed
her, a conviction of her incommunicability overwhelming him. He
turned and, fumbling with the key, unlocked the door and opened it.
"I'll see you to-morrow," he faltered once more, and watched her as she
went through the darkened outer room until she gained the lighted hallway
beyond and disappeared. Her footsteps died away into silence. He was
trembling. For several minutes he stood where she had left him, tortured
by a sense of his inability to act, to cope with this, the great crisis
of his life, when suddenly the real significance of that strange last
look in her eyes was borne home to him. And he had allowed her to go out
into the streets alone! Seizing his hat and coat, he fairly ran out of
the office and down the stairs and across the bridge.
"Which way did that young lady go?" he demanders of the sergeant.
"Why--ug West Street, Mr. Ditmar."
He remembered where Filhnore Street was; he had, indeed, sought it out
one evening in the hope of meeting her. He hurried toward it now, his
glance strained ahead to catch sight of her figure under a lamp. But he
reached Fillmore Street without overtaking her, and in the rain he stood
gazing at the mean houses there, wondering in which of them she lived,
and whether she had as yet come home....
After leaving Ditmar Janet, probably from force of habit, had indeed gone
through West Street, and after that she walked on aimlessly. It was
better to walk than to sit alone in torment, to be gnawed by that Thing
from which she had so desperately attempted to escape, and failed. She
tried to think why she had failed.... Though the rain fell on her
cheeks, her mouth was parched; and this dryness of her palate, this
physical sense of lightness, almost of dizziness, were intimately yet
incomprehensibly part and parcel of the fantastic moods into which she
floated. It was as though, in trying to solve a problem, she caught
herself from time to time falling off to sleep. In her waking moments
she was terror-stricken. Scarce an hour had passed since, in a terrible
exaltation at having found a solution, she had gone to Ditmar's office in
the mill. What had happened to stay her? It was when she tried to find
the cause of the weakness that so abruptly had overtaken her, or to cast
about for a plan to fit the new predicament to which her failure had
sentenced her, that the fantasies intruded. She heard Ditmar speaking,
the arguments were curiously familiar--but they were not Ditmar's! They
were her father's, and now it was Edward's voice to which she listened,
he was telling her how eminently proper it was that she should marry
Ditmar, because of her Bumpus blood. And this made her laugh.... Again,
Ditmar was kissing her hair. He had often praised it. She had taken it
down and combed it out for him; it was like a cloud, he said--so fine;
its odour made him faint--and then the odour changed, became that of the
detested perfume of Miss Lottie Myers! Even that made Janet smile! But
Ditmar was strong, he was powerful, he was a Fact, why not go back to him
and let him absorb and destroy her? That annihilation would be joy....
It could not have been much later than seven o'clock when she found
herself opposite the familiar, mulberry-shingled Protestant church. The
light from its vestibule made a gleaming square on the wet sidewalk, and
into this area, from the surrounding darkness, came silhouetted figures
of men and women holding up umbrellas; some paused for a moment's chat,
their voices subdued by an awareness of the tabernacle. At the sight of
this tiny congregation something stirred within her. She experienced a
twinge of surprise at the discovery that other people in the world, in
Hampton, were still leading tranquil, untormented existences. They were
contented, prosperous, stupid, beyond any need of help from God, and yet
they were going to prayer-meeting to ask something! He refused to find
her in the dark streets. Would she find Him if she went in there? and
would He help her?
The bell in the tower began to clang, with heavy, relentless strokes--
like physical blows from which she flinched--each stirring her reluctant,
drowsy soul to a quicker agony. From the outer blackness through which
she fled she gazed into bright rooms of homes whose blinds were left
undrawn, as though to taunt and mock the wanderer. She was an outcast!
Who henceforth would receive her save those, unconformed and
unconformable, sentenced to sin in this realm of blackness? Henceforth
from all warmth and love she was banished.... In the middle of the
Stanley Street bridge she stopped to lean against the wet rail; the mill
lights were scattered, dancing points of fire over the invisible swift
waters, and she raised her eyes presently to the lights themselves,
seeking one unconsciously--Ditmar's! Yes, it was his she sought; though
it was so distant, sometimes it seemed to burn like a red star, and then
to flicker and disappear. She could not be sure.... Something chill and
steely was in the pocket of her coat--it made a heavy splash in the water
when she dropped it. The river could not be so very cold! She wished
she could go down like that into forgetfulness. But she couldn't....
Where was Lise now?... It would be so easy just to drop over that
parapet and be whirled away, and down and down. Why couldn't she? Well,
it was because--because--she was going to have a child. Well, if she had
a child to take care of, she would not be so lonely--she would have
something to love. She loved it now, as though she felt it quickening
within her, she wanted it, to lavish on it all of a starved affection.
She seemed actually to feel in her arms its soft little body pressed
against her. Claude Ditmar's child! And she suddenly recalled, as an
incident of the remote past, that she had told him she wanted it!
This tense craving for it she felt now was somehow the answer to an
expressed wish which had astonished her. Perhaps that was the reason why
she had failed to do what she had tried to do, to shoot Ditmar and
herself! It was Ditmar's child, Ditmar's and hers! He had loved her,
long ago, and just now--was it just now?--he had said he loved her still,
he had wanted to marry her. Then why had she run away from him? Why had
she taken the child into outer darkness, to be born without a father,--
when she loved Ditmar? Wasn't that one reason why she wanted the child?
why, even in her moments of passionate hatred she recalled having been
surprised by some such yearning as now came over her? And for an
interval, a brief interval, she viewed him with startling clarity. Not
because he embodied any ideal did she love him, but because he was what
he was, because he had overcome her will, dominated and possessed her,
left his mark upon her indelibly. He had been cruel to her, willing to
sacrifice her to his way of life, to his own desires, but he loved her,
for she had seen, if not heeded in his eyes the look that a woman never
mistakes! She remembered it now, and the light in his window glowed
again, like a star to guide her back to him. It was drawing her,
irresistibly....
The sentry recognized her as she came along the canal.
"Mr. Ditmar's gone," he told her.
"Gone!" she repeated. "Gone!"
"Why, yes, about five minutes after you left he was looking for you--he
asked the sergeant about you."
"And--he won't be back?"
"I guess not," answered the man, sympathetically. "He said good-night."
She turned away dully. The strength and hope with which she had been so
unexpectedly infused while gazing from the bridge at his window had
suddenly ebbed; her legs ached, her feet were wet, and she shivered,
though her forehead burned. The world became distorted, people flitted
past her like weird figures of a dream, the myriad lights of Faber Street
were blurred and whirled in company with the electric signs. Seeking to
escape from their confusion she entered a side street leading north, only
to be forcibly seized by some one who darted after her from the sidewalk.
"Excuse me, but you didn't see that automobile," he said, as he released
her.
Shaken, she went on through several streets to find herself at length
confronted by a pair of shabby doors that looked familiar, and pushing
one of them open, baited at the bottom of a stairway to listen. The
sound of cheerful voices camp to her from above; she started to climb--
even with the help of the rail it seemed as if she would never reach the
top of that stairway. But at last she stood in a loft where long tables
were set, and at the end of one of these, sorting out spoons and dishes,
three women and a man were chatting and laughing together. Janet was
troubled because she could not remember who the man was, although she
recognized his bold profile, his voice and gestures.... At length one of
the women said something in a low tone, and he looked around quickly and
crossed the room.
"Why, it's you!" he said, and suddenly she recalled his name.
"Mr. Insall!"
But his swift glance had noticed the expression in her eyes, the sagged
condition of her clothes, the attitude that proclaimed exhaustion. He
took her by the arm and led her to the little storeroom, turning on the
light and placing her in a chair. Darkness descended on her....
Mrs. Maturin, returning from an errand, paused for an instant in the
doorway, and ran forward and bent over Janet.
"Oh, Brooks, what is it--what's happened to her?"
"I don't know," he replied, "I didn't have a chance to ask her. I'm
going for a doctor."
"Leave her to me, and call Miss Hay." Mrs. Maturin was instantly
competen .... And when Insall came back from the drug store where he had
telephoned she met him at the head of the stairs. "We've done everything
we can, Edith Hay has given her brandy, and gone off for dry clothes, and
we've taken all the children's things out of the drawers and laid her on
the floor, but she hasn't come to. Poor child,--what can have happened
to her? Is the doctor coming?"
"Right away," said Insall, and Mrs. Maturin went back into the storeroom.
Miss Hay brought the dry clothes before the physician arrived.
"It's probably pneumonia," he explained to Insall a little later. "She
must go to the hospital--but the trouble is all our hospitals are pretty
full, owing to the sickness caused by the strike." He hesitated. "Of
course, if she has friends, she could have better care in a private
institution just now."
"Oh, she has friends," said Mrs. Maturin. "Couldn't we take her to our
little hospital at Silliston, doctor? It's only four miles--that isn't
much in an automobile, and the roads are good now."
"Well, the risk isn't much greater, if you have a closed car, and she
would, of course, be better looked after," the physician consented.
"I'll see to it at once," said Insall....
CHAPTER XX
The Martha Wootton Memorial Hospital was the hobby of an angel alumnus of
Silliston. It was situated in Hovey's Lane, but from the window of the
white-enameled room in which she lay Janet could see the bare branches of
the Common elms quivering to the spring gusts, could watch, day by day,
the grass changing from yellow-brown to vivid green in the white
sunlight. In the morning, when the nurse opened the blinds, that
sunlight swept radiantly into the room, lavish with its caresses; always
spending, always giving, the symbol of a loving care that had been poured
out on her, unasked and unsought. It was sweet to rest, to sleep. And
instead of the stringent monster-cry of the siren, of the discordant
clamour of the mill bells, it was sweet yet strange to be awakened by
silvertoned chimes proclaiming peaceful hours. At first she surrendered
to the spell, and had no thought of the future. For a little while every
day, Mrs. Maturin read aloud, usually from books of poetry. And knowing
many of the verses by heart, she would watch Janet's face, framed in the
soft dark hair that fell in two long plaits over her shoulders. For
Janet little guessed the thought that went into the choosing of these
books, nor could she know of the hours spent by this lady pondering over
library shelves or consulting eagerly with Brooks Insall. Sometimes
Augusta Maturin thought of Janet as a wildflower--one of the rare, shy
ones, hiding under its leaves; sprung up in Hampton, of all places,
crushed by a heedless foot, yet miraculously not destroyed, and already
pushing forth new and eager tendrils. And she had transplanted it. To
find the proper nourishment, to give it a chance to grow in a native,
congenial soil, such was her breathless task. And so she had selected
"The Child's Garden of Verses."
"I should like to rise and go
Where the golden apples grow"...
When she laid down her book it was to talk, perhaps, of Silliston.
Established here before the birth of the Republic, its roots were bedded
in the soil of a racial empire, to a larger vision of which Augusta
Maturin clung: an empire of Anglo-Saxon tradition which, despite
disagreements and conflicts--nay, through them--developed imperceptibly
toward a sublimer union, founded not on dominion, but on justice and
right. She spoke of the England she had visited on her wedding journey,
of the landmarks and literature that also through generations have been
American birthrights; and of that righteous self-assertion and
independence which, by protest and even by war, America had contributed
to the democracy of the future. Silliston, indifferent to cults and
cataclysms, undisturbed by the dark tides flung westward to gather in
deposits in other parts of the land, had held fast to the old tradition,
stood ready to do her share to transform it into something even nobler
when the time should come. Simplicity and worth and beauty--these
elements at least of the older Republic should not perish, but in the end
prevail.
She spoke simply of these things, connecting them with a Silliston whose
spirit appealed to all that was inherent and abiding in the girl. All
was not chaos: here at least, a beacon burned with a bright and steady
flame. And she spoke of Andrew Silliston, the sturdy colonial prototype
of the American culture, who had fought against his King, who had spent
his modest fortune to found this seat of learning, believing as he did
that education is the cornerstone of republics; divining that lasting
unity is possible alone by the transformation of the individual into the
citizen through voluntary bestowal of service and the fruits of labour.
Samuel Wootton, the Boston merchant who had given the hospital, was
Andrew's true descendant, imbued with the same half-conscious intuition
that builds even better that it reeks. And Andrew, could he have returns
to earth in his laced coat and long silk waistcoat, would still recognize
his own soul in Silliston Academy, the soul of his creed and race.
"Away down the river,
A hundred miles or more,
Other little children
Shall bring my boats ashore."...
Janet drew in a great breath, involuntarily. These were moments when it
seemed that she could scarcely contain what she felt of beauty and
significance, when the ecstasy and pain were not to be borne. And
sometimes, as she listened to Mrs. Maturin's voice, she wept in silence.
Again a strange peace descended on her, the peace of an exile come home;
if not to remain, at least to know her own land and people before faring
forth. She would not think of that faring yet awhile, but strive to live
and taste the present--and yet as life flowed back into her veins that
past arose to haunt her, she yearned to pour it out to her new friend, to
confess all that had happened to her. Why couldn't she? But she was
grateful because Mrs. Maturin betrayed no curiosity. Janet often lay
watching her, puzzled, under the spell of a frankness, an ingenuousness,
a simplicity she had least expected to find in one who belonged to such a
learned place as that of Silliston. But even learning, she was
discovering, could be amazingly simple. Freely and naturally Mrs.
Maturin dwelt on her own past, on the little girl of six taken from her
the year after her husband died, on her husband himself, once a professor
here, and who, just before his last illness, had published a brilliant
book on Russian literature which resulted in his being called to Harvard.
They had gone to Switzerland instead, and Augusta Maturin had come back
to Silliston. She told Janet of the loon-haunted lake, hemmed in by the
Laurentian hills, besieged by forests, where she had spent her girlhood
summers with her father, Professor Wishart, of the University of Toronto.
There, in search of health, Gifford Maturin had come at her father's
suggestion to camp.
Janet, of course, could not know all of that romance, though she tried to
picture it from what her friend told her. Augusta Wishart, at six and
twenty, had been one of those magnificent Canadian women who are most at
home in the open; she could have carried Gifford Maturinout of the
wilderness on her back. She was five feet seven, modelled in proportion,
endowed by some Celtic ancestor with that dark chestnut hair which,
because of its abundance, she wore braided and caught up in a heavy knot
behind her head. Tanned by the northern sun, kneeling upright in a
canoe, she might at a little distance have been mistaken for one of the
race to which the forests and waters had once belonged. The instinct of
mothering was strong in her, and from the beginning she had taken the shy
and delicate student under her wing, recognizing in him one of the
physically helpless dedicated to a supreme function. He was forever
catching colds, his food disagreed with him, and on her own initiative
she discharged his habitant cook and supplied him with one of her own
choosing. When overtaken by one of his indispositions she paddled him
about the lake with lusty strokes, first placing a blanket over his
knees, and he submitted: he had no pride of that sort, he was utterly
indifferent to the figure he cut beside his Amazon. His gentleness of
disposition, his brilliant conversations with those whom, like her
father, he knew and trusted, captivated Augusta. At this period of her
life she was awakening to the glories of literature and taking a special
course in that branch. He talked to her of Gogol, Turgenief, and
Dostoievsky, and seated on the log piazza read in excellent French "Dead
Souls," "Peres et Enfants," and "The Brothers Karamazoff." At the end of
August he went homeward almost gaily, quite ignorant of the arrow in his
heart, until he began to miss Augusta Wishart's ministrations--and
Augusta Wishart herself.... Then had followed that too brief period of
intensive happiness....
The idea of remarriage had never occurred to her. At eight and thirty,
though tragedy had left its mark, it had been powerless to destroy the
sweetness of a nature of such vitality as hers. The innate necessity of
loving remained, and as time went on had grown more wistful and
insistent. Insall and her Silliston neighbours were wont, indeed, gently
to rally her on her enthusiams, while understanding and sympathizing with
this need in her. A creature of intuition, Janet had appealed to her
from the beginning, arousing first her curiosity, and then the maternal
instinct that craved a mind to mould, a soul to respond to her touch....
Mrs. Maturin often talked to Janet of Insall, who had, in a way, long
been connected with Silliston. In his early wandering days, when
tramping over New England, he used unexpectedly to turn up at Dr.
Ledyard's, the principal's, remain for several weeks and disappear again.
Even then he, had been a sort of institution, a professor emeritus in
botany, bird lore, and woodcraft, taking the boys on long walks through
the neighbouring hills; and suddenly he had surprised everybody by
fancying the tumble-down farmhouse in Judith's Lane, which he had
restored with his own hands into the quaintest of old world dwellings.
Behind it he had made a dam in the brook, and put in a water wheel that
ran his workshop. In play hours the place was usually overrun by
boys.... But sometimes the old craving for tramping would overtake him,
one day his friends would find the house shut up, and he would be absent
for a fortnight, perhaps for a month--one never knew when he was going,
or when he would return. He went, like his hero, Silas Simpkins, through
the byways of New England, stopping at night at the farm-houses, or often
sleeping out under the stars. And then, perhaps, he would write another
book. He wrote only when he felt like writing.
It was this book of Insall's, "The Travels of Silas Simpkins", rather than
his "Epworth Green" or "The Hermit of Blue Mountain," that Mrs. Maturin
chose to read to Janet. Unlike the sage of Walden, than whom he was more
gregarious, instead of a log house for his castle Silas Simpkins chose a
cart, which he drove in a most leisurely manner from the sea to the
mountains, penetrating even to hamlets beside the silent lakes on the
Canadian border, and then went back to the sea again. Two chunky grey
horses with wide foreheads and sagacious eyes propelled him at the rate
of three miles an hour; for these, as their master, had learned the
lesson that if life is to be fully savoured it is not to be bolted.
Silas cooked and ate, and sometimes read under the maples beside the
stone walls: usually he slept in the cart in the midst of the assortment
of goods that proclaimed him, to the astute, an expert in applied
psychology. At first you might have thought Silos merely a peddler, but
if you knew your Thoreau you would presently begin to perceive that
peddling was the paltry price he paid for liberty. Silos was in a way a
sage--but such a human sage! He never intruded with theories, he never
even hinted at the folly of the mortals who bought or despised his goods,
or with whom he chatted by the wayside, though he may have had his ideas
on the subject: it is certain that presently one began to have one's own:
nor did he exclaim with George Sand, "Il n'y a rien de plus betement
mechant que l'habitant des petites villes!" Somehow the meannesses and
jealousies were accounted for, if not excused. To understand is to
pardon.
It was so like Insall, this book, in its whimsicality, in its feeling of
space and freedom, in its hidden wisdom that gradually revealed itself as
one thought it over before falling off to sleep! New England in the
early summer! Here, beside the tender greens of the Ipswich downs was
the sparkling cobalt of the sea, and she could almost smell its cool salt
breath mingling with the warm odours of hay and the pungent scents of
roadside flowers. Weathered grey cottages were scattered over the
landscape, and dark copses of cedars, while oceanward the eye was caught
by the gleam of a lighthouse or a lonely sail.
Even in that sandy plain, covered with sickly, stunted pines and burned
patches, stretching westward from the Merrimac, Silas saw beauty and
colour, life in the once prosperous houses not yet abandoned....
Presently, the hills, all hyacinth blue, rise up against the sunset, and
the horses' feet are on the "Boston Road"--or rud, according to the
authorized pronunciation of that land. Hardly, indeed, in many places, a
"rud" to-day, reverting picturesquely into the forest trail over which
the early inland settlers rode their horses or drove their oxen with
upcountry produce to the sea. They were not a people who sought the
easiest way, and the Boston Road reflects their characters: few valleys
are deep enough to turn it aside; few mountains can appal it: railroads
have given it a wide berth. Here and there the forest opens out to
reveal, on a knoll or "flat," a forgotten village or tavern-stand. Over
the high shelf of Washington Town it runs where the air is keen and the
lakes are blue, where long-stemmed wild flowers nod on its sunny banks,
to reach at length the rounded, classic hills and sentinel mountain that
mark the sheep country of the Connecticut....
It was before Janet's convalescence began that Mrs. Maturin had consulted
Insall concerning her proposed experiment in literature. Afterwards he
had left Silliston for a lumber camp on a remote river in northern Maine,
abruptly to reappear, on a mild afternoon late in April, in Augusta
Maturin's garden. The crocuses and tulips were in bloom, and his friend,
in a gardening apron, was on her knees, trowel in hand, assisting a hired
man to set out marigolds and snapdragons.
"Well, it's time you were home again," she exclaimed, as she rose to
greet him and led him to a chair on the little flagged terrace beside the
windows of her library. "I've got so much to tell you about our
invalid."
"Our invalid!" Insall retorted.
"Of course. I look to you to divide the responsibility with me, and
you've shirked by running off to Maine. You found her, you know--and
she's really remarkable."
"Now see here, Augusta, you can't expect me to share the guardianship of
an attractive and--well, a dynamic young woman. If she affects you this
way, what will she do to me? I'm much too susceptible."
"Susceptible" she scoffed. "But you can't get out of it. I need you.
I've never been so interested and so perplexed in my life."
"How is she?" Insall asked.
"Frankly, I'm worried," said Mrs. Maturin. "At first she seemed to be
getting along beautifully. I read to her, a little every day, and it was
wonderful how she responded to it. I'll tell you about that I've got so
much to tell you! Young Dr. Trent is puzzled, too, it seems there are
symptoms in the case for which he cannot account. Some three weeks ago
he asked me what I made out of her, and I can't make anything--that's the
trouble, except that she seems pathetically grateful, and that I've grown
absurdly fond of her. But she isn't improving as fast as she should, and
Dr. Trent doesn't know whether or not to suspect functional
complications. Her constitution seems excellent, her vitality unusual.
Trent's impressed by her, he inclines to the theory that she has
something on her mind, and if this is so she should get rid of it, tell
it to somebody--in short, tell it to me. I know she's fond of me, but
she's so maddeningly self-contained, and at moments when I look at her
she baffles me, she makes me feel like an atom. Twenty times at least
I've almost screwed up my courage to ask her, but when it comes to the
point, I simply can't do it."
"You ought to be able to get at it, if any one can," said Insall.
"I've a notion it may be connected with the strike," Augusta Maturin
continued. "I never could account for her being mixed up in that,
plunging into Syndicalism. It seemed so foreign to her nature. I wish
I'd waited a little longer before telling her about the strike, but one
day she asked me how it had come out--and she seemed to be getting along
so nicely I didn't see any reason for not telling her. I said that the
strike was over, that the millowners had accepted the I.W.W. terms, but
that Antonelli and Jastro had been sent to jail and were awaiting trial
because they had been accused of instigating the murder of a woman who
was shot by a striker aiming at a policeman. It seems that she had seen
that! She told me so quite casually. But she was interested, and I went
on to mention how greatly the strikers were stirred by the arrests, how
they paraded in front of the jail, singing, and how the feeling was
mostly directed against Mr. Ditmar, because he was accused of instigating
the placing of dynamite in the tenements."
"And you spoke of Mr. Ditmar's death?" Insall inquired.
"Why yes, I told her how he had been shot in Dover Street by a demented
Italian, and if it hadn't been proved that the Italian was insane and not
a mill worker, the result of the strike might have been different."
"How did she take it?"
"Well, she was shocked, of course. She sat up in bed, staring at me, and
then leaned back on the pillows again. I pretended not to notice it--but
I was sorry I'd said anything about it."
"She didn't say anything?"
"Not a word."
"Didn't you know that, before the strike, she was Ditmar's private
stenographer?"
"No!" Augusta Maturin exclaimed. "Why didn't you tell me?"
"It never occurred to me to tell you," Insall replied.
"That must have something to do with it!" said Mrs. Maturin.
Insall got up and walked to the end of the terrace, gazing at a bluebird
on the edge of the lawn.
"Well, not necessarily," he said, after a while. "Did you ever find out
anything about her family?"
"Oh, yes, I met the father once, he's been out two or three times, on
Sunday, and came over here to thank me for what I'd done. The mother
doesn't come--she has some trouble, I don't know exactly what. Brooks, I
wish you could see the father, he's so typically unique--if one may use
the expression. A gatekeeper at the Chipperiug Mills!"
"A gatekeeper?"
"Yes, and I'm quite sure he doesn't understand to this day how he became
one, or why. He's delightfully naive on the subject of genealogy, and I
had the Bumpus family by heart before he left. That's the form his
remnant of the intellectual curiosity of his ancestors takes. He was
born in Dolton, which was settled by the original Bumpus, back in the
Plymouth Colony days, and if he were rich he'd have a library stuffed
with gritty, yellow-backed books and be a leading light in the Historical
Society. He speaks with that nicety of pronunciation of the old New
Englander, never slurring his syllables, and he has a really fine face,
the kind of face one doesn't often see nowadays. I kept looking at it,
wondering what was the matter with it, and at last I realized what it
lacked--will, desire, ambition,--it was what a second-rate sculptor might
have made of Bradford, for instance. But there is a remnant of fire in
him. Once, when he spoke of the strike, of the foreigners, he grew quite
indignant."
"He didn't tell you why his daughter had joined the strikers?" Insall
asked.
"He was just as much at sea about that as you and I are. Of course I
didn't ask him--he asked me if I knew. It's only another proof of her
amazing reticence. And I can imagine an utter absence of sympathy
between them. He accounts for her, of course; he's probably the
unconscious transmitter of qualities the Puritans possessed and tried to
smother. Certainly the fires are alight in her, and yet it's almost
incredible that he should have conveyed them. Of course I haven't seen
the mother."
"It's curious he didn't mention her having been Ditmar's stenographer,"
Insall put in. "Was that reticence?"
"I hardly think so," Augusta Maturin replied. "It may have been, but the
impression I got was of an incapacity to feel the present. All his
emotions are in the past, most of his conversation was about Bumpuses who
are dead and buried, and his pride in Janet--for he has a pride--seems to
exist because she is their representative. It's extraordinary, but he
sees her present situation, her future, with extraordinary optimism; he
apparently regards her coming to Silliston, even in the condition in
which we found her, as a piece of deserved fortune for which she has to
thank some virtue inherited from her ancestors! Well, perhaps he's
right. If she were not unique, I shouldn't want to keep her here. It's
pure selfishness. I told Mr. Bumpus I expected to find work for her."
Mrs. Maturin returned Insall's smile. "I suppose you're too polite to
say that I'm carried away by my enthusiasms. But you will at least do me
the justice to admit that they are rare and--discriminating, as a
connoisseur's should be. I think even you will approve of her."
"Oh, I have approved of her--that's the trouble."
Mrs. Maturin regarded him for a moment in silence.
"I wish you could have seen her when I began to read those verses of
Stevenson's. It was an inspirations your thinking of them."
"Did I think of them?"
"You know you did. You can't escape your responsibility. Well, I felt
like--like a gambler, as though I were staking everything on a throw.
And, after I began, as if I were playing on some rare instrument. She
lay there, listening, without uttering a word, but somehow she seemed to
be interpreting them for me, giving them a meaning and a beauty I hadn't
imagined. Another time I told her about Silliston, and how this little
community for over a century and a half had tried to keep its standard
flying, to carry on the work begun by old Andrew, and I thought of those
lines,
"Other little children
Shall bring my boats ashore."
That particular application just suddenly, occurred to me, but she
inspired it."
"You're a born schoolma'am," Insall laughed.
"I'm much too radical for a schoohna'am," she declared. "No board of
trustees would put up with me--not even Silliston's! We've kept the
faith, but we do move slowly, Brooks. Even tradition grows, and
sometimes our blindness here to changes, to modern, scientific facts,
fairly maddens me. I read her that poem of Moody's--you know it:--
'Here, where the moors stretch free
In the high blue afternoon,
Are the marching sun and the talking sea.'
and those last lines:--
'But thou, vast outbound ship of souls,
What harbour town for thee?
What shapes, when thy arriving tolls,
Shall crowd the banks to see?
Shall all the happy shipmates then
Stand singing brotherly?
Or shall a haggard, ruthless few
Warp her over and bring her to,
While the many broken souls of me
Fester down in the slaver's pen,
And nothing to say or do?'"
I was sorry afterwards, I could see that she was tremendously excited.
And she made me feel as if I, too, had been battened down in that hold
and bruised and almost strangled. I often wonder whether she has got out
of it into the light--whether we can rescue her." Mrs. Maturin paused.
"What do you mean?" Insall asked.
"Well, it's difficult to describe, what I feel--she's such a perplexing
mixture of old New England and modernity, of a fatalism, and an aliveness
that fairly vibrates. At first, when she began to recover, I was
conscious only of the vitality--but lately I feel the other quality. It
isn't exactly the old Puritan fatalism, or even the Greek, it's oddly
modern, too, almost agnostic, I should say,--a calm acceptance of the
hazards of life, of nature, of sun and rain and storm alike--very
different from the cheap optimism one finds everywhere now. She isn't
exactly resigned--I don't say that--I know she can be rebellious. And
she's grateful for the sun, yet she seems to have a conviction that the
clouds will gather again.... The doctor says she may leave the hospital
on Monday, and I'm going to bring her over here for awhile. Then," she
added insinuatingly, "we can collaborate."
"I think I'll go back to Maine," Insall exclaimed.
"If you desert me, I shall never speak to you again," said Mrs. Maturin.
"Janet," said Mrs. Maturin the next day, as she laid down the book from
which she was reading, "do you remember that I spoke to you once in
Hampton of coming here to Silliston? Well, now we've got you here, we
don't want to lose you. I've been making inquiries; quite a number of
the professors have typewriting to be done, and they will be glad to give
their manuscripts to you instead of sending them to Boston. And there's
Brooks Insall too--if he ever takes it into his head to write another
book. You wouldn't have any trouble reading his manuscript, it's like
script. Of course it has to be copied. You can board with Mrs. Case--
I've arranged that, too. But on Monday I'm going to take you to my
house, and keep you until you're strong enough to walk."
Janet's eyes were suddenly bright with tears.
"You'll stay?"
"I can't," answered Janet. "I couldn't."
"But why not? Have you any other plans?"
"No, I haven't any plans, but--I haven't the right to stay here."
Presently she raised her face to her friend. "Oh Mrs. Maturin, I'm so
sorry! I didn't want to bring any sadness here--it's all so bright and
beautiful! And now I've made you sad!"
It was a moment before Augusta Maturin could answer her.
"What are friends for, Janet," she asked, "if not to share sorrow with?
And do you suppose there's any place, however bright, where sorrow has
not come? Do you think I've not known it, too? And Janet, I haven't sat
here all these days with you without guessing that something worries you.
I've been waiting, all this time, for you to tell me, in order that I
might help you."
"I wanted to," said Janet, "every day I wanted to, but I couldn't. I
couldn't bear to trouble you with it, I didn't mean ever to tell you.
And then--it's so terrible, I don't know what you'll think."
"I think I know you, Janet," answered Mrs. Maturin. "Nothing human,
nothing natural is terrible, in the sense you mean. At least I'm one of
those who believe so."
Presently Janet said, "I'm going to have a child."
Mrs. Maturin sat very still. Something closed in her throat, preventing
her immediate reply.
"I, too, had a child, my dear," she answered. "I lost her." She felt
the girl's clasp tighten on her fingers.
"But you--you had a right to it--you were married." Children are sacred
things," said Augusta Maturin.
"Sacred! Could it be that a woman like Mrs. Maturity thought that this
child which was coming to her was sacred, too?
"However they come?" asked Janet. "Oh, I tried to believe that, too! At
first--at first I didn't want it, and when I knew it was coming I was
driven almost crazy. And then, all at once, when I was walking in the
rain, I knew I wanted it to have--to keep all to myself. You
understand?"
Augusta Maturity inclined her head.
"But the father?" she managed to ask, after a moment. "I don't wish to
pry, my dear, but does he--does he realize? Can't he help you?"
"It was Mr. Ditmar."
"Perhaps it will help you to tell me about it, Janet."
"I'd--I'd like to. I've been so unhappy since you told me he was dead--
and I felt like a cheat. You see, he promised to marry me, and I know
now that he loved me, that he really wanted to marry me, but something
happened to make me believe he wasn't going to, I saw--another girl who'd
got into trouble, and then I thought he'd only been playing with me, and
I couldn't stand it. I joined the strikers--I just had to do something."
Augusta Maturity nodded, and waited.
"I was only a stenographer, and we were very poor, and he was rich and
lived in a big house, the most important man in Hampton. It seemed too
good to be true--I suppose I never really thought it could happen.
Please don't think I'm putting all the blame on him, Mrs. Maturity--it
was my fault just as much as his. I ought to have gone away from
Hampton, but I didn't have the strength. And I shouldn't have--" Janet
stopped.
"But--you loved him?"
"Yes, I did. For a long time, after I left him, I thought I didn't, I
thought I hated him, and when I found out what had happened to me--that
night I came to you--I got my father's pistol and went to the mill to
shoot him. I was going to shoot myself, too."
"Oh!" Mrs. Maturity gasped. She gave a quick glance of sheer amazement
at Janet, who did not seem to notice it; who was speaking objectively,
apparently with no sense of the drama in her announcement.
"But I couldn't," she went on. "At the time I didn't know why I
couldn't, but when I went out I understood it was because I wanted the
child, because it was his child. And though he was almost out of his
head, he seemed so glad because I'd come back to him, and said he'd marry
me right away."
"And you refused!" exclaimed Mrs. Maturity.
"Well, you see, I was out of my head, too, I still thought I hated him--
but I'd loved him all the time. It was funny! He had lots of faults,
and he didn't seem to understand or care much about how poor people feel,
though he was kind to them in the mills. He might have come to
understand--I don't know--it wasn't because he didn't want to, but
because he was so separated from them, I guess, and he was so interested
in what he was doing. He had ambition, he thought everything of that
mill, he'd made it. I don't know why I loved him, it wasn't because he
was fine, like Mr. Insall, but he was strong and brave, and he needed me
and just took me."
"One never knows!" Augusta Maturity murmured.
"I went back that night to tell him I'd marry him--and he'd gone. Then I
came to you, to the soup kitchen. I didn't mean to bother you, I've
never quite understood how I got there. I don't care so much what
happens to me, now that I've told you," Janet added. "It was mean, not
to tell you, but I'd never had anything like this--what you were giving
me--and I wanted all I could get."
"I'm thankful you did come to us!" Augusta Maturin managed to reply.
"You mean--?" Janet exclaimed.
"I mean, that we who have been more--fortunate don't look at these things
quite as we used to, that the world is less censorious, is growing to
understand situations it formerly condemned. And--I don't know what kind
of a monster you supposed me to be, Janet."
"Oh, Mrs. Maturin!"
"I mean that I'm a woman, too, my dear, although my life has been
sheltered. Otherwise, what has happened to you might have happened to
me. And besides, I am what is called unconventional, I have little
theories of my own about life, and now that you have told me everything I
understand you and love you even more than I did before."
Save that her breath came fast, Janet lay still against the cushions of
the armchair. She was striving to grasp the momentous and unlooked-for
fact of her friend's unchanged attitude. Then she asked:--
"Mrs. Maturin, do you believe in God?"
Augusta Maturin was startled by the question. "I like to think of Him as
light, Janet, and that we are plants seeking to grow toward Him--no
matter from what dark crevice we may spring. Even in our mistakes and
sins we are seeking Him, for these are ignorances, and as the world
learns more, we shall know Him better and better. It is natural to long
for happiness, and happiness is self-realization, and self-realization is
knowledge and light."
"That is beautiful," said Janet at length.
"It is all we can know about God," said Mrs. Maturin, "but it is enough."
She had been thinking rapidly. "And now," she went on, "we shall have to
consider what is to be done. I don't pretend that the future will be
easy, but it will not be nearly as hard for you as it might have been,
since I am your friend, and I do not intend to desert you. I'm sure you
will not let it crush you. In the first place, you will have something
to go on with--mental resources, I mean, for which you have a natural
craving, books and art and nature, the best thoughts and the best
interpretations. We can give you these. And you will have your child,
and work to do, for I'm sure you're industrious. And of course I'll keep
your secret, my dear."
"But--how?" Janet exclaimed.
"I've arranged it all. You'll stay here this spring, you'll come to my
house on Monday, just as we planned, and later on you may go to Mrs.
Case's, if it will make you feel more independent, and do typewriting
until the spring term is over. I've told you about my little camp away
up in Canada, in the heart of the wilderness, where I go in summer.
We'll stay there until the autumn, until your baby comes, and, after
that, I know it won't be difficult to get you a position in the west,
where you can gain your living and have your child. I have a good friend
in California who I'm sure will help you. And even if your secret should
eventually be discovered--which is not probable--you will have earned
respect, and society is not as stern as it used to be. And you will
always have me for a friend. There, that's the bright side of it. Of
course it isn't a bed of roses, but I've lived long enough to observe
that the people who lie on roses don't always have the happiest lives.
Whenever you want help and advice, I shall always be here, and from time
to time I'll be seeing you. Isn't that sensible?"
"Oh, Mrs. Maturin--if you really want me--still?"
"I do want you, Janet, even more than I did--before, because you need me
more," Mrs. Maturin replied, with a sincerity that could not fail to
bring conviction....
CHAPTER XXI
As the spring progressed, Janet grew stronger, became well again, and
through the kindness of Dr. Ledyard, the principal, was presently
installed with a typewriter in a little room in an old building belonging
to the Academy in what was called Bramble Street, and not far from the
Common. Here, during the day, she industriously copied manuscripts' or,
from her notebook, letters dictated by various members of the faculty.
And she was pleased when they exclaimed delightedly at the flawless
copies and failed to suspect her of frequent pilgrimages to the
dictionary in the library in order to familiarize herself with the
meaning and manner of spelling various academic words. At first it was
almost bewildering to find herself in some degree thus sharing the
Silliston community life; and an unpremeditated attitude toward these
learned ones, high priests of the muses she had so long ignorantly
worshipped, accounted perhaps for a great deal in their attitude toward
her. Her fervour, repressed yet palpable, was like a flame burning
before their altars--a flattery to which the learned, being human, are
quick to respond. Besides, something of her history was known, and she
was of a type to incite a certain amount of interest amongst these
discerning ones. Often, after she had taken their dictation, or brought
their manuscripts home, they detained her in conversation. In short,
Silliston gave its approval to this particular experiment of Augusta
Maturin. As for Mrs. Maturin herself, her feeling was one of controlled
pride not unmixed with concern, always conscious as she was of the hidden
element of tragedy in the play she had so lovingly staged. Not that she
had any compunction in keeping Janet's secret, even from Insall; but
sometimes as she contemplated it the strings of her heart grew tight.
Silliston was so obviously where Janet belonged, she could not bear the
thought of the girl going out again from this sheltered spot into a
chaotic world of smoke and struggle.
Janet's own feelings were a medley. It was not, of course, contentment
she knew continually, nor even peace, although there were moments when
these stole over her. There were moments, despite her incredible good
fortune, of apprehension when she shrank from the future, when fear
assailed her; moments of intense sadness at the thought of leaving her
friends, of leaving this enchanted place now that miraculously she had
found it; moments of stimulation, of exaltation, when she forgot. Her
prevailing sense, as she found herself again, was of thankfulness and
gratitude, of determination to take advantage of, to drink in all of this
wonderful experience, lest any precious memory be lost.
Like a jewel gleaming with many facets, each sunny day was stored and
treasured. As she went from Mrs. Case's boarding-house forth to her
work, the sweet, sharp air of these spring mornings was filled with
delicious smells of new things, of new flowers and new grass and tender,
new leaves of myriad shades, bronze and crimson, fuzzy white, primrose,
and emerald green. And sometimes it seemed as though the pink and white
clouds of the little orchards were wafted into swooning scents. She
loved best the moment when the Common came in view, when through the rows
of elms the lineaments of those old houses rose before her, lineaments
seemingly long familiar, as of old and trusted friends, and yet ever
stirring new harmonies and new visions. Here, in their midst, she
belonged, and here, had the world been otherwise ordained, she might have
lived on in one continuous, shining spring. At the corner of the Common,
foursquare, ample, painted a straw colour trimmed with white, with its
high chimneys and fan-shaped stairway window, its balustraded terrace
porch open to the sky, was the eighteenth century mansion occupied by Dr.
Ledyard. What was the secret of its flavour? And how account for the
sense of harmony inspired by another dwelling, built during the term of
the second Adams, set in a frame of maples and shining white in the
morning sun? Its curved portico was capped by a wrought-iron railing,
its long windows were touched with purple, and its low garret--set like a
deckhouse on the wide roof--suggested hidden secrets of the past. Here a
Motley or a Longfellow might have dwelt, a Bryant penned his
"Thanatopsis." Farther on, chequered by shade, stood the quaint brick
row of professors' houses, with sloping eaves and recessed entrances of
granite--a subject for an old English print.... Along the border of the
Common were interspersed among the ancient dormitories and halls the new
and dignified buildings of plum-coloured brick that still preserved the
soul of Silliston. And to it the soul of Janet responded.
In the late afternoon, when her tasks were finished, Janet would cross
the Common to Mrs. Maturin's--a dwelling typical of the New England of
the past, with the dimensions of a cottage and something of the dignity
of a mansion. Fluted white pilasters adorned the corners, the windows
were protected by tiny eaves, the roof was guarded by a rail; the
classically porched entrance was approached by a path between high
clipped hedges of hemlock; and through the library, on the right, you
reached the flagged terrace beside a garden, rioting in the carnival
colours of spring. By September it would have changed. For there is
one glory of the hyacinth, of the tulip and narcissus and the jonquil,
and another of the Michaelmas daisy and the aster.
Insall was often there, and on Saturdays and Sundays he took Mrs. Maturin
and Janet on long walks into the country. There were afternoons when the
world was flooded with silver light, when the fields were lucent in the
sun; and afternoons stained with blue,--the landscape like a tapestry
woven in delicate grins on a ground of indigo. The arbutus, all aglow
and fragrant beneath its leaves, the purple fringed polygala were past,
but they found the pale gold lily of the bellwort, the rust-red bloom of
the ginger. In the open spaces under the sky were clouds of bluets, wild
violets, and white strawberry flowers clustering beside the star moss all
ashimmer with new green. The Canada Mayflower spread a carpet under the
pines; and in the hollows where the mists settled, where the brooks
flowed, where the air was heavy with the damp, ineffable odour of growing
things, they gathered drooping adder's-tongues, white-starred bloodroots
and foam-flowers. From Insall's quick eye nothing seemed to escape. He
would point out to them the humming-bird that hovered, a bright blur,
above the columbine, the woodpecker glued to the trunk of a maple high
above their heads, the red gleam of a tanager flashing through sunlit
foliage, the oriole and vireo where they hid. And his was the ear that
first caught the exquisite, distant note of the hermit. Once he stopped
them, startled, to listen to the cock partridge drumming to its mate....
Sometimes, of an evening, when Janet was helping Mrs. Maturin in her
planting or weeding, Insall would join them, rolling up the sleeves of
his flannel shirt and kneeling beside them in the garden paths. Mrs.
Maturin was forever asking his advice, though she did not always follow
it.
"Now, Brooks," she would say, "you've just got to suggest something to
put in that border to replace the hyacinths."
"I had larkspur last year--you remember--and it looked like a chromo in a
railroad folder."
"Let me see--did I advise larkspur?" he would ask.
"Oh, I'm sure you must have--I always do what you tell me. It seems to
me I've thought of every possible flower in the catalogue. You know,
too, only you're so afraid of committing yourself."
Insall's comic spirit, betrayed by his expressions, by the quizzical
intonations of his voice, never failed to fill Janet with joy, while it
was somehow suggestive, too, of the vast fund of his resource. Mrs.
Maturin was right, he could have solved many of her questions offhand if
he had so wished, but he had his own method of dealing with appeals. His
head tilted on one side, apparently in deep thought over the problem, he
never answered outright, but by some process of suggestion unfathomable
to Janet, and by eliminating, not too deprecatingly, Mrs. Maturin's
impatient proposals, brought her to a point where she blurted out the
solution herself.
"Oriental poppies! How stupid of me not to think of them!"
"How stupid of me!" Insall echoed--and Janet, bending over her weeding,
made sure they had been in his mind all the while.
Augusta Maturin's chief extravagance was books; she could not bear to
await her turn at the library, and if she liked a book she wished to own
it. Subscribing to several reviews, three English and one American, she
scanned them eagerly every week and sent in orders to her Boston
bookseller. As a consequence the carved walnut racks on her library
table were constantly being strained. A good book, she declared, ought
to be read aloud, and discussed even during its perusal. And thus Janet,
after an elementary and decidedly unique introduction to worth-while
literature in the hospital, was suddenly plunged into the vortex of
modern thought. The dictum Insall quoted, that modern culture depended
largely upon what one had not read, was applied to her; a child of the
new environment fallen into skilful hands, she was spared the boredom of
wading through the so-called classics which, though useful as milestones,
as landmarks for future reference, are largely mere reminders of an
absolute universe now vanished. The arrival of a novel, play, or
treatise by one of that small but growing nucleus of twentieth century
seers was an event, and often a volume begun in the afternoon was taken
up again after supper. While Mrs. Maturin sat sewing on the other side
of the lamp, Janet had her turn at reading. From the first she had been
quick to note Mrs. Maturin's inflections, and the relics of a high-school
manner were rapidly eliminated. The essence of latter-day realism and
pragmatism, its courageous determination to tear away a veil of which she
had always been dimly aware, to look the facts of human nature in the
face, refreshed her: an increasing portion of it she understood; and she
was constantly under the spell of the excitement that partially grasps,
that hovers on the verge of inspiring discoveries. This excitement,
whenever Insall chanced to be present, was intensified, as she sat a
silent but often quivering listener to his amusing and pungent comments
on these new ideas. His method of discussion never failed to illuminate
and delight her, and often, when she sat at her typewriter the next day,
she would recall one of his quaint remarks that suddenly threw a bright
light on some matter hitherto obscure.... Occasionally a novel or a play
was the subject of their talk, and then they took a delight in drawing
her out, in appealing to a spontaneous judgment unhampered by
pedagogically implanted preconceptions. Janet would grow hot from
shyness.
"Say what you think, my dear," Mrs. Maturin would urge her. "And
remember that your own opinion is worth more than Shakespeare's or
Napoleon's!"
Insall would escort her home to Mrs. Case's boarding house....
One afternoon early in June Janet sat in her little room working at her
letters when Brooks Insall came in. "I don't mean to intrude in business
hours, but I wanted to ask if you would do a little copying for me," he
said, and he laid on her desk a parcel bound with characteristic
neatness.
"Something you've written?" she exclaimed, blushing with pleasure and
surprise. He was actually confiding to her one of his manuscripts!
"Well--yes," he replied comically, eyeing her.
"I'll be very careful with it. I'll do it right away."
"There's no particular hurry," he assured her. "The editor's waited six
months for it--another month or so won't matter."
"Another month or so!" she ejaculated,--but he was gone. Of course she
couldn't have expected him to remain and talk about it; but this
unexpected exhibition of shyness concerning his work--so admired by the
world's choicer spirits--thrilled yet amused her, and made her glow with
a new understanding. With eager fingers she undid the string and sat
staring at the regular script without taking in, at first, the meaning of
a single sentence. It was a comparatively short sketch entitled "The
Exile," in which shining, winged truths and elusive beauties flitted
continually against a darkbackground of Puritan oppression; the story of
one Basil Grelott, a dreamer of Milton's day, Oxford nurtured, who,
casting off the shackles of dogma and manmade decrees, sailed with his
books to the New England wilderness across the sea. There he lived,
among the savages, in peace and freedom until the arrival of Winthrop and
his devotees, to encounter persecution from those who themselves had fled
from it. The Lord's Brethren, he averred, were worse than the Lord's
Bishops--Blackstone's phrase. Janet, of course, had never heard of
Blackstone, some of whose experiences Insall had evidently used. And the
Puritans dealt with Grelott even as they would have served the author of
"Paradise Lost" himself, especially if he had voiced among them the
opinions set forth in his pamphlet on divorce. A portrait of a stern
divine with his infallible Book gave Janet a vivid conception of the
character of her ancestors; and early Boston, with yellow candlelight
gleaming from the lantern-like windows of the wooden, Elizabethan houses,
was unforgettably etched. There was an inquisition in a freezing barn of
a church, and Basil Grelott banished to perish amid the forest. in his
renewed quest for freedom.... After reading the manuscript, Janet sat
typewriting into the night, taking it home with her and placing it
besides her bed, lest it be lost to posterity. By five the next evening
she had finished the copy.
A gentle rain had fallen during the day, but had ceased as she made her
way toward Insall's house. The place was familiar now: she had been
there to supper with Mrs. Maturin, a supper cooked and served by Martha
Vesey, an elderly, efficient and appallingly neat widow, whom Insall had
discovered somewhere in his travels and installed as his housekeeper.
Janet paused with her hand on the gate latch to gaze around her, at the
picket fence on which he had been working when she had walked hither the
year before. It was primly painted now, its posts crowned with the
carved pineapples; behind the fence old-fashioned flowers were in bloom,
lupins and false indigo; and the retaining wall of blue-grey slaty stone,
which he had laid that spring, was finished. A wind stirred the maple,
releasing a shower of heavy drops, and she opened the gate and went up
the path and knocked at the door. There was no response--even Martha
must be absent, in the village! Janet was disappointed, she had looked
forward to seeing him, to telling him how great had been her pleasure in
the story he had written, at the same time doubting her courage to do so.
She had never been able to speak to him about his work and what did her
opinion matter to him? As she turned away the stillness was broken by a
humming sound gradually rising to a crescendo, so she ventured slowly
around the house and into the orchard of gnarled apple trees on the slope
until she came insight of a little white building beside the brook. The
weathervane perched on the gable, and veering in the wet breeze, seemed
like a live fish swimming in its own element; and through the open window
she saw Insall bending over a lathe, from which the chips were flying.
She hesitated. Then he looked up, and seeing her, reached above his head
to pull the lever that shut off the power.
"Come in," he called out, and met her at the doorway. He was dressed in
a white duck shirt, open at the neck, and a pair of faded corduroy
trousers. "I wasn't looking for this honour," he told her, with a
gesture of self-deprecation, "or I'd have put on a dinner coat."
And, despite her eagerness and excitement, she laughed.
"I didn't dare to leave this in the house," she explained. Mrs. Vesey
wasn't home. And I thought you might be here."
"You haven't made the copy already!"
"Oh, I loved doing it!" she replied, and paused, flushing. She might
have known that it would be simply impossible to talk to him about it!
So she laid it down on the workbench, and, overcome by a sudden shyness,
retreated toward the door.
"You're not going!" he exclaimed.
"I must--and you're busy."
"Not at all," he declared, "not at all, I was just killing time until
supper. Sit down!" And he waved her to a magisterial-looking chair of
Jacobean design, with turned legs, sandpapered and immaculate, that stood
in the middle of the shop.
"Oh, not in that!" Janet protested. "And besides, I'd spoil it--I'm sure
my skirt is wet."
But he insisted, thrusting it under her. "You've come along just in
time, I wanted a woman to test it--men are no judges of chairs. There's
a vacuum behind the small of your back, isn't there? Augusta will have
to put a cushion in it."
"Did you make it for Mrs. Maturin? She will be Pleased!" exclaimed
Janet, as she sat down. "I don't think it's uncomfortable."
"I copied it from an old one in the Boston Art Museum. Augusta saw it
there, and said she wouldn't be happy until she had one like it. But
don't tell her."
"Not for anything!" Janet got to her feet again. "I really must be
going."
"Going where?"
"I told Mrs. Maturin I'd read that new book to her. I couldn't go
yesterday--I didn't want to go," she added, fearing he might think his
work had kept her.
"Well, I'll walk over with you. She asked me to make a little design for
a fountain, you know, and I'll have to get some measurements."
As they emerged from the shop and climbed the slope Janet tried to fight
off the sadness that began to invade her. Soon she would have to be
leaving all this! Her glance lingered wistfully on the old farmhouse
with its great centre chimney from which the smoke was curling, with its
diamond-paned casements Insall had put into the tiny frames.
"What queer windows!" she said. "But they seem to go with the house,
beautifully."
"You think so?" His tone surprised her; it had a touch more of
earnestness than she had ever before detected. "They belong to that type
of house the old settlers brought the leaded glass with them. Some
people think they're cold, but I've arranged to make them fairly tight.
You see, I've tried to restore it as it must have been when it was
built."
"And these?" she asked, pointing to the millstones of different diameters
that made the steps leading down to the garden.
"Oh, that's an old custom, but they are nice," he agreed. "I'll just put
this precious manuscript inside and get my foot rule," he added, opening
the door, and she stood awaiting him on the threshold, confronted by the
steep little staircase that disappeared into the wall half way up. At
her left was the room where he worked, and which once had been the
farmhouse kitchen. She took a few steps into it, and while he was
searching in the table drawer she halted before the great chimney over
which, against the panel, an old bell-mouthed musket hung. Insall came
over beside her.
"Those were trees!" he said. "That panel's over four feet across, I
measured it once. I dare say the pine it was cut from grew right where
we are standing, before the land was cleared to build the house."
"But the gun?" she questioned. "You didn't have it the night we came to
supper."
"No, I ran across it at a sale in Boston. The old settler must have
owned one like that. I like to think of him, away off here in the
wilderness in those early days."
She thought of how Insall had made those early days live for her, in his
story of Basil Grelott. But to save her soul, wen with such an opening,
she could not speak of it.
"He had to work pretty hard, of course," Insall continued, "but I dare
say he had a fairly happy life, no movies, no Sunday supplements, no
automobiles or gypsy moths. His only excitement was to trudge ten miles
to Dorset and listen to a three hour sermon on everlasting fire and
brimstone by a man who was supposed to know. No wonder he slept soundly
and lived to be over ninety!"
Insall was standing with his head thrown back, his eyes stilt seemingly
fixed on the musket that had suggested his remark--a pose eloquent, she
thought, of the mental and physical balance of the man. She wondered
what belief gave him the free mastery of soul and body he possessed.
Some firm conviction, she was sure, must energise him yet she respected
him the more for concealing it.
"It's hard to understand such a terrible religion!" she cried. "I don't
see how those old settlers could believe in it, when there are such
beautiful things in the world, if we only open our eyes and look for
them. Oh Mr. Insall, I wish I could tell you how I felt when I read your
story, and when Mrs. Maturin read me those other books of yours."
She stopped breathlessly, aghast at her boldness--and then, suddenly, a
barrier between them seemed to break down, and for the first time since
she had known him she felt near to him. He could not doubt the sincerity
of her tribute.
"You like them as much as that, Janet?" he said, looking at her.
"I can't tell you how much, I can't express myself. And I want to tell
you something else, Mr. Insall, while I have the chance--how just being
with you and Mrs. Maturin has changed me. I can face life now, you have
shown me so much in it I never saw before."
"While you have the chance?" he repeated.
"Yes." She strove to go on cheerfully, "Now I've said it, I feel better,
I promise not to mention it again. I knew--you didn't think me
ungrateful. It's funny," she added, "the more people have done for you-
when they've given you everything, life and hope,--the harder it is to
thank them." She turned her face away, lest he might see that her eyes
were wet. "Mrs. Maturin will be expecting us."
"Not yet," she heard him say, and felt his hand on her arm. "You haven't
thought of what you're doing for me."
"What I'm doing for you!" she echoed. "What hurts me most, when I think
about it, is that I'll never be able to do anything."
"Why do you say that?" he asked.
"If I only could believe that some day I might be able to help you--just
a little--I should be happier. All I have, all I am I owe to you and
Mrs. Maturin."
"No, Janet," he answered. "What you are is you, and it's more real than
anything we could have put into you. What you have to give is--
yourself." His fingers trembled on her arm, but she saw him smile a
little before he spoke again. "Augusta Maturin was right when she said
that you were the woman I needed. I didn't realize it then perhaps she
didn't--but now I'm sure of it. Will you come to me?"
She stood staring at him, as in terror, suddenly penetrated by a dismay
that sapped her strength, and she leaned heavily against the fireplace,
clutching the mantel-shelf.
"Don't!" she pleaded. "Please don't--I can't."
"You can't!... Perhaps, after a while, you may come to feel differently
--I didn't mean to startle you," she heard him reply gently. This
humility, in him, was unbearable.
"Oh, it isn't that--it isn't that! If I could, I'd be willing to serve
you all my life--I wouldn't ask for anything more. I never thought that
this would happen. I oughtn't to have stayed in Silliston."
"You didn't suspect that I loved you?"
"How could I? Oh, I might have loved you, if I'd been fortunate--if I'd
deserved it. But I never thought, I always looked up to you--you are so
far above me!" She lifted her face to him in agony. "I'm sorry--I'm
sorry for you--I'll never forgive myself!"
"It's--some one else?" he asked.
"I was--going to be married to--to Mr. Ditmar," she said slowly,
despairingly.
"But even then--" Insall began.
"You don't understand!" she cried. "What will you think of me?--Mrs.
Maturin was to have told you, after I'd gone. It's--it's the same as if
I were married to him--only worse."
"Worse!" Insall repeated uncomprehendingly.... And then she was aware
that he had left her side. He was standing by the window.
A thrush began to sing in the maple. She stole silently toward the door,
and paused to look back at him, once to meet his glance. He had turned.
"I can't--I can't let you go like this!" she heard him say, but she fled
from him, out of the gate and toward the Common....
When Janet appeared, Augusta Maturin was in her garden. With an instant
perception that something was wrong, she went to the girl and led her to
the sofa in the library. There the confession was made.
"I never guessed it," Janet sobbed. "Oh, Mrs. Maturin, you'll believe
me--won't you?"
"Of course I believe you, Janet," Augusta Maturity replied, trying to
hide her pity, her own profound concern and perplexity. "I didn't
suspect it either. If I had--"
"You wouldn't have brought me here, you wouldn't have asked me to stay
with you. But I was to blame, I oughtn't to have stayed, I knew all
along that something would happen--something terrible that I hadn't any
right to stay."
"Who could have foreseen it!" her friend exclaimed helplessly. "Brooks
isn't like any other man I've ever known--one can never tell what he has
in mind. Not that I'm surprised as I look back upon it all!"
"I've hurt him!"
Augusta Maturity was silent awhile. "Remember, my dear," she begged,
"you haven't only yourself to think about, from now on."
But comfort was out of the question, the task of calming the girl
impossible. Finally the doctor was sent for, and she was put to bed....
Augusta Maturity spent an agonized, sleepless night, a prey of many
emotions; of self-reproach, seeing now that she had been wrong in not
telling Brooks Insall of the girl's secret; of sorrow and sympathy for
him; of tenderness toward the girl, despite the suffering she had
brought; of unwonted rebellion against a world that cheated her of this
cherished human tie for which she had longed the first that had come into
her life since her husband and child had gone. And there was her own
responsibility for Insall's unhappiness--when she recalled with a pang
her innocent sayings that Janet was the kind of woman he, an artist,
should marry! And it was true--if he must marry. He himself had seen
it. Did Janet love him? or did she still remember Ditmar? Again and
again, during the summer that followed, this query was on her lips, but
remained unspoken....
The next day Insall disappeared. No one knew where he had gone, but his
friends in Silliston believed he had been seized by one of his sudden,
capricious fancies for wandering. For many months his name was not
mentioned between Augusta Maturity and Janet. By the middle of June they
had gone to Canada....
In order to reach the camp on Lac du Sablier from the tiny railroad
station at Saint Hubert, a trip of some eight miles up the decharge was
necessary. The day had been when Augusta Maturity had done her share of
paddling and poling, with an habitant guide in the bow. She had foreseen
all the needs of this occasion, warm clothes for Janet, who was wrapped
in blankets and placed on cushions in the middle of a canoe, while she
herself followed in a second, from time to time exclaiming, in a
reassuring voice, that one had nothing to fear in the hands of Delphin
and Herve, whom she had known intimately for more than twenty years. It
was indeed a wonderful, exciting, and at moments seemingly perilous
journey up the forested aisle of the river: at sight of the first roaring
reach of rapids Janet held her breathso incredible did it appear that any
human power could impel and guide a boat up the white stairway between
the boulders! Was it not courting destruction? Yet she felt a strange,
wild delight in the sense of danger, of amazement at the woodsman's eye
that found and followed the crystal paths through the waste of foam....
There were long, quiet stretches, hemmed in by alders, where the canoes,
dodging the fallen trees, glided through the still water... No such
silent, exhilarating motion Janet had ever known. Even the dipping
paddles made no noise, though sometimes there was a gurgle, as though a
fish had broken the water behind them; sometimes, in the shining pools
ahead, she saw the trout leap out. At every startling flop Delphin would
exclaim: "Un gros!" From an upper branch of a spruce a kingfisher darted
like an arrow into the water, making a splash like a falling stone.
Once, after they had passed through the breach of a beaver dam, Herve
nodded his head toward a mound of twigs by the bank and muttered
something. Augusta Maturin laughed.
"Cabane de castor, he says--a beaver cabin. And the beavers made the dam
we just passed. Did you notice, Janet, how beautifully clean those logs
had been cut by their sharp teeth?"
At moments she conversed rapidly with Delphin in the same patois Janet
had heard on the streets of Hampton. How long ago that seemed!
On two occasions, when the falls were sheer, they had to disembark and
walk along little portages through the green raspberry bushes. The
prints of great hooves in the black silt betrayed where wild animals had
paused to drink. They stopped for lunch on a warm rock beside a singing
waterfall, and at last they turned an elbow in the stream and with
suddenly widened vision beheld the lake's sapphire expanse and the
distant circle of hills. "Les montagnes," Herve called them as he flung
out his pipe, and this Janet could translate for herself. Eastward they
lay lucent in the afternoon light; westward, behind the generous log camp
standing on a natural terrace above the landing, they were in shadow.
Here indeed seemed peace, if remoteness, if nature herself might bestow
it.
Janet little suspected that special preparations had been made for her
comfort. Early in April, while the wilderness was still in the grip of
winter, Delphin had been summoned from a far-away lumber camp to Saint
Hubert, where several packing-cases and two rolls of lead pipe from
Montreal lay in a shed beside the railroad siding. He had superintended
the transportation of these, on dog sledges, up the frozen decharge,
accompanied on his last trip by a plumber of sorts from Beaupre, thirty
miles down the line; and between them they had improvised a bathroom, and
attached a boiler to the range! Only a week before the arrival of Madame
the spring on the hillside above the camp had been tapped, and the pipe
laid securely underground. Besides this unheard-of luxury for the Lac du
Sablier there were iron beds and mattresses and little wood stoves to go
in the four bedrooms, which were more securely chinked with moss. The
traditions of that camp had been hospitable. In Professor Wishart's day
many guests had come and gone, or pitched their tents nearby; and Augusta
Maturin, until this summer, had rarely been here alone, although she had
no fears of the wilderness, and Delphin brought his daughter Delphine to
do the housework and cooking. The land for miles round about was owned
by a Toronto capitalist who had been a friend of her father, and who
could afford as a hobby the sparing of the forest. By his permission a
few sportsmen came to fish or shoot, and occasionally their campfires
could be seen across the water, starlike glows in the darkness of the
night, at morning and evening little blue threads of smoke that rose
against the forest; "bocane," Delphin called it, and Janet found a sweet,
strange magic in these words of the pioneer.
The lake was a large one, shaped like an hourglass, as its name implied,
and Augusta Maturin sometimes paddled Janet through the wide, shallow
channel to the northern end, even as she had once paddled Gifford. Her
genius was for the helpless. One day, when the waters were high, and the
portages could be dispensed with, they made an excursion through the
Riviere des Peres to the lake of that name, the next in the chain above.
For luncheon they ate the trout Augusta caught; and in the afternoon,
when they returned to the mouth of the outlet, Herve, softly checking the
canoe with his paddle, whispered the word "Arignal!" Thigh deep in the
lush grasses of the swamp was an animal with a huge grey head, like a
donkey's, staring foolishly in their direction--a cow moose. With a
tremendous commotion that awoke echoes in the forest she tore herself
from the mud and disappeared, followed by her panic-stricken offspring, a
caricature of herself....
By September the purple fireweed that springs up beside old camps, and in
the bois brute, had bloomed and scattered its myriad, impalpable
thistledowns over crystal floors. Autumn came to the Laurentians. In
the morning the lake lay like a quicksilver pool under the rising mists,
through which the sun struck blinding flashes of light. A little later,
when the veil had lifted, it became a mirror for the hills and crags, the
blue reaches of the sky. The stinging air was spiced with balsam.
Revealed was the incredible brilliance of another day,--the arsenic-green
of the spruce, the red and gold of the maples, the yellow of the alders
bathing in the shallows, of the birches, whose white limbs could be seen
gleaming in the twilight of the thickets. Early, too early, the sun fell
down behind the serrated forest-edge of the western hill, a ball of
orange fire.... One evening Delphin and Herve, followed by two other
canoes, paddled up to the landing. New visitors had arrived, Dr. McLeod,
who had long been an intimate of the Wishart family, and with him a
buxom, fresh-complexioned Canadian woman, a trained nurse whom he had
brought from Toronto.
There, in nature's wilderness, Janet knew the supreme experience of
women, the agony, the renewal and joy symbolic of nature herself. When
the child was bathed and dressed in the clothes Augusta Maturin herself
had made for it, she brought it into the room to the mother.
"It's a daughter," she announced.
Janet regarded the child wistfully. "I hoped it would be a boy," she
said. "He would have had--a better chance." But she raised her arms,
and the child was laid in the bed beside her.
"We'll see that she has a chance, my dear," Augusta Maturin replied, as
she kissed her.
Ten days went by, Dr. McLeod lingered at Lac du Sablier, and Janet was
still in bed. Even in this life-giving air she did not seem to grow
stronger. Sometimes, when the child was sleeping in its basket on the
sunny porch, Mrs. Maturin read to her; but often when she was supposed to
rest, she lay gazing out of the open window into silver space listening
to the mocking laughter of the loons, watching the ducks flying across
the sky; or, as evening drew on, marking in the waters a steely angle
that grew and grew--the wake of a beaver swimming homeward in the
twilight. In the cold nights the timbers cracked to the frost, she heard
the owls calling to one another from the fastnesses of the forest, and
thought of life's inscrutable mystery. Then the child would be brought
to her. It was a strange, unimagined happiness she knew when she felt it
clutching at her breasts, at her heart, a happiness not unmixed with
yearning, with sadness as she pressed it to her. Why could it not remain
there always, to comfort her, to be nearer her than any living thing?
Reluctantly she gave it back to the nurse, wistfully her eyes followed
it....
Twice a week, now, Delphin and Herve made the journey to Saint Hubert,
and one evening, after Janet had watched them paddling across the little
bay that separated the camp from the outlet's mouth, Mrs. Maturin
appeared, with an envelope in her hand.
"I've got a letter from Brooks Insall, Janet," she said, with a well-
disguised effort to speak naturally. "It's not the first one he's sent
me, but I haven't mentioned the others. He's in Silliston--and I wrote
him about the daughter."
"Yes," said Janet.
"Well--he wants to come up here, to see you, before we go away. He asks
me to telegraph your permission."
"Oh no, he mustn't, Mrs. Maturin!"
"You don't care to see him?"
"It isn't that. I'd like to see him if things had been different. But
now that I've disappointed him--hurt him, I couldn't stand it. I know
it's only his kindness."
After a moment Augusta Maturin handed Janet a sealed envelope she held in
her hand.
"He asked me to give you this," she said, and left the room. Janet read
it, and let it fall on the bedspread, where it was still lying when her
friend returned and began tidying the room. From the direction of the
guide's cabin, on the point, came the sounds of talk and laughter, broken
by snatches of habitant songs. Augusta Maturin smiled. She pretended
not to notice the tears in Janet's eyes, and strove to keep back her own.
"Delphin and Herve saw a moose in the decharge," she explained. "Of
course it was a big one, it always is! They're telling the doctor about
it."
"Mrs. Maturin," said Janet, "I'd like to talk to you. I think I ought to
tell you what Mr. Insall says."
"Yes, my dear," her friend replied, a little faintly, sitting down on the
bed.
"He asks me to believe what--I've done makes no difference to him. Of
course he doesn't put it in so many words, but he says he doesn't care
anything about conventions," Janet continued slowly. "What I told him
when he asked me to marry him in Silliston was a shock to him, it was so-
-so unexpected. He went away, to Maine, but as soon as he began to think
it all over he wanted to come and tell me that he loved me in spite of
it, but he felt he couldn't, under the circumstances, that he had to wait
until--now. Although I didn't give him any explanation, he wants me to
know that he trusts me, he understands--it's because, he says, I am what
I am. He still wishes to marry me, to take care of me and the child. We
could live in California, at first--he's always been anxious to go there,
he says."
"Well, my dear?" Augusta Maturin forced herself to say at last.
"It's so generous--so like him!" Janet exclaimed. "But of course I
couldn't accept such a sacrifice, even if--" She paused. "Oh, it's made
me so sad all summer to think that he's unhappy because of me!"
"I know, Janet, but you should realize, as I told you in Silliston, that
it isn't by any deliberate act of your own, it's just one of those things
that occur in this world and that can't be foreseen or avoided." Augusta
Maturin spoke with an effort. In spite of Janet's apparent calm, she had
never been more acutely aware of the girl's inner suffering.
"I know," said Janet. "But it's terrible to think that those things we
unintentionally do, perhaps because of faults we have previously
committed, should have the same effect as acts that are intentional."
"The world is very stupid. All suffering, I think, is brought about by
stupidity. If we only could learn to look at ourselves as we are! It's
a stupid, unenlightened society that metes out most of our punishments
and usually demands a senseless expiation." Augusta Maturin waited, and
presently Janet spoke again.
"I've been thinking all summer, Mrs. Maturin. There was so much I wanted
to talk about with you, but I wanted to be sure of myself first. And
now, since the baby came, and I know I'm not going to get well, I seem to
see things much more clearly."
"Why do you say you're not going to get well, Janet? In this air, and
with the child to live for!"
"I know it. Dr. McLeod knows it, or he wouldn't be staying here, and
you've both been too kind to tell me. You've been so kind, Mrs. Maturin--
I can't talk about it. But I'm sure I'm going to die, I've really known
it ever since we left Silliston. Something's gone out of me, the thing
that drove me, that made me want to live--I can't express what I mean any
other way. Perhaps it's this child, the new life--perhaps I've just been
broken, I don't know. You did your best to mend me, and that's one thing
that makes me sad. And the thought of Mr. Insall's another. In some
ways it would have been worse to live--I couldn't have ruined his life.
And even if things had been different, I hadn't come to love him, in that
way--it's queer, because he's such a wonderful person. I'd like to live
for the child, if only I had the strength, the will left in me--but
that's gone. And maybe I could save her from--what I've been through."
Augusta Maturin took Janet's hand in hers.
"Janet," she said, "I've been a lonely woman, as you know, with nothing
to look forward to. I've always wanted a child since my little Edith
went. I wanted you, my dear, I want your child, your daughter--as I want
nothing else in the world. I will take her, I will try to bring her up
in the light, and Brooks Insall will help me...."
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Love is nothing but attraction between the sexes
Mercifully, however, she had little leisure to reflect
Too much reason in the world, too little impulse and feeling
End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of The Dwelling Place of Light, V3
by Winston Churchill