Through the next three months Anne thought more about money than she
had ever thought in her life before. During the Wainwright days she
had often been able to save ten dollars a week, but now that this sum
was abstracted before it reached her, the remainder refused to include
all that it had included then. Their small bank balance Anne refused
to count an asset. She never mentioned it and was not sure that Roger
remembered they had it. When he suggested some extravagance, a week-end
trip, or absurdly expensive theater seats, treats that in the past had
been supposed to be made possible by this balance--but which, in the
end, Anne had always managed without touching--she now escaped on the
plea of fatigue. Nevertheless, when Roger stopped suggesting them, Anne
was hurt and angry.
Each week she put aside something for little Roger's need. And if
gradually his clothes began to be finer, his bassinet more elaborate,
his weighing scales unnecessarily expensive, she did not allow herself
to word the reason. Only when Roger donated with extra liberality to
some strike benefit or defense fund did Anne deliberately go out and
buy something little Roger could very well have done without.
In their daily intercourse there was now more of the old comradeship
than there had been for months, but often, her light housework
finished, Anne sat in a shady corner of the garden, spicy and sweet
again in the hot spring sun, and wondered whence had come this feeling
of silently and strongly holding out against something that was always
in the background of her mind. Once she had felt this something to be
in Roger himself, a kind of accidental quality that circumstances might
or might not develop. But now she felt it as something beyond Roger,
something permanent functioning through him. Between herself and Roger
there was some essential difference. Their attitude toward the coming
of Rogie, to Black Tom O'Connell and Merle, to the futile efforts of
Hilary Wainwright, even their union against the duplicity of John
Lowell, had held this germ of difference. Hour after hour Anne pried
into her own motives for action and Roger's, trying to find the source
of this difference, but when, in an entirely fictitious future, she
sometimes glimpsed its possible scope, she fled back to the concrete
present and Rogie.
It was always after one of these exhausting exhumations of motive and
impulse that Anne gripped more firmly the old habit of discussion with
Roger; that they went to one of the many protest meetings which, now
that Anne refused concerts and theaters, had come to be Roger's chief
interest outside the direct round of his work; or that Anne called for
Roger at the loft, and, while she waited, tried to feel a little of the
enthusiasm mounting sometimes almost to fever heat in him.
But the force and driving power that Roger felt as an almost concrete
thing never included Anne. She could never lose herself in it, nor be
carried away on its flood. It was too loud, too insistent, too hot,
like hissing black steam, screaming through a narrow vent.
It did not frighten, but deadened something within, so that Anne,
waiting quietly on the bench where Roger had first waited for Black
Tom, felt her effort to believe in the ultimate aim of all this
striving shrink and grow cold within her. To hear the violent click of
Katya's typewriter depressed her. To see Black Tom suddenly rise, and,
with the same sweeping gesture with which he had opened before her the
advance of strike-breakers, throw clear to Roger some new plan, made
Anne feel that the man's broken and unkempt hands had actually drawn
her with them. Nor could she ever look at him without thinking of Merle.
Like a brilliant bird, Merle flitted about the dusty place, getting in
every one's way, interrupting at her own whim, indifferent to their
amused tolerance or irritation. Birdlike, she perched on the gate of
Katya's den and chirped through Katya's clicking, or disturbed Roger
with her flutey recital of a movie she had taken the afternoon off to
enjoy. Only Black Tom's absorption did she respect, but sometimes,
when she came and chattered to Anne, Anne saw her watching him with a
wistful longing that was not in the least birdlike or gay.
Anne grew gradually to feel a protecting tenderness for Merle, quite
distinct from her realization of the girl's shallow mind and different
moral standards. It had a little of the same personal tenderness she
felt for Hilda's confused thinking and perpetual gayety. When Merle
referred to some mass meeting of protest that had fired the enthusiasm
of the others to fever heat as "a beastly bore," and Roger or Katya
demanded to know why she went, Anne felt that she understood.
For neither could Anne enter the spirit of these meetings. The hatred
of the men and women, massed to demand justice for this and that, swept
on high above Merle's head, but it weighted Anne and stuck to her like
an unclean substance. Hundreds, sometimes thousands, of bodies smelling
of sweat and dust and the day's toil in factory and machine shop,
nauseated her and stifled the purpose of their rebellion. Alone, high
in the clean sweetness of her own home, Anne could rebel against the
blockade of Russia, the forced toil of little children, the throttling
of free speech and liberty. But the air, thick with human breath, the
shrill voices of boys and girls selling revolutionary pamphlets, the
mass weight of their hatred, woke in her a rebellion against the stark
ugliness of its expression that took all Anne's control not to express
by rising and leaving the hall. When, inflamed by what she came to
feel, as the weeks passed, was deliberate manipulation of this human
capacity to hate, protest broke in that mounting cry of rage, that
long-drawn, rising bellow of hatred, that inhuman baying with which
they greeted the name of some oppressor, Anne shivered with actual
cold. "B-o-o-o," it rose and fell and rose again like an icy blast,
freezing Anne's capacity to share their anger.
Like bells, certain words and names rang out in signal--war-lords, wage
slave, master class. Through the months with Hilary Wainwright Anne had
heard them often and used them herself glibly. Now she felt that she
would never again be able to utter them. As Hilda stripped the facts of
birth and love to their biological skeletons, so these men and women
stripped the words of their conventional acceptance, their usefulness
as tags of common understanding, and released raging genii to perform
their tasks. After such a meeting the surface of her body was covered
with a clammy dampness.
But no torrent of unleashed hatred chilled Roger or made him cold and
weak. Coming, at the end of May, from the largest meeting they had
attended, Anne felt Roger throbbing with enthusiasm, even after they
had walked blocks under the peaceful stars.
"Wasn't Tom great?" he demanded for the third time, unconscious that
Anne had not answered. "When he talks as he did to-night he makes me
think of Christ driving the money changers from the temple."
"The Bible would never have remained literature if Christ had ranted
like that."
"It isn't ranting, Anne. He sees things like that, literally sees the
workers slaves, just as bound and owned by capitalistic pressure as
ever a black African savage was owned by a Southern cotton planter. He
sees the 'masters' in their great Wall Street offices just as clearly
as any master with the legal right to beat his slave." Roger tried to
speak patiently, but sometimes the shadings of Anne's sensitiveness
rasped him as much as this "ranting" rasped Anne. Was it really her
dislike of Black Tom, what she insisted on calling the "coarseness of
his moral fiber," that made her blind to the man's sincerity? Could
not, or would not, Anne see above and beyond this single breach of the
world's standard? Roger did not know. And, like Anne, fleeing before
the definite revelation of the difference between herself and Roger,
Roger, too, hurried away.
There was a pause and then Roger said:
"That was the biggest collection I've ever seen taken up at a meeting.
Carson certainly can get the cash."
Anne saw, as if he had been there in the night before her, the thin,
bowed shoulders of Robert Carson butted out over the edge of the
platform in the final gesture he always took before defying the
audience not to "give and give their all." His lank, black hair fell in
a long side lock across his high forehead, his black eyes burned in his
pale, thin face. She shivered.
"It's terrible to use hate like that, or pain, or any feeling, fan it
to that white heat and then mint money from it."
Roger bit his lip. "It isn't hate or any pain. It's not a destroying
force. It's the demand for universal justice and the right to Beauty
that centuries of oppression have not been able to kill. It's love,
Anne, not hate."
"Maybe," Anne said drearily, with such an unexpected cessation of
personal interest that Roger turned to her quickly.
"You're tired, Anne. You ought not to have gone."
His eyes were concerned for her, for her personally, her body and her
comfort. Anne swallowed the lump that rose suddenly in her throat.
"I guess I am. It was so hot and noisy and they last so long. It must
be almost twelve."