Once more Janet and Mr. Tiernan descended into the subway, taking a car
going to the south and west, which finally came out of the tunnel into a
broad avenue lined with shabby shops, hotels and saloons, and long rows
of boarding--and rooming-houses. They alighted at a certain corner,
walked a little way along a street unkempt and dreary, Mr. Tiernan
scrutinizing the numbers until he paused in front of a house with a
basement kitchen and snow-covered, sandstone steps. Climbing these, he
pulled the bell, and they stood waiting in the twilight of a half-closed
vestibule until presently shuffling steps were heard within; the door was
cautiously opened, not more than a foot, but enough to reveal a woman in
a loose wrapper, with an untidy mass of bleached hair and a puffy face
like a fungus grown in darkness.
"I want to see Miss Lise Bumpus," Mr. Tiernan demanded.
"You've got the wrong place. There ain't no one of that name here," said
the woman.
"There ain't! All right," he insisted aggressively, pushing open the door
in spite of her. "If you don't let this young lady see her quick, there's
trouble coming to you."
"Who are you?" asked the woman, impudently, yet showing signs of fear.
"Never mind who I am," Mr. Tiernan declared. "I know all about you, and I
know all about Duval. If you don't want any trouble you won't make any,
and you'll take this young lady to her sister. I'll wait here for you,
Miss Janet," he added.
"I don't know nothing about her--she rented my room that's all I know,"
the woman replied sullenly. "If you mean that couple that came here
yesterday--"
She turned and led the way upstairs, mounting slowly, and Janet followed,
nauseated and almost overcome by the foul odours of dead cigarette smoke
which, mingling with the smell of cooking cabbage rising from below,
seemed the very essence and reek of hitherto unimagined evil. A terror
seized her such as she had never known before, an almost overwhelming
impulse to turn and regain the air and sunlight of the day. In the dark
hallway of the second story the woman knocked at the door of a front
room.
"She's in there, unless she's gone out." And indeed a voice was heard
petulantly demanding what was wanted--Lise's voice! Janet hesitated, her
hand on the knob, her body fallen against the panels. Then, as she pushed
open the door, the smell of cigarette smoke grew stronger, and she found
herself in a large bedroom, the details of which were instantly
photographed on her mind--the dingy claret-red walls, the crayon over the
mantel of a buxom lady in a decollete costume of the '90's, the outspread
fan concealing the fireplace, the soiled lace curtains. The bed was
unmade, and on the table beside two empty beer bottles and glasses and
the remains of a box of candy--suggestive of a Sunday purchase at a drug
store--she recognized Lise's vanity case. The effect of all this,
integrated at a glance, was a paralyzing horror. Janet could not speak.
She remained gazing at Lise, who paid no attention to her entrance, but
stood with her back turned before an old-fashioned bureau with a marble
top and raised sides. She was dressed, and engaged in adjusting her hat.
It was not until Janet pronounced her name that she turned swiftly.
"You!" she exclaimed. "What the--what brought you here?"
"Oh, Lise!" Janet repeated.
"How did you get here?" Lise demanded, coming toward her. "Who told you
where I was? What business have you got sleuthing 'round after me like
this?"
For a moment Janet was speechless once more, astounded that Lise could
preserve her effrontery in such an atmosphere, could be insensible to the
evils lurking in this house--evils so real to Janet that she seemed
actually to feel them brushing against her.
"Lise, come away from here," she pleaded, "come home with me!"
"Home!" said Lise, defiantly, and laughed. "What do you take me for? Why
would I be going home when I've been trying to break away for two years?
I ain't so dippy as that--not me! Go home like a good little girl and
march back to the Bagatelle and ask 'em to give me another show standing
behind a counter all day. Nix! No home sweet home for me! I'm all for
easy street when it comes to a home like that."
Heartless, terrific as the repudiation was, it struck a self-convicting,
almost sympathetic note in Janet. She herself had revolted against the
monotony and sordidness of that existence She herself! She dared not
complete the thought, now.
"But this!" she exclaimed.
"What's the matter with it?" Lise demanded. "It ain't Commonwealth
Avenue, but it's got Fillmore Street beat a mile. There ain't no whistles
hereto get you out of bed at six a.m., for one thing. There ain't no
geezers, like Walters, to nag you 'round all day long. What's the matter
with it?"
Something in Lise's voice roused Janet's spirit to battle.
"What's the matter with it?" she cried. "It's hell--that's the matter
with it. Can't you see it? Can't you feel it? You don't know what it
means, or you'd come home with me."
"I guess I know what it means as well as you do," said Lise, sullenly.
"We've all got to croak sometime, and I'd rather croak this way than be
smothered up in Hampton. I'll get a run for my money, anyway."
"No, you don't know what it means," Janet repeated, "or you wouldn't talk
like that. Do you think this man will support you, stick to you? He
won't, he'll desert you, and you'll have to go on the streets."
A dangerous light grew in Lise's eyes.
"He's as good as any other man, he's as good as Ditmar," she said.
"They're all the same, to girls like us."
Janet's heart caught, it seemed to stop beating. Was this a hazard on
Lise's part, or did she speak from knowledge? And yet what did it matter
whether Lise knew or only suspected, if her words were true, if men were
all alike? Had she been a dupe as well as Lise? and was the only
difference between them now the fact that Lise was able, without
illusion, to see things as they were, to accept the consequences, while
she, Janet, had beheld visions and dreamed dreams? was there any real
choice between the luxurious hotel to which Ditmar had taken her and this
detestable house? Suddenly, seemingly by chance, her eyes fell on the box
of drug-store candy from which the cheap red ribbon had been torn, and by
some odd association of ideas it suggested and epitomized Lise's Sunday
excursion with a mama hideous travesty on the journey of wonders she
herself had taken. Had that been heaven, and this of Lise's, hell?... And
was. Lise's ambition to be supported in idleness and luxury to be
condemned because she had believed her own to be higher? Did not both
lead to destruction? The weight that had lain on her breast since the
siren had awakened her that morning and she had reached out and touched
the chilled, empty sheets now grew almost unsupportable.
"It's true," said Janet, "all men are the same."
Lise was staring at her.
"My God!" she exclaimed. "You?"
"Yes-me," cried Janet.--"And what are you going to do about it? Stay here
with him in this filthy place until he gets tired of you and throws you
out on the street? Before I'd let any man do that to me I'd kill him."
Lise began to whimper, and suddenly buried her face in the pillow. But a
new emotion had begun to take possession of Janet--an emotion so strong
as to give her an unlookedfor sense of detachment. And the words Lise had
spoken between her sobs at first conveyed no meaning.
"I'm going to have a baby...."
Lise was going to have a child! Why hadn't she guessed it? A child!
Perhaps she, Janet, would have a child! This enlightenment as to Lise's
condition and the possibility it suggested in regard to herself brought
with it an overwhelming sympathy which at first she fiercely resented
then yielded to. The bond between them, instead of snapping, had
inexplicably strengthened. And Lise, despite her degradation, was more
than ever her sister! Forgetting her repugnance to the bed, Janet sat
down beside Lise and put an arm around her.
"He said he'd marry me, he swore he was rich--and he was a spender all
right. And then some guy came up to me one night at Gruber's and told me
he was married already."
"What?" Janet exclaimed.
"Sure! He's got a wife and two kids here in Boston. That was a twenty-one
round knockout! Maybe I didn't have something to tell him when he blew
into Hampton last Friday! But he said he couldn't help it--he loved me."
Lise sat up, seemingly finding relief in the relation of her wrongs,
dabbing her eyes with a cheap lace handkerchief. "Well, while he'd been
away--this thing came. I didn't know what was the matter at first, and
when I found out I was scared to death, I was ready to kill myself. When
I told him he was scared too, and then he said he'd fix it. Say, I was a
goat to think he'd marry me!" Lise laughed hysterically.
"And then--" Janet spoke with difficulty, "and then you came down here?"
"I told him he'd have to see me through, I'd start something if he
didn't. Say, he almost got down on his knees, right there in Gruber's!
But he came back inside of ten seconds--he's a jollier, for sure, he was
right there with the goods, it was because he loved me, he couldn't help
himself, I was his cutie, and all that kind of baby talk."
Lise's objective manner of speaking about her seducer amazed Janet.
"Do you love him?" she asked.
"Say, what is love?" Lise demanded. "Do you ever run into it outside of
the movies? Do I love him? Well, he's a good looker and a fancy dresser,
he ain't a tight wad, and he can start a laugh every minute. If he hadn't
put it over on me I wouldn't have been so sore. I don't know he ain't so
bad. He's weak, that's the trouble with him."
This was the climax! Lise's mental processes, her tendency to pass from
wild despair to impersonal comment, her inability, her courtesan's
temperament that prevented her from realizing tragedy for more than a
moment at a time--even though the tragedy were her own--were
incomprehensible to Janet.
"Get on to this," Lise adjured her. "When I first was acquainted with him
he handed me a fairy tale that he was taking five thousand a year from
Humphrey and Gillmount, he was going into the firm. He had me
razzle-dazzled. He's some hypnotizes as a salesman, too, they say.
Nothing was too good for me; I saw myself with a house on the avenue
shopping in a limousine. Well, he blew up, but I can't help liking him."
"Liking him!" cried Janet passionately. "I'd kill him that's what I'd
do."
Lise regarded her with unwilling admiration.
"That's where you and me is different," she declared. "I wish I was like
that, but I ain't. And where would I come in? Now you're wise why I can't
go back to Hampton. Even if I was stuck on the burg and cryin' my eyes
out for the Bagatelle I couldn't go back."
"What are you going to do?" Janet demanded.
"Well," said Lise, "he's come across--I'll say that for him. Maybe it's
because he's scared, but he's stuck on me, too. When you dropped in I was
just going down town to get a pair of patent leathers, these are all wore
out," she explained, twisting her foot, "they ain't fit for Boston. And I
thought of lookin' at blouses--there's a sale on I was reading about in
the paper. Say, it's great to be on easy street, to be able to stay in
bed until you're good and ready to get up and go shopping, to gaze at the
girls behind the counter and ask the price of things. I'm going to
Walling's and give the salesladies the ha-ha--that's what I'm going to
do."
"But--?" Janet found words inadequate.
Lise understood her.
"Oh, I'm due at the doctor's this afternoon."
"Where?"
"The doctor's. Don't you get me?--it's a private hospital." Lise gave a
slight shudder at the word, but instantly recovered her sang-froid.
"Howard fixed it up yesterday--and they say it ain't very bad if you take
it early."
For a space Janet was too profoundly shocked to reply.
"Lise! That's a crime!" she cried.
"Crime, nothing!" retorted Lise, and immediately became indignant. "Say,
I sometimes wonder how you could have lived all these years without
catching on to a few things! What do you take me for! What'd I do with a
baby?"
What indeed! The thought came like an avalanche, stripping away the
veneer of beauty from the face of the world, revealing the scarred rock
and crushed soil beneath. This was reality! What right had society to
compel a child to be born to degradation and prostitution? to beget,
perhaps, other children of suffering? Were not she and Lise of the
exploited, of those duped and tempted by the fair things the more
fortunate enjoyed unscathed? And now, for their natural cravings, their
family must be disgraced, they must pay the penalty of outcasts! Neither
Lise nor she had had a chance. She saw that, now. The scorching
revelation of life's injustice lighted within her the fires of anarchy
and revenge. Lise, other women might submit tamely to be crushed, might
be lulled and drugged by bribes: she would not. A wild desire seized her
to get back to Hampton.
"Give me the address of the hospital," she said.
"Come off!" cried Lise, in angry bravado. "Do you think I'm going to let
you butt into this? I guess you've got enough to do to look out for your
own business."
Janet produced a pencil from her bag, and going to the table tore off a
piece of the paper in which had been wrapped the candy box.
"Give me the address," she insisted.
"Say, what are you going to do?"
"I want to know where you are, in case anything happens to you."
"Anything happens! What do you mean?" Janet's words had frightened Lise,
the withdrawal of Janet's opposition bewildered her. But above all, she
was cowed by the sudden change in Janet herself, by the attitude of
steely determination eloquent of an animus persons of Lise's type are
incapable of feeling, and which to them is therefore incomprehensible.
"Nothing's going to happen to me," she whined. "The place is all right
--he'd be scared to send me there if it wasn't. It costs something, too.
Say, you ain't going to tell 'em at home?" she cried with a fresh access
of alarm.
"If you do as I say, I won't tell anybody," Janet replied, in that odd,
impersonal tone her voice had acquired. "You must write me as soon--as
soon as it is over. Do you understand?"
"Honest to God I will," Lise assured her.
"And you mustn't come back to a house like this."
"Where'll I go?" Lise asked.
"I don't know. We'll find out when the time comes," said Janet,
significantly.
"You've seen him!" Lise exclaimed.
"No," said Janet, "and I don't want to see him unless I have to. Mr.
Tiernan has seen him. Mr. Tiernan is downstairs now, waiting for me."
"Johnny Tiernan! Is Johnny Tiernan downstairs?"
Janet wrote the address, and thrust the slip of paper in her bag.
"Good-bye, Lise," she said. "I'll come down again I'll come down whenever
you want me." Lise suddenly seized her and clung to her, sobbing. For a
while Janet submitted, and then, kissing her, gently detached herself.
She felt, indeed, pity for Lise, but something within her seemed to have
hardened--something that pity could not melt, possessing her and
thrusting heron to action. She knew not what action. So strong was this
thing that it overcame and drove off the evil spirits of that darkened
house as she descended the stairs to join Mr. Tiernan, who opened the
door for her to pass out. Once in the street, she breathed deeply of the
sunlit air. Nor did she observe Mr. Tiernan's glance of comprehension....
When they arrived at the North Station he said:--"You'll be wanting a
bite of dinner, Miss Janet," and as she shook her head he did not press
her to eat. He told her that a train for Hampton left in ten minutes. "I
think I'll stay in Boston the rest of the day, as long as I'm here," he
added.
She remembered that she had not thanked him, she took his hand, but he
cut her short.
"It's glad I was to help you," he assured her. "And if there's anything
more I can do, Miss Janet, you'll be letting me know--you'll call on
Johnny Tiernan, won't you?"
He left her at the gate. He had intruded with no advice, he had offered
no comment that she had come downstairs alone, without Lise. His
confidence in her seemed never to have wavered. He had respected, perhaps
partly imagined her feelings, and in spite of these now a sense of
gratitude to him stole over her, mitigating the intensity of their
bitterness. Mr. Tiernan alone seemed stable in a chaotic world. He was a
man.
No sooner was she in the train, however, than she forgot Mr. Tiernan
utterly. Up to the present the mental process of dwelling upon her own
experience of the last three months had been unbearable, but now she was
able to take a fearful satisfaction in the evolving of parallels between
her case and Lise's. Despite the fact that the memories she had cherished
were now become hideous things, she sought to drag them forth and compare
them, ruthlessly, with what must have been the treasures of Lise. Were
her own any less tawdry? Only she, Janet, had been the greater fool of
the two, the greater dupe because she had allowed herself to dream, to
believe that what she had done had been for love, for light! because she
had not listened to the warning voice within her! It had always been on
the little, unpremeditated acts of Ditmar that she had loved to linger,
and now, in the light of Lise's testimony, of Lise's experience, she saw
them all as false. It seemed incredible, now, that she had ever deceived
herself into thinking that Ditmar meant to marry her, that he loved her
enough to make her his wife. Nor was it necessary to summon and marshal
incidents to support this view, they came of themselves, crowding one
another, a cumulative and appalling array of evidence, before which she
stood bitterly amazed at her former stupidity. And in the events of
yesterday, which she pitilessly reviewed, she beheld a deliberate and
prearranged plan for her betrayal. Had he not telephoned to Boston for
the rooms, rehearsed in his own mind every detail of what had
subsequently happened? Was there any essential difference between the
methods of Ditmar and Duval? Both were skilled in the same art, and
Ditmar was the cleverer of the two. It had only needed her meeting with
Lise, in that house, to reveal how he had betrayed her faith and her
love, sullied and besmirched them. And then came the odd reflection,--how
strange that that same Sunday had been so fateful for herself and Lise!
The agony of these thoughts was mitigated by the scorching hatred that
had replaced her love, the desire for retaliation, revenge. Occasionally,
however, that stream of consciousness was broken by the recollection of
what she had permitted and even advised her sister to do; and though the
idea of the place to which Lise was going sickened her, though she
achieved a certain objective amazement at the transformation in herself
enabling her to endorse such a course, she was glad of having endorsed
it, she rejoiced that Lise's child would not be born into a world that
had seemed--so falsely--fair and sweet, and in reality was black and
detestable. Her acceptance of the act--for Lise--was a function of the
hatred consuming her, a hatred which, growing in bigness, had made Ditmar
merely the personification of that world. From time to time her hands
clenched, her brow furrowed, powerful waves of heat ran through her, the
craving for action became so intense she could scarcely refrain from
rising in her seat.
By some odd whim of the weather the wind had backed around into the east,
gathering the clouds once more. The brilliancy of the morning had given
place to greyness, the high slits of windows seemed dirtier than ever as
the train pulled into the station at Hampton, shrouded in Gothic gloom.
As she left the car Janet was aware of the presence on the platform of an
unusual number of people; she wondered vaguely, as she pushed her way
through them, why they were there, what they were talking about? One
determination possessed her, to go to the Chippering Mill, to Ditmar.
Emerging from the street, she began to walk rapidly, the change from
inaction to exercise bringing a certain relief, starting the working of
her mind, arousing in her a realization of the necessity of being
prepared for the meeting. Therefore, instead of turning at Faber Street,
she crossed it. But at the corner of the Common she halted, her glance
drawn by a dark mass of people filling the end of Hawthorne Street, where
it was blocked by the brick-coloured facade of the Clarendon Mill. In the
middle distance men and boys were running to join this crowd. A girl,
evidently an Irish-American mill hand of the higher paid sort, hurried
toward her from the direction of the mill itself. Janet accosted her.
"It's the strike," she explained excitedly, evidently surprised at the
question. "The Polaks and the Dagoes and a lot of other foreigners quit
when they got their envelopes--stopped their looms and started through
the mill, and when they came into our room I left. I didn't want no
trouble with 'em. It's the fifty-four hour law--their pay's cut two
hours. You've heard about it, I guess."
Janet nodded.
"They had a big mass meeting last night in Maxwell Hall," the girl
continued, "the foreigners--not the skilled workers. And they voted to
strike. They tell me they're walking out over at the Patuxent, too."
"And the Chippering?" asked Janet, eagerly.
"I don't know--I guess it'll spread to all of 'em, the way these
foreigners are going on--they're crazy. But say," the girl added, "it
ain't right to cut our pay, either, is it? They never done it two years
ago when the law came down to fifty-six."
Janet did not wait to reply. While listening to this explanation,
excitement had been growing in her again, and some fearful, overpowering
force of attraction emanating from that swarm in the distance drew her
until she yielded, fairly running past the rows of Italian tenements in
their strange setting of snow, not to pause until she reached the fruit
shop where she and Eda had eaten the olives. Now she was on the outskirts
of the crowd that packed itself against the gates of the Clarendon. It
spread over the width of East Street, growing larger every minute, until
presently she was hemmed in. Here and there hoarse shouts of approval and
cheers arose in response to invisible orators haranging their audiences
in weird, foreign tongues; tiny American flags were waved; and suddenly,
in one of those unforeseen and incomprehensible movements to which mobs
are subject, a trolley car standing at the end of the Hawthorne Street
track was surrounded, the desperate clanging of its bell keeping pace
with the beating of Janet's heart. A dark Sicilian, holding aloft the
green, red, and white flag of Italy, leaped on the rear platform and
began to speak, the Slav conductor regarding him stupidly, pulling the
bellcord the while. Three or four policemen fought their way to the spot,
striving to clear the tracks, bewildered and impotent in the face of the
alien horde momentarily growing more and more conscious of power.
Janet pushed her way deeper and deeper into the crowd. She wanted to
savour to the full its wrath and danger, to surrender herself to be
played upon by these sallow, stubby-bearded exhorters, whose menacing
tones and passionate gestures made a grateful appeal, whose wild, musical
words, just because they were uncomprehended, aroused in her dim
suggestions of a race-experience not her own, but in which she was now
somehow summoned to share. That these were the intruders whom she, as a
native American, had once resented and despised did not occur to her. The
racial sense so strong in her was drowned in a sense of fellowship. Their
anger seemed to embody and express, as nothing else could have done, the
revolt that had been rising, rising within her soul; and the babel to
which she listened was not a confusion of tongues, but one voice lifted
up to proclaim the wrongs of all the duped, of all the exploited and
oppressed. She was fused with them, their cause was her cause, their
betrayers her betrayers.
Suddenly was heard the cry for which she had been tensely but
unconsciously awaiting. Another cry like that had rung out in another mob
across the seas more than a century before. "Ala Bastille!" became "To
the Chippering!" Some man shouted it out in shrill English, hundreds
repeated it; the Sicilian leaped from the trolley car, and his path could
be followed by the agitated progress of the alien banner he bore. "To the
Chippering!" It rang in Janet's ears like a call to battle. Was she
shouting it, too? A galvanic thrill ran through the crowd, an impulse
that turned their faces and started their steps down East Street toward
the canal, and Janet was irresistibly carried along. Nay, it seemed as if
the force that second by second gained momentum was in her, that she
herself had released and was guiding it! Her feet were wet as she
ploughed through the trampled snow, but she gave no thought to that. The
odour of humanity was in her nostrils. On the left a gaunt Jew pressed
against her, on the right a solid Ruthenian woman, one hand clasping her
shawl, the other holding aloft a miniature emblem of New World liberty.
Her eyes were fixed on the grey skies, and from time to time her lips
were parted in some strange, ancestral chant that could be heard above
the shouting. All about Janet were dark, awakening faces....
It chanced that an American, a college graduate, stood gazing down from a
point of vantage upon this scene. He was ignorant of anthropology,
psychology, and the phenomena of environment; but bits of "knowledge"
--which he embodied in a newspaper article composed that evening stuck
wax-like in his brain. Not thus, he deplored, was the Anglo-Saxon wont to
conduct his rebellions. These Czechs and Slavs, Hebrews and Latins and
Huns might have appropriately been clad in the skins worn by the hordes
of Attila. Had they not been drawn hither by the renown of the Republic's
wealth? And how essentially did they differ from those other barbarians
before whose bewildered, lustful gaze had risen the glittering palaces on
the hills of the Tiber? The spoils of Rome! The spoils of America! They
appeared to him ferocious, atavistic beasts as they broke into the
lumberyard beneath his window to tear the cord-wood from the piles and
rush out again, armed with billets....
Janet, in the main stream sweeping irresistibly down the middle of the
street, was carried beyond the lumberyard into the narrow roadway beside
the canal--presently to find herself packed in the congested mass in
front of the bridge that led to the gates of the Chippering Mill. Across
the water, above the angry hum of human voices could be heard the
whirring of the looms, rousing the mob to a higher pitch of fury. The
halt was for a moment only. The bridge rocked beneath the weight of their
charge, they battered at the great gates, they ran along the snow-filled
tracks by the wall of the mill. Some, in a frenzy of passion, hurled
their logs against the windows; others paused, seemingly to measure the
distance and force of the stroke, thus lending to their act a more
terrible and deliberate significance. A shout of triumph announced that
the gates, like a broken dam, had given way, and the torrent poured in
between the posts, flooding the yard, pressing up the towered stairways
and spreading through the compartments of the mill. More ominous than the
tumult seemed the comparative silence that followed this absorption of
the angry spirits of the mob. Little by little, as the power was shut
off, the antiphonal throbbing of the looms was stilled. Pinioned against
the parapet above the canal--almost on that very spot where, the first
evening, she had met Ditmar--Janet awaited her chance to cross. Every
crashing window, every resounding blow on the panels gave her a fierce
throb of joy. She had not expected the gates to yield--her father must
have insecurely fastened them. Gaining the farther side of the canal, she
perceived him flattened against the wall of the gatehouse shaking his
fist in the faces of the intruders, who rushed past him unheeding. His
look arrested her. His face was livid, his eyes were red with anger, he
stood transformed by a passion she had not believed him to possess. She
had indeed heard him give vent to a mitigated indignation against
foreigners in general, but now the old-school Americanism in which he had
been bred, the Americanism of individual rights, of respect for the
convention of property, had suddenly sprung into flame. He was ready to
fight for it, to die for it. The curses he hurled at these people sounded
blasphemous in Janet's ears.
"Father!" she cried. "Father!"
He looked at her uncomprehendingly, seemingly failing to recognize her.
"What are you doing here?" he demanded, seizing her and attempting to
draw her to the wall beside him. But she resisted. There sprang from her
lips an unpremeditated question: "Where is Mr. Ditmar?" She was, indeed,
amazed at having spoken it.
"I don't know," Edward replied distractedly. "We've been looking for him
everywhere. My God, to think that this should happen with me at the
gates!" he lamented. "Go home, Janet. You can't tell what'll happen, what
these fiends will do, you may get hurt. You've got no business here."
Catching sight of a belated and breathless policeman, he turned from her
in desperation. "Get 'em out! Far God's sake, can't you get 'em out
before they ruin the machines?"
But Janet waited no longer. Pushing her way frantically through the
people filling the yard she climbed the tower stairs and made her way
into one of the spinning rooms. The frames were stilled, the overseer and
second hands, thrust aside, looked on helplessly while the intruders
harangued, cajoled or threatened the operatives, some of whom were cowed
and already departing; others, sullen and resentful, remained standing in
the aisles; and still others seemed to have caught the contagion of the
strike. Suddenly, with reverberating strokes, the mill bells rang out,
the electric gongs chattered, the siren screeched, drowning the voices.
Janet did not pause, but hurried from room to room until, in passing
through an open doorway in the weaving department she ran into Mr.
Caldwell. He halted a moment, in surprise at finding her there, calling
her by name. She clung to his sleeve, and again she asked the question:--
"Where's Mr. Ditmar?"
Caldwell shook his head. His answer was the same as Edward's. "I don't
know," he shouted excitedly above the noise. "We've got to get this mob
out before they do any damage."
He tore himself away, she saw him expostulating with the overseer, and
then she went on. These tower stairs, she remembered, led to a yard
communicating by a little gate with the office entrance. The door of the
vestibule was closed, but the watchman, Simmons, recognizing her,
permitted her to enter. The offices were deserted, silent, for the bells
and the siren had ceased their clamour; the stenographers and clerks had
gone. The short day was drawing to a close, shadows were gathering in the
corners of Ditmar's room as she reached the threshold and gazed about her
at the objects there so poignantly familiar. She took off her coat. His
desk was littered with books and papers, and she started, mechanically,
to set it in order, replacing the schedule books on the shelves, sorting
out the letters and putting them in the basket. She could not herself
have told why she should take up again these trivial tasks as though no
cataclysmic events had intervened to divide forever the world of
yesterday from that of to-morrow. With a movement suggestive of
tenderness she was picking up Ditmar's pen to set it in the glass rack
when her ear caught the sound of voices, and she stood transfixed,
listening intently. There were footsteps in the corridor, the voices came
nearer; one, loud and angered, she detected above the others. It was
Ditmar's! Nothing had happened to him! Dropping the pen, she went over to
the window, staring out over the grey waters, trembling so violently that
she could scarcely stand.
She did not look around when they entered the room Ditmar, Caldwell,
Orcutt, and evidently a few watchmen and overseers. Some one turned on
the electric switch, darkening the scene without. Ditmar continued to
speak in vehement tones of uncontrolled rage.
"Why in hell weren't those gates bolted tight?" he demanded. "That's what
I want to know! There was plenty of time after they turned the corner of
East Street. You might have guessed what they would do. But instead of
that you let 'em into the mill to shut off the power and intimidate our
own people." He called the strikers an unprintable name, and though Janet
stood, with her back turned, directly before him, he gave no sign of
being aware of her presence.
"It wasn't the gatekeeper's fault," she heard Orcutt reply in a tone
quivering with excitement and apprehension. "They really didn't give us a
chance--that's the truth. They were down Canal Street and over the bridge
before we knew it."
"It's just as I've said a hundred times," Ditmar retorted. "I can't
afford to leave this mill a minute, I can't trust anybody--" and he broke
out in another tirade against the intruders. "By God, I'll fix 'em for
this--I'll crush 'em. And if any operatives try to walkout here I'll see
that they starve before they get back--after all I've done for 'em, kept
the mill going in slack times just to give 'em work. If they desert me
now, when I've got this Bradlaugh order on my hands--" Speech became an
inadequate expression of his feelings, and suddenly his eye fell on
Janet. She had turned, but her look made no impression on him. "Call up
the Chief of Police," he said.
Automatically she obeyed, getting the connection and handing him the
receiver, standing by while he denounced the incompetence of the
department for permitting the mob to gather in East Street and demanded
deputies. The veins of his forehead were swollen as he cut short the
explanations of the official and asked for the City Hall. In making an
appointment with the Mayor he reflected on the management of the city
government. And when Janet by his command obtained the Boston office, he
gave the mill treasurer a heated account of the afternoon's occurrences,
explaining circumstantially how, in his absence at a conference in the
Patuxent Mill, the mob had gathered in East Street and attacked the
Chippering; and he urged the treasurer to waste no time in obtaining a
force of detectives, in securing in Boston and New York all the
operatives that could be hired, in order to break the impending strike.
Save for this untimely and unreasonable revolt he was bent on stamping
out, for Ditmar the world to-day was precisely the same world it had been
the day before. It seemed incredible to Janet that he could so regard it,
could still be blind to the fact that these workers whom he was
determined to starve and crush if they dared to upset his plans and
oppose his will were human beings with wills and passions and grievances
of their own. Until to-day her eyes had been sealed. In agony they had
been opened to the panorama of sorrow and suffering, of passion and evil;
and what she beheld now as life was a vast and terrible cruelty. She had
needed only this final proof to be convinced that in his eyes she also
was but one of those brought into the world to minister to his pleasure
and profit. He had taken from her, as his weed, the most precious thing a
woman has to give, and now that she was here again at his side, by some
impulse incomprehensible to herself--in spite of the wrong he had done
her!--had sought him out in danger, he had no thought of her, no word for
her, no use save a menial one: he cared nothing for any help she might be
able to give, he had no perception of the new light which had broken
within her soul.... The telephoning seemed interminable, yet she waited
with a strange patience while he talked with Mr. George Chippering and
two of the most influential directors. These conversations had covered
the space of an hour or more. And perhaps as a result of self-suggestion,
of his repeated assurances to Mr. Semple, to Mr. Chippering, and the
directors of his ability to control the situation, Ditmar's habitual
self-confidence was gradually restored. And when at last he hung up the
instrument and turned to her, though still furious against the strikers,
his voice betrayed the joy of battle, the assurance of victory.
"They can't bluff me, they'll have to guess again. It's that damned
Holster--he hasn't any guts--he'd give in to 'em right now if I'd let
him. It's the limit the way he turned the Clarendon over to them. I'll
show him how to put a crimp in 'em if they don't turn up here to-morrow
morning."
He was so magnificently sure of her sympathy! She did, not reply, but
picked up her coat from the chair where she had laid it.
"Where are you going?" he demanded. And she replied laconically, "Home."
"Wait a minute," he said, rising and taking a step toward her.
"You have an appointment with the Mayor," she reminded him.
"I know," he said, glancing at the clock over the door. "Where have you
been?--where were you this morning? I was worried about you, I--I was
afraid you might be sick."
"Were you?" she said. "I'm all right. I had business in Boston."
"Why didn't you telephone me? In Boston?" he repeated.
She nodded. He started forward again, but she avoided him.
"What's the matter?" he cried. "I've been worried about you all day
--until this damned strike broke loose. I was afraid something had
happened."
"You might have asked my father," she said.
"For God's sake, tell me what's the matter!"
His desire for her mounted as his conviction grew more acute that
something had happened to disturb a relationship which, he had
congratulated himself, after many vicissitudes and anxieties had at last
been established. He was conscious, however, of irritation because this
whimsical and unanticipated grievance of hers should have developed at
the moment when the caprice of his operatives threatened to interfere
with his cherished plans--for Ditmar measured the inconsistencies of
humanity by the yardstick of his desires. Her question as to why he had
not made inquiries of her father added a new element to his disquietude.
As he stood thus, worried, exasperated, and perplexed, the fact that
there was in her attitude something ominous, dangerous, was slow to dawn
on him. His faculties were wholly unprepared for the blow she struck him.
"I hate you!" she said. She did not raise her voice, but the deliberate,
concentrated conviction she put into the sentence gave it the dynamic
quality of a bullet. And save for the impact of it--before which he
physically recoiled--its import was momentarily without meaning.
"What?" he exclaimed, stupidly.
"I might have known you never meant to marry me," she went on. Her hands
were busy with the buttons of her coat.
"All you want is to use me, to enjoy me and turn me out when you get
tired of me--the way you've done with other women. It's just the same
with these mill hands, they're not human beings to you, they're--they're
cattle. If they don't do as you like, you turn them out; you say they can
starve for all you care."
"For God's sake, what do you mean?" he demanded. "What have I done to
you, Janet? I love you, I need you!"
"Love me!" she repeated. "I know how men of your sort love--I've seen
it--I know. As long as I give you what you want and don't bother you, you
love me. And I know how these workers feel," she cried, with sudden,
passionate vehemence. "I never knew before, but I know now. I've been
with them, I marched up here with them from the Clarendon when they
battered in the gates and smashed your windows--and I wanted to smash
your windows, too, to blow up your mill."
"What are you saying? You came here with the strikers? you were with that
mob?" asked Ditmar, astoundedly.
"Yes, I was in that mob. I belong there, with them, I tell you--I don't
belong here, with you. But I was a fool even then, I was afraid they'd
hurt you, I came into the mill to find you, and you--and you you acted as
if you'd never seen me before. I was a fool, but I'm glad I came--I'm
glad I had a chance to tell you this."
"My God--won't you trust me?" he begged, with a tremendous effort to
collect himself. "You trusted me yesterday. What's happened to change
you? Won't you tell me? It's nothing I've done--I swear. And what do you
mean when you say you were in that mob? I was almost crazy when I came
back and found they'd been here in this mill--can't you understand? It
wasn't that I didn't think of you. I'd been worrying about you all day.
Look at this thing sensibly. I love you, I can't get along without
you--I'll marry you. I said I would, I meant it I'll marry you just as
soon as I can clean up this mess of a strike. It won't take long."
"Don't touch me!" she commanded, and he recoiled again. "I'll tell you
where I've been, if you want to know,--I've been to see my sister in--in
a house, in Boston. I guess you know what kind of a house I mean, you've
been in them, you've brought women to them,--just like the man that
brought her there. Would you marry me now--with my sister there? And am I
any different from her? You you've made me just like her." Her voice had
broken, now, into furious, uncontrolled weeping--to which she paid no
heed.
Ditmar was stunned; he could only stare at her.
"If I have a child," she said, "I'll--I'll kill you--I'll kill myself."
And before he could reply--if indeed he had been able to reply--she had
left the office and was running down the stairs....