What was happening to Hampton? Some hundreds of ignorant foreigners,
dissatisfied with the money in their pay envelopes, had marched out of
the Clarendon Mill and attacked the Chippering and behold, the revered
structure of American Government had quivered and tumbled down like a
pack of cards! Despite the feverish assurances in the Banner "extra" that
the disturbance was merely local and temporary, solid citizens became
panicky, vaguely apprehending the release of elemental forces hitherto
unrecognized and unknown. Who was to tell these solid, educated business
men that the crazy industrial Babel they had helped to rear, and in which
they unconsciously dwelt, was no longer the simple edifice they thought
it? that Authority, spelled with a capital, was a thing of the past? that
human instincts suppressed become explosives to displace the strata of
civilization and change the face of the world? that conventions and
institutions, laws and decrees crumble before the whirlwind of human
passions? that their city was not of special, but of universal
significance? And how were these, who still believed themselves to be
dwelling under the old dispensation, to comprehend that environments
change, and changing demand new and terrible Philosophies? When night
fell on that fateful Tuesday the voice of Syndicalism had been raised in
a temple dedicated to ordered, Anglo-Saxon liberty--the Hampton City
Hall.
Only for a night and a day did the rebellion lack both a leader and a
philosophy. Meanwhile, in obedience to the unerring instinct for drama
peculiar to great metropolitan dailies, newspaper correspondents were
alighting from every train, interviewing officials and members of labour
unions and mill agents: interviewing Claude Ditmar, the strongest man in
Hampton that day. He at least knew what ought to be done, and even before
his siren broke the silence of the morning hours in vigorous and emphatic
terms he had informed the Mayor and Council of their obvious duty. These
strikers were helots, unorganized scum; the regular unions--by
comparison respectable--held aloof from them. Here, in effect, was his
argument: a strong show of force was imperative; if the police and
deputies were inadequate, request the Governor to call out the local
militia; but above all, waste no time, arrest the ringleaders, the
plotters, break up all gatherings, keep the streets clear. He demanded
from the law protection of his property, protection for those whose right
to continue at work was inalienable. He was listened to with sympathy and
respect--but nothing was done! The world had turned upside down indeed if
the City Government of Hampton refused to take the advice of the agent of
the Chippering Mill! American institutions were a failure! But such was
the fact. Some unnamed fear, outweighing their dread of the retributions
of Capital, possessed these men, made them supine, derelict in the face
of their obvious duty.
By the faint grey light of that bitter January morning Ditmar made his
way to the mill. In Faber Street dark figures flitted silently across the
ghostly whiteness of the snow, and gathered in groups on the corners;
seeking to avoid these, other figures hurried along the sidewalks close
to the buildings, to be halted, accosted, pleaded with--threatened,
perhaps. Picketing had already begun! The effect of this pantomime of the
eternal struggle for survivals which he at first beheld from a distance,
was to exaggerate appallingly the emptiness of the wide street, to
emphasize the absence of shoppers and vehicles; and a bluish darkness
lurked in the stores, whose plate glass windows were frosted in quaint
designs. Where were the police? It was not fear that Ditmar felt, he was
galvanized and dominated by anger, by an overwhelming desire for action;
physical combat would have brought him relief, and as he quickened his
steps he itched to seize with his own hands these foreigners who had
dared to interfere with his cherished plans, who had had the audacity to
challenge the principles of his government which welcomed them to its
shores. He would have liked to wring their necks. His philosophy, too,
was environmental. And beneath this wrath, stimulating and energizing it
the more, was the ache in his soul from the loss for which he held these
enemies responsible. Two days ago happiness and achievement had both been
within his grasp. The only woman--so now it seemed--he had ever really
wanted! What had become of her? What obscure and passionate impulse had
led her suddenly to defy and desert him, to cast in her lot with these
insensate aliens? A hundred times during the restless, inactive hours of
a sleepless night this question had intruded itself in the midst of his
scheming to break the strike, as he reviewed, word by word, act by act,
that almost incomprehensible revolt of hers which had followed so
swiftly--a final, vindictive blow of fate--on that other revolt of the
workers. At moments he became confused, unable to separate the two. He
saw her fire in that other.... Her sister, she had said, had been
disgraced; she had defied him to marry her in the face of that
degradation--and this suddenly had sickened him. He had let her go. What
a fool he had been to let her go! Had she herself been--! He did not
finish this thought. Throughout the long night he had known, for a
certainty, that this woman was a vital part of him, flame of his flame.
Had he never seen her he would have fought these strikers to their knees,
but now the force of this incentive was doubled. He would never yield
until he had crushed them, until he had reconquered her.
He was approaching one of the groups of strikers, and unconsciously he
slowed his steps. The whites of his eyes reddened. The great coat of
golden fur he wore gave to his aspect an added quality of formidableness.
There were some who scattered as he drew near, and of the less timorous
spirits that remained only a few raised dark, sullen glances to encounter
his, which was unflinching, passionately contemptuous. Throughout the
countless generations that lay behind them the instinct of submission had
played its dominant, phylogenetic role. He was the Master. The journey
across the seas had not changed that. A few shivered--not alone because
they were thinly clad. He walked on, slowly, past other groups, turned
the corner of West Street, where the groups were more numerous, while the
number of those running the gantlet had increased. And he heard, twice or
thrice, the word "Scab!" cried out menacingly. His eyes grew redder still
as he spied a policeman standing idly in a doorway.
"Why in hell don't you do your duty?" he demanded. "What do you mean by
letting them interfere with these workers?"
The man flinched. He was apologetic. "So long as they're peaceable, Mr.
Ditmar--those are my orders. I do try to keep 'em movin'."
"Your orders? You're a lot of damned cowards," Ditmar replied, and went
on. There were mutterings here; herded together, these slaves were
bolder; and hunger and cold, discouragement at not being able to stop the
flow toward the mills were having their effect. By the frozen canal, the
scene of the onslaught of yesterday, the crowd had grown comparatively
thick, and at the corner of the lodging-house row Ditmar halted a moment,
unnoticed save by a few who nudged one another and murmured. He gave them
no attention, he was trying to form an estimate of the effect of the
picketing on his own operatives. Some came with timid steps; others,
mostly women, fairly ran; still others were self-possessed, almost
defiant--and such he marked. There were those who, when the picketers
held them by the sleeve, broke precipitately from their annoyers, and
those who hesitated, listening with troubled faces, with feelings torn
between dread of hunger for themselves and their children and sympathy
with the revolt. A small number joined the ranks of the picketers. Ditmar
towered above these foreigners, who were mostly undersized: a student of
human nature and civilization, free from industrial complexes, would from
that point of vantage have had much to gather from the expressions coming
within his view, but to Ditmar humanity was a means to an end. Suddenly,
from the cupolas above the battlement of the mill, the bells shattered
the early morning air, the remnant of the workers hastened across the
canal and through the guarded gates, which were instantly closed. Ditmar
was left alone among the strikers. As he moved toward the bridge they
made a lane for him to pass; one or two he thrust out of his way. But
there were mutterings, and from the sidewalk he heard a man curse him.
Perhaps we shall understand some day that the social body, also, is
subject to the operation of cause and effect. It was not what an
ingenuous orthodoxy, keeping alive the fate of the ancient city from
which Lot fled, would call the wrath of heaven that visited Hampton,
although a sermon on these lines was delivered from more than one of her
pulpits on the following Sunday. Let us surmise, rather, that a decrepit
social system in a moment of lowered vitality becomes an easy prey to
certain diseases which respectable communities are not supposed to have.
The germ of a philosophy evolved in decadent Europe flies across the sea
to prey upon a youthful and vigorous America, lodging as host wherever
industrial strife has made congenial soil. In four and twenty hours
Hampton had "caught" Syndicalism. All day Tuesday, before the true nature
of the affection was developed, prominent citizens were outraged and
appalled by the supineness of their municipal phagocytes. Property, that
sacred fabric of government, had been attacked and destroyed, law had
been defied, and yet the City Hall, the sanctuary of American tradition,
was turned over to the alien mob for a continuous series of mass
meetings. All day long that edifice, hitherto chastely familiar with
American doctrine alone, with patriotic oratory, with perorations that
dwelt upon the wrongs and woes of Ireland--part of our national
propaganda--all day long that edifice rang with strange, exotic speech,
sometimes guttural, often musical, but always impassioned, weirdly
cadenced and intoned. From the raised platform, in place of the shrewd,
matter-of-fact New England politician alive to the vote--getting powers
of Fourth of July patriotism, in place of the vehement but fun-loving son
of Erin, men with wild, dark faces, with burning black eyes and unkempt
hair, unshaven, flannel skirted--made more alien, paradoxically, by their
conventional, ready-made American clothes--gave tongue to the
inarticulate aspirations of the peasant drudge of Europe. From lands long
steeped in blood they came, from low countries by misty northern seas,
from fair and ancient plains of Lombardy, from Guelph and Ghibelline
hamlets in the Apennines, from vine-covered slopes in Sicily and Greece;
from the Balkans, from Caucasus and Carpathia, from the mountains of
Lebanon, whose cedars lined the palaces of kings; and from villages
beside swollen rivers that cross the dreary steppes. Each peasant
listened to a recital in his own tongue--the tongue in which the
folklore, the cradle sayings of his race had been preserved--of the
common wrongs of all, of misery still present, of happiness still
unachieved in this land of liberty and opportunity they had found a
mockery; to appeals to endure and suffer for a common cause. But who was
to weld together this medley of races and traditions, to give them the
creed for which their passions were prepared, to lead into battle these
ignorant and unskilled from whom organized labour held aloof? Even as
dusk was falling, even as the Mayor, the Hon. Michael McGrath, was making
from the platform an eloquent plea for order and peace, promising a
Committee of Arbitration and thinking about soldiers, the leader and the
philosophy were landing in Hampton.
The "five o'clock" edition of the Banner announced him, Antonio
Antonelli, of the Industrial Workers of the World! An ominous name, an
ominous title,--compared by a well-known publicist to the sound of a
fire-bell in the night. The Industrial Workers, not of America, but of
the World! No wonder it sent shivers down the spine of Hampton! The
writer of the article in the Banner was unfamiliar with the words
"syndicalism" and "sabotage," or the phrase "direct action," he was too
young to know the history of the Knights, he had never heard of a
philosophy of labour, or of Sorel or Pouget, but the West he had heard
of,--the home of lawlessness, of bloodshed, rape, and murder. For obvious
reasons he did not betray this opinion, but for him the I.W.W. was born
in the West, where it had ravaged and wrecked communities. His article
was guardedly respectful, but he ventured to remind his readers that Mr.
Antonelli had been a leader in some of these titanic struggles between
crude labour and capital--catastrophes that hitherto had seemed to the
citizens of Hampton as remote as Kansas cyclones....
Some of the less timorous of the older inhabitants, curious to learn what
doctrine this interloper had to proclaim, thrust their way that evening
into the City Hall, which was crowded, as the papers said, "to
suffocation." Not prepossessing, this modern Robespierre; younger than he
looked, for life had put its mark on him; once, in the days of severe
work in the mines, his body had been hard, and now had grown stout. In
the eyes of a complacent, arm-chair historian he must have appeared one
of the, strange and terrifying creatures which, in times of upheaval, are
thrust from the depths of democracies to the surface, with gifts to voice
the longings and passions of those below. He did not blink in the light;
he was sure of himself, he had a creed and believed in it; he gazed
around him with the leonine stare of the conqueror, and a hush came over
the hall as he arose. His speech was taken down verbatim, to be submitted
to the sharpest of legal eyes, when was discovered the possession of a
power--rare among agitators--to pour forth in torrents apparently
unpremeditated appeals, to skirt the border of sedition and never
transgress it, to weigh his phrases before he gave them birth, and to
remember them. If he said an incendiary thing one moment he qualified it
the next; he justified violence only to deprecate it; and months later,
when on trial for his life and certain remarks were quoted against him,
he confounded his prosecutors by demanding the contexts. Skilfully,
always within the limits of their intelligence, he outlined to his
hearers his philosophy and proclaimed it as that of the world's
oppressed. Their cause was his--the cause of human progress; he
universalized, it. The world belonged to the "producer," if only he had
the courage to take possession of his own....
Suddenly the inspirer was transformed into the man of affairs who calmly
proposed the organization of a strike committee, three members of which
were to be chosen by each nationality. And the resolution, translated
into many tongues, was adopted amidst an uproar of enthusiasm. Until that
moment the revolt had been personal, local, founded on a particular
grievance which had to do with wages and the material struggle for
existence. Now all was changed; now they were convinced that the
deprivation and suffering to which they had pledged themselves were not
for selfish ends alone, but also vicarious, dedicated to the liberation
of all the downtrodden of the earth. Antonelli became a saviour; they
reached out to touch him as he passed; they trooped into the snowy
street, young men and old, and girls, and women holding children in their
arms, their faces alight with something never known or felt before.
Such was Antonelli to the strikers. But to those staid residents of
Hampton who had thought themselves still to be living in the old New
England tradition, he was the genius of an evil dream. Hard on his heels
came a nightmare troop, whose coming brought to the remembrance of the
imaginative the old nursery rhyme:--"Hark! Hark! The dogs do bark, The
beggars are come to town."
It has, indeed, a knell-like ring. Do philosophies tend also to cast
those who adopt them into a mould? These were of the self-same breed,
indubitably the followers of Antonelli. The men wore their hair long,
affected, like their leader, soft felt hats and loose black ties that
fell over the lapels of their coats. Loose morals and loose ties! The
projection of these against a Puritan background ties symbolical of
everything the Anglo-Saxon shudders at and abhors; of anarchy and mob
rule, of bohemia and vagabondia, of sedition and murder, of Latin
revolutions and reigns of terror; of sex irregularity--not of the
clandestine sort to be found in decent communities--but of free love that
flaunts itself in the face of an outraged public. For there were women in
the band. All this, and more, the invaders suggested--atheism,
unfamiliarity with soap and water, and, more vaguely, an exotic poetry
and art that to the virile of American descent is saturated with
something indefinable yet abhorrent. Such things are felt. Few of the
older citizens of Hampton were able to explain why something rose in
their gorges, why they experienced a new and clammy quality of fear and
repulsion when, on the day following Antonelli's advent, these strangers
arrived from nowhere to install themselves--with no baggage to speak of
--in Hampton's more modest but hitherto respectable hostelries. And no
sooner had the city been rudely awakened to the perilous presence, in
overwhelming numbers, of ignorant and inflammable foreigners than these
turned up and presumed to lead the revolt, to make capital out of it, to
interpret it in terms of an exotic and degenerate creed. Hampton would
take care of itself--or else the sovereign state within whose borders it
was would take care of it. And his Honour the Mayor, who had proclaimed
his faith in the reasonableness of the strikers, who had scorned the
suggestions of indignant inhabitants that the Governor be asked for
soldiers, twenty-four hours too late arranged for the assembly of three
companies of local militia in the armory, and swore in a hundred extra
police.
The hideous stillness of Fillmore Street was driving Janet mad. What she
burned to do was to go to Boston and take a train for somewhere in the
West, to lose herself, never to see Hampton again. But--there was her
mother. She could not leave Hannah in these empty rooms, alone; and
Edward was to remain at the mill, to eat and sleep there, until the
danger of the strike had passed. A messenger had come to fetch his
clothes. After leaving Ditmar in the office of the mill, Janet crept up
the dark stairs to the flat and halted in the hallway. Through the open
doorway of the dining-room she saw Hannah seated on the horsehair sofa
--for the first time within memory idle at this hour of the day. Nothing
else could have brought home to her like this the sheer tragedy of their
plight. Until then Janet had been sustained by anger and excitement, by
physical action. She thought Hannah was staring at her; after a moment it
seemed that the widened pupils were fixed in fascination on something
beyond, on the Thing that had come to dwell here with them forever.
Janet entered the room. She sat down on the sofa and took her mother's
hand in hers. And Hannah submitted passively. Janet could not speak. A
minute might have passed, and the silence, which neither had broken,
acquired an intensity that to Janet became unbearable. Never had the room
been so still! Her glance, raised instinctively to the face of the
picture-clock, saw the hands pointing to ten. Every Monday morning, as
far back as she could recall, her father had wound it before going to
work--and to-day he had forgotten. Getting up, she opened the glass door,
and stood trying to estimate the hour: it must be, she thought, about
six. She set the hands, took the key from the nail above the shelf, wound
up the weight, and started the pendulum. And the sound of familiar
ticking was a relief, releasing at last her inhibited powers of speech.
"Mother," she said, "I'll get some supper for you."
On Hannah, these simple words had a seemingly magical effect. Habit
reasserted itself. She started, and rose almost briskly.
"No you won't," she said, "I'll get it. I'd ought to have thought of it
before. You must be tired and hungry."
Her voice was odd and thin. Janet hesitated a moment, and ceded.
"Well, I'll set the dishes on the table, anyway."
Janet had sought refuge, wistfully, in the commonplace. And when the meal
was ready she strove to eat, though food had become repulsive.
"You must take something, mother," she said.
"I don't feel as if I ever wanted to eat anything again," she replied.
"I know," said Janet, "but you've got to." And she put some of the cold
meat, left over from Sunday's dinner, on Hannah's plate. Hannah took up a
fork, and laid it down again. Suddenly she said:--"You saw Lise?"
"Yes," said Janet.
"Where is she?"
"In a house--in Boston."
"One of--those houses?"
"I--I don't know," said Janet. "I think so."
"You went there?"
"Mr. Tiernan went with me."
"She wouldn't come home?"
"Not--not just now, mother."
"You left her there, in that place? You didn't make her come home?"
The sudden vehemence of this question, the shrill note of reproach in
Hannah's voice that revealed, even more than the terrible inertia from
which she had emerged, the extent of her suffering, for the instant left
Janet utterly dismayed. "Oh mother!" she exclaimed. "I tried--I--I
couldn't."
Hannah pushed back her chair.
"I'll go to her, I'll make her come. She's disgraced us, but I'll make
her. Where is she? Where is the house?"
Janet, terrified, seized her mother's arm. Then she said:--"Lise isn't
there any more--she's gone away."
"Away and you let her go away? You let your sister go away and be a--a
woman of the town? You never loved her--you never had any pity for her."
Tears sprang into Janet's eyes--tears of pity mingled with anger. The
situation had grown intolerable! Yet how could she tell Hannah where Lise
was!
"You haven't any right to say that, mother!" she cried. "I did my best.
She wouldn't come. I--I can't tell you where she's gone, but she promised
to write, to send me her address."
"Lise" Hannah's cry seemed like the uncomprehending whimper of a stricken
child, and then a hidden cadence made itself felt, a cadence revealing to
Janet with an eloquence never before achieved the mystery of mother love,
and by some magic of tone was evoked a new image of Lise--of Lise as she
must be to Hannah. No waywardness, no degradation or disgrace could
efface it. The infant whom Hannah had clutched to her breast, the woman,
her sister, whom Janet had seen that day were one--immutably one. This,
then, was what it meant to be a mother! All the years of deadening hope
had not availed to kill the craving--even in this withered body it was
still alive and quick. The agony of that revelation was scarcely to be
borne. And it seemed that Lise, even in the place where she was, must
have heard that cry and heeded it. And yet--the revelation of Lise's
whereabouts, of Lise's contemplated act Janet had nearly been goaded into
making, died on her lips. She could not tell Hannah! And Lise's child
must not come into a world like this. Even now the conviction remained,
fierce, exultant, final. But if Janet had spoken now Hannah would not
have heard her. Under the storm she had begun to rock, weeping
convulsively.... But gradually her weeping ceased. And to Janet,
helplessly watching, this process of congealment was more terrible even
than the release that only an unmitigated violence of grief had been able
to produce. In silence Hannah resumed her shrunken duties, and when these
were finished sat awhile, before going to bed, her hands lying listless
in her lap. She seemed to have lived for centuries, to have exhausted the
gamut of suffering which, save for that one wild outburst, had been the
fruit of commonplace, passive, sordid tragedy that knows no touch of
fire....
The next morning Janet was awakened by the siren. Never, even in the days
when life had been routine and commonplace, had that sound failed to
arouse in her a certain tremor of fear; with its first penetrating
shriek, terror invaded her: then, by degrees, overcoming her numbness,
came an agonizing realization of tragedy to be faced. The siren blew and
blew insistently, as though it never meant to stop; and now for the first
time she seemed to detect in it a note of futility. There were those who
would dare to defy it. She, for one, would defy it. In that reflection
she found a certain fierce joy. And she might lie in bed if she wished
--how often had she longed to! But she could not. The room was cold,
appallingly empty and silent as she hurried into her clothes. The
dining-room lamp was lighted, the table set, her mother was bending over
the stove when she reached the kitchen. After the pretence of breakfast
was gone through Janet sought relief in housework, making her bed,
tidying her room. It was odd, this morning, how her notice of little,
familiar things had the power to add to her pain, brought to mind
memories become excruciating as she filled the water pitcher from the
kitchen tap she found herself staring at the nick broken out of it when
Lise had upset it. She recalled Lise's characteristically flippant
remark. And there was the streak in the wall-paper caused one night by
the rain leaking through the roof. After the bed was made and the room
swept she stood a moment, motionless, and then, opening the drawer in the
wardrobe took from it the rose which she had wrapped in tissue paper and
hidden there, and with a perverse desire as it were to increase the
bitterness consuming her, to steep herself in pain, she undid the parcel
and held the withered flower to her face. Even now a fragrance, faint yet
poignant, clung to it.... She wrapped it up again, walked to the window,
hesitated, and then with a sudden determination to destroy this sole
relic of her happiness went to the kitchen and flung it into the stove.
Hannah, lingering over her morning task of cleaning, did not seem to
notice the act. Janet turned to her.
"I think I'll go out for a while, mother," she said.
"You'd ought to," Hannah replied. "There's no use settin' around here."
The silence of the flat was no longer to be endured. And Janet, putting
on her coat and hat, descended the stairs. Not once that morning had her
mother mentioned Lise; nor had she asked about her own plans--about
Ditmar. This at least was a relief; it was the question she had feared
most. In the street she met the postman.
"I have a letter for you, Miss Janet," he said. And on the pink envelope
he handed her, in purple ink, she recognized the unformed, childish
handwriting of Lise. "There's great doings down at the City Hall," the
postman added "the foreigners are holding mass meetings there." Janet
scarcely heard him as she tore open the envelope. "Dear Janet," the
letter ran. "The doctor told me I had a false alarm, there was nothing to
it. Wouldn't that jar you? Boston's a slow burg, and there's no use of my
staying here now. I'm going to New York, and maybe I'll come back when
I've had a look at the great white way. I've got the coin, and I gave him
the mit to-night. If you haven't anything better to do, drop in at the
Bagatelle and give Walters my love, and tell them not to worry at home.
There's no use trying to trail me. Your affectionate sister Lise."
Janet thrust the letter in her pocket. Then she walked rapidly westward
until she came to the liver-coloured facade of the City Hall, opposite
the Common. Pushing through the crowd of operatives lingering on the
pavement in front of it, she entered the building....