"Well?"
"I said I'd let her know Wednesday."
"Good! You'll say yes, I bet you will. And you'll go to the theater with
me Monday."
"No, not Monday."
"Tuesday, then."
"No, I don't want to go this week. Good-by."
"What do you mean?" Dick looked with amazement at Hertha's outstretched
hand. "Think I'm going to bring you here and then leave you to go back
alone?"
"I don't need you. I know the way from here and I'd rather go alone."
"Say," said Dick much perturbed, "what have I done?"
"You haven't done anything, but I want to go back by myself. All I have
to do is to change when I'm over the bridge. I'll let you and Mrs.
Pickens know when I decide."
She pushed her fare in at the ticket-window, moved through the
turnstile, and without looking around hurried down the platform and
boarded the incoming train. Dick, deciding that this was a time to let a
girl have her own way, however foolish it might be, turned back to his
home and indulged in delicious thoughts of the future with Hertha each
morning opposite him at table and each evening going with him somewhere,
it mattered not where, so long as they were together.
What to do? What to do? The bumping cars gave no answer to the riddle.
To go to this new home or to stay in the old one? How could she decide
which was best when there were advantages and disadvantages in both? It
was a nuisance to weigh and balance. Perhaps the suggestion she had made
in talking with Ellen was worth something. She could not go ahead and
plan things, but if she waited things would happen. She had not planned
the strike but it had relieved her of overtaxing work; she had not
thought of moving but Dick Brown had, and unquestionably he had found an
attractive home. Probably he was right, too, regarding the business
school. Why not let other people do the planning and fall in with their
schemes if they seemed good? If there was anything odious it was having
to make changes, but if a change were made for you, you might accept it
as the easiest thing to do. And yet she did not want to leave Kathleen.
But Kathleen did not help her case as she and Hertha and William
Applebaum sat together at the little dinner that had so disturbed the
mind of Richard Brown. It was a usual enough affair, at the French
_table d'hote_ that they all three liked, and Madame and her daughters
waited on the table and saw to it that the meat and vegetables were upon
hot plates and the salad upon cold ones. But this evening, Hertha, tired
from her previous night of excitement, without an opportunity to rest
after her outing with Dick, found her Irish friend's propaganda
regarding capital and labor wearying and even unkind. Applebaum,
appreciating her fatigue, tried to turn the conversation into
indifferent channels, but Kathleen would not be moved from her course.
She had learned that the girls were in danger of losing their strike,
that the "Imperial" was succeeding in securing reliable non-union help,
and she longed to send Hertha out to redeem the situation. Perhaps her
confidence in her new friend was excessive, certainly she exaggerated
her activity at the walkout, but she knew that a shy, attractive girl,
without ambition for position, could sometimes wield a greater influence
than the best organizer. Only the shy girl would so seldom use her
power.
"A strike," she said, putting down her soup-spoon, "a strike is the one
power the lords of the universe, meaning the capitalists, leave us. They
can take away fresh air and sunlight, they can rob us of our childhood
like they done me when I was a little girl in the country up-state, but
they can't make us work. If I stop, and the rest of the workers stop
with me, it's starvation for the world until we start to work again."
"Did you live in the country when you were a child?" Hertha asked,
interested at once.
"That I did," Kathleen answered.
"Didn't you love it? The sky is so big in the country--you get such
miserable smoky patches here--and there are great stretches of earth.
You feel like running with your arms thrown out and singing; and while
you're feeling the air and the sky and the big things you look down at
your feet and see the little spring flowers."
"Is it like that?" asked Kathleen. "Do you know I hardly remember it."
"Did you leave when you were so young?"
"Eleven."
"But, Kathleen----"
"The sky and air and flowers were dear where I lived, they were only for
the rich. For a little girl like me, who slaved in the factory from sun
to sun, they were luxuries that came Sundays and holidays and that she
was too weary to enjoy."
"At work in the factory at eleven?"
"I worked when I was eight. I remember how my teacher looked when she
met me one Sunday and asked why I didn't come to school. I told her my
mother had put me to work in the cotton mill. 'It's a sin,' she said and
the tears in her eyes. And then she went on to tell how I was her best
pupil, and my mother must leave me with her. But that was all come of
it, just words. Words from her and the mill for me."
Hertha was silent; but she pictured a little girl, with clear gray eyes
and bright hair, holding her thumb tight on her book while she read from
its pages, or playing tag at recess; and again, sober, tired-eyed,
walking slowly in the twilight back from the factory to her home. "I
didn't know such things happened in the North," she said.
"They don't now, thanks to the unions. To-day's children have a better
chance than I had. But that's why the sky and flowers aren't so close to
my memory as the walls of the spinning-room and the whirring bobbins."
"Do eat your soup, Kathleen," Applebaum said, looking from his empty
plate. "It's quite cold."
"Well, if it's cold I won't bother with it. Yes, Miss Marie, you can
take it away. And who's that coming in? Major Hayes, I do believe! Come
over here and sit with us, Major. It's a long day since you've been
here."
An old man, walking slowly but with a soldierly bearing, came to where
Kathleen sat. He greeted her quietly, responded silently to her
introduction of Applebaum and Hertha, and, taking the fourth place at
the table, applied himself assiduously to his dinner. Hertha welcomed
his advent as relieving her of Kathleen's labor talk. He sat at her
right, and she noted his thin, aristocratic face, his high forehead and
long straight nose, his clear blue eyes and soft white hair. She thought
him the handsomest old gentleman she had ever seen--a little like old
Mr. Merryvale but with more of wisdom and worldliness. There was little
talk for a time, only Applebaum occasionally making pleasant if
unilluminating remarks on the day's happenings; but with the coming of
dessert and coffee Kathleen took command of the conversation and resumed
her charge. The Irishwoman, true to her race, was always ready for a
fight and could never see when she was beaten.
"We were talking of factories and unions before you came in," she said
turning to the Major. "Miss Ogilvie here went out on strike not long
since, the 'Imperial' shop. She led the girls out----"
"I did not," Hertha interrupted.
She was angry that Kathleen should represent her as doing anything so
aggressive.
"Well, you helped to, I'm proud to say. But I was telling them how I
worked in the mill when I was a kid. I was starting on the story of my
first strike, and I leading it, when the sight of you put it out of my
head."
"Tell it to us all now, Kitty," the Major said.
It was a pleasant time to hear a story. The room was quiet, for most of
the diners had left. Madame sat at the desk in the corner counting her
receipts, while a couple of elderly men in the middle of the room played
at dominoes. There was an air of homelikeness about the place. Major
Hayes and William Applebaum, lighting their cigars, leaned back in their
chairs to listen, while Hertha sipped her coffee that she knew she
should not drink, and looked with apprehension, but with admiration
also, into Kathleen's face. What wonderful gray eyes this Irishwoman
had, and how whole-heartedly she flung herself into whatever she had to
say! She was like a bright beam of sunlight falling suddenly into a dull
room; or, again, like a flash of lightning that carried with it an
ominous rumble of thunder. The world would be a wonderful, sublimely
happy place when it let the sunlight triumph in lives like Kathleen's.
"I was eleven years old," she began, "when I led out the spinning-room
in the factory up in the hills in this glorious old state. We were all a
lot of children, some bigger than me, some smaller, and we worked from
sun to sun. For wages, we had none, not that we ever knew, and I doubt
if our fathers or mothers ever saw a penny from us, for what with the
rent and the bills at the company store, it's little money they ever
handled. But every morning we went into the huge building that shut out
the world from us and turned our red lips white, and every night we came
back, the boys too tired to throw stones at a stray hen.
"Well, one day when we started work we found a new foreman. The man
before him had been a decent sort of chap, rough after his fashion,
pulling our ears maybe to make us work faster, or batting a boy over the
head, but with a heart in his body. But this morning he was gone, and in
his place a great giant of a creature named Hicks who roared at us in a
voice that made our hearts jump. Not but what we was always ruled by
terror. It was do as you were bid or death, and no incarnation, but
forever and ever annihilation. But Hicks was the very ogre of the story
book, and we expected to hear him call out any minute:
"'Fee, fi, fo, fum,
I smell the blood of an Irishman!"
And make a pounce on one of us. And we weren't mistaken, for soon the
pounce came.
"It's hard work in the spinning-room and I wonder now how such children
as we ever managed to do it at all. I suppose our strength and power,
that ought to have gone out into lessons at school, and learning to keep
house at home, and baseball and fishing and swimming, went into watching
the spools as they whirled on the spindles or keeping our eyes open to
catch the broken threads. How I used to see those spools, hundreds there
were that I took care of, twirling around and around before my eyes when
I'd lie down to go to sleep! Some of us was quicker than others, but to
do the work right we needed to keep together a bit and it was when Jules
Claire, a little French Canadian, got ahead of us at doffing time, that
trouble began.
"Jules was a born Frenchman. There was a gesture in everything he did,
and he couldn't live without showing off. He was the fastest worker in
the room, and when we were taking the full spools off and putting the
empty ones on, one child one side the frame, the other the other, Jules
must go ahead of his mate. We tried to stop him for we didn't want the
foreman to think we could all work at that pace, but he was an artist
and must do things his own way. So he hurries down his line, his little
hands moving like lightning, and when he comes to the end, and we still
plodding, he jumps on an empty truck and stamping with his bare feet,
gives himself three cheers.
"Then the ogre sees him, and the great hulking sneak jumps on the boy,
clouts him over the head, and kicks him with his boot. All he saw was an
idle child. The little fellow was too surprised to cry. 'My God,' he
whispers coming to me, 'did you see dat?' 'I did,' I answers, 'and you
got what was coming to you for going ahead of the rest!' But while I
said it I laid my plans, for there was fire in my heart.
"There's one way a child can always leave her place whether at the mill
or the school and that's by asking for a drink of water. The good Lord
must have made the little ones so dry that they would be sure of moving
about once in a while during the long day. After a time, when Hicks had
us whiter than the cotton we was working on, I got permission to get a
drink. That meant I must go through another room to where the bucket of
water was. After I'd drunk my fill I walked back, and there were the two
girls in charge of the warper looking out of the window, the machines
going merrily all the while. They glanced around at me and then turned
to the window again, and just then I slipped my roller-hook into a nice
place in the machinery where I thought it would do me some good, and, as
innocent looking as a cat that's stole the cream, went back to the
spinning-room.
"It isn't but three or four minutes before one of the two girls come to
the old ogre to say something's wrong with the machinery. The man gives
an oath and leaves us. I knew he'd be some minutes finding the trouble,
and I began talking to my mates. There was a big window near where I
worked that looked out on an embankment, and one by one I called the
boys and girls to me, and explained that we must go on a strike. We
oughtn't to work for a man that beat and hollered at us the way Hicks
did. 'Twas the time now to show our strength and get out of this dirty
hole.
"I don't remember my arguments very well. I think they were somewhat
hurried, with one eye on the window and the other on the door where the
ogre might come back. But the children got into the spirit of the thing,
and it was jump out of the window and the strike was on!
"Jules went first. We made him, but he was game for it anyway. And then
the rest of us dropped down the few feet on the grass and away to the
hills at the back of the town.
"Ah, that was a great day! I can see it now! The apple trees were in
blossom and the grass was thick with violets, while in the woods were
frail blue and white flowers. Everything smelled of the sunshine and the
fresh earth, and we little white-faced youngsters swung in the trees,
and picked the flowers, and played tag, and called and shouted to one
another. Some of the boys gathered stones and made a barricade and when
any one from the town came to get us, he was so pelted with rocks that
he beat a quick retreat. So we played on through the long spring day,
while in the spinning-room the spools twirled round and round, and the
cotton tangled and knotted and broke, and enough damage was done to take
days to set right again. It was a great time! But every day must come to
an end, and the sun went down on our day, until at last, tired and rosy
and hungry we turned with lagging and timid steps toward home."