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....