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....