The Dwelling Place of Light, Volume 2

W >> Winston Churchill >> The Dwelling Place of Light, Volume 2


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.