第130章 CHAPTER XIX(3)

"The eyes of the world are fixed on the workers of Hampton! They must be true to the trust their fellows have placed in them! To-day the mill-owners, the masters, are at the end of their tether. Always unscrupulous, they have descended to the most despicable of tactics in order to deceive the public. But truth will prevail!..." Rolfe lit another cigarette, began a new sentence and broke it off. Suddenly he stood over her. "It's you!" he said. "You don't feel it, you don't help me, you're not in sympathy."

He bent over her, his red lips gleaming through his beard, a terrible hunger in his lustrous eyes--the eyes of a soul to which self-denial was unknown. His voice was thick with uncontrolled passion, his hand was cold.

"Janet, what has happened? I love you, you must love me--I cannot believe that you do not. Come with me. We shall work together for the workers--it is all nothing without you."

For a moment she sat still, and then a pain shot through her, a pain as sharp as a dagger thrust. She drew her hand away.

"I can't love--I can only hate," she said.

"But you do not hate me!" Rolfe repudiated so gross a fact. His voice caught as in a sob. "I, who love you, who have taught you!"

She dismissed this--what he had taught her--with a gesture which, though slight, was all-expressive. He drew back from her.

"Shall I tell you who has planned and carried out this plot?" he cried.

"It is Ditmar. He is the one, and he used Janes, the livery stable keeper, the politician who brought the dynamite to Hampton, as his tool.

Half an hour before Janes got to the station in Boston he was seen by a friend of ours talking to Ditmar in front of the Chippering offices, and Janes had the satchel with him then. Ditmar walked to the corner with him."

Janet, too, had risen.

"I don't believe it," she said.

"Ah, I thought you wouldn't! But we have the proof that dynamite was in the satchel, we've found the contractor from whom it was bought. I was a fool--I might have known that you loved Ditmar."

"I hate him!" said Janet.

"It is the same thing," said Rolfe.

She did not answer.... He watched her in silence as she put on her hat and coat and left the room.

The early dusk was gathering when she left the hall and made her way toward the city. The huge bottle-shaped chimneys of the power plant injected heavy black smoke into the wet air. In Faber Street the once brilliant signs above the "ten-foot" buildings seemed dulled, the telegraph poles starker, nakeder than ever, their wires scarcely discernible against the smeared sky. The pedestrians were sombrely garbed, and went about in "rubbers"--the most depressing of all articles worn by man. Sodden piles of snow still hid the curb and gutters, but the pavements were trailed with mud that gleamed in the light from the shop windows. And Janet, lingering unconsciously in front of that very emporium where Lisehad been incarcerated, the Bagatelle, stared at the finery displayed there, at the blue tulle dress that might be purchased, she read, for $22.99. She found herself repeating, in meaningless, subdued tones, the words, "twenty-two ninety-nine." She even tried--just to see if it were possible--to concentrate her mind on that dress, on the fur muffs and tippets in the next window; to act as if this were just an ordinary, sad February afternoon, and she herself once more just an ordinary stenographer leading a monotonous, uneventful existence. But she knew that this was not true, because, later on, she was going to do something--to commit some act. She didn't know what this act would be.

Her head was hot, her temples throbbed....

Night had fallen, the electric arcs burned blue overhead, she was in another street--was it Stanley? Sounds of music reached her, the rumble of marching feet; dark, massed figures were in the distance swimming toward her along the glistening line of the car tracks, and she heard the shrill whistling of the doffer boys, who acted as a sort of fife corps in these parades--which by this time had become familiar to the citizens of Hampton. And Janet remembered when the little red book that contained the songs had arrived at Headquarters from the west and had been distributed by thousands among the strikers. She recalled the words of this song, though the procession was as yet too far away for her to distinguish them:--"The People's flag is deepest red, It shrouded oft our martyred dead, And ere their limbs grew stiff and cold, Their life-blood dyed its every fold."

The song ceased, and she stood still, waiting for the procession to reach her. A group of heavy Belgian women were marching together. Suddenly, as by a simultaneous impulse, their voices rang out in the Internationale--the terrible Marseillaise of the workers:--"Arise, ye prisoners of starvation!

Arise, ye wretched of the earth "

And the refrain was taken up by hundreds of throats:--"'Tis the final conflict, Let each stand in his place The walls of the street flung it back. On the sidewalk, pressed against the houses, men and women heard it with white faces. But Janet was carried on.... The scene changed, now she was gazing at a mass of human beings hemmed in by a line of soldiers. Behind the crowd was a row of old-fashioned brick houses, on the walls of which were patterned, by the cold electric light, the branches of the bare elms ranged along the sidewalk. People leaned out of the windows, like theatregoers at a play.

The light illuminated the red and white bars of the ensign, upheld by the standard bearer of the regiment, the smaller flags flaunted by the strikers--each side clinging hardily to the emblem of human liberty. The light fell, too, harshly and brilliantly, on the workers in the front rank confronting the bayonets, and these seemed strangely indifferent, as though waiting for the flash of a photograph. A little farther on a group of boys, hands in pockets, stared at the soldiers with bravado.

From the rear came that indescribable "booing" which those who have heard never forget, mingled with curses and cries:--"Vive la greve!"