That was one of the strangest days which Ellen had ever passed. The enforced idleness gave her an indefinite sense of guilt. She tried to assist her mother about the household tasks, then she tried to sew on the wrappers, but she was awkward about it, from long disuse.
“Do take your book and sit down and read and rest a little, now you've got a chance,” said Fanny, with sharp solicitude.
She said never one word concerning it to Ellen, but all the time she thought how Ellen had probably lost her lover. It was really doubtful which suffered the more that day, the mother or the daughter. Fanny, entirely faithful to her own husband, had yet that strange vicarious affection for her daughter's lover, and a realization of her state of mind, of which a mother alone is capable. It is like a cord of birth which is never severed. Not one shadow of sad reflection passed over the bright enthusiastic face of the girl but was passed on, as if driven by some wind of spirit, over the face of the older woman. She reflected Ellen entirely.
As for Andrew, his anxiety was as tender, and less subtle. He did not understand so clearly, but he suffered more. He was clumsy with this mystery of womanhood, but he was unremitting in his efforts to do something for the girl. Once he tiptoed up to Fanny and whispered, when Ellen was in the next room, that he hoped she hadn't made any mistake, that it seemed to him she looked pretty pale.
“Mistake?” cried Fanny, tossing her head, and staring at him proudly. “Haven't you got any spirit, and you a man, Andrew Brewster?”
“I ain't thinking about myself,” said Andrew.
And he was quite right. Andrew, left to himself and his purely selfish interests, could have struck with the foremost. He would never have considered himself when it came to a question of a conscientious struggle against injustice, though he was so prone to look upon both sides of an argument that his decision would have been necessarily slow; but here was Ellen to consider, and she was more than himself. While he had been, in the depths of his heart, fiercely jealous of Robert Lloyd, yet the suspicion that his girl might suffer because of her renunciation of him hurt him to the quick. Ellen had told him all she had done in the interests of the strike, and he had no doubt that her action would effectually put an end to all possible relations between the two. He tried to imagine how a girl would feel, and being a man, and measuring all passion by the strength of his own, he exaggerated her suffering. He could eat nothing, and looked haggard. He remained out-of-doors the greater part of the day. After he had cleared his own paths, he secured a job clearing some for a more prosperous neighbor. Andrew in those days grasped eagerly at any little job which could bring him in a few pennies. He worked until dark, and when he went home he saw with a great throb of excitement the Lloyd sleigh waiting before his door.
Robert had heard from Dennison of Ellen's attitude about the strike. He had been incredulous at first, as indeed he had been incredulous about the strike. He had looked out of the office window with the gaze of one who does not believe what he sees when he had heard that retreating tramp of the workmen on the stairs.
“What does all this mean?” he said to Dennison, who entered, pale to his lips.
“It means a strike,” replied Dennison. Nellie Stone rolled her pretty eyes around at the two men from under her fluff of blond hair. Flynn came in and stood in a curious, non-committal attitude.
“A strike!” repeated Robert, vaguely. “What for?”
It seemed incredible that he should ask, but he did. The calm masterfulness of his uncle, which could not even imagine opposition, had apparently descended upon him.
Both foremen stared at him. Nellie Stone smiled a little covertly.
“Why, you know you had a committee wait upon you last night, Mr. Lloyd,” replied Dennison.
Flynn looked out of the window at the retreating throngs of workmen, and gave a whistle under his breath.
“Have they struck because of the wage-cutting?” asked Robert, in a curious, boyish, incredulous, aggrieved tone. Then all at once he colored violently. “Let them strike, then!” he cried. He threw himself into a chair and took up the morning paper, with its glaring headlines about the unprecedented storm, as if nothing had happened. Nellie Stone, after a sly wink at Flynn, which he did not return, began writing again. Flynn went out, and Dennison remained standing in a rather helpless attitude. A strike in Lloyd's was unprecedented, but this manner of receiving the news was more unprecedented still. The proprietor was apparently reading the morning paper with much interest, when two more foremen, heads of other departments, came hurrying in.
“I have heard already,” said Robert, in response to their gasped information. Then he turned another page of the paper.
“What's to be done, sir?” said one of the new-comers, after a prolonged stare at his companion and Dennison. He was a spare man, with a fierce glimmer of blue eyes under bent brows.
“Let them strike if they want to,” replied Robert.
It was in his mind to explain at length to these men his reasons for cutting the wages—for his own attitude as he knew it himself was entirely reasonable—but the pride of a proud family was up in him.
“The strike would never have been on, for the men went to work quietly enough, if it hadn't been for that Brewster girl,” Dennison said, presently, but rather doubtfully. He was not quite sure how the information would be received.
Robert dropped his paper, and stared at him with angry incredulity.
“What are you talking about?” he said. “What had Miss Brewster to do with it?”
He said “Miss Brewster” with a meaning emphasis of respect, and Dennison was quick to adopt the hint.
“Oh, nothing,” he replied, uneasily, “only she talked with them.”
“You mean that Miss Brewster talked to the men?”
“Yes; she said a good deal yesterday, and to-day the men would not have struck if it had not been for her. It only needs a spark to set them off sometimes.”
Robert was very pale. “Well,” he said, coolly, “there is no need for you to remain longer, since the factory is shut down. You may as well go.”
“The engineer is seeing to the fires, Mr. Lloyd,” said Dennison.
“Very well.” Robert turned to the girl at the desk. “The factory is closed, Miss Stone,” he said; “there is no need for you to remain longer to-day. Come to-morrow at ten o'clock, and I will have something for you to do with regard to settling up accounts. There is nothing in shape now.”
That afternoon Robert went to see Ellen. He could not wait until evening.
Fanny greeted him at the door, and there was the inevitable flurry about lighting the parlor stove, and presently Ellen entered.
She had changed the gown which she had worn at her factory-work for her last winter's best one. Her young face was pale, almost severe, and she met him in a way which made her seem a stranger.
Robert realized suddenly that she had, as it were, closed the door upon all their old relations. She seemed years older, and at the same time indefinably younger, since she was letting the childish impulses, which are at the heart of all of us untouched by time and experience, rise rampant and unchecked. She was following the lead of her own convictions with the terrible unswerving of a child, even in the face of her own hurt. She was, metaphorically, bumping her own head against the floor in her vain struggles for mastery over the mighty conditions of her life.
She bowed to Robert, and did not seem to see his proffered hand.
“Won't you shake hands with me?” he asked, almost humbly, although his own wrath was beginning to rise.
“No, I would rather not,” she replied, with a straight look at him. Her blue eyes did not falter in the least.
“May I sit down?” he said. “I have something I would like to say to you.”
“Certainly, if you wish,” she replied. Then she seated herself on the sofa, with Robert opposite in the crushed-plush easy-chair.
The room was still very cold, and the breath could be seen at the lips of each in white clouds. Robert had on his coat, but Ellen had nothing over her blue gown. It was on Robert's tongue to ask if she were not cold, then he refrained. The issues at stake seemed to make the question frivolous to offensiveness. He felt that any approach to tenderness when Ellen was in her present mood would invoke an indignation for which he could scarcely blame her, that he must try to meet her on equal fighting-ground.
Ellen sat before him, her little, cold hands tightly folded in her lap, her mouth set hard, her steady fire of blue eyes on his face, waiting for him to speak.
Robert felt a decided awkwardness about beginning to talk. Suddenly it occurred to him to wonder what there was to say. It amounted to this: they were in their two different positions, their two points of view—would either leave for any argument of the other? Then he wondered if he could, in the face of a girl who wore an expression like that, stoop to make an argument, for the utter blindness and deafness of her very soul to any explanation of his position was too evident in her face.
“I called to tell you, if you will permit me, how much I regret the unfortunate state of affairs at the factory,” Robert said, and the girl's eyes met his as with a flash of flame.
“Why did you not prevent it, then?” asked she. Ellen had all the fire of her family, but a steadiness of manner which never deserted her. She was never violent.
“I could not prevent it,” replied Robert, in a low voice.
Ellen said nothing.
“You mistake my position,” said Robert. It was in his mind then to lay the matter fully before her, as he had disdained to do before the committee, but her next words deterred him.
“I understand your position very fully,” said she.
Robert bowed.
“There is only one way of looking at it,” said Ellen, in her inexpressibly sweet, almost fanatical voice. She tossed her head, and the fluff of fair hair over her temples caught a beam of afternoon sunlight.
“She is only a child,” thought Robert, looking at her. He rose and crossed over to the sofa, and sat down beside her with a masterful impatience. “Look here, Ellen,” he said, leaving all general issues for their own personal ones, “you are not going to let this come between us?”
Ellen sat stiff and straight, and made no reply.
“All this can make very little difference to you,” Robert urged. “You know how I feel. That is, it can make very little difference to you if you still feel as you did. You must know that I have only been waiting—that I am eager and impatient to lift you out of it all.”
Ellen faced him. “Do you think I would be lifted out of it now?” she said.
“Why, but, Ellen, you cannot—”
“Yes, I can. You do not know me.”
“Ellen, you are under a total misapprehension of my position.”
“No, I am not. I apprehend it perfectly.”
“Ellen, you cannot let this separate us.”
Ellen looked straight ahead in silence.
“You at least owe it to me to tell me if, irrespective of this, your feelings have changed,” Robert said, in a low voice.
Ellen said nothing.
“You may have come to prefer some one else,” said Robert.
“I prefer no one before my own, before all these poor people who are a part of my life,” Ellen cried out, suddenly, her face flaming.
“Then why do you refuse to let me act for their final good? You must know what it means to have them thrown out of work in midwinter. You know the factory will remain closed for the present on account of the strike.”
“I did not doubt it,” said Ellen, in a hard voice. All the bitter thoughts to which she would not give utterance were in her voice.
“I cannot continue to run the factory at the present rate and meet expenses,” said Robert; “in fact, I have been steadily losing for the last month.” He had, after all, descended to explanation. “It amounts to my either reducing the wage-list or closing the factory altogether,” he continued. “For my own good I ought to close the factory altogether, but I thought I would give the men a chance.”
Robert thought by saying that he must have finally settled matters. It did not enter his head that she would really think it advisable for him to continue losing money. The pure childishness of her attitude was something really beyond the comprehension of a man of business who had come into hard business theories along with his uncle's dollars.
“What if you do lose money?” said Ellen.
Robert stared at her. “I beg your pardon?” said he.
“What if you do lose money?”
“A man cannot conduct business on such principles,” replied Robert. “There would soon be no business to conduct. You don't understand.”
“Yes, I do understand fully,” replied Ellen.
Robert looked at her, at the clear, rosy curve of her young cheek, the toss of yellow hair above a forehead as candid as a baby's, at her little, delicate figure, and all at once such a rage of masculine insistence over all this obstinacy of reasoning was upon him that it was all he could do to keep himself from seizing her in his arms and forcing her to a view of his own horizon. He felt himself drawn up in opposition to an opponent at once too delicate, too unreasoning, and too beloved to encounter. It seemed as if the absurdity of it would drive him mad, and yet he was held to it. He tried to give a desperate wrench aside from the main point of the situation. He leaned over Ellen, so closely that his lips touched her hair.
“Ellen, let us leave all this,” he pleaded; “let me talk to you. I had to wait a little while. I knew you would understand that, but let me talk to you now.”
Ellen sat as rigid as marble. “I wish to talk of nothing besides the matter at hand, Mr. Lloyd,” said she. “That is too close to my heart for any personal consideration to come between.”
When Robert went home in the winter twilight he was more miserable than he had ever been in his life. He felt as if he had been assaulting a beautiful alabaster wall of unreason. He felt as if that which he could shatter at a blow had yet held him in defiance. The idea of this girl, of whom he had thought as his future wife, deliberately setting herself against him, galled him inexpressibly, and in spite of himself he could not quite free his mind of jealousy. On his way home he stopped at Lyman Risley's office, and found, to his great satisfaction, that he was alone, writing at his desk. Even his stenographer had gone home. He turned around when Robert entered, and looked at him with his quizzical, yet kindly, smile.
“Well, how are you, boy?” he said.
Robert dropped into the first chair, and sat therein, haunched up as in a lapse of despair and weariness.
“What is the matter?” asked Risley.
“You have heard about the trouble in the factory?”
For answer Risley held up a night's paper with glaring head-lines.
“Yes, of course it is in the papers,” assented Robert, wearily.
Risley stared at him in a lazily puzzled fashion. “Well,” he said, “what is it all about? Why are you so broken up about it?” Risley laid considerable emphasis on theyou.
“Yes,” cried Robert, in a sudden stress of indignation. “You look at it like all the rest. Why are all the laborers to be petted and coddled, and the capitalists held up to execration? Good Lord, isn't there any pity for the rich man without his drop of water, in the Bible or out? Are all creation born with blinders on, and can they only see before their noses?”
“What are you talking about, Robert?” said Risley, laughing a little.
“I say why should all the sympathy go to the workmen who are acting like the pig-headed idiots they are, and none for the head of the factory, who has the sharp-edged, red-hot brunt of it all to bear?”
“You wouldn't look at it that way if you were one of the poor men just out on strike such weather as this,” said Risley, dryly. He glanced as he spoke at the window, which was beginning to be thickly furred with frost in spite of the heat of the office. Robert followed his gaze, and noted the spreading fairy jungle of crystalline trees and flowers on the broad field of glass.
“Do you think that is the worst thing in the world to bear?” he demanded, angrily.
“What? Cold and hunger not only for yourself, but for those you love?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I think it is pretty bad,” replied Risley.
“Well, suppose you had to bear that, at least for those you loved, and—and—” said the young man, lamely.
Risley remained silent, waiting.
“If I had been my uncle instead of myself I should simply have shut down with no ado,” said Robert, presently, in an angry, argumentative voice.
“I suppose you would; and as it was?”
“As it was, I thought I would give them a chance. Good God, Risley, I have been running the factory at a loss for a month as it is. With this new wage-list I should no more than make expenses, if I did that. What was it to me? I did it to keep them in some sort of work. As for myself, I would much rather have shut down and done with it, but I tried to keep it running on their account, poor devils, and now I am execrated for it, and they have deliberately refused what little I could offer.”
“Did you explain all this to the committee?” asked Risley.
“Explain? No! I told them my course was founded upon strict business principles, and was as much for their good as for mine. They understood. They know how hard the times are. Why, it was only last week that Weeks & McLaughlin failed, and that meant a heavy loss. I didn't explain.” Then Robert hesitated and colored. “I have just explained to her,” he said, with a curious hang of his head, like a boy, “and if my explanation was met in the same fashion by the others in the factory I might as well have addressed the north wind. They are all alike; they are a different race. We cannot help them, and they cannot help themselves, because they are themselves.”
“You mean by her, Ellen Brewster?” Risley said.
Robert nodded gloomily.
“That is all in the paper,” said Risley—“what she said to the men.”
Robert made an impatient move.
“If ever there was a purely normal outgrowth, a perfect flower of her birth and environments and training, that girl is one,” said Risley, with an accent of admiration.
“She is infected with the ranting idiocy of those with whom she has been brought in daily contact,” said Robert; but even as he spoke he seemed to see the girl's dear young face, and his voice faltered.
“Even as you may be infected with the conservatism of those with whom you are brought in contact,” said Risley, dryly.
“What a democrat you are, Risley!” said Robert, impatiently. “I believe you would make a good walking delegate.”
Risley laughed. “I think I would myself,” he said. “Wouldn't she listen to you, Robert?”
“She listened with such utter dissent that she might as well have been dumb. It is all over between us, Risley.”
“How precipitate you are, you young folks!” said the other, good-humoredly.
“How precipitate? Do you mean to say—?”
“I mean that you are forever thinking you are on the brink of nothingness, when the true horizon-line is too far for you ever to reach in your mortal life.”
“Not in this case,” said Robert.
“You know nothing about it. But if you will excuse me, it seems to me that the matter of all these people being reduced to starvation in a howling winter is of more importance than the coming together of two people in the bonds of wedlock. It is the aggregate against the individual.”
“I don't deny that,” said Robert, doggedly, “but I am not responsible for the starvation, and the aggregate have brought it on themselves.”
“You have shut down finally?”
“Yes, I have. I would rather shut down than not, as far as I am concerned. It is distinctly for my interest. The only one objection is losing experienced workmen, but in a community like this, and in times like this, that objection is reduced to a minimum. I can hire all I want in the spring if I wish to open again. I should run a risk of losing on every order I should have to fill in the next three months, even with the reduced list. I would rather shut down than not; I only reduced the wages for them.”
Robert rose as he spoke. He felt in his heart that he had gotten scant sympathy and comfort. The older man looked with pity at the young fellow's handsome, gloomy face.
“There's one thing to remember,” he said.
“What?”
“All the troubles of this world are born with wings.” Risley laughed, as he spoke, in his half-cynical fashion.
As Robert walked home—for there was no car due—he felt completely desolate. It seemed to him that everybody was in league against him. When he reached his uncle's splendid house and entered, he felt such an isolation from his kind in the midst of his wealth that something like an actual terror of solitude came over him.
The impecunious cousin of his aunt's who had come to her during her last illness acted as his housekeeper. There was something inexpressibly irritating about this woman, who had suffered so much, and was now nestling, with a sense of triumph over the passing of her griefs, in a luxurious home.
She asked Robert if it were true that the factory was closed, and he felt that she noted his gloomy face, and realized a greater extent of comfort from her own exemption from such questions.
“Business must be a great care,” said she, and a look of utter peaceful reflection upon her own lot overspread her face.
After supper Robert went down to his aunt Cynthia's. He had not been there for a long time. The minute he entered she started up with an eagerness which had been completely foreign to her of late years.
“What is the matter, Robert?” she asked, softly. She took both his hands as she spoke, and her look in his face was full of delicate caressing.
Robert succumbed at once to this feminine solicitude, of which he had had lately so little. He felt as if he had relapsed into childhood. A sense of injury which was exquisite, as it brought along with it a sense of his demand upon love and sympathy, seized him.
“I am worried beyond endurance, Aunt Cynthia,” said he.
“About the strike? I have read the night papers.”
“Yes; I tried to do what was right, even at a sacrifice to myself, and—”
Cynthia had read about Ellen, but she was a woman, and she said nothing as to that.
“I tried to do what was right,” Robert said, fairly broken down again.
Cynthia had seated herself, and Robert had taken a low foot-stool at her side. It came over him as he did so that it had been a favorite seat of his when a child. As for Cynthia, influenced by the appealing to the vulnerable place of her nature, she put her slim hands on her nephew's head, and actually seemed to feel his baby curls.
“Poor boy,” she whispered.
Robert put both his arms around her and hid his face on her shoulder, for love is a comforter, in whatever guise.
On the day after the strike Ellen went to McGuire's and to Briggs's, the two other factories in Rowe, to see if she could obtain a position; but she was not successful. McGuire had discharged some of his employés, reducing his force to its smallest possible limits, since he had fewer orders, and was trying in that way to avert the necessity of a cut in wages, and a strike or shut-down. McGuire's was essentially a union factory, as was Briggs's. Ellen would have found in either case difficulty about obtaining employment, because she did not belong to the union, if for no other reason. At Briggs's she encountered the proprietor himself in the office, and he dismissed her with a bluff, almost brutal, peremptoriness which hurt her cruelly, although she held up her head high as she left. Briggs turned to a foreman who was standing by before she was well out of hearing.
“I like that!” he said. “Mrs. Briggs read about that girl in the paper last night, and the strike wouldn't have been on at Lloyd's if it hadn't been for her. I would as soon take a lighted match into a powder-magazine.”
The foreman grinned. “She's a pretty, mild-looking thing,” he said; “doesn't look as if she could say boo to a goose.”
“That's all you can tell,” returned Briggs. “Deliver me from a light-complexioned woman. They're all the very devil. Mrs. Briggs says it's the same girl that read that composition that made such a stir at the high-school exhibition. She'd make more trouble in a factory than a dozen ordinary girls, and just now, when everything is darned ticklish-looking.”
“That's so,” assented the foreman, “and all the more because she's good-looking.”
“I don't know what you call good-looking,” returned Briggs.
He had two daughters, built upon the same heavy lines as himself and wife, and he adored them. Insensibly he regarded all more delicate feminine beauty as a disparagement of theirs. As Briggs spoke, the foreman seemed to see in the air before his eyes the faces of the two Briggs girls, large and massive, and dull of hue, the feminine counterpart of their father's.
“Well, maybe you're right,” said he, evasively. “I suppose some might call her good-looking.”
As he spoke he glanced out of the window at Ellen's retreating figure, moving away over the snow-path with an almost dancing motion of youth and courage, though she was sorely hurt. The girl had scarcely ever had a hard word said to her in her whole life, for she had been in her humble place a petted darling. She had plenty of courage to bear the hard words now, but they cut deeply into her unseasoned heart.
Ellen went on past the factories to the main street of Rowe. She had no idea of giving up her efforts to obtain employment. She said to herself that she must have work. She thought of the stores, that possibly she might obtain a chance to serve as a sales-girl in one of them. She actually began at the end of the long street, and worked her way through it, with her useless inquiries, facing proprietors and superintendents, but with no success. There was not a vacancy in more than one or two, and there they wished only experienced hands. She found out that her factory record told against her. The moment she admitted that she had worked in a factory the cold shoulder was turned. The position of a shop-girl was so far below that of a sales-lady that the effect upon the superintendent was almost as if he had met an unworthy aspirant to a throne. He would smile insultingly and incredulously, even as he regarded her.
“You would find that our goods are too fine to handle after leather. Have you tried all the shops?”
At last Ellen gave that up, and started homeward. She paused once as she came opposite an intelligence office. There was one course yet open to her, but from that she shrank, not on her own account, but she dared not—knowing what would be the sufferings of her relatives should she do so—apply for a position as a servant.
As for herself, strained as she was to her height of youthful enthusiasm for a great cause, as she judged it to be, clamping her feet to the topmost round of her ladder of difficulty, she would have essayed any honest labor with no hesitation whatever. But she thought of her father and mother and grandmother, and went on past the intelligence office.
When she came to her old school-teacher's—Miss Mitchell's—house, she paused and hesitated a moment, then she went up the little path between the snow-banks to the front door, and rang the bell. The door was opened before the echoes had died away. Miss Mitchell had seen her coming, and hastened to open it. Miss Mitchell had not been teaching school for some years, having retired on a small competency of her savings. Her mortgage was paid, and there was enough for herself and her mother to live upon, with infinite care as to details of expenditure. Every postage-stamp and car-fare had its important part in the school-teacher's system of economy; but she was quite happy, and her large face wore an expression of perfect peace and placidity.
She was a woman who was not tortured by any strong, ungratified desires. Her allotment of the gifts of the gods quite satisfied her.
When Ellen entered the rather stuffy sitting-room—for Miss Mitchell and her mother were jealous of any breath of cold air after the scanty fire was kindled—it was like entering into a stratum of peace. It seemed quite removed from the turmoil of her own life. The school-teacher's old mother sat in her rocker close to the stove, stouter than ever, filling up her chair with those wandering curves and vague outlines which only the over-fleshy human form can assume. She looked as indefinite as a quivering jelly until one reached her face. That wore a fixedness of amiability which accentuated the whole like a high light. She had not seen Ellen for a long time, and she greeted her with delight.
“Bless your heart!” said she, in her sweet, throaty, husky voice. “Go and get her some of them cookies, Fanny, do.” The old woman's faculties were not in the least impaired, although she was very old, neither had her hands lost their cunning, for she still retained her skill in cookery, and prepared the simple meals for herself and daughter, seated in a high chair at the kitchen table to roll out pastry or the famous little cookies which Ellen remembered along with her childhood.
There was something about these cookies which Miss Mitchell presently brought to her in a pretty china plate, with a little, fine-fringed napkin, which was like a morsel of solace to the girl. With the first sweet crumble of the cake on her plate, she wished to cry. Sometimes the rush of old, kindly, tender associations will overcome one who is quite equal to the strain of present emergency. But she did not cry; she ate her cookies, and confided to Miss Mitchell and her mother her desire to obtain a position elsewhere, since her factory-work had failed her. It had occurred to her that possibly Miss Mitchell, who was on the school-board, might know of a vacancy in a primary school for the coming spring term, and that she might obtain it.
“I think I know enough to teach a primary school,” Ellen said.
“Of course you do, bless your heart,” said old Mrs. Mitchell. “She knows enough to teach any kind of a school, don't she, Fanny? You get her a school, dear, right away.”
But Miss Mitchell knew of no probable vacancy, since one young woman who had expected to be married had postponed her marriage on account of the strike in Lloyd's, and the consequent throwing out of employment of her sweetheart. Then, also, Miss Mitchell owned with hesitation, in response to Ellen's insistent question, that she supposed that the fact that she had worked in a shop might in any case interfere with her obtaining a position in a school.
“There is no sense in it, dear child, I know,” she said, “but it might be so.”
“Yes, I supposed so,” replied Ellen, bitterly. “They would all say that a shop-girl had no right to try to teach school. Well, I'm much obliged to you, Miss Mitchell.”
“What are you going to do?” Miss Mitchell asked, anxiously, following her to the door.
“I'm going to Mrs. Doty, to get some of the wrappers that mother works on, until something else turns up,” replied Ellen.
“It seems a pity.”
Ellen smiled bravely. “Beggars mustn't be choosers,” she said. “If we can only keep along, somehow, I don't care.”
There came a vehement pound of a stick on the floor, for that was the way the old woman in the sitting-room commanded attention. Miss Mitchell opened the door on a crack, that she might not let in the cold air.
“What is it, mother?” she said.
“You get Ellen a school right away, Fanny.”
“All right, mother; I'll do my best.”
“Get her the grammar-school you used to have.”
“All right, mother.”
There was something about the imperative solicitude of the old woman which comforted Ellen in spite of its futility as she went on her way. The good-will of another human soul, even when it cannot be resolved into active benefits, has undoubtedly a mighty force of its own. Ellen, with the sweet of the cookies still lingering on her tongue, and the sweet of the old woman's kindness in her soul, felt refreshed as if by some subtle spiritual cake and wine. She even went to the door of Mrs. Doty's house. Mrs. Doty was the woman who let out wrappers to her impecunious neighbors with an undaunted heart. She had no difficulty there. The demand for cheap wrappers was not on the wane, even in the hard times. When Ellen reached her grandmother's house, with a great parcel under her arm, Mrs. Zelotes opened her side door.
“What have you got there, Ellen Brewster?” she called out sharply.
“Some wrappers,” replied Ellen, cheerfully.
“Are you going to work on wrappers?”
“Yes, grandma.”
The door was shut with a loud report.
When Ellen entered the house and the sitting-room, her mother looked up from a pink wrapper which she was finishing.
“What have you got there?” she demanded.
“Some wrappers.”
“Why, I haven't finished the last lot.”
“These are for me to make, mother.”
Andrew got up and went out of the room. Fanny shut her mouth hard, and drew her thread through with a jerk.
“Well,” she said, in a second, “take off your things, and let me show you how to start on them. There's a little knack about it.”
That was a hard winter for Rowe. Aside from the financial stress, the elements seemed to conspire against the people who were so ill-prepared to meet their fury. It was the coldest winter which had been known for years; coal was higher, and the poor people had less coal to burn. Storm succeeded storm; then, when there came a warm spell, there was an epidemic of the grippe, and doctors' bills to pay and quinine to buy—and quinine was very dear.
The Brewsters managed to keep up the interest on the house mortgage, but their living expenses were reduced to the smallest possible amount. In those days there was no wood laid ready for kindling in the parlor stove, since there was neither any wood to spare nor expectation of Robert's calling. Ellen and her mother sat in the dining-room, for even the sitting-room fire had been abolished, and they heated the dining-room whenever the weather admitted it from the kitchen stove, and worked on the wrappers for their miserable pittance.
The repeated storms were in a way a boon to Andrew, since he got many jobs clearing paths, and thus secured a trifle towards the daily expenses.
In those days Mrs. Zelotes watched the butcher-cart anxiously when it stopped before her son's house, and she knew just what a tiny bit of meat was purchased, and how seldom. On the days when the cart moved on without any consultation at the tail thereof, the old woman would buy an extra portion, cook it, and carry some over to her son's.
Times grew harder and harder. Few of the operatives who had struck in Lloyd's succeeded in obtaining employment elsewhere, and most of them joined the union to enable them to do so. There was actual privation. One evening, when the strike was some six weeks old, Abby Atkins came over in a pouring rain to see Ellen. There were a number of men in the dining-room that night. Amos Lee and Frank Dixon were among them. It was a singular thing that Andrew, taking, as he had done, no active part in any rebellion against authority, should have come to see his house the headquarters for the rallies of dissension. Men seemed to come to Andrew Brewster's for the sake of bolstering themselves up in their hard position of defiance against tremendous odds, though he sat by and seldom said a word. As for Ellen, she and her mother on these occasions sat out in the kitchen, sewing on the endless seams of the endless wrappers. Sometimes it seemed to the girl as if wrappers enough were being made to clothe not only the present, but future generations of poor women. She seemed to see whole armies of hopeless, overburdened women, all arrayed in these slouching garments, crowding the foreground of the world.
That evening little Amabel, who had developed a painful desire to make herself useful, having divined the altered state of the family finances, was pulling out basting-threads, with a puckered little face bent over her work. She was a very thin child, but there was an incisive vitality in her, and somehow Fanny and Ellen contrived to keep her prettily and comfortably clothed.
“I've got to do my duty by poor Eva's child, if I starve,” Fanny often said.
When the side door opened, Ellen and her mother thought it was another man come to swell the company in the dining-room.
“It beats all how men like to come and sit round and talk over matters; for my part, I 'ain't got any time to talk; I've got to work,” remarked Fanny.
“That's so,” rejoined Ellen. She looked curiously like her mother that night, and spoke like her. In her heart she echoed the sarcasm to the full. She despised those men for sitting hour after hour in a store, or in the house of some congenial spirit, or standing on a street corner, and talking—talking, she was sure, to no purpose. As for herself, she had done what she thought right; she had, as it were, cut short the thread of her happiness of life for the sake of something undefined and rather vague, and yet as mighty in its demands for her allegiance as God. And it was done, and there was no use in talking about it. She had her wrappers to make. However, she told herself, extenuatingly, “Men can't sew, so they can't work evenings. They are better off talking here than they would be in the billiard-saloon.” Ellen, at that time of her life, had a slight, unacknowledged feeling of superiority over men of her own class. She regarded them very much as she regarded children, with a sort of tolerant good-will and contempt. Now, suddenly, she raised her head and listened. “That isn't another man, it's a woman—it's Abby,” she said to her mother.
“She wouldn't come out in all this rain,” replied Fanny. As she spoke, a great, wind-driven wash of it came over the windows.
“Yes, it is,” said Ellen, and she jumped up and opened the dining-room door.
Abby had entered, as was her custom, without knocking. She had left her dripping umbrella in the entry, and her old hat was flattened on to her head with wet, and several damp locks of her hair straggled from under it and clung to her thin cheeks. She still held up her wet skirts around her, as she had held them out-of-doors, but she was gesticulating violently with her other hand. She was repeating what she had said before. Ellen had heard her indistinctly through the door.
“Yes, I mean just what I say,” she cried. “Get up and go to work, if you are men! Stop hanging around stores and corners, and talking about the tyranny of the rich, and go to work, and make them pay you something for it, anyhow. This has been kept up long enough. Get up and go to work, if you don't want those belonging to you to starve.”
Abby caught sight of Ellen, pale and breathless, in the door, with her mother looking over her shoulder, and she addressed her with renewed violence. “Come here, Ellen,” she said, “and put yourself on my side. We've got to give in.”
“You go away,” cried little Amabel, in a shrill voice, looking around Ellen's arm; but nobody paid any attention to her.
“I never will,” returned Ellen, with a great flash, but her voice trembled.
“You've got to,” said Abby. “I tell you there's no other way.”
“I'll die before I give up,” cried Lee, in a loud, threatening voice.
“I'm with ye,” said Tom Peel.
Dixon and the young laster who sat beside him looked at each other, but said nothing. Dixon wrinkled his forehead over his pipe.
“Then you'd better go to work quick, before some that I know of, who are enough sight better worth saving than you are, starve,” replied Abby, unshrinkingly. “If I could I would go to Lloyd's and open it on my own account to-morrow. I believe in bravery, but nothing except fools and swine jump over precipices.”
Abby passed through the room, sprinkling rain-drops from her drenched skirts, and went into the kitchen with Ellen. Fanny cast an angry glance at her, then a solicitous one at her dripping garments.
“Abby Atkins, you haven't got any rubbers on,” said she.
“Rubbers!” repeated Abby.
“You just slip off those wet skirts, and Amabel will fetch you down Ellen's old black petticoat and brown dress. Amabel—”
But Abby seated herself peremptorily before the kitchen stove and extended one soaked little foot in its shabby boot. “I'm past thinking or caring about wet skirts,” said she. “Good Lord, what do wet skirts matter? We can't make wrappers any longer. We had to sell the sewing-machine yesterday to pay the rent or be turned out, and we haven't got a thing to eat in the house except potatoes and a little flour. We haven't had any meat for a week. Nice fare for a man like poor father and a girl like Maria! We have come down to the kitchen fire like you, but we can't keep it burning as late as this. The rest went to bed an hour ago to keep warm. Maria has got more cold. She did seem better one spell, but now she's worse again. Our chamber is freezing cold, and we haven't had a fire in it since the strike. John Sargent has ransacked every town within twenty miles for work, but he can't get any, and his sick sister keeps sending to him for money. He looks as if he was just about done, too. He went off somewhere after supper. A great supper! He don't smoke a pipe nowadays. Father don't get the medicine he ought to have, and that cold spell he just about perished for a little whiskey. The bedroom was like ice with no fire in the sitting-room, and he didn't sleep warm. It's one awful thing after another happening. Did you know Mamie Brady took laudanum last night?”
“Good land!” said Fanny.
“Yes, she did. Ed Flynn has been playing fast and loose with her for a long time, and she's none too well balanced, and when it came to her not having enough to eat, and to keep her warm, and her mother nagging at her all the time—you know what an awful hard woman her mother is—she got desperate. She gulped it down when the last car went past and Ed Flynn hadn't come; she had been watchin' out for him; then she told her mother, and her mother shook her, then run for Dr. Fox, and he called in Dr. Lord, and they worked with a stomach-pump till morning, and she isn't out of danger yet. Then that isn't all. Willy Jones's mother is failing. He was over to our house last evening, telling us about it, and he fairly cried, poor boy. He said he actually could not get her what she needed to make her comfortable this awful winter. It was all he could do with odd jobs to keep the roof over their heads, that she hadn't actually enough to eat and keep her warm. It seemed as if he would die when he told about it. And that isn't all. Those little Blake children next door are fairly starving. They are going around to the neighbors' swill-buckets—it's a fact—just like little hungry dogs, and it's precious little they find in them. Mrs. Wetherhed has let her sewing-machine go, and Edward Morse is going to be sold out for taxes. And that isn't all.” Abby lowered her voice a little. She cast an apprehensive glance at the door of the other room, and at Amabel. “Mamie Bemis has gone to the bad. I had it straight. She's in Boston. She didn't have enough to pay for her board, and got desperate. I know her sister did wrong, but that was no reason why she should have, and I don't believe she would if it hadn't been for the strike. It's all on account of the strike. There's no use talking: before the sparrow flies in the eyes of the tiger, he'd better count the cost.”
Fanny, quite white, stood staring from Abby to Ellen, and back again.
Amabel was holding fast to a fold of Ellen's skirt. Ellen looked rigid.
“I knew it all before,” she said, in a low voice.
Suddenly Abby jumped up and caught the other girl in a fierce embrace. “Ellen,” she sobbed—“Ellen, isn't there any way out of it? I can't see—”
Ellen freed herself from Abby with a curious imperative yet gentle motion, then she opened the door into the other room again. The loud clash of voices hushed, and every man faced towards her standing on the threshold, with her mother and Abby and little Amabel in the background. “I want to say to you all,” said Ellen, in a clear voice, “that I think I did wrong. I have been wondering if I had not for some time, and growing more and more certain. I did not count the cost. All I thought of was the principle, but the cost is a part of the principle in this world, and it has to be counted in with it. I see now. I don't think the strike ought ever to have been. It has brought about too much suffering upon those who were not responsible for it, who did not choose it of their own free will. There are children starving, and people dying and breaking their hearts. We have brought too much upon ourselves and others. I am sorry I said what I did in the shop that day, if I influenced any one. Now I am not going to strike any longer. Let us all accept Mr. Lloyd's terms, and go back to work.”
But Ellen's voice was drowned out in a great shout of wrath and dissent from Lee. He directly leaped to the conclusion that the girl took this attitude on account of Lloyd, and his jealousy, which was always smouldering, flamed.
“Well, I guess not!” he shouted. “I rather guess not! I've struck, and I'm going to stay struck! I ain't goin' to back out because a girl likes the boss, damn him!”
Andrew and the young laster rose and moved quietly before Ellen. Tom Peel said nothing, but he grinned imperturbably.
“I 'ain't had a bit of tobacco, and the less said about what I've had to eat the better,” Lee went on, in a loud, threatening voice, “but I ain't going to give up. No, miss; you've het up the fightin' blood in me, and it ain't so easy coolin' of it down.”
The door opened, and Granville Joy entered. He had knocked several times, but nobody had heard him. He looked inquiringly from one to another, then moved beside Andrew and the laster.
Dixon got up. “It looks to me as if it was too soon to be giving up now,” he said.
“It's easy for a man who's got nobody dependent upon him to talk,” cried Abby.
“I won't give up!” cried Dixon, looking straight at Ellen, and ignoring Abby.
“That's so,” said Lee. “We don't give up our rights for bosses, or bosses' misses.”
As he said that there was a concerted movement of Andrew, the laster, and Granville. Granville was much slighter than Lee, but suddenly his right arm shot out, and the other man went down like a log. Andrew followed him up with a kick.
“Get out of my house,” he shouted, “and never set foot in it again! Out with ye!”
Lee was easily cowed. He did not attempt to make any resistance, but gathered himself up, muttering, and moved before the three into the entry, where he had left his coat and hat. Dixon and Peel followed him. When the door was shut, Ellen turned to the others, with a quieting hand on Amabel's head, who was clinging to her, trembling.
“I think it will be best to talk to John Sargent,” said she. “I think a committee had better be appointed to wait upon Mr. Lloyd again, and ask him to open the factory. I'm not going to strike any longer.”
“I'm sure I'm not,” said Abby.
“Abby and I are not going to strike any longer,” said Ellen, in an indescribably childlike way, which yet carried enormous weight with it.
Ellen had not arrived at her decision with regard to the strike as suddenly as it may have seemed. All winter, ever since the strike, Ellen had been wondering, not whether the principle of the matter was correct or not, that she never doubted; she never swerved in her belief concerning the cruel tyranny of the rich and the helpless suffering of the poor, and their good reason for making a stand, but she doubted more and more the wisdom of it. She used to sit for hours up in her chamber after her father and mother had gone to bed, wrapped up in an old shawl against the cold, resting her elbows on the window-sill and her chin on her two hands, staring out into the night, and reflecting. Her youthful enthusiasm carried her like a leaping-pole to conclusions beyond her years. “I wonder,” she said to herself, “if, after all, this inequality of possessions is not a part of the system of creation, if the righting of them is not beyond the flaming sword of the Garden of Eden? I wonder if the one who tries to right them forcibly is not meddling, and usurping the part of the Creator, and bringing down wrath and confusion not only upon his own head, but upon the heads of others? I wonder if it is wise, in order to establish a principle, to make those who have no voice in the matter suffer for it—the helpless women and children?” She even thought with a sort of scornful sympathy of Sadie Peel, who could not have her nearseal cape, and had not wished to strike. She reflected, as she had done so many times before, that the world was very old—thousands of years old—and inequality was as old as the world. Might it not even be a condition of its existence, the shifting of weights which kept it to its path in the scheme of the universe? And yet always she went back to her firm belief that the strikers were right, and always, although she loved Robert Lloyd, she denounced him. Even when it came to her abandoning her position with regard to the strike, she had not the slightest thought of effecting thereby a reconciliation with Robert.
For the first time, that night when she had gone to bed, after announcing her determination to go back to work, she questioned her affection for Robert. Before she had always admitted it to herself with a sort of shamed and angry dignity. “Other women feel so about men, and why should I not?” she had said; “and I shall never fail to keep the feeling behind more important things.” She had accepted the fact of it with childlike straightforwardness as she accepted all other facts of life, and now she wondered if she really did care for him so much. She thought over and over everything Abby had said, and saw plainly before her mental vision those poor women parting with their cherished possessions, the little starving children snatching at the refuse-buckets at the neighbors' back doors. She saw with incredulous shame, and something between pity and scorn, Mamie Bemis, who had gone wrong, and Mamie Brady, who had taken her foolish, ill-balanced life in her own hands. She remembered every word which she had said to the men on the morning of the strike, and how they had started up and left their machines. “I did it all,” she told herself. “I am responsible for it all—all this suffering, for those hungry little children, for that possible death, for the ruin of another girl.” Then she told herself, with a stern sense of justice, that back of her responsibility came Robert Lloyd's. If he had not cut the wages it would never have been. It seemed to her that she almost hated him, and that she could not wait to strive to undo the harm which she had done. She could not wait for morning to come.
She lay awake all night in a fever of impatience. When she went down-stairs her eyes were brilliant, there were red spots on her cheeks, her lips were tense, her whole face looked as if she were strained for some leap of action. She took hold of everything she touched with a hard grip. Her father and mother kept watching her anxiously. Directly after breakfast Ellen put on her hat and coat.
“What are you going to do?” asked Fanny.
“I am going over to see John Sargent, and ask him to get some other men and go to see Mr. Lloyd, and tell him we are willing to go to work again,” replied Ellen.
Ellen discovered, when she reached the Atkins house, that John Sargent had already resolved upon his course of action.
“The first thing he said when he came in last night was that he couldn't stand it any longer, and he was going to see the others, and go to Lloyd, and ask him to open the shop on his own terms,” said Abby. “I told him how we felt about it.”
“Yes, I am ready to go back whenever the factory is opened,” said Ellen. “I am glad he has gone.”
Ellen did not remain long. She was anxious to return and finish some wrappers she had on hand. Abby promised to go over and let her know the result of the interview with Lloyd.
It was not until evening that Abby came over, and John Sargent with her. Lloyd had not been at home in the morning, and they had been forced to wait until late afternoon. The two entered the dining-room, where Ellen and her mother sat at work.
Abby spoke at once, and to the point. “Well,” said she, “the shop's going to be opened to-morrow.”
“On what terms?” asked Ellen.
“On the boss's, of course,” replied Abby, in a hard voice.
“It's the only thing to do,” said Sargent, with a sort of stolid assertion. “If we are willing to be crushed under the Juggernaut of principle, we haven't any right to force others under, and that's what we are doing.”
“Bread without butter is better than no bread at all,” said Abby. “We've got to live in the sphere in which Providence has placed us.” The girl said “Providence” with a sarcastic emphasis.
Andrew was looking at Sargent. “Do you think there will be any trouble?” he asked.
Sargent hesitated, with a glance at Fanny. “I don't know; I hope not,” said he. “Lee and Dixon are opposed to giving in, and they are talking hard to-night in the store. Then some of the men have joined the union since the strike, and of course they swear by it, because it has been helping them, and they won't approve of giving up. But I doubt if there will be much trouble. I guess the majority want to go to work, even the union men. The amount of it is, it has been such a tough winter it has taken the spirit out of the poor souls.” Sargent, evidently, in yielding was resisting himself.
“You don't think there will be any danger?” Fanny said, anxiously, looking at Ellen.
“Oh no, there's no danger for the girls, anyhow. I guess there's enough men to look out for them. There's no need for you to worry, Mrs. Brewster.”
“Mr. Lloyd did not offer to do anything better about the wages?” asked Ellen.
Sargent shook his head.
“Catch him!” said Abby, bitterly.
Ellen had a feeling as if she were smiting in the face that image of Robert which always dwelt in her heart.
“Well,” said Abby, with a mirthless laugh, “there's one thing: according to the Scriptures, it is as hard for the rich man to get into heaven as it is for the poor men to get into their factories.”
“You don't suppose there will be any danger?” Fanny said again, anxiously.
“Danger—no; who's afraid of Amos Lee and a few like him?” cried Abby, contemptuously; “and Nahum Beals is safe. He's going to be tried next month, they say, but they'll make it imprisonment for life, because they think he wasn't in his right mind. If he was here we might be afraid, but there's nobody now that will do anything but talk. I ain't afraid. I'm going to march up to the shop to-morrow morning and go to work, and I'd like to see anybody stop me.”
However, before they left, John Sargent spoke aside with Andrew, and told him of a plan for the returning workmen to meet at the corner of a certain street, and go in a body to the factory, and suggested that there might be pickets posted by the union men, and Andrew resolved to go with Ellen.
The next morning the rain had quite ceased, and there was a faint something, rather a reminiscence than a suggestion, of early spring in the air. People caught themselves looking hard at the elm branches to see if they were acquiring the virile fringe of spring or if their eyes deceived them, and wondered, with respect to the tips of maple and horse-chestnut branches, whether or not they were swollen red and glossy. Sometimes they sniffed incredulously when a soft gust of south wind seemed laden with fresh blossom fragrance.
“I declare, if I didn't know better, I should think I smelled apple blossoms,” said Maria.
“Stuff!” returned Abby. She was marching along with an alert, springy motion of her lean little body. She was keenly alive to the situation, and scented something besides apple blossoms. She had tried to induce Maria to remain at home. “I don't know but there'll be trouble, and if there is, you'll be just in the way,” she told her before they left the house, but not in their parents' hearing.
“Oh, I don't believe there'll be any. Folks will be too glad to get back to work,” replied Maria. She had a vein of obstinacy, gentle as she was; then, too, she had a reason which no one suspected for wishing to be present. She would not yield when John Sargent begged her privately not to go. It was just because she was afraid there might be trouble, and he was going to be in it, that she could not bear to stay at home herself.
Andrew had insisted upon accompanying Ellen in spite of her remonstrances. “I've got an errand down to the store,” he said, evasively; but Ellen understood.
“I don't think there is any danger, and there wouldn't be any danger for me—not for the girls, sure,” she said; but he persisted.
“Don't you say a word to your mother to scare her,” he whispered. But they had not been gone long before Fanny followed them, Mrs. Zelotes watching her furtively from a window as she went by.
All the returning employés met, as agreed upon, at the corner of a certain street, and marched in a solid body towards Lloyd's. The men insisted upon placing the girls in the centre of this body, although some of them rebelled, notably Sadie Peel. She was on hand, laughing and defiant.
“I guess I ain't afraid,” she proclaimed. “Father's keepin' on strikin', but I guess he won't see his own daughter hurt; and now I'm goin' to have my nearseal cape, if it is late in the season. They're cheaper now, that's one good thing. On some accounts the strike has been a lucky thing for me.” She marched along, swinging her arms jauntily. Ellen and Maria and Abby were close together. Andrew was on the right of Ellen, Granville Joy behind; the young laster, who had called so frequently evenings, was with him. John Sargent and Willy Jones were on the left. They all walked in the middle of the street like an army. It was covertly understood that there might be trouble. Some of the younger men from time to time put hands on their pockets, and a number carried stout sticks.
The first intimation of disturbance came when they met an electric-car, and all moved to one side to let it pass. The car was quite full of people going to another town, some thirty miles distant, to work in a large factory there. Nearly every man and woman on the car belonged to the union.
As this car slid past a great yell went up from the occupants; men on the platforms swung their arms in execration and derision. “Sc-ab, sc-ab!” they called. A young fellow leaped from the rear platform, caught up a stone and flung it at the returning Lloyd men, but it went wide of its mark. Then he was back on the platform with a running jump, and one of the Lloyd men threw a stone, which missed him. The yell of “Scab, scab!” went up with renewed vigor, until it died out of hearing along with the rumble of the car.
“Sometimes I wish I had joined the union and stuck it out,” said one of the Lloyd men, gloomily.
“For the Lord's sake, don't show the white feather now!” cried a young fellow beside him, who was striding on with an eager, even joyous outlook. He had fighting blood, and it was up, and he took a keen delight in the situation.
“It's easy to talk,” grumbled the other man. “I don't know but all our help lies in the union, and we've been a pack of fools not to go in with them, because we hoped Lloyd would weaken and take us back. He hasn't weakened; we've had to. Good God, them that's rich have it their own way!”
“I'd have joined the union in a minute, and got a job, and got my nearseal cape, if it hadn't been for father,” said Sadie Peel, with a loud laugh. “But, my land! if father'd caught me joinin' the union I dun'no' as there would have been anything left of me to wear the cape.”
They all marched along with no disturbance until they reached the corner of the street into which they had to turn in order to approach Lloyd's. There they were confronted by a line of pickets, stationed there by the union, and the real trouble began. Yells of “Scab, scab!” filled the air.
“Good land, I ain't no more of a scab than you be!” shrieked Sadie Peel, in a loud, angry voice. “Scab yourself! Touch me if you dasse!”
Many young men among the returning force had stout sticks in their hands. Granville Joy was one of them. Andrew, who was quite unarmed, pressed in before Ellen. Granville caught him by the arm and tried to draw him back.
“Look here, Mr. Brewster,” he said, “you keep in the background a little. I am young and strong, and here are Sargent and Mendon. You'd better keep back.”
But Ellen, with a spring which was effectual because so utterly uncalculated, was before Granville and her father, and them all. She reasoned it out in a second that she was responsible for the strike, and that she would be in the front of whatever danger there was in consequence. Her slight little figure passed them all before they knew what she was doing. She was in the very front of the little returning army. She saw the threatening faces of the pickets; she half turned, and waved an arm of encouragement, like a general in a battle. “Strike if you want to,” she cried out, in her sweet young voice. “If you want to kill a girl for going back to work to save herself and her friends from starvation, do it. I am not afraid! But kill me, if you must kill anybody, because I am the one that started the strike. Strike if you want to.”