Dick Brown looked at the youngster as he lay happily sprawling on his stomach, and then turned to Hertha. "And I've lived for twenty-five years without a chance at that!"
"It's never too late to learn," she suggested.
He thrust his hand in his pocket and pulled out a nickel. "Say," he said, calling to the boy who was starting off, "Gimme a ride!"
The youngster grinned derisively. "What 'er givin' me?" he asked, and slid away on the path.
Brown ran after him. "I'm giving you this," he answered and produced the nickel.
This altered the situation. The boy looked a little doubtfully at his sled and at the tall young man beside him, but, financial gain outweighing distrust, he took the money and handed over his property. "Go a little easy," he said, "it ain't yer size."
The man from Georgia eyed the bit of board on runners and then looked down at his long overcoat, his gloved hands, his highly polished shoes. Suddenly he felt very foolish. He glanced up at Hertha who was standing some rods away watching.
Moved by an impulse of mischief, she ran over to where he was. "I'm waiting to see you do it," she said. "It's perfectly easy, isn't it?" turning to the boy.
"I bet you two are dagoes," the youngster said by way of answer. "Dagoes don't know any more about snow 'n the fleas they bring wid 'em. Say, mister, this sled ain't your fit. Why don't you give your girl a ride?"
"Will you?" said Dick Brown, glowing with pleasure at the suggestion.
The park was filling up. Ahead on the path were two girls, one not more than a baby, clad in so many jackets that she looked like a little ball, sitting upright on a sled, which her little sister, in red coat and white hood, was pulling. She same running down the path, steering with accuracy and care.
"I could do that all right," Brown said with assurance. "Won't you try?"
"Oh, no, I couldn't!"
"Please do," he pleaded.
There were only children about, and, to Hertha, Dick Brown himself was beginning to seem just a big boy. The intoxicating air and the dazzling snow were breaking down convention and leaving her quite gay and daring.
"Well, just a little way," she said curling herself up on the sled.
Dick at once took off his overcoat and wrapped it about her, tucking it well under her feet. To her expostulations he paid not the slightest attention.
"There you are, all right," he cried joyously, and ran with her down the path.
The owner of the sled followed after, steering occasionally from behind when expert skill was needed, or firing a snowball at any boy who got in the way of their triumphal progress. It was glorious sport, and there was no knowing how long it might have continued had not Dick Brown, careless in his growing skill, looked away from duty for a moment and striking an obstacle in the path, rolled Hertha into the snow.
Protected by his great coat she was entirely unhurt, both in person and in dress and she found herself laughing immoderately as he helped her up; but he was prostrate in his contrition.
"I'm the stupidest hill billy in Casper County," he said. "I'd like to kick myself. Are you sure you aren't hurt?"
"Of course, I'm not! The snow is as soft as a pillow. Don't mind, please, Mr. Brown, we've had such fun."
"Have you? I have, but I wouldn't have dumped you out that way, not for a hundred dollars."
"You could have done it for five cents."
The snow was brushed from her dress and she was standing, her muff pulled over her arm, settling her hat in place.
"It's not quite straight," he said and moved as though to put it right for her.
She drew back, indignant. Was he going to be fresh and spoil everything after their jolly time together?
"Excuse me!" he grew red with embarrassment. Here was a girl with whom evidently he must never practise the code of manners agreeable to the girls at his own home. He added somewhat lamely, "It's all right now."
"I'm glad," she was her shyest self again; "and now good-by."
"You won't let me take you home?"
"I'm not going home," and she held out her hand.
He shook it heartily. "I mean to read the book through," he declared.
"I think you'll like it. Good-by."
"Good-by."
Watching her walk across the park and down the street until the little hat with its red feather was lost to sight, Dick Brown saw before him many evenings spent in a public library reading-room. He had been lonely since he had come, four months ago, a stranger to New York. It was not his first experience away from Casper County—a year of business in Atlanta had proved a preface to his New York position—but he had never before been in a city quite without home acquaintances. New York was a fine place for movies and restaurants, for walks up Broadway, a cigar in your mouth, watching whisky and petticoats, spool cotton and the latest leg show, wink their merits at you overhead; but it was poor in nice girls. There were plenty of the other kind. He felt disgust as he remembered with whom he had already chaffed and dallied, but only by chance would he be likely to meet such a young woman as Hertha Ogilvie. Setting his hat firmly on his head and pulling on his gloves, he said to himself that he was glad she was so careful but that he must find some way of breaking through her reserve.
A snowball struck him in the neck, and turning he found his new boy acquaintance grinning at him. Here was a time to take off, not to put on, the gloves. Stripping himself of impediments, he entered upon his first snowball fight to emerge wet but triumphant.
Hertha walked west for a few blocks, then north, then back to the east again. She meant to go to church, but she did not mean that Richard Shelby Brown should know where her church was. As she hurried down the street, all aglow once more, she felt girlishly happy. It came upon her quite suddenly that she had rarely been happy like this before. Her life at home, at school, with Miss Patty, had brought her quiet content; the hours with her lover which were slowly receding from her thoughts had stirred her passion; but save with a little boy like Tom she had never played as she had played this morning. In the South there was rest and passion, the warm breath of the refulgent summer; but in the North, there was cold, tingling air, and jolly times. It was a place in which to work hard; but also a place to play in, to go coasting, to run, perhaps to dance.
She looked so young and sweet when she entered her church that the woman at the end of the seat into which she was ushered smiled at her; an unholy liberty in New York.
"All ye snow and hail, praise ye the Lord, praise Him and glorify Him forever!"
She found it in her prayerbook, and all through the service, through the Te Deum and prayer and litany, she was entering into the treasures of the snow.
That night the thermometer rose twenty degrees and the next morning there was only a dirty gray slush upon the street.
New York had been preparing for Christmas. From all over the world beautiful things had poured in at her docks and stations to be distributed among her stores and shops. From the great steamers that came daily to her ports, from the trains that snorted up to her depots, were unloaded cases filled with garments of every texture and color; rich silks; fanciful ribbons, undergarments far too lovely to be hidden, that later would shine resplendent in shop windows. Household possessions came; graceful vases; plates of china rimmed with gold; many-hued glass; tables and chairs with slender fragile legs; soft, sumptuous rugs; heavy figures in white marble. Out of the boxes came gay and intricate toys; dolls of varied ages but all newly born; brightly illustrated picture books; tinkling music boxes. The shop windows each day, in number beyond number, recorded the multitude of possessions that make up the life of civilized man.
These possessions, however, were to be found in the city all the year, though they grew more lovely and numerous at holiday time; but as December advanced the trains brought in the special harbingers of Christmas. From Maine came the fir-balsam, most fragrant of trees, some tall and thickly boughed, others a child's measure in height; ground-pine and laurel were brought from nearer by; while holly and mistletoe traveled up from the South. All stood in display upon the sidewalks in both the poor and the resplendent sections of the town.
When the noon hour came, and, seated by the machines, the other girls opened their packages of luncheon and ate and visited with one another, Hertha went out to walk. She did not spend more than ten minutes in the clattering restaurant, but hurried on to the great department store where the wealth of the world was on exhibit. There she would wander each day, sometimes in toy-land, sometimes where the pianos were playing or the victrolas singing, sometimes among the lovely dresses or under the great rotunda where the silks shone in rainbow colors. At first she was fearful lest she had no right to examine these wonderful things that she could not purchase, but she soon found that no one was troubled by her presence. Once in a while she would buy a little candy or a picture card to feel the importance of a customer, but the very multiplicity of the things about her and the simplicity and narrowness of her own life made expensive purchases incredible. She smiled sometimes as she thought of Miss Patty's suggestion of a large expenditure upon clothes. The soft blue evening dress with the touch of yellow at the neck would have become her; but Miss Patty would have recognized as soon as she, that there was nothing in her present life to claim kinship with the gown. To have worn it, or a cheap imitation of it, to some dance-hall would never have entered the head of either of them. Whether wisely or not, she had chosen the position of a working girl in this, her new life, and the doors of social intercourse that might, as a student, have been ajar had she gone with Miss Witherspoon, were now closed.
Nevertheless, the splendor of the shop did make its impression upon her and she felt that her aristocratic lineage became her as she walked among its beautiful and costly things. "Now remember," she would say to herself each day as she entered, "you are Hertha Ogilvie, Miss Ogilvie of Florida. Your grandfather was a distinguished judge and left you money, and after his death you came to New York to live." So far, so good; but she must have a fuller story if she were to satisfy the natural questions of her friends. Kathleen had respected her reserve, for which she was most grateful, but if she saw Richard Brown again, and accepted him in her life, he would want to know a great deal. Southern folk were always talking about personal affairs with a kindly, active curiosity, and there was little hope that a short sojourn in the North would cure any one of them of such a trait. Yes, she must build up an unreal past in which she moved among strange people, a white child unknown even to herself. To have told her life as she had lived it, with its strange and dramatic change from one race to another, was repugnant to her. It was partly to escape the curious glances, the whispered remarks about her appearance—"Yes, one could see she might have been taken for a Negro, that curly hair"—the inquisitive questions regarding her bringing up among blacks, that she had turned from the Boston world that Miss Witherspoon had prepared for her. But Hertha Williams found it difficult to create a life story for Hertha Ogilvie and to carry it through its normal vicissitudes and adventures for twenty-three years. It was repugnant to her to conceive and carry out a lie; and as she walked down one long aisle and up another, she had an annoying way of forgetting her grandfather and the many years she had lived with him (she made no effort to visualize other relatives) and of recalling her own black people at home.
They should know, these dear people whom she could not forget, that Christmas found her alive and well, but she would send no address and would receive no welcome word in return. That was what they had meant. Hertha Ogilvie's two feet were not yet planted firmly enough in the white world for her to return, even for a short time, to the black. So on a little card that showed a cottage standing in a field of snow, she sent to foster-mother and sister her greeting of love and her assurance of health and happiness. To Tom she sent a top, his favorite toy. He had been famous at spinning his top, and it was pleasant to send him a child's gift. And when she had dropped both card and toy in the box at the post-office she turned away winking the drops from her eyes.
William Applebaum at this time was a great comfort. He was a whole Christmas, in himself, for he loved every custom associated with the day, German, English, American, and carried them all to Kathleen's home. With Hertha he hung up wreaths of holly in the four windows, and two days before Christmas he appeared carrying a ten-pound turkey. "I bought it myself," he said, as Kathleen glared as though she thought it might have come from the Salvation Army. "I wanted to make sure of my dinner here, and if Miss Hertha will let me, I'll cook it under her supervision." On Christmas eve, which happened to be Sunday, he took them to a concert given by his choral society, and leaving them in the best seats in the house, went upon the stage and sang the choruses in The Messiah with a rapture of happiness and good-will. When the two women returned home, after saying good-night to him at the door, they found within a little tree, not four feet in height, but set out in the regalia of the season, tinsel, cornucopias, candles, and at the top a golden star. They lighted the candles and sat for a time in their radiance until Hertha declared that they must be blown out that they might be lighted again to-morrow.
"He's a good man," Kathleen said as she examined the little gilt toys on the boughs, "but he lacks vision."
Christmas morning was lowering, but after she had tidied up her room, Hertha went out to church. She walked through the park, a gray and cheerless place to-day, and felt aggrieved that no one was there to meet her. There was, of course, no reason why she should have thought to see her new acquaintance, but she had half expected it both Sunday and now and his absence was a disappointment. And at the library, while she had scrupulously kept to her usual routine, visiting it neither more nor less than usual, she had not seen him either. Her life, whether set in the South, where roses and purple clematis were blooming now over the doorways, or in the North of gray clouds and snow, was just a place into which people entered for a time to play a part, and, at the end of the act, went out and left her to finish as best she could alone.
Once within the church, however, with the organ pealing out the music she had heard the night before of the shepherds keeping watch over their flocks, she ceased to feel aggrieved and with deep emotional happiness entered into the service. As Hertha Ogilvie she had at once gone to the Episcopal Church. To enter its portals and take part in its ritual seemed to her as much in keeping with her new character as sitting down at table with white men and women. But her nature so swiftly responded to beauty, there were so many sensitive chords of the spirit that vibrated to the chant of the service, or to the moments of silent prayer within the darkened church amid the multitude of throbbing souls, that she grew to love the church of her adoption. "How glad I am to be white," she thought as she stood up and heard the Te Deum ring through the softly lighted spaces. "And yet how queer it is to be glad, for I've always been just the same."
The snow began to fall at one o'clock, and when Applebaum appeared for dinner at three (he had not been allowed to help in its preparation) he made much ado of standing in the hall and shaking off the flakes.
"I especially ordered a white Christmas for you, Miss Hertha," he called as he stood in the open doorway.
She smiled in reply and asked him to come in.
"Could I have a word with Kitty?" he stammered.
Leaving him still in the hall, clutching nervously at his umbrella, she went into the kitchen and sent out Kathleen.
Applebaum was much embarrassed. "Would you mind, Kitty?" he said. "There's a little boy downstairs that was in the street a minute ago, yelling loud enough to drown a whole orchestra because they were taking his mother away to the hospital. He was pounding and kicking the doctor until I promised him a turkey dinner, when he stopped as if his mouthpiece was broken. Do you mind if I bring him up?"
"Why, of course not," she answered, "it's only you that would mind, for you're not used to children."
When he appeared in the hall again he was accompanied by a singularly unattractive boy of eight with a colorless face and incredibly dirty hands.
"We hadn't time to fix up," Applebaum said with forced cheerfulness, endeavoring to make proper connections between a very shabby pair of trousers and a soiled shirt. "There, that's better."
"Come this way," Hertha called, and to the surprise of the others the boy followed her down the hall into her bedroom.
Getting some hot water, she helped him roll up his sleeves and then, handing him her soap, told him to wash.
At this point he shook his head vigorously. "I can't, Miss," he explained; "it would chap 'em. Yer don't wash yer hands in winter."
"Just try," she suggested.
With a great splash he plunged in his hands, found the warm water pleasant, the soap agreeably slippery; and while he scowled as he rubbed, under Hertha's silent supervision, he made a thorough job.
"Now, look," she said when he had finished with her towel.
The boy looked down and out beyond his coat-sleeves, where once there had been black, were now white, astonishingly white, hands. They gleamed against his dark trousers. Slowly a smile spread over his face as though he were welcoming back summer friends.
"Tom could never get a result like that," Hertha thought as they walked into the kitchen together. She placed the lad at Kathleen's left where he watched voraciously the carving of the deliciously browned turkey. He grabbed at the first plate, which, nevertheless, went on its way to Hertha. But when the second turned not to the left but to the right and landed in front of Applebaum, his anger rose.
"Damn you," he said, grabbing Kathleen by the arm, "gimme something to eat!"
In a flash she had boxed his ear. "Keep your mouth shut," she commanded, "if you want to get anything in it. No wonder your poor mother's in the hospital!"
The boy sniffled a little, but remained silent. When he received his portion he fell upon it voraciously, swallowing potato in gulps, tearing at bones, and cleaning the plate of its last drop of gravy. This accomplished (it occupied not more than five minutes) he seized his cap, ran from the room, leaving the doors wide open in his flight so that they heard the front door slam, and rushed into the street.
Hertha looked at the empty plate. "I've seen hungry boys before, but never one so hungry as that," she said.
"Poor little kid," said Kathleen, "and he missed his pudding!"
"You weren't pitying him a while ago." There was reproach in Hertha's voice.
Kathleen made haste to explain. "That was the only language he knew. I done that or he would have had us in hell in a minute. Perhaps you could have managed better," she added, almost humbly, "you got him to wash his hands."
Applebaum had risen from his place while they were talking and had taken away the boy's plate. The exit of his unsightly, bad mannered guest was a great relief, and he now sat down and attacked his food with interest. "We have fed the hungry," he said solemnly from the depths of his plate.
Kathleen flew at him. "And so that's why you done it! I was wondering you were so thick with the kids all of a sudden. You wanted to ease your conscience on Christmas day! Well, you're in it now with the Bowery Mission and the Salvation Army and Tim Sullivan and you can enjoy yourself. Charity to-day is on the job."
"Why not say the Christmas spirit?" he made answer. "I meant it kindly."
A lovely look came over the Irish woman's face. All her irritability vanished, and, smiling at them like some strong saint, she lifted her coffee cup. "To the Christmas spirit, then, and may it stay with us all the year round."
"Hertha, here, is the Christian," she said later, when they were all comfortably seated in the front room, "she goes to church more times than I can count."
"It's a good habit for a woman," Billy retorted. "What did they preach about this morning?"
"I hardly know," Hertha answered. "The sermon was very short, but the service and the singing by the choir boys was most beautiful."
"And the priests in their robes and the altar with its candles and the incense," Kathleen added.
"Oh, we are not High Church like that."
"Why not do the whole thing if you're about it? I wouldn't stop at one gown, I'd have two, a dozen for the great events, and as many candles as the rich could pay for. But what is there in it all for a hungry heart?
"I remember once," Kathleen continued, a look of sorrow coming into her gray eyes, "going to church of a Palm Sunday. I had broken from the faith since the priest went against me and the girls in my big strike, but I thought of how my father and mother, if they'd been living, would have asked me to go, and I went to please them. I'd hardly entered the door, though, when the smell of the incense and the sight of the priests' rich robes sickened me. I thought of the lowly Nazarene who had not where to lay His head, and it seemed to me that I must scream; so I left and walked down the street, and across the way I saw another building, with a plain entrance, and over the doorway the words 'Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.' 'I don't know what it may mean,' I thought to myself, 'but that must be the place for me.' So I went inside and sat at the back against the wall where no one saw me.
"There was a pleasant looking man on the platform, dressed as he would be dressed to go into the street, and he was telling the meaning of Palm Sunday. It was when our Saviour was coming into Jerusalem riding on an ass, the people following Him. But His followers all being poor, like Himself, had nothing to give, so they tore the leaves from the palm trees as He rode by and threw them in His path, their only offering. And as I sat there and listened, and heard of the hard road that the poor must tread, something broke in my heart and I leaned against the wall and sobbed."
Hertha was deeply moved. "Where did that man preach, Kathleen?" she asked.
"It was a long way from here, darling, and likely as not they've thrown him out of his church by this time. He was too good to be let long to do as he liked."
"Oh, Kathleen, Kathleen!"
"Well, well, I mustn't be making remarks like that on Christmas. Has Billy told you the story yet, Hertha, of how his grandfather fought in the German Revolution and made his escape from prison?"
Their visitor left early, and for a time they worked together in the kitchen clearing away the things. This task done, Kathleen brought out her Christmas cards and gifts and looked them over, commenting on this or that friend or patient, while Hertha sat quietly by, her hands in her lap. The day had brought her no remembrance save a gift from Kathleen.
"There's one thing I do love about you, Hertha," her friend said, "you're not always fidgeting; you know how to rest."
"Yes. It's been a real vacation for me, these two days."
"Still it must be hard not to be home at playtime."
Hertha remained silent.
"I'm not asking questions, dearie," her friend went on. "It's for you to talk or not, as you wish. But sometimes when we're by ourselves we want to speak and yet we don't know how. If there's anything you'd feel like saying, I'd keep it to myself. I know," looking closely at the young girl, "you've heard nothing at all from home."
It was very quiet. As Hertha sat looking at her hands in her lap, she heard the clock tick and smelled the fragrance of the geranium blossoms. She was struggling with a desire to get up and, throwing her arms about her friend's neck, tell her her whole story. Hating deception, fearing that she could play her part but poorly, she wanted above everything else to do as her friend asked and reveal what was close to her heart. But reticence and, too, a feeling that she must keep to the plan that she had formulated, held her back. So she only said in a half whisper, "I am very much alone, Kathleen."
"I'm knowing that, darling."
"I never knew my father or my mother. I saw more of my grandfather than of any one else. But he died last summer and left me with a little money, only a little, and I came to New York."
"You've no sister to turn to?"
"No," very slowly.
"You said you had a brother once?"
"Yes, but he's a long way off. I don't see him any more."
"That's a lonely way to be. And is your grandmother alive now?"
"No." Then, with a touch of petulance, "I didn't like her much."
"But you're grieving, dear, I can tell that; and it's not for the dead, but the living."
"Perhaps."
"Is it some man now that you're needing?"
"No," Hertha said with a little laugh that ended in a sob, "it's not a man, Kathleen, it's my black mammy."
She put her arms around her friend's neck and kissed her good-night; and then went to her room, her head erect, her carriage that of the granddaughter of Judge Ogilvie. She had taken the first step and the next would not be so difficult. But Kathleen, out in the kitchen, shook her head and looked mystified.
The "Imperial," to which Hertha went every morning, was a high-grade shop. The large room in which she spent forty-nine hours a week was as clean as a conscientious scrubwoman could make it; the ventilation was not bad, and few of the workers were obliged to use artificial light. At rare moments of interruption, when stopping to catch a bit of thread or to adjust a piece of trimming, Hertha would look about at her companions bent over their machines, one running a tuck here, another attaching the lace to the muslin there, and would marvel at their dexterity and at the speed with which the finished product came out ready to go to another room to be pressed. Later she might see it at a department store, thrown over a show figure, and priced at $5.65 or $3.95, according to the day of the week. They were pretty shirtwaists and she took a pride in her part in their production.
By January the trade became brisk. Orders for "Imperial" waists were shipped to-day to give place to new orders to be shipped to-morrow. The girls were paid by the piece, and were, for their own interest, likely to work as fast as they could; but foreman and manufacturer were continually calling for greater speed. The exigencies of the trade—capricious changes of style, a keen competition among the manufacturers—created a period of swift production to be followed by a period of unemployment. Now, in midwinter, work was speeded up; and, bending over each whirring machine, was a taut, tired girl whose one thought, if she thought at all, was of the signal that should come at last to tell her that this day's work was done.
Hertha never became accustomed to the daily speeding. Not only did her body rebel against it, but her spirit refused to accept its sacrilege. She had always enjoyed making clothes, seeing a garment grow under her fingers. No matter how simple the article might be at which she was at work, she had felt the satisfaction of the creator when the final stitch was taken and the parts had become a useful whole. But now nothing grew; everything was made artificially by a series of explosions as they made puffed rice. At her machine she ran row after row of small tucks, fashioning the shoulders to give fullness to the bust. It was a graceful pattern, but if she stopped a moment to think of it she lost money for her employer and for herself. Her mind must be concentrated on her machine and on the goods that she fed it with the constant suggestion of hurrying, and again hurrying, and under the accusing eye of the foreman hurrying yet again.
Among the few American girls who worked at the shop was one Annie Black, who lived in a suburb. Annie seemed always to be running to and from trains. Her life on the road bore a striking similarity to her life at her machine. She rushed in the morning to get the 6:59, which, if it were on time, got her in and at work by eight. By shortening her noon hour she could just catch the 5:51 train for home. But if the 6:59 was late, then it was futile to attempt to make up lost time and she must work until nearly six and take the 6:41 back to a late dinner. And as her trains moved so moved her machine with its girl engine driver impatient for each run to be over and done.
We all love to make things, and the tragedy of the modern factory is that it denies this joy to the worker. Within the great buildings that we see from the street car window or that we flash by on the railroad train, men and women are not fashioning shirtwaists or shoes or automobiles; they are not seeing one out of the million things of man's creation grow beneath their touch; they are performing a series of motions for which they receive remuneration. The swifter and more accurate the performance of these motions the better the pay; but of the finished product they have neither knowledge nor thought. At ten years of age, with needle or wheel, they are better, more intelligent creators than at thirty, when, with fagged brain, they mechanically add their part to the multitude of parts that make up the factory product. At ten they take joy in the thing they have made and may sell it for a nickel or a kiss; at thirty they have but one desire, to dispose of their part of the product as dearly as they can. For, as they have no part in the creation of the whole, so they have no share in the intricate ways of business that make possible the factory's life. They are only tools like the machines they operate, to be used by the few, the creators, who, like the gods themselves, conceive and command.
At the Imperial shop most of the girls were Jewish. Annie Black and half a dozen other young Americans sat by themselves at a north window and when luncheon time came rehearsed the very lively happenings of the night before over their indigestible food; but the other girls were Russian Jews and spoke in Yiddish. Hertha was glad to have been seated with the latter group, for from the first she liked them better than her compatriots. Her shyness, coupled with her dislike of the vulgar, kept her from making any acquaintances among the American girls, but she sometimes regretted that the barrier of language separated her from the Jewish. Some of them were, to be sure, foolish and vain, but the majority were serious, and a few appealed to her sense both of decorum and beauty. These girls had broad foreheads and wore their dark hair parted and drawn down over the upper part of their ears. Their deep brown eyes had long curling lashes. They carried serious looking books to and from their work. She often wondered what they were talking about when they got together at luncheon, and she always smiled when she passed them to go out at noon.
One night, early in January, she got into conversation with one of them as they left the factory. It was Sophie Switsky, a small, thin young woman of eighteen whose dark hair and eyes made almost too striking a contrast to her white face. "I go with you?" she had asked, looking up at Hertha as they went out into the rain, "I go under your umbrella?" Hertha had said "yes" eagerly, ashamed not to have offered shelter herself. Then, looking down at her companion's feet that were rapidly becoming soaked, she asked, smiling, "You didn't think it would rain when you left home this morning?"
"No," Sophie answered, without the smile that is as much a part of the American greeting as a handshake. "I did not to forget. All the money I have I save for my brother in Lithuania to bring him here to me."
"Yes?"
"Then I must keep money for the summer when we shall have no work."
"No work?" Hertha questioned.
"Did you not know? This trade is very bad, very bad. In the winter we work like the slaves and in the summer no work. And before the work will stop we sit in the room and wait and wait to see if we will be needed for the day. Sometimes we sit for one week, two weeks, and only work a day; we cannot tell."
"Why don't we work all the year through, but have shorter hours, and not speed?" Hertha asked.
"The trade is like that," Sophie Switsky answered wisely. "People want everything the same time, made the same way. Then the fashions change, and people throw away all that they have and buy again."
"How silly," Hertha thought to herself. The ways of trade seemed to her lacking not so much in humanity as in ordinary common sense.
Their way lay along the same streets until they came almost to Hertha's door when they said good-night, Sophie refusing to allow her new acquaintance to go further. "It is nothing to get wet," she averred, "I used to it;" and she hurried on, mingling so swiftly with the crowd that thronged the Bowery that Hertha soon lost sight of her small figure. She felt attracted to this young Jewish girl, and yet she half feared that she, too, like Kathleen, had a vision, and she questioned whether she desired another friend who wished to change the world.
And yet, when she had finished a supper alone and had dropped wearily into a chair by the lamp, she found she was almost ready for a world-change herself. She was too tired to care to read, too tired for coherent thought. In her head buzzed and hummed and roared the machines of the shop and every now and then her whole body twitched convulsively. Outside the rain beat steadily upon the pavement. It was a night like this, she remembered, that she had been carried, a little new-born baby, and placed on mammy's big bed. Who did such a thing? Not her young mother who had died so soon after her birth. Not her grandfather who in the end had given her his name. Was it her mother's mother who had tried to hide the family shame? She shrewdly suspected so. Well, she had not succeeded, for here was Hertha Ogilvie, after all. It was not so easy to hide a white child, not so easy to stifle the spirit of remorse.
As she sat in her chair, her eyes half closed, she found her thoughts, as so often happened, drifting back to her home among the pines, to the cabin with the white sand at the doorway and the red roses clambering over the porch. Instead of coming home to this empty flat, Ellen and her mother and Tom were on hand to welcome her. They helped take off her things, they dried her shoes, they gave her hot coffee to drink. Was it foolish to have gone away to enter the life of this ruthless city that held you in a mad whirl of work for half the year and for the other half left you to starve; this city in which there was no time for a pleasant homecoming and an evening meal together; this city in which you met a friendly face and lost it again in the great crowds that swarmed in millions over the miles of narrow streets? Her head drooped as though nodding yes to her questions, and her eyes wholly closed.
But just then the doorbell rang.
It was the bell of the outer door, and Hertha went to the kitchen to push the button that released the latch. Who could be coming to see Kathleen, she thought, on such a wretched night? Of course, some one who needed her services as nurse; and, going into the hall, she opened the outer door of the flat the better to guide the stranger upstairs.
"May I come in?"
It was a very wet figure that stood before her clasping a hat in one hand and in the other a large cotton umbrella that dripped puddles of water upon the floor. The question was asked in a jovial tone, and yet the man's attitude betrayed something like timidity.
"Certainly," Hertha answered. "Give me your umbrella; it's very wet."
"No, tell me where to put it; you mustn't get any of this rain on you," and Richard Shelby Brown followed Hertha as she led the way into the kitchen.
Together they put the umbrella into the washtub where it could drip harmlessly, and then, divested of his coat and hat, the young man went with his hostess into the front room where she insisted that he sit close to the radiator to get dry.
When she had seated him to her satisfaction and was back in her chair by the table there was silence. Now that Dick Brown's bodily wants were cared for, Hertha began to question herself how he had ever gotten there, and to wonder whether she should not be angry with him for following her uninvited to her home. But she was too homesick, too much in need of companionship, not to feel a little pleasure in seeing him, his long legs tucked under his straight chair, his thin face making a grotesque silhouette against the window shade. He was certainly homely and a pusher, just an ordinary "hill billy," as he had described himself. She decided that since he had come uninvited he must begin the conversation.
Dick Brown, as though appreciating his position, opened his mouth to speak and then sneezed—not once, but a number of times.
"You've taken a cold already," Hertha said sympathetically. "You shouldn't have come out to-night."
"No, I haven't, indeed I haven't. I'm just getting over one."
"How long have you had it?"
"About a month."
"I believe you got it that morning in the park. You shouldn't have given me your overcoat."
"That had nothing to do with it!" Brown spoke with a kindly bluster. "Nothing to do with it. Don't you think that for a minute. You see, after you left, I got playing with the kids and they squeezed snow down my neck and I lambasted them and we had a grand lark. It was mighty fine, but I learned that snow melts and then——"
He sneezed again.
"It was too bad," Hertha exclaimed. "It's so hard to be ill away from home."
"I reckon it is! Your meals set down by the side of your bed, the gruel cold and full of lumps, no one to growl at when your head aches and you can't go to sleep! It's a mighty poor state of things."
"I'm afraid you were pretty sick."
"Just missed pneumonia."
"You ought not to have come out to-night." Hertha spoke with emphasis.
"Oh, I'm all hunky now. I've sat in the library most every night since they let me out. Wouldn't they grin at home if they saw me fooling this way with books! Why, I know more news out of the magazines this month than all of Casper County ever knew since the first moonshiner set up his still! I'm reeking with information. But I bet you're reading one of those three-volume novels they tell about that last a year. I couldn't wait any longer, so I came to headquarters."
"How did you get my address?" Hertha had not meant to ask the question, but it slipped out unawares.
"Don't make me explain, please. It's against all the rules and regulations and the librarian only told because at times I'm a beautiful liar."
His thin face, looking thinner than ever from his sickness, wore a worried expression, and one of his long hands moved nervously against his side. At home he was accounted a confident youth who could grab up a girl and swing away with her a little faster than the next man, but here in New York he was off his ground. Moreover, this very pretty young woman with her aristocratic ways gave him no help, but sat quite silent as though questioning what right he had in her home. Awkwardly he rose and played his last card.
"I've a letter I want you to see," he said, "it's from my mother. I wrote and told her about you and how I hoped we'd get acquainted, only New York's such a big place a girl has to be careful. It ain't much like our country towns in Dixie, is it? Anyway, she wrote in answer, and here's the letter. You can read it, postmark and all. Seems like it was written for you."
He handed the letter to her with an attempt at self-confidence; but she took it with so serious a face that, saying nothing further, he stood, almost humbly, awaiting her decision.
Hertha read the letter through. It was badly written and showed more than one lapse in spelling. Two pages were filled with admonitions to keep sober and serve the Lord; the third contained bits of local news: Cousin Sally Lou's visit, the number of partridges Uncle Barton had brought in for dinner. But on the last was the message that was doubtless meant for Hertha's eyes. "The young lady, from all you say, must be mighty grand, but she needn't be afraid of you. You weren't one to hang round the station every evening, or to steal out nights with the fellows to get whisky. You've been a good son, Dick, and every mother can't say that. Look at Jim Slade's mother, now——" and the letter ended with an account of Jim's latest escapade.
Hertha handed it back with a pleasant smile. "It reads just like the South, doesn't it?" she said cordially. "Down there we know every little happening, while in New York you have to tell a story to learn where I live."
The young man laughed noisily; his relief was great.
"You're right, all right," he said, sitting nearer her. "It's like one big family down there, and if a visitor drops in there ain't a person in town from the Baptist preacher to the poorest nigger who won't have the news. Are you a Baptist, Miss Hertha?"
"No, I'm an Episcopalian."
"Whew! We only know 'em by name our way. It's Baptist or Methodist with us, with once in a while a Christian place of worship. Ever seen a revival now?"
"Yes."
"Have you? I wouldn't have supposed that an Episcopalian would so much as go to one. But it's a wonderful sight, don't you think, when the sinners come to the penitent seat? I've seen 'em, big men, crying like babies. And then the preacher with his great voice calling 'em to repent and showing 'em the way to righteousness. And out from somewhere a woman'll start a song, perhaps 'Rock of Ages,' and the whole room'll be full of the sound of the hymn."
He grew eloquent as he spoke, picturing the scene he knew so well. In his narrow life the church and its emotional appeal had occupied an important place. He wanted to tell her that he had been among that group kneeling in repentance, that he was a sinner saved by grace; but there was an aloofness about her that kept him from going further. He could not guess that she had wholly forgotten him, and was sitting in a bare room where the dim lamp lighted a multitude of black faces; where the cries of "Amen" rang from the penitent seat, and where the black preacher, the only father she had ever known, called upon the Lord to give to His children mercy and forgiveness. Her visitor had never listened to such a revival as she!
There was a long silence. Then Richard Brown strove again to make conversation.
"The niggers, now, they're a worthless lot, don't you think?"
Hertha started nervously. "I don't think so," she said.
"Don't you? I suppose you've had 'em in your family for a long time—old mammies and uncles. They don't grow that kind round our way, only a lot of worthless coons that won't do a lick of work unless they're driven to it."
"There's the funniest nigger minstrel show at the Hippodrome," he went on, "you ought to see it. Greatest thing out. There ain't anything much funnier, anyway, than to see a black buck dressed in a high hat and a pair of fancy shoes, opening his frog mouth and singing a coon song. Mighty funny songs they've got there, too. Wish you could hear one of them."
He wanted to ask her to go to the show with him the next week, but she looked further removed from him than ever. Had he said anything to warrant it he would have thought that she was angry; but that could hardly be the case. She just wasn't his kind and he had better accept the fact and go home. But as he sat crossing and recrossing his knees, wishing inexpressibly for the relief of a smoke, her face in the lamplight was so lovely that he shut his teeth and resolved to hang on.
Then a sneeze came to his relief, a big-throated sneeze, followed by a second and a third.
"Oh," Hertha cried, rousing herself, "aren't you warm enough? Perhaps it's warmer in the kitchen."
"Don't bother."
"It isn't any bother. I often sit there."
He followed her into the bright little kitchen, hoping that in a new environment he might be able to break through her reticence; but Hertha herself helped him.
"I'm going to make you a cup of cocoa," she said. "You're cold and you need something to warm you up."
Beyond allowing him to light the gas stove, she refused all assistance, and as he stood watching her go through her deft movements, measuring, stirring, and at last pouring a foaming liquid into their two cups—for to his delight she was to share the meal—he was more attracted and yet more puzzled than ever.
"You cook mighty well," he said as she poured the hot cocoa.
"I'm used to doing little things about the house," she answered. "Before I came here I was a companion in a family."
The statement was made on the spur of the moment, but as Hertha thought it over she was delighted that she had been able to say something that opened up a way to live in the past without embarrassment, almost without falsehood. To conjure up the world of white people in her grandfather's home had been beyond her power; even in her thoughts she had stumbled in her endeavor to climb the ladder that led to their eminence. But as a companion in the Merryvale household she was in familiar surroundings.
Richard Brown on his part was a little disappointed. He had been dreaming of a princess in disguise and he found only a poor relation. In the large families of the South there were sometimes girls like this, though when they were so pretty they usually soon married, girls who had to do the odd tasks, give up the good times, go to live with some distant cousin or aunt as the case might be. That sort of thing made a girl shy and quiet. For the first time that evening he felt at ease.
"I bet there ain't anybody in New York can make cocoa to beat yours,", he declared emphatically. "I never liked the stuff before."
"I should have made you coffee," Hertha said regretfully. "I forgot, because coffee keeps me awake."
"Does me, too." He was ready to agree with anything. "Now, down home, tramping through the woods, I could drink a dozen cups a day. But it's different in the city."
"Were your woods pines?" she asked, "and were there streams with cypresses by the banks?"
Here at last they had found a meeting place, a common ground. If she would not play or laugh with him, they could wander through the woods together, tasting the tang of the evergreen or watching the buds burst on the wild plum. Drawing his chair a little forward, he hugged his knee and sang the song of the country of his birth.
Outside the rain splashed upon the street, making great puddles at the crossings, the wind blew fiercely down the narrow roadways and shook the windows in their frames; but within the little tenement the southern boy moved without a cloud to shadow him through the playtime of his years. Sometimes it was winter and he was among the hills trapping birds and shooting rabbits. Again it was early spring and with rod in hand he trailed the brown stream until the trout rose and brought him all attention to the game they played that through his skill ended in death and victory. Or it was summer and too hot to walk, but glorious to gallop in the early morning over the rough road and down the hollow to where the brook broadened into a swimming-pool that called him to bathe in its reviving water. Again he moved among the woods in autumn, hunting, but not too intent upon his game to fail to find the nuts scattered upon his path or to stop and, putting his hand in a hole of a decaying tree, bring out a blinking, monkey-faced owl.
"Why, it's half past ten," he cried, looking at the clock on the shelf above the stove. "I must go, for we both have to work to-morrow."
He ventured this at a hazard, but she did not contradict him.
"Your coat is quite dry," she answered, feeling it as she came to take it from the hook where it hung.
They stood in the narrow hallway and as he swung the coat upon his high shoulders he was a little awkward and brushed against her arm. She laughed away his apology, but he felt this slight contact as something tender, exquisite. As he opened the door he could only mutter an embarrassed good-evening.
"Thank you for coming out in the rain," she said, "and you mustn't take cold or I shall think you ought not to have risked it."
"I'm tough." He moved out onto the stair. Wasn't she going to ask him to come again? "By the way," he called out, "I've readSherlock Holmes. It's great!"
"I'm glad you liked it," she replied, "and I'll try to find another good story for you next Saturday evening."
He went away rapturously happy in having won the chance to know so beautiful a southern girl. Whether she lived as a worker in a tenement or as a companion in an old family mansion, she was the most refined person he had ever met and he planned great days when they should be together. The rain fell unheeded. Despite the bright light from the electric lamp, he walked into a deep puddle, drenching his feet and ankles and splashing his best clothes with dirty water. Oblivious of such trivial happenings, dreaming of the future, counting the evenings to Saturday night, he reached his home, where, lying down to sleep, the lady of his heart followed him in his dreams.
Hertha, as she washed the cups and tidied up the kitchen, was happy, too, for a time, recollecting with pleasurable excitement the look of admiration in her visitor's eyes. But shortly her cheeks grew hot with anger at him and at herself. He had insulted the colored people, "her people," as she had so recently called them, and she had said no word of protest. If she could not talk, she argued to herself, she could refuse to see this young man again. It was men like this who stole the Negro's crops, who kept their children in ignorance, who even broke down jail doors and lynched black prisoners. Why had she ever allowed herself to be kind to such a man? Then as she looked about her, as she seemed to see Dick in the chair by the table, she smiled a little. Probably it was foolish to get so excited on the matter. Mammy's last instructions were not to try to stand in two worlds, and if the white world showed more indifference, more antagonism to the black than even she had expected, she was in it and it was as well to know it as it was. In her loneliness she taught herself to believe that she had a right to become acquainted with this southern youth, but she resolved firmly not to let him have the conversation all to himself if he should again broach the Negro question. However bashful she might be, it should be possible for her to utter some forceful word.
With the coming of February, speeding did not stop at the "Imperial," while overtime crept in. Owing to rush orders the girls found themselves working half an hour or even an hour over the usual time to close. The 5:51 train became a thing of the past with Annie Black and she bemoaned it bitterly; but Hertha noticed that while there was complaint among the American girls and much grumbling over unfairness and meanness, it seemed to end there, while with the Jewish girls some plan was afoot. Seated, together at the luncheon hour, their eyes shining, a slight touch of color in their cheeks, a number of the more serious, with Sophie Switsky at their head, talked of something beside their feeling of fatigue, the forlornness of a cold dinner, or the loss of an evening with a gentleman friend. One day, coming in earlier than usual from luncheon, Hertha found herself drawn into the circle while Sophie explained the meaning of the conference.
The shop must be unionized. Only by this means was there any hope for justice. Without the union to back them, the employers could treat them as they pleased, could confer or withdraw favors at their pleasure. But with the union behind their demands this overtime work would cease and they would secure a better wage. Did Hertha not think the conditions abominable?
Hertha felt embarrassed. To these girls the trade which they worked was their one means of livelihood; they were intense in their attitude toward it, while to her it was only a step to something more, she did not yet know what. She regretted the long hours, but they would not last for many weeks, and as long as she could endure them and make good pay she had not thought of change. Richard Brown, whom she was seeing a good deal of now, urged her to drop the whole thing; but since he knew nothing of her affairs she took his advice lightly. Her little legacy kept her for the time in safety, but Sophie Switsky in her old dress with her wet shoes, sending money to her brother and striving to save for the summer, was not safe. Any day she might face starvation.
"I don't know about these things," Hertha stammered in answer to the question put to her.
"What's doing?" Annie Black asked good naturedly, coming over to them; but before she could receive a reply the signal came to turn to work again.
"I see there's a strike in the 'Parisian,'" Kathleen said the next morning as she scanned the paper. "Perhaps you'll be going out before long; you aren't organized."
"Kathleen," Hertha questioned, "do you believe in the union?"
"Do I believe in the union? Do I believe in God? There, don't be shocked, but there's something tangible about what the union done for me; while, when my sister Maggie broke her arm, just as Johnnie came down with the measles and her husband lost his job, I had to live by faith—and that's a poor thing to fill an empty stomach."
"Please talk sensibly," Hertha said.
"Am I not? I'm only saying that the ways of the Almighty are mysterious while the ways of the union, if you believe in the man who keeps the cash box, are clear and plain. The union is the only thing that stands between the working girl and starvation and sickness and sin. Don't forget that."
There was no laughter now in Kathleen's voice and her eyes glowed with emotion as she looked across the table at her questioner.
"We aren't unionized, Kathleen, but the 'Imperial' is one of the best shops in the city; all the girls say so."
"Then you're living on the work others have done and not doing your part. In sweat and suffering some union made the standard for your shop."
At work much the same talk was in the air. When luncheon came Annie received the answer to her question and learned of what was on foot. For some weeks Sophie and her colleagues had been working upon the other Jewish girls striving to win them to unionism. Now they were ready to turn to the Americans.
"We must join the union," Sophie called out in her clear if broken English. "See how we work long hours, and when the rush is over, no work. And if we say anything we lose our job."
"Shut up, then," said Annie crossly.
She looked about nervously, but as the foreman was absent, proceeded to enter the debate.
"It ain't so bad here," she announced. "There's lots worse shops in New York, Sophie, if you don't know it."
"That's right, Annie," one of her companions chimed in, "I got a lady friend works in a bum shop. You can smell the place before you come up the stairs."
"Sure," echoed another, "this ain't a bad shop; the boss is good to us."
"Good?" Sophie cried indignantly, "I do not call it good. We work and the boss pays us as small as he can."
"Listen!" Annie put down the pickle she was eating and proceeded to instruct the foreigner. "You don't know as much about America as I do, Sophie; you come from Russia where people are slaves. Yes, I read about it in the Sunday paper. But here in the United States every one is free. We don't need unions. If I don't like this shop I can up and go to another. There's nothing to stop me, and if you don't like it you can go, too."
"And if the boss don't like it he can fire us all!"
"Ain't he the right? He pays us. But sure he won't fire us if we stand by him. My father's worked for thirty years with the same house. You bet he don't get fired, and he don't belong to no union either."
Annie was very much in earnest. In her heart she felt intense disdain for these foreigners who came to her country and tried to lead her and other girls into a betrayal of their employer's trust.
Sophie had no idea of being worsted, but her position was difficult. She must try to convert the ignorant mind that felt itself superior to her, and she must do it with an imperfect knowledge of the tongue in which she spoke.
She made a brave attempt. In a torrent of broken English she explained the class struggle and the necessity for organization. She put before the girls the helplessness of the individual worker and her inability to bargain. The whim of a foreman or forelady, a day's sickness, a slackening in the trade, and she might be thrown out on the street. She made them all remember the uncertainty of obtaining work, the days of going from shop to shop, the long hours waiting on the chance of being taken on, only at last to return home disconsolate! She pictured the boss living in luxury while the girls who created his wealth were without proper clothes or food; and yet when they demanded a further share in his prosperity, that but for them could never have existed, he sneered as though they came for charity. Then came her picture of organization: the individual impotent, the mass of individuals, each helping one another, a mighty power that could grapple with the employer and force from him a generous wage. She told them of their trade as it had been in the past, of the battles that the workers had fought to secure for them their present measure of freedom. She decried Annie's free America. If America were free it was because there had been brave men who had overthrown England's tyranny and other brave men who had fought to free the slaves. And with her queer little accent she quoted, "Who would be free, himself must strike the blow."
Unquestionably she overawed her audience. Annie and her companions found her knowledge embarrassing and a little humiliating. They had all been to grammar school, Annie herself had recited a poem once before her class, but she had never looked upon knowledge with much zest and she found it difficult to follow Sophie's arguments. But when one of her companions asked, rather sheepishly, what it meant to join the union she was on safe ground.
"It means twenty cents a week of good pay out of your envelope," she declared with emphasis, "that's what it means, and you can bet your life you'll never get a penny of it back!"
For the next few days the girls marshaled their forces at noon and debated the union shop; at least, the Jewish girls debated while Annie and her friends gave that answer, so exasperating to the serious thinker, the retort irrelevant. Nothing so hurt the earnest supporters of organized industry as the way the Americans made a joke of it. "Of course Sophie wants us to join," Annie remarked once, not ill-humoredly, "it's up to her to bring in members. Didn't I see her going away last night with the organizer, anall-rightniker, sure enough?"
Sophie was enraged at the personal motive ascribed to her, but still more at having a devoted and unselfish union man called by a name used to describe self-seeking climbers. "He's not like that," she said indignantly, "he would to help us. I only talk with him to learn what to do."
"Well, find me a good looking man who can speak English," Annie went on, "and who'll take me to the theayter, and I'll go out on your strike," and she turned to receive reassuring smiles at her repartee and to start on a new piece of chewing gum, for there was little time when Annie was not in some fashion exercising her jaws.
Watching the two girls, one wondered whether in another generation Sophie would resemble Annie; there seemed little reason to believe that Annie would ever resemble Sophie. Annie was a loosely put together girl, with nondescript features and an air of good-humored carelessness. An unkind critic would have described her as common. She meant to have a good time when she was young and perhaps to marry later when the good time was over; that is, if marriage would assure her an easier life than the one she now led—otherwise she would have nothing of it. She had seen her mother burdened with many children and she did not mean to follow her mother's example. Long hours were disagreeable, but it would be more serious if the moving picture show across the way from where she lived were to close its doors; that indeed would have aroused her righteous wrath. Under her father's tutelage she had grown to believe that an organization of girls was unfeminine, and she enjoyed ridiculing Sophie's serious arguments and her picture of the coming day when the worker should own the product of his toil. If the Jewish girl, however, had made a personal appeal, if she had begged her to join the union not for a principle but as a favor to herself, Annie would have walked to headquarters and have put down her twenty cents; for she was a spendthrift by nature and cared less for twenty cents than Sophie did for one.
When the crash came it was a dramatic one. The "Parisian" girls had been out for two weeks, the strikers demanding better pay, while the employers tried to carry on their business with unskilled hands. Sophie reported the situation each day at noon, and urged upon the "Imperial" girls to stand by their striking sisters. Save with her own small group, this argument missed fire. Nevertheless, the most of them were interested in the struggle at the "Parisian" shop and watched hopefully for the triumph of the strikers. On a Thursday morning in February, as the girls began their work, the keener ones noted that there was a difference in the stock. To Hertha it meant nothing, but to Sophie it was portentous; and at noon, contrary to her custom, she rushed out into the street. A few minutes before the noon hour was over she was back again.
"Girls," she cried, hurrying into the room, "see, they give us scabs' work!"
Standing by her machine, she waved her unfinished shirtwaist as though it were an enemy banner. "It's 'Parisian,'" she cried, "there were not enough scabs to do it in their own shop and so they sent it here! We are breaking their strike, their strike for better pay!"
She spoke in Yiddish and the Jewish girls followed her excitedly, expressing indignation at her news.
"We will strike, Sophie," her friend, Rachel, said. "We cannot do work like this; it would be wicked."
Sophie again waved her enemy banner. "Will you be scabs?" she called out, this time in English. "Do you not see? This is not our waist; it is the 'Parisian.' I see the girls; they are downstairs, and they ask us to stop, to stand by them as sisters."
"What's all this noise?" cried the foreman sternly as he entered the room. And then without waiting for a response, though it was a few minutes too soon, he threw on the power.
Sophie, Rachel, and a dozen other Jewish girls stood excitedly in the aisle, failing to go to their seats.
"Get to work!" the foreman called above the din. Then thinking it advisable to consult with a higher authority, he left the room.
In a moment Sophie had thrown off the power.
"Sisters," she cried, "down below are the 'Parisian' girls, waiting for us. Will you be scabs? Will you take their work?"
"We'll pull down the shop," came from her adherents.
"No, you don't," came from Annie Black. "Those 'Parisian' sheenies can stay out if they want for all me. I stop here."
"Oh!" Sophie cried. "Shame!"
She was a little figure, thin, underfed, but with the soul of the fanatic gleaming from her deep eyes. Having known oppression in the land of her birth, she recognized it in the land of her adoption. Poverty was not something to accept as the beggar accepted his dole, nor was it something to struggle against alone. It was a grievous disease that the body politic might cure if only those who suffered courageously battled for health. Before her was the vision of a world set free, and for the moment at least there was to her no sacrifice in accepting hunger and cold if such privation might bring a step nearer the freedom that she worshiped. Only a few of the girls understood her call, but none doubted her sincerity.
"See!" she said, drawing an imaginary line with her foot upon the floor. "All who will not be scabs, all who will not take bread from the mouths of others, come to me, cross the line!"
A number of the Jewish girls rose and walked to Sophie's side. Some went with heads erect, eyes shining, exultant, as though drawing the fine breath of freedom. Others moved slowly, hesitatingly, sometimes casting angry looks at Sophie as though they wished to disobey her call and yet dared not stand out against her. "You go?" asked the girl at Hertha's right.
The call had been so sudden that Hertha, accustomed to taking her time before making any decision, had not moved. The voice at her side aroused her to do her part. Sophie was looking entreatingly in her direction; and with the realization that her choice one way or the other was of little personal moment, she rose from her chair and, saying quietly to her seatmate, "I think we ought to go," crossed the line.
Her stand, little as she appreciated it, had its influence. She had represented the aristocracy of the workroom. Had she been arrogant she would have been hated, but her uniform gentleness coupled with her refined face and graceful carriage, had made her a romantic character about whom one might weave tales of former greatness or unrequited love. That she should join the labor movement, linking herself with the despised foreigner, made a dozen of the doubtful follow in her lead.
"You come, too?" called Sophie to the few remaining Jews and the group of Americans.
"No!" cried Annie, "we ain't no dirty sheenies. We stand by the boss!"
"Scabs! Scabs!" Sophie hissed the word between her teeth. "Dirty scabs!" and with a swift movement she flung the power on again. "Keep on, you dirty scabs," she yelled, and, gathering her followers about her, rushed from the room.
Below stood the "Parisian" girls, and as the strikers appeared, hastily wrapped in their outer clothing, some with hats awry, others with coats flung over their arms, they gave cheer after cheer.
"We knew you'd pull down the shop, Sophie," a big, handsome Jewess cried, grasping the fragile strike-breaker by the arm. "We knew you'd never let the boss keep you working at our leavings."
"Girls," called out another of the leaders, "this is the fourth shop to go out this week. We'll win. Hurrah for the 'Imperial!' We'll win."
"Move on!" a policeman said sharply, pushing his way into the crowd. "What are you doing blocking the street this way? You girls should be at work!"
"We're on a strike," Sophie replied, "we go to Union Hall."
The officer watched them as they moved from the factory building, muttering to himself that they were sure to make trouble striking at the height of the season.
Hertha, though she tried to slip away, found herself caught up by the crowd. She was embarrassed and conscious that they were all the source of amused comment on the part of the spectators. Talking excitedly in Yiddish, the "Imperials" swung into line with their "Parisian" sisters and all started a triumphant progress down the avenue.
"Sure, you was fine," Sophie said to Hertha.
The little Jewish girl had grabbed her new recruit by the arm and with glowing face was leading her along the road to organization and industrial battle. There would be days and months ahead dedicated to the struggle to secure a better wage. The time was momentous, the opening of a great conflict. But to Hertha the time was auspicious for slipping away from these noisy working girls. She had given up her job at their call but she had no thought of following them in their struggle to get their jobs back again. Yet here she was on the avenue in a crowd that was attracting attention from the many passers-by. Supposing Richard Brown should see her or one of the nice people who bowed to her at church! She tried to make her escape, but it was as impossible to get from Sophie's grasp as from the clutch of a small and very friendly bear who had tucked your arm in his. So down the avenue and across into a side street she was swept with the eager, excited band of strike-breakers to Union Hall.
It was a small hall and crowded before they entered it. Confusion was piled upon confusion. Hertha, dropped for a moment by Sophie, who turned to speak to her organizer about whom the girls had joked, started at once to leave the building, but, half lifted off her feet, was forcibly pushed into a seat between two workers. Here she was compelled to remain while a man with a long, dirty beard addressed the meeting in an unknown tongue. So many people were moving about and talking in the rear of the hall that, it seemed to her, even if she had understood Yiddish, she would not have known what was being said. But occasionally the woman at her left would interpret. "He tell you to get a card. Give name. See?"
There was nothing to attract her in the crowd, now that she saw it assembled in this ill-smelling place. She thought the men rude and she wished heartily to get away. But she was wedged in her seat and must remain until time brought release. For a few minutes, however, when Sophie Switsky was on the platform, Hertha listened with attention. Not that she understood the words—Sophie used Yiddish—but emotion may transcend and illumine any speech. Here stood a working girl, young, almost childlike in appearance, whose face and tragic tones told of a willingness to die if need be for a cause. Watching her, for the first time since she had joined the crowd of strikers, Hertha forgot herself. For a little she felt her heart beat in sympathy. But with a sudden shock self-consciousness returned. Sophie had beckoned her, asking her to come to the platform. "Tell what you did!" she called out, smiling. "Some understand the English." The southern girl shook her head and when the woman at her side tried to help her to the aisle, gripped her seat with both hands. The horror of being made conspicuous swept over her again, and she sat with burning cheeks until Sophie mercifully went back to her Yiddish and left her alone.