CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Through the next three months Anne thought more about money than she had ever thought in her life before. During the Wainwright days she had often been able to save ten dollars a week, but now that this sum was abstracted before it reached her, the remainder refused to include all that it had included then. Their small bank balance Anne refused to count an asset. She never mentioned it and was not sure that Roger remembered they had it. When he suggested some extravagance, a week-end trip, or absurdly expensive theater seats, treats that in the past had been supposed to be made possible by this balance—but which, in the end, Anne had always managed without touching—she now escaped on the plea of fatigue. Nevertheless, when Roger stopped suggesting them, Anne was hurt and angry.
Each week she put aside something for little Roger's need. And if gradually his clothes began to be finer, his bassinet more elaborate, his weighing scales unnecessarily expensive, she did not allow herself to word the reason. Only when Roger donated with extra liberality to some strike benefit or defense fund did Anne deliberately go out and buy something little Roger could very well have done without.
In their daily intercourse there was now more of the old comradeship than there had been for months, but often, her light housework finished, Anne sat in a shady corner of the garden, spicy and sweet again in the hot spring sun, and wondered whence had come this feeling of silently and strongly holding out against something that was always in the background of her mind. Once she had felt this something to be in Roger himself, a kind of accidental quality that circumstances might or might not develop. But now she felt it as something beyond Roger, something permanent functioning through him. Between herself and Roger there was some essential difference. Their attitude toward the coming of Rogie, to Black Tom O'Connell and Merle, to the futile efforts of Hilary Wainwright, even their union against the duplicity of John Lowell, had held this germ of difference. Hour after hour Anne pried into her own motives for action and Roger's, trying to find the source of this difference, but when, in an entirely fictitious future, she sometimes glimpsed its possible scope, she fled back to the concrete present and Rogie.
It was always after one of these exhausting exhumations of motive and impulse that Anne gripped more firmly the old habit of discussion with Roger; that they went to one of the many protest meetings which, now that Anne refused concerts and theaters, had come to be Roger's chief interest outside the direct round of his work; or that Anne called for Roger at the loft, and, while she waited, tried to feel a little of the enthusiasm mounting sometimes almost to fever heat in him.
But the force and driving power that Roger felt as an almost concrete thing never included Anne. She could never lose herself in it, nor be carried away on its flood. It was too loud, too insistent, too hot, like hissing black steam, screaming through a narrow vent.
It did not frighten, but deadened something within, so that Anne, waiting quietly on the bench where Roger had first waited for Black Tom, felt her effort to believe in the ultimate aim of all this striving shrink and grow cold within her. To hear the violent click of Katya's typewriter depressed her. To see Black Tom suddenly rise, and, with the same sweeping gesture with which he had opened before her the advance of strike-breakers, throw clear to Roger some new plan, made Anne feel that the man's broken and unkempt hands had actually drawn her with them. Nor could she ever look at him without thinking of Merle.
Like a brilliant bird, Merle flitted about the dusty place, getting in every one's way, interrupting at her own whim, indifferent to their amused tolerance or irritation. Birdlike, she perched on the gate of Katya's den and chirped through Katya's clicking, or disturbed Roger with her flutey recital of a movie she had taken the afternoon off to enjoy. Only Black Tom's absorption did she respect, but sometimes, when she came and chattered to Anne, Anne saw her watching him with a wistful longing that was not in the least birdlike or gay.
Anne grew gradually to feel a protecting tenderness for Merle, quite distinct from her realization of the girl's shallow mind and different moral standards. It had a little of the same personal tenderness she felt for Hilda's confused thinking and perpetual gayety. When Merle referred to some mass meeting of protest that had fired the enthusiasm of the others to fever heat as "a beastly bore," and Roger or Katya demanded to know why she went, Anne felt that she understood.
For neither could Anne enter the spirit of these meetings. The hatred of the men and women, massed to demand justice for this and that, swept on high above Merle's head, but it weighted Anne and stuck to her like an unclean substance. Hundreds, sometimes thousands, of bodies smelling of sweat and dust and the day's toil in factory and machine shop, nauseated her and stifled the purpose of their rebellion. Alone, high in the clean sweetness of her own home, Anne could rebel against the blockade of Russia, the forced toil of little children, the throttling of free speech and liberty. But the air, thick with human breath, the shrill voices of boys and girls selling revolutionary pamphlets, the mass weight of their hatred, woke in her a rebellion against the stark ugliness of its expression that took all Anne's control not to express by rising and leaving the hall. When, inflamed by what she came to feel, as the weeks passed, was deliberate manipulation of this human capacity to hate, protest broke in that mounting cry of rage, that long-drawn, rising bellow of hatred, that inhuman baying with which they greeted the name of some oppressor, Anne shivered with actual cold. "B-o-o-o," it rose and fell and rose again like an icy blast, freezing Anne's capacity to share their anger.
Like bells, certain words and names rang out in signal—war-lords, wage slave, master class. Through the months with Hilary Wainwright Anne had heard them often and used them herself glibly. Now she felt that she would never again be able to utter them. As Hilda stripped the facts of birth and love to their biological skeletons, so these men and women stripped the words of their conventional acceptance, their usefulness as tags of common understanding, and released raging genii to perform their tasks. After such a meeting the surface of her body was covered with a clammy dampness.
But no torrent of unleashed hatred chilled Roger or made him cold and weak. Coming, at the end of May, from the largest meeting they had attended, Anne felt Roger throbbing with enthusiasm, even after they had walked blocks under the peaceful stars.
"Wasn't Tom great?" he demanded for the third time, unconscious that Anne had not answered. "When he talks as he did to-night he makes me think of Christ driving the money changers from the temple."
"The Bible would never have remained literature if Christ had ranted like that."
"It isn't ranting, Anne. He sees things like that, literally sees the workers slaves, just as bound and owned by capitalistic pressure as ever a black African savage was owned by a Southern cotton planter. He sees the 'masters' in their great Wall Street offices just as clearly as any master with the legal right to beat his slave." Roger tried to speak patiently, but sometimes the shadings of Anne's sensitiveness rasped him as much as this "ranting" rasped Anne. Was it really her dislike of Black Tom, what she insisted on calling the "coarseness of his moral fiber," that made her blind to the man's sincerity? Could not, or would not, Anne see above and beyond this single breach of the world's standard? Roger did not know. And, like Anne, fleeing before the definite revelation of the difference between herself and Roger, Roger, too, hurried away.
There was a pause and then Roger said:
"That was the biggest collection I've ever seen taken up at a meeting. Carson certainly can get the cash."
Anne saw, as if he had been there in the night before her, the thin, bowed shoulders of Robert Carson butted out over the edge of the platform in the final gesture he always took before defying the audience not to "give and give their all." His lank, black hair fell in a long side lock across his high forehead, his black eyes burned in his pale, thin face. She shivered.
"It's terrible to use hate like that, or pain, or any feeling, fan it to that white heat and then mint money from it."
Roger bit his lip. "It isn't hate or any pain. It's not a destroying force. It's the demand for universal justice and the right to Beauty that centuries of oppression have not been able to kill. It's love, Anne, not hate."
"Maybe," Anne said drearily, with such an unexpected cessation of personal interest that Roger turned to her quickly.
"You're tired, Anne. You ought not to have gone."
His eyes were concerned for her, for her personally, her body and her comfort. Anne swallowed the lump that rose suddenly in her throat.
"I guess I am. It was so hot and noisy and they last so long. It must be almost twelve."
Roger drew her arm into his. "I ought not to have let you go."
"I don't think I will any more—before Rogie comes."
"I sha'n't let you," Roger warned, and Anne smiled up at him. Roger smiled back: "You're nothing but a baby yourself."
But he was glad that Anne had decided not to go to any more meetings until after the baby came. Perhaps, then, he and Anne would go and understand together, as they had understood that day on the Bluff in the sweeping wind; and by the lake in the green and scarlet dawn.