CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
In winter Gregory Allen always looked forward to summer, except for missing Puck, as a rest from the weary round of Margaret's enthusiasms, her uninteresting friends, and the boring parties to which he went because it was less trouble to go than to fuss about not going. During the winter he never made any close friends, but always thought he might do so in the summer. And then, after the first few weeks of freedom to come and go as he pleased, he began to miss Puck with her long, serious discussions of the doings of Lady Jane, and the well-managed house. In these moods he went to the club of Beaux Arts graduates, knowing beforehand that it would be no more interesting than either of the other two clubs to which he belonged. But he always felt that something interesting ought to develop, although it never did. The members who frequented it were men like himself, neither rich nor famous nor pushed out of the race, comfortable, moderately successful financially, with modest summer homes on Long Island, to which they sent their families from May to September. They had all adjusted their lives as he had, and beyond the round of their work, were as unmagnetic as the routine of their days. They all accepted each other as they were, and believed they were common-sense, practical men.
As for women, Gregory met very few in the course of his work; and, once relieved from his duty as Margaret's husband to the members of The Fortnightly, he could no more imagine looking any of them up during the summer, even if they had been in town, than he could have picked up a stray companion of the streets and spent a pleasant evening in some crowded dance-hall. He could no more imagine meeting Caroline Ainsworth or Mabel Dawson on the street and going home to dinner with them, than he could imagine doing something careless and impromptu with Margaret. Gregory smiled as he pictured himself walking off with Mabel Dawson or Caroline Ainsworth.
At Nineteenth Street the doctor turned east, crossed Gramercy Park and stopped before an old brownstone front on the north side.
"Here we are." They followed through a wide, cool hall, flagged in black and white marble, to a huge door on the right. Dr. Mary threw it open and swept them in with a flourish.
"There, you doubting Thomases. Not so bad, is it?"
Gregory and Jean looked at each other and laughed.
"Mary, I'm glad I didn't bet you that set of Dostoievsky. I would have been broke for a month."
"As long as you are repentant now, I won't crow. Dinner will be ready in a few minutes. I'll hurry it up."
Like the hall, the room was high, cool and dim. The heavy, tapestried furniture seemed built for the ample Dutch forms that had no doubt once inhabited it. It was impossible to imagine raucous voices or useless rush between these lofty walls.
"It's the only real bit of Old New York left," Gregory said, and with one accord they moved to the wide window looking down on the Park.
The rumble of the Third Avenue El, two blocks away, threw into sharp relief the spirit of the past, the old, unhurried past that hangs over Gramercy Park. Behind the scratched and rusted palings, the dusty trees stood aloof, superior to the hustle and roar of the great tide washing its borders; faithful to dead standards, tolerant of the rented keys that now open the gates, to the ever-changing stream of tenants that flows in and out of the brownstone fronts, once the stately homes of unhurrying men.
"Itisa bit of the past, isn't it?"
"Yes. It always makes me think of an old French marquise, stiff, powdered, poor, but never forgetting. Here, like this."
He took a scrap of paper from his pocket and drew, with a few strokes, a marquise of the older days.
"But you see, she has to make some concessions, while she waits here, year after year, for the return of the Bourbons, and so——" Gregory clapped upon her head a hat, just a little bedraggled and over-trimmed. "The Spirit of the Present. She bought it at a bargain."
"Oh, Mary!"
"No. Don't, please." Gregory tore up the paper in such discomfort that Jean wanted to pat him on the shoulder and say: "There, there."
"What?" Mary peered in through the door.
"When is that food coming?"
"In a moment." Mary disappeared.
Gregory looked at Jean and they laughed again. "Thanks," he said.
Until dessert the talk was general, mostly of the great strike of garment workers, and of Rachael Cohen, the leader.
"She is literally like a flame. And her people follow her blindly. They will win or lose by Rachael."
"Why lose?"
"They won't. They can't. But, the man whom Rachael loves, hates her people, her power, everything about Ray that makes her what she is, and yesterday Tom Dillon gave her the choice of leading this thing—think of it, fifty thousand people—and winning, because Rachaelwillwin, and a little house in the Bronx with some chickens and, I believe, a baby for good measure."
"Poor girl," Mary said sadly. "Jean, do you remember Carmen?"
Jean nodded. "Oh, Mary, it makes me sick clear through sometimes."
And then, for a little while, they talked of old times and people whom Gregory did not know, but he did not feel left out, only he wondered whether there were many women in the world like these two. Their interests were so varied and deep and they were so, almost exhaustingly, alive.
But with the coffee and cigarettes, they came again to the plans, and Gregory sketched his new idea. They all bent together over the table, suggested, disapproved, argued and contradicted each other, until Gregory forgot he was working with women at all.
It was half past nine when Jean pushed the plans away and stood up.
"Not another word, please," she begged, "or I'll begin on that sun-porch idea of mine and then I never will get to the meeting."
"Does every one's pet wrinkle get included in the general plan? Because I have a couple up my own sleeve," Gregory demanded, as he gathered up the sheets, disappointed that the evening was over.
"Certainly. Didn't I tell you the limit was an expanding quantity? You ought to have seen Mr. Allen's face, Mary, when I told him we didn't know how much we would have to spend."
"We may not know the amount but we know how we're going to get it. And now we've seen you, I think we will notch it up a few pegs, eh, Jean?"
Jean pretended to survey him critically. "Yes, I shouldn't wonder. Oh, Mary, they'll just eat it up, won't they?"
"Who? Me?" Gregory felt a little silly at this banter, but enjoyed it.
"No, the cake, which you will hand 'round."
"Never."
"Don't be alarmed. It won't be to-morrow. Not until winter. Right after the first blizzard we give a tea, very exclusive, only the rich invited. You've made a nice technical plan full of dotted lines and cross-sections, guaranteed to confuse any living female. Said plan hangs upon wall, real live architect, all dressed up, explains. Money pours in. By summer tenements are. Tenants move in. Q.E.D."
Gregory shook his head. "Plans until you're both dizzy with them, every female in the world sick with the blind staggers—but no tea."
"Oh, by that time, you'll be such a reformed character you'll beg to come."
Laughing, Jean moved to the door and Gregory followed. Dr. Mary came as far as the front door and watched them down the steps. On the sidewalk, Jean held out her hand.
"Good-night."
But Gregory Allen fell into step beside her. "Don't condemn me, please, to a roasting hot apartment alone or to a Broadway show. Mayn't I come? I'd like to see this Rachael."
"Of course, gladly, if you care to. But a lot of it will be in Yiddish and it will be fearfully hot and smelly. I want to talk with the committee and after the meeting is the best time."
Gregory did not answer but walked along beside her. She told him more of Rachael, banished by her family because of her love for the Gentile Tom; of the frightful conditions in the garment trade and the faith of her people in Rachael. Gregory Allen heard only stray phrases here and there. But he felt Jean's strength and belief as she swung along beside him, as unwearied as if the day were just beginning. When a woman was wonderful she was very wonderful indeed.
The hall was packed. From wall to wall a flat surface of women's dusky heads swayed like a dark sea, with here and there, like rocks rising above the surface, the hatted heads of men. From this sea rose a suppressed rumble, so that the walls seemed to vibrate with the throttled protest. As Gregory followed Jean to the seats instantly vacated for them, he felt as if he were dropping down far below the daily surface of his life. And as he took his seat it seemed to him that a trap literally closed above him, a trap of foul air, so thick it had the quality of iron, and of rebellion so unbreakable that it had the resistance of steel. A trap that, once having sprung, would never again rise above the imprisoned below. He looked to Jean. But Jean did not seem to be imprisoned in a foul subsurface. Her eyes glowed with excited interest and he realized that this was not a strange scene to her, but part of her daily interest.
"Do you think they will lose?" she asked, with a look that made Gregory feel as if her strong, white hands were drawing him gently with her into this seething mass, rumbling below the settled plane of his life with Margaret and Puck. But, before he could answer, the door at the rear of the platform opened, and a man and woman came out.
"He's the National Secretary of the Garment Workers. And she's Rose Kominsky——Ladies' Waist Makers. I wonder where Ray is."
The National Secretary was short and oily, with none of the dignity of his race. Western hustle was grafted upon Eastern servility. In the midst of bluster, he might suddenly cringe. He was a radical, but he appreciated the good job of being National Secretary, and if it had not been a tenet of his radicalism to despise insignia, he would have delighted in a gilt badge. He made a long speech, shouting and beating in his meaning with furious gestures of his fat hands. He amused and disgusted Gregory.
The local secretary followed, riding in on the wave of the other's emotion, with stated facts and proved data. As she flung her last bunch of clinching statistics to the ceiling, scattering it like confetti on the heads of the people, the rear door opened again, and a slip of a girl in black, with great black eyes in the dead whiteness of her face, came forward. The local secretary broke off her last sentence in the middle and sat down. The girl came to the very edge of the platform and waited quietly for the applause to cease. At last it died, and Rachael began to speak.
She spoke in Yiddish but Gregory felt that the terrible silence of the listening mass was a medium through which her words were registering in his consciousness. Jean was right. She was like a flame. Like an acetylene torch burning its way through all barriers of race difference, social strata and language. So fully did he feel that he knew what Rachael was saying that he scarcely noticed when at the end she swept into English.
"Wait," she cried, "wait in patience and in courage. For thousands of years our people have waited. For ages we workers have waited. And now the time is coming, each year a little nearer, with every battle, another inch. It is near, our freedom, near. Wait. Wait. And out of that waiting rises the thing we demand. It hears us calling. It is coming. It is there always, under the ashes of past hopes, never dead, always burning, a light. Keep heart. Keep faith. Do not kill the little spark. After all the years we have waited, can we not wait in faith a little longer?"
Before the roar of applause ceased, Jean and Gregory were out on the sidewalk. Here the heat was like a cool touch after the fetid heat of the hall.
"Whew."
Jean turned to him: "Did you get more than you bargained for?"
"Yes. In a way, I did," he answered slowly.
"I warned you."
He might have been a child who had disobeyed. Gregory frowned.
"I know you did," he said shortly, and then added, with a look that made Jean wonder what he meant, even after he was gone, "Thank you."
Did he mean for taking him? Or for the meeting itself?