We'll strike and keep on striking, we'll break their machinery, spoil their mills and factories, and drive them out. And even if we do not win at once, it is better to suffer and die fighting than to have the life ground out of us--is it not?"
"Yes, it is better!" she agreed. The passion in her voice did not escape him.
"Some day, perhaps sooner than we think, we shall have the true Armageddon, the general strike, when the last sleeping toiler shall have aroused himself from his lethargy to rise up and come into his inheritance." He seemed to detach himself from her, his eyes became more luminous.
"`Like unseen music in the night,'--so Sorel writes about it. They may scoff at it, the wise ones, but it will come. `Like music in the night!'
You respond to that!"
Again she was silent. They had walked on, through familiar streets that now seemed strange.
"You respond--I can tell," he said. "And yet, you are not like these others, like me, even. You are an American. And yet you are not like most of your countrywomen."
"Why do you say that?"
"I will tell you. Because they are cold, most of them, and trivial, they do not feel. But you--you can feel, you can love and hate. You look calm and cold, but you are not--I knew it when I looked at you, when you came up to me."
She did not know whether to resent or welcome his clairvoyance, his assumption of intimacy, his air of appropriation. But her curiosity was tingling.
"And you?" she asked. "Your name is Rolfe, isn't it?"
He assented. "And yours?"
She told him.
"You have been in America long--your family?"
"Very long," she said. "But you speak Italian, and Rolfe isn't an Italian name."
"My father was an Englishman, an artist, who lived in Italy--my mother a peasant woman from Lombardy, such as these who come to work in the mills.
When she was young she was beautiful--like a Madonna by an old master."
"An old master?"
"The old masters are the great painters who lived in Italy four hundred years ago. I was named after one of them--the greatest. I am called Leonard. He was Leonardo da Vinci."
The name, as Rolfe pronounced it, stirred her. And art, painting! It was a realm unknown to her, and yet the very suggestion of it evoked yearnings. And she recalled a picture in the window of Hartmann's book-store, a coloured print before which she used to stop on her way to and from the office, the copy of a landscape by a California artist. The steep hillside in the foreground was spread with the misty green of olive trees, and beyond--far beyond--a snow-covered peak, like some high altar, flamed red in the sunset. She had not been able to express her feeling for this picture, it had filled her with joy and sadness. Once she had ventured to enter and ask its price--ten dollars. And then came a morning when she had looked for it, and it was gone.
"And your father--did he paint beautiful pictures, too?"
"Ah, he was too much of a socialist. He was always away whey I was a child, and after my mother's death he used to take me with him. When I was seventeen we went to Milan to take part in the great strike, and there I saw the soldiers shooting down the workers by the hundreds, putting them in prison by the thousands. Then I went to live in England, among the socialists there, and I learned the printer's trade. When I first came to this country I was on a labour paper in New York, I set up type, I wrote articles, and once in a while I addressed meetings on the East Side. But even before I left London I had read a book on Syndicalism by one of the great Frenchmen, and after a while I began to realize that the proletariat would never get anywhere through socialism."
"The proletariat?" The word was new to Janet's ear.
"The great mass of the workers, the oppressed, the people you saw here to-day. Socialism is not for them. Socialism--political socialism--betrays them into the hands of the master class. Direct action is the thing, the general strike, war,--the new creed, the new religion that will bring salvation. I joined the Industrial Workers of the World that is the American organization of Syndicalism. I went west, to Colorado and California and Oregon, I preached to the workers wherever there was an uprising, I met the leaders, Ritter and Borkum and Antonelli and Jastro and Nellie Bond, I was useful to them, I understand Syndicalism as they do not. And now we are here, to sow the seed in the East. Come," he said, slipping his arm through hers, "I will take you to Headquarters, I will enlist you, you shall be my recruit. I will give you the cause, the religion you need."
She longed to go, and yet she drew back, puzzled. The man fired and fascinated her, but there were reservations, apprehensions concerning him, felt rather than reasoned. Because of her state of rebellion, of her intense desire to satisfy in action the emotion aroused by a sense of wrong, his creed had made a violent appeal, but in his voice, in his eyes, in his manner she had been quick to detect a personal, sexual note that disturbed and alarmed her, that implied in him a lack of unity.
"I can't, to-night," she said. "I must go home--my mother is all alone.
But I want to help, I want to do something."
They were standing on a corner, under a street lamp. And she averted her eyes from his glance.
"Then come to-morrow," he said eagerly. "You know where Headquarters is, in the Franco-Belgian Hall?"
"What could I do?" she asked.
"You? You could help in many ways--among the women. Do you know what picketing is?"
"You mean keeping the operatives out of the mills?"
"Yes, in the morning, when they go to work. And out of the Chippering Mill, especially. Ditmar, the agent of that mill, is the ablest of the lot, I'm told. He's the man we want to cripple."
"Cripple!" exclaimed Janet.
