"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.