Salome Shepard, reformer

by Helen M. Winslow

For what was this unexpected white form which appeared in the doorway, and advanced to meet them?

Salome was dressed in a clinging, white, soft serge, with falls of fine lace at the neck and wrists, and under the dim light of the piazza-lamp, she seemed like an angel of retribution, her eyes flaming reproach, and her hands raised in deprecation.

“Aren’t you ashamed of yourselves?” she burst forth, in ringing tones. “You, who call yourselves honest men, and loyal citizens! You who come here with a claim for fair play, you who come here to assert the right of every American to be treated with respect by every other; to insult and maltreat an old man with white hair—a man whom, as a long associate in your work, you should honor? Do you come to my house to call forth a man who was even now listening to plans for the improvement of your homes and lives and prospects, simply that you may turn yourselves into a pack of dogs to bark at him? Go home. Lay aside your prejudices and your low, unworthy passions, and think whether we be entirely in the wrong. Think whether you are showing yourselves worthy of being trusted? Go home and weigh calmly your conduct against that of these officers, and decide for yourselves whether you deserve to be met half-way. And I give you my word of honor as owner of the Shawsheen Mills, that when you decide to behave like men and not like beasts, you shall be treated as men. You shall have good places with good pay. You shall find that we are willing to do as much as—yes, more, than you are willing to do for us, and that we will meet you half-way in the open, fair discussion of all points connected with the labor question.”

“Three cheers for the lady!” shouted a hoodlum, who cared not which side he was on, provided he could make a noise.

But the cheers were stayed, and further demonstration was choked in utterance. For Otis Greenough fell suddenly at the feet of the woman who stood there boldly championing him and her sense of right.

The superintendent carried him quickly within and put him on a sofa; a physician was hastily summoned, and in a few words Villard dismissed the mob, now hushed and awe-stricken.

But Otis Greenough in one moment had passed beyond the disturbances of howling malcontents, beyond the petty smallness of his old-fashioned and cramped ideas, out into that world where there is no fear of anarchy and socialism, no disgrace in being a philanthropist, no bounds to the heart of love for all mankind, and no limits to the horizon of a larger, diviner life.

VIII.

Death is never fully realized until he is an actual presence; and Otis Greenough’s sudden demise before their eyes and almost under, if not by, their own hands, solemnized and terrified the mob, and brought the strikers to a sense of the desperate pass to which they had come.

The members of the Labor Union laid their grievances aside for the time, and paid every mark of respect to the old agent now that he had passed beyond the recognition of it. A sudden fit of apoplexy had blotted out his choleric and intolerant behavior, and left only the remembrance that he had been their head for many years.