The song ceased, and she stood still, waiting for the procession to reach her. A group of heavy Belgian women were marching together. Suddenly, as by a simultaneous impulse, their voices rang out in the Internationale—the terrible Marseillaise of the workers:—
"Arise, ye prisoners of starvation!
Arise, ye wretched of the earth!"
And the refrain was taken up by hundreds of throats:—
"'Tis the final conflict,
Let each stand in his place!"
The walls of the street flung it back. On the sidewalk, pressed against the houses, men and women heard it with white faces. But Janet was carried on…. The scene changed, now she was gazing at a mass of human beings hemmed in by a line of soldiers. Behind the crowd was a row of old-fashioned brick houses, on the walls of which were patterned, by the cold electric light, the branches of the bare elms ranged along the sidewalk. People leaned out of the windows, like theatregoers at a play. The light illuminated the red and white bars of the ensign, upheld by the standard bearer of the regiment, the smaller flags flaunted by the strikers—each side clinging hardily to the emblem of human liberty. The light fell, too, harshly and brilliantly, on the workers in the front rank confronting the bayonets, and these seemed strangely indifferent, as though waiting for the flash of a photograph. A little farther on a group of boys, hands in pockets, stared at the soldiers with bravado. From the rear came that indescribable "booing" which those who have heard never forget, mingled with curses and cries:—"Vive la greve!"
"To hell with the Cossacks!"
"Kahm on—shoot!"
The backs of the soldiers, determined, unyielding, were covered with heavy brown capes that fell below the waist. As Janet's glance wandered down the line it was arrested by the face of a man in a visored woollen cap—a face that was almost sepia, in which large white eyeballs struck a note of hatred. And what she seemed to see in it, confronting her, were the hatred and despair of her own soul! The man might have been a Hungarian or a Pole; the breadth of his chin was accentuated by a wide, black moustache, his attitude was tense,—that of a maddened beast ready to spring at the soldier in front of him. He was plainly one of those who had reached the mental limit of endurance.
In contrast with this foreigner, confronting him, a young lieutenant stood motionless, his head cocked on one side, his hand grasping the club held a little behind him, his glance meeting the other's squarely, but with a different quality of defiance. All his faculties were on the alert. He wore no overcoat, and the uniform fitting close to his figure, the broad-brimmed campaign hat of felt served to bring into relief the physical characteristics of the American Anglo-Saxon, of the individualist who became the fighting pioneer. But Janet, save to register the presence of the intense antagonism between the two, scarcely noticed her fellow countryman…. Every moment she expected to see the black man spring,—and yet movement would have marred the drama of that consuming hatred….
Then, by one of those bewildering, kaleidoscopic shifts to which crowds are subject, the scene changed, more troops arrived, little by little the people were dispersed to drift together again by chance—in smaller numbers—several blocks away. Perhaps a hundred and fifty were scattered over the space formed by the intersection of two streets, where three or four special policemen with night sticks urged them on. Not a riot, or anything approaching it. The police were jeered, but the groups, apparently, had already begun to scatter, when from the triangular vestibule of a saloon on the corner darted a flame followed by an echoing report, a woman bundled up in a shawl screamed and sank on the snow. For an instant the little French-Canadian policeman whom the shot had missed gazed stupidly down at her….