Dwelling Place of Light, the — Complete eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 540 pages of information about Dwelling Place of Light, the — Complete.

Dwelling Place of Light, the — Complete eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 540 pages of information about Dwelling Place of Light, the — Complete.
in her was drowned in a sense of fellowship.  Their anger seemed to embody and express, as nothing else could have done, the revolt that had been rising, rising within her soul; and the babel to which she listened was not a confusion of tongues, but one voice lifted up to proclaim the wrongs of all the duped, of all the exploited and oppressed.  She was fused with them, their cause was her cause, their betrayers her betrayers.

Suddenly was heard the cry for which she had been tensely but unconsciously awaiting.  Another cry like that had rung out in another mob across the seas more than a century before.  “Ala Bastille!” became “To the Chippering!” Some man shouted it out in shrill English, hundreds repeated it; the Sicilian leaped from the trolley car, and his path could be followed by the agitated progress of the alien banner he bore.  “To the Chippering!” It rang in Janet’s ears like a call to battle.  Was she shouting it, too?  A galvanic thrill ran through the crowd, an impulse that turned their faces and started their steps down East Street toward the canal, and Janet was irresistibly carried along.  Nay, it seemed as if the force that second by second gained momentum was in her, that she herself had released and was guiding it!  Her feet were wet as she ploughed through the trampled snow, but she gave no thought to that.  The odour of humanity was in her nostrils.  On the left a gaunt Jew pressed against her, on the right a solid Ruthenian woman, one hand clasping her shawl, the other holding aloft a miniature emblem of New World liberty.  Her eyes were fixed on the grey skies, and from time to time her lips were parted in some strange, ancestral chant that could be heard above the shouting.  All about Janet were dark, awakening faces....

It chanced that an American, a college graduate, stood gazing down from a point of vantage upon this scene.  He was ignorant of anthropology, psychology, and the phenomena of environment; but bits of “knowledge” —­which he embodied in a newspaper article composed that evening stuck wax-like in his brain.  Not thus, he deplored, was the Anglo-Saxon wont to conduct his rebellions.  These Czechs and Slavs, Hebrews and Latins and Huns might have appropriately been clad in the skins worn by the hordes of Attila.  Had they not been drawn hither by the renown of the Republic’s wealth?  And how essentially did they differ from those other barbarians before whose bewildered, lustful gaze had risen the glittering palaces on the hills of the Tiber?  The spoils of Rome!  The spoils of America!  They appeared to him ferocious, atavistic beasts as they broke into the lumberyard beneath his window to tear the cord-wood from the piles and rush out again, armed with billets....

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Dwelling Place of Light, the — Complete from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.