Viewing page 10 of 27

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

171 THE CRISIS

sleepy physician from his slumbers and returned. The woman still groaned in pain. I opened the door slowly and stepped into her room. She lay under the scantiest cover, her face toward the wall, her shoulders heaving as she cried.

"Madam," I said, "the doctor will be here soon, I hope."

She turned. The flickering lamplight shone full upon her face, all flushed with the ravages of fever. I saw a tangled mass of raven hair, a perfect mouth, and two great eyes, sombre and gray. The very eyes that I had seen before me day after day and night after night all these dreary years. I started back, as one who sees a ghost. She started, too, then fell back and gazed intently upon my face.

"Mary" I cried.

Weakly she murmured, "Clark!"

In a moment I was on my knees beside her.

"Oh, Mary, you are suffering, be quiet."

'Twas all I could say.

"No, I'm not suffering now," she said.

"But I have suffered-a great deal, Clark."

She did not seem surprised that I should be there beside her and talked on hurriedly.

"I know I'm dying and I'm glad, so glad! Why did I live? WHy could I not have died before I met him? Why did God let me live to ruin our lives, bot yours and mind? You look old, Clark, very old."

I did not answer and she went on.

"I might have been so happy," she murmured. "I might have loved you; but I was wild, a wilful, foolish girl and you worshipped me until I tired of your adoration. I wanted fire-not love, I suppose; but before God, I loved him. I loved him, Clark!"

She covered her face in the bed clothes and sobbed hysterically and one who slept at her side, and whom I had not noticed until now, awoke. It was a little boy about four years old. He sat up and looked mournfully upon his weeping mother. Then he turned to me a cherub's gold-brown face and eyes as gray as dawn, his mother's eyes.

He has awakened now and is looking silently upon me as I write. Before she died she made me promise to take him. "You are good, Clark," she said. "Keep him and make him good, as you would make your own."

The madness of the old dream overwhelmed me. I bent and gently kissed her trembling lips.

"I promise you," I said, and then she died.

She lies there in the room across the hall and I have brought him over here, this quiet little fellow who seldom smiles and in whose baby eyes the seriousness of life seems lurking now.

"Make him good," she said.

It is a dream. His mother's weakness; his father's vice; my own new-found, cynical harshness. What has he to hope from these? Yet I must try. Because I loved his mother? No. That was a dream. Because God loves the child? Because God loves the child. That is no dream, I pray. He must grow strong and he must know the worldl its suffering and its sorrows. He must not dream and he must not shirk, he must know. He must be good and true and pure in thought, prepared to fight and suffer and, if need be, die for the right, as did teh son of another Mary in the long ago. My shattered life from now on must be given to him. It is my task. I must not fail. I will not fail, Gray Eyes, I promise you.

TEARS AND KISSES
By G. Douglas Johnson

There are tears of emotion, of joy, of sur-
prise,

There are tears far too deep for the lakes of
the eyes.

There are kisses like snowdrops, pink kisses
and red,

There are kisses that live in the hearts of
the dead!

The Looking Glass

LITERATURE.
"THE Poetic Year for 1916, A Critical Anthology," by William Stanley Braithwaite, is one of the important books of the season. In this volume Mr. Braithwaite allows himself and three other characters under the mythological names of Jason, Psyche and Cassandra to discuss at large the values of the school fo modern poets. The book is very exhaustive, for the critics review and quote not only from the better known writers, such as Untermeyer and Miss Burr, but form many obscure poets, whom Jason cleverly calls "the dandelions and anemones among poets-or, to be flat and offensive about it, the minor poets." Besides, the critics discuss such publications as "The Present-Day Poets of America and Great Britain," "An Anthology of the New Verse," "A Book of Princeton Verse," "The Catholic Anthology," "Some Imagist Poets, 1916," "The Chicago Anthology," and the author's own "Anthology for 1916." Of course, such a work is bound to be discursive, but for anyone who is truly interested in the curious trend of letter-day verse and who has time to spare, the "Critical Anthology" is both diverting and informing. One certainly would not need to read the poets themselves after a thorough perusal. The volume, which is published by Small, Maynard and Company, Boston, is beautifully got up and would adorn any library. The author in a prefatory note acknowledges his indebtedness to Mr. Alain LeRoy Locke for many helpful suggestions.

THE RIOT IN EAST ST. LOUIS
THE FACTS

THE New York Hearald says:

Anywhere between twenty-five and seventy-five Negroes and at lest half a dozen white men have been killed in race riots that have startled East St. Louis since last midnight. Black Valley, the big Negro quarter, was set afire by the mobs of whites and the flames have spread steadily until the business centre of the city is menaced at midnight.

The New York Call gives a little more detail:

Negroes are being shot down like rabbits and strung up to telegraph poles.

The official police estimate at 9 o'clock put the number of dead at 100. They reach this total partly through reports that many victims have been pursued into creeks and shot, burned in buildings or murdered and thrown into the Mississippi. The exact number of dead probably will never be known.

Six Negroes were hanged to telegraph poles in the south end of town. A telegraph poles in the south end of town. A reliable white man reports having-counted 19 Negro corpses on a side street.

THE CAUSES
According to New York Tribune:

Michael Whalen, president of the Central Trades and Labor Council here and likewise city clerk, gave one explanation of conditions which he thought led to the rioting.

Last summer 4,500 white men went on strike in the packing plants of Armour & Co., Morris & Co. and Swift & Co. Eight hundred Negroes from the South came into the plants as strikebreakers. When the strike ended the Negroes remained at work and an equivalent number of white men failed to get their jobs back. Since then there has been a stream of Negroes arriving. At least 2,500 Negroes have come from the South in the last year.

Managers of plants mentioned by Mr. WHalen asserted that not a white man had been deprived of work because of the Negroes. Even with the Negroes it was difficult to get enough labor, they said. They explained that rosy letters written back home by the first arrivals accounted for teh continued influx from the South. The Negro laborers were particulary pleased to get the same wages and hours as the white men.

The New York Herald says:

The rioting is a revival of the riots of a month ago, when the leaders of various labor unions found that many Negroes were being imported from the South. The unions had been arranging for a big strike, and the Negroes were induced to come here from the South to be ready to take the strikers' places.

The New York TImes adds:

The disorder began when a mob of 200 Negroes fired on an automobile load of policemen last night, killing one.

C. W. Wallace, editor of a Negro religious publication, said the firing on the police was due to a misunderstanding. According to Wallace's account, a Negro minster, a Negro physician, and himself were returning from St. Louis last night when they saw white "joy riders" ride down a block in Market street inhabited by Negroes and fire into the houses. The neighborhood was aroused and teh Negroes armed themselves. Wallace did not see the Negro mob fire on an automobile filled with policemen, but he said a witness told him that the Negroes thought when the police automobile stopped it was the joy riders returning. The shooting began, he was told, before this misunderstanding was removed. It was said that the policement were in plain clothes.

175