Such thoughts, confused and swift, came to her, and she asked Rhona what had happened. How had the strike started? First, said Rhona, there was the strike at Marrin's--a spark that set off the other places. Then at Zandler's conditions had become so bad that one morning Jake Hedig, her boss, a young, pale-faced, black-haired man, suddenly arose and shouted in a loud voice throughout the shop:
"I am sick of slave-driving. I resign my job."
The boss, and some of the little bosses, set upon him, struck him, and dragged him out, but as he went he shouted lustily:
"Brothers and sisters, are you going to sit by your machines and see a fellow-worker used this way?"
The machines stopped: the hundreds of girls and the handful of men marched out simultaneously. Then, swiftly the sedition had spread about the city until a great night in Cooper Union, when, after speeches of peace and conciliation, one of the girls had risen, demanded and secured the floor, and moved a general strike. Her motion was unanimously carried, and when the chairman cried, in Yiddish: "Do you mean faith? Will you take the old Jewish oath?" up went two thousand hands, with one great chorus:
"If I turn traitor to the cause I now pledge, may this hand wither from the arm I now raise."
By this oath Rhona was bound. And so were thirty thousand others--Americans, Italians, Jews--and with them were some of the up-town women, some of the women of wealth, some of the big lawyers and the labor-leaders and reformers.
"Some of the up-town women!" thought Myra. She was amazed to find herself so interested, so wrought up. And she felt as if she had stumbled upon great issues and great struggles; she realized, dimly, that first moment, that this strike was involved in something larger, something vaster--swallowed up in the advance of democracy, in the advance of woman. All the woman in her responded to the call to arms.
And she was discovering now what Joe had meant by his "crisis"--what he had meant by his fight for "more democracy; a better and richer life; a superber people on earth. It was a real thing. She burned now to help Joe--she burned to do for him--to enter into his tragic struggle--to be of use to him.
"What are you going to do now?" she asked Rhona.