Montgomery County sentinel. [volume] (Rockville, Md.) 1855-1974, 1931-10-16
OBSESSION--!
TRAGEDY OF
THE CAUSE
.HE blazing August fitted down
like a red hot stove lid over

By Fannie Hurst
20, 1881, Mcclure Newspaper Syndicate
(WNU Servlce.l

THE blazing August fitted down
like a red hot stove lid over
Il Clancy street.
D., In its way, it reminded Eta
Of the blazing kind Of fanaticlsm her
father brought home to the ground
floor, four-room apartment they occu-
pied in n dingy brown tenement. Eta
was sure, had you taken her fathers
temperature any of the twenty-four
hours of the day, he would have reg
istered fever heat. The dingy four
walls of their apartment rang with
the haranguing, the invective, the ar
gument and the dlatrlbe of his fanati-
cism on the subject Of better condl-
lions for day laborers in the building
trade.
OF course, Eta agreed with him.
Her father himself was living argu-
ment. He dragged leg from steel
beam that had felled him while work
ing on scaffolding of one of the most
spectacular office buildings In New
York. One of his lungs was half
eaten away from pneumonia con-
tracted while working on building
whose foundation had oozed wet slime
over his feet for half a winter.
Eta Rouke had plenty of reason to
resent the perlls, the long hours, the
exposure of trade such as her IA
Tiers. But his haranguing was so
relentless. Every spare hour was
spent at the meeting hall, at union
headquarters, at organizing camps.
The neighbors in the gaunt brown tene-
ment SHE'D away from him. The chill
dren made blah-blah noises with their
tongues when they saw him coming.
With the whole of her heart, Eta,
who was thirty-five, tired and dlsillu-
stoned, came to hate the very name
Of the Cause to which her father was
devoting so much Of his time, his
vitality and his strength. For twenty
years, while her glrlhood had slipped
from her and her devotion to her fa-
Their had dulled her eye and broken
her spirit, Eta had lived rebelllOusly
in the narrow Stun.
After all, man had always been mans
oppressor. There would always be
day laborers hurting from scaffOld-
ings and carrying down with them the
entire destinies of helpless families
and little children. There would al
ways be men who would never live to
see the interior of the beautiful homes
they created. There would always be
men forced to live in the squalor of
airless tenements while others lived
in the beauty of the homes their man
ual labor had constructed.
Rouke was fitting at windmllls, and
Eta who had yearned and yearned
over n period Of twenty years to coax
him into the country where he could
ply his building trade at the more
placid work Of carpentry, grew older
and bitterer and more disillusioned as
the merciless winter and the merciless
summers dashed their way into the
narrow aisle of Clancy street.
Earlier, when her own spirit was
higher and there had been youth
who had finally tired Of waiting, there
had been something idealstlc and
noble and exciting about ROulse's 10y
atty to the cause Of his fellow labor
ers. All that was gone now. ROuke
was a garrulous old fanatic. He but
tonholed whoever would listen to him,
he prattled Of capital and labor,
unions and vested interests. Mean
WHILE the men who had worked side
by side with him on the scaffoldng
for number Of years had grown
wealthy; had become foremen and
even master builders on their own
while Rouke prattled and prattled Of
dim Elysium, which, while It re-
manned very bright In his obsessed eyes
grew DINNER and DINNER in the dim
ming eyes Of Eta.
The summers were even more ter
rlble than the winters The one that
came in this particular August was as
hot as mask to the face. The mar
row tenement street oozed smells
Fables lay naked on fire escapes
Fruit rotted and drlpped on the push
carts. The apartment which Eta
shared with her father was rancid
with stale air and, to top II, II was
necessary because Of lack Of windows
TO keep the gas burning all day or
indulge in the alternative Of sitting,
sweltering in the hot darkness.
Hate began to smoldcr in Eta. Not
against the Cause that was keeping
her father, fanatic that he was, In
the swelter OF meeting halls when he
was not at his work, not against the
sitting tenement, but against her 70
Their himself. Fanatic. Fool.
The old dream Of place in the
country, even oneroom shanty on IA
river front, began to press against her
blazing eyellds with a pain that was
scarcely endurable. The time had
come, Eta realized to herself, when
II was either n matter Of escaping the
turgd horror Of those terror-rldden
days or going mad. Her father was
sacrificing his life to cause TINT
thanked him nOt--sacrl1cing his san
ity because sometimes It seemed TO
Eta that the madness OF Illustration
lay IN pools In the old mans eyes.
the came madness Of Illustration that
might be said TO lie IN the pool Of
Etta'g heart.
The days we're unbearable The
nights were unbearablc. The comings
and goings OF RQnhe, mumbling Of 10