The Rising Tide 4/5
J2 RPS AU
NC-17
Part 4 of 5
Master post
Art
A couple of guys on the night shift let the strikers in through the loading docks while the rest of the shift is leaving out the front - the night shift workers who joined the strike, which is most of them, will just double back and sneak in later - and then the strikers spread out through the mill, making sure all the entrances are barricaded and the place is shut up tight against any incursions. Jared feels like a general shoring up his defenses in preparation for a morning attack by the opposing army. He should have an officer's helmet, with a plume.
Some of the men drift off to find spots in which to nap. Jared doesn't want any lights on, doesn't want any indication to the outside world that anyone is inside the mill at a time when the building should be empty. He tries to gather everyone on the floor, among the still, quiet looms, to remind them of the plan and the process and the fact that they're doing this for themselves and their children and all the men and women who will come after them.
“We've taken control,” he reminds them. “We have to hold out until nine, and then the rest of the city will join us. This is ours” - he waves his arm, gesturing at the vast room with its vast looms, including the rest of the mill beyond - “and we're not giving it up until we get what we need. What time is it? Does anyone know?”
It's still too dark in the mill to see much, but someone strikes a match, peers at a pocketwatch, and yells out “Just five!”
Three hours, and then one more. Jared thinks about Jensen, no doubt nervously awake in their tiny flat. He thinks about Danneel, who's going to walk out on her job, and about Genevieve, who needs to find another way to get what she wants, and about Jake, who wouldn't be swayed to their side. Jared thinks about the millworkers who refused to join, who will be quite surprised when they're locked out come morning. Well, what did they expect? If they're not 100% with the strikers, they're against them.
He can't stand here and think. He needs to do something. He doesn't know definitively what will happen when everyone outside discovers the mill has been taken over, but he can guess the cops will come out in force to retake the mill owner's property. He has to make sure none of the strikers will just let them in. And aside from that, they all have three hours to kill and they need to be ready.
Jared asks for volunteers to watch the front entrance and the loading dock and any other entrances and exits they can find, to make sure no one tries to break in. He sends a few men up to the roof - reminding them to wait until they can see where they're putting their feet before they climb up there - to keep an eye out for the police. He chats with Misha. He reminds Chad to keep his mouth shut when the cops start making demands. He tries to calm Kurt when Kurt starts to panic about property theft and trespassing and whatever other charges he thinks the city and the Council can bring against them.
“Jim was telling us,” Kurt explains. “There are a lot of things they can charge us for. I can't go to jail. My wife and I are looking after the grandkids - my older daughter's got twin babies - my mom depends on me - ”
“You've already been to jail,” Jared reminds him. “The last strike, remember? Think about Tim. Think about your grandkids. You're doing this for them too, so they can grow up in a world where they have a right to a fair wage, a reasonable workweek, redress for their grievances, care if they get hurt, and some respect from their boss.” He puts his hand on Kurt's shoulder. “You're doing the right thing. Besides, it's too late to back out now.”
Kurt doesn't look reassured. Jared tells him to have faith.
To Jared's great surprise, some of the men lie down and take naps. He can't. His brain is working too hard, reviewing the current plan and contingencies, trying to think ahead, mentally checking off the workers who will join in at nine. He wonders if Jensen's awake, and if he is, what is he thinking. He takes a stroll around the mill to check up on the guys guarding the various entrances and exits. He counts millworkers - the men at the doors, the men on the roof, the men lying around the quiet looms.
By the time Tahmoh comes to see him, the sun is fully up and Jared thinks it must be almost time.
“Something wrong?” he asks. Tahmoh shakes his head.
“Not yet. Someone tried to get in through the back door. We told him we were striking and it was locked.”
“Who was it?” As far as Jared knows, the back door where Tahmoh was standing is used mainly by the owner. But there's no reason for the guy to be here now. He has an office upstairs but he's almost never in it.
“Dunno,” Tahmoh says. “He didn't say. We told him we had control of the mill and we're going to stay here until our demands are met. Police are probably on their way now.”
“The guys back there with you are on the night shift, aren't they? How are they holding up?”
Tahmoh shakes his head, smiling a little. “Ten hours on a loom, four more watching the door, and it's like they just got out of bed.”
Jared glances outside at the morning sunlight streaming through the tall windows, trying to judge what time it is. Jensen would know. He was always better at determining the hour by the angle of the sun. Besides, he has that nice pocketwatch.
“Get ready,” Jared tells Tahmoh. “This is it.” Tahmoh nods and heads back the way he came. Jared walks around the floor, waking men up, getting them ready. He's nervous but oddly excited. He has faith in his leadership and his plan and the men striking with him, and whatever happens in the rest of the city, the millworkers have still taken full control of the mill.
About half an hour later, one of the guys who was standing watch at the front door appears on the floor and reports that a man who claimed to be the bookkeeper showed up with two cops and tried to get in.
“They told us we're trespassing,” the striker finishes. He snickers.
“They'll bring the rest of the cops,” Jared tells him. “Be prepared.”
It takes a large group of police longer than Jared would have expected to show up, and by that time the men who wouldn't join the strike have arrived, tried and failed to get in, and are now standing around confusedly in front of the mill, or yelling at the workers inside.
The cops try to break in, of course, with no more success than anyone else. The police chief uses a bullhorn to tell the men in the mill that they're all under arrest for trespassing and unlawful entry, both of which make Jared laugh. The day shift workers are supposed to be here. The guys who work nights entered the mill for their shift yesterday. And none of them should be intimidated. They have the power now. They have the mill.
Because the strike was Jared's idea, and because he worked so hard to make it happen, he elected himself spokesman. He thinks he'll make the police chief sweat it out a little longer. Can he make the guy wait until the rest of the city shuts down?
The police chief repeats the charges, adds a couple more for good measure, and appears to direct some of his men to try and break down the front doors again.
Misha comes up next to where Jared is watching this through the window and comments “If they break out the big guns we're in trouble. The cops have a battering ram.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Jared says. “Have you seen the doors?”
“I have, and I've seen the men watching them. We're tough, but we should prepare ourselves for a fight.”
Jared tries to push the window open - the bottom panels of the windows are supposed to swing out to allow fresh air onto the floor - and when it won't budge, he tries another. He leans out of the second window as much as he can and yells “We have the mill! We're not leaving!”
“Make your demands,” Misha reminds him.
“You're all under arrest!” is the police chief's answer.
“Get the owner down here!” Jared yells back. “We'll only talk to him!” He swings the window shut. “Go make sure the doors are all secure,” he tells Misha, and Misha goes.
The police chief looks like he's giving orders to the cops standing around. They clear off all the bystanders, curious passersby and locked-out mill workers both. Jared keeps an eye on them.
After what feels like forever, during which time Jared talks to Misha and Jim and Chad and a bunch of other guys, someone runs up to the police chief and says something to him.
“We're not done here,” the police chief tells Jared through his bullhorn, before apparently leaving someone else in charge and storming off.
“It's time,” Jared says, mostly to himself. He can imagine what pulled the police chief away - steam trams sitting idle on their tracks, chambermaids walking out of their hotels, sewing machines and steam irons in the garment factories falling silent and cold. He can't help but smile as he pictures men and women leaving their places of work and marching on the sidewalks in protest. But he needs to know for sure.
The answer comes in the form of Osric climbing through a window into the coat room. It only takes him five minutes to run into someone, but ten minutes to explain who he is and reassure the guy that he isn't a spy.
“What's the good word?” Jared asks him.
“There are cops everywhere,” Osric says, breathless. “So many steam trams have stopped. It looks like the central depot sent out more drivers, but some of them don't want to cross the strikers. All the striking drivers look ready to fight. You should see the hotel workers! Half the chambermaids walked out still in their uniforms. I saw Danneel and she said they'll all get docked for that, but they were in such a hurry they didn't bother to change back into their street clothes. They're marching in front of the hotel, demanding better hours and more consistent wages.”
“Take a breath. What do you hear from the garment factories? The docks? The landing fields?”
“I saw a delivery guy get into it with a greengrocer. Cops were just marching on one of the garment factories when I got there, but the girls were putting up some fight.” He can't stop grinning. “I thought I heard someone say a buggy factory was on strike too. The steam trams are just sitting there. It's crazy. I had to hide from the cops standing in front of your mill.”
“Have you seen Genevieve?” Osric shakes his head. “Jensen?” Another shake. “Okay. What's your next stop?”
“The central tram depot. We have a man there.”
“Be careful.”
“Will do!” Osric salutes.
“You know how to get back out?”
“I'll take him,” Chad says. “Then I'll go up to the roof.”
He leads Osric off. Jared thinks. So far, so good. The police can't get into the mill, the trams aren't running, the factories are shut down. He wonders how many people are striking out in the city. He wishes he'd asked Osric to try to get a headcount. He wishes he'd asked Osric to tell Jensen he's okay.
“What now?” Matt asks him, not ten minutes later. “Can we make our demands?”
“We're waiting for the owner,” Jared says. “Remember, we'll only talk to him. And I want to see what happens in the rest of the city.”
“That boy who was just here said everything stopped.”
“His name's Osric. I know. But walking out on the job means nothing if you don't stay off the job. We'll give it until at least tonight. See what happens. For now, walk around, pee if you have to, take advantage of the free time.”
Jared takes his own advice and goes for a walk through the mill, checking on his fellow strikers, making sure everyone is behaving, telling them to keep their heads down and their spirits up.
“This is just the beginning,” he says, in every place he stops. “We have a list of grievances the length of my arm but we're not getting anything until the owner realize we're in this for the long haul. If we stick this out,” he reminds the family men, “you'll be able to take better care of your families. We're doing this for your kids,” he reminds the fathers, “and your younger brothers and sisters,” he reminds the older brothers, “and future generations that haven't been born yet,” he reminds the newlyweds and the bachelors. “We're doing this for us. The city's workers are behind us.” He isn't entirely sure that's true, but they did get what sounds like a very large percentage of laborers and bottom-income workers to strike with them. They convinced enough people to fall in with them that the city has ground to a halt.
“I gotta tell my kid I'm okay,” Jim says. His daughter Maddie works as a housemaid for a wealthy family. She and other girls like her aren't part of the strike - their working conditions vary wildly, and at least some of them have secure beds and regular meals in the houses where they work, which they won't jeopardize - but she knows, as a lot of them must know, what's going on and why.
This is the first strike of its kind. Not just that the men in the mill have taken it over, but that they've brought enough of the city to strike with them. No one knows what's going to happen.
“The next time a runner comes in we'll tell him to let her know,” Jared says. Another thing he should have asked Osric - let people's families know they're safe. Osric will probably tell Jensen - as far as Jared's aware, there's still a show tonight, and Jensen will want to know - and Victoria will probably assume Misha is in one piece, but other people's families might worry.
Everything about this is a learning experience, he thinks. He feels like he should be taking notes.
The police chief comes back around six, to remind the mill workers through his bullhorn that the strike is illegal and they all need to leave the premises so the night shift can get to their stations. Jared pushes open a window again and yells out that they're not doing anything wrong, they're only trying to get the mill owner to listen to them.
“This strike is still illegal,” the police chief repeats. “Don't make us break in.”
Jared knows the doors are barricaded too well for that. If the cops could break into the place, they would have by now. He assumes Chad or someone else blocked the window into the coat room after Osric snuck back out.
“I'd like to see you try,” Chad calls. Jared gives him a shove to get him away from the window.
Another cop comes up to the police chief and says something to him. The police chief stomps off, leaving a contingent of men behind. Jared shuts the window.
“Something's happening,” he tells Chad and Misha. “I don't know what. We need to organize ourselves in case we're here for a while. Make arrangements for food. Make sure we don't get bored.”
“I can do that,” Chad says. “Fun coming up.” He trots off, presumably to organize group games or indoor sports leagues or something. Jared lets himself admit that he was worried Chad would do something dumb and rash out of an overabundance of excitement, but so far, he's behaving himself pretty well.
“How long do you think we'll be in here?” Jared asks Misha, now that they're alone. Men are wandering all over the mill, and every so often someone comes over to the windows to peer out at the police, but when they get close to Jared and Misha, Misha waves them away. “This is all new. I don't think anyone knows what to expect.”
“In some ways it's the same as any other strike,” Misha says, apparently trying to sound reassuring. “We wait for the owner to get down here, listen to our demands, and decide what he's going to do. The only new variable is whether or not he can get the police to break in and force us out.”
“So you're saying you don't know.”
“That's exactly what I'm saying.”
“That doesn't help me. Chad's probably getting a bunch of poker games up and running right now, but we have to eat and sleep and poker's going to get boring. We have to be organized about this. I caught a couple guys trying to break into a locked office earlier, and that can't happen again. We won't get anything if we're acting like a bunch of hooligans.”
“We can get volunteers to think of things to keep us sharp. Victoria and some of the other wives are going to try and get us dinner later, so we won't starve.”
Finding out what the workers are interested in is a good idea. Jared goes off in search of some paper and a pencil, so he can keep track of what people tell him.
A couple of days later Jensen is quite surprised to get to the theater only to discover a notice pasted across the doors announcing that the building has been closed by order of the Council, due to unsafe and unsanitary conditions. If he didn't have to open the place for the matinee, he'd laugh. As if the Council has ever cared about unsafe conditions in the poorer wards. If they did, every single apartment building would have been condemned years ago.
His first impulse is to slice through the notice, unlock the doors, and go inside anyway. He goes around to the alley, where there's another notice slapped on the stage door. He unlocks that door and goes inside. It's true that they still can't find the source of the leak backstage, but it's also true that they've been working around it, and as anyone who works in theater knows, the show must go on.
Jensen unlocks the front doors from the inside, ripping the Council notice in the process, and tries to figure out how to get it off. It's been glued on with paste, like the kind Alex uses to put up the posters for new shows. Jensen knows how well that stuff can stick, but this notice was slapped up quickly and not very thoroughly, and he thinks hot water and a good brush might get take care of it.
He's sponging and scraping when Alex appears.
“What's up, boss?” Alex asks. “What's on the door?”
“Notice from the Council,” Jensen says, scraping at a particularly stubborn bit of paper. “They're trying to close the theater for unsafe conditions.”
“What unsafe conditions? We haven't had a gas leak in a year, and I haven't fallen off the catwalk yet. Is it because of the leak backstage? Why would anyone close the theater for that?”
“They didn't. If I remember right, the gas leak was your fault. Find a scrub brush and help me.”
With Alex's help Jensen gets most of the notice off the door in short order, and then he leaves Alex to get rid of the remaining bits and shreds and goes back inside. He checks the props, the costumes, the sets, even the rows of seats and the tickets locked up in the box office. The puddle from the most recent leak has dried, but it's anyone's guess when the leak will return. Jensen carefully climbs up the catwalk to look at the spotlights, which seem to be in good enough working order, at least for now. He climbs down and checks the footlights, which are also currently fine. The curtain is secure. He fills his bucket with more hot water and takes his sponge and brush outside to scrape the notice off the stage door.
By the time he's done with that the rest of the company has started filing in to get ready for the matinee. Alex comes to get the key to the box office so he can set up. Alona has a complaint about her costume, of course, and Sterling has what sounds like a cold.
“Why are you here?” Jensen asks him. “You sound terrible.”
“I can go on,” Sterling says, and sneezes. Jensen hands him a handkerchief. It's not the cleanest hankie, but it's better than nothing. Sterling blows his nose.
“No you can't. Osric's your understudy. He'll go on for you.”
Fortunately Sterling's role is flexible enough that Osric won't look out of place playing it, but Osric hasn't shown up yet. Jensen knows he's running messages between Jared's mill and all the other strikers, but that's no excuse. He's not the only runner.
Danneel is still striking with her fellow chambermaids, and in fact they've been able to join the march the garment workers have scheduled for this afternoon - Jensen is impressed the chambermaids haven't given in yet - but Sam will take over for her. This is why they have understudies.
The theater is reasonably full for a Sunday matinee, especially considering half the city is on strike, and when Osric fails to show up, Jensen puts on Sterling's costume (which fits him better anyway) and goes on in his place. He makes Sterling take over the prompting, and by the end of the first act he realizes that he can devote himself to performing and leave everything else to the rest of the company, and the show will run just fine. It's both reassuring, because it means he hired competent people, and sobering, because it makes him feel unnecessary.
What is not reassuring is that halfway through the second act, four policemen bang into the auditorium and demand the show stop and the audience leave.
Jensen is offstage waiting for his cue but it's hard to miss the sounds of police making demands and audience members hesitantly starting to move. He walks onstage and down to the apron, behind the footlights, and calls out “What's the problem?”
“This theater's closed by order of the Council,” one of the cops calls back. He waves at the rows of seats nearest to him, indicating that the people sitting in them should move a little faster. “Didn't you see the notice?”
“Yeah, I saw it. It didn't make sense.”
“You need to leave, otherwise we'll fine you.”
“I'm not the owner. I'm just the manager.” Meaning, You won't be getting any money out of me and it would be dumb to try. “Why are you even here?” He can feel the rest of the cast standing onstage behind him. Not everyone in the audience is leaving, and Jensen wonders briefly if there's going to be an altercation. The cops haven't stopped moving and haven't stopped trying to get people out, but the longer anyone resists, the closer a fight comes to breaking out.
“We were told that someone had opened the theater in clear defiance of a posted Council order. You have until the count of five to leave peacefully, and then we'll use force. The fine goes without saying.”
“We're not going until you tell us why,” Alona calls from somewhere behind Jensen.
“The building's been deemed unsafe,” the cop says, sounding almost tired. “Don't you people read?”
Jensen holds a hand out to the side, trying to communicate to everyone on stage that they should keep their mouths shut. He can sense the unease and bafflement behind him, and the unease in the audience. He can't understand why an inoffensive little theater in a poor ward should demand any cop's attention, when half the city is on strike and marching in the streets. The police should have better things to do.
It suddenly occurs to him that he probably should have canceled the matinee in solidarity with the striking workers, and so the cast and crew could show their support for the garment workers' march. Jared would no doubt be pleased with him if he did. Well, too late now.
“Is it because of the leak?” Jake asks. Jensen wants to smack him but the nearest cop doesn't seem to have heard.
“Five,” the cop says, holding up his hand. He bends his thumb in. “Four. Three. Two. One. You're out.” He pulls his nightstick from his belt and uses it to shove people towards the auditorium doors, and then someone shoves back.
Great.
“We said move!” one of the other cops yells, and now there's a lot more pushing and shoving, from both police and audience members. A woman starts slapping one of the cops with her hat. Jake jumps off the stage and into the melee, followed by half the cast and what looks like most of the crew.
Jensen is a reasonably law-abiding citizen under normal circumstances. He knows there's nothing to be gained by antagonizing the police, not when you're a person of little power and less money. And everyone in this theater, from the cast and crew on down to the parents who occasionally bring their disruptive toddlers to productions that no toddler should see, is a person of little power, and in the interests of protecting their own skins, none of them should be fighting back.
But these are not normal circumstances. The strikes are wide-ranging enough that everyone here is affected in some way. Even if people aren't aware of all the ways in which the wealthy and powerful alternately take advantage of and ignore the lower wards, even if they haven't had to listen to one of Jared's sermons about the subject, they feel the effects every day, and if nothing else they're aware of how little the greater body of policemen cares to protect them.
Jensen realizes that the strikes all over the city, the strikes that Jared bullied and cajoled into being in order to bring the city to its knees and the Council to the table so the workers could negotiate for a better life - those strikes did something else besides show the upper classes the power of organized labor. They showed the lower classes they had power, and they could fight back.
And now, in Jensen's theater, in the middle of a Sunday matinee, they're doing just that.
All because someone, for some reason, wanted to close the Augustus, and “unsafe and unsanitary conditions” was the best excuse they could think of.
Jensen jumps off the stage to join the fray. All he cares about is getting the police out of his theater before they can hurt - or worse, arrest - anyone. He doesn't bear them any love, but he doesn't want them hurt either, and once this is taken care of, then he can apply himself to the task of figuring out why the order was issued and the notice posted to close the theater in the first place.
Some people left when the cops appeared, but four policemen, armed only with nightsticks, are no match for even half a small theater's worth of confused, angry people. They don't get a lot of free time and they take their chances to be entertained when they can. No policeman should be able to just barge into a theater for no good reason and make people leave in the middle of a production they've paid for. Don't these cops know the city is in an upheaval? Don't they have better things to do with their time?
Eventually the police are pushed out of the building, although not without some blood being shed and some damage being done. Jensen considers it lucky that no one was arrested and no one was killed, and he'll take a little damage to the theater if it means everyone can go home in more or less one piece.
“Shouldn't we finish the play, boss?” Alex asks, half his sentence lost into his arm as he wipes blood off his nose with his sleeve.
Jensen looks around. Some of his audience has vanished into the ward, either chasing the cops or, what, avoiding them? Most of the cast and crew is within earshot, but is it worth it to try and resume the production? They had half of the second act and all of the third to go. Should he try and get everyone back into the theater for half a play?
“See who you can find,” Jensen tells him. “Tell them to go back inside.”
He sends Sam off on the same errand, with additional instructions to suggest to the people milling around that they go back inside the theater for the rest of the show. She goes off in one direction and he goes in the other, and fifteen minutes later the entirety of the cast (minus Alona, who seems to have disappeared) and most of the crew has been reassembled, the theater has been partly refilled, and any costume damage has been hurriedly fixed. He apologizes to the audience, thanks them for coming back, and gives the cast their cue. He doesn't want to wait for - or spend time trying to find - Alona, and is relieved when she bursts into the auditorium and hustles down a side aisle and backstage.
“Where were you?” Jensen hisses, as she straightens her costume.
“I was on my way to the march,” she explains, breathless from running, “when I realized I was still in costume.” She flips the skirt around. “How do I look?”
“Fine. You're up soon.”
It takes until partway through the third act for the cast to really get back into the mood of the play, but they get control of themselves and the situation, and Jensen thinks it ends well. They get a standing ovation, much to his surprise. Is it because the show went on after the cops tried to break it up? Is it because the theater company fought back? Who knows? The company almost never gets a standing ovation, except occasionally on opening night, although back when Jensen was new to the city and new to the Augustus, the audience stood for a performance by a pillar of the ward, a man who hadn't walked a stage in twenty years but who had been famous when he did.
Jensen doesn't know if the garment workers' march is still going - Danneel told him the route they planned to take, and when and where the speeches were scheduled, but it's anyone's guess if they stayed on route and on schedule - and there's always the chance that enough cops showed to derail it altogether - but he wants to show his support for the strikers. He practically shoves everyone out of the theater as soon as they can get their costumes and makeup off, and as soon as the stage can be reset for tomorrow night, the lights turned off, and the ticket money locked up.
Alona practically drags him through the streets to find the march, Alex hanging on to his coat, and either they're lucky or the march is slow, because they find a spot on the sidewalk in enough time to cheer on the garment workers passing by.
“Have you seen a group of hotel chambermaids?” Jensen asks an older woman standing next to him.
“Can't tell who all they are,” she says. “Could be chambermaids.”
It looks like some of the women are carrying banners and signs, but Jensen's view is blocked just enough that he can't clearly read them. The marchers chant and wave their signs and demand better working hours, better working conditions, better pay. He wonders how many factories they've closed down, if they've closed any at all, and he's impressed that there are so many of them and that there hasn't been any violence yet to try and get them to disperse.
“Got two daughters in that crowd,” the woman next to Jensen tells him. She points at the marchers streaming past. “Twelve hours a day they work, six days a week. One of 'em was out three days and they would've given her seat to someone else if her sister wasn't a good enough worker to make them hold it. I do piecework and look after their kids.” The woman huffs. “Me and my husband came to this city when our girls were just little things. Sometimes I wish we'd stayed on my dad's farm. He had a heavy hand but we was family.”
Jensen nods in understanding. He's never wished he hadn't come to Mendeley - he met Jared here, for one thing, and he wouldn't change that for all the money in the world - but he knows what she means. Back home, in the small towns where people like them came from, they knew where they stood in the world and they knew the people in charge of their lives. If Jensen hadn't run away to the big city, he'd be working for his father, sitting on a bench next to his brother making and repairing shoes. A respectable living, but not one he ever wanted. He might be married to a nice girl by now, probably even with a baby. He wouldn't have much of an outlet for his love of performance. The church his family attends doesn't even have a choir for him to join.
Better for him here, in a city big enough for him to carve out his own space, live a life he can design for himself. Even if someone else is always in charge and taking advantage, even if the men and women in power are so much more unreachable and untouchable than they were at home. There are more people like him in the city, more of the powerless who can be taught that if enough of them band together, there's no limit to their power.
These thoughts make him snort in amusement. He sounds like Jared.
Now the march seems to be coming to an end. The groups streaming down the street are thinning out. They're still chanting and waving their signs, and the crowds on the sidewalks are still cheering and clapping and yelling out both encouragement and insults. Jensen can't tell if the marchers are garment workers or chambermaids or another group of striking female laborers, but it doesn't matter. They're all in it together.
“Where do your daughters work?” Jensen asks the woman next to him.
“Swan Garment Company,” she says. “My middle girl works at a candy factory, but they didn't want to strike.” She shakes her head. “Guess they think they're well taken care of. My oldest said there's speeches after the march. Come on.” She pushes through the people bunched on the sidewalk without even checking to see if Jensen is following her.
“We should go listen to the speakers,” Alona says on his other side, unknowingly echoing the older woman, who has now disappeared into the crowd.
Jensen is pretty sure they've missed some of the speeches by now, but he lets Alona lead him and Alex through the wards to where a massive crowd has packed into Ennitt Square, pressing around a temporary platform. There are four women standing very close together on top of it, one of them yelling into a bullhorn to make herself heard. Jensen can't understand most of what she's saying - he and Alex and Alona are too far away and there are too many people making too much noise - so he asks a man standing near him what's going on. The guy summarizes the speeches they missed and translates the current murmur into a call for equal pay and better opportunities for women, allowances for pregnant girls and new mothers, equal rights and opportunities for immigrants, stricter child labor laws, better working conditions for everyone, recompense for on-the-job injuries, and more humane working hours.
One of the women standing on the platform is holding a sign, which Alex deciphers as saying “United Women's Labor Organization”. Jensen wonders how much Jared and his fellow sit-in strikers know about the march and the speakers and this working women's organization, and what they think of it. It feels to Jensen as if this thing that Jared put into motion, this thing he bullied into existence, is slipping out of his grasp and away from him.
The plight of the working man and woman is bigger than one person, obviously. But this march and this gathering exist because Jared realized that small-scale strikes here and there won't accomplish as much as a giant, city-wide shutdown. The garment workers and hotel chambermaids and whoever else was pulled into this ladies' labor organization was only organized on such a large scale, and at this particular point in time, because Jared and his fellow millworkers decided to include as many working-class people in as many industries as they possibly could. Jensen is convinced that the four women standing on that platform in the middle of the square, as dedicated and as earnest as they are, wouldn't be there and wouldn't have attracted such a crowd if Jared hadn't convinced them and the steam tram operators and the street cleaners and the dockworkers and the men and women toiling in factories all over the city to shut off their machines and put down their tools and stop their trams at the same time on the same day, and bring the city to a screeching halt.
But Jensen needs to be more generous. Jared wouldn't want to take credit for every single strike in every single ward. He leads his fellow laborers in the mill where they work, but if asked, he'd just say he convinced the workers of the city that they have to band together to get what they need, and if they organize, they can make demands and get the Council to concede. He'd say each bloc has its own leader, who isn't him.
Jensen needs to step back and give these women credit for their own efforts, and not try to put their power back into Jared's hands. Isn't the whole point of this strike to get everyone to see that organizing is its own kind of power? It isn't about one man being able to claim credit for the whole thing. It's about many men and women taking control and joining up with their neighbors and coworkers to demand a better life for everyone.
It's exhilarating being here among all these people, although after awhile Jensen starts to feel too crowded. Everyone is pretty well packed into the square, all trying to hear the women speaking. He was never a big fan of crowds like this, and while he hates to leave before the rally is over, he can't stay packed in like a sardine for much longer.
“How much longer do you think this will go on?” he asks Alona, who shrugs.
“Until they're done,” she says unhelpfully.
“I'm going to go back to the theater and make sure everything's ready for tomorrow. Good show today.”
“Even though the cops busted it up?” She grins and Jensen has to grin back.
“Good show bringing it back. I'll see you tomorrow. Don't be late.” He pushes his way through the crowd and out.
The next day, to his surprise, he gets to the theater to find not only another notice pasted across the front doors, but a heavy chain with a padlock laced through the door handles. He goes down the alley to discover someone has nailed a board across the stage door. There's another notice slapped on the board and Jensen realizes that this is more than just someone complaining about the leak backstage. This has to be personal.
This is not something he can take care of on his own. He has to talk to Mr Morgan.
While Jensen is hunting answers through the wards, Jared is hunting chalk. He suspects Chad of hoarding, because it seems like a dumb thing Chad would do. Everyone is still behaving themselves, although there's a certain amount of grumbling from men who miss sleeping in beds, as hard and lumpy and crowded as those beds sometimes are, not to mention a certain amount more grumbling from men who miss sleeping with their spouses. Jared understands that.
Onward!
NC-17
Part 4 of 5
Master post
Art
A couple of guys on the night shift let the strikers in through the loading docks while the rest of the shift is leaving out the front - the night shift workers who joined the strike, which is most of them, will just double back and sneak in later - and then the strikers spread out through the mill, making sure all the entrances are barricaded and the place is shut up tight against any incursions. Jared feels like a general shoring up his defenses in preparation for a morning attack by the opposing army. He should have an officer's helmet, with a plume.
Some of the men drift off to find spots in which to nap. Jared doesn't want any lights on, doesn't want any indication to the outside world that anyone is inside the mill at a time when the building should be empty. He tries to gather everyone on the floor, among the still, quiet looms, to remind them of the plan and the process and the fact that they're doing this for themselves and their children and all the men and women who will come after them.
“We've taken control,” he reminds them. “We have to hold out until nine, and then the rest of the city will join us. This is ours” - he waves his arm, gesturing at the vast room with its vast looms, including the rest of the mill beyond - “and we're not giving it up until we get what we need. What time is it? Does anyone know?”
It's still too dark in the mill to see much, but someone strikes a match, peers at a pocketwatch, and yells out “Just five!”
Three hours, and then one more. Jared thinks about Jensen, no doubt nervously awake in their tiny flat. He thinks about Danneel, who's going to walk out on her job, and about Genevieve, who needs to find another way to get what she wants, and about Jake, who wouldn't be swayed to their side. Jared thinks about the millworkers who refused to join, who will be quite surprised when they're locked out come morning. Well, what did they expect? If they're not 100% with the strikers, they're against them.
He can't stand here and think. He needs to do something. He doesn't know definitively what will happen when everyone outside discovers the mill has been taken over, but he can guess the cops will come out in force to retake the mill owner's property. He has to make sure none of the strikers will just let them in. And aside from that, they all have three hours to kill and they need to be ready.
Jared asks for volunteers to watch the front entrance and the loading dock and any other entrances and exits they can find, to make sure no one tries to break in. He sends a few men up to the roof - reminding them to wait until they can see where they're putting their feet before they climb up there - to keep an eye out for the police. He chats with Misha. He reminds Chad to keep his mouth shut when the cops start making demands. He tries to calm Kurt when Kurt starts to panic about property theft and trespassing and whatever other charges he thinks the city and the Council can bring against them.
“Jim was telling us,” Kurt explains. “There are a lot of things they can charge us for. I can't go to jail. My wife and I are looking after the grandkids - my older daughter's got twin babies - my mom depends on me - ”
“You've already been to jail,” Jared reminds him. “The last strike, remember? Think about Tim. Think about your grandkids. You're doing this for them too, so they can grow up in a world where they have a right to a fair wage, a reasonable workweek, redress for their grievances, care if they get hurt, and some respect from their boss.” He puts his hand on Kurt's shoulder. “You're doing the right thing. Besides, it's too late to back out now.”
Kurt doesn't look reassured. Jared tells him to have faith.
To Jared's great surprise, some of the men lie down and take naps. He can't. His brain is working too hard, reviewing the current plan and contingencies, trying to think ahead, mentally checking off the workers who will join in at nine. He wonders if Jensen's awake, and if he is, what is he thinking. He takes a stroll around the mill to check up on the guys guarding the various entrances and exits. He counts millworkers - the men at the doors, the men on the roof, the men lying around the quiet looms.
By the time Tahmoh comes to see him, the sun is fully up and Jared thinks it must be almost time.
“Something wrong?” he asks. Tahmoh shakes his head.
“Not yet. Someone tried to get in through the back door. We told him we were striking and it was locked.”
“Who was it?” As far as Jared knows, the back door where Tahmoh was standing is used mainly by the owner. But there's no reason for the guy to be here now. He has an office upstairs but he's almost never in it.
“Dunno,” Tahmoh says. “He didn't say. We told him we had control of the mill and we're going to stay here until our demands are met. Police are probably on their way now.”
“The guys back there with you are on the night shift, aren't they? How are they holding up?”
Tahmoh shakes his head, smiling a little. “Ten hours on a loom, four more watching the door, and it's like they just got out of bed.”
Jared glances outside at the morning sunlight streaming through the tall windows, trying to judge what time it is. Jensen would know. He was always better at determining the hour by the angle of the sun. Besides, he has that nice pocketwatch.
“Get ready,” Jared tells Tahmoh. “This is it.” Tahmoh nods and heads back the way he came. Jared walks around the floor, waking men up, getting them ready. He's nervous but oddly excited. He has faith in his leadership and his plan and the men striking with him, and whatever happens in the rest of the city, the millworkers have still taken full control of the mill.
About half an hour later, one of the guys who was standing watch at the front door appears on the floor and reports that a man who claimed to be the bookkeeper showed up with two cops and tried to get in.
“They told us we're trespassing,” the striker finishes. He snickers.
“They'll bring the rest of the cops,” Jared tells him. “Be prepared.”
It takes a large group of police longer than Jared would have expected to show up, and by that time the men who wouldn't join the strike have arrived, tried and failed to get in, and are now standing around confusedly in front of the mill, or yelling at the workers inside.
The cops try to break in, of course, with no more success than anyone else. The police chief uses a bullhorn to tell the men in the mill that they're all under arrest for trespassing and unlawful entry, both of which make Jared laugh. The day shift workers are supposed to be here. The guys who work nights entered the mill for their shift yesterday. And none of them should be intimidated. They have the power now. They have the mill.
Because the strike was Jared's idea, and because he worked so hard to make it happen, he elected himself spokesman. He thinks he'll make the police chief sweat it out a little longer. Can he make the guy wait until the rest of the city shuts down?
The police chief repeats the charges, adds a couple more for good measure, and appears to direct some of his men to try and break down the front doors again.
Misha comes up next to where Jared is watching this through the window and comments “If they break out the big guns we're in trouble. The cops have a battering ram.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Jared says. “Have you seen the doors?”
“I have, and I've seen the men watching them. We're tough, but we should prepare ourselves for a fight.”
Jared tries to push the window open - the bottom panels of the windows are supposed to swing out to allow fresh air onto the floor - and when it won't budge, he tries another. He leans out of the second window as much as he can and yells “We have the mill! We're not leaving!”
“Make your demands,” Misha reminds him.
“You're all under arrest!” is the police chief's answer.
“Get the owner down here!” Jared yells back. “We'll only talk to him!” He swings the window shut. “Go make sure the doors are all secure,” he tells Misha, and Misha goes.
The police chief looks like he's giving orders to the cops standing around. They clear off all the bystanders, curious passersby and locked-out mill workers both. Jared keeps an eye on them.
After what feels like forever, during which time Jared talks to Misha and Jim and Chad and a bunch of other guys, someone runs up to the police chief and says something to him.
“We're not done here,” the police chief tells Jared through his bullhorn, before apparently leaving someone else in charge and storming off.
“It's time,” Jared says, mostly to himself. He can imagine what pulled the police chief away - steam trams sitting idle on their tracks, chambermaids walking out of their hotels, sewing machines and steam irons in the garment factories falling silent and cold. He can't help but smile as he pictures men and women leaving their places of work and marching on the sidewalks in protest. But he needs to know for sure.
The answer comes in the form of Osric climbing through a window into the coat room. It only takes him five minutes to run into someone, but ten minutes to explain who he is and reassure the guy that he isn't a spy.
“What's the good word?” Jared asks him.
“There are cops everywhere,” Osric says, breathless. “So many steam trams have stopped. It looks like the central depot sent out more drivers, but some of them don't want to cross the strikers. All the striking drivers look ready to fight. You should see the hotel workers! Half the chambermaids walked out still in their uniforms. I saw Danneel and she said they'll all get docked for that, but they were in such a hurry they didn't bother to change back into their street clothes. They're marching in front of the hotel, demanding better hours and more consistent wages.”
“Take a breath. What do you hear from the garment factories? The docks? The landing fields?”
“I saw a delivery guy get into it with a greengrocer. Cops were just marching on one of the garment factories when I got there, but the girls were putting up some fight.” He can't stop grinning. “I thought I heard someone say a buggy factory was on strike too. The steam trams are just sitting there. It's crazy. I had to hide from the cops standing in front of your mill.”
“Have you seen Genevieve?” Osric shakes his head. “Jensen?” Another shake. “Okay. What's your next stop?”
“The central tram depot. We have a man there.”
“Be careful.”
“Will do!” Osric salutes.
“You know how to get back out?”
“I'll take him,” Chad says. “Then I'll go up to the roof.”
He leads Osric off. Jared thinks. So far, so good. The police can't get into the mill, the trams aren't running, the factories are shut down. He wonders how many people are striking out in the city. He wishes he'd asked Osric to try to get a headcount. He wishes he'd asked Osric to tell Jensen he's okay.
“What now?” Matt asks him, not ten minutes later. “Can we make our demands?”
“We're waiting for the owner,” Jared says. “Remember, we'll only talk to him. And I want to see what happens in the rest of the city.”
“That boy who was just here said everything stopped.”
“His name's Osric. I know. But walking out on the job means nothing if you don't stay off the job. We'll give it until at least tonight. See what happens. For now, walk around, pee if you have to, take advantage of the free time.”
Jared takes his own advice and goes for a walk through the mill, checking on his fellow strikers, making sure everyone is behaving, telling them to keep their heads down and their spirits up.
“This is just the beginning,” he says, in every place he stops. “We have a list of grievances the length of my arm but we're not getting anything until the owner realize we're in this for the long haul. If we stick this out,” he reminds the family men, “you'll be able to take better care of your families. We're doing this for your kids,” he reminds the fathers, “and your younger brothers and sisters,” he reminds the older brothers, “and future generations that haven't been born yet,” he reminds the newlyweds and the bachelors. “We're doing this for us. The city's workers are behind us.” He isn't entirely sure that's true, but they did get what sounds like a very large percentage of laborers and bottom-income workers to strike with them. They convinced enough people to fall in with them that the city has ground to a halt.
“I gotta tell my kid I'm okay,” Jim says. His daughter Maddie works as a housemaid for a wealthy family. She and other girls like her aren't part of the strike - their working conditions vary wildly, and at least some of them have secure beds and regular meals in the houses where they work, which they won't jeopardize - but she knows, as a lot of them must know, what's going on and why.
This is the first strike of its kind. Not just that the men in the mill have taken it over, but that they've brought enough of the city to strike with them. No one knows what's going to happen.
“The next time a runner comes in we'll tell him to let her know,” Jared says. Another thing he should have asked Osric - let people's families know they're safe. Osric will probably tell Jensen - as far as Jared's aware, there's still a show tonight, and Jensen will want to know - and Victoria will probably assume Misha is in one piece, but other people's families might worry.
Everything about this is a learning experience, he thinks. He feels like he should be taking notes.
The police chief comes back around six, to remind the mill workers through his bullhorn that the strike is illegal and they all need to leave the premises so the night shift can get to their stations. Jared pushes open a window again and yells out that they're not doing anything wrong, they're only trying to get the mill owner to listen to them.
“This strike is still illegal,” the police chief repeats. “Don't make us break in.”
Jared knows the doors are barricaded too well for that. If the cops could break into the place, they would have by now. He assumes Chad or someone else blocked the window into the coat room after Osric snuck back out.
“I'd like to see you try,” Chad calls. Jared gives him a shove to get him away from the window.
Another cop comes up to the police chief and says something to him. The police chief stomps off, leaving a contingent of men behind. Jared shuts the window.
“Something's happening,” he tells Chad and Misha. “I don't know what. We need to organize ourselves in case we're here for a while. Make arrangements for food. Make sure we don't get bored.”
“I can do that,” Chad says. “Fun coming up.” He trots off, presumably to organize group games or indoor sports leagues or something. Jared lets himself admit that he was worried Chad would do something dumb and rash out of an overabundance of excitement, but so far, he's behaving himself pretty well.
“How long do you think we'll be in here?” Jared asks Misha, now that they're alone. Men are wandering all over the mill, and every so often someone comes over to the windows to peer out at the police, but when they get close to Jared and Misha, Misha waves them away. “This is all new. I don't think anyone knows what to expect.”
“In some ways it's the same as any other strike,” Misha says, apparently trying to sound reassuring. “We wait for the owner to get down here, listen to our demands, and decide what he's going to do. The only new variable is whether or not he can get the police to break in and force us out.”
“So you're saying you don't know.”
“That's exactly what I'm saying.”
“That doesn't help me. Chad's probably getting a bunch of poker games up and running right now, but we have to eat and sleep and poker's going to get boring. We have to be organized about this. I caught a couple guys trying to break into a locked office earlier, and that can't happen again. We won't get anything if we're acting like a bunch of hooligans.”
“We can get volunteers to think of things to keep us sharp. Victoria and some of the other wives are going to try and get us dinner later, so we won't starve.”
Finding out what the workers are interested in is a good idea. Jared goes off in search of some paper and a pencil, so he can keep track of what people tell him.
A couple of days later Jensen is quite surprised to get to the theater only to discover a notice pasted across the doors announcing that the building has been closed by order of the Council, due to unsafe and unsanitary conditions. If he didn't have to open the place for the matinee, he'd laugh. As if the Council has ever cared about unsafe conditions in the poorer wards. If they did, every single apartment building would have been condemned years ago.
His first impulse is to slice through the notice, unlock the doors, and go inside anyway. He goes around to the alley, where there's another notice slapped on the stage door. He unlocks that door and goes inside. It's true that they still can't find the source of the leak backstage, but it's also true that they've been working around it, and as anyone who works in theater knows, the show must go on.
Jensen unlocks the front doors from the inside, ripping the Council notice in the process, and tries to figure out how to get it off. It's been glued on with paste, like the kind Alex uses to put up the posters for new shows. Jensen knows how well that stuff can stick, but this notice was slapped up quickly and not very thoroughly, and he thinks hot water and a good brush might get take care of it.
He's sponging and scraping when Alex appears.
“What's up, boss?” Alex asks. “What's on the door?”
“Notice from the Council,” Jensen says, scraping at a particularly stubborn bit of paper. “They're trying to close the theater for unsafe conditions.”
“What unsafe conditions? We haven't had a gas leak in a year, and I haven't fallen off the catwalk yet. Is it because of the leak backstage? Why would anyone close the theater for that?”
“They didn't. If I remember right, the gas leak was your fault. Find a scrub brush and help me.”
With Alex's help Jensen gets most of the notice off the door in short order, and then he leaves Alex to get rid of the remaining bits and shreds and goes back inside. He checks the props, the costumes, the sets, even the rows of seats and the tickets locked up in the box office. The puddle from the most recent leak has dried, but it's anyone's guess when the leak will return. Jensen carefully climbs up the catwalk to look at the spotlights, which seem to be in good enough working order, at least for now. He climbs down and checks the footlights, which are also currently fine. The curtain is secure. He fills his bucket with more hot water and takes his sponge and brush outside to scrape the notice off the stage door.
By the time he's done with that the rest of the company has started filing in to get ready for the matinee. Alex comes to get the key to the box office so he can set up. Alona has a complaint about her costume, of course, and Sterling has what sounds like a cold.
“Why are you here?” Jensen asks him. “You sound terrible.”
“I can go on,” Sterling says, and sneezes. Jensen hands him a handkerchief. It's not the cleanest hankie, but it's better than nothing. Sterling blows his nose.
“No you can't. Osric's your understudy. He'll go on for you.”
Fortunately Sterling's role is flexible enough that Osric won't look out of place playing it, but Osric hasn't shown up yet. Jensen knows he's running messages between Jared's mill and all the other strikers, but that's no excuse. He's not the only runner.
Danneel is still striking with her fellow chambermaids, and in fact they've been able to join the march the garment workers have scheduled for this afternoon - Jensen is impressed the chambermaids haven't given in yet - but Sam will take over for her. This is why they have understudies.
The theater is reasonably full for a Sunday matinee, especially considering half the city is on strike, and when Osric fails to show up, Jensen puts on Sterling's costume (which fits him better anyway) and goes on in his place. He makes Sterling take over the prompting, and by the end of the first act he realizes that he can devote himself to performing and leave everything else to the rest of the company, and the show will run just fine. It's both reassuring, because it means he hired competent people, and sobering, because it makes him feel unnecessary.
What is not reassuring is that halfway through the second act, four policemen bang into the auditorium and demand the show stop and the audience leave.
Jensen is offstage waiting for his cue but it's hard to miss the sounds of police making demands and audience members hesitantly starting to move. He walks onstage and down to the apron, behind the footlights, and calls out “What's the problem?”
“This theater's closed by order of the Council,” one of the cops calls back. He waves at the rows of seats nearest to him, indicating that the people sitting in them should move a little faster. “Didn't you see the notice?”
“Yeah, I saw it. It didn't make sense.”
“You need to leave, otherwise we'll fine you.”
“I'm not the owner. I'm just the manager.” Meaning, You won't be getting any money out of me and it would be dumb to try. “Why are you even here?” He can feel the rest of the cast standing onstage behind him. Not everyone in the audience is leaving, and Jensen wonders briefly if there's going to be an altercation. The cops haven't stopped moving and haven't stopped trying to get people out, but the longer anyone resists, the closer a fight comes to breaking out.
“We were told that someone had opened the theater in clear defiance of a posted Council order. You have until the count of five to leave peacefully, and then we'll use force. The fine goes without saying.”
“We're not going until you tell us why,” Alona calls from somewhere behind Jensen.
“The building's been deemed unsafe,” the cop says, sounding almost tired. “Don't you people read?”
Jensen holds a hand out to the side, trying to communicate to everyone on stage that they should keep their mouths shut. He can sense the unease and bafflement behind him, and the unease in the audience. He can't understand why an inoffensive little theater in a poor ward should demand any cop's attention, when half the city is on strike and marching in the streets. The police should have better things to do.
It suddenly occurs to him that he probably should have canceled the matinee in solidarity with the striking workers, and so the cast and crew could show their support for the garment workers' march. Jared would no doubt be pleased with him if he did. Well, too late now.
“Is it because of the leak?” Jake asks. Jensen wants to smack him but the nearest cop doesn't seem to have heard.
“Five,” the cop says, holding up his hand. He bends his thumb in. “Four. Three. Two. One. You're out.” He pulls his nightstick from his belt and uses it to shove people towards the auditorium doors, and then someone shoves back.
Great.
“We said move!” one of the other cops yells, and now there's a lot more pushing and shoving, from both police and audience members. A woman starts slapping one of the cops with her hat. Jake jumps off the stage and into the melee, followed by half the cast and what looks like most of the crew.
Jensen is a reasonably law-abiding citizen under normal circumstances. He knows there's nothing to be gained by antagonizing the police, not when you're a person of little power and less money. And everyone in this theater, from the cast and crew on down to the parents who occasionally bring their disruptive toddlers to productions that no toddler should see, is a person of little power, and in the interests of protecting their own skins, none of them should be fighting back.
But these are not normal circumstances. The strikes are wide-ranging enough that everyone here is affected in some way. Even if people aren't aware of all the ways in which the wealthy and powerful alternately take advantage of and ignore the lower wards, even if they haven't had to listen to one of Jared's sermons about the subject, they feel the effects every day, and if nothing else they're aware of how little the greater body of policemen cares to protect them.
Jensen realizes that the strikes all over the city, the strikes that Jared bullied and cajoled into being in order to bring the city to its knees and the Council to the table so the workers could negotiate for a better life - those strikes did something else besides show the upper classes the power of organized labor. They showed the lower classes they had power, and they could fight back.
And now, in Jensen's theater, in the middle of a Sunday matinee, they're doing just that.
All because someone, for some reason, wanted to close the Augustus, and “unsafe and unsanitary conditions” was the best excuse they could think of.
Jensen jumps off the stage to join the fray. All he cares about is getting the police out of his theater before they can hurt - or worse, arrest - anyone. He doesn't bear them any love, but he doesn't want them hurt either, and once this is taken care of, then he can apply himself to the task of figuring out why the order was issued and the notice posted to close the theater in the first place.
Some people left when the cops appeared, but four policemen, armed only with nightsticks, are no match for even half a small theater's worth of confused, angry people. They don't get a lot of free time and they take their chances to be entertained when they can. No policeman should be able to just barge into a theater for no good reason and make people leave in the middle of a production they've paid for. Don't these cops know the city is in an upheaval? Don't they have better things to do with their time?
Eventually the police are pushed out of the building, although not without some blood being shed and some damage being done. Jensen considers it lucky that no one was arrested and no one was killed, and he'll take a little damage to the theater if it means everyone can go home in more or less one piece.
“Shouldn't we finish the play, boss?” Alex asks, half his sentence lost into his arm as he wipes blood off his nose with his sleeve.
Jensen looks around. Some of his audience has vanished into the ward, either chasing the cops or, what, avoiding them? Most of the cast and crew is within earshot, but is it worth it to try and resume the production? They had half of the second act and all of the third to go. Should he try and get everyone back into the theater for half a play?
“See who you can find,” Jensen tells him. “Tell them to go back inside.”
He sends Sam off on the same errand, with additional instructions to suggest to the people milling around that they go back inside the theater for the rest of the show. She goes off in one direction and he goes in the other, and fifteen minutes later the entirety of the cast (minus Alona, who seems to have disappeared) and most of the crew has been reassembled, the theater has been partly refilled, and any costume damage has been hurriedly fixed. He apologizes to the audience, thanks them for coming back, and gives the cast their cue. He doesn't want to wait for - or spend time trying to find - Alona, and is relieved when she bursts into the auditorium and hustles down a side aisle and backstage.
“Where were you?” Jensen hisses, as she straightens her costume.
“I was on my way to the march,” she explains, breathless from running, “when I realized I was still in costume.” She flips the skirt around. “How do I look?”
“Fine. You're up soon.”
It takes until partway through the third act for the cast to really get back into the mood of the play, but they get control of themselves and the situation, and Jensen thinks it ends well. They get a standing ovation, much to his surprise. Is it because the show went on after the cops tried to break it up? Is it because the theater company fought back? Who knows? The company almost never gets a standing ovation, except occasionally on opening night, although back when Jensen was new to the city and new to the Augustus, the audience stood for a performance by a pillar of the ward, a man who hadn't walked a stage in twenty years but who had been famous when he did.
Jensen doesn't know if the garment workers' march is still going - Danneel told him the route they planned to take, and when and where the speeches were scheduled, but it's anyone's guess if they stayed on route and on schedule - and there's always the chance that enough cops showed to derail it altogether - but he wants to show his support for the strikers. He practically shoves everyone out of the theater as soon as they can get their costumes and makeup off, and as soon as the stage can be reset for tomorrow night, the lights turned off, and the ticket money locked up.
Alona practically drags him through the streets to find the march, Alex hanging on to his coat, and either they're lucky or the march is slow, because they find a spot on the sidewalk in enough time to cheer on the garment workers passing by.
“Have you seen a group of hotel chambermaids?” Jensen asks an older woman standing next to him.
“Can't tell who all they are,” she says. “Could be chambermaids.”
It looks like some of the women are carrying banners and signs, but Jensen's view is blocked just enough that he can't clearly read them. The marchers chant and wave their signs and demand better working hours, better working conditions, better pay. He wonders how many factories they've closed down, if they've closed any at all, and he's impressed that there are so many of them and that there hasn't been any violence yet to try and get them to disperse.
“Got two daughters in that crowd,” the woman next to Jensen tells him. She points at the marchers streaming past. “Twelve hours a day they work, six days a week. One of 'em was out three days and they would've given her seat to someone else if her sister wasn't a good enough worker to make them hold it. I do piecework and look after their kids.” The woman huffs. “Me and my husband came to this city when our girls were just little things. Sometimes I wish we'd stayed on my dad's farm. He had a heavy hand but we was family.”
Jensen nods in understanding. He's never wished he hadn't come to Mendeley - he met Jared here, for one thing, and he wouldn't change that for all the money in the world - but he knows what she means. Back home, in the small towns where people like them came from, they knew where they stood in the world and they knew the people in charge of their lives. If Jensen hadn't run away to the big city, he'd be working for his father, sitting on a bench next to his brother making and repairing shoes. A respectable living, but not one he ever wanted. He might be married to a nice girl by now, probably even with a baby. He wouldn't have much of an outlet for his love of performance. The church his family attends doesn't even have a choir for him to join.
Better for him here, in a city big enough for him to carve out his own space, live a life he can design for himself. Even if someone else is always in charge and taking advantage, even if the men and women in power are so much more unreachable and untouchable than they were at home. There are more people like him in the city, more of the powerless who can be taught that if enough of them band together, there's no limit to their power.
These thoughts make him snort in amusement. He sounds like Jared.
Now the march seems to be coming to an end. The groups streaming down the street are thinning out. They're still chanting and waving their signs, and the crowds on the sidewalks are still cheering and clapping and yelling out both encouragement and insults. Jensen can't tell if the marchers are garment workers or chambermaids or another group of striking female laborers, but it doesn't matter. They're all in it together.
“Where do your daughters work?” Jensen asks the woman next to him.
“Swan Garment Company,” she says. “My middle girl works at a candy factory, but they didn't want to strike.” She shakes her head. “Guess they think they're well taken care of. My oldest said there's speeches after the march. Come on.” She pushes through the people bunched on the sidewalk without even checking to see if Jensen is following her.
“We should go listen to the speakers,” Alona says on his other side, unknowingly echoing the older woman, who has now disappeared into the crowd.
Jensen is pretty sure they've missed some of the speeches by now, but he lets Alona lead him and Alex through the wards to where a massive crowd has packed into Ennitt Square, pressing around a temporary platform. There are four women standing very close together on top of it, one of them yelling into a bullhorn to make herself heard. Jensen can't understand most of what she's saying - he and Alex and Alona are too far away and there are too many people making too much noise - so he asks a man standing near him what's going on. The guy summarizes the speeches they missed and translates the current murmur into a call for equal pay and better opportunities for women, allowances for pregnant girls and new mothers, equal rights and opportunities for immigrants, stricter child labor laws, better working conditions for everyone, recompense for on-the-job injuries, and more humane working hours.
One of the women standing on the platform is holding a sign, which Alex deciphers as saying “United Women's Labor Organization”. Jensen wonders how much Jared and his fellow sit-in strikers know about the march and the speakers and this working women's organization, and what they think of it. It feels to Jensen as if this thing that Jared put into motion, this thing he bullied into existence, is slipping out of his grasp and away from him.
The plight of the working man and woman is bigger than one person, obviously. But this march and this gathering exist because Jared realized that small-scale strikes here and there won't accomplish as much as a giant, city-wide shutdown. The garment workers and hotel chambermaids and whoever else was pulled into this ladies' labor organization was only organized on such a large scale, and at this particular point in time, because Jared and his fellow millworkers decided to include as many working-class people in as many industries as they possibly could. Jensen is convinced that the four women standing on that platform in the middle of the square, as dedicated and as earnest as they are, wouldn't be there and wouldn't have attracted such a crowd if Jared hadn't convinced them and the steam tram operators and the street cleaners and the dockworkers and the men and women toiling in factories all over the city to shut off their machines and put down their tools and stop their trams at the same time on the same day, and bring the city to a screeching halt.
But Jensen needs to be more generous. Jared wouldn't want to take credit for every single strike in every single ward. He leads his fellow laborers in the mill where they work, but if asked, he'd just say he convinced the workers of the city that they have to band together to get what they need, and if they organize, they can make demands and get the Council to concede. He'd say each bloc has its own leader, who isn't him.
Jensen needs to step back and give these women credit for their own efforts, and not try to put their power back into Jared's hands. Isn't the whole point of this strike to get everyone to see that organizing is its own kind of power? It isn't about one man being able to claim credit for the whole thing. It's about many men and women taking control and joining up with their neighbors and coworkers to demand a better life for everyone.
It's exhilarating being here among all these people, although after awhile Jensen starts to feel too crowded. Everyone is pretty well packed into the square, all trying to hear the women speaking. He was never a big fan of crowds like this, and while he hates to leave before the rally is over, he can't stay packed in like a sardine for much longer.
“How much longer do you think this will go on?” he asks Alona, who shrugs.
“Until they're done,” she says unhelpfully.
“I'm going to go back to the theater and make sure everything's ready for tomorrow. Good show today.”
“Even though the cops busted it up?” She grins and Jensen has to grin back.
“Good show bringing it back. I'll see you tomorrow. Don't be late.” He pushes his way through the crowd and out.
The next day, to his surprise, he gets to the theater to find not only another notice pasted across the front doors, but a heavy chain with a padlock laced through the door handles. He goes down the alley to discover someone has nailed a board across the stage door. There's another notice slapped on the board and Jensen realizes that this is more than just someone complaining about the leak backstage. This has to be personal.
This is not something he can take care of on his own. He has to talk to Mr Morgan.
While Jensen is hunting answers through the wards, Jared is hunting chalk. He suspects Chad of hoarding, because it seems like a dumb thing Chad would do. Everyone is still behaving themselves, although there's a certain amount of grumbling from men who miss sleeping in beds, as hard and lumpy and crowded as those beds sometimes are, not to mention a certain amount more grumbling from men who miss sleeping with their spouses. Jared understands that.
Onward!