← catalogue

The Nine-Tenths

by James Oppenheim · English · Gutenberg #11372 · 401,002 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Nine-Tenths
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: The Nine-Tenths

Author: James Oppenheim


        
Release date: February 1, 2004 [eBook #11372]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11372

Credits: Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Bill Walker and PG Distributed Proofreaders


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE NINE-TENTHS ***

THE NINE-TENTHS

BY JAMES OPPENHEIM
1911

TO THE MEMORY OF MY FATHER




CONTENTS


PART I--THE DREAM

I.    THE PRINTERY

II.   THE EAST EIGHTY-FIRST STREET FIRE

III.  THE GOOD PEOPLE

IV.   GOLDEN OCTOBER

V.    MYRA AND JOE

VI.   MARTY BRIGGS

VII.  LAST OF JOE BLAINE AND HIS MEN

VIII. THE WIND IN THE OAKS


PART II--THE TEST

I.    BEGINNINGS

II.   THE NINE-TENTHS

III.  OTHERS: AND SALLY HEFFER

IV.   OTHERS: AND THEODORE MARRIN

V.    FORTY-FIVE TREACHEROUS MEN

VI.   A FIGHT IN GOOD EARNEST

VII.  OF THE THIRTY THOUSAND

VIII. THE ARREST

IX.   RHONA

X.    THE TRIAL

XI.   THE WORKHOUSE

XII.  CONFIDENT MORNING

XIII. THE CITY


PART I--THE DREAM




I


THE PRINTERY

That windy autumn noon the young girls of the hat factory darted out of
the loft building and came running back with cans of coffee, and bags of
candy, and packages of sandwiches and cakes. They frisked hilariously
before the wind, with flying hair and sparkling eyes, and crowded into
the narrow entrance with the grimy pressmen of the eighth floor. Over
and over again the one frail elevator was jammed with the laughing crowd
and shot up to the hat factory on the ninth floor and back.

The men smoked cigarettes as the girls chattered and flirted with them,
and the talk was fast and free.

At the eighth floor the pressmen got off, still smoking, for "Mr. Joe"
was still out. Even after the presses started up they went on
surreptitiously, though near one group of them in a dark corner of the
printery lay a careless heap of cotton waste, thoroughly soaked with
machine-oil. This heap had been passed by the factory inspector
unnoticed, the pressmen took it for granted, and Joe, in his slipshod
manner, gave it no thought. Later that very afternoon as the opening of
the hall door rang a bell sharply and Joe came in, the men swiftly and
guiltily flung their lighted cigarettes to the floor and stepped them
out or crumpled them with stinging fingers in their pockets. But Joe did
not even notice the clinging cigarette smell that infected the strange
printery atmosphere, that mingled with its delightful odor of the
freshly printed page, damp, bitter-sweet, new. Once Marty Briggs, the
fat foreman, had spoken to Joe of the breaking of the "No Smoking" rule,
but Joe had said, with his luminous, soft smile:

"Marty, the boys are only human--they see me smoking in the private
office!"

Up and down the long, narrow, eighth-floor loft the great intricate
presses stood in shadowy bulk, and the intense gray air was spotted here
and there with a dangling naked electric bulb, under whose radiance the
greasy, grimy men came and went, pulling out heaps of paper, sliding in
sheets, tinkering at the machinery. Overhead whirled and traveled a
complex system of wheels and belting, whirring, thumping, and turning,
and the floor, the walls, the very door trembled with the shaking of the
presses and made the body of every man there pleasantly quiver.

The stir of the hat factory on the floor above mingled with the stir of
the presses, and Joe loved it all, even as he loved the presence of the
young girls about him. Some of these girls were Bohemians, others
Jewish, a few American. They gave to the gaunt, smoky building a touch
as of a wild rose on a gray rock-heap--a touch of color and of melody.
Joe, at noon, would purposely linger near the open doorway to get a
glimpse of their bright faces and a snatch of their careless laughter.
Some of the girls knew him and would nod to him on the street--their
hearts went out to the tall, homely, sorrowful fellow.

But his printery was his chief passion. It absorbed him by its masterful
stress, overwhelming every sense, trembling, thundering, clanking,
flashing, catching his eye with turning wheels and chewing press-mouths,
and enveloping him in something tremulously homelike and elemental. Even
that afternoon as Joe stood at the high wall-desk near the door, under a
golden bulb of light, figuring on contracts with Marty Briggs, he felt
his singular happiness of belonging. Here he had spent the work hours of
the last ten years; he was a living part of this living press-room; this
was as native to him as the sea to a fish. And glancing about the
crowded gray room, everything seemed so safe, secure, unending, as if it
would last forever.

Up to that very evening Joe had been merely an average American--clean
of mind and body, cheerful, hard-working, democratic, willing to live
and let live, and striving with all his heart and soul for success. His
father had served in the Civil War and came back to New York with his
right sleeve pinned up, an emaciated and sick man. Then Joe's mother had
overridden the less imperious will of the soldier and married him, and
they had settled down in the city. Henry Blaine learned to write with
his left hand and became a clerk. It was the only work he could do.
Then, as his health became worse and worse, he was ordered to live in
the country (that was in 1868), and as the young couple had scarcely any
money they were glad to get a little shanty on the stony hill which is
now the corner of Eighty-first Street and Lexington Avenue and is the
site of a modern apartment-house. But Joe's mother was glad even of a
shanty; she made an adventure of it; she called herself the wife of a
pioneer, and said that they were making a clearing in the Western
wilderness.

Here in 1872 Joe was born, and he was hardly old enough to crawl about
when his father became too sick to work, and his mother had to leave
"her two men" home together and go out and do such work as she could.
This consisted largely in reading to old ladies in the neighborhood,
though sometimes she had to do fancy needlework and sometimes take in
washing. Of these last achievements she was justly proud, though it made
Henry Blaine wince with shame.

Joe was only six years old when his father died, and from then on he and
his mother fought it out together. The boy entered the public school on
Seventy-ninth Street, and grew amazingly, his mind keeping pace. He was
a splendid absorber of good books; and his mother taught him her poets
and they went through English literature together.

Yorkville sprang up, a rubber-stamped neighborhood, of which each street
was a brownstone duplicate of the next. The rocky hill became valuable
and went for twenty thousand dollars, of which three thousand had to be
deducted for the mortgage. Then Joe graduated from high school, and,
lusting for life, took a clerk's job with one of the big express
companies. He held this for two years, and learned an interesting
fact--namely, that a clerk's life began at 5 P.M. and ended at 8.30 A.M.
In between the clerk was a dead but skilled machine that did the work of
a child. He learned, besides, that advancement was slow and only for a
few, and he saw these few, men past middle life, still underlings. A man
of forty-five with a salary of three thousand was doing remarkably well,
and, as a rule, he was a dried-up, negative, timid creature.

Out of all this he went like a stick of dynamite, took the seventeen
thousand dollars and went into his father's business of printing. Joe
was shrewd, despite his open nature; he never liked to be "done"; and so
he made money and made it fast. Besides his printing he did some
speculating in real estate, and so at thirty-eight he was a successful
business man and could count himself worth nearly a hundred thousand
dollars. He made little use of this money; his was a simple, serious,
fun-loving nature, and all his early training had made for plain living
and economy. And so for years he and his mother had boarded in a
brownstone boarding-house in the quiet block west of Lexington Avenue up
the street. They spent very little on themselves. In fact, Joe was too
busy. He was all absorbed in the printery--he worked early and late--and
of recent years in the stress of business his fine relationship with his
mother had rather thinned out. They began leading separated lives; they
began shutting themselves away from each other.

And so here he was, thirty-eight years of his life gone, and what had it
all been? Merely the narrow, steady, city man's life--work, rest, a
little recreation, sleep. Outside his mother, his employees, his
customers, and the newspapers he knew little of the million-crowded life
of the city about him. He used but one set of streets daily; he did not
penetrate the vast areas of existence that cluttered the acres of stone
in every direction. There stood the city, a great fact, and even that
afternoon as the wild autumn wind blew from the west and rapid, ragged
cloud masses passed huge shadows over the ship-swept Hudson, darkened
briefly the hurrying streets, extinguished for a moment the glitter of
a skyscraper and went gray-footed over the flats of Long Island, even
at that moment terrific forces, fierce aggregations of man-power,
gigantic blasts of tamed electricity, gravitation, fire, and steam and
steel, made the hidden life of the city cyclonic. And in that mesh of
nature and man the human comedy went on--there was love and disaster,
frolic and the fall of a child, the boy buying candy in a shop, the
woman on the operating-table in the hospital. Who could measure that
swirl of life and whither it was leading? But who could live in the
heart of it all and be unaware of it?

Yet Joe's eyes were unseeing. Children played on the street, people
walked and talked, the toilers were busy at their tasks, and that was
all he knew or saw. And yet of late he had a new, unexpected vista of
life. Like many men, Joe had missed women. There was his mother, but no
one else. He was rather shy, and he was too busy. But during the last
few months a teacher--Myra Craig--had been coming to the printery to
have some work done for the school. She had strangely affected
Joe--sprung an electricity on him that troubled him profoundly. He could
not forget her, nor wipe her image from his brain, nor rid his ears of
the echoes of her voice. He went about feeling that possibly he had
underrated poetry and music. Romance, led by Myra's hand, had entered
the dusty printery and Joe began to feel like a youngster who had been
blind to life.

Outside the world was blowing away on the gray wings of the twilight,
blowing away with eddies of dust that swept the sparkling street-lamps,
and the air was sharp with a tang of homesickness and autumn. The
afternoon was quietly waning, up--stairs the hat-makers, and here the
printers, were toiling in a crowded, satisfying present, and Joe stood
there musing, a tall, gaunt man, the upstart tufts of his tousled hair
glistening in the light overhead. His face was the homeliest that ever
happened. The mouth was big and big-lipped, the eyes large, dark,
melancholy and slightly sunken, and the mask was a network of wrinkles.
His hands were large, mobile, and homely. But about him was an air of
character and thought, of kindliness and camaraderie, of very human
nature. He stood there wishing that Myra would come. The day seemed to
demand it; the wild autumn cried out for men to seek the warmth and
forgetful glory of love.

He could get some nice house and make a home for her; he could take her
out of the grind and deadliness of school-work and make her happy; there
would be little children in that house. He thought she loved him; yes,
he was quite sure. Then what hindrance? There, at quarter to five that
strange afternoon, Joe felt that he had reached the heights of success,
and he saw no obstacle to long years of solid advance. He had before
his eyes the evidence of his wealth--the great, flapping presses, the
bending, moving men. If anything was sure and solid in this world, these
things were.

He felt sure Myra would come. She had not been around for a week, and,
anticipating a new meeting with her, he felt very young, like a very
young man for the first time aware of the strange loveliness of night,
its haunting and hidden beauties, its women calling from afar. It all
seemed wild and impossible romance. It smote his heart-strings and set
them trembling with music. He wondered why he had been so stupid all
these years and evaded life, evaded joys that should have been his
twenty years earlier. Now it seemed to him that his youth had passed
from him defeated of its splendor.

If Myra came to-day he would tell her. The very thought gave his heart a
lovely quake of fear, a trembling that communicated itself to his hands
and down his legs, a throbbing joy dashed with a strange tremor. And
then as he wanted, as he wished for, the door beside him opened and the
bell sharply sounded.

She stood there, very small, very slight, but quite charming in her
neat, lace-touched clothes. A fringe at the wrist, a bunch at the neck,
struck her off as some one delicate and sensitive, and the face
strengthened this impression. It was long and oval, with a narrow
woman-forehead cut off by a curve of dark hair; the mouth was small and
sweet; the nose narrow; the eyes large, clear gray, penetrating. Under
the gracefully modeled felt hat she stood quite complete, quite a
personality. One instantly guessed that she was an aristocrat by birth
and breeding. But her age was doubtful, seeming either more or less than
the total, which was thirty-two.

There she stood, glancing at Joe with a breathless eagerness. He turned
pale, and yet at the same time there was a whirl of fire in his heart.
She had come to him; he wanted to gather her close and bear her off
through the wild autumn weather, off to the wilderness. He reached out a
hand and inclosed a very cold and very little one.

"Why, you're frozen!" he said, with a queer laugh.

"Oh--not much!" she gasped. She held her leather bag under her arm and
took off her gloves. Then she loosened her coat, and gave a sigh.

He gazed at her warm-tinted cheek, almost losing himself, and then
murmured, suddenly:

"More school stuff?"

She made a grimace and tried to speak lightly, but her voice almost
failed her.

"Class 6-B, let me tell you, is giving the 'Landing of the Pilgrims,'
and every blessed little pilgrim is Bohemian. Here's the programme!"

With trembling fingers she opened her bag and handed him some loose
sheets. He bent over them at once.

"Now make it cheap, Mr. Blaine," she said, severely. "Rock bottom! Or
I'll give the job to some one else."

Joe laughed strangely.

"How many copies?"

"One thousand."

He spoke as if in fear.

"Fifty cents too much?"

Myra laughed.

"I don't want the school to ruin you!"

He said nothing further, and in the awkward silence she began pitifully
to button her coat. There was no reason for staying.

Then suddenly he spoke, huskily:

"Don't go, Miss Craig...."

"You want ..." she began.

He leaned very close.

"I want to take a walk with you. May I?"

She became dead white, and the terror of nature's resistless purpose
with men and women, that awful gravitation, that passion of creation
that links worlds and uses men and women, went through them both.

"I may?" he was whispering.

Her "Yes" was almost inaudible.

So Joe put on his coat, and slapped over his head a queer gray slouch
hat, and called over Marty.

"I won't be back to-night, Marty!" he said.

Then at the door he gave one last glance at his life-work, the orderly
presses, the harnessed men, and left it all as if it must surely be
there when he returned. He was proud at that moment to be Joe Blaine,
with his name in red letters on the glass door, and under his name
"Power Printer." His wife would be able to hold her head high.

The frail elevator took them clanking, bumping, slipping, down, down
past eight floors, to the street level. The elevator boy, puffing at his
cigarette, remarked, amiably:

"Gee! it's a windy day. It's gittin' on to winter, all right....
Good-night, Mr. Blaine!"

"Good-night, Tom," said Joe.




II


THE EAST EIGHTY-FIRST STREET FIRE

They emerged in all the magic wildness of an autumn night and walked
east on Eighty-first Street. The loft building was near the corner of
Second Avenue. They passed under the elevated structure, cutting through
a hurrying throng of people.

"Take my arm," cried Joe.

She took it, trembling. They made an odd couple passing along between
the squalid red-brick tenements, now in shadow, now in the glow of some
little shop window, now under a sparkling lamp. At Avenue A they went
south to Seventy-ninth Street, and again turned east, passing a row of
bright model tenements, emerging at last at the strange riverside.

Down to the very edge of the unpaved waste they walked, or rather
floated, so strange and uplifted and glorious they felt, blown and
carried bodily with the exultant west wind, and they only stopped when
they reached the wooden margin, where an old scow, half laden with
brick, was moored fast with ropes. This scow heaved up and down with the
motion of the rolling waters; the tight ropes grated; the water swashed
melodiously.

The man and woman seemed alone there, a black little lump in the vast
spaces, for behind them the city receded beyond empty little hill-sides
and there was nothing some distance north and south.

"Look," said Joe, "look at the tide!"

It was running north, a wide expanse of rolling waters from their feet
to Blackwells Island in the east, all hurling swiftly like a billowing
floor of gray. Here and there whitecaps spouted. On Blackwells Island
loomed the gray hospitals and workhouses, and at intervals on the shore
sparkled a friendly light.

"But see the bridge," exclaimed Myra.

She pointed far south, where across the last of the day ran a slightly
arched string of lights, binding shore with shore. On the New York side,
and nearer, rose the high chimneys of mills, and from these a purplish
smoke swirled thickly, melting into the gray weather.

And it seemed to Joe at that wild moment that nothing was as beautiful
as smoking chimneys. They meant so much--labor, human beings, fire,
warmth.

And over all--river, bridge, chimneys, Blackwells Island, and the
throbbing city behind them--rose the immense gray-clouded heavens. A
keen smell of the far ocean came to their nostrils and the air was clear
and exhilarant. Then, as they watched, suddenly a tug lashed between
enormous flat boats on which were red freight-cars, swept north with the
tide. A thin glaze of heat breathed up from the tug's pipe; it was
moving without its engines, and the sight was unbelievable. The whole
huge mass simply shot the river, racing by them.

And then the very magic of life was theirs. The world fell from them,
the dusty scales of facts, the complex intricacies of existence melted
away. They were very close, and the keen, yelling wind was wrapping them
closer. Vision filled the gray air, trembled up from the river to the
heavens. They rose from all the chaos like two white flames blown by the
wind together--they were two gigantic powers of the earth preparing like
gods for new creation. In that throbbing moment each became the world to
the other, and love, death-strong, shot their hearts.

He turned, gazing strangely at her pale, eager, breathless face.

"I want ..." he began.

"Yes," she breathed.

He opened his lips, and the sound that escaped seemed like a sob.

"Myra!"

And then at the sound of her name she was all woman, all love. She cried
out:

"Joe!"

And they flung their arms round each other. She sobbed there, overcome
with the yearning, the glory, the beatitude of that moment.

"Oh," he cried, "how I love you!... Myra ..."

"Joe, Joe--I couldn't have stood it longer!"

All of life, all of the past, all of the million years of earth melted
into that moment, that moment when a man and a woman, mingled into one,
stood in the heart of the wonder, the love, the purpose of nature--a
mad, wild, incoherent half-hour, a secret ecstasy in the passing of the
twilight, in the swing of the wind and the breath of the sea.

"Come home to my mother," cried Joe. "Come home with me!"

They turned ... and Myra was a strange new woman, tender, grave, and
wrought of all lovely power, her face, in the last of the light, mellow
and softly glowing with a heightened woman-power.

"Yes," she said, "I want to see Joe's mother."

It was Joe's last step to success. Now he had all--his work, his love.
He felt powerfully masculine, triumphant, glorious.

Night had fallen, and on the darkness broke and sparkled a thousand
lights in tenement windows and up the shadowy streets--everywhere homes,
families; men, women, and children busily living together; everywhere
love. Joe glanced, his eyes filling. Then he paused.

"Look at that," he said in a changed voice.

Over against the west, a little to the north, the gray heavens were
visible--a lightning seemed to run over them--a ghastly red
lightning--sharply silhouetting the chimneyed housetops.

"What is it?" said Myra.

He gazed at it, transfixed.

"That's a fire ... a big fire." Then suddenly his face, in the pale
light of a street-lamp, became chalky white and knotted. He could barely
speak. "It must be on Eighty-first or Eighty-second Street."

She spoke shrilly, clutching his arm.

"Not ... the loft?"

"Oh, it can't be!" he cried, in an agony. "But come ... hurry ..."

They started toward Eighty-first Street up Avenue A. They walked fast;
and it seemed suddenly to Joe that he had been dancing on a thin crust,
and that the crust had broken and he was falling through. He turned and
spoke harshly:

"You must run!"

Fear made their feet heavy as they sped, and their hearts seemed to be
exploding in their breasts. They felt as if that fire were consuming
them; as if its tongues of flame licked them up. And so they came to the
corner of Eighty-first Street and turned it, and looked, and stopped.

Joe spoke hoarsely.

"It's burning;... it's the loft.... The printery's on fire...."

Beyond the elevated structure at Second Avenue the loft building rose
like a grotesque gigantic torch in the night. Swirls of flame rolled
from the upper three stories upward in a mane of red, tossing volumes of
smoke, and the wild wind, combing the fire from the west, rained down
cinders and burned papers on Joe and Myra as they rushed up the street.
Every window was blankly visible in the extreme light, streams of water
played on the walls, and the night throbbed with the palpitating,
pounding fire-engines.

And it seemed to Joe as if life were torn to bits, as if the world's end
had come. It was unbelievable, impossible--his eyes belied his brain.
That all those years of labor and dream and effort were going up in
flame and smoke seemed preposterous. And only a few moments before he
and Myra had stood on the heights of the world; had their mad moment;
and even then his life was being burned away from him. He felt the
hoarse sobs lifting up through his throat.

They reached Second Avenue, and were stopped by the vast swaying crowd
of people, a density that could not be cloven. They went around about it
frantically; they bore along the edge of the crowd, beside the houses;
they wedged past one stoop; they were about to get past the next, when,
in the light of the lamp, Joe saw a strange sight. Crouched on that
stoop, with clothes torn, with hair loosed down her back, her face
white, her lips gasping, sat one of the hat factory girls. It was Fannie
Lemick. Joe knew her. And no one seemed to notice her. The crowd was
absorbed in other things.

And even at that moment Joe heard the dire clanging of ambulances, and
an awful horror dizzied his brain. No, no, not that! He clutched the
stoop-post, leaned, cried weirdly:

"Fannie! Fannie!"

She gazed up at him. Then she recognized him and gave a terrible sob.

"Mr. Joe! Oh, how did you get out?"

"I wasn't there," he breathed. "Fannie! what's happened?... None of the
girls ..."

"You didn't know?" she gasped.

He felt the life leaving his body; it seemed impossible.

"No ..." he heard himself saying. "Tell me...."

She looked at him with dreadful eyes and spoke in a low, deadly,
monotonous voice:

"The fire-escape was no good; it broke under some of the girls;... they
fell;... we jammed the hall;... some of the girls jumped down the
elevator shaft;... they couldn't get out ... and Miss Marks, the
forelady, was trying to keep us in order.... She stayed there ... and I
ran down the stairs, and dropped in the smoke, and crawled ... but when
I got to the street ... I looked back ... Mr. Joe ... the girls were
jumping from the windows...."

Joe seized the stoop-post. His body seemed torn in two; he began to
reel.

"From the ninth floor," he muttered, "and couldn't get out.... And I
wasn't there! Oh, God, why wasn't I killed there!"




III


THE GOOD PEOPLE

Joe broke through the fire line. He stepped like a calcium-lit figure
over the wet, gleaming pavement, over the snaky hose, and among the
rubber-sheathed, glistening firemen, gave one look at the ghastly heap
on the sidewalk, and then became, like the host of raving relatives and
friends and lovers, a man insane. It was as if the common surfaces of
life--the busy days, the labor, the tools, the houses--had been drawn
aside like a curtain and revealed the terrific powers that engulf
humanity.

In his ears sounded the hoarse cries of the firemen, the shout of the
sprayed water, the crash of axes, the shatter of glass. It was too
magnificent a spectacle, nature, like a Nero, using humanity to make a
sublime torch in the night. And through his head pulsed and pulsed the
defiant throb of the engines. Cinders fell, sticks, papers, and Joe saw
fitfully the wide ring of hypnotized faces. It was as if the world had
fallen into a pit, and human beings looked on each other aghast.

"Get back there!" cried a burly policeman.

Joe resisted his shouldering.

"I'm Mr. Blaine;... it's my loft burning. I'm looking for my men...."

"Go to the morgue then," snapped the policeman. "A fire line's a fire
line."

Joe was pushed back, and as the crowd closed about him, a soft pressure
of clothing, men and women, he became aware of the fact that he had lost
his head. He pulled himself together; he told himself that he, a human
being, was greater than anything that could happen; that he must set his
jaw and fight and brave his way through the facts. He must get to work.

Myra clutched his sleeve. He turned to her a face of death, but she
brought her wide eyes close to him.

"Joe! Joe!"

"Myra," he said, in a whisper, suddenly in that moment getting a sharp
revelation of his changed life. "I may never see you again. I belong to
those dead girls." He paused. "Go home ... do that for me, anyway."

He had passed beyond her; there was no opposing him.

"I'll go," she murmured.

Then, dizzily, she reeled back, and was lost in the crowd.

And then he set to work. He was strangely calm now, numb, unfeeling.
There was nothing more to experience, and the overwrought brain refused
any new emotions. So stupendous was the catastrophe that it left him
finally calm, ready, and eagerly awake. He stepped gently through the
crowd, searching, and found John Rann, the pressman. John wept like a
little boy when they met.

"Marty got out ... yes ... most of us did ... but Eddie Baker, Morty,
and Sam Bender.... It was the cotton waste, Mr. Joe, and the
cigarettes...."

Joe put his arm about the rough man.

"Never mind, Johnny ... Go home to the kiddies...."

There was so little he could do. He went to a few homes he knew, he went
to the hospital to ask after the injured, he went to the morgue. At
midnight the fire, like an evil thing, drew him back, and he encountered
only a steamy blackness lit by the search-light of the engine. There was
still the insistent throbbing. And then he thought of his mother and her
fears, and sped swiftly up the street, over deserted Lexington Avenue,
and up the lamp-lit block. Already newsboys were hoarsely shouting in
the night, as they waved their papers--a cry of the underworld
palpitating through the hushed city: "Wuxtra! Wuxtra!
Great--fire--horror! Sixty--killed! Wuxtra!"

The house was still open, lighted, awake. People came into the hall as
he entered, but he shunned them and started up the stairs. One called
after him.

"Your mother's out, Mr. Joe."

He turned.

"Out? How long?"

"Since the fire started ... She's been back and forth several times ..."

He went on up, entered the neat, still front room, lit the gas beside
the bureau mirror, and began to pace up and down. His mother was
searching for him; he might have known it; he should have remembered it.

And then he heard the uncanny shouting of the newsboys--as if those dead
girls had risen from their ashes and were running like flaming furies
through the city streets, flinging handfuls of their fire into a million
homes, shaking New York into a realization of its careless, guilty
heart, crying for vengeance, stirring horror and anger and pity. Who was
the guilty one, if not he, the boss?

And then the inquisition began, the repeated sting of lashing thoughts
and cruel questions. He asked himself what right he had to be an
employer, to take the responsibility of thirty lives in his hands. He
was careless, easy-going, he was in business for profits. Had such a man
any right to be placed over others, to be given the power over other
lives? The guilt was his; the blame fell on him. He should have kept
clean house; he should have stamped out the smoking; he should not have
smoked himself. There fell upon his shoulders a burden not to be borne,
the burden of his blame, and he felt as if nothing now in the world
could assuage that sense of guilt.

Life, he found, was a fury, a cyclone, not the simple, easy affair he
had thought it. It was his living for himself, his living alone, his
ignorance of the fact that his life was tangled in with the lives of all
human beings, so that he was socially responsible, responsible for the
misery and poverty and pain all about him.

That _he_ should be the one! Had he not lived just the average
life--blameless, cheerful, hard-working, fun-loving--the life of the
average American? Just by every-day standards his was the useful and
good life. But no, that was not enough. In his rush for success he had
made property his treasure instead of human beings. That was the crime.
And so these dead lay all about him as if he had murdered them with his
hands. It was his being an average man that had killed sixty-three girls
and men. And what had he been after? Money? He did not use his money,
did not need so much. Just a little shared with his employees would have
saved them. No, the average man must cease to exist, and the social man
take his place, the brother careful of his fellow-men, not careless of
all but his own gain.

A boy passed, hoarsely shouting that terrible extra. Would nothing in
the world silence that sound? The cold sweat came out on his face. He
was the guilty one. That was the one fact that he knew.

And then he paused; the door opened creakingly and his mother entered.
She was a magnificent young-old woman, her body sixty-three years old,
her mind singularly fresh and young. She was tall, straight, spirited,
and under the neat glossy-white hair was a noble face, somewhat long,
somewhat slim, a little pallid, but with firm chin and large forehead
and living large black eyes set among sharp lines of lids. The whole
woman was focussed in the eyes, sparkled there, lived there, deep,
limpid, quick, piercing. Her pallor changed to pure whiteness.

"Joe ..." her voice broke. "I've been looking for you...."

He paused, walled away from her by years of isolation. She advanced
slowly; her face became terrible in its hungry love, its mother passion.
She met his eyes, and then he fled to her, and his body shook with
rough, tearless sobs. Her relief came in great tears.

"And all those girls," she was murmuring, "and those men. How did it
happen?"

He drew back; his eyes became strange.

"Mother," he said, harshly, "I'm the guilty one. There was a heap of
cotton waste in the corner, shouldn't have been there. And I let the men
smoke cigarettes."

She was horrified.

"But _why_ did you do that?" she whispered, moving a little away from
him.

"My thoughtlessness ... my _business_." The word was charged with
bitterness. "Business! business! I'm a business man! I wasn't in
business"--he gave a weird laugh--"for the health of my employees! I was
making money!"

She looked at him as if he had ceased being her son and had turned into
a monster. Then she swayed, grasped the bedpost and sank on the bed.

Her voice was low and harsh.

"_Your_ fault ... and all those young girls...."

His mother had judged him; he looked at her with haggard eyes, and spoke
in a hollow voice.

"Nothing will ever wipe this guilt from my mind.... I'm branded for
life ... this thing will go on and on and on every day that I live...."

She glanced at him then, and saw only her son, the child she had carried
in her arms, the boy who had romped with her, and she only knew now that
he was suffering, that no one on earth could be in greater pain.

"Oh, my poor Joe!" she murmured.

"Yes," he went on, beside himself, "I'm blasted with guilt...."

She cried out:

"If you go on like this, we'll both go out of our minds, Joe! Fight!
It's done ... it's over.... From now on, make amends.... Joe!"--She rose
magnificently then--"Your father lost his arm in the war.... Now give
your life to setting things right!"

And she drew him close again. Her words, her love, her belief in him
roused him at last.

"You know the fault isn't all yours," she said. "The factory inspector's
to blame, too--and the men--and the people up-stairs--and the law
because it didn't demand better protection and fire-drills--all are to
blame. You take too much on yourself...."

And gradually, striving with him through the early morning hours, she
calmed him, she soothed him, and got him to bed. He was at last too
weary to think or feel and he slept deep into the day. And thinking a
little of herself, she realized that the tragedy had brought them closer
together than they had been for years.

       *       *       *       *       *

Out of those ashes on East Eighty-first Street rose a certain splendor
over the city. All of New York drew together with indignation and
wondrous pity. It did not bring the dead girls to life again--it was too
late for that--but it brought many other dead people to life.

Fifty thousand dollars flowed to the newspapers for relief; an inquest
probed causes and guilt and prevention; mass--meetings were held; the
rich and the powerful forgot position and remembered their common
humanity; and the philanthropic societies set to work with money, with
doctors and nurses and visitors. The head of one huge association said
to the relief committee in a low, trembling voice: "Of course, our whole
staff is at your service." Just for a time, a little time, the
five-million-manned city flavored its confused, selfish struggle with
simple brotherhood.

How had it happened? Whose was the fault? How came it that sixty girls
were imprisoned in the skies, as it were, and could only fling
themselves down to the stone pavement in an insanity of terror? What war
was more horrible than this Peace of Industry? Such things must be
prevented in future, said New York, rising like a wrathful god--and for
a while the busy wheels of progress turned.

Joe had to attend the inquest as a witness. He gave his testimony in a
simple, sincere, and candid way that gained him sympathy. His men
testified in his behalf, trying to wholly exonerate him and inculpate
themselves, and the lawyers cleverly scattered blame from one power to
another--the city, the State, the fire department, the building
department, etc. It became clear that Joe could not be officially
punished; it was evident that he had done as much as the run of
employers to protect life, and that his intentions had been blameless.

However, that did not ease Joe's real punishment. He was a changed man
that week, calm, ready with his smile, but haggard and bowed, nervous
and overwrought, bearing a burden too heavy for his heart. He made over
the twenty thousand dollars of insurance money to the Relief and
Prevention Work; he visited the injured and the bereaved; he forgot Myra
and tried to forget himself; he attended committee meetings.

Myra wrote him a little note:

  DEAR JOE,--Don't forget that whatever happens I
  believe in you utterly and I love you and shall always
  love you, and that you have me when all else is lost.

  Your
  MYRA.

To which he merely replied:

  DEAR MYRA,--I shall remember what you say, and I
  shall see you when I can.

  Yours,
  JOE.

It was on Sunday afternoon that Joe met Fannie Lemick on the street. Her
eyes filled with tears and he noticed she was trembling.

"Mr. Joe!" she cried.

"Yes, Fannie...."

"Are you going, too?"

"Going where?"

"Don't you know? _The mass-meeting at Carnegie Hall_!"

He looked at her, smiling.

"I'll go with you, if I may!"

So they went down together. A jam of poor people was crowding the
doors, and a string of automobiles drew up and passed at the curb. Joe
and Fannie got in the throng. There was no room left in the orchestra
and they were swept with the flood up and up, flight after flight, to
the high gallery. Here they found seats and looked down, down as if on
the side of the planet, on the far-away stage filled with the speakers
and the committees, and on that sea of humanity that swept back and up
through the boxes to themselves. All in the subdued light, the golden
light that crowd sat, silent, remorseful, stirred by a sense of having
risen to a great occasion; thousands of human beings, the middle class,
the rich, the poor; Americans, Germans, Italians, Jews. But all about
him Joe felt a silent hatred, a still cry for vengeance, a class
bitterness. Many of these were relatives of the dead.

It was a demonstration of the human power that refuses to submit to
environment and circumstance and fate; that rises and rebukes facts,
reshapes destiny. And then the speaking began: the bishop, the rabbi,
the financier, the philanthropist, the social worker. They spoke
eloquently, they showed pity, they were constructive, they were prepared
to act; they represented the "better classes" and promised the "poor,"
the toilers, that they would see that relief and protection were given;
but somehow their eloquence did not carry; somehow that mass of
commonest men and women refused to be stirred and thrilled. There was
even a little hissing when it was announced that a committee of big men
would see to the matter.

Joe had a dull sense of some monstrous social cleavage; the world
divided into the rulers and the ruled, the drivers and the driven. He
felt uncomfortable, and so did the throng. There was a feeling as if the
crowd ought to have a throat to give vent to some strange, fierce fact
that festered in its heart.

And then toward the end the chairman announced that one of the
hat-trimmers, one of the girls who worked--in another hat factory, would
address the meeting--Miss Sally Heffer.

A girl arose, a young woman with thin, sparse, gold-glinting hair, with
face pallid and rounded, with broad forehead and gray eyes of remarkable
clarity. She was slim, dressed in a little brown coat and a short brown
skirt. She came forward, trembling, as if overcome by the audience. She
paused, raised her head and tried to speak. There was not a sound, and
suddenly the audience became strangely still, leaning forward, waiting.

Then again she tried to speak; it was hardly above a whisper; and yet so
clear was the hush that Joe heard every word. And he knew, and all knew,
that this young woman was overcome, not by the audience, but by the
passion of the tragedy, the passion of an oppressed class. She was the
voice of the toilers at last dimly audible; she was the voice of a
million years of sore labor and bitter poverty and thwarted life. And
the audience was thrilled, and the powerful were shaken with remorse.

Trembling, terrible came the words out of that little body on the far
stage:

"I would be a traitor to these poor burned bodies if I came here to talk
good-fellowship. We have tried you good people of the public and we have
found you wanting. The old Inquisition had its rack and its thumbscrews
and its instruments of torture with iron teeth. We know what these
things are to-day: the iron teeth are our necessities, the thumbscrews
the high-powered and swift machinery close to which we must work, and
the rack is here in the fire-trap structures that will destroy us the
minute they catch on fire.

"This is not the first time girls have been burned alive in this city.
Every week I learn of the untimely death of one of my sister workers.
Every year thousands of us are maimed. _The life of men and women is so
cheap and property is so sacred!_ There are so many of us for one job,
it matters little if sixty of us are burned to death.

"We have tried you citizens; we are trying you now, and you have a
couple of dollars for the sorrowing mothers and brothers and sisters by
way of a charity gift. But every time the workers come out in the only
way they know to protest against conditions which are unbearable, the
strong hand of the law is allowed to press heavily down on us.

"Public officials have only words of warning to us--warning that we must
be intensely orderly and intensely peaceable, and they have the
workhouse just back of all their warnings.

"I can't talk fellowship to you who are gathered here. Too much blood
has been spilled. I know from my experience it is up to the working
people to save themselves. The only way they can save themselves is by a
strong working-class movement."

Joe heard nothing further. There were several other speakers, but no
words penetrated to his brain. He felt as if he must stifle. He felt the
globe of earth cracking, breaking in two under his feet, and for the
first time in his life he was acutely aware of the division of humanity.
All through his career he had taken his middle-class position for
granted; he tacitly agreed that there were employees and employers; but
in his own case his camaraderie had hidden the cleavage. Now he saw a
double world--on the one side the moneyed owners, on the other the
crowded, scrambling, disorganized hordes of the toilers--each one of
them helpless, a victim, worked for all that was in him, and then flung
aside in the scrap heap. And behold, this horde was becoming
self-conscious, was beginning to organize, was finding a voice. And he,
who was one of the "good people," was rejected by this voice. He had
been "tried" and found wanting. He was on the other side of the fence.
And it was the fault of his class that fire horrors and all the chaos
and cruelty of industry arose. So that now the working people had found
that they must "save themselves."

In an agony of guilt again he felt what he had said to Myra: "From now
on I belong to those dead girls"--yes, and to their fellow-workers.
Suddenly it seemed to him that he must see Sally Heffer--that to her he
must carry the burden of his guilt--to her he must personally make
answer to the terrible accusations she had voiced. It was all at once,
as if only in this way could he go on living, that otherwise he would
end in the insanity of the mad-house or the insanity of suicide.

He was walking down the stairs with Fannie, and he was trembling.

"Do you know this Sally Heffer?"

"Know her? We all do!" she cried, with all a young girl's enthusiasm.

"I want to see her, Fannie. Where does she live?"

"Oh, somewhere in Greenwich Village. But she'll be up at the Woman's
League after the meeting."

He went up to the Woman's League and found the office crowded with women
and men. He asked for Miss Heffer.

"I'll take your name," said the young woman, and then came back with the
answer that "he'd have to wait."

So he took a seat and waited. He felt feverish and sick, as if he could
no longer carry this burden with him. It seemed impossible to sit still.
And yet he waited over an hour, waited until it was eight at night, all
the gas-jets lit.

The young woman came up to him.

"You want to see Miss Heffer? Come this way."

He was led up a flight of stairs to a little narrow hall-room. Sally
Heffer was there at a roll-top desk, still in her little brown
coat--quiet, pale, her clear eyes remarkably penetrating. She turned.

"Yes?"

He shook pitifully,... then he sat down, holding his hat in his hands.

"I'm Joe Blaine...."

"Joe Blaine ... of what?"

"Of the printery ... that burned...."

She looked at him sharply.

"So, you're the employer."

"Yes, I am."

"Well," she said, brusquely, "what do you want?"

"I heard you speak this afternoon." His face flickered with a smile.

"And so you ...?"

He could say nothing; and she looked closer. She saw his gray face, his
unsteady eyes, the tragedy of the broken man. Then she spoke with a
lovely gentleness.

"You want to do something?"

"Yes," he murmured, "I want to give--all."

She lowered her voice, and it thrilled him.

"It won't help to give your money--you must give yourself. We don't want
charity."

He said nothing for a moment; and then strength rose in him.

"I'll tell you why I came.... I felt I had to.... I felt that you were
accusing me. I know I am guilty. I have come here to be"--he smiled
strangely--"sentenced."

She drew closer.

"You came here for _that_?"

"Yes."

She rose and took a step either way. She gazed on him, and suddenly she
broke down and cried, her hands to her face.

"O God," she sobbed, "when will all this be over? When will we get rid
of this tragedy? I can't stand it longer."

He rose, too, confused.

"Listen," he whispered. "I swear to you, I swear, that from this day on
my life belongs to those"--his voice broke--"dead girls ... to the
toilers...."

She impulsively reached out a hand, and he seized it. Then, when she
became more quiet, she murmured:

"I can see you mean it. Oh, this is wonderful! It is a miracle springing
out of the fire!"

There was a strange throbbing silence that brought them close together.
And Sally, glancing at him again, whispered:

"I can see how you have suffered! Let me help you ... all that I can!"

He spoke in great pain.

"What can I do? I know so little."

"Do? You must learn that for yourself. You must fit in where you belong.
Do you know anything of the working-class movement?"

"No," he said.

"Then I will make a list of books and magazines for you."

She sat down and wrote a list on a slip, and arose and handed it to him.

She was gazing at him again, gazing at the tragic face. Then she
whispered:

"I believe in you.... Is there anything else?"

And again she reached out her hand and he clasped it. Her fine faith
smote something hard in him, shriveled it like fire, and all at once,
miraculously, divinely, a little liquid gush of lovely joy, of wonderful
beatitude began to rise from his heart, to rise and overflow and fill
him. He was being cleansed, he had expiated his guilt by confessing it
to his accuser and receiving her strange and gentle forgiveness; tears
came to his eyes, came and paused on the lashes and trickled down. He
gulped a sob.

"I can go on now," he said.

She looked at him, wondering.

"You can!" she whispered.

And he went out, a free man again, at the beginning of a new life.




IV


GOLDEN OCTOBER

Life has an upspringing quality that defies pain. Something buoyant
throbs in the heart of the world--something untamed and wild--exultant
in the flying beauty of romping children, glinting in the dawn-whitened
sea, risen, indeed, through man into triumphant cities and works, and
running like a pulse through his spirit. San Francisco is shattered, and
there is death and sorrow and destruction: a whole population is
homeless--whereupon the little human creatures come down from the hills
like laughing gods and create but a more splendid city. Earth itself
forges through its winters with an April power that flushes a continent
with delicate blossoms and tints.

Joe had come home from Sally Heffer a man renewed. From some clear well
in his nature sprang a limpid stream of soft, new joy; a new
exhilarating sense of life; a new creative power that made him eager for
action. His heart was cleansed, and with the exquisite happiness of a
forgiven child he "took up the task eternal." Hereafter he was a man
dedicated, a man consecrated to a great work.

His mother noticed the change in him, a new wisdom, a sweet jocularity,
and, withal, the return of much of his old nature--its rough
camaraderie, its boyish liveliness and homely simplicity. For her this
was a marvelous relief, and she could only watch him and wonder at the
change. He seemed very busy again, and she did not disturb him in these
sensitive days of growth; she waited the inevitable time when he would
come to her and tell her what he was going to do, whether he would
re-establish his business or whether he had some new plan. And then one
day, tidying up his room, she stumbled on a heap of books. Her heart
thrilled and she began to surreptitiously borrow these books herself.

Already the great city had forgotten its fire horror--save the tiny,
growing stir of an agitating committee--and even to those most nearly
concerned it began to fade, a nightmare scattered by the radiance of new
morning. One could only trust that from those fair and unpolluted bodies
had sprung a new wave of human brotherliness never to be quite lost. And
Joe's mother had had too much training in the terrible to be long
overborne. She believed in her son and stood by him.

Luckily for Joe, he had much work to do. He and Marty Briggs had to
settle up the business, close with customers, dig from the burned
rubbish proofs and contracts, attend the jury, and help provide for his
men. One sunny morning he and Marty were working industriously in the
loft, when Marty, with a cry of exultation, lifted up a little slot box.

"Holy Moses, Joe!" he exclaimed, "if here ain't the old kick-box!"

They looked in it together, very tenderly, for it was the very symbol of
Joe's ten years of business. On its side there was still pasted a slip
of paper, covered with typewriting:

  KICK-BOX

  This business is human--not perfect. It needs good
  thinking, new ideas (no matter how unusual), and
  honest criticism.

  There are many things you think wrong about the
  printery and the printery's head--things you would
  not talk of face to face, as business time is precious
  and spoken words are sometimes hard to bear.

  Now this is what I want: Sit down and write what
  you think in plain English. It will do me good.

  JOE BLAINE.

Suddenly Marty looked at his boss.

"Say, Joe."

"What is it, Marty?" The big fellow hesitated.

"Say--when that jury finishes--you're going to set things up again, and
go on. Ain't you?"

Joe smiled sadly.

"I don't know, Marty."

Tears came to Marty's eyes.

"Say--what will the fellers say? Ah, now, you'll go ahead, Joe."

"Just give me a week or two, Marty--then I'll tell you."

But the big fellow's simple grief worked on him and made him waver, and
there were other meetings with old employees that sharply drew him back
to the printery. One evening, after a big day of activity, he found it
too late to reach the boarding-house for supper and he remembered that
John Rann's baby was sick. So he turned and hurried across the golden
glamor of Third Avenue, on Eightieth Street, and just beyond climbed up
three flights of stairs in a stuffy tenement and knocked on the rear
door. Smells of supper--smells chiefly of cabbage, cauliflower, fried
onions, and fried sausages--pervaded the hall like an invisible
personality, but Joe was smell-proof.

A husky voice bade him come in and he pushed open the door into a neat
kitchen. At a table in the center under a nicely globed light sat John
Rann in his woolen undershirt. John was smoking a pipe and reading the
evening paper, and opposite John two young girls, one about ten, the
other seven, were studying their lessons.

"Hello, John!" said Joe.

John nodded amiably, and muttered:

"Hello yourself!"

He was a strong, athletic, stocky fellow, with sunken little blue eyes,
heavy jaws, and almost bald head. Before he had time to rise the two
young girls leaped up with shrieks of joy and rushed to Joe. Joe at once
tucked one under each arm and hugged them forward to a big chair, into
which they all sank together.

"Well! Well!" cried Joe.

"Who do you love most?" asked the seven-year-old.

"The one who loves me most!" said Joe.

"I do!" they both shrieked.

"Now leave Mr. Joe be," warned the father. "Such tomboys they're getting
to be, there's no holdin' 'em in!"

At once in the half-curtained doorway to the next room appeared a stocky
little woman, whose pale face was made emphatic by large steel-rimmed
glasses that shrank each eye-pupil to the size of a tack-head. Her
worried forehead smoothed; she smiled.

"I knew it was Mr. Joe," she said, "by the way those gals yelled."

Joe spoke eagerly:

"I just had to run in, Mrs. Rann, to ask how the baby was."

"He's a sight better. Mrs. Smith, who lives third floor front, had one
just like him sick a year ago come Thanksgiving, and he died like that.
But the doctor you sent over is that kind and cute he's got the little
fellow a-fightin' for his life. He's a _big_ sight better. Want to see
him?"

Joe gave a kiss each way, set down two reluctant women-to-be, and
followed Mrs. Rann to the inner room. In a little crib a youngster, just
recovered from colic, was kicking up his heels. Joe leaned over and
tickled the sole of one foot.

"Well, Johnny boy!"

"Unc! Unc!" cried the infant.

The mother purred with delight.

"He's trying to say Uncle Joe. Did you ever hear the likes?"

Joe beamed with pride.

"Well, your uncle hasn't forgotten you, old man!"

And he produced from his pocket a little rubber doll that whistled
whenever its belly was squeezed.

John Rann appeared behind them.

"Say, Mr. Joe, _you_ haven't had your supper yet."

"Not hungry!" muttered Joe.

"G'wan! Molly, put him up a couple of fried eggs, browned on both, and a
cup of coffee. I won't take no, either."

Joe laughed.

"Well, perhaps I'd better. I'm ashamed to ask for anything home this
hour--in fact, I'm scared to."

So he got his fried eggs and coffee, and the family hung around him, and
Joe, circled with such warm friendliness, was glad to be alive. He was
especially pleased with Mrs. Rann's regard. But Joe was always a
favorite with mothers. Possibly because he was so fond of their babies.
Possibly because mothers love a good son, wherever they find one.
Possibly because his heart was large enough to contain as something
precious their obscure lives. Just before he left John asked him:

"Will the printery soon be running, Mr. Joe?"

"Tell you later," murmured Joe, and went out. But he was sorely
troubled.

However, to Joe there had been revealed--almost in a day and after
thirty-eight years of insulated life--two of the supreme human facts.
There was humanity, on the one side, building the future, the new state,
organizing its scattered millions into a rich, healthy, joyous life and
calling to every man to enlist in the ranks of the creators; and then
there was woman, the undying splendor of the world, the beauty that
drenches life with meaning and magic, that stirs the elemental in a man,
that wakens the race instinct, that demands the creation of new
generations to inhabit that new state of the future. Intertwined, these
wondrous things drew the heart now this way, now that, and to Joe they
arose separately in intermittent pulsations that threatened to absorb
his existence.

He did not dare go to Myra until he was sure of himself. It seemed that
he would have to choose between woman and work. It seemed as if his
work would lead into peril, dirt, disaster, and that he could not ask a
delicate, high-strung woman to go with him. The woman could not follow
her warrior to the battle, for marriage meant children to Joe, and the
little ones must stay back at home with the mother.

In that moment of clear terror he had said to Myra:

"I may never see you again.... I belong to those dead girls."

And this phrase came and went like a refrain. He must choose between her
and those "dead girls." There stood Myra with gray luminous eyes and
soft echoing voice magically hinting of a life of ever-renewed romance.
She had a breast for his aching head, she had in her hands a thousand
darling household things, she had in her the possibilities of his own
children ... who should bring a wind of laughter into his days and a
strange domestic tenderness. The depths of the man were stirred by these
appeals--that was the happy human way to take, the common road fringed
with wild flowers and brier-lost berries, and glorious with the stride
of health and the fresh open air.

And Myra herself, that charming presence to infold his life--He would go
walking through the golden October park, by little leaf-strewn paths
under the wild and sun-soaked foliage, with many vistas every way of
luring mystery, and over all the earth the rich opulent mother-bliss of
harvest, and his heart would ache, ache within him, ache for his own
harvests, ache like the sun for the earth, the man for the woman.

A mad frenzy would seize him and he would plunge into his books and read
and think and lash himself to a fury of speculation till the early hours
of the morning. Exhaustion alone brought him peace.

But something had to be done. He sat down and wrote to her with a
trembling hand:

  DEAR MYRA,--Though I am impatient to see you, I
  must yet wait a little while. Bear with me. You will
  understand later.

  Yours,
  JOE.

And then she replied:

  DEAR JOE,--Can't I help you?
  MYRA.

He had to fight a whole afternoon before he replied:

  Not yet--later.
  JOE.

And back he went into the whirlwind of the world-vision, a stupendous
force upsetting, up-rooting, overturning, demolishing, almost erasing
and contradicting everything that Joe had taken for granted, and in the
wake of the destruction, rising and ever rising, a new creation, the
vision of a new world.

He had taken so much for granted. He had taken for granted that he lived
in a democracy--that the Civil War had once for all made America a free
nation--a nation of opportunity, riches, and happiness for all. Not so.
Literally millions were living in abject poverty, slaves to their
pay-envelopes; to lose a job meant to lose everything, there being more
laborers than jobs, or if not, at least recurrent "panics" and "hard
times" when the mills and the mines shut down. And these wage slaves had
practically no voice in one of the chief things of their life--their
work. So millions were penned in places of danger and disease and dirt,
lived and toiled in squalor, and were cut off from growth, from health,
from leisure and culture and recreation; and worse, millions of women
had to add the burden of earning a living to the already overwhelming
burden of child-bearing and home-making; and, still worse, millions of
children had been drafted into the service of industrialism.

He proved the case for himself. He began making tours of the city,
discovering New York, laying bare the confusion and ugliness and grime
and crime and poverty of a great industrial center. He poked into the
Ghetto, into Chinatown, Greenwich Village, and Little Italy; he peered
into jails, asylums, and workhouses; he sneaked through factories and
hung about saloons. Everywhere a terrific struggle, many sinking down
into the city's underworld of crime, men becoming vagrants or thieves,
women walking the streets as prostitutes.

And over this broad foundation of the "people" rose the structure of
business and politics, equally corrupted--or so it seemed to Joe, as it
does to every one who is fresh to the facts. Men at the top gathering
into their hands the necessities of life: oil, meat, coal, water-power,
wool; seizing on the railroads, those only modern means of social
exchange; snatching strings of banks wherein the people's money was
being saved; and using their mighty money-power to corrupt legislation,
to thwart the will of the voters, to secure new powers, to crush
opposition. So had arisen a "Money Power" that was annuling democracy.

And Joe's books argued that all this change had been wrought by the
invention of machinery, that only through steam, steel, and electricity
could world-wide organization take place, that only through these arose
the industrial city, the modern mill. The very things that should have
set man free, the enormous powers he snatched from nature and harnessed
to do his work, powers with the strength of a nation of men--these very
things had been seized by a few for their own profit, and had enslaved
the majority. Over and over again could the race be fed, clothed,
housed, and enriched by these powers, and that with lessened hours of
toil and more variety of work.

But Joe's books argued further and most dogmatically that this
organization by the selfish few was a necessary step in progress, that
when their work was finished the toilers, the millions, would arise and
seize the organization and use it thereafter for the good of all.
Indeed, this was what Sally's labor movement meant: the enlightenment of
the toilers as to the meaning of industrialism, and their training for
the supreme revolution.

And out of all this arose the world-vision. At such moments Joe walked
in a rarer air, he stepped on a fairer earth than ordinarily obtains. It
was the beauty and loveliness of simple human camaraderie, of warm human
touch. And at such times Joe had no doubt of his life-work. It lay in
exquisite places, in chambers of jolly grandeur, in the invisible halls
and palaces of the human spirit. He was one with the toilers of earth,
one with the crowded underworld. It was that these lives might grow
richer in knowledge, richer in art, richer in health, richer in
festival, richer in opportunity, that Joe had dedicated his life. And so
arose that wonderful and inexpressible vision--a picture as it were of
the far future--a glimpse of an earth singing with uplifted crowds of
humanity, on one half of the globe going out to meet the sunrise, on the
other, the stars. He heard the music of that Hymn of Human Victory,
which from millions of throats lifts on that day when all the race is
woven into a harmony of labor and joy and home and great unselfish
deeds. That day, possibly, might never arrive, forever fading farther
and farther into the sunlit distances--but it is the day which leads the
race forward. To Joe, however, came that vision, and when it came it
seemed as if the last drop of his blood would be little to offer, even
in anguish, to help, even by ever so little, the coming and the
consummation of that Victory.

He would awake in the night, and cry out in a fever:

"By God, I'm going to help change things."

The vision shook him--tugged at his heart, downward, like the clutch of
a convulsive child; seized him now and again like a madness. Even unto
such things had the "dead girls" brought him.

So, crammed with theories--theories as yet untested by experience--Joe
became an iconoclast lusting for change. He was bursting with good news,
he wanted to cry the intimations from the housetops, he wanted to
proselytize, convert. He was filled with Shelley's passion for reforming
the world, and like young Shelley, he felt that all he had to do was to
show the people the truth and the truth would make them free.

All this was in his great moments,... there were reactions when his
human humorous self--backed by ten years of the printery--told him that
the world is a complex mix-up, and that there are many visions; moments
that made him wonder what he was about, and why so untrained a man
expected to achieve such marvels.

But these reactions were swallowed up by the recurrent pulsations, the
spasms of his vision. He felt from day to day a growth of purpose, an
accumulation of energy that would resistlessly spill into action, that
would bear him along, whether or no. But what should he do, and how? He
was unfitted, and did not think he cared, for settlement work. He knew
nothing and cared less for charity work. Politics were an undiscovered
world to him. What he wanted passionately was to go and live among the
toilers, get to know them, and be the means of arousing and training
them.

But then there was the problem of his mother--a woman of sixty-three.
Could he leave her alone? It was preposterous to think of taking her
with him. Myra could a thousand times better go. He must talk with his
mother, he must thresh the matter out with her, he must not delay longer
to clear the issue. And yet he hesitated. Would she be able to
understand? How could he communicate what was bursting in his breast?
She belonged to a past generation; how could she hear the far-off drums
of the advance?

Up and down the Park he went early one evening in a chaos of excitement,
and he had a sudden conviction that he could not put off the moment any
longer. He must go to his mother at once, he must tell all. As he
walked down the lamp-lit street, under all the starriness of a tranquil
autumn night, he became alternately pale and flushed, his heart thumped
hard against his ribs, he felt like a little boy going to his mother to
confess a wrong.

He looked up; the shades of the second floor were illumined: she was up
there. Doing what? Sharply then he realized what a partial life she led,
the decayed middle-class associates of the boarding-house, tired,
brainless, and full of small talk, the lonesome evenings, the long days.
He became more agitated, and climbed the stoop, unlocked his way into
the house, went up the dim, soft, red-cushioned stairs, past the milky
gas-globe in the narrow hall, and knocked at her door.

"Come in!" she cried.

He swung the door wide and entered. She was, as usual, sitting in the
little rocker under the light and beside the bureau, between the bed and
the window. The neat, fragrant room seemed to be sleeping, but the
clear-eyed, upright woman was very much awake. She glanced up from her
sewing and realized intuitively that at last the crisis had come. His
big, homely face was a bald advertisement of his boyish excitement.

She nodded, and murmured, "Well!"

He drew up a chair awkwardly, and sat opposite her, tilting back to
accommodate his sprawling length. Then he was at a loss.

"Well," he muttered, trying to be careless, "how are you?"

"All right," she said drily.

She could not help him, though her heart was beginning to pain in her
side.

"I've been walking about the Park," he began again, with an indifference
that was full of leaks, "and thinking...." He leaned forward and spoke
suddenly: "Say, mother, don't you get tired of living in this place?"

She felt strangely excited, but answered guardedly.

"It isn't so bad, Joe.... There are a few decent people ... there's Miss
Gardiner, the librarian ... and I have books and sewing."

"Oh, I know," he went on, clumsily, "but you're alone a lot."

"Yes, I am," she said, and all at once she felt that she could speak no
further with him. She began sewing diligently.

"Say, mother!"

No answer.

"Mother!"

"Yes," dimly.

His voice sounded unnatural.

"Since the ... fire ... I've been doing some thinking, some reading...."

"Yes."

"I've been going about ... studying the city...."

"Yes."

"Now I want you to understand, mother.... I want to tell you of ...
It's--well, I want to do something with my money, my life...." And his
voice broke, in spite of himself.

His mother felt as if she were smothering. But she waited, and he went
on:

"For those dead girls, mother...." and sharply came a dry sob. "And for
all the toilers. Oh, but can you understand?"

There was a silence. Then she looked at him from her youthful, brilliant
eyes, and saw only an overgrown, rather ignorant boy. This gave her
strength, and, though it was painful, she began speaking:

"_Understand_? Do you mean the books you are reading?"

"Yes," he murmured.

"Well," she smiled weakly, "I've been reading them, too."

"_You_!" He was shocked. He looked at her as if she had revealed a new
woman to him.

"Yes," she said, quickly. "I found them in your room."

He was amazedly silent. He felt then that he had never really known his
mother.

"Joe," she said, tremulously, "I want to tell you a little about the
war.... There are things I haven't told you."

And while he sat, stupefied and dumfounded, she told him--not all, but
many things. She was back in the Boston of the sixties, when she was a
young girl, when that town was the literary center of America, when high
literature was in the air, when the poets had great fame and every one,
even the business man, was a poet. She had seen or met some of the great
men. Once Whittier was pointed out to her, at a time when his lines on
slavery were burning in her brain. She had seen the clear-eyed Lowell
walking under the elms of Cambridge, and she justly felt that she was
one of those

            "Who dare to be
  In the right with two or three."

Once, even, a relative of hers, a writer then well known and now
forgotten, had taken her out to see "the white Mr. Longfellow." It was
one of the dream-days of her life--the large, spacious, square Colonial
house where once Washington had lived; the poet's square room with its
round table and its high standing desk in which he sometimes wrote; the
sloping lawn; the great trees; and, better than anything, the simple,
white-haired, white-bearded poet who took her hand so warmly and spoke
so winningly and simply. He even gave her a scrap of paper on which were
written some of his anti-slavery lines.

Those were great days--days when America, the world's experiment in
democracy, was thrown into those fires that consume or purify. The great
test was on, whether such a nation could live, and Boston was athrob
with love of country and eagerness to sacrifice. The young, beautiful,
clear-eyed girl did not hesitate a moment to urge Henry Blaine to give
up all and go to the front. It was like tearing her own heart in two,
and, possibly at a word, Blaine would have remained in Boston and helped
in some other way. But she fought it out with him one night on Boston
Commons, and she wished then that she was a man and could go herself. On
that clear, mild night, the blue luminous tinge of whose moon she
remembered so vividly, they walked up and down, they passionately
embraced, they felt the end of life and the mystery of death, and then
at last when the young man said: "I'll go! It's little enough to do in
this crisis!" she clung to him with pride and sacred joy and knew that
life was very great and that it had endless possibilities.

And so Henry Blaine went with his regiment, and the black and terrible
years set in--years in which so often she saw what Walt Whitman had
seen:

  "I saw askant the armies,
  I saw as in noiseless dreams hundreds of battle-flags,
  Borne through the smoke of the battles and pierced with missiles I saw
     them,
  And carried hither and yon through the smoke, and torn and bloody,
  And at last but a few shreds left on the staffs (and all in silence),
  And the staffs all splinter'd and broken.
  I saw battle-corpses, myriads of them,
  And the white skeletons of young men, I saw them.
  I saw the débris and débris of all the slain soldiers of the war,

  But I saw they were not as was thought.
  They themselves were fully at rest, they suffered not,
  The living remain'd and suffer'd, the mother suffer'd,
  And the wife and the child and the musing comrade suffer'd,
  And the armies that remain'd suffer'd."

Terrible years, years of bulletins, years of want, hard times, years
when all the future was at stake, until finally that day in New York
when she saw the remnant returning, marching up Broadway between the
black crowds and the bunting, the drums beating, the fifes playing,

  "Returning, with thinned ranks, young, yet very old,
  worn, marching, noticing nothing."

Henry Blaine was one of these and he came to her a cripple, an emaciated
and sick man. Then had followed, as Joe knew, the marriage, the hard
pioneer life in the shanty on the stony hill, the death, and the long
widowhood....

Had she not a right to speak to him?

"Understand?" she ended. "I think, Joe, I ought to understand.... I sent
your father into the war...."

Depth beneath depth he was discovering her. He was amazed and awed. He
asked himself where he had been all these years, and how he had been so
blind. He felt very young then. It was she who actually knew what the
word social and the word patriotism meant.

He looked down on the floor, and spoke in a whisper:

"And ... would you send me off, too? The new war?"

She could scarcely speak.

"Whereto?"

"I ... oh, I'll have to go down in a tenement somewhere--the slums...."

"Well, then," she said, quietly, "I'll go with you."

"But you--" he exclaimed, almost adding, "an old woman"--"it's
impossible, mother."

She answered him with the same quietness.

"You forget the shanty."

And then it was clear to him. Like an electric bolt it shot him,
thrilling, stirring his heart and soul. She _would_ go with him; more
than that, she _should_. It was her right, won by years of actual want
and struggle and service. More, it was her escape from a flat, stale,
meaningless boarding-house existence. Suddenly he felt that she was
really his mother, knit to him by ties unbreakable, a terrible thing in
its miraculousness.

But he only said, in a strained voice,

"All right, mother!"

And she laughed, and mused, and murmured:

"How does the world manage to keep so new and young?"




V


MYRA AND JOE

Myra Craig used to dream at night that the fifty-seven members of her
class arose from their desks with wild shrieks and danced a war-dance
about her. This paralyzed her throat, her hands, and her feet, and she
could only stand, flooded with horror, awaiting the arrival of the
school principal and disgrace. Out of this teacher's dream she always
awoke disgusted with school-work.

Myra came from Fall River--her parents still lived there--came when she
was ten years younger, to seek her fortune in the great city. New York
had drawn her as it draws all the youth of the land, for youth lusts for
life and rushes eagerly to the spot where life is most intense and most
exciting. The romance of crowds, of wealth, of art, of concentrated
pleasure and concentrated vice, of immense money-power, the very
architecture of the world-city, the maelstrom of people, drew the young
Fall River woman irresistibly. She did not want the even and smooth
future of a little town; she wanted to plunge into the hazardous
interweaving of the destinies of millions of people. She wanted to
grasp at some of the magic opportunities of the city. She wanted a
career.

And so she came. Early that June morning she left her cabin on the Sound
steamboat and went out on deck, and then she had unfolded to her the
most thrilling scene of the earth. Gazing, almost panting with
excitement, it seemed to her that the nature she had known--the hills
and fields of New England--shrank to littleness. First there was all
about her the sway of the East River, golden--flecked with the morning
sun, which glowed through a thin haze. From either shore a city climbed,
topped with steeples and mill chimneys--floods of tenements and homes.
Then the boat swept under the enormous steel bridges which seemed upheld
by some invisible power and throbbed with life above them. And then,
finally, came the Vision of the City. The wide expanse of rolling,
slapping water was busy with innumerable harbor craft, crowded ferries,
puffing tugs, each wafting its plume of smoke and white steam; but from
those waters rose tier after tier of square-set skyscrapers climbing in
an irregular hill to the thin peak of the highest tower. In the golden
haze, shot with sun, the whole block of towers loomed distant, gigantic,
shadowy, unreal--a magic city floating on the waters of the morning.
Windows flashed, spirals of white smoke spun thin from the far roofs.
Myra thought of those skyscrapers as the big brothers of the island
gazing out over the Atlantic.

The boat rounded the tip of the island, furrowing the broad surface of
the bay, which seemed as the floor of a stage before that lifting huge
sky-lost amphitheater. Every advance changed the many-faceted beauty of
New York, and Myra, gazing, had one glimpse across little green Battery
Park up the deep twilit cañon of Broadway, the city's spine. The young
woman was moved to tears. She seemed to slough off at that moment the
church of her youth, averring that New York was too big for a creed. It
was the great human outworking; the organism of the mighty many. It
seemed a miracle that all this splendor and wonder had been wrought by
human hands. Surely human nature was great--greater than she had
dreamed. If creatures like herself had wrought this, then she was more
than she had dared to imagine, "deeper than ever plummet had sounded."
She felt new courage, new faith. She wanted to leave the boat and merge
with those buildings and those swarming streets. She was proud of the
great captains who had engineered this masswork, proud of the powers
that ruled this immensity.

But beyond all she felt the city's _livingness_. The air seemed charged
with human activity, with toil-pulsations. She was all crowded about
with human beings, and felt the mystery of what might be termed
_crowd-touch_. Here, surely, was life--life thick, happy, busy, daring,
ideal. Here was pioneering--a reaching forth to a throbbing future. So,
as the boat landed, she mentally identified herself with this city,
labeled herself New-Yorker, and became one of its millions.

Her rapture lasted throughout her first stay. She tasted romance
glancing in shop windows or moving in a crowd or riding in an elevated
train. A letter of introduction to a friend of her mother's secured her
a companion, who "showed her the sights" and helped her choose her
boarding-house in East Eightieth Street. And then came the examinations
for public-school teaching; and after these she went home for the
summer, returning to New York in the fall.

Then her new life began, the rapture ceased, and Myra Craig, like so
many others, found that her existence in the city was just as narrow as
it had been in the town. In some ways, more narrow. She was quite
without friends, quite without neighborhood. Her day consisted in
teaching from 9 A.M. to 3 P.M., correcting papers and planning lessons
and making reports until well into the evening, sometimes until late in
the night, and meeting at meals unfriendly people that she disliked. Her
class was composed of rather stupid, rather dirty children. They
_smelled_--a thing she never forgave them. And what could one woman do
with fifty or sixty children? The class was at least three times too big
for real teaching, and so almost inevitably a large part of the work
became routine--a grind that spoiled her temper and embittered her
heart. Her fellow-teachers were an ignorant lot; the principal himself
she thought the biggest lump of stupidity she had ever met--a man
demanding letter-perfection and caring not one rap for the growth of
children. Her week-ends were her only relief, and she used these partly
for resting and partly in going to theater and concert.

Such for ten years--with summers spent at home--was Myra's life. It was
bounded by a few familiar streets; it was largely routine; it was hard
and bitter; and it had no future. It was anything but what she had
dreamed. New York was anything but what she had dreamed. She never saw
again that Vision of the City; never felt again that throb of life, that
sense of pioneering and of human power. And yet in those years Myra had
developed. She was thrown back on books for friendship, and through
these and through hard work and through very routine she developed
personality--grew sensitive, mentally quick, metropolitan. She had, as
it were, her own personal _flavor_--one felt in her presence a
difference, a uniqueness quite precious and exquisite.

And then one day she had gone to the printery and met a man, who was
homely, rough, simple, and, in spite of her revulsion from these
qualities, was immensely drawn to him. Something deeper than the veneer
of her culture overpowered her. She had almost forgotten sex in the
aridity of those ten years; she had almost become a dried old maid; but
now by the new color in her cheeks, the sparkle in her eyes, the fresh
rapidity of her blood, and through the wonder of the world having become
more _light_, as if there were two suns in the sky instead of one--yes,
through the fact that she lived now at ten human-power instead of
one--her heart told her exultingly, "You are a _woman_."

Girlhood had come again, but girlhood made all woman by immense
tenderness, by the up-rush of a wild love, and by the awakening of all
her instincts of home and mating and child-bearing. And then had come
that mad, wind-blown twilight at the riverside when the spirit of life
had drenched her and she had become grave, tender, and wrought of all
lovely power. Joe was just a boy then to her, and her great woman-heart
drew him in and sheltered him in the sacred warmth of her being. In that
moment she had reached the highest point of her womanhood, a new
unfolding, a new release. And then had come horror, and he had been
swept away from her--one glimpse of his numb, ghastly face, and he was
gone.

It was Fannie Lemick that took her home. She only knew that she was
being led away, while crashing through her mind went flames, smoke, the
throbbing of the engines, and the words: "I may never see you again ...
dead girls...." All that night she tossed about in a horror, and in the
morning she feverishly read the terrible news until she thought she must
swoon away. She became sick; the landlady had to come up and help her;
the doctor had to be sent for, and he had told her that this nervous
breakdown had been long overdue; she had been working under too great a
strain; it only needed some shock to break her.

But while she lay in a sick fever her heart went out to Joe. If she only
could be at his side, nerve him to the fight, protect him and soothe
him. She knew that his whole old life had been consumed in that fire,
and lay in ruins, and she felt subtly that he had been taken from her.
By one blow, at the very moment of the miracle of their love, they had
been torn from each other. She did not want to live; she hoped that she
had some serious disease that would kill her.

But she did live; she became better, and then in a mood of passionate
tenderness she wrote her first little love-letter to Joe. She went
about, doing her school-work and bearing the weight of intolerable
lonely days, and he had written twice, just a word to her, a word of
delay. What kept him? What was he doing? She read of his testimony at
the inquest and became indignant because he blamed himself. Who was to
blame for such an accident? It was not his cigarette that had started
the blaze. In her overwrought condition she passed from a terrible love
to a sharp hate, and back and forth. Was he a fool or was he more noble
than she could fathom? He should have seen her sooner, he should not
have left her a prey to her morbid thoughts. Time and again she became
convinced that he had ceased to love her, that he was more concerned
over his burnt printery. She twisted his letters against him. She would
sit in her room trying to work at her school papers, and suddenly she
would clench her fists, turn pale, and stare despairingly at the blank
wall.

Day after day she waited, starting up every time she heard the postman's
whistle and the ringing of the bell. And then at last one night, as she
paced up and down the narrow white little room, she heard the landlady
climbing the stairs, advancing along the hall, and there was a sharp
rap. She felt faint and dizzy, flung open the door, took the letter, and
sank down on the bed, hardly daring to open it.

It was brief and cold:

  Dear Myra,--I know you are up early, so I am
  coming around at seven to-morrow morning--I'll be
  out in the street and wait for you. We can go to the
  Park. I have some serious problems to lay before
  you.

  Joe.

"Serious problems!" She understood. He was paving the way for renouncing
her. Perhaps it was a money matter--he thought he ought not marry on a
reduced income. Or perhaps he found he didn't love her. For hours she
sat there with the letter crumpled in her hand, frozen, inert, until she
was incapable of feeling or thinking. So he was coming at seven. He took
it for granted that she would be ready to see him--would be eager to
walk in the Park with him. Well, what if she didn't go? A fine letter
that, after that half-hour at the riverside. A love-letter! She laughed
bitterly. And then her heart seemed to break within her. Life was too
hard. Why had she ever left the peace and quiet of Fall River? Why had
she come down to the cruel, careless, vicious city to be ground up in a
wholesale school system and then to break her heart for an uncouth,
half-educated printer? It was all too hard, too cruel. Why had she been
born to suffer so? Why must she tingle now with pain, when in a few
years she would be unfeeling dust again? Among all the millions of the
people of the earth, among all the life of earth and the circling
million scattered worlds, she felt utterly isolated, defrauded,
betrayed. Life was a terrible gift, and she did not want it. This whirl
of emotion rose and rose in her, went insanely through her brain, and,
becoming intolerable, suddenly ceased and left her careless, numb, and
hard.

She arose mechanically and looked in the glass at herself. Her face was
haggard.

"I'm getting homely," she thought, and quietly went to bed.

But in the night she awoke to a swift frenzy of joy. He was coming.
After all, he was coming. She would see him. She would be near him
again. Yes, how she loved him! loved with all her nature. It was the
intensity of her love that made her hate. And she lay throbbing with
joy, her whole being quivering with desire for him. He was hers, after
all. It was the woman's part to forgive and forget.

But when the morning broke, and she arose in her nightgown and sat on
the chair at the window, smoothing out and rereading the letter, her
doubts returned. He was coming to renounce her. He would make all sorts
of plausible excuses, he would be remorseful and penitent, but it all
came to the same end. Why should she go and meet him to be humiliated in
this way? She would not go.

Yet she rose and dressed with unusual care and tried to smile back the
radiance of her face, and fixed her hair this way and that in a pitiful
attempt to take away the sharpness of her expression, and when her
little clock showed seven she put on hat and coat with trembling hands
and went swiftly down and out at the front door. She was shaking with
terrible emotions, fire filled and raged in her breast, and she had to
bite her lip to keep it still.

The city flashed before her in all the sparkle of October, the air
tingled, and in the early morning light the houses, the street, looked
as bright and fresh as young school-children washed, combed,
bright-eyed, new with sleep, and up from roofs went magic veilings of
flimsy smoke. Down the avenues clanged cars black with mechanics,
clerks, and shop-girls on the way to work; people streamed hurrying to
their day's toil. The city was awake, shaking in every part of her with
glad breakfast and the rush to activity. What colossal forces swinging
in, swinging out of the metropolis in long pulsations of freight and
ship and electricity! Wall Street would roar, the skyscrapers swarm, the
schools drone and murmur and sing, the mills grind and rattle, and the
six continents and the seven seas would pulse their blood into the city
and be flushed by her radiating tides. Into this hidden activity Myra
stepped, deaf and blind to all but the clamor of her heart and a single
man walking like a black pawn aureoled in the low early sunlight.

She came down slowly, as he came up. She glanced at his face. She was
shocked by its suffering, its gray age. He looked quite shabby in his
long frayed coat, his unpolished shoes, his gray slouch hat--shabby and
homely, and ill-proportioned, stooping a little, his rough shock of hair
framing the furrowed face and sunken melancholy eyes. And it was for
this man that she had been breaking her heart! Yet, at the moment there
swept over her an awful surge of passion, so strong that she could have
seized him in her arms and died in his embrace.

He, in turn, saw how white and set her face was, how condemnatory. He
had come to her almost ready to throw his plans overboard and cleave to
her--for a day and a night that side of his nature had dominated,
expunging all else, driving him to her, demanding that he grasp her
magic presence, her womanly splendor. This alone was real, and all the
rest fantastic. And he had walked up and down the street with all the
October morning singing in his blood; the world was glorious again and
he was young; he would take her, he would forget all else, and they
would go off somewhere in the wilderness and really live. He had never
lived yet. He thirsted for life, he thirsted for all this woman could
give him. And now the condemnation in her face choked him off, made her
a stranger, separated them, made it hard to speak to her.

He cried in a low voice:

"Myra!"

The word was charged with genuine passion, and she became more pale, and
stood unable to find her tongue, her lips quivering painfully.

Then suddenly there was a nervous overflow.

"You wanted to walk in the Park," she blurted in a cold, uneven voice.
"We'd better be going then. I won't have much time. I've got to be at
school early."

She started off, and he strode beside her. They walked in a strange slow
silence, each charged with inexpressible, conflicting emotions, and
each waiting for the other. This strain was impossible, and finally Joe
began speaking in low tones.

"I know it seems queer that I haven't been to see you ... but you'll
understand, I couldn't. There was so much to do...."

He stopped, and then again came the cold, uneven voice:

"You could have found a moment."

They went on in silence, and entered the Park, following the walk where
it swept its curve alongside the tree-arched roadway, past low green
hills to the right and the sinking lawns to the left, crossed the
roadway, and climbed the steep path that gave on to the Ramble--that
twisty little wilderness in the heart of the city, that remote, wild,
magic tangle.

A little pond lay in the very center of it, all deep with the blue sky,
and golden October gloried all about it--swaying in wild-tinted
treetops, blowing in dry leaves, sparkling on every spot of wet, and all
suffused and splashed and strangely fresh with the low, red, radiant
sunlight. There was splendor in the place, and the air dripped with
glorious life, and through it all went the lovers, silent, estranged,
pitiable.

"We can sit here," said Joe.

It was a bench under a tree, facing the pond. They sat down, each gazing
on the ground, and the leaves dropped on them, and squirrels ran up to
them, tufted their tails and begged for peanuts with lustrous beady
eyes, and now and then some early walker or some girl or man on the way
to work swung lustily past and disappeared in foliage and far low vistas
of tree trunks.

The suspense became intolerable again. Joe turned a little to her.

"Myra!"

She was trembling; a moment more she would be in his arms, sobbing,
forgiving him. But she hurried on in an unnatural way.

"You wanted to speak to me--I'm waiting. _Why_ don't you speak?"

It was a blow in the face; his own voice hardened then.

"You're making it very hard for me."

She said nothing, and he had to go on.

"After the fire--" his voice snapped, and it was a space before he went
on, "I felt I was guilty.... I went to a mass-meeting and one of the
speakers accused the ... class I belong to ... of failing in their
duty.... She said ..."

Myra spoke sharply:

"Who said?"

"Miss Heffer."

"Oh!"

Joe felt suddenly silenced. Something unpleasant was creeping in between
them. He did not know enough of women, either, to divine how Myra was
suffering, to know that she had reached a nervous pitch where she was
hardly responsible for what she thought and said. He went on
blunderingly:

"I felt that I was accused... I felt that I had to make reparation to
the toilers, ... had to spend my life making conditions better.... You
see this country has reached a crisis ..."

It was all gibberish to her.

"Exactly what do you mean?" she asked, sharply.

"I mean"--he fumbled for words--"I must go and live among the poor and
arouse them and teach them of the great change that is taking place...."

She laughed strangely.

"Oh--an uplifter, settlement work, charity work--"

He was stupefied.

"Myra, can't you see--"

"Yes, I see," she said, raising her voice a little; "you're going to
live in the slums and you want me to release you. I do. Anything else?"

She was making something sordid of his beautiful dream, and she was
startlingly direct. He was cut to the heart.

"You're making it impossible," he began.

She laughed a little, stroking down her muff.

"So you're going to live among the poor ... and you didn't dare come and
tell me...."

"I had no right to involve you until I was sure...."

"And now you're sure...."

"No," he cried.

She raised her voice a little again:

"And I wrote asking if I couldn't help you. Women are fools...."

He sat searching about for something to say. His heart was like cold
lead in his breast; his head ached. He felt her side of the case very
vividly, and how could she ever understand?

Then, as she sat there her head seemed to explode, and she spoke
hurriedly, incoherently:

"It's time to get to school. I want to go alone. Good-by."

She rose and went off rapidly.

"Myra!" he cried, leaping up, but she only accelerated her pace....

Instead of going to school she went straight home, flung herself
full-length on the bed, buried her face in the pillow, and shook for a
long time with terrible tearless sobs. Her life was ruined within her.




VI


MARTY BRIGGS

Joe went home in a distraught condition. He was angry, amazed, and
passion-shaken. He had had a look into that strange mixture which is
woman--and he was repelled, and yet attracted as he had never been
before. He felt that all was over between them, that somehow she had
convicted him of being brutal, selfish, and unmanly, and in the light of
her condemnation he saw in his delay to meet her only cowardice and
harsh indifference. And yet all along he had acted on the conclusion
that he had no right to ask a woman to go into the danger of his work
with him.

Pacing up and down his narrow room, he began lashing himself again,
excusing, forgiving Myra everything. He had never really understood her
nature; he should have gone to her in the beginning and trusted to her
love and her insight; he should have let her share the aftermath of the
fire; that fierce experience would have taught her that he was forever
mortgaged to a life of noble reparation, and even the terror of it all
would have been better than shutting her out, to brood morbidly alone.

Yet, what could he do? He must be strong, be wise, keep his head. He had
pledged himself, sworn himself into the service of the working class
movement. There was no escape. He tried to bury himself in his books,
regain for a moment his splendid dream of the future state, feel again
those strange throes of world-building, of social service.

And out of it all grew a letter, a letter to Myra. He wrote it in a
strange haste, the sentences coming too rapidly for his pen. It ran:

  DEAR MYRA,--I must _make_ you understand! I hurt
  you when I wanted to help you; I wronged you when
  I wanted only to do right by you. Why didn't you
  listen to me this morning?

  It was at the fire there, at that moment you tugged
  at my sleeve and I spoke to you, that I saw clearly that
  my life was no longer my own, that I could not even
  give it to you, whom I loved, whom I love now with
  every bit of my existence. I told you I belonged to
  those dead girls. Have you forgotten? _Sixty of them_--and
  three of my men. It was as if I had killed them
  myself. I am a guilty man, and I must expiate this
  guilt. There is no use fooling myself with pleasant
  phrases, no use thinking others to blame. It was I
  who was responsible.

  And through the death of those girls I learned of the
  misery of the world, of the millions in want, the women
  wrenched from their homes to toil in the mills, the
  little children--fresh, sweet bodies, bubbling hearts,
  and tender, whimsical minds--slaving in factories,
  tiny boys and girls laboring like men and women in
  cotton and knitting mills, in glass factory and coal-mine,
  and on the streets of cities, upon whose frail little
  spirits is thrust the responsibility, the wage burden, the
  money, and family trouble, the care and drudgery and
  mortal burden we grown people ourselves not seldom
  find too hard. I have learned of a world gone wrong;
  I have learned of a new slavery on earth; and I as a
  member of the master class share the general guilt for
  the suffering of the poor...I must help to free
  them from the very conditions that killed the sixty
  girls...

  And when I think of those girls and their families
  (some of them were the sole support of their mothers
  and sisters and brothers) the least I can do is to render
  up my life for the, lives that were lost--the least I can
  do is to fill myself with the spirit of the dead and
  go forth, not to avenge them, but to help build a
  world where the living will not be sacrificed as they
  were.

  This country is facing a great crisis; civilization is
  facing a great crisis. Shall we go forward or be drawn
  backward? There is a call to arms and every man must
  offer his life in the great fight--that fight for democracy,
  that fight for lifting up the millions to new levels of
  life, that fight for a better earth and a superber race
  of human beings; and in that fight I am with the
  pioneers, heart and soul; I am ringing with the joy
  and struggle of it; I am for it, with all my strength and
  all my power. It demands everything; its old cry,
  "Arise, arise, and follow me;" means giving up possessions,
  giving away all, making every sacrifice. Before
  this issue our little lives shrink into nothingness,
  and we must sink our happiness into the future of the
  world.

  How can I ask you to go into the peril, the dirt, and
  disease of this struggle? And how can I refrain from
  going in myself? Let me see you once more. Do not
  deny me that. And understand that through life my
  love will follow you ... a love greatened, I trust, by
  what little I do in the great cause....

  Ever yours,    JOE

He waited for an answer and none came, and he felt during those days
that the life was being dragged out of him. Feverishly then he buried
himself in his tasks and his books, he went on cramming himself with
theories until he reached the bursting-point and wanted to go out on
fire with mission, almost a fanatic, an Isaiah to shake the city with
invective and prophesy change. What could he do to spread the tidings,
the news? The time had come to find an outlet for the overbearing flood
within him. And then one evening in the Park like a flash came the plan.
He must go among the poor, he must get to know them--not in this
neighborhood, "a prophet is not without honor, etc."--but in some new
place where he was unknown. He thought of Greenwich Village. Did not
Fannie Lemick tell him that Sally Heffer lived in Greenwich Village?
Well, he would look into the matter. He was a printer; why not then
print a little weekly newspaper directly for the toilers, for his
neighbors? He could tell all that way, pour out his enlightenment, stir
them, stand by them, take part in their activities, their troubles and
their strikes and lead them forth to a new life. He was sure they were
ripe for the facts, powder awaiting the spark; he would go down among
them and make his paper the center of their disorganized life.

The more he thought of the plan the more it thrilled him. What was
greater than the power of the press? What more direct? He was done with
palliatives, finding men jobs, giving Christmas turkeys, paying for
coal. What the people needed was education so that they could get
justice--all else would follow.

But even at that perfervid period of his life Joe was saved from being a
John Brown by his sense of humor. This was the imp in him that always
poked a little doubt into his heart and laughed at his ignorance and
innocence. By next morning Joe was smiling at himself. Nevertheless, he
was driven ahead.

He called for Marty Briggs and they went to lunch together. Third Avenue
lay naked to the rain, which swept forward in silvery gusts, dripping,
dripping from the elevated structure, and the pattering liquid sound had
a fresh mellow music. Here and there a man or woman, mush-roomed by an
umbrella, dashed quickly for a car, and the trolleys, gray and crowded,
seemed to duck hurriedly under the downpour. The faces of Joe and Marty
were fresh-washed and spattering drops; they laughed together as they
walked.

"I've some business to talk over with you," explained Joe, and they
finally went into a little restaurant on Third Avenue. The stuffy little
place, warm and damp with the excluded rain, and odorous with sizzling
lard and steaming coffee and boiling cabbage, was crowded with people,
but Joe and Marty took a little table to themselves in the darkest
corner. They sat against the dirty rear wall, whose white paint was
finger-marked, fly-specked, and food-spotted, and in which a
shelf-aperture furnished the connection with the kitchen. To this hole
in the wall hurried the three waitresses, shrieking their orders above
the din of many voices and the clatter and clash of plates and utensils.

"One ham--and!"

A monstrous greasy cook peered forth, shoving out a plate of fried eggs
and echoing huskily:

"Ham--and!"

"Corn-beef-an'-cabbage!" "One harf-an'-harf!" "Make a sunstroke on the
hash!" and other pleasing chants of the noon.

"What'll yer have?"

A thin and nervous young woman swooped between them and mopped off the
sloppy, crumby table with her apron.

"What's good?" asked Joe.

The waitress regarded Joe with half-shut eyes.

"_You_ want veal cutlets."

And she wafted the information to the cook.

"Well, Joe," said the practical Briggs, unable to hold in his excitement
any longer, "let's get down to business."

Joe leaned forward.

"I'm thinking of starting up the printery, Marty."

Marty flushed, choked, and could hardly speak.

"I _knew_ you would, Joe."

"Yes," Joe went on, "but I'm not going to go on with it."

Marty spoke sharply:

"Why not?"

"I'll tell you later, Marty."

"Not--lost your nerve? The fire?"

Joe laughed softly.

"Other reasons--Marty."

"Retire?" Marty's appetite was spoiled. He pushed the veal cutlet from
him. He was greatly agitated. "Retire--_you_? I can see you doing
nothing, blamed if I can't. Gettin' sporty, Joe, in your old age, aren't
you? You'll be wearing one of these dress-suits next and a flasher in
yer chest. Huh!" he snorted, "you'd make a good one on the shelf!"

Joe laughed with joy.

"With my flunkies and my handmaids. No, Marty, I'm going into another
business."

"What business?"

"Editing a magazine."

"And what do you know about editing a magazine?"

"What do most of the editors know?" queried Joe. "You don't have to know
anything. Everybody's editing magazines nowadays."

"A magazine!" Marty was disgusted. "You're falling pretty low, Joe. Why
don't you stick to an honest business? Gosh! you'd make a queer fist
editing a magazine!"

Joe was delighted.

"Well, there are reasons, Marty."

"What reasons?"

So Joe in a shaking voice unfolded his philosophy, and as he did so
Marty became dazed and aghast, gazing at his boss as if Joe had turned
into some unthinkable zoological oddity. Into Marty's prim-set life,
with its definite boundaries and unmysterious exactness, was poured a
vapor of lunacy. Finally Joe wound up with:

"So you see I've got to do what little I can to help straighten things.
You see, Marty? Now, what do you think of it? Give me your honest
opinion."

Marty spoke sharply:

"You want to know what I really think?"

"Every word of it!"

"Now see here, Joe," Marty burst out, "you and I grew up in the business
together, and we know each other well enough to speak out, even if you
are my boss, don't we?"

"We do, Marty!"

Marty leaned over.

"Joe, I think you're a blamed idiot!"

Joe laughed.

"Well, Marty, if it weren't for the blamed idiots--like Columbus and Tom
Watts and the prophets and Abe Lincoln--this world would be in a pretty
mess."

But Marty refused to be convinced, even averring that the world _is_ in
a pretty mess, and that probably the aforementioned "idiots" had caused
it to be so. Then finally he spoke caressingly:

"Ah, Joe, tell me it's a joke."

"No," said Joe, earnestly, "it's what I've got to face, Marty, and I
need your backing."

Marty mused miserably.

"So the game's up, and you've changed, and we men can go to the dogs.
Why, we can't run that printery without you. We'd go plumb to hell!"

Joe changed his voice--it became more commanding.

"Never mind now, Marty. I want your help to figure things out."

So Marty got out his little pad and the two drew close together.

"I want to figure on a weekly newspaper--I'm figuring big on the
future--just want to see what it will come to. Say an edition of twenty
thousand copies, an eight-page paper, eight by twelve, no
illustrations."

Marty spoke humbly:

"As you say, Joe. Cheap paper?"

"Yes."

"Do your own printing?"

"Yes."

"Well, you'll need a good cylinder press for a starter."

"How much help?"

"Make-up man--pressman--feeder--that's on the press. Will you set up the
paper yourself?"

"No, I'll have it set up outside."

"Who'll bind it, fold, and address?"

"The bindery--give that out, too."

"And who'll distribute?"

"Outside, too."

"The news company?"

"No, I won't deal with any news company. I want to go direct to the
people. Say I get a hundred newsmen to distribute in their
neighborhood?"

"But who'll get the paper to the newsmen?"

"Hire a truck company--so much a week."

"And how much will you charge for the paper?"

"Cent a copy."

"Can't do it," said Marty.

"Why not?"

Marty did some figuring, so they raised the price to two cents. And then
they put in twenty minutes and worked out the scheme. It summed up as
follows:

  Paper sells at 2 cts., 20,000       $400
  Expenses                             340
                                      ----
  Profit                              $ 60

Joe was exultant.

"Sixty profit! Well, I'm hanged."

"Not so fast, Joe," said Marty, drily. "They say no one ever started a
magazine without getting stuck, and anyway, you just reckon there'll be
expenses that will run you into debt right along. But of course there'll
be the ads."

"I don't know about the ads," said Joe. "But the figures please me just
the same."

Marty squirmed in his chair.

"Joe," he burst out, "how the devil is the printery going to run without
you?"

Their eyes met, and Joe laughed.

"Will it be worth twenty-five thousand dollars when it's rebuilt and
business booming again?" he asked, shrewdly.

"More than that!" said Marty Briggs.

"Then," said Joe, "I want _you_ to take it."

"_Me_?" Marty was stunned.

"You can do it easily. I'll take a mortgage and you pay it off two
thousand a year and five per cent. interest. That will still leave you a
tidy profit."

"_Me_?" Then Marty laughed loud. "Listen, my ears! Did you hear that?"

"Think it over!" snapped Joe. "Now come along."




VII


LAST OF JOE BLAINE AND HIS MEN

So the printery was rehabilitated, and one gray morning Joe, with a
queer tremor at his heart, went down the street and met many of his men
in the doorway. They greeted him with strange, ashamed emotion.

"Morning, Mr. Joe.... It's been a long spell.... Good to see the old
place again.... Bad weather we're having.... How've you been?"

The loft seemed strangely the same, strangely different--fresh painted,
polished, smelling new and with changed details. For a few moments Joe
felt the sharp shock of the fire again, especially when he heard the
trembling of the hat factory overhead ... and that noon the bright faces
and laughter in the hallway! It seemed unreal; like ghosts revisiting;
and he learned later that the first morning the hat factory had set to
work, some of the girls had become hysterical.

But as he stood in his private office, looking out into the gray loft,
and feeling how weird and swift are life's changes, the men turned on
the electrics, and the floors and walls began their old trembling and
the presses clanked and thundered. He could have wept. To Joe this
moment of starting up had always been precious: it had seemed to bring
him something he had missed; something that fitted like an old shoe and
was friendly and familiar. All at once he felt as if he could not leave
this business, could not leave these men.

And yet he had only three days with them to wind up the business and
install Marty Briggs. And then there was a last supper of Joe Blaine and
his men. Those days followed one another with ever-deepening gloom, in
which the trembling printery and all the human beings that were part of
it seemed steeped in a growing twilight. Do what Joe would and could in
the matter of good-fellowship, loud laughter, and high jocularity, the
darkness thickened staggeringly. Hardly had Joe settled the transfer of
the printery to Marty, when the rumor of the transaction swept the
business. At noon men gathered in groups and whispered together as if
some one had died, and one after another approached Joe with a:

"Mr. Joe, is it true what the fellows say?"

"Yes, Tom."

"Going to leave us, Mr. Joe?"

"Going, Tom."

"_Got_ to go?"

"I'm afraid I have to."

"I'll hate to go home and tell my wife, Mr. Joe. She'll cry her head
off."

"Oh, come! come!"

"Say--we men, Mr. Joe--"

But Tom would say no more, and go off miserably; only to be replaced by
Eddie or Mack or John, and then some such dialogue would be repeated.
Under the simple and inadequate words lurked that sharp tragedy of life,
the separation of comrades, that one event which above all others
darkens the days and gives the sense of old age. And the men seemed all
the closer to Joe because of the tragedy of the fire. All these
conversations told on Joe. He went defiantly about the shop, but
invariably his spoken orders were given in a humble, almost affectionate
tone, as (with one arm loosely about the man):

"Say, Sam, _don't_ you think you'd better use a little benzine on that?"

And Sam would answer solemnly:

"I've always done as you've said, Mr. Joe--since the very first."

His men succeeded in this way in making Joe almost as miserable as when
he had parted from Myra; and indeed a man's work is blood of his blood,
heart of his heart.

Possibly one thing that hurt Joe as much as anything else was a curious
change in Marty Briggs. That big fellow, from the moment that Joe had
handed over the business, began to unfold hitherto unguessed bits of
personality. He ceased to lament Joe's going; he went about the shop
with a certain jaunty air of proprietorship; and the men, for some
unknown reason, began to call him Mr. Briggs. He even grew a bit cool
toward Joe. Joe watched him with a sad sort of mirth, and finally called
him into the office one morning. He put his hands on the big man's
shoulders and looked in his face.

"Marty," he said, "I hope you're not going to make an ass of yourself."

"What do you mean?" murmured Marty.

Joe brought his face a little nearer.

"I want to know something."

"What?"

Joe spoke slowly:

"_Are you Marty Briggs now or are you Martin Briggs_?"

Marty tried to laugh; tried to look away.

"What's the difference?" he muttered.

"Difference?" Joe's voice sank. "Marty, I thought you were a bigger man.
It's only the little peanut fellows who want to be bossy and
holier-than-thou. _Don't make any mistake_!"

"I guess," muttered Marty, "I can steer things O.K."

"You'd better!" Joe spoke a little sharply. "Our men here are as big as
you and I, every one of them. My God! you'll have to pay the price of
being a high muck-a-muck, Marty! So, don't forget it!"

Marty tried to laugh again.

"You're getting different lately," he suggested.

"I?" Joe laughed harshly. "What if it's you? But don't let's quarrel.
We've been together too long. Only, let's both remember. That's all,
Marty!"

All of which didn't mend matters. It was that strangest of all the
twists of human nature--the man rising from the ranks turning against
his fellows.

On Friday night Joe climbed the three flights of the stuffy Eightieth
Street tenement and had supper with the Ranns. That family of five
circled him with such warmth of love that the occasion burst finally
into good cheer. The two girls, seated opposite him, sent him smiling
and wordless messages of love. Not a word was said of the fire, but John
kept serving him with large portions of the vegetables and the excellent
and expensive steak which had been bought in his honor; and John's wife
kept spurring him on.

"I'm sure Mr. Joe could stand just a weeny sliver more."

"Mrs. Rann"--Joe put down knife and fork--"do you want me to _burst_?"

"A big man like you? Give him the sliver, John."

"John, spare me!"

"Mr. Joe"--John waved his hand with an air of finality--"in the shop
what you says goes, but in this here home I take my orders from the old
lady. See?"

"Nellie--Agnes--" he appealed, despairingly, to his little loves, "_you_
save me! Don't you love me any more?"

This set Nellie and Agnes giggling with delight.

"Give him a pound, a whole pound!" cried Agnes, who was the elder.

A nice sliver was waved dripping on Joe's plate, which Joe proceeded to
eat desperately, all in one mouthful. Whereupon the Ranns were convulsed
with joy, and John kept "ha-ha-ing" as he thumped the table, and went to
such excesses that he seemed to put his life in peril and Mrs. Rann and
the girls had to rise and pound him until their hands hurt.

"Serves you right, John," said Joe, grimly. "Try it again, and you'll
get a stroke."

"Ain't he the limit?" queried John, gasping.

Then Mrs. Rann went mysteriously to the cupboard, and the girls began to
whisper together and giggle. And then Mrs. Rann brought something
covered with a napkin, and then the napkin was removed. It was pie.

Joe pretended that he didn't know the secret, and leaned far over and
gazed at it.

"It's--well, what is it?"

Mrs. Rann's voice rang with exultation.

"Your favorite, Mr. Joe."

"Not--_raisin pie_?"

A shout went up from all. Then real moisture came stealthily to Joe's
eyes, and he looked about on those friendly faces, and murmured:

"Thoughtful, mightily thoughtful!"

There was a special bottle of wine--rather cheap, it is true, but then
it was served with raisin pie and with human love, which made it very
palatable. Mrs. Rann fixed John with a sharp glance through her glasses
and cleared her throat several times, and finally Agnes gave him a poke
in the ribs, whispering:

"Hurry up, dad!"

John blushed and rose to his feet.

"Mr. Joe, I ain't a talker, anyway on my feet. But, Mr. Joe, you've been
my boss six years. And, Mr. Joe--" He paused, stuck, and gazed
appealingly at Joe.

Joe rose to the occasion.

"So it's, here's to good friends, isn't it, John?"

John beamed.

"That's it--you took the words out of my mouth! Toast!"

So they drank.

Then Joe rose, and spoke musingly, tenderly:

"There's a trifle I want to say to you to-night--to every one of you. I
can't do without you. Now it happens that I'm going to put a press in my
new business and I'm looking for a first-class crackerjack of a
pressman. Do you happen to know any one in this neighborhood who could
take the job?"

He sat down. There was profound silence. And then Mrs. Rann took off
her spectacles and sobbed. John reached over and took Joe's hand, and
his voice was husky with tears.

"Mr. Joe! Mr. Joe! Ah, say, you make me feel foolish!"

Joe stayed with them late that night, and when he left, the kisses of
the two girls moist on his cheeks, he had no doubt of his life-work. But
next day, Saturday--the last day--was downright black. Things went
wrong, and the men steered clear of Joe.

"Don't bother _him_," they said, meaning to spare him, and thereby
increasing his pain. Men spoke in hushed tones, as soldiers might on the
eve of a fatal battle, and even Marty Briggs dropped his new mannerisms
and was subdued and simple.

Then Joe went off into a state of mind which might be described as the
"hazes"--a thing he did now and then. At such times the word went round:

"The old man's got 'em again!"

And he was left well alone, for the good reason that he was
unapproachable. He seemed not to listen to spoken words, nor to pay any
attention to the world about him. The men, however, appreciated these
spells, for, as a rule, something came of them--they bore good practical
fruit, the sure test of all sanity.

The day finally wore away, to every one's relief. Joe took a last look
around at all the familiar scene, shut his desk, handed over the keys
to Marty (who could not speak because he was half-choked), sang out,
"See you later, boys!" heard for the last time the sharp ring of the
door-bell and the slam of the door, and hurried away. Then at last night
came, and with night the last supper (as already announced) of Joe
Blaine and His Men.

By Monday there would be painted an addition on that door, namely:

  MARTIN BRIGGS
  SUCCESSOR TO

The supper was held in the large hall, upstairs, of Pfaff's, on East
Eighty-sixth Street. The large table was a dream of green and white, of
silver and glass, and the men hung about awkwardly silent in their
Sunday best. Then Joe cried:

"Start the presses!"

There came a good laugh then to break the icy air, and they sat down and
were served by flying waiters, who in this instance had the odd
distinction of appearing to be the "upper classes" serving the
"lower"--a distinction, up to date, not over-eagerly coveted by society.
For the waiters wore the conventional dress of "gentlemen" and the
diners were in plain and common clothes.

At first the diners were in a bit of a funk, but Pfaff's excellent
meats and cool, sparkling wines soon set free in each a scintillant
human spirit, and the banquet took on almost an air of gaiety.

Finally there came the coffee and the ice-cream in forms, and Martin
Briggs rose. There was a stamping of feet, a clanking of knives on
glasses, a cry of "Hear! Hear!"

Martin Briggs knew it by heart and launched it with the aid of two
swallows of water. His voice boomed big.

"Fellow-workers, friends, and the Old Man!"

This produced tumults of applause.

"We are met to-night on a solemn occasion. Ties are to be severed,
friends parted. Such is life. Mr. Blaine--" (Cries from the far end of
the table, "Say, Joe! say, Joe!") "Mr. Joe has been our friend, through
all these long years. He has been our friend, our boss, our co-worker.
Never did he spare himself; often he spared us. He had created an
important business, a profitable business, a business which has brought
a good living to every one of us. It is not for us to talk of the
catastrophe--this is not the occasion for that. Enough to say that
to-night Mr. Joe leaves that business. Others must carry it on. My
sentiment is that these others must continue in the same spirit of Mr.
Joe. That's my sentiment." (Roars of applause, stamping of feet, but one
voice heard in talk with a neighbor, "Say, I guess his wife wrote that,
Bill.") "So I propose a toast. To Mr. Joe, now and forever!"

They rose, they clanked glasses, they drank. Then they sat down and felt
that something was wrong. Marty surely had missed fire.

Whereupon John Rann, blushing, rose to his feet, and began to stammer:

"Say, fellers, do you mind if I put in a word?" (Cries: "Not a bit!"
"Soak it him, Johnny.") "Well, I want to say," his voice rose, "Joe
Blaine is _it_." (Applause, laughter, stamping.) "He's jest one of us."
(Cries: "You bet!" "You've hit it, Johnny!" "Give us more!") "He's a
friend." (Cries: "That's the dope!") "He never did a mean thing in his
life." (One loud cry: "Couldn't if he wanted to!") "Say," (Cries: "Go
ahead!" "Nobody 'll stop yer!" "Give him hell!" Laughter.) "We fellers
never appreciated this here Joe Blaine, did we?" (Cries: "Gosh no!")
"But we do _now_!" (Uproarious and prolonged applause.) "Say, fellers,
he's been like a regular father to us kids." (A strange silence.) "He's
been--Oh, hell!" (Speaker wipes his eyes with a red handkerchief.
Strange silence prolonged. Then one voice: "Tell him to his face, John.
'Bout time he knew.") "Joe Blaine" (speaker faces Mr. Blaine, and tries
not to choke), "if any one tries to say that you had anything to do with
the fire--he's a _damned liar_!"

A thrill charged the men; they became pale; they gazed on Joe, who
looked as white as linen; and suddenly they burst forth in a wildness,
a shouting, a stamping, a cry of: "Mr. Joe! Mr. Joe! Mr. Joe!"

Joe arose; he leaned a little forward; he trembled visibly, his rising
hand shaking so that he dropped it. Then at last he spoke:

"Yes--John is my friend. And you--are my friends. Yes. But--you're
wrong. I _was_ to blame." He paused. "I _was_ to blame. Here, to-night,
I want to say this: Those girls, those comrades of ours--all that went
to waste with them--well," his voice broke, "I'm going to try to make
good for them...."

For a moment he stood there, his face working strangely as if he were
going to break down, and the men looked away from him. Then he went on
in a voice warmly human and tender:

"You and I, boys, we grew up together. I know your wives and children.
You've given me happy hours. I've made you stand for a lot--your old man
was considerable boy--had his bad habits, his queer notions. Once in
awhile went crazy. But we managed along, quarreling just enough to hit
it off together. Remember how I fired Tommy three times in one week?
Couldn't get rid of him. Oh, Tommy, what 'pi' you made of things! Great
times we've had, great times. It hurts me raw." He paused, looking round
at them. They were glancing at him furtively with shining eyes. "Hurts
me raw to think those times are over--for me. But the dead have called
me. I go out into another world. I go out into a great fight. I may
fail--quite likely I will. But I shall be backed. Your love goes with
me, and I've got a big job ahead." Again he paused, overcome. Then he
tried to smile, tried to smooth out the tragic with a forced jocularity.
"Now, boys, behave. Mind you don't work too much. And don't all forget
the old man. And--but that's enough, I guess."

The silence was terrible. Some of those big men were crying softly like
stricken children. It was the last requiem over the dead, the last
flare-up of the tragic fire. They crowded round Joe. He was blind
himself with tears, though he felt a strange quiet in his heart.

And then he was out in the starry autumn night, walking home, murmuring:

"It's all over. That's out of my life."

And he felt as if something had died within him.




VIII


THE WIND IN THE OAKS

Early Monday evening there came a note from Myra:

  I wanted you to know that I am leaving for the
  country--to-morrow--to get a rest.

  MYRA.

Joe at once put on his hat and coat and went out. The last meeting with
his men had given him a new strength, a heightened manhood. Like a man
doomed to death, he felt beyond despair now. He only knew he must go to
Myra and set straight their relationship as a final step before he
plunged into the great battle. No more weakness! No more quarreling! But
clear words and definite understanding!

He went up the stoop and rang the bell. A servant opened the door,
showed him into the dimly lighted parlor, and went up the stairs with
his name. He heard her footsteps, light, hesitant. She appeared before
him, pale and sick and desperate.

"What do you want?" she asked in a tortured voice.

He arose and came close to her. He spoke authoritatively:

"Myra, get on your things. We must take a walk."

Her shifting eyes glanced up, gave him their full luminous gray and all
the trouble of her heart.

"Myra," his voice deepened, and struck through her, "you must go with me
to-night. It's our last chance."

She turned and was gone. He heard her light footsteps ascending; he
waited, wondering, hoping; and then she came down again, showing her
head at the door. She had on the little rounded felt hat, and she
carried her muff.

They went out together, saying nothing, stepping near one another under
the lamps and over the avenues, and into the Park. It was a strange,
windy night, touched with the first bleakness of winter, tinged with the
moaning melancholy of the tossing oak-trees, and with streaks of faint
reflected city lights in the far heavens.

It was their last night together. Both knew it. There was no help for
it. The great issues of life were sweeping them away into black gulfs of
the future, where there might never be meeting again, never hand-touch
nor sound of each other's voice. And strangely life deepened in their
hearts, and they were swept by the mystery of being alive ... alive in
the star-streaked darkness of space, alive with so many other brief
creatures that brightened for a moment in the gloom and then sank away
into the stormy heart of nature. And Love contended with Death, and the
little labors of man helped Death to crush Love; and so that moment of
existence, that brief span, became a mere brute struggle, a clash, a
fight, a thing sordid and worse than death.

Out of the mystery, each, from some unimaginable distance, had come
forth and met here on the earth, met for a wild moment, a moment that
gave them lightning-lit glimpses of that mystery, only to part from each
other now, each to return into the darkness.

They felt in unison more than they could ever say. And it was the last
night together.

They sat down on a bench, under those mournful boughs, under the
lamentations of the oaks.

"Myra," said Joe.

She murmured, "Yes."

His voice was charged with some of the strangeness of the night, some
significance of the mystery of life and death.

"You read my letter ..."

"Yes."

"And you understand ... at last?"

"I don't know ... I can't tell."

He paused; he leaned nearer.

"Why are you going away?"

"I've been sick," she whispered. "The doctor told me to go."

"For long?"

"For a rest."

"And you go to-morrow?"

"I go to-morrow."

"_Without forgiving me_?" He leaned very near.

There was a palpitating silence, a silence that searched their souls,
and sharply then Myra cried out:

"Oh, Joe! Joe! This is killing me!"

"Myra!" he cried.

He drew her close, very close, stroking her cheek, and the tears ran
over his fingers.

"Oh, don't you see," he went on, brokenly, "I can't ask you to come with
me? And yet I must go?"

"I don't know," she sobbed. "I must go away and rest ... and think ...
and try to understand...."

"And may I write to you?..."

"Yes," she murmured.

"And I am forgiven?"

"Forgive me!" she sobbed.

They could say no more, but sat in the wild darkness, clasping each
other as if they could not let one another go.... How could they send
each other forth to go in loneliness and homelessness to the ends of the
earth? The hours passed as they talked brokenly together, words of
remorse, of love, of forgiveness.

And then finally they arose--it was very late--and Myra whispered,
clinging to him:

"We must say good-by here!"

"Good-by!" he cried ... and they kissed.

"Joe," she exclaimed, "take care of yourself! Do just that for me!"

"I will," he said huskily, "but you must do the same for me. Promise."

"I promise!"

"Oh, Joe!" she cried out, "what is life doing with us?"

And they went back, confused and strange, through the lighted streets.
They stood before her house.

"Till you come back!" he whispered.

She flashed about then, a look of a new wonder in her eyes.

"If only I thought you were right in your work!" she cried.

"You will! You will, Myra! And in that hope, we will go on!"

She was gone; the door shut him out of her life. And all alone, strong,
bitter, staring ahead, Joe stepped off to begin the new life ... to
plunge into the battle.

       *       *       *       *       *


PART II--THE TEST




I


BEGINNINGS

It was in that red gash of crosstown brick--West Tenth Street--that the
new life began. The neighborhood was quaint and poor, a part of that old
Greenwich Village which at one time was a center of quiet and chaste
respectability, with its winding streets, its old-fashioned low brick
houses, its trees, its general air of detachment and hushed life. Now it
was a scene of slovenliness and dust, of miserable lives huddled thickly
in inadequate houses, of cheap roomers and boarders, of squalid
poverty--a mix of many nations well-sprinkled with saloons.

But the house was quite charming--three stories, red brick, with a stoop
of some ten steps, and long French windows on the first floor. Behind
those French windows was a four-room flat; beneath them, in the
basement, a room with iron-grated windows. Into that flat Joe and his
mother moved.

The invasion was unostentatious. No one could have dreamed that the
tall, homely man, dashing in and out in his shirt-sleeves between the
rooms and the moving-van drawn up at the curb, had come down with the
deliberate purpose of making a neighborhood out of a chaos, of
organizing that jumble of scattered polyglot lives.... In the faded
sunshine of the unusually warm winter afternoon, with its vistas of
gold-dusty air, and its noise of playing children and on-surging
trolleys and trucks and all the minute life of the saloons and the
stores--women hanging out of windows to get the recreation of watching
the confused drama of the streets, neighbors meeting in doorways, young
men laughing and chatting in clusters about lamp-posts--Joe toiled
valiantly and happily. He would rapidly glance at the thickly peopled
street and wonder, with a thrill, how soon he would include these lives
in his own, how soon he would grip and rouse and awaken the careless
multitude....

All was strange, all was new. Everything that was deep in his life--all
the roots he had put down through boyhood, youth, and manhood into the
familiar life of Yorkville--was torn up and transplanted to this fresh
and unfriendly soil.... He felt as if he were in an alien land, under
new skies, in a new clime, and there was all the romance of the
mysterious and all the fear of the untried. Beginnings always have the
double quality of magic and timidity--the dreaded, delicious first
plunge into cold water, the adventurous striking out into unknown
perils.... Did it not at moments seem like madness to dare
single-handed into this vast and careless population? Was he not merely
a modern Don Quixote tilting at windmills? Well, so be it, he thought;
the goal might be unreachable, but the quest was life itself.

He had an inkling of the monstrous size of New York. All his days he had
lived within a half-hour's ride of Greenwich Village, and yet it was a
new world to him. So the whole city was but a conglomeration of nests of
worlds, woven together by a few needs and the day's work, worlds as yet
undiscovered in every direction, huge tracts of peoples of all races
leading strange and unassimilated lives. He felt lost in the crowded
immensity, a helpless, obscure unit in the whirl of life.

He had fallen in love with Greenwich Village from the first day he had
explored it for a promising dwelling-place. Here, he knew, lived Sally
Heffer, and here doubtless he would meet her and she would help shape
his fight, perhaps be the woman to gird on his armor, put sword in his
hand, and send him forth. For he needed her, needed her as a child needs
a teacher, as a recruit needs a disciplined veteran. It was she who had
first revealed the actual world to him; it was she who had first divined
his power and his purpose; it was she who had released him from guilt by
showing him a means of expiation.

And yet, withal, he feared to meet her. There had been something
terrible about her that afternoon at Carnegie Hall, and something that
awed him that evening at the Woman's League. Until she had broken down
and wept, she had hardly seemed a woman--rather a voice crying in the
wilderness, a female Isaiah, the toilers become articulate. And he could
not think of her as a simple, vivacious young woman. How would she greet
him? Would her eyes remember his part in the fire?

At least, so he told himself, he would not seek her out (he had her
address from Fannie Lemick) until he had something to show for his new
life--until, possibly, he had a copy of that magazine which was still a
hypothesis and a chimera. Then he would nerve himself and go to her and
she should judge him as she pleased.

That first supper with his mother had a sweetness new to their lives. He
ran out to the butcher, the grocer, and the delicatessen man, and came
home laden with packages. The stove in the rear kitchen was set alight;
the wooden table in the center was spread with cloth and cutlery; and
they sat down opposite each other, utterly alone ... no boarding--house
flutter and gossip and noise, no unpleasant jarring personalities, no
wholesale cookery. All was quiet and peace--a brooding, tinkling
silence. They both smiled and smiled, their eyes moist, and the food
tasted so good. Blessed bread that they broke together, the cup that
they shared between them! The moment became sacred, human, stirred by
all the old, old miraculousness of home, that deepest need of humanity,
that rich relationship that cuts so much deeper than the light
touch-and-go of the world.

Joe spoke awkwardly.

"So we're here, mother ... and it's ripping, isn't it?"

She could hardly speak, but her eyes seemed to sparkle with a second
youth.

"Yes," she murmured, "it's the first time we've had anything like this
since you were a boy."

They both thought of his father, and the vanished days of the shanty on
the hillside, and his mother thought:

"People must live out their own lives in their own homes."

There was something that fed the roots of her woman-nature to have this
place apart, this quiet shelter where she ruled. It would be a joy to go
marketing, it would be a delight to cook, and it was charming to live so
intimately with her son. They were a family again.

After supper they washed the dishes together, laughing and chatting.
There were a hundred pleasing details to consider--where to place
furniture, what to buy, whether to have a servant or not (Joe insisted
on one), and all the incidents of the day to go over.

And then after the dish-washing they stopped work, and sat down in the
front office amid the packing-cases and the trunks and the litter and
débris. The gas was lighted above them, and the old-fashioned stove
which stood in the center and sprouted up a pipe nearly to the ceiling
and then at right angles into the wall was made red-hot with wood and
coal. Joe smoked and his mother sewed, and a hush seemed to fall on the
city, broken only by the echo of passing footsteps and the mellowed
thunder of the intermittent trolley-cars.

"And they call this a slum," muttered Joe.

In fact, save possibly for less clear air and in the summer a noise of
neighbors, they might have been living in New York's finest
neighborhood--almost a disappointment to two people prepared to plunge
into dirt, danger, and disease.... Later Joe learned that some of the
city's magazine writers had settled in the district on purpose, not
because they were meeting a crisis, but because they liked it, liked its
quaint old flavor, its colorful life, its alien charm, and not least,
its cheaper rents.

But this evening all was unknown save the joy and peace of a real home.
They went to bed early, Joe in the room next the office, his mother in
the adjoining room next the kitchen, but neither slept for a long time.
They lay awake tingling with a strange happiness, a fine freedom, a
freshness of re-created life. Only to the pioneer comes this thrill of a
new-made Eden, only to those who tear themselves from the easy ruts and
cut hazardous clearings in the unventured wilderness. It is like being
made over, like coming with fresh heart and eyes upon the glories of the
earth; it is the only youth of the world.

The night grew late and marvelously hushed, a silence almost oppressive,
where every noise seemed like an invader, and Joe, lying there keenly
awake, seemed to feel the throb of the world, the pauseless pulsations
of that life that beats in every brain and every heart of the earth;
that life that, more intense than human love and thought, burns in the
suns that swing about heaven rolling the globe of earth among them; that
life that enfolds with tremendous purpose the little human creature in
the vastness, that somehow expresses itself and heightens and changes
itself in human lives and all the dreams and doings of men. Joe felt
that life, thrilling to it, opening his heart to it, letting it
surcharge and overflow his being with strength and joy. And he knew then
that he lay as in a warm nest of the toilers and the poor, that crowded
all about him in every direction were sleeping men and women and little
children, all recently born, all soon to die, he himself shortly to be
stricken out of these scenes and these sensations. It was all mystery
unplumbable, unbelievable ... that this breath was not to go on forever,
that this brain was to be stopped off, this heart cease like a run-down
clock, this exultation and sorrow to leave like a mist, scattered in
that life that bore it.... That he, Joe Blaine, was to die!

Surely life was marvelous and sacred; it was not to be always a selfish
scramble, a money rush, a confusion and jumble, but rather something of
harmony and mighty labors and mingled joys. He felt great strength; he
felt equal to his purposes; he was sure he could help in the advancing
processes.... Even as he was part of the divine mystery, so he could
wield that divineness in him to lift life to new levels, while the
breath was in his body, while the glow was in his brain.

And he thought of Myra, his mate in the mystery, and in the night he
yearned for her, hungered through all his being. She had written him a
note; it came to him from the mountains. It ran:

  DEAR JOE,--You will be glad to know that I am getting
  back to myself. The peace and stillness of the
  white winter over the hills is healing me. It seems
  good merely to exist, to sleep and eat and exercise and
  read. I can't think now how I behaved so unaccountably
  those last few weeks, and I wonder if you will
  ever understand. I have been reading over and over
  again your long letter, trying hard to puzzle out its
  meanings, but I fear I am very ignorant. I know nothing
  of the crisis you speak of. I know that "ye have
  the poor always with you," I know that there is much
  suffering in the world--I have suffered myself--but I
  cannot see that living among the poor is going to help
  vitally. Should we not all live on the highest level
  possible? Level up instead of leveling down. Ignorance,
  dirt, and sickness do not attract me ... and
  now here among the hills the terrible city seems like
  a fading nightmare. It would be better if people lived
  in the country. I feel that the city is a mistake. But
  of one thing I am sure. I understand that you cannot
  help doing what you are doing, and I know that it would
  have been a wrong if I had interfered with your life.
  I would have been a drag on you and defeated your
  purposes, and in the end we would both have been very
  unhappy. It seems to me most marriages are. Write
  me what you are doing, where you are living, and how
  you are.

  Yours,

  MYRA.

He had smiled over some of the phrases in this letter, particularly, "I
feel that the city is a mistake." Would Myra ever know that her very
personality and all of her life were interwoven inextricably with the
industrial city--that the clothes she wore, the food she ate, the books
she studied, the letter she wrote him, even down to ink, pen, and paper,
the education and advantages she enjoyed, were all wrought in the mills,
the mines, the offices, and by the interchange and inweaving and mighty
labors of industrialism? The city teacher is paid by taxes levied on the
commerce and labors of men, and the very farmer cannot heighten his life
without exchange with the city.

And so her letter made him smile. Yet at the same time it stirred him
mightily. All through it he could read renunciation; she was giving him
up; she was loosening her hold over him; she was nobly sacrificing her
love to his life-work. And she announced herself as teachable and
receptive. She could not yet understand, but understanding might come in
time.

So in the night he tried to send his thought over the hills, flash his
spirit into hers, in the great hope that she would thrill with a new
comprehension, a new awakening.... In a world so mysterious, in an
existence so strange, so impossible, so unbelievable, might such a
miracle be stranger than the breath he breathed and the passions he
felt?

And so in that hope, that great wild hope, he fell asleep in the
uneventful beginnings of the battle. And all through those unconscious
hours forces were shaping about him and within him to bear his life
through strange ways and among strange people. His theories, so easy as
he drank them out of books, were to be tested in the living world of men
and women, in that reality that hits back when we strike it, and that
batters us about like driftwood in the whirlpool.




II


THE NINE-TENTHS

Standing on Washington Heights--that hump on northwestern Manhattan
Island--gazing, say, from a window of the City College whose gray and
quaint cluster fronts the morn as on a cliff above the city--one sees,
at seven of a sharp morning, a low-hung sun in the eastern skies, a vast
circle and lift of mild blue heavens, and at one's feet, down below, the
whole sweep of New York from the wooded ridges of the Bronx to the
Fifty-ninth Street bridge and the golden tip of the Metropolitan Tower.
It is a flood of roofs sweeping south to that golden, flashing minaret,
a flood bearing innumerable high mill chimneys, church steeples, school
spires, and the skeleton frames of gas-works. Far in the east the Harlem
River lies like a sheet of dazzling silver, dotted with boats; every
skylight, every point of glass or metal on the roofs, flashes in the
sun, and, gazing down from that corner in the sky, one sees the visible
morning hymn of the city--a drift from thousands of house chimneys of
delicate unraveling skeins of white-blue smoke lifting from those human
dwellings like aerial spirits. It is the song of humanity rising, the
song of the ritual of breaking bread together, of preparation for the
day of toil, the song of the mothers sending the men to work, the song
of the mothers kissing and packing to school the rosy, laughing
children.

It might be hard to imagine that far to the south in that moving human
ocean, a certain Joe Blaine, swallowed in the sea, was yet as real a
fact as the city contained--that to himself he was far from being
swallowed, that he was, in fact, so real to himself that the rest of the
city was rather shadowy and unreal, and that he was immensely concerned
in a thousand-flashing torrent of thoughts, in a mix-up of appetite and
desires, and in the condition and apparel of his body. That as he sat at
his desk, for instance, it was important to him to discover how he could
break himself of a new habit of biting the end of his pen-holder.

And yet, under that flood of roofs, Joe was struggling with that crucial
problem. He finally settled it by deciding to smoke lots of cigars, and
proceeded to light one as a beginning. He smoked one, then a second,
then a third--which was certainly bad for his health. He was in the
throes of a violent reaction.

Several days of relentless activity had followed the moving in. There
was much to do. The four rooms became immaculately clean--sweetened up
with soap and water, with neat wallpaper, with paint and furniture.
Even the dark inner bedrooms contrived to look cozy and warm and
inviting. Joe's mother was a true New England housekeeper, which meant
scrupulous order, cleanliness, and brightness. The one room exempt from
her rule was Joe's. After the first clean-up, his mother did not even
try to begin on it.

"You're hopeless, Joe," she laughed, "and you'll ruin faster than I can
set right."

And so that editorial office soon became a nest of confusion. The walls
were lined with bookshelves and a quaint assortment of books, old and
new, populated not only these, but the floor, the two tables, the
roll-top desk, and here and there a chair. White paper began to heap up
in the corners. Magazines--"my contemporaries," said the proud
editor--began their limitless flood. And the matting on the floor was
soon worn through by Joe's perpetual pacing.

The whole home, however, began to have atmosphere--personality. There
was something open, hospitable, warm about it--something comfortable and
livable.

Among the first things Joe did was to procure two assistants. One was
the bookkeeper, Nathan Slate, a lean and dangling individual, who
collapsed over his high desk in the corner like a many-bladed penknife.
He was thin and cadaverous, and spoke in a meek and melancholy voice,
studied and slow. He dressed in black and tried to suppress his thin
height by stooping low and hanging his head. The other addition was
Billy, the office-boy, a sharp, bright youth with red hair and brilliant
blue eyes.

There was much else to do. For instance, there were the money affairs to
get in shape. Joe secured a five-per-cent mortgage with his capital.
Marty Briggs paid down two thousand cash and was to pay two thousand a
year and interest. So Joe could figure his income at somewhat over six
thousand dollars, and, as he hoped that he and his mother would use not
more than fifteen hundred a year, or, at the most, two thousand, he felt
he had plenty to throw into his enterprise.

Among the first things that Joe discovered was a gift of his own
temperament. He was a born crowd-man, a "mixer." He found he could
instantly assume the level of the man he talked with, and that his
tongue knew no hindrance. Thought flowed easily into speech. This gave
him a freedom among men, a sense of belonging anywhere, and singled him
out from the rest. It gave him, too, the joy of expression--the joy of
throwing out his thought and getting its immediate reaction in other
lives. Yet he understood perfectly the man who seemed shy and recluse,
who was choked-off before strangers, and who yet burned to be a
democrat, to give and take, to share alien lives, to be of the moving
throng of life. Such a man was the victim either of a wrong education,
an education of repression that discouraged any personal display, or he
had a twist in his temperament. Joe, who began to be well aware of his
gift, used it without stint and found that it had a contagious
quality--it loosened other people up; it unfolded their shy and secret
petals like sun heat on a bud; it made the desert of personality blossom
like the rose. He warmed the life about him because he could express
himself.

So it was not hard for Joe to shift to this new neighborhood and become
absorbed in its existence. Tradespeople, idlers, roomers and landlady in
the house accepted him at once and felt as if they had known him all
their lives. By a power almost of intuition he probed their obscure
histories and entered into their destinies.

However, in spite of these activities and all the bustle and stir of
fresh beginnings, Joe, that sunny morning, was suffering a sharp
reaction. In the presence of Nathan Slate and Billy he was pretending to
work, but his brain was as dry as a soda-cracker. It was that natural
revulsion of the idealist following the first glow. Here he was, up
against a reality, and yet with no definite plan, not even a name for
his paper, and he had not even begun to penetrate the life about him.
The throbbing moment had arrived when he must set his theories into
motion, drive them out into the lives of the people, and get reactions.
But how? In what way? His brain refused to think, and he felt nothing
save a misery and poverty of the spirit that were unendurable.

It seemed to him suddenly as if he had hastily embarked on a search for
the fountain of eternal youth--a voyage that followed mirages, and was
hollow and illusory. Beginnings, after the first flush, always have this
quality of fake, and Joe was standing in the shadow-land between two
lives. The old life was receding in the past; the new life had not yet
appeared. Without training, without experience, without definite
knowledge of the need to be met, with only a strong desire and a mixed
ideal, and almost without his own volition, he found himself now sitting
at a desk in West Tenth Street, with two employees, and nothing to do.
How out of this emptiness was he to create something vital?

This naturally brought a pang he might have anticipated. He had a sudden
powerful hankering for the old life. That at least was man-size--his job
had been man's work. He looked back at those fruitful laborious days,
with their rich interest and absorbing details, their human
companionships, and had an almost irrepressible desire to rush out, take
the elevated train, go down East Eighty-first Street, ascend the
elevator, ring the bell, and enter his dominion of trembling, thundering
presses. He could smell the old smells, he could see the presses and the
men, he could hear the noise. That was where he belonged. Voluntarily he
had exiled himself from happiness and use. He wanted to go back--wanted
it hard, almost groaned with homesickness.

Such struggles are death throes or birth throes. They are as real as two
men wrestling. Joe could sit still no longer, could mask no longer the
combat within him. So he rose hastily and went out and wandered about
the shabby, unfriendly neighborhood. He had a mad desire, almost
realized, to take the car straight to Eighty-first Street, and only the
thought of Marty Briggs in actual possession held him back. Finally he
went back and took lunch, and again tried the vain task of pretending to
work.

It was three o'clock when he surrendered. He strode in to his mother.

"Mother," he said, "isn't there something we can do together?"

"In what way?"

"Any way. I've been idling all day and I'm half dead." He laughed
strangely. "I believe I'm getting nerves, mother."

"Nerves!" She looked at him sharply. "What is it, Joe?"

"Oh! It's in-betweenness."

"I see." She smiled. "Well, there's some shopping to do--"

"Thank Heaven!"

So they went out together and took the Sixth Avenue car to Thirty-fourth
Street. Their shopping took them to Fifth Avenue, and then, later, up
Broadway to Forty-second Street. It was a different New York they
saw--in fact, the New York best known to the stranger. The gorgeous
palaces of trade glittered and sparkled, shimmered and flashed, with
jewels and silver, with silks and knick-knacks. The immense and rich
plenty of earth, the products of factories and mills, were lavishly
poured here, gathered in isles, about which a swarming sea of
well-dressed women pushed and crowded. The high ceilings were hung with
glowing moons of light; the atmosphere was magic with confused talk,
shuffling footsteps, and all the hum and stir of a human hive. Up and
down Fifth Avenue swept a black thick stream of motors and carriages in
which women and men lounged and stared. The great hotels sucked in and
poured out tides of jeweled and lace-wrapped creatures, and in the
lighted interiors of restaurants were rouged cheeks and kindled eyes.

As Joe and his mother reached Forty-second Street, that whirlpool of
theaters released its matinee crowds, a flood of youth, beauty,
brightness, and luxury.

And it seemed to Joe, seeing all this life from a Tenth Street
viewpoint, that here was a great city of wealth and idleness. Evidently
a large population had nothing to do save shop and motor, eat and idle.
How could he from shabby Tenth Street send out a sheet of paper that
would compete with these flashing avenues?

The sight depressed him. He said as much to his mother.

"This is New York," he said, "barbaric, powerful, luxuriant. These
people are the power of the city--the mighty few--these are the owners.
What can we do with them?"

His mother sensed then the struggle in his mind.

"Joe," she cried, "isn't there any place where we can see--the other
people?"

There was. They took the car down to Eighth Street, they walked east,
and entered little Washington Park, with its monumental arch, and its
shadowy trees, its wide and curving walks--its general sense of being a
green breathing-space in the sweep of streets. As they walked through
the sharp wintry air in the closing sunlight, what time the blue
electric lights gleamed out among the almost naked boughs, the
six-o'clock whistles began blowing from factories all about them--a glad
shriek that jumped from street to street over the city--and at once
across the eastern plaza of the park streamed the strange torrent of the
workers--a mighty, swift march of girls and boys, women and men,
homeward bound, the day's work ended--a human stream, in the gray light,
steeped in an atmosphere of accomplishment, sweet peace, solution. All
life seemed to touch a moment of harvest.

Joe's mother was thrilled, and in spite of himself Joe felt his heart
clutched, as it were, in a vise. He felt the strange, strong, human
grip. It was a marvelous spectacle, though common, daily, and cheap as
life.

Joe's mother whispered, in a low voice:

"Joe, this is the real New York!"

And then again:

"Those others are only a fraction--these are the people."

"Yes," murmured Joe, his blood surging to his cheeks, "these are the
nine-tenths."

They went closer to that mighty marching host--they saw the cheap
garments--baggy trousers, torn shoes, worn shirts; they saw the earnest,
tired faces, the white and toil-shrunk countenances, the poverty, the
reality of pain and work, all pressing on in an atmosphere of serious
progress, as if they knew what fires roared, what sinews ached down in
the foundations of the world where the future is created. And Joe
realized, as never before, that upon these people and their captains,
their teachers and interpreters, rested the burdens of civilization;
that the mighty city was wrought by their hands and those who dreamed
with them, that the foam and sparkle of Broadway and Fifth Avenue
bubbled up from that strong liquor beneath. And he believed that the
second-generation idlers had somehow expropriated the toilers and were
living like drones in the hive, and he felt that this could not be
forever, and he was seized by the conviction that a change could only
come through the toilers themselves. Could these pale people but know
their power, know their standing, know the facts of this strange double
life, and then use their might wisely and well, constructively,
creatively, to build up a better and fairer world, a finer justice, a
more splendid day's work, a happier night's home! These that created a
great city could, if trained, create a higher life in that city!

Surely the next few ages of the future had their work cut out for
them--the most stupendous task the race had ever undertaken.

Then, after all, he was right. All who could must be dedicated to the
work of sowing enlightenment, of yeasting the crowds with knowledge and
love and light--all who could. Then he, too, could do his share; he,
too, could reach this crowd. And these people--they were reachable. No
theaters and restaurants competed with him here. Their hearts and minds
were open. He could step in and share their lives. He had done so in his
shop, and these were of the same human nature.

Power returned to him.

"Mother," he said, his eyes flashing, "it's all right. Now I'm ready to
begin! I'm for the nine-tenths."

They turned, walking home in silence, and as they went the phrase
"nine-tenths," which Joe must have picked up in some book on socialism
or some sociological study, kept haunting his mind. The new power
released in him made his brain work like lightning--creatively. Thoughts
crowded, combinations sprung up; he began to actively dream and scheme.

"I've got it!" he cried. "Why not call my paper _The Nine-Tenths_?"

"Good!"

He began to plan aloud as the quick thoughts flashed.

"An eight-page paper--weekly. An editorial, giving some of the plain
facts about civilization--simple stuff to teach the people what industry
means, what their work means, what they ought to be doing. Then
news--news about all movements toward freedom--labor, strikes, reform,
new laws, schools--news of all the forces working for betterment--a
concrete statement of where the world stands to-day and what it is
doing. But a fair sheet, mother. No railing, no bitterness, no
bomb-throwing. Plenty of horse sense, plenty of banking the fires, of
delaying wisely. No setting class against class. No under-rating of
leaders and captains. Justice, but plenty of mercy. Facts, but plenty of
philosophy to cool 'em off. Progress all the time, but no French
revolutions. And when sides must be taken, no dishonest compromises, no
cowardly broad--mindedness--but always with the weakest, the under dog,
whenever their cause is good. That's my programme; that's _The
Nine-Tenths_."

"Of course," said his mother, "you'll see things clearer as you do them.
There'll be changes."

"Surely!" His mind was already miles ahead. "Mother, I've got it now,
for sure!"

"What now?" She laughed, enthusiastically.

"Isn't this a whopper? No _ads_."

"But why not, Joe? That would support the paper."

"No, not a line. I don't expect the paper to pay. That's where our money
comes in. We mustn't carry a line. Don't you see? There's hardly a
paper in the land that is free. They're influenced by their
advertising--that's their bread and butter. And even if they're not
influenced, people suspect they are. We must be free even of that
suspicion. We can be free--utterly so--say what we please--speak our
minds out--and nothing to hinder us. That will be unique--that will be
something new in magazines. We'll go the limit, mother."

His mother laughed.

"I guess you're right, Joe. It's worth trying. But how are you going to
circulate the paper?"

"How?" Again his mind jumped forward. "House-to-house canvass--labor
unions--street corners. I'm going to dig in now, get acquainted with the
people round about, spread it any old way. And I'm going to start with
the idea of a big future--twenty thousand copies finally. You see, it'll
be a sort of underground newspaper--no publicity--but spreading from
group to group among the workers. Broadway and up-town will never see a
copy."

So the new life started, started in full swing. Joe worked late that
very night putting his plans on paper, and the next morning there was
plenty of activity for everybody. Joe bought a rebuilt cylinder press
for fifteen hundred dollars and had it installed in the basement. Then
he had the basement wired, and got an electric motor to furnish the
power. John Rann and his family were moved down to a flat farther west
on Tenth Street, and a feeder, a compositor, and a make-up man were
hired along with him. In the press-room (the basement) was placed a
stone--a marble-top table--whereon the make-up man could take the strips
of type as they came from the compositors, arrange them into pages, and
"lock them up" in the forms, ready to put on the presses.

Then Joe arranged with a printery to set up the type weekly; with a
bindery to bind, fold, bundle, and address the papers; and with Patrick
Flynn, truckman, to distribute the papers to newsdealers.

Next Joe made a tour of the neighborhood, spoke with the newsdealers,
told them that all they would have to do was to deliver the papers to
the addresses printed upon them. He found them willing to thus add to
their income.

Thus he made ready. But he was not yet prepared to get subscriptions
(one dollar a year or twenty-five cents a quarter), feeling that first
he must have a sample paper to show.

The labor on that first number was a joy to him. He would jump up in the
middle of the night, rush into the office, light the gas, and get to
work in his nightgown. He was at it at all hours. And it proved to be an
enormous task. Eight pages eight by twelve do not read like a lot, but
they write like a very great deal. There was an editorial, "Greetings to
You," in which Joe set forth in plain words the ideas and ideals of the
paper, and in which he made clear the meaning of the phrase
"nine-tenths." Then he found that there were two great strikes in
progress in the city. This amazed him, as there was no visible sign of
such a condition. The newspapers said nothing of it, and peace seemed to
brood over the city's millions. Yet there were thousands of cloak-makers
out, and over in Brooklyn the toilers in the sugar refineries were
having little pitched battles with strike-breakers in the streets. Three
men had been killed and a score wounded.

Joe dug into these strikes, called at the union headquarters, spoke with
the men, even called on some of the cloak-makers' bosses and learned
their grievances. Then he wrote accounts of the strike without taking
sides, merely reporting the facts as fairly as he could.

In this way, and with the aid of clippings, and by printing that poem by
Lowell which was his mother's favorite, wherein was the couplet already
quoted,

  "They are slaves who dare not be
  In the right with two or three,"

he made up a hodge-podge of a magazine.

Up in the corner of the editorial page he ran the following, subject to
change:

               THE NINE-TENTHS

  A WEEKLY WORD ABOUT MEN, WOMEN, AND CHILDREN

         *       *       *       *       *

                  MY MOTTO

  I ACCEPT LIFE LARGELY, BUT NOT IN DETAILS

         *       *       *       *       *

      SOME OF THE DETAILS NOT ACCEPTED
                    ARE

  Anything that prevents a child from being well born
        and from fulfilling its possibilities.

   Anything that prevents a woman or man from using
        every good side of her or his nature.

           ABOUT THESE DETAILS NO DOUBT:

                    DISEASE
                    EXCESS
                     WANT
                   OVERWORK
                  CHILD LABOR

  And let's avoid jealousy, quarrels, ridicule, meanness,
       and the rest of the mosquito things.

        Otherwise: what a glorious world.

This didn't please him altogether, but he wanted to be definite and
simple, and he wanted to show that he wasn't a narrow partisan.

Thus the first number came to be. As he turned it out, Billy rushed it
in batches to the compositors, and when finally it all came back in
strips of type, it was hurried down to the idlers in the basement. At
ten-thirty that chilly, dust-blowing morning, when the sun-stricken air
glittered with eddies of motes, Joe, sitting at his desk, had the
exquisite rapture of feeling the building tremble.

He rushed to his mother, and exulted.

"Can't you feel the press going? Listen!"

Truly the new life had begun--the vision was beginning to crystallize in
daily living.

"We're in the fight now, mother!" he cried. "There's something doing!"

And later, when Joe stood at the back of the press and that first
complete sheet came through, he picked it up as if it were a new-born
child, as indeed it was, wet, drippy, forlorn, and weird, and yet a
wonder and a miracle. Joe looked on his own creation--the little
sheets--the big, black _The Nine-Tenths_--the clear, good type. He was
awed and reduced almost to tears.

He mailed a copy to Myra with a brief note:

  DEAR MYRA,--Here's the answer to your question.
  I'm doing the inclosed, and doing it in West Tenth
  Street. Do you know the neighborhood? Old Greenwich
  Village, red, shabby, shoddy, common, and vulgar.
  Mother and I are as happy as children. How are you?
  Your letter is splendid. I am sure you will come to
  understand. When are you returning to New York?

  As ever,

  JOE BLAINE.

And he thought, "Now I have something to show Sally Heffer!"




III


OTHERS: AND SALLY HEFFER

Joe filled a stiff cloth portfolio with a batch of 9/10s (abbreviation
for home use), pulled his gray hat over his bushy hair, and went over
and tapped the collapsible Slate on the shoulder.

"Yes, Mr. Joe."

"Nathan," cried Joe, excitedly, "if there's a rush of subscribers while
I'm gone, make 'em stand in line, and each wait his turn. But don't let
them block the car tracks--string 'em around the corner."

Nathan gazed at Joe like a lost soul.

"But I think, Mr. Joe," he said, slowly, "you place your hopes too high.
I don't like to be too gloomy, Mr. Joe, but I have my doubts about a
rush."

"Slate," cried Joe, slapping the tragic bookkeeper a whack, "you're
inspiring!"

And he swung out to the street in the brilliant morning sunshine, ready
to begin his canvass.

"Next door," he mused, "is the place to start."

There was a woman sitting on the stoop, a two-year-old girl in her
arms. Joe paused and looked at the baby.

"Hello, you."

The baby looked at him a little doubtfully, and then laughed.

"Girl or boy?" asked Joe of the mother.

"Girl."

"How old?"

"Two."

"She's a darling! What's her name?"

"Name's Annie."

"Named after you?"

"Sure!"

"You wouldn't mind if I gave her a peppermint to suck?"

"Would you mind some candy, Annie?"

"_Candy_!" shrieked the child.

Joe dove into his bulging pocket and produced a good hard white one.
Annie snatched it up and sucked joyously.

"Thank the man, Annie."

"Thank you."

"Is this your only one, Mrs.--"

"Cassidy's my name! No, I've buried two others."

"From this house?"

"No, we keep movin'--" Mrs. Cassidy laughed a little.

Joe made a grim face.

"Jump your rent, eh?"

Mrs. Cassidy shrugged her shoulders.

"What can poor people do?"

"But hasn't Mr. Cassidy a job?"

"He has when he has it--but it's bum work. Slave like a nigger and then
laid off for six months, maybe."

"What kind of work is that?"

"'Longshore--he's a 'longshoreman."

"And when he's unemployed you have a hard time, don't you?"

"Hard?" Mrs. Cassidy's voice broke. "What can we do? There's the
insurance every week--fifteen cents for my man, ten cents for me, and
five cents for Annie. We couldn't let that go; it's buryin'-money, and
there ain't a Cassidy isn't going to have as swell a funeral as any in
the ward. And then we've got to live. I've found one thing in this
world--the harder you work the less you get."

Joe spoke emphatically.

"Mrs. Cassidy, when your husband's out of work, through no fault of his
own, he ought to get a weekly allowance to keep you going."

"And who's to give it to him?"

"Who? Do you know what they do in Germany?"

"What do they do in Germany?"

"They have insurance for the unemployed, and when a man's out he gets
so-and-so-much a week. We ought to have it in America."

"How can we get it? Who listens to the poor?"

"Your man belongs to a union, doesn't he?"

"Sure!"

"Well, the trouble is our people here don't know these things. If they
knew them, they'd get together and make the bosses come round. It's
ignorance holding us all back."

"I've often told Tim he ought to study something. There's grand lectures
in the schools every Tuesday and Thursday night. But Tim don't put stock
in learning. He says learning never bought a glass of beer."

Joe laughed.

"Mrs. Cassidy, that's not what I mean. Listen. I'm a neighbor of
yours--live next door--"

"Sure! Didn't I see you move in? When my friend, Mrs. Leupp, seen your
iron beds, she up and went to Macy's and bought one herself. What yer
doing in there, anyway, with that printing-press? It gives me the
trembles."

Joe laughed heartily.

"You feel the press in this house?"

"First time, I thought it was an earthquake, Mr. Blaine."

Joe was abashed.

"How'd you know my name?"

"Ast it off your landlady."

"Well, you're wrong--I'm Mr. Joe."

Mrs. Cassidy was hugely amused.

"You're one grand fellow, let me tell you. But, oh, that black, thin
one--he's creepy, Mr. Joe. But your mother--she's all right. I was
telling Mrs. Rann so myself."

Joe sighed tragically.

"I suppose the whole neighborhood knows all my family secrets."

"Pretty near," laughed Mrs. Cassidy.

"Well, there's one thing you didn't know."

"What's that?"

"About my newspaper."

"What about it?"

"What paper do you take?"

Mrs. Cassidy mentioned a daily penny paper.

"Let's see," said Joe, "that's eleven cents a week, isn't it? Will you
spend two cents more, and take _The Nine-Tenths_?"

"_Yours_?"

"It's a paper that tells about the rich and the poor, and what the poor
ought to do to get more out of life. Here, take this copy, keep it; make
Tim read it."

Mrs. Cassidy was handed a neat little sheet, eight by twelve inches,
clearly printed. There was something homely and inviting about it,
something hospitable and honest. The woman fingered it curiously.

"Ain't it cute?" she cried.

"It's all written for just such people as you, and I want you to take
it."

"How much is it?"

"Well, you pay twenty-five cents and get it for three months, once a
week, and let Tim read it out loud. Say, don't you think Annie'd like
to see the printing-press?"

"'Deed she would!"

And then Joe did the one thing that won. He seized up little Annie
himself, and bore her down to the press-room, Mrs. Cassidy following,
and mentally concluding that there was no one in the ward like Mr. Joe.

Result: first subscription, and Joe elated with victory. All of which
shows, it must be confessed, that Joe was considerable of a politician,
and did not hesitate to adopt the methods of Tammany Hall.

It was the next day, at a street corner, that, quite accidentally, Joe
met Michael Dunan, truckman.

"I've got a cigar," said Joe, "but I haven't a match."

"I've got a match," said Michael, easily, "but I haven't a cigar."

"My name's Joe Blaine," said Joe, handing over a panetela.

"Mine's Mike Dunan," said Michael, passing a match.

They lit up together.

"The drinks are on me," murmured Michael.

They stepped into the saloon at the corner--a bright, mirrory place,
whose tiled floor was covered with sawdust, and whose bar shone like
mahogany.

"Two beers, Donovan."

"Dark or light, Mike?"

"Dark."

They drank. Michael pounded the bar.

"Joe Blaine, the times are hard."

"How so, Michael?"

"The rich are too rich, and the poor too poor. I'm tired of it!"

"Then look this over."

Michael looked it over, and bubbled with joy.

"That's great. Did you spiel it out? Did you say this little piece? Joe,
I want to join your union!"

Joe laughed; he sized up the little man, with his sparkling eyes, his
open face, his fiery, musical voice, his golden hair. And he had an
inspiration.

"Mike," he said, "I'm getting out this paper up the street. Have a press
there and an office. Run in and see my mother. If you like her, tell me,
and you can join the Stove Circle."

"And what may the Stove Circle be?"

"The get-together club--my advisory board."

"I'm on."

"See here, you," said a blunt, biting, deep-chested voice at their side.
"Let me get a look."

Joe turned and met Oscar Heming, delicatessen man, stumpy, bull-necked,
with fierce bristling mustache, and clothes much too big for him. He was
made a member at once of the Stove Circle.

That same evening Joe went down three steps into a little, low, cigar
store, whose gas-blazing atmosphere reeked with raw and damp tobacco. He
stepped up to the dusty counter.

"What's your best?"

The proprietor, a wise little owl of a man, with thin black hair, and
untidy spade beard, and big round glasses enlarging his big brown eyes,
placed a box before him.

"My own make--Underdogs--clear Havana--six cents apiece."

"I like the name. Give me ten. But explain!"

"Well"--Nathan Latsky (for so he proved to be) shrugged his
shoulders--"I'm one myself. But--what's in a name?"

"He's a red revolutionist!" said a voice, and Joe, turning, noticed two
men leaning beside him at the counter; one, a fine and fiery Jew,
handsome, dark, young; the other, a large and gentle Italian, with
pallid features, dark hair sprinkled with gray, and a general air of
largeness and leadership about him. The Jew had spoken.

"Why a red?" asked Joe.

"Oh," said Latsky, quietly, "I come from Russia, you know!"

"Well, I'm a revolutionist myself," said Joe. "But I haven't any color
yet."

"Union man?" asked the Italian.

"Not exactly. I run a radical newspaper."

"What's the name of it?" asked the Jew.

"_The Nine-Tenths_."

The words worked magic. They were all eagerness, and exchanged names.
Thus Joe came to know Jacob Izon and Salvatore Giotto and Nathan Latsky.
He was greatly interested in Izon, the facts of whose life he soon came
to know. Izon was a designer, working at Marrin's, the shirtwaist
manufacturer; he made thirty dollars a week, had a wife and two
children, and was studying engineering in a night school. He and his
wife had come from Russia, where they had been revolutionists.

The three men examined the paper closely.

"That's what we need," said Izon. "You must let us help to spread it!"

Joe added the three to the Stove Circle.

He went to Giotto's house with him, up to the sixth floor of a tenement,
and met the Italian's neat, dark-eyed wife, and looked in on the three
sleeping children. Then under the blazing gas in the crowded room, with
its cheap, frail, shiny furniture, its crayons on the wall, its crockery
and cheap clocks, and with the noise of the city's night rising all
about them, the two big men talked together. Joe was immensely
interested. The Italian was large-hearted, open-minded, big in body and
soul, and spoke quaintly, but thoughtfully.

"Tell me about yourself," said Joe.

Giotto spread out the palms of his hands.

"What to tell? I get a good education in the old country--but not much
spik English--better read, better write it. I try hard to learn. Come
over here, and education no good. Nobody want Italian educated man. So
worked on Italian paper--go round and see the poor--many tragedies,
many--like the theater. Write a novel, a romance, about the poor. Wish I
could write it in English."

"Good work," cried Joe. "Then what did you do?"

Giotto laughed.

"Imported the wine--got broke--open the saloon. Toughs come there,
thieves, to swindle the immigrants. Awfully slick. No good to warn
immigrants--they lose all their money. Come in crying. What can I do? I
get after the bums and they say, 'Giotto no good; we will kill him.'
Then I get broke again. Go to West Virginia and work in the
coal-mine--break my leg. And that was the baddest place in the world."

"The mine?"

"And the town. Laborers--Italian, nigger; saloons and politics--Jews;
bosses all Irish--nothing but the saloons and the women to spenda the
money. Company own everything--stores, saloons, women. Pay you the money
and get it all back. Every day a man killed. Hell!"

"Then where did you go?"

"Chicago--printing--anything to do I could get. Sometimes make forty
cents a day. Little. Have to feed and work for wife and three children.
I try and try. Hod-carrier"--Giotto laughed at the memory--"press
coats--anything. Then come back here."

"And what are you doing now?"

"I try to make labor union with Italians. Hard work. Italians live like
pigs--ignorant--not--not _social_. Down-stairs live a Calabria man,
makes ice-cream--got four rooms--in the four rooms man, wife, mother,
five children, fifteen boarders--"

"Go on!" cried Joe. "Why do you stop?"

Giotto laughed.

"So maybe your paper help. Many Italians read English. I make them read
your paper, Mr. Joe."

       *       *       *       *       *

It was not until nearly the end of the week that Joe sought out Sally
Heffer. Though every day he meditated stepping down that narrow red side
street, each time he had felt unprepared, throbbingly incapable; but
this evening as he finished his work and was on the way home it seemed
that beyond his own volition he suddenly swerved at her corner, hurried
down the lamp-lit pave, searched out the faded number in the meager
light, mounted the stoop, and pushed open the unlocked door.

He was very weary--heart-sick and foot-sore--as he climbed the dark
steps of the three-story house. He felt pent in the vast pulsations of
life about him--a feeling of impossibility, of a task greater than he
could bear. He simply had to see the young woman who was responsible for
sending him here. He had a vivid mental image of her tragic loveliness,
of how she had stepped back and forth before him and suddenly put her
hands to her face and wept, of how she had divined his suffering, and
impulsively seized his hand, and whispered, "I have faith in you." He
expected a sort of self-illumined Joan of Arc with eyes that saw
visions, with spirit flaming. And even in the dark top-floor hallway he
was awed, and almost afraid.

Then in the blackness, his eyes on the thread of light beneath the rear
door, he advanced, reached up his hand, and knocked.

There came, somehow surprising him, a definite, clear-edged voice:

"Come in!"

He opened the door, which swung just free of the narrow cot. Just
beyond, Sally Heffer was writing at a little table, and the globed gas
burned above her, lighting the thin gold of her sparse hair. She turned
her face to him quite casually, the same pallid, rounded face, the same
broad forehead and gray eyes, of remarkable clarity--eyes that were as
clear windows allowing one to peer in. And she was dressed in a white
shirtwaist and the same brown skirt, and over a hook, behind her, hung
the same brown coat. Yet Joe was shocked. This was not the Sally Heffer
of his dreams--but rather a refreshing, forceful, dynamic young woman,
brimming over with the joy of life. And even in that flash of
strangeness he sensed the fact that at the time he had met her she was
merely the voice of a vast insurgent spirit, merely the instrument of a
great event. This was the everyday Sally, a quite livable, lovable human
being, healthy, free in her actions, pulsing with the life about her.
The very words she used were of a different order.

And as she casually glanced around she began to stare, her eyes lit with
wonder, and she arose, exclaiming:

"Mr.--_Blaine_!"

At the sound of her voice the tension snapped within him; he felt common
and homely again; he felt comfortable and warm; and he smiled wearily.

"Yes," he said, "I'm here."

She came close to him, more and more incredulous, and the air became
electric.

"But what brings you here?"

"I live here--West Tenth."

"_Live_ here? Why?"

Her eyes seemed to search through his.

"You made me," he murmured.

She smiled strangely.

"_That night_?"

"Yes."

Impulsively her hand went out, and he clasped it ... her hand seemed
almost frozen. Tears of humility sprang to her eyes.

"I was high and mighty that night,... but I couldn't help it.... But
you ... do you realize what a wonderful thing you've done?"

He laughed awkwardly.

"Yes, here's what I've done"--he handed her a copy of _The
Nine-Tenths_--"and it's very wonderful."

She gave a strange, short laugh again--excitement, exultation--and held
the paper as if it were a living thing.

"This ... _The Nine-Tenths_ ... oh!... for the working people.... Let me
see!"

She went to the light, spread the paper and eagerly read. Then she
glanced back a moment and saw his worn face and the weary droop of his
back.

"Say--you're dead tired. Sit down. You don't mind the bed, do you?"

He smiled softly.

"I don't! I am pretty much done up." And he sank down, and let his hands
droop between his knees.

Sally read, and then suddenly turned to him.

"This editorial is--it's just a ripper."

The author felt the thrill of a creator. She went on:

"I wish every working-girl in New York could read this."

"So do I."

She turned and looked at him, more and more excited.

"So _this_ is what you're doing. I must pinch myself--it's all a dream!
Too good to be true."

Suddenly there seemed to be a reversal in their relationships. Before,
his end of the beam was down, hers up. But subtly in her voice he felt
the swing to the other extreme. She had set him in a realm above
herself.

"Tell me," she said, "just how you came to go into this."

He told her a little, and as he spoke he became thoroughly at his ease
with her, as if she were a man, and in the pleasure of their swift
comradeship they could laugh at each other.

"Mr. Blaine," she said, suddenly, "if I got you into this, it's up to me
to help you win. I'm going to turn into an agent for you--I'll make 'em
subscribe right and left."

Joe laughed at her.

"Lordy, if you knew how good it is to hear this--after tramping up three
miles of stairs and more and nabbing a tawdry twenty subscriptions."

"Is that all you got?"

"People don't understand."

"We'll _make_ them!" cried Sally, clenching her fist.

Joe laughed warmly; he was delighted with her.

"Are you working here?" he asked.

"Yes--you know I used to be in Newark--I was the president of the
Newark Hat-Trimmers' Union."

"And now?"

"I'm trying to organize the girls here."

"Well," he muttered, grimly. "I wouldn't like to be your boss, Miss
Heffer."

She laughed in her low voice.

"Let me tell you what sort I am!" And she sat down, crossed her legs,
and clasped her hands on her raised knee. "I was working in that Newark
factory, and the girls told me to ask the boss, Mr. Plump, for a half
holiday. So I went into his office and said: 'Mr. Plump, the girls want
a half holiday.' He was very angry. He said: 'You won't get it. Mind
your own business.' So I said, quietly: 'All right, Mr. Plump, we'll
take a _whole_ holiday. We won't show up Monday.' Then he said to me,
'Sally Heffer, go to hell!' He was the first man to say such a thing to
my face. Well, one of the girls found me in the hall drying my eyes, and
when she got the facts she went back and told the others, and the bunch
walked out, leaving this message: 'Mr. Plump, we won't come back till
you apologize to Sally.' Well, we were out a week, and what do you
think?" Sally laughed with quiet joy. "Plump took it to the
Manufacturers Association, and they--backed him? Not a bit! _Made him
apologize_!"

Joe chuckled.

"Great! Great!"

"Oh, I'm doing things all the time," said Sally. "Organized the Jewish
hat-trimmers in Newark, and all my friends went back on me for sticking
up for the Jews. Did I care? Ten years ago every time the men got a
raise through their union, the girls had their salaries cut. Different
now. We've enough sense to give the easy jobs to the old ladies--and
there's lots of old ones trimming hats."

"What's trimming hats?"

Sally plucked up Joe's gray hat, and then looked at Joe, her eyes
twinkling.

"It's a little hard to show you on this. But see the sweat-band? It has
a lot of needle holes in it, and the trimmer has to stitch through those
holes and then sew the band on to the hat, and all the odds and ends. It
kills eyes. What do you think?" she went on. "The girls used to drink
beer--bosses let 'em do it to keep them stimulated--and it's ruined
lots. I stopped that."

Joe looked at Sally. And he had a wild impulse then, a crazy thought.

"How much do you get a week?"

"Fifteen."

"Well," said Joe, "I want a woman's department in the paper. Will you
handle it for fifteen a week?"

"But you don't know me!"

"Well," said Joe, "I'm willing to gamble on you."

Sally's low voice loosed exultation.

"You're a wonder, Mr. Blaine. I'll _do it_! But we're both plumb crazy."

"I know it," said Joe, "and I like it!"

They shook hands.

"Come over to-morrow and meet my mother!" He gave her the address.

"Good-by," she said. "And let me tell you, I'm simply primed for woman
stuff. It is the women"--she repeated the phrase slowly--"it is the
women, as you'll find, who bear the burden of the world! Good-by!"

"Good-by!"

He went down into the open air exulting.

He could not overcome his astonishment. She was so different than he had
anticipated, so much more human and simple; so much more easy to fit
into the every-day shake-up of life, and full of that divine allowance
for other people's shortcomings. It was impossible to act the tragedian
before her. And, most wondrous of all, she was a "live wire." He had
gone to her abasing himself; he came away as her employer, subtly
cheered, encouraged, and lifted to new heights of vivid enterprise.

"Sally Heffer!" he kept repeating. "Isn't she a marvel! And, miracle of
miracles, she is going to swing the great work with me!"

And so the Stove Circle was founded with Sally Heffer, Michael Dunan,
Oscar Heming, Nathan Latsky, Salvatore Giotto, and Jacob Izon. Its
members met together a fortnight later on a cold wintry night. The
stove was red-hot, the circle drew about it on their kitchen chairs, and
Joe spent the first meeting in going over his plans for the paper. There
were many invaluable practical comments--especially on how to get news
and what news to get--and each member was delegated to see to one
department. Latsky and Giotto took immigration, Dunan took politics and
the Irish, Heming took the East Side, Izon, foreign news, and Sally
Heffer took workwomen. Thereafter each one in his way visited labor
unions, clubs, and societies and got each group to pledge itself to send
in news. They helped, too, to get subscriptions--both among their
friends and in the unions. In this way Joe founded his paper. He never
repeated the personal struggle of that first week, for he now had an
enthusiastic following to spread the work for him--men and a woman,
every one of whom had access to large bodies of people and was an
authority in his own world.

But that wonderful week was never forgotten by Joe. Each day he had
risen early and gone forth and worked till late at night, making a
canvass in good earnest. House after house he penetrated, knocking at
doors, inquiring for a mythical Mrs. (or Mr.) Parsons (this to hush the
almost universal fear that he had come to collect the rent or the
instalment on the furniture or clothes of the family). In this way he
started conversation. He found first that the immediate neighborhood
knew him already. And he found many other things. He found rooms tidy,
exquisite in their cleanliness and good taste of arrangement; and then
other rooms slovenly and filthy. He found young wives just risen from
bed, chewing gum and reading the department-store advertisements in the
paper, their hair in curl-papers. He found fat women hanging out of
windows, their dishes unwashed, their beds unmade, their floors unswept.
He found men sick in bed, and managed to sit down at their side and give
them an interesting twenty minutes. He found other men, out of work,
smoking and reading. He found one Italian family making "willow plumes"
in two narrow rooms--one a bedroom, the other a kitchen--every one at
work, twisting the strands of feathers to make a swaying plume--every
one, including the grandmother and little dirty tots of four and
six--and every one of them cross-eyed as a result of the terrific work.
He found one dark cellar full of girls twisting flowers; and one attic
where, in foul, steaming air, a Jewish family were "finishing"
garments--the whole place stacked with huge bundles which had been given
out to them by the manufacturer. He found one home where an Italian
"count" was the husband of an Irish girl, and the girl told him how she
had been led into the marriage by the man's promise of title and castle
in Venice, only to bring her from Chicago to New York and confess that
he was a poor laborer.

"But I made the best of it," she cried. "I put down my foot, hustled him
out to work, and we've done well ever since. I've been knocking the dago
out of him as hard as I can hit!"

"You're ambitious," said Joe.

"My! I'd give my hands for education!"

Joe prescribed _The Nine-Tenths_.

Everywhere he invited people to call--"drop over"--and see his plant and
meet his mother. Even the strange specimen of white woman who had
married a negro and was proud of it.

"Daniel's black outside, but there's many stuck-up women I know whose
white man is black _inside_."

Absorbingly interesting was the quest--opening up one vista of life
after another. Joe gained a moving-picture knowledge of life--saw
flashed before him dramatic scene after scene, destiny after
destiny--squalor, ignorance, crime, neatness, ambition, thrift,
respectability. He never forgot the shabby dark back room where under
gas-light a frail, fine woman was sewing ceaselessly, one child sick in
a tumble-down bed, and two others playing on the floor.

"I'm all alone in the world," she said. "And all I make is two hundred
and fifty dollars a year--less than five dollars a week--to keep four
people."

Joe put her on the free list.

He learned many facts, vital elements in his history.

For instance, that on less than eight hundred dollars a year no family
of five (the average family) could live decently, and that nearly half
the people he met had less, and the rest not much more. That, as a rule,
there were three rooms for five people; and many of the families
gathered their fuel on the street; that many had no gas--used oil and
wood; that many families spent about twenty-five cents a day for food;
that few clothes were bought, and these mainly from the instalment man
and second hand at that; that many were recipients of help; and that
recreation and education were everywhere reduced to the lowest terms.
That is, boys and girls were hustled to work at twelve by giving their
age as fourteen, and recreation meant an outing a year to Coney Island,
and beer, and, once in a while, the nickel theater; that there were
practically no savings. And there was one conclusion he could not
evade--namely, that while overcrowding, improvidence, extravagance, and
vice explained the misery of some families, yet there were limits. For
instance:

On Manhattan Island no adequate housing can be obtained at less than
twelve or fourteen dollars a month.

That there is no health in a diet of bread and tea.

That--curious facts!--coal burns up, coats and shoes wear out in spite
of mending.

That the average housewife cannot take time to go bargain-hunting or
experimenting with new food combinations, or in making or mending
garments, and neither has she the ability nor training to do so.

That, in fact, the poor, largely speaking, were between the upper and
nether millstones of low wages and high prices.

Of course there was the vice, but while drink causes poverty, poverty
causes drink. Joe found intemperance among women; he found little
children running to the saloon for cans of beer; he found plenty of men
drunkards. But what things to offset these! The woman who bought three
bushels of coal a week for seventy-five cents, watched her fires, picked
out the half-burned pieces, reused them, and wasted no heat; the
children foraging the streets for kindling-wood; the family in bed to
keep warm; the wife whose husband had pawned her wedding-ring for drink,
and who had bought a ten-cent brass one, "to keep the respect of her
children"; the man working for ten dollars a week, who once had owned
his own saloon, but, so he said, "it was impossible to make money out of
a saloon unless I put in gambling-machines or women, and I wouldn't
stand for it"; the woman whose husband was a drunkard, and who,
therefore, went to the Battery 5 A.M. to 10, then 5 P.M. to 7, every day
to do scrubbing for twenty dollars a month; the wonderful Jewish family
whose income was seven hundred and ninety-seven dollars and who yet
contrived to save one hundred and twenty-three dollars a year to later
send their two boys to Columbia University.

And everywhere he found the miracle of miracles: the spirit of charity
and mutual helpfulness--the poor aiding the poorer; the exquisite
devotion of mothers to children; the courage that braved a terrible
life.

For a week the canvass went on. Joe worked feverishly, and came home
late at night too tired almost to undress himself. Again and again he
exclaimed to his mother:

"I never dreamed of such things! I never dreamed of such poverty! I
never dreamed of such human nature!"

Greenwich Village, hitherto a shabby red clutter of streets, uninviting,
forbidding, dull, squalid, became for Joe the very swarm and drama and
warm-blooded life of humanity. He began to sense the fact that he was in
the center of a human whirlpool, in the center of beauty and ugliness,
love and bitterness, misery and joy. The whole neighborhood began to
palpitate for him; the stone walls seemed bloody with struggling souls;
the pavements stamped with the steps of a battle.

"What can I do," he kept thinking, "with these people?"

And to his amazement he began to see that just as up-town offered the
rivals of luxury, pleasure, and ease, so down-town offered the rivals of
intemperance, grinding poverty, ignorance. His theories were beginning
to meet the shock of facts.

"How move them? How touch them off?" he asked himself.

But the absorbing interest--the faces--the shadowy scenes--the gas-lit
interiors--everywhere human beings, everywhere life, packed, crowded,
evolving.

At the end of the week he stopped, though the fever was still on him. He
had gained two hundred and fifty subscribers; he had distributed twelve
hundred copies of the paper. He now felt that he could delay no longer
in bringing out the next number. So he sat down, and, with Sally
Heffer's words ringing in his mind, he wrote his famous editorial, "It
is the Women":


  It is the women who bear the burden of this world--the poor women.
  Perhaps they have beauty when they marry. Then they plunge into
  drudgery. All day and night they are in dark and damp rooms, scrubbing,
  washing, cooking, cleaning, sewing. They wear the cheapest clothes--thin
  calico wrappers. They take their husbands' thin pay-envelopes, and
  manage the finances. They stint and save--they buy one carrot at a time,
  one egg. When rent-week comes--and it comes twice a month--they cut the
  food by half to pay for housing. They are underfed, they are denied
  everything but toil--save _love_. Child after child they bear. The toil
  increases, the stint is sharper, the worry infinite. Now they must
  clothe their children, feed them, dress them, wash them, amuse them.
  They must endure the heart-sickness of seeing a child underfed. They
  must fight the demons of disease. Possibly they must stop a moment in
  the speed of their labor and face death. Only for a moment! Need calls
  them: mouths ask for food, floors for the broom, and the pay-envelope
  for keen reckonings. Possibly then the husband will begin to
  drink--possibly he will come home and beat his wife, drag her about the
  floor, blacken her eyes, break a rib. The next day the task is taken up
  again--the man is fed, the children clothed, the food marketed, the
  floor scrubbed, the dress sewn. And then as the family grows there come
  hard times. The man is out of work--he wants to work but cannot. Rent
  and the butcher and grocer must be paid, but there are no wages brought
  home. The woman takes in washing. She goes through the streets to the
  more prosperous and drags home a basket of soiled clothes. The burden of
  life grows heavier--the husband becomes accustomed to the changed
  relationships. Very often he ceases to be a wage-earner and loafs about
  saloons. From then on the woman wrestles with worlds of
  trouble--unimaginable difficulties. Truly, running a state may be easier
  than running a family. And yet the woman toils on; she does not
  complain; she sets three meals each day before husband and children; she
  sees that they have clothes; she gives the man his drink money; she
  endures his cruelty; she plans ambitiously for her children. Or possibly
  the man begins to work again, and then one day is killed in an accident.
  There is danger of the family breaking up. But the woman rises to the
  crisis and works miracles. She keeps her head; she takes charge; she
  toils late into the night; she goes without food, without sleep. Somehow
  she manages. There was a seamstress in Greenwich Village who pulled her
  family of three and herself along on two hundred and fifty dollars a
  year--less than five dollars a week! If luck is with the woman the
  children grow up, go to work, and for a time ease the burden. But then,
  what is left? The woman is prematurely old--her hair is gray, her face
  drawn and wrinkled, or flabby and soiled, her back bent, her hands raw
  and red and big. Beauty has gone, and with the years of drudgery, much
  of the over-glory, much of the finer elements of love and joy, have
  vanished. Her mind is absorbed by little things--details of the day. She
  has ceased to attend church, she has not stepped beyond the street
  corner for years, she has not read or played or rested. Much is dead in
  her. Love only is left. Love of a man, love of children. She is a fierce
  mother and wife, as of old. And she knows the depth of sorrow and the
  truth of pain.

He repeated his programme. Perhaps--he afterward thought so
himself--this editorial was a bit too pessimistic. But he had to write
it--had to ease his soul. He set it off, however, by a lovely little
paragraph which he printed boxed. Here it is:

  Possibly much of the laughter heard on this planet comes from
  the mothers and fathers who are thinking or talking of the children.

In this way, then, Joe entered into the life of the people.




IV


OTHERS: AND THEODORE MARRIN

Joe became a familiar figure in Greenwich Village. As time went on, and
issue after issue of _The Nine-Tenths_ appeared, he became known to the
whole district. Whenever he went out people nodded right and left,
passed the time of day with him, or stopped him for a hand-shake and a
question. He would, when matters were not pressing, pause at a stoop to
speak with mothers, and people in trouble soon began to acquire a habit
of dropping in at his office to talk things over with the "Old Man."

If it was a matter of employment, he turned the case over to some member
of the Stove Circle; if it was a question of honest want, he drew on the
"sinking-fund" and took a note payable in sixty days--a most ela

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/11372