outrages which had been perpetrated on the poor woman. It was worth
while seeing him. He was magnificent. As long as I was talking only of
the man, he was merely acquiescent, uttering his "Ya, Ya,"
irresponsively over his beer; but when I told him of the woman and
children, he was on his feet in an instant--"Tamming te strikers and all
teir vorks." He seized his hat and big stick, and pouring out gutturals
so fast that I could not pretend to follow him, ordered me to show him
the place. As he strode through the streets, I could scarcely keep up
with him. His stick rang on the frozen pavement like a challenge to
battle. And when he reached the house he was immense. He was suddenly
transformed. No mother could have been tenderer, no father more
protecting. He gathered up the children in his great arms, and petted
and soothed them; his tone, a little while before so ferocious, now as
soft and gentle as the low velvet bass of his great drum. I always think
of the Good Shepherd now as something like him that evening; rugged as a
rock, gentle as a zephyr. He would have taken them all to his house and
have adopted them if the woman would have let him. His heart was bigger
than his house. He seemed to have filled all the place; to have made it
a fortress.
The strike had cast its black cloud over all the section, and not all of
its victims were murdered by the mob.
I fell in with the man who had spoken to me so cheerily one morning of
the sun's shining for him. He looked haggard and ill and despairing. He
was out of work and could find none. In our talk he did not justify the
strike; but he bowed to it with resignation as a stricken Orestes might
have bowed to the blows of Fate. His spirit was not then broken--it was
only embittered. His furniture which was so nearly paid for had gone to
the loan sharks; his house of which he boasted had reverted to the
Building Company. He looked fully twenty years older than when I had
seen him last. I offered him a small sum which he took gratefully. It
was the first money he had had in weeks, he said, and the stores had
stopped his credits. A few weeks later I saw him staggering along the
street, his heart-eating sorrow drowned for an hour in the only nepenthe
such poverty knows.
XXXVII
WOLFFERT'S NEIGHBORS
I had not been to visit Wolffert and, indeed, had but a hazy idea of
where he lived, knowing only that he had a room in the house of some Jew
in the Jewish quarter. Hitherto our meetings had taken place either in
John Marvel's narrow little quarters or in mine at the old Drummer's.
But having learned from John that he was ill, I got the address from
him, and one afternoon went over to see him. I found the place in a
region more squalid than that in which John Marvel and I had our
habitation and as foreign as if it had been in Judea or in a Black Sea
province. In fact, it must have exhibited a mixture of both regions. The
shops were small and some of them gay, but the gayest was as mean as the
most sombre. The signs and notices were all in Yiddish or Russian, the
former predominating, and as I passed through the ill-paved,
ill-smelling, reeking streets I could scarcely retain my conviction that
I was still in an American city. It was about the hour that the
manufactories of clothing, etc., closed and the street through which I
walked was filled with a moving mass of dark humanity that rolled
through it like a dark and turgid flood. For blocks they filled the
sidewalk, moving slowly on, and as I mingled in the mass, and caught
low, guttural, unknown sounds, and not a word of English all the while,
I became suddenly aware of a strange alien feeling of uncertainty and
almost of oppression. Far as eye could see I could not descry one Saxon
countenance or even one Teuton. They were all dark, sallow, dingy, and
sombre. Now and then a woman's hat appeared in the level moving surge of
round black hats, giving the impression of a bubble floating on a deep,
slow current to melt into the flood. Could this, I reflected sombrely,
be the element we are importing? and what effect would the strange
confluence have on the current of our life in the future? No wonder we
were in the throes of a strike vast enough to cause anxiety!
I was still under the dominion of this reflection when I reached the
street in which Wolffert had his home, and, after some difficulty,
discovered the house in which he had his abode.
The street was filled with wretched little shops, some more wretched
than others, all stuck together in a curious jumble of tawdry finery and
rusty necessities. Among them were many shops where second-hand clothing
was exhibited, or, from appearances, clothing for which that term was a
flattering euphemism. I stopped at one where second-hand shoes were hung
out, and, opening the door to ask the way, faced a stout, shapeless
woman with a leathery skin and a hooked nose, above which a pair of
inquisitive black eyes rested on me, roving alternately from my feet to
my face, with an expression of mingled curiosity, alarm, and hostility.
I asked her if she could tell me where the number 1 wanted was, and as
my inquiry caused not the least change of expression, I took out my card
and wrote the number down. She gazed at it in puzzled silence, and then
with a little lighting of her dark face, muttered a few unintelligible
words and bustled back to where a curtain hung across the narrow shop,
and lifting one corner of it gave a call which I made out to be
something like "Jacob." The next moment a small, keen-looking boy made
his way from behind the curtain and gazed at me. A few words passed
between the two, in a tongue unknown to me, and then the boy, laying
down a book that he carried in his hand, came forward and asked me in
perfectly good English, "What is it you want?"
"I want to know where number 5260-1/2 ---- Street is. I have that
address, but cannot find the number."
"I'll show you." His eyes too were on my shoes. "The numbers of the
streets were all taken down last year, and have not been put back yet.
That is where Mr. Wolffert lives. Do you know him?"
"Yes, I am going to see him."
He turned and said something rapidly to his mother, in which the only
word I recognized was Wolffert's name. The effect was instantaneous. The
expression of vague anxiety died out of the woman's face and she came
forward jabbering some sort of jargon and showing a set of yellow,
scattering teeth.
"I'll show you where he lives. You come with me," said Jacob. "She
thought you were an agent." He suddenly showed a much better set of
teeth than his mother could display--"She don't speak English, you see."
He had laid down his book on the counter and he now put on his cap. As
he passed out of the door he paused and fastened his eyes on my feet.
"You don't want a pair of shoes? We have all sorts--some as good as new.
You can't tell. Half the price, too."
I declined the proffered bargain, and we walked up the street, Jacob
discoursing volubly of many things, to show his superior intelligence.
"What was your book?" I inquired.
"U. S. History. I'm in the sixth grade."
"So? I should think you are rather small to be so high?" My ideas of
grades were rather hazy, having been derived from "Tom Brown at Rugby"
and such like encyclopædias.
"Pah! I stand next to head," he cried contemptuously.
"You do! Who stands head?"
"Iky Walthiemer--he's fourteen and I ain't but twelve. Then there is a
fellow named Johnson--Jimmy Johnson. But he ain't nothin'!"
"He isn't? What's the matter with him?"
"He ain't got no eye on him--he don't never see nothin'."
"You mean he's dull?"
"Sure! Just mem'ry, that's all. He's dull. We beat 'em all."
"Who are 'we'?"
"We Jews."
"So----"
"Well, here we are. I'll run up and show you the door"--as we stopped at
a little butcher shop beside which was a door that evidently led up a
stair to the upper story.
"All right. You know Mr. Wolffert?"
"Sure! We all know him. He's a Jew, too."
"Sure!" I tried to imitate his tone, for it was not an accent only.
He ran up the stair and on up a second flight and back along a dark,
narrow little passage, where he tapped on a door, and, without waiting,
walked in.
"Here's a man to see you."
"A gentleman, you mean," I said dryly, and followed him, for I have a
particular aversion to being referred to to my face as a mere man. It is
not a question of natural history, but of manners.
"Well, Jacob," said Wolffert when he had greeted me, "have you got to
the top yet?"
"Will be next week," said Jacob confidently.
I found Wolffert sitting up in a chair, but looking wretchedly ill. He,
however, declared himself much better. I learned afterward--though not
from him--that he had caught some disease while investigating some
wretched kennels known as "lodging houses," where colonies of Jews were
packed like herrings in a barrel; and for which a larger percentage on
the value was charged as rental than for the best dwellings in the city.
His own little room was small and mean enough, but it was comfortably
if plainly furnished, and there were books about, which always give a
homelike air, and on a little table a large bunch of violets which
instantly caught my eye. By some inexplicable sixth sense I divined that
they had come from Eleanor Leigh; but I tried to be decent enough not to
be jealous; and Wolffert's manifest pleasure at seeing me made me feel
humble.
We had fallen to talking of his work when I said, "Wolffert, why do you
live in this horrible quarter? No wonder you get ill. Why don't you get
a room in a more decent part of the town--near where John Marvel lives,
for instance?"
Wolffert smiled.
"Why?--what is the matter with this?"
"Oh! Why, it is dreadful. Why, it's the dirtiest, meanest, lowest
quarter of the city! I never saw such a place. It's full of stinking"--I
was going to say "Jews"; but reflected in time to substitute "holes."
Wolffert, I saw, supplied the omitted objection.
"Do you imagine I would live among the rich?" he demanded; "I thought
you knew me better. I don't want to be fattened in the dark like a
Strasbourg goose for my liver to make food acceptable to their jaded
appetites. Better be a pig at once."
"No, but there are other places than this--and I should think your soul
would revolt at this--" I swung my arm in a half circle.
"Are they not my brethren?" he said, half smiling.
"Well, admit that they are--" (And I knew all along that this was the
reason.) "There are other grades--brethren of nearer degree."
"None," he ejaculated. "'I dwell among my own people'--I must live among
them to understand them."
"I should think them rather easy to understand."
"I mean to be in sympathy with them," he said gently. "Besides, I am
trying to teach them two or three things."
"What?" For I confess that my soul had revolted at his surroundings.
That surging, foreign-born, foreign-looking, foreign-spoken multitude
who had filled the street as I came along through the vile reek of
"Little Russia," as it was called, had smothered my charitable feelings.
"Well, for one thing, to learn the use of freedom--for another, to learn
the proper method and function of organization."
"They certainly appear to me to have the latter already--simply by being
what they are," I said lightly.
"I mean of business organization," Wolffert explained. "I want to break
up the sweat shop and the sweat system. We are already making some
headway, and have thousands in various kinds of organized business which
are quite successful."
"I should not think they would need your assistance--from what I saw.
They appear to me to have an instinct."
"They have," said Wolffert, "but we are teaching them how to apply it.
The difficulty is their ignorance and prejudice. You think that they
hold you in some distrust and dislike, possibly?" As his tone implied a
question, I nodded.
"Well, that is nothing to the way in which they regard me. You they
distrust as a gentile, but me they detest as a renegade."
"Well, I must say that I think you deserve what you get for bringing in
such a mass of ignorance. Now, you are an American, and a patriotic one.
How do you reconcile it with your patriotism to introduce into the body
politic such an element of ignorance, superstition, and unrest?"
"Why," said Wolffert, "you don't know our people. The Jew is often an
element of ignorance and superstition, though he is not alone in this,
but he is never an element of unrest--when he is justly treated," he
added after a pause. "But, whatever these people are in this generation,
the next generation--the children of this generation--will be useful
American citizens. All they require is a chance. Why, the children of
these Russian Jews, baited from their own country, are winning all the
prizes in the schools," he added, his pale face flushing faintly. "That
lad who showed you in is the son of parents who sell second-hand shoes
in the next street and cannot speak a word of English, and yet he stands
at the head of his class."
"No, second!" I said.
"How do you know?"
"He told me."
"The little rascal! See how proud he is of it," said Wolffert
triumphantly.
"He tried to sell me a pair of shoes."
Wolffert chuckled. "Did he?" Then he sobered, catching my thought. "That
is the most important thing for him at present, but wait. Let this
develop." He tapped his forehead. "He may give you laws equal to
Kepler's or a new philosophy like Bacon's. He may solve aerial
navigation--or revolutionize thought in any direction--who knows!"
His face had lighted up as he proceeded, and he was leaning forward in
his chair, his eyes glowing.
"I know," I said, teasingly. "He'll sell shoes--second-hand ones
polished up for new."
I was laughing, but Wolffert did not appreciate my joke. He flushed
slightly.
"That's your gentile ignorance, my friend. That's the reason your people
are so dense--they never learn--they keep repeating the same thing. No
wonder we discover new worlds for you to claim!"
"What new worlds have you discovered?"
"Well, first, Literature, next commerce. What is your oldest boasted
scripture?"
"I thought you were talking of material worlds!"
"We helped about that, too--did our full part. You think Queen Isabella
pawned her jewels to send Christobal Colon to discover America--don't
you?"
I nodded.
"Well, the man who put up the money for that little expedition was a
Jew--'Arcangel, the Treasurer.' You never heard of him!"
"Never."
"He did it all the same. If you would read something else beside your
narrow English writings, Glave, you would learn something of the true
history of civilization." Now and then Wolffert's arrogance, like
Antipater's, showed through the rents in his raiment.
"What for instance? since you appear to know it all."
"Well, almost any other history or philosophy. Read the work of the
thinkers old and new--and see how much deeper life is than the shallow
thing called by that divine name by the butterflies and insects and
reptiles who flaunt their gauzy vans in our faces or fasten their brazen
claws in our vitals. Meantime, you might read my book," he said with a
smile, "when it comes out."
"Well, tell me about it meantime and save me the trouble. I sometimes
prefer my friends to their books."
"You were always lazy," he said smiling. But he began to talk, laying
down his philosophy of life, which was simple enough, though I could not
follow him very far. I had been trained in too strict a school to accept
doctrines so radical. And but that I saw him and John Marvel and Eleanor
Leigh acting on them I should have esteemed them absolutely utopian. As
it was, I wondered how far Eleanor Leigh had inspired his book.
XXXVIII
WOLFFERT'S PHILOSOPHY
(WHICH MAY BE SKIPPED BY THE READER)
As Wolffert warmed up to his theme, his face brightened and his deep
eyes glowed.
"The trouble with our people--our country--the world--is that our whole
system--social--commercial--political--every activity is based on greed,
mere, sheer greed. State and Church act on it--live by it. The success
of the Jew which has brought on him so much suffering through the ages
has revenged itself by stamping on your life the very evil with which
you charge him--love of money. What ideals have we? None but money. We
call it wealth. We have debased the name, and its debasement shows the
debasement of the race. Once it meant weal, now mere riches, though
employed basely, the very enemy and assassin of weal. The covetousness,
whose reprobation in the last of the commandments was intended as a
compendium to embrace the whole, has honeycombed our whole life, public
and private. The amassing of riches, not for use only, for
display--vulgar beyond belief--the squandering of riches, not for good,
but for evil, to gratify jaded appetites which never at their freshest
craved anything but evil or folly, marks the lowest level of the
shopkeeping intellect. The Argands and the Canters are the aristocrats
of the community, and the Capons are the fit priests for such people."
He turned away in disgust--but I prodded him.
"What is your remedy? You criticise fiercely! but give no light. You are
simply destructive."
"The remedy is more difficult to give," he said gravely; "because the
evil has been going on so long that it has become deep-rooted. It has
sunk its roots into, not only the core of our life, but our character.
It will take long to eradicate it. But one economic evil might be, and
eventually must be changed, unless we wish to go down into the abyss of
universal corruption and destruction."
"You mean----?"
"Capitalism--the idea that because a man is accidentally able to acquire
through adventitious and often corrupt means vast riches which really
are not made by himself, but by means of others under conditions and
laws which he did not create, he may call them his own; use them in ways
manifestly detrimental to the public good and, indeed, often in
notorious destructiveness of it, and be protected in doing so by those
laws."
"'Accidentally'--and 'adventitious means'! That does not happen so
often. It may happen by finding a gold mine--once in ten thousand
times--or by cornering some commodity on the stock or Produce Exchange
once in one hundred thousand times, but even then a man must have
intellect--force--courage--resourcefulness--wonderful powers of
organization."
"So has the burglar and highwayman," he interrupted.
"But they are criminals--they break the law."
"What law? Why law more than these others? Is not the fundamental law,
not to do evil to others?"
"The law established by society for its protection."
"Who made those laws?"
"The people--through their representatives," I added hastily, as I saw
him preparing to combat it.
"The people, indeed! precious little part they have had in the making of
the laws. Those laws were made, not by the people--who had no voice in
their making, but by a small class--originally the Chief--the
Emperor--the King--the Barons--the rich Burghers--the people had no part
nor voice."
"They received the benefit of them."
"Only the crumbs which fell from their masters' tables. They got the
gibbet, the dungeon, the rack, and the stick."
"Wolffert, you would destroy all property rights."
"My dear fellow, what nonsense you talk. I am only for changing the law
to secure property rights for all, instead of for a class, the necessity
for which no longer exists, if it ever did exist."
"Your own law-giver recognized it and inculcated it." I thought this a
good thrust. He waved it aside.
"That was for a primitive people in a primitive age, as your laws were
for your people in their primitive age. But do you suppose that Moses
would make no modification now?"
"I have no idea that he would. For I believe they were divine."
"Surely--Moses acted under the guidance of the great Jehovah, whose law
is justice and equity and righteousness. The laws he gave were to
inculcate this, and they served their purpose when Israel served God.
But now when He is mocked, the letter of the law is made an excuse and
is given as the command to work injustice and inequity and
unrighteousness. Surely they should be, at least, interpreted in the
spirit in which they were given. You claim to be a Christian?"
"A very poor one."
"In name, at least, you claim that there has been a new dispensation?"
"Yes--an amplification--a development and evolution."
"Precisely. In place of an 'eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth--the
other cheek turned--to do to others as you would have them do to you!'"
"That is the ideal. I have not yet reached that degree of----" I paused
for the word.
"I, too, acknowledge that evolution, that ideal. Why should we not act
on it?"
"Because of human nature. We have not yet reached the stage when it can
be practically applied."
"But human nature while it does not change basically may be regulated,
developed, uplifted, and this teaching is based on this principle. It
has not yet borne much apparent fruit, it is true; but it is sound,
nevertheless. We both in our better moments, at least, feel it to be
sound, and there has been a little, however little uplift, and however
hard to maintain.
"You believe in the development of man; but you look only to his
material development. I look for his complete development, material and
spiritual. As he has advanced through the countless ages since God
breathed into him the breath of Life, and by leading him along the lines
of physical development to a station in creation where the physical
evolution gave place to the ever-growing psychical development; so I
believe he is destined to continue this psychical or spiritual growth,
increasing its power as the ages pass and mounting higher and higher in
spiritual knowledge, until he shall attain a degree of perfection that
we only think of now as a part of the divine. We see the poet and the
saint living to-day in an atmosphere wholly distinct from the gross
materialism of common humanity. We see laws being enacted and principles
evolved which make for the improvement of the human race. We see the
gradual uplifting and improvement of the race. War is being
diminished; its horrors lessened; food is becoming more diffused;
civilization--material civilization--is being extended; and the
universal, fundamental rights are being a little more recognized,
however dimly. This means growth--the gradual uplifting of mankind, the
diffusion of knowledge, as well as of food--the growth of
intellectuality. And as this comes, think you that man will not rise
higher? A great reservoir is being tapped and from it will flow, in the
future, rich streams to fertilize the whole world of humanity.
Aspirations will leap higher and higher, and the whole race in time will
receive new light, new power, new environments, with an ever-widening
horizon, and a vast infinitude of spiritual truth as the field for the
soul's exercise."
"It is a dream," I said, impressed by his burning eyes, his glowing
face, as he drifted on almost in a rhapsody.
"Yes--a dream; but it might come true if all--if you and all like you--I
mean all educated and trained people, would unite to bring it about.
Your leader preached it, you profess the principles now, but do not
practise them. The State has been against it--the Church equally. It is
full of sham."
"It was Jerusalem that stoned the prophets," I interrupted. He swept on
with a gesture.
"Yes, yes--I know--I am not speaking now as a sectarian."
"But, at least, as a Jew," I said, laughing.
"Yes, perhaps. I hardly know. I know about Hannan the High Priest. He
tried to stand in with Pilate. He thought he was doing his duty when he
was only fighting for his caste. But what an Iliad of woes he brought on
his people--through the ages. But now they know, they profess, and yet
stone the prophets. Your church, founded to fight riches and selfishness
and formalism, is the greatest exploiter of all that the world knows.
Two generations sanctify the wealth gotten by the foulest means. The
robber, the murderer, the destroyer of homes are all accepted, and if
one protests he is stoned to-day as if he were a blasphemer of the law.
If the Master to whom your churches are erected should come to-day and
preach the doctrines he preached in Judea nineteen hundred years ago, he
would be cast out here precisely as he was cast out there." He spoke
almost fiercely.
"Yet his teachings," he added, "are nearer those of the people I
represent than of those who assail them. Why should we not act on it?
Possibly, some others might see our good works, and in any event we
shall have done our part. John Marvel does."
"I know he does, but he is a better Christian than I am, and so are
you."
"I am not a Christian at all. I am only a Jew."
"Will you say that His teachings have had no part in forming your
character and life?"