Then Sue began to take me in hand. From the subdued and weary girl that
I had found when I came home, in the last few weeks she had blossomed
out. The color had come into her cheeks, a new animation into her voice,
a resolute brightness into her eyes.
"This thing has got to stop, Billy," she said determinedly. "This house
has been like a tomb for months, you and Dad are so gloomy and tired
you're sights. He needs a change, and so do you. You're getting into a
little rut and throwing away your chance to write. You need friends who
are writers, you need a lot of fresh ideas to tone you up. There's
plenty of money in writing. And I need a change myself. I can't stand
this house any longer. After all, I've got my own life to live. I'm
going to get a job before long. In the meantime I'm going to see my
friends. And what's more, I'm going to have them here to the house---
just as often as they'll come! Let's brighten things up a little!"
I looked at her with interest. Here was _another_ sister of mine--risen
out of her sorrow and eager to live, and talking of running our lives as
well, of curing us both by large, firm doses of "fresh ideas," while she
herself looked around for a job that would help her to "live her own
life."
"Look here, Sue," I argued vaguely. "You don't want to take a job----"
"I certainly do----"
"But you can't! Dad wouldn't hear to it!"
"He'll have to--when I've found it. No poor feeble old man supporting
me, thank you--quite probably no man at all--ever! But you needn't
worry. I won't take any old job that comes along. And I won't bother
Dad till I've found just what I really want--something I can grow in."
"That's right, take it easy," I said.
"Where have you been!" I thought as I watched her. It came over me as a
distinct surprise that Sue had been in all sorts of places and had been
making all sorts of friends, had been having ambitions and dreams of her
own--all the time I had been having mine. Most older brothers, I
suppose, at some time or another have felt this same bewilderment. "Look
here, Sis," they wonder gravely, "where in thunder have you been?"
I took a keen interest in her now. In the evenings when I wasn't out
working we had long talks about our lives, which to my satisfaction
became almost entirely talks about _her_ life, her needs, her growth.
Her delight in herself, her intensity over plans for herself, her
enthusiasm for all the new "movements," reforms and ideas that she had
heard of God-knows-where and felt she must gather into herself to expand
herself--it was wonderful! She was like that chap from Detroit, that
would-be perfect all-round man. But Sue was so much less solemn about
it, one minute in art and the next in social settlements, so little
hampered by ever putting through what she planned.
"In short, a woman," I thought sagely.
I felt I knew a lot about women, although I had had no more intimate
talks since that affair in Paris. I had felt that would last me for
quite a while. But here was something perfectly safe. A sister, decent
but far from dull, well stocked with all the feminine points and only
too glad to be confidential. She wanted to study for the stage! Of
course that was the kind of thing that Dad and I would stop darned
quick. Still--I could see Sue on the stage. She was not at all like me.
I was middling small, with a square jaw, snub nose and sandy hair. Sue
was tall and easy moving, with an abundance of soft brown hair worn low
over large and irregular features. She had fascinating eyes. She could
sprawl on a rug or a sofa as lazy and indolent as you please--all but
her eyes, they were always doing something or other, letting this out or
keeping that back, practicing on me!
"Oh, yes, she'll marry soon enough," I thought. "This talk of a job for
life is a joke."
Some nights I would listen to her for hours. It was so good to come back
to life, to feel younger than my worries, to forget for a little while
that stark heavy certainty that poor old Dad would soon be a burden in
spite of himself, and that with a family on my hands I'd have to spend
the best years of my life slaving for a little hay.
I took the same delight in her friends.
Starting with her classmates in a Brooklyn high school, most of whom
were working over in New York, Sue had followed in their trail, and at
settlements, in studios and in girl bachelor flats she had picked up an
amazing assortment of friends. "Radicals," they called themselves.
Nothing was too wild or new for these friends of Sue's to jump into--and
what was more, to tie themselves to by a regular job in some queer
irregular office. "Votes for Women" was just starting up, and one of
this group, a stenographer in a suffragette office, had been in the
first small parade. Another, a stout florid youth who wrote poems for
magazines, had paraded bravely in her wake. Here were two girls who
lived in a tenement, did their own cooking and pushed East Side
investigations that they said would soon "shake up the town." There were
several rising muckrakers, too, some of whom did free work on the side
for socialist papers. There was one real socialist, a painter, who had a
red membership card in his pocket to prove that he belonged to "the
Party." Others were spreading music and art and dramatics through the
tenements--new music, new art and new dramatics. One young husband and
wife, intensely in love with one another, were working together night
and day for easier divorces which would put an end to the old-fashioned
home.
These people seemed to me to be laughing at a different old thing every
time. But when they weren't laughing they were scowling, over some new
attack upon life--and when they did that they were laughable. At least
so they were to me. Not that I minded attacking things, I had done
plenty of that myself in Paris. But how different we had been back
there. We, too, had thrown old creeds to the winds, but with how much
more finesse and art. And there had been a large remoteness about it.
Each one had tossed his far-away country into the cosmopolitan pot, our
talk had been on a world-wide scale. But this crude crowd, except for
occasional mental flights, kept all its attention, its laughs and its
jeers, its attacks and exposures centered on this one mammoth town,
against which as a background they seemed the merest pigmies. Three
little muckrakers loomed against Wall Street, one small, scoffing
suffragette against a hundred and eighty thousand solid stolid Brooklyn
wives. They had posed themselves so absurdly close to the world of
things as they are.
And they were in such a rush about their work. Over there in Paris, with
all our smashing of idols, we had at least held fast to our one great
goddess of art, we had slaved like dogs at the hard daily labor of
honestly learning our various crafts. But here they stopped for nothing
at all. The magazine writers were "tearing off copy," the painters were
simply "slapping it down." One of them told me he "painted the real
stuff right out of life"--dashed it off with one hand, so to speak,
while he shook his fist at the town with the other. Everyone wanted to
see something done--and done damn quick--about this, that or the other.
My artist's eyes surveyed this group and twinkled with amused surprise.
But I could sit by the hour and listen to their talk. I found it mighty
refreshing, after those bills in the hardware shop, that monotonous
martyr feeling of mine and those worries down by the harbor.
But I felt the harbor always there, slowly closing in on my father, who
looked older day by day, slowly bringing things to a crisis. In the
garden behind our house on warm September evenings when these pigmies
gathered to chatter reforms, the harbor hooted at their little plans as
it had hooted at my own. One evening, I remember, when the talk had
waxed hot and loud in favor of labor unions and strikes, Sue left the
group and with a friend strolled to the lower end of the garden. There I
saw them peer over the edge and listen to the drunken stokers singing in
the barrooms deep under all these flower beds and all this adventurous
chatter of ours. I thought of the years I had spent with Sam--and Sue,
too, seemed to me to be having a spree. Poor kid, what a jolt she would
get some day. She called me "our dreamer imported from France." But I
was far from dreaming.
Presently the harbor just opened one of its big eyes and sent up by a
messenger a little grim reality.
A Russian revolutionist had appeared among us with a letter to Sue from
Joe Kramer. Joe, I found to my surprise, had seen quite a little of Sue
over here while I had been in Paris--and from the various ships and
hotels that had been his "home" of late, he had written her now and
then. Through him Sue had joined a society known as "The Friends of
Russian Freedom," and Joe wrote now from Moscow urging her to "stir up
the crowd and lick this fellow into shape to talk at big meetings and
raise some cash. He has the real goods," Joe added. "All he needs is the
English language and a few points about making it yellow. If handled
right he'll be a scream."
He was handled right and he was a scream. Three months later he finished
a tour that had netted over ten thousand dollars. Now to buy guns and
ship them to Russia--where in the awful poverty bequeathed to them by
the war with Japan, a bitter people was still fighting hard to make an
end of autocracy.
"I think I can help you, Puss," said Dad.
I looked at him with interest. I knew he had been as tickled as I by
these astonishing friends of hers. "Revolooters," he called them. He was
a great favorite with the girls.
"I once knew a man in a business way who dealt in guns," he explained to
Sue. "He shipped some to Bolivia from my dock. I'll have him up to meet
your friend."
So this messenger from the harbor, a keen lean man of business, gave one
hour of his time to the problem in which the Russian dreamer had been
absorbed for fifteen years. And the hour made the fifteen years look
decidedly dreamy.
"Guns for Russia, eh?" he said. "How'll you get 'em into your country?
Where's your frontier weakest? You don't know? Then I'll tell you." And
the man of business did. "Now what kind of guns do you want? You hadn't
thought? Well, my friend, you want Mausers. They happen to be cheap just
now in Vienna. You should have looked into that before you traipsed way
over here. You can get 'em there for three twenty apiece--they dropped
three cents last Tuesday."
The dreamer dreamed hard and fast for a moment.
"Then," he cried triumphantly, "wit' ten t'ousand dollairs I can buy
over t'ree t'ousand guns!"
The gunman's look was patient.
"Don't you want to shoot 'em off?" he inquired. "Because if you do
you'll need ammunition. You ought to have a thousand rounds, which will
come to a little over three times the actual cost of the guns
themselves. You see when you shoot off a gun at an army you want to have
plenty of cartridges or else be ready to run like hell.
"On second thought," he added, "I advise you to give up the Mausers and
go in for Springfields over here--old ones--you can get 'em cheap.
They're no good at over a mile, but for the first few months your
fellahs will be lucky if they hit a man at a hundred yards. And there's
one good point about Springfields, they make a devil of a noise--and
that's all you need for a starter, noise enough to break into headlines
all over the world as a 'Brave Little Rebel Army.' If you can do that,
and the word goes around on the quiet that you're using American
rifles--well, there's a kind of a sentiment in our trade--you'll find us
all behind you. We'll even _lose_ money. We're a queer bunch."
"But wait!" cried the Russian. "Dere ees a trouble! Your tr-reaty wit'
Russia! Have you not a tr-reaty which makes it forbidden to sell to me
guns?"
Again that look of patience:
"Yes, General, we have a tr-reaty. But we'll ship your guns as grand
pianos to Naples, from there by slow boat down to Brazil and then up to
the Baltic, where they'll arrive with their pedigrees lost. Our agent
will be there ahead, he'll have found a customhouse man he can fix,
he'll cable us where--and when those fifty pianos are landed the said
official will open the box marked twenty-two. It'll take him over an
hour to do it, the boards will be nailed so cussedly tight. And he'll
find a real piano inside. Then he'll look at the other forty-nine crates
and say, 'Oh, Hell!' in Russian. Then they'll go on to wherever you want
'em--and you'll revolute. But don't forget that what you need most is
the livest press agent you can find. I've got to go now. Think it over.
And if you want to do business with me come to my office to-morrow at
ten."
The man of business left us. And while the dreamer talked like mad and
finally decided that as Mausers were "shoot farther guns" he had better
go to Vienna, I watched the twinkle in Dad's gray eyes and thought of
the cool contempt in his friend's. And from being amused I became rather
sore. For, after all, this little Russian cuss had risked his life for
fifteen years and expected to lose it shortly. (As a matter of fact, he
was stood up against a wall and shot the following April.) Why make him
look so small?
Was there nothing under the heavens that this infernal harbor didn't
know all about, and "do business with" so thoroughly that it could
always smile?