The next morning, after the rush of relief at the news of Eleanore's
safety and the strange sight of our tiny son, I felt keyed gloriously
high, ready for anything under the sun. But there seemed to be nothing
whatever to do, I felt in the way each time that I moved, so I took to
my old refuge, work. And then into my small workroom came Eleanore's
father for a long talk. He too had been up all night, his lean face was
heavily marked from the strain, but their usual deep serenity had come
back into his quiet eyes.
"Let's take a day off," he said, smiling. "We're both so tired we don't
know it."
"Tired?" I demanded.
"Yes," he said, "you're tired--more than you've ever been in your life.
You'll feel like a rag by to-morrow, and then I hope you'll take a good
rest. But to-day, while you are still way up, I want to talk about your
work. Do you mind?"
"Mind? No," I replied, a bit anxiously. "It's just what I'm trying to
figure out."
"I know you are. You've figured for months and you've worked yourself
thin. I don't mind that, I like it, because I know the reason. But I
don't think the result has been good. It seems to me you've been so
anxious to get on, because of this large family of yours, that you've
shut yourself up and written too fast, you've gotten rather away from
life. Shall I go right on?"
"Yes," I said, watching intently.
"Well," he continued, "you've been using what name you've already made
and writing short stories of harbor life."
"That's what the editors want," I said. "When a man makes a hit in one
vein of writing they want that and nothing else."
"At this rate you'll soon work out the vein," he said. "I'd like to see
you stop writing now, take time to find new ground--and dig."
"There's not an awful lot of time," I remarked.
"My plan won't stop your making money," he replied. "I want you to write
less, but get more pay."
"That sounds attractive. How shall I do it?"
"By writing about big men," he said. "I suggest that you try a series of
portraits of some of the big Americans and the America they know."
I jumped up so suddenly he started.
"What's the matter?" he asked with a glance at the door. "Did you hear
anything?"
"Yes," I said excitedly. "I heard a stunning title! The America They
Know!"
We discussed it all that morning and it appealed to me more and more.
Later on, with Eleanore's help (for she grew stronger fast those days),
I prevailed upon her father to let me practice upon himself as my first
subject. I worked fast, my material right at hand, and within a few
weeks I had written the story of those significant incidents out of
thirty years of work and wanderings east and west that showed the
America he had known, his widening view. I did his portrait, so to
speak, with his back to the reader, letting the reader see what he saw.
This story I sold promptly, and under the tonic of that success I went
into the work with zest and vim.
It filled the next four years of my life. It took the view I had had of
the harbor and widened it to embrace the whole land, which I now saw
altogether through the eyes of the men at the top.
The most central figure of them all, and by far the most difficult to
attack, was a powerful New York banker, one of those invisible gods
whose hand I had felt on the harbor.
"The value of him to you," Dillon said, "is that if you can only make
him talk you'll find him a born storyteller. The secret scandal of his
life is that once in a short vacation he tried to write a play."
It was weeks before he would see me, and I had my first interview at
last only by getting on a night train which he had taken for Cleveland.
There in his stateroom, cornered, he received me with a grim reluctance.
And with a humorous glint in his eyes,
"How much do you know about banking?" he asked.
"Nothing," I said frankly. And then I took a sudden chance. "What do you
know about writing?" I asked.
"Nothing," he said placidly.
"Is that true? I thought you once wrote a play." He sat up very quickly.
"If you did," I went on, "you've probably read some of Shakespeare's
stuff. It was strong stuff about strong men. If he were alive he'd write
about you, but I'm sure that he wouldn't know about banking. That's only
your job."
"What do you want of me, young man?" he inquired. "Is it my soul?"
"Not at all," I answered. "It's the America you know, expressed in such
simple human terms that even a young ignoramus like me will be able to
understand it. Out of this big country a good many thousands of men, I
suppose, have come to you for money. Which are the most significant
ones?"
And I went on to explain my idea. Soon it began to take hold of him. We
talked until after midnight, and later we had other talks. It was hard
at first in the questioning to dodge the technical side of it all, the
widely intricate workings of that machine of credit of which he was
chief engineer. But as he saw how eager I was to feel his view and
become enthused, by degrees he humanized it all. And not only that, he
trusted me, he gave me the most intimate glimpses into this life of big
money, although when I dared to include such bits in the story that I
showed him he calmly scratched them out and said:
"You're mistaken, young man. I didn't say that."
As he talked I saw again that vision I had had on the North River docks.
For into this man's office had come the men of the mines, the factories
and the mills, the promoters of vast irrigations on prairies, builders
of railroads, real estate plungers, street traction promoters,
department store owners, newspaper proprietors, politicians--the
builders and boomers, the strong energetic men of the land. He showed me
their power and made me feel it was still but in its infancy. He made me
feel a dazzling future rushing upon us, a future of plenty still more
controlled by the keen minds and wide visions of the powerful men at the
top.
Of all these men and the rushing world of power they lived in, I have
only a jumble of memories now. For my own life was a jumble--irregular,
crowded and intense. In their offices, clubs and homes, in their motors,
on yachts and trains, in Chicago and Pittsburgh and other cities, I
followed them, making my time suit theirs. Some had no use for me at
all, but I found others delighted to talk--like the great Dakota
ranchman who ordered twenty thousand copies of the issue in which his
story appeared and scattered them like seeds of fame over the various
counties of wheat, corn and alfalfa he owned. And in the main I had
little trouble. I met often that curious respect which so many men of
affairs seem to have, God knows why, for a successful writer.
I got in where men with ten times my knowledge were barred. I remember
with a touch of shame the institute of scientific research where the
chief of the place took a whole afternoon to show me around, and while I
looked wise and tried to feel thrilled over glass tubes and jars and
microscopes through which I peered at microbes, a simple old country
doctor, one of the thousands of _common_ visitors, by my invitation
followed humbly in my wake, murmuring from time to time,
"Miraculous, by George, astounding!" And gratefully pressing my hand at
the end, "This has been the chance of a lifetime," he said.
Perhaps the principal reason why I got so warm a welcome was the name I
had already made as a writer of glory stories. I liked these men; I
liked to enthuse over all the big things they were doing. And still true
to my efficiency god, the immense importance of getting things done
loomed so high in my view of life as to overshadow everything else. My
sense of moral values changed.
It was a strange unmoral world.
In the institute of science these keen laboratory gods (who had seemed
so cold and comfortless to me but a few short years ago) were perfecting
a cure for syphilis. Strong men were removing the wages of sin!
In Chicago I met the president of a huge industrial company who had
found it necessary at times to use money on politicians. For this he had
been sent to jail, but later his influence got him out. Promptly he was
made treasurer of another company. In one year, through his energy, now
more intense than ever, the business of that company increased some
thirty-five per cent., whereupon the directors of the original
corporation, after a stormy meeting in which two church deacon directors
fussed and fumed considerably, unanimously decided to ask him to come
back. He did. He told me the story quite frankly himself. I admired him
tremendously.
The head of a mining company sat in his office one afternoon and talked
of the labor problem. There was no right or wrong involved, he said, it
was simply a matter of force. Once when a strike threatened he had
called in a "labor expert" who had used money wholesale and there had
been no strike.
"Well?" he asked, smiling. "What do you think of it?"
"I think I can't print it." He still smiled.
"Naturally not. But what do you think? If you yourself were responsible
to several hundred stockholders, what would you do? Risk a strike that
might wipe out their dividends? Or would you resort to bribery"--his
smile slowly deepened--"which is a penal offense in this State?"
I found such questions cropping up almost everywhere I went. In their
dealings with the public and still more with their rivals, there was a
ruthless vigor that swept old-fashioned maxims aside. And I liked this,
for it got things done! I was bored to find, as I often did, these men
in their homes quite old-fashioned again to suit sober old wives who
still went to church. I remember one such elderly lady and the shock I
unwittingly gave her. She had deplored the decline of churches; her own,
she said, was barely half full. And I then tried to cheer her by an
account of my last story, which was of an advertising man, a genius who
in the last two years had made churches his especial line and by his
up-to-date methods had packed church after church on a commission basis.
Her burst of disapproval almost drove me from the house. And there were
so many homes like that. Men who were perfect giants by day would become
the gentlest babies at night, allowing their wives to read to them such
sentimental drivel as would have been kicked from the office by day.
"But God knows they need such vacuous homes," I reflected, "to rest in."
I had never dreamed before how strenuous men's lives could be. One day
in the New York office of a big plunger in real estate I pointed to a
map on the wall.
"What are all those lots marked 'vacant' for?" I asked him. "I never saw
many vacant lots in that part of town." He grinned cheerfully.
"Anything under four stories is vacant to us," he answered, "because it
pays to buy it, tear it down and build something higher."
That was the way they crowded their cities, and as with their cities, so
with their lives. One story that interested me most was of the weird
America which a renowned nerve specialist knew. To him came these men
broken down, some on the verge of insanity. He gave me stories of their
lives, of his glimpses into their straining minds, he described their
pathetic efforts to rest, their strenuous attempts to relax. He himself
had some mysterious ailment, his hands kept trembling while he talked.
His wife said he hadn't had a vacation of over a week in eleven years.
From such men I would turn to exuberant lives, like that of the Tammany
leader now dead, who gave a ten-thousand-dollar banquet one night, in
the Ten Eyck in Albany, in honor of the newsboy who every morning for
twenty-two winters had brought morning papers to him in bed in his hotel
room. Or like that of the millionaire merchant who told me with the most
naive pride of the eleven hundred electric lights in his new home on
Fifth Avenue, and of how the bathrooms of both his large daughters were
fitted in solid silver throughout.
"Not plated, understand," he said. "I told the architect while he was at
it to put in the real solid stuff--and plenty of it!"
Through this varied throng of successes, this rich abundance of types, I
ranged with an ever deepening zest. As a hunter of game I watched that
endless human procession on and off the front pages of papers, the men
who were for the moment news. Often small people too would be
there--like the telephone girl from a suburb, who for one day, as the
most important witness in a sensational case of graft, was suddenly
before the whole country and then as suddenly dropped out of sight. In
fact, that was now my view of the land, figures emerging from dark
obscure multitudes up into a bright circle of light.
And I took this front-page view of New York. I saw it as a city where
big exceptional people were endlessly doing sensational things, both in
the making and spending of money. I saw it not only as a cluster of tall
buildings far downtown, but uptown as well a towering pile of rich
hotels and apartments, a region that sparkled gaily at night, lights
flashing from tens of thousands of rooms, in and out of which, I felt
delightedly, millions of people had passed through the years. I loved to
look up at these windows at night, at the sheer inscrutability of them.
For behind these twinkling masses I knew were all things tragic,
comic--people laughing, fighting, hating, scheming, dreaming, loving,
living. I thought of that row of cabins de luxe that I had seen on the
Christmas boat. Here was the same thing magnified, a monstrous
caravansary with but one question over its doors: "Have You Got the
Price?"
Once I had seen a harbor. Then it had grown into a port. And now I saw a
metropolis, the hub of a successful land.
And through this gay city of triumph I moved, myself a success, and my
view of the whole was colored by that. My life as an observer was
sprinkled with personal moments that made me see everything in high
lights. I would watch the life of a street full of people, and I myself
would be on my way to an interview with some noted man or coming away
from one who had given me stuff that I knew would write up big--I knew
just how! Or at a corner newsstand I would catch a glimpse of my name on
the cover of some magazine. Again I would be hurrying home, or into a
neighboring florist's or a theater ticket office, or diving into the
jolly whirl of the large Fifth Avenue toy shop in which I took an
unflagging delight. In my mind would be thoughts of a pillow fight or a
long evening with Eleanore, or we would be having friends to dine or
going out to dinner.
For Eleanore had been swift to use my success to broaden both our lives.
Young and adorably happy, eagerly alive, she did for me what she had
done for her father, filling my life with other lives. She was an artist
in living. It was a joy to see her make out a list of people to be asked
to dine. Her father, once watching the process, remarked to me in low,
solemn tones:
"She's a regular social chemist--who has never had an explosion."
He was often on the list, and through him and his many friends and the
ones I made through my writing, by degrees our circle widened. We met
all kinds of people, for Eleanore hated "sets" and "cliques." We met not
only successful men but (God help us sometimes) we also met their wives.
We met successful writers, artists and musicians, and a few people of
the stage. We met visitors from the West and from half the big cities of
Europe. We furbished up our French and German, our knowledge of books
and pictures and plays--_successful_ books and pictures and plays.
Through Eleanore's father and his work our minds were still held to the
past, to the harbor which had taken me, bruised and blind and petty, and
lifted me up and taught me to live, had given me my work, my home and my
new god. I was grateful, I was proud, I was in love and I felt strong.
And my view of the harbor in those days was of a glorious symbol of the
power of mind over matter, and of the mighty speeding up of a world of
civilization and peace, a successful world, strong, broad, tolerant,
sweeping on and bearing us with it.
So we adventured gaily, not deeper down, but higher and higher up into
life.
BOOK III
CHAPTER I
We had been married four years.
At the end of a crisp November day I was just about starting home. I
remember how keenly alive I felt, how tingling with bodily health, and
above all how successful.
I had had such a successful day. I had written hard all morning and my
work had been going splendidly. I had lunched downtown with the man
whose life I was writing that month, a man of astounding fertility, who
had started fifteen years ago with a small hotel in a western town, had
made money, had built a larger hotel, had made money, had moved to a
larger town and bought a still larger hotel, had made money, had moved
to Chicago, New York, had made money. And the America he knew was made
up of people who themselves had made their money so suddenly they had to
come to hotels to spend it. The stories that he told me, both scandalous
and otherwise, of these men and women who shot up rich and diamondy out
of this booming country of ours, had a range and a richness of color
that had held me delighted through many long talks. During luncheon he
had told some of his best, and had given me permission to print, with a
discreet twist or so to disguise them, certain intimate episodes in the
first fat years of men whose names were by-words now all over the land.
I could already see that story selling on the newsstands.
From this man I had come uptown to a branch of the Y. M. C. A., where
after an hour of hand-ball and a plunge in the swimming tank I had gone
to a room downstairs, to which ambitious youngsters came for free advice
from an expert who told them how to get on in life. His room was a
confessional. He would cross-examine each suppliant hard, make a
diagnosis of each one and then give him advice as to what to do--whether
or not to throw over his job, what kind of work he was suited for best.
The America he knew was made up of these small human units, some
pitiably or absurdly small, but all anxiously straining upward. And they
too appealed to me.
For I was so successful now that I was growing mellow. From certain big
men I had written about I had taken a spacious breadth of view that
included a deep indulgence for all these skurrying pigmies. Poor little
devils, give 'em a chance, especially those among them who had "bim"
enough to want a chance, to wonder why they were not getting on and want
to do something about it. And so I had formed the habit of dropping in
often at this room, hearing its confessions and now and then helping get
someone a job. As the swimming tank made my body tingle, so this place
affected my soul. It warmed me to do all I could for some fellow, some
decent kid who was down on his luck. Besides, some confessions were gems
of their kind, glimpses into human lives, hard struggles, wild
ambitions. I meant to write them up some day. In fact, I meant to write
everything up, I felt everything waiting for my pen.
And as I went down to the coat-room, the thought I had had so often
lately came again into my mind. I too would soon throw over my job,
leave articles and write fiction--my old Paris dream. But what a wide
and varied experience of life I had gathered since those ingenuous Paris
days. Yes, I would do it real and big, out of the big life I had known.
And my heroes would no longer be watching at my elbow to point to the
choicest bits and say, "You're mistaken, young man, I never said that."
No, all those lifelike human touches would stay in. Stories kept coming
up in my mind, one especially of late. As I stood in line for my hat and
coat I thought of it now and grew so absorbed I forgot that I was
standing in a line of insignificant clerks--until the one ahead of me,
who had just come in from the street, asked the chap in front of him:
"Say, Gus, did you see the suffragettes? Their parade's just going by."
This brought me down from the clouds with a jerk. For I had meant to see
that parade. Sue was in it, in it hard. Suffrage was her latest fad.
"Naw," growled Gus. "If I was the mayor and they came to me for a permit
to march I'd tell 'em to go and buy corsets. That's their complaint.
They can't get kissed so they want to vote." The other one chuckled:
"I saw one who can have my vote--and all I'll ask is a better look.
Believe me, some silk stockings!"
As they went away I glared after them. "Damn little muts," I thought. I
was rather in favor of suffrage, at least I felt indulgent about it. Why
shouldn't I be? The great thing was to keep your mind open and kindly,
to feel contempt for nothing whatever. And because I felt contempt for
no thing or person in all the world, I now glared with the most utter
contempt on these narrow-minded little clerks.
Then I hurried out and over to Fifth Avenue, where the throb of the
drums was still to be heard. And there I found to my surprise that in a
very real sense this parade was different from anything that I had ever
seen before. I was more than indulgent, I was excited. And by what? Not
by the marching lines of figures, fluttering banners, booming bands, nor
just by the fact that these marchers were women, and women quite frankly
dressed for effect, so that the whole rhythmic mass had a feminine color
and dash that made it all gay and delightful. No, there was something
deeper. And that something, I finally made out, was this. These women
and girls were all deeply thrilled by the feeling that for the first
time in their lives they were doing something all together--for an idea
that each one of them had thought rather big and stirring before, but
now, as each felt herself a part of this moving, swinging multitude, she
felt the idea suddenly loom so infinitely larger and more compelling
than before that she herself was astounded. Here for the first time in
my life I felt the power of mass action.
And as presently I started home and the intensity of it was gone, there
was an added pleasure to me in remembering how I had felt it. Another
proof of my breadth of mind. I hurried home to dinner.
As I entered our apartment I gave a long, low mysterious whistle. And
after a moment another whistle, which tried hard to be mysterious,
answered mine from another room. Then there were stealthy footsteps
which ended in a sudden charge, and my wee son, "the Indian," hurled me
onto a sofa, where, to use his expression, we "rush-housed" each other.
We did this almost every night.
When the big time was about over Eleanore appeared:
"Come, Indian, it's time for bed." She led him off protesting and blew
me back a kiss from the door.
She had developed wonderfully, this bewitching wife of mine, this quiet
able one in her work, this smiling humorous one in her life, this
watchful, joyous, intimate one in the hours that shut everything out.
Sue said I idolized my wife, that I saw her all perfection, "without one
redeeming vice." Not at all. I knew her vices well enough. I knew she
could get distinctly cross when a new gown came home all wrong. I knew
that she could lie to me, I had caught her at it several times when she
said she was feeling finely and then confessed to me the next day, "I
had a splitting headache last night." In fact, she had any number of
vices--queer, mysterious feminine moods when she quite shamelessly shut
me out. She didn't half take care of herself, she went places when she
should have stayed at home. And finally, she was slow at dressing.
Placidly seated in front of her mirror she could spend an entire hour in
doing her soft luxuriant hair.
I went over all these vices now as I lay back on the sofa. Idolize her?
Not at all. I knew her. We were married, thank God.
Then she came back into the room. She was smiling in rather a curious
way, an expectant way, and I noticed that her color was unusually high.
Eleanore always dressed so well, but to-night she had outdone herself.
From her trim blue satin slippers to the demure little band of blue at
her throat she was more enchantingly fresh than ever. Suffragettes and
that sort of thing were all very well on the Avenue. Give me Eleanore at
home.
"Did you see the parade?" she inquired.
"Yes."
"Did you see me?"
I fairly jumped!
"You?" I demanded. "Were you in that march?"
"I most certainly was," she said quietly. Having shot her bolt she was
regarding me gravely now, with the merest glint of amused delight
somewhere in her gray-blue eyes. "Why not?" she asked. "I believe in it,
I want the vote. Why shouldn't I march? I paraded," she added serenely,
"in the college section right up near the head of the line. That's why
I'm home so early. I'm afraid I was quite conspicuous, for you see I'm
rather small and I had to take long swinging strides to keep in step.
But I soon got used to it, and I thoroughly enjoyed the cheers. We waved
back at them with our flags."
"But," I cried, "my darling wife! Why didn't you tell me about it
ahead?"
"Because"--she came close up to me and said quite confidentially, "we
do these things all by ourselves. You don't mean to say that you mind
it, dear?"
I lost about five seconds and then I did exactly right. I took her in my
arms and laughed and called my wife by many names and said she couldn't
worry me, that I didn't mind it in the least, was proud of her and so
on. In short, to use a slang expression, I distinctly got away with it.
Moreover, I soon felt what I said. I was honestly rather proud of my
wife for having had the nerve to march. It must have been quite a
struggle, for she was no born marcher.
And I was glad that I was proud. Another proof of my tolerance--which
was the more grateful to me just now because a magazine man I admired
had genially hinted the other day that I was rather narrow.
"Did you see Sue?" I inquired.
"Only for a moment," she said. "Sue was one of the marshals and she was
all up and down the lines. She's coming to supper with many paraders."
"A crowd of women here? I'm off!"
"No you're not. She's bringing some men paraders too."
Men paraders! Now I could smile. I had earned the right, I had been
broad. But after all, there are limits. I could see those chaps parading
with women. I knew them, I had seen them before, for Sue had often
brought them here. I enjoyed myself immensely--till Eleanore shot
another bolt.
"Smile on, funny one," she said. "You'll be in line yourself in a year."
"I will not be in line!"
"I wonder." She looked at me in a curious way. The mirth went slowly out
of her eyes. "There are so many queer new ideas crowding in all around
us," she said. "And I know you, Billy, oh, so well--so much better than
you know yourself. I know that when you once feel a thing you're just
the kind to go into it hard. I'm not speaking of suffrage now--that's
only one nice little part. I mean this whole big radical movement--all
the kind of thing your friend Joe Kramer stood for." She put her arms
about my neck. "Don't get too radical, husband mine--you're so nice and
funny now, my love."
I regarded her anxiously:
"Has this parade gone to your head--or has Sue been talking to you
again?"
"I lunched with Sue----"
"I knew it! And now she's coming here to supper--bringing men paraders!"
"And they'll all be rabidly hungry," said Eleanore with a sudden change.
She went quickly in to see the cook and left me to grim meditation.
I a radical? I smiled. And my slight uneasiness passed away, as I
thought about my sister.
CHAPTER II
Poor old Sue. What queer friends she had, what a muddled life compared
to ours. What a vague confused development, jumping from one idea to
another, never seeing any job through, forever starting all over again
with the same feverish absorption in the next new radical fad. High-brow
dramatics, the settlement movement, the post-impressionists, socialism,
votes for women, one thing after the other pell mell. She would work
herself all up, live hard, talk, organize, think and feel till her
nerves went all to pieces, and then she would come to us for a rest and
laugh at us for our restfulness and at herself for the state she was in.
That was one thing at least she had learned--to laugh at herself--she
could be deliciously humorous. And Eleanore, meeting her on that ground,
would quiet her and steady her down.
We had grown very fond of Sue. We knew her life was not easy at home.
Alone over there with poor old Dad and feeling herself anchored down,
she would still at intervals rebel--against his sticking to his dull
job, against her own dependence, against the small monthly allowance
which without my father's knowledge they still had from me.
"Let me earn my own living!" she would exclaim. "Why shouldn't I? I'm
twenty-six--and I'm working hard enough as it is--the Lord knows! I'm
organizing every day and making speeches half my nights. Other girls
take pay for that. Now Father, please be sensible. I'm going to take a
good salaried job."
But then Dad, whose mind was so old and rigid, so much less tolerant
than mine, would grow excited or, still worse, ashamed that he couldn't
make money enough to give her all she wanted. And that desperate hungry
love with which he clung to her these latter days would in the end make
her give in. For under all her radical talk Sue had the kindest heart in
the world.
Eleanore did her best to help. She was always having Dad over to dinner,
and we had a room which she called his, where he would come and stay the
week-end. At six o'clock each Saturday night he would arrive with his
satchel.
"Daughter-in-law," he would announce, "my other daughter's _agin_ the
law, she's gone off revolooting. Can you take a decent old gentleman in
out of the last century? Don't change any plans on my account. If you're
going out to dinner just tell the cook to give me a snack and a cup of
tea, and then I'll light a good cigar and read the works of my great
son. Go right ahead as if I wasn't here."
If we had he would have been furious. Eleanore always made it his
night--and no quiet evening, either. When we didn't take him out to a
play she invited people to dinner--young people, for he liked them best.
And late on Sunday morning the "Indian" would wake him up, would watch
him shave and dress and breakfast, and then they would be off to the
Park. We had named our small son after Dad and they were the most
splendid chums. They had any number of secrets.
Eleanore too had made Sue use our apartment. Sue called it her Manhattan
club and brought her friends here now and then--"to stir you people up,"
she said. But this did not disturb me, I felt too secure in life. And
with a safe, amused and slightly curious attitude I found Sue quite a
tonic. I liked to hear her knock my big men in her cocksure superior
way. It was mighty good fun. And every now and then by mistake she would
hit on something that was true.
I found something too in her ideas. This suffrage business, for
example. She had stuck to this hobby quite a while, and through it she
had reached the conviction that women would never get the vote until the
great mass of working girls were drawn into the movement. So she had
gone in for working girls' clubs, and from clubs into trade unions and
from trade unions into strikes. There had been a strike of laundry girls
which for a week was the talk of the town. Sue and some of her suffrage
friends had organized meetings every night, and in a borrowed automobile
she had rushed from meeting to meeting with two laundry women, meager
forlorn-looking creatures who stood up much embarrassed and awkwardly
told about their lives. One of them, a young widow, had gone home from
work one night at eleven and found that her small baby had died of
convulsions during her absence. It was grim, terrible stuff of its kind,
and Sue was so intensely wrought up you'd have thought there was nothing
else in the world. But the strike stopped as suddenly as it began, and
the two women whose names she had brought into headlines were refused
jobs wherever they went. Sue tried to help them for a while, until this
suffrage parade came along, when she went into this equally hard and
quite forgot their existence.
And then Eleanore took them up. Quietly and as a matter of course, she
took their troubles on her hands, sent one to a hospital and got the
other work, looked into their wretched home affairs and had them come
often to see her. And this kind of thing was happening often, Sue taking
up and dropping what Eleanore then took up and put through. I compared
them with a glow of pride.
Eleanore's way was so sane and sure. She looked upon society much as she
did upon our son, who had frequent little ailments but through them all
what a glorious growth, to watch it was a perpetual joy. I remember
once, when in his young stomach there were some fearful goings on,
Eleanore's remarking:
"Now if Sue had a child with a stomach in trouble, I suppose her way
would be to quickly remove the entire stomach and put some new radical
thing in its place."
And then she went to the medicine chest, and a vastly comforted Indian
was soon cheerfully sitting up in bed.
Eleanore could help others, I felt, because she had first helped
herself, had tackled the mote in her own eye, from the time when she had
gone down to the harbor to get her roots, as she called it. She was a
wonderful manager, our budget was carefully worked out. And she had
herself so well in hand she could put herself behind herself and smile
clearly out on life.
"When Eleanore takes up a charity case," said her father, "she turns it
into a person at once, and later into an intimate friend."
He himself took a quiet interest in all her charity cases. They would
often talk them over at night, and in his easy careless way he would
turn over all his spare money to help in the work. Eleanore would
protest at times, and tell him how utterly foolish he was in not putting
money aside for himself. But soon, deep in another case of poignant
human misery, she would throw all caution to the winds and use her
father's money--every dollar he could spare. That was another vice she
had.
How she hated all the red tape in that huge network of institutions by
which New York City provides "relief." She never dropped a case of hers
into that cumbrous relief machine and then let it slip out of her sight.
She did the hard thing, she followed it up. She had learned, as I had in
my work, to "get on the inside" of this secretive city, to go to the
gods behind it all and so have her cases shoved. One day when one of
them, a woman, was in a hospital so desperately ill that her very life
depended on being moved to a private room--"It can't be done," said the
superintendent. Eleanore took the subway downtown to the Wall Street
office of the man who was the hospital's principal backer. She found
his outer office crowded with men who were waiting to see him on
business. "He can't see you," she was told. Then she scribbled this on
her card:
"I want none of your money, a little of your influence and one minute of
your time on behalf of a woman who is dying."
About twenty minutes later that woman was in a private room.
It is hard to stop talking about my wife. But to return to my sister:
* * * * *
Into my reverie that night Sue burst with a dozen radical friends.
Others kept arriving, and our small rooms were soon a riot of color and
chatter. Banners were stacked against the wall, bright yellow ribbons
were everywhere, faces were flushed and happily tired. Eleanore sat at
her coffee urn, cups and saucers and plates went around, and people
still too excited to rest stood about eating hungrily. The talking was
fast and furious now. I listened, watched their faces.
These "radicals," it seemed to me, had talked straight on both day and
night ever since the evenings years ago when one of their earliest
coteries had gathered in our Brooklyn home. And talking they had
multiplied and ramified all over the town. There was nothing under
heaven their fingers did not itch to change. Here close by my side were
three of them, two would-be Ibsen actresses and one budding playwright
who had had two Broadway failures and one Berkeley Lyceum success. But
were they talking of plays? Not at all. They talked of the Russian
Revolution. It had died down in the last few years, and they wanted to
help stir it up again by throwing some more American money into the
smoldering embers. To do this they planned to whip into new life "The
Friends of Russian Freedom."
That was it, I told myself, these people were all friends of
revolutions. Vaguely as I watched them now I felt I was seeing the
parlor side, the light and fluffy outer fringe, of something rather
dangerous. I thought again of that parade and my impression of mass
force. No danger in that, it was dressy and safe. But some of these
youngsters did not stop there, they went in for stirring up people in
rags, mass force of a very different kind. Here was a sculptor socialist
who openly bragged that he'd had a hand in filling Union Square one day
with a seething mass of unemployed, and then when some poor crazed
fanatic threw a bomb, our socialist friend, as he himself smilingly put
it, never once stopped running until he reached his studio.
It was this kind of thing that got on my nerves. For I pitied the
unwieldy poor, the numberless muddle-headed crowds down there in the
tenements, and it seemed to me perfectly criminal that a lot of these
young high-brows should be allowed to stir them up. Their own thinking
was so muddled, their views of life so out of gear.
I a radical? No chance!
While they chattered on excitedly, I thought of my trip uptown on the
"El" that afternoon, a trip that I had made hundreds of times. Coming as
I usually was from some big man or other, whose busy office and whose
mind was a clean, brilliant illustration of what efficiency can be, I
would sit in the car and idly watch the upper story windows we passed,
with yellow gas jets flaring in the cave-like rooms behind them. There I
had glimpses of men and girls at long crowded tables making coats,
pants, vests, paper flowers, chewing-gum, five-cent cigars. I saw
countless tenement kitchens, dirty cooking, unmade beds. These glimpses
followed one on the other in such a dizzying torrent they merged into
one moving picture for me. And that picture was of crowds, crowds,
crowds--of people living frowzily.
This was poverty. And it was like some prodigious swamp. What could you
do about it? You could pull out individuals here and there, as Eleanore
did. I considered that a mighty fine job--for a woman or a clergyman.
But to go at it and drain the swamp was a very different matter. You
couldn't do it by easy preaching of patent cure-alls, nor by stirring up
class hatred through rabid attacks upon big men. No, this was a job for
the big men themselves, men who would go at this human swamp as
Eleanore's father had gone at the harbor--quietly and slowly, with an
engineer's precision. He had been at it six solid years, but he still
remarked humbly, "We've only begun."
Then from thinking of big men I thought of the one I had seen that day,
and of my story about him. It was just in the stage I liked, where I
could feel it all coming together. Incidents, bits of character and neat
little turns of speech rose temptingly before my mind.
Presently, through the clamor around me, I heard "the Indian" crying.
All this chatter had waked him up. I saw Eleanore go in to him and soon
I heard the crying stop, and I knew she was telling him a story, a nice
sleepy one to quiet him down.
What an infernal racket these people were making about the world. I went
on thinking about my work.
CHAPTER III
"You two," said Sue, when at last her friends had gone away, "have built
up a wall of contentment around you a person couldn't break through with
an axe."
"Have a little," I suggested.
"Stay all night," said Eleanore.
"No, thanks," said Sue. "I promised Dad that I'd be home."
And then instead of going home she sprawled lazily on the sofa with her
head upon one elbow, and settled in for some more talk. But her talk was
different to-night. She usually talked about herself, but to-night she
talked of us instead, of our contemptible content. And presently through
her talk I felt that she had some surprise to spring. In a few moments
Eleanore felt it too, I could tell that by the vigilant way she kept
glancing up from her knitting.
"I think," I was remarking, "we're a pretty liberal-minded pair."
"That's it," said Sue. "You're liberals!" What utter disdain she threw
into the word. "And what's more you're citizens. In all these
movements," she went on, "you always find two classes--citizens and
criminals. You two are both born citizens."
"What's the difference?" I inquired.
"Citizens," said Sue impressively, "are ready to _vote_ for what they
believe in. Criminals are ready to get arrested and go to jail."
Eleanore looked up at her.
"Who gave you that?" she asked. Sue looked a little taken back, but only
for a moment.
"One of the criminals," she said. Her voice was carefully casual now but
her eyes were a little excited. "He's a man who made up his mind that he
wanted to get way down to the bottom, and see how it feels to be down
there. So he took the very worst job he could find. For two years he was
a stoker--on ships of all kinds all over the world. And now that he
knows just how it feels, he has an office down on the docks where he's
getting the stokers and dockers together--getting them ready for a
strike--on your beloved harbor."
"Joe Kramer," said Eleanore quietly. Sue gave a sudden, nervous start.
"Eleanore," she severely rejoined, "sometimes you're simply uncanny--the
way you quietly jump at a thing!"
Eleanore had gone on with her knitting. I rose and lit a cigarette. I
could feel Sue's eyes upon me. So _this_ was her infernal surprise! J.
K. banging into my life again!
"How long has Joe been here?" I asked.
"About five months," Sue answered.
"He might have looked me up," I said.
"He doesn't want to look anyone up, I've only seen him once myself. He
has simply buried himself down there. Why don't you go and see him,
Billy?" she added, with a quick glance at Eleanore. "He won't amuse you
the way we do. He's one of the real criminals now."
Still Eleanore did not look up.
"What's his address?" I asked gruffly. Sue gave it to me and
good-humoredly yawned and said she must be getting home.
"Good-night, dear," said Eleanore. She had risen and come to the door.
"What a love of a hat you're wearing. It's a new one, isn't it? I caught
sight of it in the parade."
But the smile which my tall sister threw back at us from the doorway
had nothing whatever to do with hats. It said as plainly as in words:
"Now, you cozy liberals, go over and touch _that_ spot if you dare."
When she had gone I took up a book and tried to read. But I soon
gloomily relapsed. Would J. K. never leave me alone? What was he doing
with my harbor? Why should I look him up, confound him--he hadn't
bothered his head about me. But I knew that I _would_ look him up and
would find him more disturbing than ever. How he did keep moving on. No,
not on, but down, down--until now he had bumped the bottom!
"Are you going to see him?"
Glancing sharply up, I saw Eleanore carefully watching my face.
"Oh, I suppose so," I replied. She bent again to her knitting.
"He must be a strange kind of a person," she said.
CHAPTER IV
I slept little that night, and my work the next morning went badly. So,
after wasting an hour or two, I decided to stop. I would go and see Joe
and be done with it.
What was he doing with my harbor? The address Sue had given me was down
on the North River, my old hunting ground. The weather had turned cold
over-night, and when I came to the waterfront I felt the big raw breath
of the sea. I had hardly been near the harbor in years. It had become
for me a deep invisible corner-stone upon which my vigorous world was
built. I had climbed up into the airy heights, I had been writing of
millionaires. And coming so abruptly now from my story of life in rich
hotels, the place I had once glorified looked bleak and naked,
elemental. Down to the roots of things again.
I came to a bare wooden building, climbed some stairs and entered a
large, low-ceilinged room which was evidently a meeting hall. Chairs
were stacked along the walls and there was a low platform at one end. As
I lingered there a moment, by habit my eyes took in the details. The
local color was lurid enough. On the walls were foreign pictures, one of
the anarchist Ferrer being executed in Spain, and another of an Italian
mob shaking their fists and yelling like demons at a bloated hideous
priest. There were posters in which flaming torches, blood-red flags and
barricades and cannon belching clouds of smoke stood out in heavy blacks
and reds. And all this foreign violence was made grimly real in its
purpose here by the way these pictures centered around the largest
poster, which was of an ocean liner with all its different kinds of
workers gathered together in one mass and staring fixedly up at the
ship.
Through a door in a board partition I went into a narrow room from which
two dirty windows looked out upon the docks below. This room was cramped
and crowded. Newspapers and pamphlets lay heaped on the floor, and in
the corners were four desks, at one of which three men, whom I learned
later to be an Italian, an Englishman and a Spaniard, were talking
together intensely. They took no notice of my entrance, for many other
visitors, burly, sooty creatures, were constantly straggling in and out.
I saw Joe at a desk in one corner. Looking doubly tall and lean and
stooped, and with a tired frown on his face, he sat there with his
sleeves rolled up slowly pounding out a letter on the typewriter before
him. On top of his desk were huge ledgers, and over them upon hooks on
the wall hung bunches of letters from other ports. It all gave me a
heavy impression of dull daily drudgery. And in this Joe was so absorbed
that he took no notice of my presence, although I now stood close behind
him. When at last he did look up and I got a full view of his face, with
its large, familiar features, tight-set jaw and deep-set eyes, I was
startled at its gauntness.
"Hello, Joe----"
"Hello." A dullish red came into his face and then a slight frown. He
half rose from his seat. "Hello, Bill," he repeated. "What's brought you
here?"
He appeared a little dazed at first, then anything but glad to see me.
The thought of our old college days flashed for a moment into my mind.
How far away they seemed just now. Through our first few awkward remarks
he lapsed back into such a tired, worn indifference that I was soon on
the point of leaving. But that bony gauntness in his face, and all it
showed me he had been through, gave him some right to his rudeness, I
thought. So I changed my mind and stuck to my purpose of having it all
out with Joe and learning what he was about. Persisting in my
friendliness my questions slowly drew him out.
Since I had seen him five years ago he had continued his writing, but as
he had grown steadily more set on writing only what he called "the truth
about things," the newspapers had closed their doors. While I had gone
up he had gone down, until finally throwing up in disgust "this whole
fool game of putting words on paper," he had made up his mind to throw
in his life with the lives of the men at the bottom. So for two years he
had shoveled coal in the stokeholes of ships by day and by night, he had
mixed with stokers of every race, from English, French and Germans to
Russians and Italians, Spaniards, Hindus, Coolies, Greeks. He had worked
and eaten and slept in their holes, he had ranged the slums of all the
seas. And of all this he spoke in short, commonplace phrases, still in
that indifferent tone, as though personal stories were a bore.
"But look here, Joe," I asked at the end, "what's the good of living
like this? What the devil can you do?"
I still remember the look he gave me, the weary remoteness of it. But
all he said was,
"Organize strikes."
"Here?"
"Everywhere."
"Of stokers?"
"No, of all industries."
"For higher pay, eh, and shorter hours."
Another brief look.
"No, for revolution," he said.
Briefly, in reply to my questions, he explained how he and his friends
had already induced some twelve thousand stokers and dockers to leave
their old trade unions and enroll themselves as members of this new
international body, which was to embrace not only one trade but all the
labor connected with ships--ships of all nations. He was here doing the
advance work. As soon as the ground was made ready, he said, some of the
bigger leaders would come. Then there would be mass meetings here and
presently a general strike. And as the years went on there would be
similar strikes in all trades and in all countries, until at some time
not many years off there would be such labor rebellions as would
paralyze the industrial world. And out of this catastrophe the workers
would emerge into power to build up a strange new world of their own.
This was what Joe saw ahead. He seemed to be seeing it while he spoke,
with a hard, clear intensity that struck me rather cold. Here was no
mere parlor talk, here was a man who lived what he said.
"You comfortable people," he said, "are so damn comfortable you're
blind. You see nothing ahead but peace on earth and a nice smooth
evolution--with a lot of steady little reforms. You've got so you
honestly can't believe there's any violence left in the world. You're as
blind as most folks were five years before the Civil War. But what's the
use talking?" he ended. "You can't understand all this." Again my
irritation rose.
"No, I can't say I do," I replied. "To stir up millions of men of that
kind and then let 'em loose upon the world strikes me as absolutely
mad!"
"I knew it would."
"Look here, Joe, how are _you_ so sure about all this? Hasn't it ever
struck you that you're getting damnably narrow?" He smiled.
"I don't care much if I'm narrow," he said.
"You think it's good for you, being like this?"
"I don't care if it's good for me."
"Don't you want to see anything else?"
"Not in your successful world."
"Well, J. K., I'm sorry," I retorted hotly. "Because I'd like to see
your world, I honestly would! I'm not like you, I'm always ready to be
shown!"
"All right, come and see it. Why don't you write up Jim Marsh?" He
smiled as he named the notorious leader of the whole organization.
"He'll be here soon, and in his line he has been a mighty successful
man. All up and down the U. S. A. Jim's name has been in headlines and
Jim himself has been in jail. A successful revolutionist. So why not add
him to your list? Write up the America _he_ knows." There was a
challenge in Joe's voice.
"All right, perhaps I will," I said. At least I had him talking now.
"Come out to lunch and tell me some more."
"I don't want any lunch."
Something in the way he said that made me look at him quickly. He
appeared to me now not only thin but tense and rather feverish. His
nerves were plainly all on edge. He had smoked one cigarette after
another.
"I've got a lot of work to-day," he added restlessly. "Not only these
damn letters to write--I've got to make up our paper besides--it goes to
the printer to-morrow. Here, take a copy with you."
And he handed me the last week's issue. It was a crude and flimsy
affair, with its name, in scarehead letters, "WAR SURE." I glanced it
over in silence a moment. What a drop for Joe, from what he had been, to
this wretched violent little sheet, this muckraker of the ocean world.
"Not like the harbor _you_ painted," he said.
"No," I answered shortly.
"Do you want another look at your harbor?"
I eyed him for a moment:
"All right--I'll look----"
"Fine business." He had risen now, and a gleam of the old likable Joe
came for a moment into his eyes.
"Meet me to-morrow at seven a. m. And let's look at some of its
failures," he said.
CHAPTER V
"Did you see him?" Eleanore asked that night.
"Yes--I saw him----"
I could feel her waiting, but I could not bring myself to talk. Eleanore
wouldn't like J. K. She wouldn't like what I had told him I'd do. I was
sorry now that I had, it was simply looking for trouble. I damned that
challenge in Joe's voice. Why did he always get hold of me so?
"How did he look? Is he much changed?" Eleanore asked me quietly.
"Yes. He looks half sick--and old. He's been through a good deal," I
answered.
"Did he talk about that?"
"Yes"--I hesitated--"and of what he wants to show me," I said. Eleanore
looked quickly up.
"Are you going to see him soon again?"
"Yes--to-morrow morning--to have a look at his stoker friends. I want to
have just one good look at the life that has made him what he is. That's
all--that's all it amounts to----"
There was another silence. Then she came over behind my chair and I felt
the cool quiet of her hand as she slowly stroked my forehead.
"You look tired, dear," she said.
* * * * *
Just before daylight the next morning I rose and dressed, swallowed some
coffee and set out. I took a surface car downtown.
I had not been out at this hour in years. And as in my present mood,
troubled and expectant, I watched the streets in the raw half-light,
they looked as utterly changed to me as though they were streets of a
different world. The department store windows looked unreal. Their soft
rich lights had been put out, and in this cold hard light of dawn all
their blandishing ladies of wax appeared like so many buxom ghosts. Men
were washing the windows. Women and girls were hurrying by, and as some
of them stopped for a moment to peer in at these phantoms of fashion,
their own faces looked equally waxen to me. A long, luxurious motor
passed with a man and a woman in evening clothes half asleep in each
other's arms. An old man with a huge pack of rags turned slowly and
stared after them. The day's work was beginning. Peddlers trundled
push-carts along, newspaper vendors opened their stands, milk wagons and
trucks from the markets came by, some on the gallop. Our car had filled
with people now. Men and boys clung to the steps behind and women and
girls were packed inside, most of them hanging to the straps. How badly
and foolishly dressed were these girls. There must be thousands of them
out. Two kept tittering inanely. All the rest were silent.
By the time that I reached the docksheds the day was breaking over their
roofs. It was freezing cold, and the chill was worse in the dock that I
entered. I buttoned my ulster tighter. The big place was dark and empty.
The dockers, I learned from the watchman, had quit work at three
o'clock, for a few tons of fruit was all the freight that remained to be
loaded. The ship was to sail at nine o'clock.
The stokers had not yet gone aboard. I found about a hundred of them
huddled along the steel wall of the shed. Some of them had old leather
grips or canvas bags, but many had no luggage at all. A few wore seedy
overcoats, but the greater part had none, they stood with their hands in
their ragged pockets, shivering and stamping. Most of them were
undersized, some tough, some rather sickly. A dull-eyed, wretched,
sodden lot. I got the liquor on their breaths. A fat old Irish stoker
came drifting half-drunk up the pier with a serene and waggish smile.
"Hello," said Joe at my elbow.
He looked more fagged than the day before. I noticed that his lips were
blue and that his teeth were chattering.
"Joe," I said abruptly, "you're not fit to be here. Let's get out of
this, you belong in bed." He glanced at me impatiently.
"I'm fit enough," he muttered. "We'll stay right here and see this
show--unless you feel you want to quit----"
"Did I say I did? I'm ready enough----"
"All right, then wait a minute. They're about ready to go on board."
But as we stood and watched them, I still felt the chattering teeth by
my side, and a wave of pity and anger and of disgust swept over me. Joe
wouldn't last long at this kind of thing!
"What do you think of my friends?" he asked.
"I think you're throwing your life away!"
"Do you? How do you make it out?"
"Because they're an utterly hopeless crowd! Look at 'em--poor
devils--they look like a lot of Bowery bums!"
"Yes--they look like a lot of bums. And they feed all the fires at sea."
"Are they all like these?" I demanded.
"No better dressed," he answered. "A million lousy brothers of Christ."
"And you think you can build a new world _with them_?"
"No--I think they can do it themselves."
"Do you know what I think they'll do themselves? If they ever do win in
any strike and get a raise in wages--they'll simply blow it in on
drink!"
Joe looked at me a moment.
"They'll do so much more than drink," he said. "Come on," he added.
"They're going aboard."
They were forming in a long line now before the third-class gang-plank.
As they went up with their packs on their shoulders, a man at the top
gave each a shove and shouted out a number, which another official
checked off in a book. The latter I learned was the chief engineer. He
was a lean, powerful, ruddy-faced man with a plentiful store of
profanity which he poured out in a torrent:
"Come on! For Christ's sake! Do you want to freeze solid, you ---- human
bunch of stiffs?"
We came up the plank at the end of the line, and I showed him a letter
which I had procured admitting us to the engine rooms. He turned us over
promptly to one of his junior engineers, and we were soon climbing down
oily ladders through the intricate parts of the engines, all polished,
glistening, carefully cleaned. And then climbing down more ladders until
we were, as I was told, within ten feet of the keel of the ship, we came
into the stokers' quarters.
And here nothing at all was carefully cleaned. The place was foul, its
painted steel walls and floor and ceiling were heavily encrusted with
dirt. The low chamber was crowded with rows of bunks, steel skeleton
bunks three tiers high, the top tier just under the ceiling. In each was
a thin, dirty mattress and blanket. In some of these men were already
asleep, breathing hard, snoring and wheezing. Others were crowded around
their bags intent on something I could not see. Many were smoking, the
air was blue. Some were almost naked, and the smells of their bodies
filled the place. It was already stifling.
"Had enough?" asked our young guide, with a grin.
"No," I said, with an answering superior smile. "We'll stay a while and
get it all."
And after a little more talk he left us.
"How do you like our home?" asked Joe.
"I'm here now," I said grimly. "Go ahead and show me. And try to believe
that I want to be shown."
"All right, here comes our breakfast."
Two stokers were bringing in a huge boiler. They set it down on the
dirty floor. It was full of a greasy, watery soup with a thick, yellow
scum on the top, through which chunks of pork and potato bobbed up here
and there.
"This is scouse," Joe told me. Men eagerly dipped tin cups in this and
gulped it down. The chunks of meat they ate with their hands. They ate
sitting on bunks or standing between them. Some were wedged in close
around a bunk in which lay a sleeper who looked utterly dead to the
world. His face was white.
"He reminds me," said Joe, "of a fellow whose bunk was once next to
mine. He was shipped at Buenos Ayres, where the crimps still handle the
business. A crimp had carried this chap on board, dumped him, got his
ten dollars and left. The man was supposed to wake up at sea and shovel
coal. But this one didn't. The second day out some one leaned over and
touched him and yelled. The crimp had sold us a dead one."
As Joe said this he stared down at the sleeper, a curious tensity in his
eyes.
"Joe, how did you ever stand this life?"
My own voice almost startled me, it sounded so suddenly tense and
strained. Joe turned and looked at me searchingly, with a trace of that
old affection of his.
"I didn't, Kid," he said gruffly. "The two years almost got me. And
that's what happens to most of 'em here. Half of 'em," he added, "are
down-and-outers when they start. They're what the factories and mills
and all the rest of this lovely modern industrial world throw out as no
more wanted. So they drift down here and take a job that nobody else
will take, it's so rotten, and here they have one week of hell and
another week's good drunk in port. And when the barrooms and the women
and all the waterfront sharks have stripped 'em of their last red cent,
then the crimps collect an advance allotment from their future wages to
ship 'em off to sea again."
"That's not true in _this_ port," I retorted, eagerly catching him up on
the one point that I knew was wrong. "They don't allow crimps in New
York any more."
"No," Joe answered grimly. "The port of New York has got reformed, it's
become all for efficiency now. The big companies put up money for a kind
of a seamen's Y. M. C. A. where they try to keep men sober ashore, and
so get 'em back quick into holes like these, in the name of Christ.
"But there's one thing they forget," he added bitterly. "The age of
steam has sent the old-style sailors ashore and shipped these fellows in
their places. And that makes all the difference. These chaps didn't grow
up on ships and get used to being kicked and cowed and shot for mutiny
if they struck. No, they're all grown up on land, in factories where
they've been in strikes, and they bring their factory views along into
these floating factories. And they don't like these stinking holes! They
don't like their jobs, with no day and no night, only steel walls and
electric light! You hear a shout at midnight and you jump down into the
stokehole and work like hell till four a. m., when you crawl up all
soaked in sweat and fall asleep till the next shout. And you do this,
not as the sailor did for a captain he knew and called 'the old man,'
but for a corporation so big it has rules and regulations for you like
what they have in the navy. You're nothing but a number. Look here."
He took me to a bulletin that had just been put up on the wall. Around
it men were eagerly crowding.
"Here's where you find by your number what shift you're to work in," he
said, "and what other number you have to replace if he goes down. Heart
failure is damn common here, and if your man gives out it means you
double up for the rest of the voyage. So you get his number and hunt for
him and size him up. You hope he'll last. I'll show you why."
He crawled down a short ladder and through low passageways dripping wet
and so came into the stokehole.
This was a long, narrow chamber with a row of glowing furnace doors. Wet
coal and coal-dust lay on the floor. At either end a small steel door
opened into bunkers that ran along the sides of the ship, deep down near
the bottom, containing thousands of tons of soft coal, which the men
called "trimmers" kept shoveling out to the stokers. As the voyage went
on, Joe told me, these trimmers had to go farther and farther back into
the long, black bunkers, full of stifling coal-dust, in which if the
ship were rolling the masses of coal kept crashing down. Hundreds of men
had been killed that way. In the stokehole the fires were not yet up,
but by the time the ship was at sea the furnace mouths would be white
hot and the men at work half naked. They not only shoveled coal into the
flames, they had to spread it out as well and at intervals rake out the
"clinkers" in fiery masses on the floor. On these a stream of water
played, filling the chamber with clouds of steam. In older ships, like
this one, a "lead stoker" stood at the head of the line and set the pace
for the others to follow. He was paid more to keep up the pace. But on
the fast new liners this pacer was replaced by a gong.
"And at each stroke of the gong you shovel," said Joe. "You do this till
you forget your name. Every time the boat pitches, the floor heaves you
forward, the fire spurts at you out of the doors and the gong keeps on
like a sledgehammer coming down on top of your mind. And all you think
of is your bunk and the time when you're to tumble in."
From the stokers' quarters presently there came a burst of singing.
"Now let's go back," he ended, "and see how they're getting ready for
this."
As we crawled back the noise increased, and it swelled to a roar as we
entered. The place was pandemonium now. Those groups I had noticed
around the bags had been getting out the liquor, and now at eight
o'clock in the morning half the crew were already well soused. Some
moved restlessly about. One huge bull of a creature with large, limpid,
shining eyes stopped suddenly with a puzzled stare, then leaned back on
a bunk and laughed uproariously. From there he lurched over the shoulder
of a thin, wiry, sober man who, sitting on the edge of a bunk, was
slowly spelling out the words of a newspaper aeroplane story. The big
man laughed again and spit, and the thin man jumped half up and snarled.
Louder rose the singing. Half the crew was crowded close around a little
red-faced cockney. He was the modern "chanty man." With sweat pouring
down his cheeks and the muscles of his neck drawn taut, he was jerking
out verse after verse about women. He sang to an old "chanty" tune, one
that I remembered well. But he was not singing out under the stars, he
was screaming at steel walls down here in the bottom of the ship. And
although he kept speeding up his song the crowd were too drunk to wait
for the chorus, their voices kept tumbling in over his, and soon it was
only a frenzy of sound, a roar with yells rising out of it. The singers
kept pounding each other's backs or waving bottles over their heads. Two
bottles smashed together and brought a still higher burst of glee.
"I'm tired!" Joe shouted. "Let's get out!"
I caught a glimpse of his strained, frowning face. Again it came over me
in a flash, the years he had spent in holes like this, in this hideous,
rotten world of his, while I had lived joyously in mine. And as though
he had read the thought in my disturbed and troubled eyes,
"Let's go up where _you_ belong," he said.
I followed him up and away from his friends. As we climbed ladder after
ladder, fainter and fainter on our ears rose that yelling from below.
Suddenly we came out on deck and slammed an iron door behind us.
And I was where I belonged. I was in dazzling sunshine and keen frosty
Autumn air. I was among gay throngs of people. Dainty women brushed me
by. I felt the softness of their furs, I breathed the fragrant scent of
them and of the flowers that they wore, I saw their fresh immaculate
clothes, I heard the joyous tumult of their talking and their laughing
to the regular crash of the band--all the life of the ship I had known
so well.
And I walked through it all as though in a dream. On the dock I watched
it spellbound--until with handkerchiefs waving and voices calling down
good-bys, that throng of happy travelers moved slowly out into
midstream.
And I knew that deep below all this, down in the bottom of the ship, the
stokers were still singing.
CHAPTER VI
That same day I had an appointment to lunch with the owner of rich
hotels whose story I was writing. And the interview dragged. For the
America he knew was like what I'd seen on the upper decks of the ship
that had sailed a few hours before. And I could not get back my old zest
for it all, I kept thinking of what I had seen underneath. The faces of
individual stokers, some fiery red, some sodden gray, kept bobbing up in
my memory. Angrily trying to keep them down, I went on with my
questions. But I caught the hotel millionaire throwing curious looks at
me now and then.
I went home worried and depressed and shut myself up in my workroom.
This business had to be thought out. It wasn't only stokers; it was
something deep, world-wide. I had come up against the slums. What had I
to do with it all?
I was in my room all afternoon. I heard "the Indian" at my door, but I
sat still and silent, and presently he went away.
Late in the twilight Eleanore came. How beautiful she was to-night. She
was wearing a soft gown of silk, blue with something white at her throat
and a brooch that I had given her. As she bent over my shoulder I felt
her clean, fresh loveliness.
"Don't you want to tell me, love, just what it was he showed you?"
"I'd rather not, my dear one, it was something so terribly ugly," I
said.
"I don't like being so far away from you, dear. Please tell me. Suppose
you begin at the start."
It took a long time, for she would let me keep nothing back.
"I wouldn't have thought it could hit me so hard," I said at the end.
"I'm not surprised," said Eleanore.
"I can't be simply angry at Joe," I went on. "He's so intensely and
gauntly sincere. It isn't just talk with him, you see, as it is with
Sue's parlor radical friends. Think of the life he's been leading, think
of it compared to mine. Joe and I were mighty close once"--I broke off
and got up restlessly. "I hate to think of him," I said.
"It's funny," said Eleanore quietly. "I knew this was coming sooner or
later. Ever since we've been married I've known that Joe Kramer still
means more to you than any man you've ever met."
"He doesn't," I said sharply. "Where on earth did you get that idea?"
"From you, my love," she answered. "You can't dream how often you've
spoken about him."
"I didn't know I had!" It is most disquieting at times, the things
Eleanore tells me about myself.
"I know you don't," she continued, "you do it so unconsciously. That's
why I'm so sure he has a real place in the deep unconscious part of you.
He worries you. He gets you to think you've no right to be happy!" There
was a bitterness in her voice that I had never heard before. "I believe
in helping people--of course--whenever I get a chance," she said. "But I
don't believe in this--I hate it! It's simply an insane attempt to pull
every good thing down! It's too awful even to think of!"
"We're not going to," I told her. "I'm sorry for Joe and I wish I could
help him out of his hole. But I can't--it's too infernally deep. He
won't listen to any talk from me--and as long as he won't I'll leave him
alone. It's hideous enough--God knows. But if I ever tackle poverty and
labor and that sort of thing it'll be along quite different lines."
The door-bell rang.
"Oh Billy," she said, "I forgot to tell you. Father's coming to dinner
to-night." I looked at her a moment:
"Did you ask him here on my account?" Eleanore smiled frankly.
"Yes--I thought I might need him," she said.
I did not talk to her father of Joe--his plans for a strike were his
secret, not mine. But with Eleanore pushing me on, I described the hell
I had seen in the stokehole.
"You're right, it's hell," her father agreed. "But in time we'll do away
with it."
"I knew it," Eleanore put in.
"How?" I asked.
"By using oil instead of coal. Or if we can't get oil cheap enough by
automatic stokers--machines to do the work of men."
I thought hard and fast for a moment, and suddenly I realized that I had
never given any real thought to matters of this kind before.
"Then what will become of the stokers?" I asked him.
"One thing at a time." I caught Dillon keenly watching me over his
cigar. "Don't give up your faith in efficiency, Bill. If they'll only
give us time enough we'll be able to do so much for men."
There was something so big and sincere in his voice and in his clear and
kindly eyes.
"I'm sure you will," I answered. "If you don't, there's nobody else who
can."
In a week or two, by grinding steadily on at my work and by a few more
quiet talks with Eleanore and her father, I could feel myself safely
back on my ground.
* * * * *
But one morning Sue broke in on me.
"I've just heard from a friend of Joe Kramer's," she said, "that he is
dangerously ill. And there's no one to look after him. Hadn't you better
go yourself?"
"Of course," I assented gruffly. "I'll go down at once."
It seemed as though the Fates and Sue were in league to keep Joe in my
life.
I went to Joe's office and found the address of the room where he slept.
It was over a German saloon close by. It was a large, low-ceilinged
room, bare and cheaply furnished, with dirty curtains at the windows,
dirty collars and shirts on the floor. It was cold. In the high
old-fashioned fireplace the coal fire had gone out. Joe was lying
dressed on the bed. He jumped up as I entered and came to me with his
face flushed and his eyes dilated. He gripped my hand.
"Why, hello, Kid," he cried. "Glad to see you!" And then with a quick
drop of his voice: "Hold on, we mustn't talk so loud, we've got to be
quiet here, you know." He turned away from me restlessly. "I've been
hunting for hours for that damn book. Their cataloguing system here is
rotten, Kid, it's rotten!" As he spoke he was slowly feeling his way
along the dirty white wall of his room. "They've cheated us, Bill, I'm
on to 'em now! That's what college is really for these days, to hide the
books we ought to read!"
It came over me suddenly that Joe was back in college, on one of those
library evenings of ours. I felt a tightening at my throat.
"Say, Joe." I drew him toward the bed. "The chapel bell has just struck
ten. Time for beer and pretzels."
"Fine business! Gee, but I've got a thirst! But where's the door? God
damn it all--I can't find anything to-night!" He laughed unsteadily.
"Right over here," I answered. "Steady, old man----"
And so I got him to his bed. He fell down on it breathing hard and I
brought him a drink of water. He began to shiver violently. I covered
him up with dirty blankets, went down to the barroom and telephoned to
Eleanore. Too deeply disturbed to think very clearly, acting on an
impulse, I told her of Joe's condition and asked if I might bring him
home.
"Why of course," came the answer, a little sharp. "Wait a moment. Let me
think." There was a pause, and then she added quietly, "Go back to his
room and keep him in bed. I'll see that an ambulance comes right down."
Within an hour after that Joe was installed in our guest room with a
trained nurse to attend to him. The doctor pronounced it typhoid and he
was with us for nine weeks.
* * * * *
The effect upon our lives was sharp. In our small crowded apartment all
entertaining was suddenly stopped, and with the sole exception of Sue no
one came to see us. Even our little Indian learned to be quiet as a
mouse. Our whole home became intense.
Through the thin wall of my workroom I could hear Joe in his delirium.
Now he was busily writing letters, now in a harsh excited voice he was
talking to a crowd of men, again he was furiously shoveling coal. All
this was incoherent, only mutterings most of the time. But when the
voice rose suddenly it was so full of a stern pain, so quivering with
revolt against life, and it poured out such a torrent of commonplace
minute details that showed this was Joe's daily life and the deepest
part of his being--that as I listened at my desk the ghost I thought I
had buried deep, that vague guilty feeling over my own happiness, came
stealing up in me again. And it was so poignant now, that struggle
angrily as I would to plunge again into my work, I found it impossible
to describe the life in those rich gay hotels with the zest and the dash
I needed to make my story a success.
But it had to be a success, for we needed money badly, the expenses of
Joe's sickness were already rolling in. So I did finish it at last and
took it to my successful man, who read it with evident disappointment.
It was not the glory story that I had led him to expect. My magazine
editor said he would use it, but he, too, appeared surprised.
"You weren't up to your usual form," was his comment. "What's the
matter?"
"A sick friend."
I started another story at once, one I had already planned, about a man
who was to build a string of gorgeous opera houses in the leading
American cities. This story, too, went slowly. Joe Kramer's voice kept
breaking in. From time to time as I struggled on I could feel Eleanore
watching me.
"Don't try to hurry it," she said. "We can always borrow from father,
you know--and besides, I'm going to cut our expenses."
She was as good as her word. She dismissed the nurse, and through the
last weeks of delirium and the first of returning consciousness she
placed herself in Joe's borderland as the one whose presence he vaguely
felt pulling him back into comfort and strength.
"No, don't talk," I heard her say to him one evening. "I don't want to
hear you. All I want is to get you well. That's the only thing you and I
have to talk of."
But having so thrown him off his guard, as his mind grew clearer she
began cautiously drawing him out, despite his awakening hostility to
this woman who had made me a success. From my room I heard snatches of
their talk. She surprised J. K. by the intimate bits of knowledge about
him that she had collected both from me and from his own sick ramblings.
She had just enough of his point of view to rouse him from his
indifference, to annoy him by her mistakes and her refusals to
understand. I remember one afternoon when I went in to sit with him, his
staring grimly up at my face and saying:
"Bill, that wife of yours is such a born success she scares me.
Everything she touches, everything she brings me to drink, everything
she does to this bed, is one thundering success. And she won't listen to
anything _but_ success. Your case is absolutely hopeless."
They became grim enemies, and both of them enjoyed it. She let our
small son come and sit by the bed. The Indian promptly worshiped Joe as
the "longest" man he had ever seen, and they became boon companions.
"It's pathetic," Eleanore told me, "the little things that appeal to him
here. Poor boy, he has forgotten what a decent home is like."
As he grew stronger she read the paper to him each morning, and they
quarreled with keen relish over the news events of the day. And as at
the start, so now, she kept giving him little shocks of surprise by her
intimate glimpses into his views. On one of these occasions, after she
had come out from his room and was sitting by me reading,
"You're a wonder, Eleanore," I said. "I don't see how you've done it."
"Done what, my love?" asked Eleanore.
"Wormed all his views out of poor old Joe."
"I haven't done anything of the sort. I've learned over half of it from
Sue. She comes here often nowadays and we have long talks about him. Sue
seems to know him rather well."
This did not interest me much, so I switched our talk to something that
did.
"What bothers me," I said with a scowl, "is this infernal work of mine.
What are you smiling at?" I asked.
"Nothing," she murmured, beginning to read. "But if I were you I'd stick
at my work. You're good at that."
"Not now I'm not," I retorted. "This story about the opera man isn't
coming on at all! The more I work the worse it gets!"
"It will get better soon," she said.
"I'm not so sure. Do you know what I think is the matter with me? I was
in to-day looking at Joe asleep, and watching the lines in that face of
his it came over me all of a sudden what a wretched coward I've been."
Eleanore looked up suddenly. "I know there's something in all his talk,
I've known it every time we've met. His view's so distorted it makes me
mad, but there's something in it you can't get away from. Poverty,
that's what it is, and I've always steered way clear of it as though I
were afraid to look. I've taken your father's point of view and left the
slums for him and his friends to tackle when they get the time. I was
only too glad to be left out. But that hour with J. K. and his stokers
gave me a jolt. I can feel it still. I can't seem to shake it off. And
I'm beginning to wonder now why I shouldn't get up the nerve to see for
myself, to have a good big look at it all--and write about it for a
while."
"Don't!" said Eleanore. "Leave it alone!" Her voice was so sharp it
startled me.
"Why?" I rejoined. "You've tackled poverty often enough. I guess I can
stand it if you can."
"You're different," she answered. "You leave poverty alone and force
yourself to go on with your work. You've made a very wonderful start.
You'll be ready to take up fiction soon. When you have, and when you
have gone so far that you can feel sure of your name and yourself, then
you can look at whatever you like."
"I wonder what Joe would say to that."
"I know what he'll say--he'll agree with me. Why don't you ask him and
see for yourself? I'm beginning to like Joe Kramer," she added with a
quiet smile, "because now that I understand him I know that his life and
yours are so far apart you've hardly a point in common."
And in the talks I had with Joe this soon proved to be the case.
Eleanore brought us together now and listened with deep satisfaction as
we clashed and jarred each other apart.
His old indifferent manner was gone, he was softened, grateful for what
we had done--but he held to that view of his like a rock, and the view
entirely shut me out. Joe saw society wholly as "War Sure" between two
classes, and I was hopelessly on the wrong side. My work, my home and my
whole life were bound in with the upper class. And there could be no
middle ground. My boasted tolerance, breadth of mind, my readiness to
see both sides, my passion for showing up all men as human--this to Joe
was utter piffle. He had no use for such writing, or in fact for art of
any kind. "Propaganda" was all that he wanted, and that could be as
cheap as Nick Carter, as sentimental as Uncle Tom's Cabin, if only it
had the kind of "punch" that would reach to the mass of ignorant workers
and stir their minds and their passions into swift and bitter revolt.
Revolution! That was the thing. The world had come to a time, he said,
when talking and writing weren't going to count. We were entering into
an age of force--of "direct action"--strikes and the like--by prodigious
masses of men. All I could do was worthless.
These talks made me so indignant and sore, so sure that Joe and all his
work were utterly wild and that only in Dillon and his kind lay any hope
of solving the dreary problems of the slums--that within a few days more
I was delving into my opera man with a most determined approval. He at
least was a builder, he didn't want to tear everything down! In his
every scheme for a huge success I took now an aggravated delight. All my
recent tolerance gone, I threw into my work an intensity that I had not
felt in months.
And Eleanore smiled contentedly, as though she knew what she was about.
When at last the time came for Joe to leave, she was twice as friendly
to him as I.
CHAPTER VII
But on coming home one evening two or three weeks later, I found
Eleanore reading aloud to our son with a most preoccupied look on her
face.
"Joe Kramer is coming to dinner," she said. "He called up this morning
and said he'd like to see us again. Sue is coming, too, as it happens.
She dropped in this afternoon."
Sue arrived a few minutes later, and at once I thought to myself I had
never seen her look so well. For once she had taken time to dress. She
had done her dark hair in a different way. Her color, which had been
poor of late, to-night was most becomingly high, and those fascinating
eyes of hers were bright with a new animation.
"She has found a fine new hobby," I thought.
Her whole attitude to us was one of eager friendliness. She made much of
what we had done for Joe.
"You've no idea," she told me, "how he feels about you both." She was
speaking of this when Joe came in.
He, too, appeared to me different. Into his blunt manner had crept a
certain awkwardness, his gruff voice had an anxious note at times and
his eyes a hungry gleam. Poor old Joe, I thought. It must be hard,
despite all his talk, to see what he had missed in life, to feel what a
sacrifice he had made. He had thrown everything aside, love, marriage,
home, all personal ties--to tackle this bleak business of slums. The
more pity he had such a twisted view. And as presently, in reply to
Sue's questions, he talked about the approaching strike, my irritation
at his talk grew even sharper than before.
"Your stokers and dock laborers," I interrupted hotly, "are about as
fit to build up a mew world as they are to build a Brooklyn Bridge! When
I compare them to Eleanore's father and his way of going to work"--I
broke off in exasperation. "Can't you see you're all just floundering in
a perfect swamp of ignorance?"
"No," said Joe. "I don't see that----"
"I'm mighty glad you don't," said Sue. Eleanore turned on her abruptly.
"Why are _you_ glad, Sue?" she asked.
"Because," Sue answered warmly, "he's where every one of us ought to be!
He's doing the work we all ought to be doing!"
"Then why don't you do it?" said Joe. His voice was low but sharp as in
pain. The next instant he turned from Sue to me. "I mean all of you," he
added. I looked at him in astonishment. What had worked this change in
Joe? In our last talk he had shut me out so completely. He seemed to
feel this at once himself, for he hastened to explain his remark. He had
turned his back on Sue and was talking hard at me:
"Of course I don't mean you can do it, Bill, unless you change your
whole view of life. But why shouldn't you change? You're young enough.
That look at a stokehole got hold of you hard. And if you're able to
feel like that why not do some thinking, too?"
"I'm thinking," I said grimly. "I told you before that I wanted to help.
But you said----"
"I say it still," J. K. cut in. "If you want to help the people you've
got to drop your efficiency gods. You've got to believe in the people
first--that all they need is waking up to handle this whole job
themselves. You've got to see that they're waking up fast--all over the
world--that they're getting tired of gods above 'em slowly planning out
their lives--that they don't want to wait till they're dead to be
happy--that they feel poverty every day like a million tons of brick on
their chests--it's got so they can't even breathe without thinking! And
you've got to see that what they're thinking is, 'Do it yourself and do
it quick!' The only thing that's keeping them back is that in these
times of peace men get out of the habit of violence!
"But the minute you get this clear in your mind, then I say you can help
'em. Because what's needed is so big. It's not only more pay and shorter
hours and homes where they needn't die off like flies--they need more
than that--they need a change as much as you--in their whole way of
looking at things. They've got to learn that they are a crowd--and can't
get anywhere at all until all pull together. Ignorant? Of course they
are! But that's where you and me come in--we can help 'em get together
faster than they would if left to themselves! You can help that way a
lot--by writing to the tenements! _That's_ what I meant!"
Joe stopped short. And after his passionate outburst, Eleanore spoke up
quietly.
"This sounds funny from you," she said. "A few weeks ago you were just
as sure that Billy could do nothing. What has made you change so?"
Joe reddened and looked down at his hands.
"I suppose," he said gruffly after a moment, "it's because I'm still
weak from typhoid--weak enough to want to see some one but stokers get
into the job that's become my life. You see," he muttered, "I was raised
among people like you. It's a kind of a craving, I suppose--like
cigarettes." Again he stopped short and there was a pause.
"Rather natural," Sue murmured. Again he turned sharply from her to me.
"I say you can help by your writing," he said. "You call my friends an
ignorant mob. But thousands of 'em have read your stuff!"
I looked up at Joe with a start.
"Oh they don't like it," he went on. "It only makes 'em sore and mad.
But if you ever see things right, and get into their side of this fight
with that queer fountain-axe of yours, you'll be surprised at the
tenement friends who'll pop up all around you. The first thing you know
they'll be calling you 'Bill.' That's the kind they are--they don't want
to shut anyone out--all they want to know is whether he means business.
If he doesn't he's no use, because they know that sooner or later
they'll do it anyhow themselves. It's going to be the biggest fight
that's happened since the world began! No cause has ever been so fine,
so worth a man's giving his life to aid! And all you've got to decide is
this--whether you're to get in now, and help make it a little easier,
help make it come without violence--or wait till it all comes to a crash
and then be yanked in like a sack of meal!"
Before I could speak, Sue drew a deep breath.
"I don't see how there's any choice about that," she said.
Eleanore turned to her again:
"Do you mean for Billy?"
"I mean for us all," Sue answered. "Even for a person like me!" Sue was
beautiful just then--her cheeks aglow, her features tense, a radiant
eagerness in her eyes. "I've felt it, oh so long," she said. "It's gone
all through my suffrage work--through every speech that I have
made--that the suffragists need the working girls and ought to help them
win their strikes!"
"And what do _you_ think, Joe?" Eleanore persisted. "Were you speaking
of Billy alone just now or did you have Sue, too, in mind?"
Joe looked back at her steadily.
"I don't want to shut out the women," he said. "I've seen too many girls
jump in and make a big success of it. Not only working girls, but plenty
of college girls like you." He turned from Eleanore to Sue--and with a
gruff intensity, "You may think you can't do it, Sue," he said. "But I
know you can. I've seen it done, I tell you, all the way from here to
the Coast--girls like you as speakers, as regular organizers--forgetting
themselves and sinking themselves--ready for any job that comes."
"That's the way I should want to do it," said Sue, her voice a little
breathless.
"But how about wives?" asked Eleanore. "For some of these girls marry, I
suppose," she added thoughtfully. "At least I hope they do. I hope Sue
will."
"I never said anything against that," Joe answered shortly.
"But if they marry and have children," Eleanore continued, "aren't they
apt to get sick of it then, even bitter about it, this movement you
speak of that takes you in and sinks you down, swallows up every dollar
you have and all your thoughts and feelings?"
"It needn't do as much as that," Joe muttered as though to himself.
"Still--I'd like to see it work out," Eleanore persisted. "Do you happen
to know the wives of any labor leaders?"
"I do," Joe answered quickly. "The wife of the biggest man we've got.
Jim Marsh arrived in town last night. His wife is with him. She always
is."
"Now are you satisfied, dear?" Sue asked. But Eleanore smiled and shook
her head.
"Is Mrs. Marsh a radical, too--I mean an agitator?" she asked. Joe's
face had clouded a little.
"Not exactly," he replied. Eleanore's eyes were attentive now:
"Do you know her well, Joe?"
"I've met her----"
"I'd like to meet her, too," she said. "And find out how she likes her
life."
"I think I know what you'd find," said Sue, in her old cocksure,
superior manner. "I guess she likes it well enough----"
"Still, dear," Eleanore murmured, "instead of taking things for granted
it would be interesting, I think, in all this talk to have one look at a
little real life."
"Aren't you just a little afraid of real life, Eleanore?" Sue demanded,
in a quick challenging tone.
"Am I?" asked Eleanore placidly.
* * * * *
Long after Joe had left us, Sue kept up that challenging tone. But she
did not speak to Eleanore now, her talk like Joe's was aimed at me.
"Why not think it over, Billy?" she urged. "You're not happy now, I
never saw you so worried and blue."
"I'm not in the least!" I said stoutly. But Sue did not seem to hear me.
She went on in an eager, absorbed sort of way:
"Why not try it a little? You needn't go as far as Joe Kramer. He may
even learn to go slower himself--now that he has had typhoid----"
"Do you think so?" Eleanore put in.
"Why not?" cried Sue impatiently. "If he keeps on at this pace it will
kill him! Has he no right to some joy in life? Why should you two have
it all? Just think of it, Billy, you have a name, success and a lot of
power! Why not use it here? Suppose it is harder! Oh, I get so out of
patience with myself and all of us! Our easy, lazy, soft little lives!
Why can't we _give_ ourselves a little?" And she went back over all Joe
had said. "It's all so real. So tremendously real," she ended.
* * * * *
"I wonder what's going to happen," said Eleanore when we were alone.
"God knows," I answered gloomily. That hammering from Joe and Sue had
stirred me up all over again. I had doggedly resisted, I had told Sue
almost angrily that I meant to keep right on as before. But now she was
gone, I was not so sure. "I still feel certain Joe's all wrong," I said
aloud. "But he and his kind are so dead in earnest--so ready for any
sacrifice to push their utterly wild ideas--that they may get a lot of
power. God help the country if they do."
"I wasn't speaking of the country, my love," my wife informed me
cheerfully. "I was speaking of Sue and Joe Kramer."
"Joe," I replied, "will slam right ahead. You can be sure of that, I've
got him down cold."
"Have you?" she asked. "And how about Sue?"
"Oh Sue," I replied indifferently, "has been enthused so many times."
"Billy."
I turned and saw my wife regarding her husband thoughtfully.
"I wonder," she said, "how long it will be before you can write a love
story."
"What?"
"Sue and Joe Kramer, you idiot."
I stared at her dumfounded.
"Did you think all that talk was aimed at you?" my pitiless spouse
continued. "Did you think all that change in Joe's point of view was on
your account?"
I watched her vigilantly for a while.
"If there's anything in what you say," I remarked carefully at last,
"I'll bet at least that Joe doesn't know it. He doesn't even suspect
it."
"There are so many things," said Eleanore, "that men don't even suspect
in themselves. I'm sorry," she added regretfully. "But that summer
vacation we'd planned is off."
"What?"
"Oh, yes, we'll stay right here in town. I see anything but a pleasant
summer."
"Suppose," I said excitedly, "you tell me exactly what you _do_ see!"
"I see something," Eleanore answered, "which unless we can stop it may
be a very tragic affair. Tragic for Sue because I feel sure that she'd
never stand Joe's impossible life. And even worse for your father. He's
not only old and excitable, and very weak and feeble, too, but he's so
conservative besides that if Sue married Joe Kramer he'd consider her
utterly damned."
"But I tell you you're wrong, all wrong!" I broke in. "Joe isn't that
kind of an idiot!"
"Joe," said my wife decidedly, "is like every man I've ever met. I found
that out when he was sick. He has the old natural longing for a wife and
a home of his own. His glimpse of it here may have started it rising.
I'm no more sure than you are that he admits it to himself. But it's
there all the same in the back of his mind, and in that same mysterious
region he's trying to reconcile marrying Sue to the work which he
believes in--even with this strike coming on. It's perfectly pathetic.
"Isn't it funny," she added, "how sometimes everything comes all at
once? Do you know what this may mean to us? I don't, I haven't the least
idea. I only know that you yourself are horribly unsettled--and that now
through this affair of Sue's we'll have to see a good deal of Joe--and
not only Joe but his friends on the docks--and not even the quiet ones.
No, we're to see all the wild ones. We're to be drawn right into this
strike--into what Joe calls revolution."
"You may be right," I said doggedly. "But I don't believe it."
CHAPTER VIII
A few days later Joe called me up and asked me to come down to his
office. His reason for wanting to see me, he said, he'd rather not give
me over the 'phone.
"You're right," I told Eleanore dismally. "He's going to talk to me
about Sue."
I dreaded this talk, and I went to see Joe in no easy frame of mind. But
it was not about Sue. I saw that in my first glimpse of his face. He sat
half around in his office chair listening intensely to a man by his
side.
"I want you to meet Jim Marsh," he said.
I felt a little electric shock. So here was the great mob agitator, the
notorious leader of strikes. Eleanore's words came into my mind: "We're
to meet all the wild ones. We're to be drawn right into this
strike--into what Joe calls revolution." Well, here was the
arch-revolutionist, the prime mover of them all. Of middle size, about
forty years old, angular and wiry, there was a lithe easy force in his
limbs, but he barely moved as he spoke to me now. He just turned his
narrow bony face and gave me a glance with his keen gray eyes.
"I've known your work for quite a while," he said in a low drawling
voice, "Joe says you're thinking of writing me up."
So this was why Joe had sent for me. I had quite forgotten this idea,
but I took to it eagerly now. My work was going badly. Here was
something I could do, the life story of a man whose picture would soon
be on the front page of every paper in New York. It would interest my
magazine, it would give me a chance to get myself clear on this whole
ugly business of labor, poverty and strikes. I had evaded it long
enough, I would turn and face it squarely now.
"Why yes, I'd like to try," I said.
"He wants to do your picture with the America you know," said Joe. "He
says he's ready to be shown."
Marsh glanced out at the harbor.
"If he'll trail around with us for a while we may show him some of it
here," he drawled. And then quietly ignoring my presence he continued
his talk with Joe, as though taking it for granted that I was an
interested friend. I listened there all afternoon.
The thing that struck me most at first was the cool effrontery of the
man in undertaking such a struggle. The old type of labor leader had at
least stuck to one industry, and had known by close experience what he
had to face. But here was a mere outsider, a visitor strolling into a
place and saying, "I guess I'll stop all this." Vaguely I knew what he
had to contend with. Sitting here in this cheap bare room, the thought
of other rooms rose in my mind, spacious, handsomely furnished rooms
where at one time or another I had interviewed heads of foreign ship
companies, railroad presidents, bankers and lawyers, newspaper editors,
men representing enormous wealth. All these rooms had been parts of my
harbor--a massed array of money and brains. He would have all this
against him. And to such a struggle I could see no end for him but jail.
For against all this, on his side, was a chaotic army of ignorant men,
stokers, dockers, teamsters, scattered all over this immense region,
practically unorganized. What possible chance to bring them together?
How could he feel that he had a chance? How much did he already know?
I asked him what he had seen of the harbor. For days, I learned, he had
told no one but Joe of his coming, he had wandered about the port by
himself. And as a veteran tramp will in some mysterious fashion get the
feel of a new town within a few short hours there, so Marsh had got the
feel of this place--of a harbor different from mine, for he felt it from
the point of view of its hundred thousand laborers. He felt it with its
human fringe, he saw its various tenement borders like so many camps and
bivouacs on the eve of a battle.
He told a little incident of how the harbor learned he was here. About
nine o'clock one morning, as he was waiting his chance to get into one
of the North River docks, a teamster recognized him there from a picture
of him he had once seen. The news traveled swiftly along the docks, out
onto piers and into ships. And at noon, way over in Hoboken, Marsh had
overheard a German docker say to the man eating lunch beside him,
"I hear dot tamn fool anarchist Marsh is raising hell ofer dere in New
York."
"But I wasn't raising hell," he drawled. "I was over here studying
literature." And he drew out from his pocket a tattered copy of a
report, the result of a careful investigation of work on the docks, made
recently by a most conservative philanthropic organization.
"'In all the fierce rush of American industry,'" he read, with a quiet
smile of derision, "'no work is so long, so irregular or more full of
danger. Seven a. m. until midnight is a common work day here, and in the
rush season of winter when ships are often delayed by storms and so must
make up time in port, the same men often work all day and night and even
on into the following day, with only hour and half-hour stops for
coffee, food or liquor. This strain makes for accidents. From police
reports and other sources we find that six thousand killed and injured
every year on the docks is a conservative estimate.'"
Marsh glanced dryly up at me:
"Here's the America I know."
I said nothing. I was appalled. Six thousand killed and injured! I could
feel his sharp gray eyes boring down into my soul:
"You wrote up this harbor once."
"Yes," I said.
"Did you write this?"
"No. I would have said it was a lie."
"Do you say so now? These people are a careful crowd." I took the
pamphlet from his hands.
"Queer," I muttered vaguely. "I never saw this report before."
"Not so queer," he answered. "I'm told that it wasn't _meant_ to be
seen--by you and the general public. That's the way this society works.
They spend half a dead old lady's cash investigating poverty and the
other half in keeping the public from learning what they've discovered.
But we're going to furnish publicity to this secluded work of art.
"On Saturday afternoon," he continued, "I went along the North River
docks. I found long lines of dockers there--they were waiting for their
pay. At every pay window one of 'em stood with an empty cigar box in his
hands--and into that box every man as he passed dropped a part of his
pay--for the man who had been hurt that week--for him or for his widow.
"And over across the way," he went on, "I saw something on the
waterfront that fitted right into the scenery. It was a poster on a high
fence, and it had a black border around it. On one side of it was a
picture of a tall gent in a swell frock suit. He was looking squarely at
the docks and pointing to the sign beside him, which said, '_Certainly_
I'm talking to you! Money saved is money earned. Read what I will
furnish you for seventy-five dollars--cash. Black cloth or any color you
like--plush or imitation oak--casket with a good white or cream
lining--pillow--burial suit or brown habit--draping and embalming
room--chairs--hearse--three coaches--complete care and attendance--also
handsome candelabra and candles if requested.'"