I
THE PRINTERY
That windy autumn noon the young girls of the hat factory darted out of
the loft building and came running back with cans of coffee, and bags of
candy, and packages of sandwiches and cakes. They frisked hilariously
before the wind, with flying hair and sparkling eyes, and crowded into
the narrow entrance with the grimy pressmen of the eighth floor. Over
and over again the one frail elevator was jammed with the laughing crowd
and shot up to the hat factory on the ninth floor and back.
The men smoked cigarettes as the girls chattered and flirted with them,
and the talk was fast and free.
At the eighth floor the pressmen got off, still smoking, for "Mr. Joe"
was still out. Even after the presses started up they went on
surreptitiously, though near one group of them in a dark corner of the
printery lay a careless heap of cotton waste, thoroughly soaked with
machine-oil. This heap had been passed by the factory inspector
unnoticed, the pressmen took it for granted, and Joe, in his slipshod
manner, gave it no thought. Later that very afternoon as the opening of
the hall door rang a bell sharply and Joe came in, the men swiftly and
guiltily flung their lighted cigarettes to the floor and stepped them
out or crumpled them with stinging fingers in their pockets. But Joe did
not even notice the clinging cigarette smell that infected the strange
printery atmosphere, that mingled with its delightful odor of the
freshly printed page, damp, bitter-sweet, new. Once Marty Briggs, the
fat foreman, had spoken to Joe of the breaking of the "No Smoking" rule,
but Joe had said, with his luminous, soft smile:
"Marty, the boys are only human--they see me smoking in the private
office!"
Up and down the long, narrow, eighth-floor loft the great intricate
presses stood in shadowy bulk, and the intense gray air was spotted here
and there with a dangling naked electric bulb, under whose radiance the
greasy, grimy men came and went, pulling out heaps of paper, sliding in
sheets, tinkering at the machinery. Overhead whirled and traveled a
complex system of wheels and belting, whirring, thumping, and turning,
and the floor, the walls, the very door trembled with the shaking of the
presses and made the body of every man there pleasantly quiver.
The stir of the hat factory on the floor above mingled with the stir of
the presses, and Joe loved it all, even as he loved the presence of the
young girls about him. Some of these girls were Bohemians, others
Jewish, a few American. They gave to the gaunt, smoky building a touch
as of a wild rose on a gray rock-heap--a touch of color and of melody.
Joe, at noon, would purposely linger near the open doorway to get a
glimpse of their bright faces and a snatch of their careless laughter.
Some of the girls knew him and would nod to him on the street--their
hearts went out to the tall, homely, sorrowful fellow.
But his printery was his chief passion. It absorbed him by its masterful
stress, overwhelming every sense, trembling, thundering, clanking,
flashing, catching his eye with turning wheels and chewing press-mouths,
and enveloping him in something tremulously homelike and elemental. Even
that afternoon as Joe stood at the high wall-desk near the door, under a
golden bulb of light, figuring on contracts with Marty Briggs, he felt
his singular happiness of belonging. Here he had spent the work hours of
the last ten years; he was a living part of this living press-room; this
was as native to him as the sea to a fish. And glancing about the
crowded gray room, everything seemed so safe, secure, unending, as if it
would last forever.
Up to that very evening Joe had been merely an average American--clean
of mind and body, cheerful, hard-working, democratic, willing to live
and let live, and striving with all his heart and soul for success. His
father had served in the Civil War and came back to New York with his
right sleeve pinned up, an emaciated and sick man. Then Joe's mother had
overridden the less imperious will of the soldier and married him, and
they had settled down in the city. Henry Blaine learned to write with
his left hand and became a clerk. It was the only work he could do.
Then, as his health became worse and worse, he was ordered to live in
the country (that was in 1868), and as the young couple had scarcely any
money they were glad to get a little shanty on the stony hill which is
now the corner of Eighty-first Street and Lexington Avenue and is the
site of a modern apartment-house. But Joe's mother was glad even of a
shanty; she made an adventure of it; she called herself the wife of a
pioneer, and said that they were making a clearing in the Western
wilderness.
Here in 1872 Joe was born, and he was hardly old enough to crawl about
when his father became too sick to work, and his mother had to leave
"her two men" home together and go out and do such work as she could.
This consisted largely in reading to old ladies in the neighborhood,
though sometimes she had to do fancy needlework and sometimes take in
washing. Of these last achievements she was justly proud, though it made
Henry Blaine wince with shame.
Joe was only six years old when his father died, and from then on he and
his mother fought it out together. The boy entered the public school on
Seventy-ninth Street, and grew amazingly, his mind keeping pace. He was
a splendid absorber of good books; and his mother taught him her poets
and they went through English literature together.
Yorkville sprang up, a rubber-stamped neighborhood, of which each street
was a brownstone duplicate of the next. The rocky hill became valuable
and went for twenty thousand dollars, of which three thousand had to be
deducted for the mortgage. Then Joe graduated from high school, and,
lusting for life, took a clerk's job with one of the big express
companies. He held this for two years, and learned an interesting
fact--namely, that a clerk's life began at 5 P.M. and ended at 8.30 A.M.
In between the clerk was a dead but skilled machine that did the work of
a child. He learned, besides, that advancement was slow and only for a
few, and he saw these few, men past middle life, still underlings. A man
of forty-five with a salary of three thousand was doing remarkably well,
and, as a rule, he was a dried-up, negative, timid creature.
Out of all this he went like a stick of dynamite, took the seventeen
thousand dollars and went into his father's business of printing. Joe
was shrewd, despite his open nature; he never liked to be "done"; and so
he made money and made it fast. Besides his printing he did some
speculating in real estate, and so at thirty-eight he was a successful
business man and could count himself worth nearly a hundred thousand
dollars. He made little use of this money; his was a simple, serious,
fun-loving nature, and all his early training had made for plain living
and economy. And so for years he and his mother had boarded in a
brownstone boarding-house in the quiet block west of Lexington Avenue up
the street. They spent very little on themselves. In fact, Joe was too
busy. He was all absorbed in the printery--he worked early and late--and
of recent years in the stress of business his fine relationship with his
mother had rather thinned out. They began leading separated lives; they
began shutting themselves away from each other.
And so here he was, thirty-eight years of his life gone, and what had it
all been? Merely the narrow, steady, city man's life--work, rest, a
little recreation, sleep. Outside his mother, his employees, his
customers, and the newspapers he knew little of the million-crowded life
of the city about him. He used but one set of streets daily; he did not
penetrate the vast areas of existence that cluttered the acres of stone
in every direction. There stood the city, a great fact, and even that
afternoon as the wild autumn wind blew from the west and rapid, ragged
cloud masses passed huge shadows over the ship-swept Hudson, darkened
briefly the hurrying streets, extinguished for a moment the glitter of
a skyscraper and went gray-footed over the flats of Long Island, even
at that moment terrific forces, fierce aggregations of man-power,
gigantic blasts of tamed electricity, gravitation, fire, and steam and
steel, made the hidden life of the city cyclonic. And in that mesh of
nature and man the human comedy went on--there was love and disaster,
frolic and the fall of a child, the boy buying candy in a shop, the
woman on the operating-table in the hospital. Who could measure that
swirl of life and whither it was leading? But who could live in the
heart of it all and be unaware of it?
Yet Joe's eyes were unseeing. Children played on the street, people
walked and talked, the toilers were busy at their tasks, and that was
all he knew or saw. And yet of late he had a new, unexpected vista of
life. Like many men, Joe had missed women. There was his mother, but no
one else. He was rather shy, and he was too busy. But during the last
few months a teacher--Myra Craig--had been coming to the printery to
have some work done for the school. She had strangely affected
Joe--sprung an electricity on him that troubled him profoundly. He could
not forget her, nor wipe her image from his brain, nor rid his ears of
the echoes of her voice. He went about feeling that possibly he had
underrated poetry and music. Romance, led by Myra's hand, had entered
the dusty printery and Joe began to feel like a youngster who had been
blind to life.
Outside the world was blowing away on the gray wings of the twilight,
blowing away with eddies of dust that swept the sparkling street-lamps,
and the air was sharp with a tang of homesickness and autumn. The
afternoon was quietly waning, up--stairs the hat-makers, and here the
printers, were toiling in a crowded, satisfying present, and Joe stood
there musing, a tall, gaunt man, the upstart tufts of his tousled hair
glistening in the light overhead. His face was the homeliest that ever
happened. The mouth was big and big-lipped, the eyes large, dark,
melancholy and slightly sunken, and the mask was a network of wrinkles.
His hands were large, mobile, and homely. But about him was an air of
character and thought, of kindliness and camaraderie, of very human
nature. He stood there wishing that Myra would come. The day seemed to
demand it; the wild autumn cried out for men to seek the warmth and
forgetful glory of love.
He could get some nice house and make a home for her; he could take her
out of the grind and deadliness of school-work and make her happy; there
would be little children in that house. He thought she loved him; yes,
he was quite sure. Then what hindrance? There, at quarter to five that
strange afternoon, Joe felt that he had reached the heights of success,
and he saw no obstacle to long years of solid advance. He had before
his eyes the evidence of his wealth--the great, flapping presses, the
bending, moving men. If anything was sure and solid in this world, these
things were.
He felt sure Myra would come. She had not been around for a week, and,
anticipating a new meeting with her, he felt very young, like a very
young man for the first time aware of the strange loveliness of night,
its haunting and hidden beauties, its women calling from afar. It all
seemed wild and impossible romance. It smote his heart-strings and set
them trembling with music. He wondered why he had been so stupid all
these years and evaded life, evaded joys that should have been his
twenty years earlier. Now it seemed to him that his youth had passed
from him defeated of its splendor.
If Myra came to-day he would tell her. The very thought gave his heart a
lovely quake of fear, a trembling that communicated itself to his hands
and down his legs, a throbbing joy dashed with a strange tremor. And
then as he wanted, as he wished for, the door beside him opened and the
bell sharply sounded.
She stood there, very small, very slight, but quite charming in her
neat, lace-touched clothes. A fringe at the wrist, a bunch at the neck,
struck her off as some one delicate and sensitive, and the face
strengthened this impression. It was long and oval, with a narrow
woman-forehead cut off by a curve of dark hair; the mouth was small and
sweet; the nose narrow; the eyes large, clear gray, penetrating. Under
the gracefully modeled felt hat she stood quite complete, quite a
personality. One instantly guessed that she was an aristocrat by birth
and breeding. But her age was doubtful, seeming either more or less than
the total, which was thirty-two.
There she stood, glancing at Joe with a breathless eagerness. He turned
pale, and yet at the same time there was a whirl of fire in his heart.
She had come to him; he wanted to gather her close and bear her off
through the wild autumn weather, off to the wilderness. He reached out a
hand and inclosed a very cold and very little one.
"Why, you're frozen!" he said, with a queer laugh.
"Oh--not much!" she gasped. She held her leather bag under her arm and
took off her gloves. Then she loosened her coat, and gave a sigh.
He gazed at her warm-tinted cheek, almost losing himself, and then
murmured, suddenly:
"More school stuff?"
She made a grimace and tried to speak lightly, but her voice almost
failed her.
"Class 6-B, let me tell you, is giving the 'Landing of the Pilgrims,'
and every blessed little pilgrim is Bohemian. Here's the programme!"
With trembling fingers she opened her bag and handed him some loose
sheets. He bent over them at once.
"Now make it cheap, Mr. Blaine," she said, severely. "Rock bottom! Or
I'll give the job to some one else."
Joe laughed strangely.
"How many copies?"
"One thousand."
He spoke as if in fear.
"Fifty cents too much?"
Myra laughed.
"I don't want the school to ruin you!"
He said nothing further, and in the awkward silence she began pitifully
to button her coat. There was no reason for staying.
Then suddenly he spoke, huskily:
"Don't go, Miss Craig...."
"You want ..." she began.
He leaned very close.
"I want to take a walk with you. May I?"
She became dead white, and the terror of nature's resistless purpose
with men and women, that awful gravitation, that passion of creation
that links worlds and uses men and women, went through them both.
"I may?" he was whispering.
Her "Yes" was almost inaudible.
So Joe put on his coat, and slapped over his head a queer gray slouch
hat, and called over Marty.
"I won't be back to-night, Marty!" he said.
Then at the door he gave one last glance at his life-work, the orderly
presses, the harnessed men, and left it all as if it must surely be
there when he returned. He was proud at that moment to be Joe Blaine,
with his name in red letters on the glass door, and under his name
"Power Printer." His wife would be able to hold her head high.
The frail elevator took them clanking, bumping, slipping, down, down
past eight floors, to the street level. The elevator boy, puffing at his
cigarette, remarked, amiably:
"Gee! it's a windy day. It's gittin' on to winter, all right....
Good-night, Mr. Blaine!"
"Good-night, Tom," said Joe.
II
THE EAST EIGHTY-FIRST STREET FIRE
They emerged in all the magic wildness of an autumn night and walked
east on Eighty-first Street. The loft building was near the corner of
Second Avenue. They passed under the elevated structure, cutting through
a hurrying throng of people.
"Take my arm," cried Joe.
She took it, trembling. They made an odd couple passing along between
the squalid red-brick tenements, now in shadow, now in the glow of some
little shop window, now under a sparkling lamp. At Avenue A they went
south to Seventy-ninth Street, and again turned east, passing a row of
bright model tenements, emerging at last at the strange riverside.
Down to the very edge of the unpaved waste they walked, or rather
floated, so strange and uplifted and glorious they felt, blown and
carried bodily with the exultant west wind, and they only stopped when
they reached the wooden margin, where an old scow, half laden with
brick, was moored fast with ropes. This scow heaved up and down with the
motion of the rolling waters; the tight ropes grated; the water swashed
melodiously.
The man and woman seemed alone there, a black little lump in the vast
spaces, for behind them the city receded beyond empty little hill-sides
and there was nothing some distance north and south.
"Look," said Joe, "look at the tide!"
It was running north, a wide expanse of rolling waters from their feet
to Blackwells Island in the east, all hurling swiftly like a billowing
floor of gray. Here and there whitecaps spouted. On Blackwells Island
loomed the gray hospitals and workhouses, and at intervals on the shore
sparkled a friendly light.
"But see the bridge," exclaimed Myra.
She pointed far south, where across the last of the day ran a slightly
arched string of lights, binding shore with shore. On the New York side,
and nearer, rose the high chimneys of mills, and from these a purplish
smoke swirled thickly, melting into the gray weather.
And it seemed to Joe at that wild moment that nothing was as beautiful
as smoking chimneys. They meant so much--labor, human beings, fire,
warmth.
And over all--river, bridge, chimneys, Blackwells Island, and the
throbbing city behind them--rose the immense gray-clouded heavens. A
keen smell of the far ocean came to their nostrils and the air was clear
and exhilarant. Then, as they watched, suddenly a tug lashed between
enormous flat boats on which were red freight-cars, swept north with the
tide. A thin glaze of heat breathed up from the tug's pipe; it was
moving without its engines, and the sight was unbelievable. The whole
huge mass simply shot the river, racing by them.
And then the very magic of life was theirs. The world fell from them,
the dusty scales of facts, the complex intricacies of existence melted
away. They were very close, and the keen, yelling wind was wrapping them
closer. Vision filled the gray air, trembled up from the river to the
heavens. They rose from all the chaos like two white flames blown by the
wind together--they were two gigantic powers of the earth preparing like
gods for new creation. In that throbbing moment each became the world to
the other, and love, death-strong, shot their hearts.
He turned, gazing strangely at her pale, eager, breathless face.
"I want ..." he began.
"Yes," she breathed.
He opened his lips, and the sound that escaped seemed like a sob.
"Myra!"
And then at the sound of her name she was all woman, all love. She cried
out:
"Joe!"
And they flung their arms round each other. She sobbed there, overcome
with the yearning, the glory, the beatitude of that moment.
"Oh," he cried, "how I love you!... Myra ..."
"Joe, Joe--I couldn't have stood it longer!"
All of life, all of the past, all of the million years of earth melted
into that moment, that moment when a man and a woman, mingled into one,
stood in the heart of the wonder, the love, the purpose of nature--a
mad, wild, incoherent half-hour, a secret ecstasy in the passing of the
twilight, in the swing of the wind and the breath of the sea.
"Come home to my mother," cried Joe. "Come home with me!"
They turned ... and Myra was a strange new woman, tender, grave, and
wrought of all lovely power, her face, in the last of the light, mellow
and softly glowing with a heightened woman-power.
"Yes," she said, "I want to see Joe's mother."
It was Joe's last step to success. Now he had all--his work, his love.
He felt powerfully masculine, triumphant, glorious.
Night had fallen, and on the darkness broke and sparkled a thousand
lights in tenement windows and up the shadowy streets--everywhere homes,
families; men, women, and children busily living together; everywhere
love. Joe glanced, his eyes filling. Then he paused.
"Look at that," he said in a changed voice.
Over against the west, a little to the north, the gray heavens were
visible--a lightning seemed to run over them--a ghastly red
lightning--sharply silhouetting the chimneyed housetops.
"What is it?" said Myra.
He gazed at it, transfixed.
"That's a fire ... a big fire." Then suddenly his face, in the pale
light of a street-lamp, became chalky white and knotted. He could barely
speak. "It must be on Eighty-first or Eighty-second Street."
She spoke shrilly, clutching his arm.
"Not ... the loft?"
"Oh, it can't be!" he cried, in an agony. "But come ... hurry ..."
They started toward Eighty-first Street up Avenue A. They walked fast;
and it seemed suddenly to Joe that he had been dancing on a thin crust,
and that the crust had broken and he was falling through. He turned and
spoke harshly:
"You must run!"
Fear made their feet heavy as they sped, and their hearts seemed to be
exploding in their breasts. They felt as if that fire were consuming
them; as if its tongues of flame licked them up. And so they came to the
corner of Eighty-first Street and turned it, and looked, and stopped.
Joe spoke hoarsely.
"It's burning;... it's the loft.... The printery's on fire...."
Beyond the elevated structure at Second Avenue the loft building rose
like a grotesque gigantic torch in the night. Swirls of flame rolled
from the upper three stories upward in a mane of red, tossing volumes of
smoke, and the wild wind, combing the fire from the west, rained down
cinders and burned papers on Joe and Myra as they rushed up the street.
Every window was blankly visible in the extreme light, streams of water
played on the walls, and the night throbbed with the palpitating,
pounding fire-engines.
And it seemed to Joe as if life were torn to bits, as if the world's end
had come. It was unbelievable, impossible--his eyes belied his brain.
That all those years of labor and dream and effort were going up in
flame and smoke seemed preposterous. And only a few moments before he
and Myra had stood on the heights of the world; had their mad moment;
and even then his life was being burned away from him. He felt the
hoarse sobs lifting up through his throat.
They reached Second Avenue, and were stopped by the vast swaying crowd
of people, a density that could not be cloven. They went around about it
frantically; they bore along the edge of the crowd, beside the houses;
they wedged past one stoop; they were about to get past the next, when,
in the light of the lamp, Joe saw a strange sight. Crouched on that
stoop, with clothes torn, with hair loosed down her back, her face
white, her lips gasping, sat one of the hat factory girls. It was Fannie
Lemick. Joe knew her. And no one seemed to notice her. The crowd was
absorbed in other things.
And even at that moment Joe heard the dire clanging of ambulances, and
an awful horror dizzied his brain. No, no, not that! He clutched the
stoop-post, leaned, cried weirdly:
"Fannie! Fannie!"
She gazed up at him. Then she recognized him and gave a terrible sob.
"Mr. Joe! Oh, how did you get out?"
"I wasn't there," he breathed. "Fannie! what's happened?... None of the
girls ..."
"You didn't know?" she gasped.
He felt the life leaving his body; it seemed impossible.
"No ..." he heard himself saying. "Tell me...."
She looked at him with dreadful eyes and spoke in a low, deadly,
monotonous voice:
"The fire-escape was no good; it broke under some of the girls;... they
fell;... we jammed the hall;... some of the girls jumped down the
elevator shaft;... they couldn't get out ... and Miss Marks, the
forelady, was trying to keep us in order.... She stayed there ... and I
ran down the stairs, and dropped in the smoke, and crawled ... but when
I got to the street ... I looked back ... Mr. Joe ... the girls were
jumping from the windows...."
Joe seized the stoop-post. His body seemed torn in two; he began to
reel.
"From the ninth floor," he muttered, "and couldn't get out.... And I
wasn't there! Oh, God, why wasn't I killed there!"
III
THE GOOD PEOPLE
Joe broke through the fire line. He stepped like a calcium-lit figure
over the wet, gleaming pavement, over the snaky hose, and among the
rubber-sheathed, glistening firemen, gave one look at the ghastly heap
on the sidewalk, and then became, like the host of raving relatives and
friends and lovers, a man insane. It was as if the common surfaces of
life--the busy days, the labor, the tools, the houses--had been drawn
aside like a curtain and revealed the terrific powers that engulf
humanity.
In his ears sounded the hoarse cries of the firemen, the shout of the
sprayed water, the crash of axes, the shatter of glass. It was too
magnificent a spectacle, nature, like a Nero, using humanity to make a
sublime torch in the night. And through his head pulsed and pulsed the
defiant throb of the engines. Cinders fell, sticks, papers, and Joe saw
fitfully the wide ring of hypnotized faces. It was as if the world had
fallen into a pit, and human beings looked on each other aghast.
"Get back there!" cried a burly policeman.
Joe resisted his shouldering.
"I'm Mr. Blaine;... it's my loft burning. I'm looking for my men...."
"Go to the morgue then," snapped the policeman. "A fire line's a fire
line."
Joe was pushed back, and as the crowd closed about him, a soft pressure
of clothing, men and women, he became aware of the fact that he had lost
his head. He pulled himself together; he told himself that he, a human
being, was greater than anything that could happen; that he must set his
jaw and fight and brave his way through the facts. He must get to work.
Myra clutched his sleeve. He turned to her a face of death, but she
brought her wide eyes close to him.
"Joe! Joe!"
"Myra," he said, in a whisper, suddenly in that moment getting a sharp
revelation of his changed life. "I may never see you again. I belong to
those dead girls." He paused. "Go home ... do that for me, anyway."
He had passed beyond her; there was no opposing him.
"I'll go," she murmured.
Then, dizzily, she reeled back, and was lost in the crowd.
And then he set to work. He was strangely calm now, numb, unfeeling.
There was nothing more to experience, and the overwrought brain refused
any new emotions. So stupendous was the catastrophe that it left him
finally calm, ready, and eagerly awake. He stepped gently through the
crowd, searching, and found John Rann, the pressman. John wept like a
little boy when they met.
"Marty got out ... yes ... most of us did ... but Eddie Baker, Morty,
and Sam Bender.... It was the cotton waste, Mr. Joe, and the
cigarettes...."
Joe put his arm about the rough man.
"Never mind, Johnny ... Go home to the kiddies...."
There was so little he could do. He went to a few homes he knew, he went
to the hospital to ask after the injured, he went to the morgue. At
midnight the fire, like an evil thing, drew him back, and he encountered
only a steamy blackness lit by the search-light of the engine. There was
still the insistent throbbing. And then he thought of his mother and her
fears, and sped swiftly up the street, over deserted Lexington Avenue,
and up the lamp-lit block. Already newsboys were hoarsely shouting in
the night, as they waved their papers--a cry of the underworld
palpitating through the hushed city: "Wuxtra! Wuxtra!
Great--fire--horror! Sixty--killed! Wuxtra!"
The house was still open, lighted, awake. People came into the hall as
he entered, but he shunned them and started up the stairs. One called
after him.
"Your mother's out, Mr. Joe."
He turned.
"Out? How long?"
"Since the fire started ... She's been back and forth several times ..."
He went on up, entered the neat, still front room, lit the gas beside
the bureau mirror, and began to pace up and down. His mother was
searching for him; he might have known it; he should have remembered it.
And then he heard the uncanny shouting of the newsboys--as if those dead
girls had risen from their ashes and were running like flaming furies
through the city streets, flinging handfuls of their fire into a million
homes, shaking New York into a realization of its careless, guilty
heart, crying for vengeance, stirring horror and anger and pity. Who was
the guilty one, if not he, the boss?
And then the inquisition began, the repeated sting of lashing thoughts
and cruel questions. He asked himself what right he had to be an
employer, to take the responsibility of thirty lives in his hands. He
was careless, easy-going, he was in business for profits. Had such a man
any right to be placed over others, to be given the power over other
lives? The guilt was his; the blame fell on him. He should have kept
clean house; he should have stamped out the smoking; he should not have
smoked himself. There fell upon his shoulders a burden not to be borne,
the burden of his blame, and he felt as if nothing now in the world
could assuage that sense of guilt.
Life, he found, was a fury, a cyclone, not the simple, easy affair he
had thought it. It was his living for himself, his living alone, his
ignorance of the fact that his life was tangled in with the lives of all
human beings, so that he was socially responsible, responsible for the
misery and poverty and pain all about him.
That _he_ should be the one! Had he not lived just the average
life--blameless, cheerful, hard-working, fun-loving--the life of the
average American? Just by every-day standards his was the useful and
good life. But no, that was not enough. In his rush for success he had
made property his treasure instead of human beings. That was the crime.
And so these dead lay all about him as if he had murdered them with his
hands. It was his being an average man that had killed sixty-three girls
and men. And what had he been after? Money? He did not use his money,
did not need so much. Just a little shared with his employees would have
saved them. No, the average man must cease to exist, and the social man
take his place, the brother careful of his fellow-men, not careless of
all but his own gain.
A boy passed, hoarsely shouting that terrible extra. Would nothing in
the world silence that sound? The cold sweat came out on his face. He
was the guilty one. That was the one fact that he knew.
And then he paused; the door opened creakingly and his mother entered.
She was a magnificent young-old woman, her body sixty-three years old,
her mind singularly fresh and young. She was tall, straight, spirited,
and under the neat glossy-white hair was a noble face, somewhat long,
somewhat slim, a little pallid, but with firm chin and large forehead
and living large black eyes set among sharp lines of lids. The whole
woman was focussed in the eyes, sparkled there, lived there, deep,
limpid, quick, piercing. Her pallor changed to pure whiteness.
"Joe ..." her voice broke. "I've been looking for you...."
He paused, walled away from her by years of isolation. She advanced
slowly; her face became terrible in its hungry love, its mother passion.
She met his eyes, and then he fled to her, and his body shook with
rough, tearless sobs. Her relief came in great tears.
"And all those girls," she was murmuring, "and those men. How did it
happen?"
He drew back; his eyes became strange.
"Mother," he said, harshly, "I'm the guilty one. There was a heap of
cotton waste in the corner, shouldn't have been there. And I let the men
smoke cigarettes."
She was horrified.
"But _why_ did you do that?" she whispered, moving a little away from
him.
"My thoughtlessness ... my _business_." The word was charged with
bitterness. "Business! business! I'm a business man! I wasn't in
business"--he gave a weird laugh--"for the health of my employees! I was
making money!"
She looked at him as if he had ceased being her son and had turned into
a monster. Then she swayed, grasped the bedpost and sank on the bed.
Her voice was low and harsh.
"_Your_ fault ... and all those young girls...."
His mother had judged him; he looked at her with haggard eyes, and spoke
in a hollow voice.
"Nothing will ever wipe this guilt from my mind.... I'm branded for
life ... this thing will go on and on and on every day that I live...."
She glanced at him then, and saw only her son, the child she had carried
in her arms, the boy who had romped with her, and she only knew now that
he was suffering, that no one on earth could be in greater pain.
"Oh, my poor Joe!" she murmured.
"Yes," he went on, beside himself, "I'm blasted with guilt...."
She cried out:
"If you go on like this, we'll both go out of our minds, Joe! Fight!
It's done ... it's over.... From now on, make amends.... Joe!"--She rose
magnificently then--"Your father lost his arm in the war.... Now give
your life to setting things right!"
And she drew him close again. Her words, her love, her belief in him
roused him at last.
"You know the fault isn't all yours," she said. "The factory inspector's
to blame, too--and the men--and the people up-stairs--and the law
because it didn't demand better protection and fire-drills--all are to
blame. You take too much on yourself...."
And gradually, striving with him through the early morning hours, she
calmed him, she soothed him, and got him to bed. He was at last too
weary to think or feel and he slept deep into the day. And thinking a
little of herself, she realized that the tragedy had brought them closer
together than they had been for years.
* * * * *
Out of those ashes on East Eighty-first Street rose a certain splendor
over the city. All of New York drew together with indignation and
wondrous pity. It did not bring the dead girls to life again--it was too
late for that--but it brought many other dead people to life.
Fifty thousand dollars flowed to the newspapers for relief; an inquest
probed causes and guilt and prevention; mass--meetings were held; the
rich and the powerful forgot position and remembered their common
humanity; and the philanthropic societies set to work with money, with
doctors and nurses and visitors. The head of one huge association said
to the relief committee in a low, trembling voice: "Of course, our whole
staff is at your service." Just for a time, a little time, the
five-million-manned city flavored its confused, selfish struggle with
simple brotherhood.
How had it happened? Whose was the fault? How came it that sixty girls
were imprisoned in the skies, as it were, and could only fling
themselves down to the stone pavement in an insanity of terror? What war
was more horrible than this Peace of Industry? Such things must be
prevented in future, said New York, rising like a wrathful god--and for
a while the busy wheels of progress turned.
Joe had to attend the inquest as a witness. He gave his testimony in a
simple, sincere, and candid way that gained him sympathy. His men
testified in his behalf, trying to wholly exonerate him and inculpate
themselves, and the lawyers cleverly scattered blame from one power to
another--the city, the State, the fire department, the building
department, etc. It became clear that Joe could not be officially
punished; it was evident that he had done as much as the run of
employers to protect life, and that his intentions had been blameless.
However, that did not ease Joe's real punishment. He was a changed man
that week, calm, ready with his smile, but haggard and bowed, nervous
and overwrought, bearing a burden too heavy for his heart. He made over
the twenty thousand dollars of insurance money to the Relief and
Prevention Work; he visited the injured and the bereaved; he forgot Myra
and tried to forget himself; he attended committee meetings.
Myra wrote him a little note:
DEAR JOE,--Don't forget that whatever happens I
believe in you utterly and I love you and shall always
love you, and that you have me when all else is lost.
Your
MYRA.
To which he merely replied:
DEAR MYRA,--I shall remember what you say, and I
shall see you when I can.
Yours,
JOE.
It was on Sunday afternoon that Joe met Fannie Lemick on the street. Her
eyes filled with tears and he noticed she was trembling.
"Mr. Joe!" she cried.
"Yes, Fannie...."
"Are you going, too?"
"Going where?"
"Don't you know? _The mass-meeting at Carnegie Hall_!"
He looked at her, smiling.
"I'll go with you, if I may!"
So they went down together. A jam of poor people was crowding the
doors, and a string of automobiles drew up and passed at the curb. Joe
and Fannie got in the throng. There was no room left in the orchestra
and they were swept with the flood up and up, flight after flight, to
the high gallery. Here they found seats and looked down, down as if on
the side of the planet, on the far-away stage filled with the speakers
and the committees, and on that sea of humanity that swept back and up
through the boxes to themselves. All in the subdued light, the golden
light that crowd sat, silent, remorseful, stirred by a sense of having
risen to a great occasion; thousands of human beings, the middle class,
the rich, the poor; Americans, Germans, Italians, Jews. But all about
him Joe felt a silent hatred, a still cry for vengeance, a class
bitterness. Many of these were relatives of the dead.
It was a demonstration of the human power that refuses to submit to
environment and circumstance and fate; that rises and rebukes facts,
reshapes destiny. And then the speaking began: the bishop, the rabbi,
the financier, the philanthropist, the social worker. They spoke
eloquently, they showed pity, they were constructive, they were prepared
to act; they represented the "better classes" and promised the "poor,"
the toilers, that they would see that relief and protection were given;
but somehow their eloquence did not carry; somehow that mass of
commonest men and women refused to be stirred and thrilled. There was
even a little hissing when it was announced that a committee of big men
would see to the matter.
Joe had a dull sense of some monstrous social cleavage; the world
divided into the rulers and the ruled, the drivers and the driven. He
felt uncomfortable, and so did the throng. There was a feeling as if the
crowd ought to have a throat to give vent to some strange, fierce fact
that festered in its heart.
And then toward the end the chairman announced that one of the
hat-trimmers, one of the girls who worked--in another hat factory, would
address the meeting--Miss Sally Heffer.
A girl arose, a young woman with thin, sparse, gold-glinting hair, with
face pallid and rounded, with broad forehead and gray eyes of remarkable
clarity. She was slim, dressed in a little brown coat and a short brown
skirt. She came forward, trembling, as if overcome by the audience. She
paused, raised her head and tried to speak. There was not a sound, and
suddenly the audience became strangely still, leaning forward, waiting.
Then again she tried to speak; it was hardly above a whisper; and yet so
clear was the hush that Joe heard every word. And he knew, and all knew,
that this young woman was overcome, not by the audience, but by the
passion of the tragedy, the passion of an oppressed class. She was the
voice of the toilers at last dimly audible; she was the voice of a
million years of sore labor and bitter poverty and thwarted life. And
the audience was thrilled, and the powerful were shaken with remorse.
Trembling, terrible came the words out of that little body on the far
stage:
"I would be a traitor to these poor burned bodies if I came here to talk
good-fellowship. We have tried you good people of the public and we have
found you wanting. The old Inquisition had its rack and its thumbscrews
and its instruments of torture with iron teeth. We know what these
things are to-day: the iron teeth are our necessities, the thumbscrews
the high-powered and swift machinery close to which we must work, and
the rack is here in the fire-trap structures that will destroy us the
minute they catch on fire.
"This is not the first time girls have been burned alive in this city.
Every week I learn of the untimely death of one of my sister workers.
Every year thousands of us are maimed. _The life of men and women is so
cheap and property is so sacred!_ There are so many of us for one job,
it matters little if sixty of us are burned to death.
"We have tried you citizens; we are trying you now, and you have a
couple of dollars for the sorrowing mothers and brothers and sisters by
way of a charity gift. But every time the workers come out in the only
way they know to protest against conditions which are unbearable, the
strong hand of the law is allowed to press heavily down on us.
"Public officials have only words of warning to us--warning that we must
be intensely orderly and intensely peaceable, and they have the
workhouse just back of all their warnings.
"I can't talk fellowship to you who are gathered here. Too much blood
has been spilled. I know from my experience it is up to the working
people to save themselves. The only way they can save themselves is by a
strong working-class movement."
Joe heard nothing further. There were several other speakers, but no
words penetrated to his brain. He felt as if he must stifle. He felt the
globe of earth cracking, breaking in two under his feet, and for the
first time in his life he was acutely aware of the division of humanity.
All through his career he had taken his middle-class position for
granted; he tacitly agreed that there were employees and employers; but
in his own case his camaraderie had hidden the cleavage. Now he saw a
double world--on the one side the moneyed owners, on the other the
crowded, scrambling, disorganized hordes of the toilers--each one of
them helpless, a victim, worked for all that was in him, and then flung
aside in the scrap heap. And behold, this horde was becoming
self-conscious, was beginning to organize, was finding a voice. And he,
who was one of the "good people," was rejected by this voice. He had
been "tried" and found wanting. He was on the other side of the fence.
And it was the fault of his class that fire horrors and all the chaos
and cruelty of industry arose. So that now the working people had found
that they must "save themselves."
In an agony of guilt again he felt what he had said to Myra: "From now
on I belong to those dead girls"--yes, and to their fellow-workers.
Suddenly it seemed to him that he must see Sally Heffer--that to her he
must carry the burden of his guilt--to her he must personally make
answer to the terrible accusations she had voiced. It was all at once,
as if only in this way could he go on living, that otherwise he would
end in the insanity of the mad-house or the insanity of suicide.
He was walking down the stairs with Fannie, and he was trembling.
"Do you know this Sally Heffer?"
"Know her? We all do!" she cried, with all a young girl's enthusiasm.
"I want to see her, Fannie. Where does she live?"
"Oh, somewhere in Greenwich Village. But she'll be up at the Woman's
League after the meeting."
He went up to the Woman's League and found the office crowded with women
and men. He asked for Miss Heffer.
"I'll take your name," said the young woman, and then came back with the
answer that "he'd have to wait."
So he took a seat and waited. He felt feverish and sick, as if he could
no longer carry this burden with him. It seemed impossible to sit still.
And yet he waited over an hour, waited until it was eight at night, all
the gas-jets lit.
The young woman came up to him.
"You want to see Miss Heffer? Come this way."
He was led up a flight of stairs to a little narrow hall-room. Sally
Heffer was there at a roll-top desk, still in her little brown
coat--quiet, pale, her clear eyes remarkably penetrating. She turned.
"Yes?"
He shook pitifully,... then he sat down, holding his hat in his hands.
"I'm Joe Blaine...."
"Joe Blaine ... of what?"
"Of the printery ... that burned...."
She looked at him sharply.
"So, you're the employer."
"Yes, I am."
"Well," she said, brusquely, "what do you want?"
"I heard you speak this afternoon." His face flickered with a smile.
"And so you ...?"
He could say nothing; and she looked closer. She saw his gray face, his
unsteady eyes, the tragedy of the broken man. Then she spoke with a
lovely gentleness.
"You want to do something?"
"Yes," he murmured, "I want to give--all."
She lowered her voice, and it thrilled him.
"It won't help to give your money--you must give yourself. We don't want
charity."
He said nothing for a moment; and then strength rose in him.
"I'll tell you why I came.... I felt I had to.... I felt that you were
accusing me. I know I am guilty. I have come here to be"--he smiled
strangely--"sentenced."
She drew closer.
"You came here for _that_?"
"Yes."
She rose and took a step either way. She gazed on him, and suddenly she
broke down and cried, her hands to her face.
"O God," she sobbed, "when will all this be over? When will we get rid
of this tragedy? I can't stand it longer."
He rose, too, confused.
"Listen," he whispered. "I swear to you, I swear, that from this day on
my life belongs to those"--his voice broke--"dead girls ... to the
toilers...."
She impulsively reached out a hand, and he seized it. Then, when she
became more quiet, she murmured:
"I can see you mean it. Oh, this is wonderful! It is a miracle springing
out of the fire!"
There was a strange throbbing silence that brought them close together.
And Sally, glancing at him again, whispered:
"I can see how you have suffered! Let me help you ... all that I can!"
He spoke in great pain.
"What can I do? I know so little."
"Do? You must learn that for yourself. You must fit in where you belong.
Do you know anything of the working-class movement?"
"No," he said.
"Then I will make a list of books and magazines for you."
She sat down and wrote a list on a slip, and arose and handed it to him.
She was gazing at him again, gazing at the tragic face. Then she
whispered:
"I believe in you.... Is there anything else?"
And again she reached out her hand and he clasped it. Her fine faith
smote something hard in him, shriveled it like fire, and all at once,
miraculously, divinely, a little liquid gush of lovely joy, of wonderful
beatitude began to rise from his heart, to rise and overflow and fill
him. He was being cleansed, he had expiated his guilt by confessing it
to his accuser and receiving her strange and gentle forgiveness; tears
came to his eyes, came and paused on the lashes and trickled down. He
gulped a sob.
"I can go on now," he said.
She looked at him, wondering.
"You can!" she whispered.
And he went out, a free man again, at the beginning of a new life.
IV
GOLDEN OCTOBER
Life has an upspringing quality that defies pain. Something buoyant
throbs in the heart of the world--something untamed and wild--exultant
in the flying beauty of romping children, glinting in the dawn-whitened
sea, risen, indeed, through man into triumphant cities and works, and
running like a pulse through his spirit. San Francisco is shattered, and
there is death and sorrow and destruction: a whole population is
homeless--whereupon the little human creatures come down from the hills
like laughing gods and create but a more splendid city. Earth itself
forges through its winters with an April power that flushes a continent
with delicate blossoms and tints.
Joe had come home from Sally Heffer a man renewed. From some clear well
in his nature sprang a limpid stream of soft, new joy; a new
exhilarating sense of life; a new creative power that made him eager for
action. His heart was cleansed, and with the exquisite happiness of a
forgiven child he "took up the task eternal." Hereafter he was a man
dedicated, a man consecrated to a great work.
His mother noticed the change in him, a new wisdom, a sweet jocularity,
and, withal, the return of much of his old nature--its rough
camaraderie, its boyish liveliness and homely simplicity. For her this
was a marvelous relief, and she could only watch him and wonder at the
change. He seemed very busy again, and she did not disturb him in these
sensitive days of growth; she waited the inevitable time when he would
come to her and tell her what he was going to do, whether he would
re-establish his business or whether he had some new plan. And then one
day, tidying up his room, she stumbled on a heap of books. Her heart
thrilled and she began to surreptitiously borrow these books herself.
Already the great city had forgotten its fire horror--save the tiny,
growing stir of an agitating committee--and even to those most nearly
concerned it began to fade, a nightmare scattered by the radiance of new
morning. One could only trust that from those fair and unpolluted bodies
had sprung a new wave of human brotherliness never to be quite lost. And
Joe's mother had had too much training in the terrible to be long
overborne. She believed in her son and stood by him.
Luckily for Joe, he had much work to do. He and Marty Briggs had to
settle up the business, close with customers, dig from the burned
rubbish proofs and contracts, attend the jury, and help provide for his
men. One sunny morning he and Marty were working industriously in the
loft, when Marty, with a cry of exultation, lifted up a little slot box.
"Holy Moses, Joe!" he exclaimed, "if here ain't the old kick-box!"
They looked in it together, very tenderly, for it was the very symbol of
Joe's ten years of business. On its side there was still pasted a slip
of paper, covered with typewriting:
KICK-BOX
This business is human--not perfect. It needs good
thinking, new ideas (no matter how unusual), and
honest criticism.
There are many things you think wrong about the
printery and the printery's head--things you would
not talk of face to face, as business time is precious
and spoken words are sometimes hard to bear.
Now this is what I want: Sit down and write what
you think in plain English. It will do me good.
JOE BLAINE.
Suddenly Marty looked at his boss.
"Say, Joe."
"What is it, Marty?" The big fellow hesitated.
"Say--when that jury finishes--you're going to set things up again, and
go on. Ain't you?"
Joe smiled sadly.
"I don't know, Marty."
Tears came to Marty's eyes.
"Say--what will the fellers say? Ah, now, you'll go ahead, Joe."
"Just give me a week or two, Marty--then I'll tell you."
But the big fellow's simple grief worked on him and made him waver, and
there were other meetings with old employees that sharply drew him back
to the printery. One evening, after a big day of activity, he found it
too late to reach the boarding-house for supper and he remembered that
John Rann's baby was sick. So he turned and hurried across the golden
glamor of Third Avenue, on Eightieth Street, and just beyond climbed up
three flights of stairs in a stuffy tenement and knocked on the rear
door. Smells of supper--smells chiefly of cabbage, cauliflower, fried
onions, and fried sausages--pervaded the hall like an invisible
personality, but Joe was smell-proof.
A husky voice bade him come in and he pushed open the door into a neat
kitchen. At a table in the center under a nicely globed light sat John
Rann in his woolen undershirt. John was smoking a pipe and reading the
evening paper, and opposite John two young girls, one about ten, the
other seven, were studying their lessons.
"Hello, John!" said Joe.
John nodded amiably, and muttered:
"Hello yourself!"
He was a strong, athletic, stocky fellow, with sunken little blue eyes,
heavy jaws, and almost bald head. Before he had time to rise the two
young girls leaped up with shrieks of joy and rushed to Joe. Joe at once
tucked one under each arm and hugged them forward to a big chair, into
which they all sank together.
"Well! Well!" cried Joe.
"Who do you love most?" asked the seven-year-old.
"The one who loves me most!" said Joe.
"I do!" they both shrieked.
"Now leave Mr. Joe be," warned the father. "Such tomboys they're getting
to be, there's no holdin' 'em in!"
At once in the half-curtained doorway to the next room appeared a stocky
little woman, whose pale face was made emphatic by large steel-rimmed
glasses that shrank each eye-pupil to the size of a tack-head. Her
worried forehead smoothed; she smiled.
"I knew it was Mr. Joe," she said, "by the way those gals yelled."
Joe spoke eagerly:
"I just had to run in, Mrs. Rann, to ask how the baby was."
"He's a sight better. Mrs. Smith, who lives third floor front, had one
just like him sick a year ago come Thanksgiving, and he died like that.
But the doctor you sent over is that kind and cute he's got the little
fellow a-fightin' for his life. He's a _big_ sight better. Want to see
him?"
Joe gave a kiss each way, set down two reluctant women-to-be, and
followed Mrs. Rann to the inner room. In a little crib a youngster, just
recovered from colic, was kicking up his heels. Joe leaned over and
tickled the sole of one foot.
"Well, Johnny boy!"
"Unc! Unc!" cried the infant.
The mother purred with delight.
"He's trying to say Uncle Joe. Did you ever hear the likes?"
Joe beamed with pride.
"Well, your uncle hasn't forgotten you, old man!"
And he produced from his pocket a little rubber doll that whistled
whenever its belly was squeezed.
John Rann appeared behind them.
"Say, Mr. Joe, _you_ haven't had your supper yet."
"Not hungry!" muttered Joe.
"G'wan! Molly, put him up a couple of fried eggs, browned on both, and a
cup of coffee. I won't take no, either."
Joe laughed.
"Well, perhaps I'd better. I'm ashamed to ask for anything home this
hour--in fact, I'm scared to."
So he got his fried eggs and coffee, and the family hung around him, and
Joe, circled with such warm friendliness, was glad to be alive. He was
especially pleased with Mrs. Rann's regard. But Joe was always a
favorite with mothers. Possibly because he was so fond of their babies.
Possibly because mothers love a good son, wherever they find one.
Possibly because his heart was large enough to contain as something
precious their obscure lives. Just before he left John asked him:
"Will the printery soon be running, Mr. Joe?"
"Tell you later," murmured Joe, and went out. But he was sorely
troubled.
However, to Joe there had been revealed--almost in a day and after
thirty-eight years of insulated life--two of the supreme human facts.
There was humanity, on the one side, building the future, the new state,
organizing its scattered millions into a rich, healthy, joyous life and
calling to every man to enlist in the ranks of the creators; and then
there was woman, the undying splendor of the world, the beauty that
drenches life with meaning and magic, that stirs the elemental in a man,
that wakens the race instinct, that demands the creation of new
generations to inhabit that new state of the future. Intertwined, these
wondrous things drew the heart now this way, now that, and to Joe they
arose separately in intermittent pulsations that threatened to absorb
his existence.
He did not dare go to Myra until he was sure of himself. It seemed that
he would have to choose between woman and work. It seemed as if his
work would lead into peril, dirt, disaster, and that he could not ask a
delicate, high-strung woman to go with him. The woman could not follow
her warrior to the battle, for marriage meant children to Joe, and the
little ones must stay back at home with the mother.
In that moment of clear terror he had said to Myra:
"I may never see you again.... I belong to those dead girls."
And this phrase came and went like a refrain. He must choose between her
and those "dead girls." There stood Myra with gray luminous eyes and
soft echoing voice magically hinting of a life of ever-renewed romance.
She had a breast for his aching head, she had in her hands a thousand
darling household things, she had in her the possibilities of his own
children ... who should bring a wind of laughter into his days and a
strange domestic tenderness. The depths of the man were stirred by these
appeals--that was the happy human way to take, the common road fringed
with wild flowers and brier-lost berries, and glorious with the stride
of health and the fresh open air.
And Myra herself, that charming presence to infold his life--He would go
walking through the golden October park, by little leaf-strewn paths
under the wild and sun-soaked foliage, with many vistas every way of
luring mystery, and over all the earth the rich opulent mother-bliss of
harvest, and his heart would ache, ache within him, ache for his own
harvests, ache like the sun for the earth, the man for the woman.
A mad frenzy would seize him and he would plunge into his books and read
and think and lash himself to a fury of speculation till the early hours
of the morning. Exhaustion alone brought him peace.
But something had to be done. He sat down and wrote to her with a
trembling hand:
DEAR MYRA,--Though I am impatient to see you, I
must yet wait a little while. Bear with me. You will
understand later.
Yours,
JOE.
And then she replied:
DEAR JOE,--Can't I help you?
MYRA.
He had to fight a whole afternoon before he replied:
Not yet--later.
JOE.
And back he went into the whirlwind of the world-vision, a stupendous
force upsetting, up-rooting, overturning, demolishing, almost erasing
and contradicting everything that Joe had taken for granted, and in the
wake of the destruction, rising and ever rising, a new creation, the
vision of a new world.
He had taken so much for granted. He had taken for granted that he lived
in a democracy--that the Civil War had once for all made America a free
nation--a nation of opportunity, riches, and happiness for all. Not so.
Literally millions were living in abject poverty, slaves to their
pay-envelopes; to lose a job meant to lose everything, there being more
laborers than jobs, or if not, at least recurrent "panics" and "hard
times" when the mills and the mines shut down. And these wage slaves had
practically no voice in one of the chief things of their life--their
work. So millions were penned in places of danger and disease and dirt,
lived and toiled in squalor, and were cut off from growth, from health,
from leisure and culture and recreation; and worse, millions of women
had to add the burden of earning a living to the already overwhelming
burden of child-bearing and home-making; and, still worse, millions of
children had been drafted into the service of industrialism.
He proved the case for himself. He began making tours of the city,
discovering New York, laying bare the confusion and ugliness and grime
and crime and poverty of a great industrial center. He poked into the
Ghetto, into Chinatown, Greenwich Village, and Little Italy; he peered
into jails, asylums, and workhouses; he sneaked through factories and
hung about saloons. Everywhere a terrific struggle, many sinking down
into the city's underworld of crime, men becoming vagrants or thieves,
women walking the streets as prostitutes.
And over this broad foundation of the "people" rose the structure of
business and politics, equally corrupted--or so it seemed to Joe, as it
does to every one who is fresh to the facts. Men at the top gathering
into their hands the necessities of life: oil, meat, coal, water-power,
wool; seizing on the railroads, those only modern means of social
exchange; snatching strings of banks wherein the people's money was
being saved; and using their mighty money-power to corrupt legislation,
to thwart the will of the voters, to secure new powers, to crush
opposition. So had arisen a "Money Power" that was annuling democracy.
And Joe's books argued that all this change had been wrought by the
invention of machinery, that only through steam, steel, and electricity
could world-wide organization take place, that only through these arose
the industrial city, the modern mill. The very things that should have
set man free, the enormous powers he snatched from nature and harnessed
to do his work, powers with the strength of a nation of men--these very
things had been seized by a few for their own profit, and had enslaved
the majority. Over and over again could the race be fed, clothed,
housed, and enriched by these powers, and that with lessened hours of
toil and more variety of work.
But Joe's books argued further and most dogmatically that this
organization by the selfish few was a necessary step in progress, that
when their work was finished the toilers, the millions, would arise and
seize the organization and use it thereafter for the good of all.
Indeed, this was what Sally's labor movement meant: the enlightenment of
the toilers as to the meaning of industrialism, and their training for
the supreme revolution.
And out of all this arose the world-vision. At such moments Joe walked
in a rarer air, he stepped on a fairer earth than ordinarily obtains. It
was the beauty and loveliness of simple human camaraderie, of warm human
touch. And at such times Joe had no doubt of his life-work. It lay in
exquisite places, in chambers of jolly grandeur, in the invisible halls
and palaces of the human spirit. He was one with the toilers of earth,
one with the crowded underworld. It was that these lives might grow
richer in knowledge, richer in art, richer in health, richer in
festival, richer in opportunity, that Joe had dedicated his life. And so
arose that wonderful and inexpressible vision--a picture as it were of
the far future--a glimpse of an earth singing with uplifted crowds of
humanity, on one half of the globe going out to meet the sunrise, on the
other, the stars. He heard the music of that Hymn of Human Victory,
which from millions of throats lifts on that day when all the race is
woven into a harmony of labor and joy and home and great unselfish
deeds. That day, possibly, might never arrive, forever fading farther
and farther into the sunlit distances--but it is the day which leads the
race forward. To Joe, however, came that vision, and when it came it
seemed as if the last drop of his blood would be little to offer, even
in anguish, to help, even by ever so little, the coming and the
consummation of that Victory.
He would awake in the night, and cry out in a fever:
"By God, I'm going to help change things."
The vision shook him--tugged at his heart, downward, like the clutch of
a convulsive child; seized him now and again like a madness. Even unto
such things had the "dead girls" brought him.
So, crammed with theories--theories as yet untested by experience--Joe
became an iconoclast lusting for change. He was bursting with good news,
he wanted to cry the intimations from the housetops, he wanted to
proselytize, convert. He was filled with Shelley's passion for reforming
the world, and like young Shelley, he felt that all he had to do was to
show the people the truth and the truth would make them free.
All this was in his great moments,... there were reactions when his
human humorous self--backed by ten years of the printery--told him that
the world is a complex mix-up, and that there are many visions; moments
that made him wonder what he was about, and why so untrained a man
expected to achieve such marvels.
But these reactions were swallowed up by the recurrent pulsations, the
spasms of his vision. He felt from day to day a growth of purpose, an
accumulation of energy that would resistlessly spill into action, that
would bear him along, whether or no. But what should he do, and how? He
was unfitted, and did not think he cared, for settlement work. He knew
nothing and cared less for charity work. Politics were an undiscovered
world to him. What he wanted passionately was to go and live among the
toilers, get to know them, and be the means of arousing and training
them.
But then there was the problem of his mother--a woman of sixty-three.
Could he leave her alone? It was preposterous to think of taking her
with him. Myra could a thousand times better go. He must talk with his
mother, he must thresh the matter out with her, he must not delay longer
to clear the issue. And yet he hesitated. Would she be able to
understand? How could he communicate what was bursting in his breast?
She belonged to a past generation; how could she hear the far-off drums
of the advance?
Up and down the Park he went early one evening in a chaos of excitement,
and he had a sudden conviction that he could not put off the moment any
longer. He must go to his mother at once, he must tell all. As he
walked down the lamp-lit street, under all the starriness of a tranquil
autumn night, he became alternately pale and flushed, his heart thumped
hard against his ribs, he felt like a little boy going to his mother to
confess a wrong.
He looked up; the shades of the second floor were illumined: she was up
there. Doing what? Sharply then he realized what a partial life she led,
the decayed middle-class associates of the boarding-house, tired,
brainless, and full of small talk, the lonesome evenings, the long days.
He became more agitated, and climbed the stoop, unlocked his way into
the house, went up the dim, soft, red-cushioned stairs, past the milky
gas-globe in the narrow hall, and knocked at her door.
"Come in!" she cried.
He swung the door wide and entered. She was, as usual, sitting in the
little rocker under the light and beside the bureau, between the bed and
the window. The neat, fragrant room seemed to be sleeping, but the
clear-eyed, upright woman was very much awake. She glanced up from her
sewing and realized intuitively that at last the crisis had come. His
big, homely face was a bald advertisement of his boyish excitement.
She nodded, and murmured, "Well!"
He drew up a chair awkwardly, and sat opposite her, tilting back to
accommodate his sprawling length. Then he was at a loss.
"Well," he muttered, trying to be careless, "how are you?"
"All right," she said drily.
She could not help him, though her heart was beginning to pain in her
side.
"I've been walking about the Park," he began again, with an indifference
that was full of leaks, "and thinking...." He leaned forward and spoke
suddenly: "Say, mother, don't you get tired of living in this place?"
She felt strangely excited, but answered guardedly.
"It isn't so bad, Joe.... There are a few decent people ... there's Miss
Gardiner, the librarian ... and I have books and sewing."
"Oh, I know," he went on, clumsily, "but you're alone a lot."
"Yes, I am," she said, and all at once she felt that she could speak no
further with him. She began sewing diligently.
"Say, mother!"
No answer.
"Mother!"
"Yes," dimly.
His voice sounded unnatural.