The story of Sam’s life there in Chicago for the next several years
ceases to be the story of a man and becomes the story of a type, a
crowd, a gang. What he and the group of men surrounding him and making
money with him did in Chicago, other men and other groups of men have
done in New York, in Paris, in London. Coming into power with the
great expansive wave of prosperity that attended the first McKinley
administration, these men went mad of money making. They played
with great industrial institutions and railroad systems like excited
children, and a man of Chicago won the notice and something of the
admiration of the world by his willingness to bet a million dollars on
the turn of the weather. In the years of criticism and readjustment that
followed this period of sporadic growth, writers have told with great
clearness how the thing was done, and some of the participants, captains
of industry turned penmen, Caesars become ink-slingers, have bruited the
story to an admiring world.
Given the time, the inclination, the power of the press, and the
unscrupulousness, the thing that Sam McPherson and his followers did in
Chicago in not difficult. Advised by Webster and the talented Prince
and Morrison to handle his publicity work, he rapidly unloaded his huge
holdings of common stock upon an eager public, keeping for himself the
bonds which he hypothecated at the banks to increase his working capital
while continuing to control the company. When the common stock was
unloaded, he, with a group of fellow spirits, began an attack upon it
through the stock market and in the press, and bought it again at a
low figure, holding it ready to unload when the public should have
forgotten.
The annual advertising expenditure of the firearms trust ran into
millions and Sam’s hold upon the press of the country was almost
unbelievably strong. Morrison rapidly developed unusual daring and
audacity in using this instrument and making it serve Sam’s ends. He
suppressed facts, created illusions, and used the newspapers as a whip
to crack at the heels of congressmen, senators, and legislators, of the
various states, when such matters as appropriation for firearms came
before them.
And Sam, who had undertaken the consolidation of the firearms companies,
having a dream of himself as a great master in that field, a sort of
American Krupp, rapidly awoke from the dream to take the bigger chances
for gain in the world of speculation. Within a year he dropped Edwards
as head of the firearms trust and in his place put Lewis, with Morrison
as secretary and manager of sales. Guided by Sam these two, like the
little drygoods merchant of the old Rainey Company, went from capital
to capital and from city to city making contracts, influencing news,
placing advertising contracts where they would do the most good, fixing
men.
And in the meantime Sam, with Webster, a banker named Crofts who had
profited largely in the firearms merger, and sometimes Morrison or
Prince, began a series of stock raids, speculations, and manipulations
that attracted country-wide attention, and became known to the newspaper
reading world as the McPherson Chicago crowd. They were in oil,
railroads, coal, western land, mining, timber, and street railways. One
summer Sam, with Prince, built, ran to a profit, and sold to advantage
a huge amusement park. Through his head day after day marched columns
of figures, ideas, schemes, more and more spectacular opportunities
for gain. Some of the enterprises in which he engaged, while because of
their size they seemed more dignified, were of reality of a type with
the game smuggling of his South Water Street days, and in all of his
operations it was his old instinct for bargains and for the finding of
buyers together with Webster’s ability for carrying through questionable
deals that made him and his followers almost constantly successful in
the face of opposition from the more conservative business and financial
men of the city.
Again Sam led a new life, owning running horses at the tracks,
memberships in many clubs, a country house in Wisconsin, and shooting
preserves in Texas. He drank steadily, played poker for big stakes, kept
in the public prints, and day after day led his crew upon the high seas
of finance. He did not dare think and in his heart he was sick of it.
Sick to the soul, so that when thought came to him he got out of his bed
to seek roistering companions or, getting pen and paper, sat for hours
figuring out new and more daring schemes for money making. The great
forward movement in modern industry of which he had dreamed of being a
part had for him turned out to be a huge meaningless gamble with loaded
dice against a credulous public. With his followers he went on day after
day doing deeds without thought. Industries were organised and launched,
men employed and thrown out of employment, towns wrecked by the
destruction of an industry and other towns made by the building of other
industries. At a whim of his a thousand men began building a city on an
Indiana sand hill, and at a wave of his hand another thousand men of an
Indiana town sold their homes, with the chicken houses in the back-yards
and vines trained by the kitchen doors, and rushed to buy sections
of the hill plotted off for them. He did not stop to discuss with his
followers the meaning of the things he did. He told them of the profits
to be made and then, having done the thing, he went with them to drink
in bar rooms and to spend the evening or afternoon singing songs,
visiting his stable of runners or, more often, sitting silently about
the card table playing for high stakes. Making millions through the
manipulation of the public during the day, he sometimes sat half the
night struggling with his companions for the possession of thousands.
Lewis, the Jew, the only one of Sam’s companions who had not followed
him in his spectacular money making, stayed in the office of the
firearms company and ran it like the scientific able man of business he
was. While Sam remained chairman of the board of the company and had an
office, a desk, and the name of leadership there, he let Lewis run the
place, and spent his own time upon the stock exchange or in some corner
with Webster and Crofts planning some new money making raid.
“You have the better of it, Lewis,” he said one day in a reflective
mood; “you thought I had cut the ground from under you when I got Tom
Edwards, but I only set you more firmly in a larger place.”
He made a movement with his hand toward the large general offices with
the rows of busy clerks and the substantial look of work being done.
“I might have had the work you are doing. I planned and schemed with
that end in view,” he added, lighting a cigar and going out at the door.
“And the money hunger got you,” laughed Lewis, looking after him, “the
hunger that gets Jews and Gentiles and all who feed it.”
One might have come upon the McPherson Chicago crowd about the old
Chicago stock exchange on any day during those years, Crofts, tall,
abrupt, and dogmatic; Morrison, slender, dandified, and gracious;
Webster, well-dressed, suave, gentlemanly, and Sam, silent, restless,
and often morose and ugly. Sometimes it seemed to Sam that they were
all unreal, himself and the men with him. He watched his companions
cunningly. They were constantly posing before the passing crowd of
brokers and small speculators. Webster, coming up to him on the floor of
the exchange, would tell him of a snowstorm raging outside with the air
of a man parting with a long-cherished secret. His companions went from
one to the other vowing eternal friendships, and then, keeping spies
upon each other, they hurried to Sam with tales of secret betrayals.
Into any deal proposed by him they went eagerly, although sometimes
fearfully, and almost always they won. And with Sam they made millions
through the manipulation of the firearms company, and the Chicago and
Northern Lake Railroad which he controlled.
In later years Sam looked back upon it all as a kind of nightmare. It
seemed to him that never during that period had he lived or thought
sanely. The great financial leaders that he saw were not, he thought,
great men. Some of them, like Webster, were masters of craft, or, like
Morrison, of words, but for the most part they were but shrewd, greedy
vultures feeding upon the public or upon each other.
In the meantime Sam was rapidly degenerating. His paunch became
distended, and his hands trembled in the morning. Being a man of
strong appetites, and having a determination to avoid women, he almost
constantly overdrank and overate, and in the leisure hours that came to
him he hurried eagerly from place to place, avoiding thought, avoiding
sane quiet talk, avoiding himself.
All of his companions did not suffer equally. Webster seemed made for
the life, thriving and expanding under it, putting his winnings steadily
aside, going on Sunday to a suburban church, avoiding the publicity
connecting his name with race horses and big sporting events that Crofts
sought and to which Sam submitted. One day Sam and Crofts caught him in
an effort to sell them out to a group of New York bankers in a mining
deal and turned the trick on him instead, whereupon he went off to New
York to become a respectable big business man and the friend of senators
and philanthropists.
Crofts was a man with chronic domestic troubles, one of those men who
begin each day by cursing their wives before their associates and yet
continue living with them year after year. There was a kind of rough
squareness in the man, and after the completion of a successful deal
he would be as happy as a boy, pounding men on the back, shaking with
laughter, throwing money about, making crude jokes. After Sam left
Chicago he finally divorced his wife and married an actress from the
vaudeville stage and after losing two-thirds of his fortune in an effort
to capture control of a southern railroad, went to England and, coached
by the actress wife, developed into an English country gentleman.
And Sam was a man sick. Day after day he went on drinking more and more
heavily, playing for bigger and bigger stakes, allowing himself less
and less thought of himself. One day he received a long letter from John
Telfer telling of the sudden death of Mary Underwood and berating him
for his neglect of her.
“She was ill for a year and without an income,” wrote Telfer. Sam
noticed that the man’s hand had begun to tremble. “She lied to me and
told me you had sent her money, but now that she is dead I find that
though she wrote you she got no answer. Her old aunt told me.”
Sam put the letter into his pocket and going into one of his clubs began
drinking with a crowd of men he found idling there. He had paid little
attention to his correspondence for months. No doubt the letter from
Mary had been received by his secretary and thrown aside with the
letters of thousands of other women, begging letters, amorous letters,
letters directed at him because of his wealth and the prominence given
his exploits by the newspapers.
After wiring an explanation and mailing a check the size of which filled
John Telfer with admiration, Sam with a half dozen fellow roisterers
spent the late afternoon and evening going from saloon to saloon through
the south side. When he got to his apartments late that night, his head
was reeling and his mind filled with distorted memories of drinking men
and women and of himself standing on a table in some obscure drinking
place and calling upon the shouting, laughing hangers-on of his crowd of
rich money spenders to think and to work and to seek Truth.
He went to sleep in his chair, his mind filled with the dancing faces of
dead women, Mary Underwood and Janet and Sue, tear-stained faces calling
to him. When he awoke and shaved he went out into the street and to
another down-town club.
“I wonder if Sue is dead, too,” he muttered, remembering his dream.
At the club he was called to the telephone by Lewis, who asked him to
come at once to his office at the Edwards Consolidated. When he
got there he found a wire from Sue. In a moment of loneliness and
despondency over the loss of his old business standing and reputation,
Colonel Tom had shot himself in a New York hotel.
Sam sat at his desk, fingering the yellow paper lying before him and
fighting to get his head clear.
“The old coward. The damned old coward,” he muttered; “any one could
have done that.”
When Lewis came into Sam’s office he found his chief sitting at his desk
fingering the telegram and muttering to himself. When Sam handed him the
wire he came around and stood beside Sam, his hand upon his shoulder.
“Well, do not blame yourself for that,” he said, with quick
understanding.
“I don’t,” Sam muttered; “I do not blame myself for anything. I am a
result, not a cause. I am trying to think. I am not through yet. I am
going to begin again when I get things thought out.”
Lewis went out of the room leaving him to his thoughts. For an hour
he sat there reviewing his life. When he came to the day that he had
humiliated Colonel Tom, there came back to his mind the sentence he had
written on the sheet of paper while the vote was being counted. “The
best men spend their lives seeking truth.”
Suddenly he came to a decision and, calling Lewis, began laying out a
plan of action. His head cleared and the ring came back into his
voice. To Lewis he gave an option on his entire holdings of Edwards
Consolidated stocks and bonds and to him also he entrusted the clearing
up of deal after deal in which he was interested. Then, calling a
broker, he began throwing a mass of stock on the market. When Lewis told
him that Crofts was ‘phoning wildly about town to find him, and was with
the help of another banker supporting the market and taking Sam’s stocks
as fast as offered, he laughed and giving Lewis instructions regarding
the disposal of his monies walked out of the office, again a free man
and again seeking the answer to his problem.
He made no attempt to answer Sue’s wire. He was restless to get at
something he had in his mind. He went to his apartments and packed a bag
and from there disappeared saying goodbye to no one. In his mind was no
definite idea of where he was going or what he was going to do. He knew
only that he would follow the message his hand had written. He would try
to spend his life seeking truth.
BOOK III
CHAPTER I
One day when the youth Sam McPherson was new in the city he went on a
Sunday afternoon to a down-town theatre to hear a sermon. The sermon was
delivered by a small dark-skinned Boston man, and seemed to the young
McPherson scholarly and well thought out.
“The greatest man is he whose deeds affect the greatest number of
lives,” the speaker had said, and the thought had stuck in Sam’s mind.
Now walking along the street carrying his travelling bag, he remembered
the sermon and the thought and shook his head in doubt.
“What I have done here in this city must have affected thousands of
lives,” he mused, and felt a quickening of his blood at just letting go
of his thoughts as he had not dared do since that day when, by breaking
his word to Sue, he had started on his career as a business giant.
He began to think of the quest on which he had started and had keen
satisfaction in the thought of what he should do.
“I will begin all over and come up to Truth through work,” he told
himself. “I will leave the money hunger behind me, and if it returns I
will come back here to Chicago and see my fortune piled up and the men
rushing about the banks and the stock exchange and the court they pay to
such fools and brutes as I have been, and that will cure me.”
Into the Illinois Central Station he went, a strange spectacle. A
smile came to his lips as he sat on a bench along the wall between an
immigrant from Russia and a small plump farmer’s wife who held a banana
in her hand and gave bites of it to a rosy-cheeked babe lying in her
arms. He, an American multimillionaire, a man in the midst of his
money-making, one who had realised the American dream, to have sickened
at the feast and to have wandered out of a fashionable club with a bag
in his hand and a roll of bills in his pocket and to have come on this
strange quest--to seek Truth, to seek God. A few years of the fast
greedy living in the city, that had seemed so splendid to the Iowa boy
and to the men and women who had lived in his town, and then a woman had
died lonely and in want in that Iowa town, and half across the continent
a fat blustering old man had shot himself in a New York hotel, and here
he sat.
Leaving his bag in the care of the farmer’s wife, he walked across the
room to the ticket window and standing there watched the people with
definite destinations in mind come up, lay down money, and taking their
tickets go briskly away. He had no fear of being known. Although his
name and his picture had been upon the front pages of Chicago newspapers
for years, he felt so great a change within himself from just the
resolution he had taken that he had no doubt of passing unnoticed.
A thought struck him. Looking up and down the long room filled with
its strangely assorted clusters of men and women a sense of the great
toiling masses of people, the labourers, the small merchants, the
skilled mechanics, came over him.
“These are the Americans,” he began telling himself, “these people with
children beside them and with hard daily work to be done, and many
of them with stunted or imperfectly developed bodies, not Crofts, not
Morrison and I, but these others who toil without hope of luxury and
wealth, who make up the armies in times of war and raise up boys and
girls to do the work of the world in their turn.”
He fell into the line moving toward the ticket window behind a
sturdy-looking old man who carried a box of carpenter tools in one hand
and a bag in the other, and bought a ticket to the same Illinois town to
which the old man was bound.
In the train he sat beside the old man and the two fell into quiet
talk--the old man talking of his family. He had a son, married and
living in the Illinois town to which he was going, of whom he began
boasting. The son, he said, had gone to that town and had prospered
there, owning a hotel which his wife managed while he worked as a
builder.
“Ed,” he said, “keeps fifty or sixty men going all summer. He has sent
for me to come and take charge of a gang. He knows well enough I will
get the work out of them.”
From Ed the old man drifted into talk of himself and his life, telling
bare facts with directness and simplicity and making no effort to
disguise a slight turn of vanity in his success.
“I have raised seven sons and made them all good workmen and they are
all doing well,” he said.
He told of each in detail. One, who had taken to books, was a mechanical
engineer in a manufacturing town in New England. The mother of his
children had died the year before and of his three daughters two had
married mechanics. The third, Sam gathered, had not done well and from
something the old man said he thought she had perhaps gone the wrong way
there in Chicago.
To the old man Sam talked of God and of a man’s effort to get truth out
of life.
“I have thought of it a lot,” he said.
The old man was interested. He looked at Sam and then out at the car
window and began talking of his own beliefs, the substance of which Sam
could not get.
“God is a spirit and lives in the growing corn,” said the old man,
pointing out the window at the passing fields.
He began talking of churches and of ministers, against whom he was
filled with bitterness.
“They are dodgers. They do not get at things. They are damned dodgers,
pretending to be good,” he declared.
Sam talked of himself, saying that he was alone in the world and had
money. He said that he wanted work in the open air, not for the money it
would bring him, but because his paunch was large and his hand trembled
in the morning.
“I’ve been drinking,” he said, “and I want to work hard day after day so
that my muscles may become firm and sleep come to me at night.”
The old man thought that his son could find Sam a place.
“He’s a driver--Ed is,” he said, laughing, “and he won’t pay you much.
Ed don’t let go of money. He’s a tight one.”
Night had come when they reached the town where Ed lived, and the three
men walked over a bridge, beneath which roared a waterfall, toward the
long poorly-lighted main street of the town and Ed’s hotel. Ed, a young,
broad-shouldered man, with a dry cigar stuck in the corner of his mouth,
led the way. He had engaged Sam standing in the darkness on the station
platform, accepting his story without comment.
“I’ll let you carry timbers and drive nails,” he said, “that will harden
you up.”
On the way over the bridge he talked of the town.
“It’s a live place,” he said, “we are getting people in here.”
“Look at that!” he exclaimed, chewing at the cigar and pointing to the
waterfall that foamed and roared almost under the bridge. “There’s a lot
of power there and where there’s power there will be a city.”
At Ed’s hotel some twenty men sat about a long low office. They were,
for the most part, middle-aged working men and sat in silence reading
and smoking pipes. At a table pushed against the wall a bald-headed
young man with a scar on his cheek played solitaire with a greasy pack
of cards, and in front of him and sitting in a chair tilted against the
wall a sullen-faced boy idly watched the game. When the three men came
into the office the boy dropped his chair to the floor and stared at Ed
who stared back at him. It was as though a contest of some sort went on
between them. A tall neatly-dressed woman, with a brisk manner and pale,
inexpressive, hard blue eyes, stood back of a little combined desk and
cigar case at the end of the room, and as the three walked toward her
she looked from Ed to the sullen-faced boy and then again at Ed. Sam
concluded she was a woman bent on having her own way. She had that air.
“This is my wife,” said Ed, introducing Sam with a wave of his hand and
passing around the end of the desk to stand by her side.
Ed’s wife twirled the hotel register about facing Sam, nodded her head,
and then, leaning over the desk, bestowed a quick kiss upon the leathery
cheek of the old carpenter.
Sam and the old man found a place in chairs along the wall and sat down
among the silent men. The old man pointed to the boy in the chair beside
the card players.
“Their son,” he whispered cautiously.
The boy looked at his mother, who in turn looked steadily at him, and
got up from his chair. Back of the desk Ed talked in low tones to his
wife. The boy, stopping before Sam and the old man and still looking
toward the woman, put out his hand which the old man took. Then, without
speaking, he went past the desk and through a doorway, and began noisily
climbing a flight of stairs, followed by his mother. As they climbed
they berated each other, their voices rising to a high pitch and echoing
through the upper part of the house.
Ed, coming across to them, talked to Sam about the assignment of a room,
and the men began looking at the stranger; noting his fine clothes,
their eyes filled with curiosity.
“Selling something?” asked a large red-haired young man, rolling a quid
of tobacco in his mouth.
“No,” replied Sam shortly, “going to work for Ed.”
The silent men in chairs along the wall dropped their newspapers and
stared, and the bald-headed young man at the table sat with open mouth,
a card held suspended in the air. Sam had become, for the moment, a
centre of interest and the men stirred in their chairs and began to
whisper and point to him.
A large, watery-eyed man, with florid cheeks, clad in a long overcoat
with spots down the front, came in at the door and passed through the
room bowing and smiling to the men. Taking Ed by the arm he disappeared
into a little barroom, where Sam could hear him talking in low tones.
After a little while the florid-faced man came and put his head through
the barroom door into the office.
“Come on, boys,” he said, smiling and nodding right and left, “the
drinks are on me.”
The men got up and filed into the bar, the old man and Sam remaining
seated in their chairs. They began talking in undertones.
“I’ll start ‘em thinking--these men,” said the old man.
From his pocket he took a pamphlet and gave it to Sam. It was a crudely
written attack upon rich men and corporations.
“Some brains in the fellow who wrote that,” said the old carpenter,
rubbing his hands together and smiling.
Sam did not think so. He sat reading it and listening to the loud,
boisterous voices of the men in the barroom. The florid-faced man was
explaining the details of a proposed town bond issue. Sam gathered that
the water power in the river was to be developed.
“We want to make this a live town,” said the voice of Ed, earnestly.
The old man, leaning over and putting his hand beside his mouth, began
whispering to Sam.
“I’ll bet there is a capitalist deal back of that power scheme,” he
said.
He nodded his head up and down and smiled knowingly.
“If there is Ed will be in on it,” he added. “You can’t lose Ed. He’s a
slick one.”
He took the pamphlet from Sam’s hand and put it in his pocket.
“I’m a socialist,” he explained, “but don’t say anything. Ed’s against
‘em.”
The men filed back into the room, each with a freshly-lighted cigar in
his mouth, and the florid-faced man followed them and went out at the
office door.
“Well, so long, boys,” he shouted heartily.
Ed went silently up the stairs to join the mother and boy, whose voices
could still be heard raised in outbursts of wrath from above as the men
took their former chairs along the wall.
“Well, Bill’s sure all right,” said the red-haired young man, evidently
expressing the opinion of the men in regard to the florid-faced man.
A small bent old man with sunken cheeks got up and walking across the
room leaned against the cigar case.
“Did you ever hear this one?” he asked, looking about.
Obviously no answer could be given and the bent old man launched into
a vile pointless anecdote of a woman, a miner, and a mule, the crowd
giving close attention and laughing uproariously when he had finished.
The socialist rubbed his hands together and joined in the applause.
“That was a good one, eh?” he commented, turning to Sam.
Sam, picking up his bag, climbed the stairway as the red-haired young
man launched into another tale, slightly less vile. In his room to which
Ed, meeting him at the top of the stairs, led him, still chewing at the
unlighted cigar, he turned out the light and sat on the edge of the bed.
He was as homesick as a boy.
“Truth,” he muttered, looking through the window to the dimly-lighted
street. “Do these men seek truth?”
The next day he went to work, wearing a suit of clothes bought from
Ed. He worked with Ed’s father, carrying timbers and driving nails as
directed by him. In the gang with him were four men, boarders at Ed’s
hotel, and four other men who lived in the town with their families. At
the noon hour he asked the old carpenter how the men from the hotel, who
did not live in the town, could vote on the question of the power bonds.
The old man grinned and rubbed his hands together.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I suppose Ed tends to that. He’s a slick one,
Ed is.”
At work, the men who had been so silent in the office of the hotel were
alert and wonderfully busy, hurrying here and there at a word from the
old man and sawing and nailing furiously. They seemed bent upon outdoing
each other and when one fell behind they laughed and shouted at him,
asking him if he had decided to quit for the day. But though they seemed
determined to outdo him the old man kept ahead of them all, his hammer
beating a rattling tattoo upon the boards all day. At the noon hour he
had given each of the men one of the pamphlets from his pocket and on
the way back to his hotel in the evening he told Sam that the others had
tried to show him up.
“They wanted to see if I had juice in me,” he explained, strutting
beside Sam with an amusing little swagger of his shoulders.
Sam was sick with fatigue. His hands were blistered, his legs felt weak,
and a terrible thirst burned in his throat. All day he had gone grimly
ahead, thankful for every physical discomfort, every throb of his
strained, tired muscles. In his weariness and in his efforts to keep
pace with the others he had forgotten Colonel Tom and Mary Underwood.
All during that month and into the next Sam stayed with the old man’s
gang. He ceased thinking, and only worked desperately. An odd feeling
of loyalty and devotion to the old man came over him and he felt that he
too must prove that he had the juice in him. At the hotel he went to bed
immediately after the silent dinner, slept, awoke aching, and went to
work again.
One Sunday one of the men of his gang came to Sam’s room and invited him
to go with a party of the workers into the country. They went in boats,
carrying with them kegs of beer, to a deep ravine clothed on both sides
by heavy woods. In the boat with Sam sat the red-haired young man, who
was called Jake and who talked loudly of the time they would have in the
woods, and boasted that he was the instigator of the trip.
“I thought of it,” he said over and over again.
Sam wondered why he had been invited. It was a soft October day and
in the ravine he sat looking at the trees splashed with colour and
breathing deeply of the air, his whole body relaxed, grateful for the
day of rest. Jake came and sat beside him.
“What are you?” he asked bluntly. “We know you are no working man.”
Sam told him a half-truth.
“You are right enough about that; I have money enough not to have to
work. I used to be a business man. I sold guns. But I have a disease and
the doctors have told me that if I do not work out of doors part of me
will die.”
The man from his own gang who had invited him on the trip came up to
them, bringing Sam a foaming glass of beer. He shook his head.
“The doctor says it will not do,” he explained to the two men.
The red-haired man called Jake began talking.
“We are going to have a fight with Ed,” he said. “That’s what we came up
here to talk about. We want to know where you stand. We are going to see
if we can’t make him pay as well for the work here as men are paid for
the same work in Chicago.”
Sam lay back upon the grass.
“All right,” he said. “Go ahead. If I can help I will. I’m not so fond
of Ed.”
The men began talking among themselves. Jake, standing among them, read
aloud a list of names among which was the name Sam had written on the
register at Ed’s hotel.
“It’s a list of the names of men we think will stick together and vote
together on the bond issue,” he explained, turning to Sam. “Ed’s in that
and we want to use our votes to scare him into giving us what we want.
Will you stay with us? You look like a fighter.”
Sam nodded and getting up joined the men about the beer kegs. They began
talking of Ed and of the money he had made in the town.
“He’s done a lot of town work here and there’s been graft in all of
it,” explained Jake emphatically. “It’s time he was being made to do the
right thing.”
While they talked Sam sat watching the men’s faces. They did not seem
vile to him now as they had seemed that first evening in the hotel
office. He began thinking of them silently and alertly at work all day
long, surrounded by such influences as Ed and Bill, and the thought
sweetened his opinion of them.
“Look here,” he said, “tell me of this matter. I was a business man
before I came here and I may be able to help you fellows get what you
want.”
Getting up, Jake took Sam’s arm and they walked down the ravine, Jake
explaining the situation in the town.
“The game,” he said, “is to make the taxpayers pay for a millrace to be
built for the development of the water power in the river and then, by a
trick, to turn it over to a private company. Bill and Ed are both in the
deal and they are working for a Chicago man named Crofts. He’s been up
here at the hotel with Bill talking to Ed. I’ve figured out what they
are up to.” Sam sat down upon a log and laughed heartily.
“Crofts, eh?” he exclaimed. “Say, we will fight this thing. If Crofts
has been up here you can depend upon it there is some size to the deal.
We will just smash the whole crooked gang for the good of the town.”
“How would you do that?” asked Jake.
Sam sat down on a log and looked at the river flowing past the mouth of
the ravine.
“Just fight,” he said. “Let me show you something.”
He took a pencil and slip of paper from his pocket, and, with the
voices of the men about the beer kegs in his ears and the red-haired man
peering over his shoulder, began writing his first political pamphlet.
He wrote and erased and changed words and phrases. The pamphlet was a
statement of facts as to the value of water power, and was addressed to
the taxpayers of the community. He warmed to the subject, saying that a
fortune lay sleeping in the river, and that the town, by the exercise of
a little discretion now, could build with that fortune a beautiful city
belonging to the people.
“This fortune in the river rightly managed will pay the expenses of
government and give you control of a great source of revenue forever,”
he wrote. “Build your millrace, but look out for a trick of the
politicians. They are trying to steal it. Reject the offer of the
Chicago banker named Crofts. Demand an investigation. A capitalist has
been found who will take the water power bonds at four per cent and back
the people in this fight for a free American city.” Across the head
of the pamphlet Sam wrote the caption, “A River Paved With Gold,” and
handed it to Jake, who read it and whistled softly.
“Good!” he said. “I will take this and have it printed. It will make
Bill and Ed sit up.”
Sam took a twenty-dollar bill from his pocket and gave it to the man.
“To pay for the printing,” he said. “And when we have them licked I am
the man who will take the four per cent bonds.”
Jake scratched his head. “How much do you suppose the deal is worth to
Crofts?”
“A million, or he would not bother,” Sam answered.
Jake folded the paper and put it in his pocket.
“This would make Bill and Ed squirm, eh?” he laughed.
Going home down the river the men, filled with beer, sang and shouted
as the boats, guided by Sam and Jake, floated along. The night fell
warm and still and Sam thought he had never seen the sky so filled
with stars. His brain was busy with the idea of doing something for the
people.
“Perhaps here in this town I shall make a start toward what I am after,”
he thought, his heart filled with happiness and the songs of the tipsy
workmen ringing in his ears.
All through the next few weeks there was an air of something astir among
the men of Sam’s gang and about Ed’s hotel. During the evening Jake
went among the men talking in low tones, and once he took a three days’
vacation, telling Ed that he did not feel well and spending the time
among the men employed in the plough works up the river. From time to
time he came to Sam for money.
“For the campaign,” he said, winking and hurrying away.
Suddenly a speaker appeared and began talking nightly from a box before
a drug store on Main Street, and after dinner the office of Ed’s hotel
was deserted. The man on the box had a blackboard hung on a pole, on
which he drew figures estimating the value of the power in the river,
and as he talked he grew more and more excited, waving his arms and
inveighing against certain leasing clauses in the bond proposal. He
declared himself a follower of Karl Marx and delighted the old carpenter
who danced up and down in the road and rubbed his hands.
“It will come to something--this will--you’ll see,” he declared to Sam.
One day Ed appeared, riding in a buggy, at the job where Sam worked,
and called the old man into the road. He sat pounding one hand upon the
other and talking in a low voice. Sam thought the old man had perhaps
been indiscreet in the distribution of the socialistic pamphlets. He
seemed nervous, dancing up and down beside the buggy and shaking his
head. Then hurrying back to where the men worked he pointed over his
shoulder with his thumb.
“Ed wants you,” he said, and Sam noticed that his voice trembled and his
hand shook.
In the buggy Ed and Sam rode in silence. Again Ed chewed at an unlighted
cigar.
“I want to talk with you,” he had said as Sam climbed into the buggy.
At the hotel the two men got out of the buggy and went into the office.
Inside the door Ed, who came behind, sprang forward and pinioned Sam’s
arms with his own. He was as powerful as a bear. His wife, the tall
woman with the inexpressive eyes, came running into the room, her face
drawn with hatred. In her hand she carried a broom and with the
handle of this she struck Sam several swinging blows across the face,
accompanying each blow with a half scream of rage and a volley of vile
names. The sullen-faced boy, alive now and with eyes burning with zeal,
came running down the stairs and pushed the woman aside. He struck Sam
time after time in the face with his fist, laughing each time as Sam
winced under the blows.
Sam struggled furiously to escape Ed’s powerful grasp. It was the first
time he had ever been beaten and the first time he had faced hopeless
defeat. The wrath within him was so intense that the jolting impact
of the blows seemed a secondary matter to the need of escaping Ed’s
vice-like grasp.
Suddenly Ed turned and, pushing Sam before him, threw him through the
office door and into the street. In falling his head struck against a
hitching post and he lay stunned. When he partially recovered from the
fall Sam got up and walked along the street. His face was swollen and
bruised and his nose bled. The street was deserted and the assault upon
him had been unnoticed.
He went to a hotel on Main Street--a more pretentious place than Ed’s,
near the bridge leading to the station--and as he passed in he saw,
through an open door, Jake, the red-haired man, leaning against the bar
and talking to Bill, the man with the florid face. Sam, paying for a
room, went upstairs and to bed.
In the bed, with cold bandages on his bruised face, he tried to get
the situation in hand. Hatred for Ed ran through his veins. His hands
clenched, his brain whirled, and the brutal, passionate faces of the
woman and the boy danced before his eyes.
“I’ll fix them, the brutal bullies,” he muttered aloud.
And then the thought of his quest came back to his mind and quieted him.
Through the window came the roar of the waterfall, broken by noises of
the street. As he fell asleep they mingled with his dreams, sounding
soft and quiet like the low talk of a family about the fire of an
evening.
He was awakened by a noise of pounding on his door. At his call the door
opened and the face of the old carpenter appeared. Sam laughed and sat
up in bed. Already the cold bandages had soothed the throbbing of his
bruised face.
“Go away,” begged the old man, rubbing his hands together nervously.
“Get out of town.”
He put his hand to his mouth and talked in a hoarse whisper, looking
back over his shoulder through the open door. Sam, getting out of bed,
began filling his pipe.
“You can’t beat Ed, you fellows,” added the old man, backing out at the
door. “He’s a slick one, Ed is. You better get out of town.”
Sam called a boy and gave him a note to Ed asking for his clothes and
for the bag in his room, and to the boy he gave a large bill, asking him
to pay anything due. When the boy came back bringing the clothes and the
bag he returned the bill unbroken.
“They’re scared about something up there,” he said, looking at Sam’s
bruised face.
Sam dressed carefully and went down into the street. He remembered that
he had never seen a printed copy of the political pamphlet written in
the ravine and realised that Jake had used it to make money for himself.
“Now I shall try something else,” he thought.
It was early evening and crowds of men coming down the railroad track
from the plough works turned to right and left as they reached Main
Street. Sam walked among them, climbing a little hilly side street to
a number he had got from a clerk at the drug store before which the
socialist had talked. He stopped at a little frame house and a moment
after knocking was in the presence of the man who had talked night after
night from the box in the street. Sam had decided to see what could be
done through him. The socialist was a short, fat man, with curly grey
hair, shiny round cheeks, and black broken teeth. He sat on the edge of
his bed and looked as if he had slept in his clothes. A corncob pipe lay
smoking among the covers of the bed, and during most of the talk he sat
with one shoe held in his hand as though about to put it on. About the
room in orderly piles lay stack after stack of paper-covered books. Sam
sat down in a chair by the window and told his mission.
“It is a big thing, this power steal that is going on here,” he
explained. “I know the man back of it and he would not bother with a
small affair. I know they are going to make the city build the millrace
and then steal it. It will be a big thing for your party about here if
you take hold and stop them. Let me tell you how it can be done.”
He explained his plan, and told of Crofts and of his wealth and dogged,
bullying determination. The socialist seemed beside himself. He pulled
on the shoe and began running hurriedly about the room.
“The time for the election,” Sam went on, “is almost here. I have looked
into this thing. We must beat this bond issue and then put through a
square one. There is a train out of Chicago at seven o’clock, a fast
train. You get fifty speakers out here. I will pay for a special train
if necessary and I will hire a band and help stir things up. I can give
you facts enough to shake this town to the bottom. You come with me and
‘phone to Chicago. I will pay everything. I am McPherson, Sam McPherson
of Chicago.”
The socialist ran to a closet and began pulling on his coat. The name
affected him so that his hand trembled and he could scarcely get his arm
into the coat sleeve. He began to apologise for the appearance of the
room and kept looking at Sam with the air of one not able to believe
what he had heard. As the two men walked out of the house he ran ahead
holding doors open for Sam’s passage.
“And you will help us, Mr. McPherson?” he exclaimed. “You, a man of
millions, will help us in this fight?”
Sam had a feeling that the man was going to kiss his hand or do
something equally ridiculous. He had the air of a club door man gone off
his head.
At the hotel Sam stood in the lobby while the fat man waited in a
telephone booth.
“I will have to ‘phone Chicago, I will simply have to ‘phone Chicago. We
socialists don’t do anything like this offhand, Mr. McPherson,” he had
explained as they walked along the street.
When the socialist came out of the booth he stood before Sam shaking his
head. His whole attitude had changed, and he looked like a man caught
doing a foolish or absurd thing.
“Nothing doing, nothing doing, Mr. McPherson,” he said, starting for the
hotel door.
At the door he stopped and shook his finger at Sam.
“It won’t work,” he said, emphatically. “Chicago is too wise.”
Sam turned and went back to his room. His name had killed his only
chance to beat Crofts, Jake, Bill and Ed. In his room he sat looking out
of the window into the street.
“Where shall I take hold now?” he asked himself.
Turning out the lights he sat listening to the roar of the waterfall and
thinking of the events of the last week.
“I have had a time,” he thought. “I have tried something and even though
it did not work it has been the best fun I have had for years.”
The hours slipped away and night came on. He could hear men shouting and
laughing in the street, and going downstairs he stood in a hallway at
the edge of the crowd that gathered about the socialist. The orator
shouted and waved his hand. He seemed as proud as a young recruit who
has just passed through his first baptism of fire.
“He tried to make a fool of me--McPherson of Chicago--the
millionaire--one of the capitalist kings--he tried to bribe me and my
party.”
In the crowd the old carpenter was dancing in the road and rubbing his
hands together. With the feeling of a man who had finished a piece of
work or turned the last leaf of a book, Sam went back to his hotel.
“In the morning I shall be on my way,” he thought.
A knock came at the door and the red-haired man came in. He closed the
door softly and winked at Sam.
“Ed made a mistake,” he said, and laughed. “The old man told him you
were a socialist and he thought you were trying to spoil the graft.
He is scared about that beating you got and mighty sorry. He’s all
right--Ed is--and he and Bill and I have got the votes. What made you
stay under cover so long? Why didn’t you tell us you were McPherson?”
Sam saw the hopelessness of any attempt to explain. Jake had evidently
sold out the men. Sam wondered how.
“How do you know you can deliver the votes?’” he asked, trying to lead
Jake on.
Jake rolled the quid in his mouth and winked again.
“It was easy enough to fix the men when Ed, Bill and I got together,” he
said. “You know about the other. There’s a clause in the act authorising
the bond issue, a sleeper, Bill calls it. You know more about that than
I do. Anyway the power will be turned over to the man we say.”
“But how do I know you can deliver the votes?”
Jake threw out his hand impatiently.
“What do they know?” he asked sharply. “What they want is more wages.
There’s a million in the power deal and they can’t any more realise a
million than they can tell what they want to do in Heaven. I promised
Ed’s fellows the city scale. Ed can’t kick. He’ll make a hundred
thousand as it stands. Then I promised the plough works gang a ten per
cent raise. We’ll get it for them if we can, but if we can’t, they won’t
know it till the deal is put through.”
Sam walked over and held open the door.
“Good night,” he said.
Jake looked annoyed.
“Ain’t you even going to make a bid against Crofts?” he asked. “We ain’t
tied to him if you do better by us. I’m in this thing because you put me
in. That piece you wrote up the river scared ‘em stiff. I want to do
the right thing by you. Don’t be sore about Ed. He wouldn’t a done it if
he’d known.”
Sam shook his head and stood with his hand still on the door.
“Good night,” he said again. “I am not in it. I have dropped it. No use
trying to explain.”
CHAPTER II
For weeks and months Sam led a wandering vagabond life, and surely a
stranger or more restless vagabond never went upon the road. In his
pocket he had at almost any time from one to five thousand dollars, his
bag went on from place to place ahead of him, and now and then he caught
up with it, unpacked it, and wore a suit of his former Chicago clothes
upon the streets of some town. For the most part, however, he wore the
rough clothes bought from Ed, and, when these were gone, others like
them, with a warm canvas outer jacket, and for rough weather a pair of
heavy boots lacing half way up the legs. Among the people, he passed for
a rather well-set-up workman with money in his pocket going his own way.
During all those months of wandering, and even when he had returned to
something nearer his former way of life, his mind was unsettled and his
outlook on life disturbed. Sometimes it seemed to him that he, among
all men, was a unique, an innovation. Day after day his mind ground away
upon his problem and he was determined to seek and to keep on seeking
until he found for himself a way of peace. In the towns and in the
country through which he passed he saw the clerks in the stores,
the merchants with worried faces hurrying into banks, the farmers,
brutalised by toil, dragging their weary bodies homeward at the coming
of night, and told himself that all life was abortive, that on all sides
of him it wore itself out in little futile efforts or ran away in side
currents, that nowhere did it move steadily, continuously forward giving
point to the tremendous sacrifice involved in just living and working in
the world. He thought of Christ going about seeing the world and talking
to men, and thought that he too would go and talk to them, not as a
teacher, but as one seeking eagerly to be taught. At times he was filled
with longing and inexpressible hopes and, like the boy of Caxton, would
get out of bed, not now to stand in Miller’s pasture watching the rain
on the surface of the water, but to walk endless miles through the
darkness getting the blessed relief of fatigue into his body and often
paying for and occupying two beds in one night.
Sam wanted to go back to Sue; he wanted peace and something like
happiness, but most of all he wanted work, real work, work that would
demand of him day after day the best and finest in him so that he would
be held to the need of renewing constantly the better impulses of his
mind. He was at the top of his life, and the few weeks of hard physical
exertion as a driver of nails and a bearer of timbers had begun to
restore his body to shapeliness and strength, so that he was filled anew
with all of his native restlessness and energy; but he was determined
that he would not again pour himself out in work that would react upon
him as had his money making, his dream of beautiful children, and this
last half-formed dream of a kind of financial fatherhood to the Illinois
town.
The incident with Ed and the red-haired man had been his first serious
effort at anything like social service achieved through controlling or
attempting to influence the public mind, for his was the type of mind
that runs to the concrete, the actual. As he sat in the ravine talking
to Jake, and, later, coming home in the boat under the multitude of
stars, he had looked up from among the drunken workmen and his mind had
seen a city built for a people, a city independent, beautiful, strong,
and free, but a glimpse of a red head through a barroom door and a
socialist trembling before a name had dispelled the vision. After his
return from hearing the socialist, who in his turn was hedged about by
complicated influences, and in those November days when he walked south
through Illinois, seeing the late glory of the trees and breathing the
fine air, he laughed at himself for having had the vision. It was not
that the red-haired man had sold him out, it was not the beating given
him by Ed’s sullen-faced son or the blows across the face at the hands
of his vigorous wife--it was just that at bottom he did not believe the
people wanted reform; they wanted a ten per cent raise in wages. The
public mind was a thing too big, too complicated and inert for a vision
or an ideal to get at and move deeply.
And then, walking on the road and struggling to find truth even within
himself, Sam had to come to something else. At bottom he was no leader,
no reformer. He had not wanted the free city for a free people, but as a
work to be done by his own hand. He was McPherson, the money maker, the
man who loved himself. The fact, not the sight of Jake hobnobbing with
Bill or the timidity of the socialist, had blocked his way to work as a
political reformer and builder.
Tramping south between the rows of shocked corn he laughed at himself.
“The experience with Ed and Jake has done something for me,” he thought.
“They bullied me. I have been a kind of bully myself and what has
happened has been good medicine for me.”
Sam walked the roads of Illinois, Ohio, New York, and other states,
through hill country and flat country, in the snow drifts of winter and
through the storms of spring, talking to people, asking their way of
life and the end toward which they worked. At night he dreamed of Sue,
of his boyhood struggles in Caxton, of Janet Eberly sitting in her chair
and talking of writers of books, or, visualising the stock exchange or
some garish drinking place, he saw again the faces of Crofts, Webster,
Morrison, and Prince intent and eager as he laid before them some scheme
of money making. Sometimes at night he awoke, seized with horror, seeing
Colonel Tom with the revolver pressed against his head; and sitting in
his bed, and all through the next day he talked aloud to himself.
“The damned old coward,” he shouted into the darkness of his room or
into the wide peaceful prospect of the countryside.
The idea of Colonel Tom as a suicide seemed unreal, grotesque, horrible.
It was as though some round-cheeked, curly-headed boy had done the thing
to himself. The man had been so boyishly, so blusteringly incompetent,
so completely and absolutely without bigness and purpose.
“And yet,” thought Sam, “he has found strength to whip me, the man of
ability. He has taken revenge, absolute and unanswerable, for the slight
I put upon the little play world in which he had been king.”
In fancy Sam could see the great paunch and the little white pointed
beard sticking up from the floor in the room where the colonel lay dead,
and into his mind came a saying, a sentence, the distorted remembrance
of a thought he had got from a book of Janet’s or from some talk he had
heard, perhaps at his own dinner table.
“It is horrible to see a fat man with purple veins in his face lying
dead.”
At such times he hurried along the road like one pursued. People driving
past in buggies and seeing him and hearing the stream of talk that
issued from his lips, turned and watched him out of sight. And Sam,
hurrying and seeking relief from the thoughts in his mind, called to
the old commonsense instincts within himself as a captain marshals his
forces to withstand an attack.
“I will find work. I will find work. I will seek Truth,” he said.
Sam avoided the larger towns or went hurriedly through them, sleeping
night after night at village hotels or at some hospitable farmhouse, and
daily he increased the length of his walks, getting real satisfaction
from the aching of his legs and from the bruising of his unaccustomed
feet on the hard road. Like St. Jerome, he had a wish to beat upon
his body and subdue the flesh. In turn he was blown upon by the wind,
chilled by the winter frost, wet by the rains, and warmed by the sun.
In the spring he swam in rivers, lay on sheltered hillsides watching the
cattle grazing in the fields and the white clouds floating across the
sky, and constantly his legs became harder and his body more flat and
sinewy. Once he slept for a night in a straw stack at the edge of a
woods and in the morning was awakened by a farmer’s dog licking his
face.
Several times he came up to vagabonds, umbrella menders and other
roadsters, and walked with them, but he found in their society no
incentive to join in their flights across country on freight trains or
on the fronts of passenger trains. Those whom he met and with whom he
talked and walked did not interest him greatly. They had no end in
life, sought no ideal of usefulness. Walking and talking with them, the
romance went out of their wandering life. They were utterly dull and
stupid, they were, almost without exception, strikingly unclean, they
wanted passionately to get drunk, and they seemed to be forever avoiding
life with its problems and responsibilities. They always talked of
the big cities, of “Chi” and “Cinci” and “Frisco,” and were bent upon
getting to one of these places. They condemned the rich and begged and
stole from the poor, talked swaggeringly of their personal courage and
ran whimpering and begging before country constables. One of them, a
tall, leering youth in a grey cap, who came up to Sam one evening at the
edge of a village in Indiana, tried to rob him. Full of his new strength
and with the thought of Ed’s wife and the sullen-faced son in his mind,
Sam sprang upon him and had revenge for the beating received in the
office of Ed’s hotel by beating this fellow in his turn. When the tall
youth had partially recovered from the beating and had staggered to his
feet, he ran off into the darkness, stopping when well out of reach to
hurl a stone that splashed in the mud of the road at Sam’s feet.
Everywhere Sam sought people who would talk to him of themselves. He
had a kind of faith that a message would come to him out of the mouth of
some simple, homely dweller of the villages or the farms. A woman,
with whom he talked in the railroad station at Fort Wayne, Indiana,
interested him so that he went into a train with her and travelled all
night in the day coach, listening to her talk of her three sons, one
of whom had weak lungs and had, with two younger brothers, taken up
government land in the west. The woman had been with them for some
months, helping them to get a start.
“I was raised on a farm and knew things they could not know,” she told
Sam, raising her voice above the rumble of the train and the snoring of
fellow passengers.
She had worked with her sons in the field, ploughing and planting, had
driven a team across country, carrying boards for the building of a
house, and had grown brown and strong at the work.
“And Walter is getting well. His arms are as brown as my own and he has
gained eleven pounds,” she said, rolling up her sleeves and showing her
heavy, muscular forearms.
She planned to take her husband, a machinist working in a bicycle
factory in Buffalo, and her two grown daughters, clerks in a drygoods
store, with her and return to the new country, and having a sense of her
hearer’s interest in her story, she talked of the bigness of the
west and the loneliness of the vast, silent plains, saying that they
sometimes made her heart ache. Sam thought she had in some way achieved
success, although he did not see how her experience could serve as a
guide to him.
“You have got somewhere. You have got hold of a truth,” he said, taking
her hand when he got off the train at Cleveland, at dawn.
At another time, in the late spring, when he was tramping through
southern Ohio, a man drove up beside him, and pulling in his horse,
asked, “Where are you going?” adding genially, “I may be able to give
you a lift.”
Sam looked at him and smiled. Something in the man’s manner or in his
dress suggesting the man of God, he assumed a bantering air.
“I am on my way to the New Jerusalem,” he said seriously. “I am one who
seeks God.”
The young minister picked up his reins with a look of alarm, but when
he saw a smile playing about the corners of Sam’s mouth, he turned the
wheels of his buggy.
“Get in and come along with me and we will talk of the New Jerusalem,”
he said.
On the impulse Sam got into the buggy, and driving along the dusty road,
told the essential parts of his story and of his quest for an end toward
which he might work.
“It would be simple enough if I were without money and driven by hard
necessity, but I am not. I want work, not because it is work and will
bring me bread and butter, but because I need to be doing something that
will satisfy me when I am done. I do not want so much to serve men as to
serve myself. I want to get at happiness and usefulness as for years I
got at money making. There is a right way of life for such a man as me,
and I want to find that way.”
The young minister, who was a graduate of a Lutheran seminary at
Springfield, Ohio, and had come out of college with a very serious
outlook on life, took Sam to his house and together they sat talking
half the night. He had a wife, a country girl with a babe lying at
her breast, who got supper for them, and who, after supper, sat in the
shadows in a corner of the living-room listening to their talk.
The two men sat together. Sam smoked his pipe and the minister poked at
a coal fire that burned in a stove. They talked of God and of what the
thought of God meant to men; but the young minister did not try to give
Sam an answer to his problem; on the contrary, Sam found him strikingly
dissatisfied and unhappy in his way of life.
“There is no spirit of God here,” he said, poking viciously at the coals
in the stove. “The people here do not want me to talk to them of God.
They have no curiosity about what He wants of them nor of why He has
put them here. They want me to tell them of a city in the sky, a kind
of glorified Dayton, Ohio, to which they can go when they have finished
this life of work and of putting money in the savings bank.”
For several days Sam stayed with the clergyman, driving about the
country with him and talking of God. In the evening they sat in the
house, continuing their talks, and on Sunday Sam went to hear the man
preach in his church.
The sermon was a disappointment to Sam. Although his host had talked
vigorously and well in private, his public address was stilted and
unnatural.
“The man,” thought Sam, “has no feeling for public address and is not
treating his people well in not giving them, without reservation,
the ideas he has expounded to me in his house.” He decided there was
something to be said for the people who sat patiently listening week
after week and who gave the man the means of a living for so lame an
effort.
One evening when Sam had been with them for a week the young wife came
to him as he stood on the little porch before the house.
“I wish you would go away,” she said, standing with her babe in her
arms and looking at the porch floor. “You stir him up and make him
dissatisfied.”
Sam stepped off the porch and hurried off up the road into the darkness.
There had been tears in the wife’s eyes.
In June he went with a threshing crew, working among labourers and
eating with them in the fields or about the crowded tables of farmhouses
where they stopped to thresh. Each day Sam and the men with him worked
in a new place and had as helpers the farmer for whom they threshed and
several of his neighbours. The farmers worked at a killing pace and the
men of the threshing crew were expected to keep abreast of each new lot
of them day after day. At night the threshermen, too weary for talk,
crept into the loft of a barn, slept until daylight and then began
another day of heartbreaking toil. On Sunday morning they went for a
swim in some creek and in the afternoon sat in a barn or under the trees
of an orchard sleeping or indulging in detached, fragmentary bits of
talk, talk that never rose above a low, wearisome level. For hours they
would try to settle a dispute as to whether a horse they had seen at
some farm during the week had three, or four, white feet, and one man
in the crew never talked at all, sitting on his heels through the long
Sunday afternoons and whittling at a stick with his pocket knife.
The threshing outfit with which Sam worked was owned by a man named Joe,
who was in debt for it to the maker and who, after working with the
men all day, drove about the country half the night making deals
with farmers for other days of threshing. Sam thought that he looked
constantly on the point of collapse through overwork and worry, and one
of the men, who had been with Joe through several seasons, told Sam that
at the end of the season their employer did not have enough money left
from his season of work to pay the interest on the debt for his machines
and that he continually took jobs for less than the cost of doing them.
“One has to keep going,” said Joe, when one day Sam began talking to him
on the matter.
When told to keep Sam’s wage until the end of the season he looked
relieved and at the end of the season came to Sam, looking more worried
and said that he had no money.
“I will give you a note bearing good interest if you can let me have a
little time,” he said.
Sam took the note and looked at the pale, drawn face peering out of him
from the shadows at the back of the barn.
“Why do you not drop the whole thing and begin working for some one
else?” he asked.
Joe looked indignant.
“A man wants independence,” he said.
When Sam got again upon the road he stopped at a little bridge over a
stream, and tearing up Joe’s note watched the torn pieces of it float
away upon the brown water.
CHAPTER III
Through the summer and early fall Sam continued his wanderings. The
days on which something happened or on which something outside himself
interested or attracted him were special days, giving him food for hours
of thought, but for the most part he walked on and on for weeks, sunk in
a kind of healing lethargy of physical fatigue. Always he tried to get
at people who came into his way and to discover something of their way
of life and the end toward which they worked, and many an open-mouthed,
staring man and woman he left behind him on the road and on the
sidewalks of the villages. He had one principle of action; whenever an
idea came into his mind he did not hesitate, but began trying at once
the practicability of living by following the idea, and although
the practice brought him to no end and only seemed to multiply the
difficulties of the problem he was striving to work out, it brought him
many strange experiences.
At one time he was for several days a bartender in a saloon in a town
in eastern Ohio. The saloon was in a small wooden building facing a
railroad track and Sam had gone in there with a labourer met on the
sidewalk. It was a stormy night in September at the end of his first
year of wandering and while he stood by a roaring coal stove, after
buying drinks for the labourer and cigars for himself, several men came
in and stood by the bar drinking together. As they drank they became
more and more friendly, slapping each other on the back, singing songs
and boasting. One of them got out upon the floor and danced a jig. The
proprietor, a round-faced man with one dead eye, who had himself been
drinking freely, put a bottle upon the bar and coming up to Sam, began
complaining that he had no bartender and had to work long hours.
“Drink what you want, boys, and then I’ll tell you what you owe,” he
said to the men standing along the bar.
Watching the men who drank and played like school boys about the room,
and looking at the bottle sitting on the bar, the contents of which had
for the moment taken the sombre dulness out of the lives of the workmen,
Sam said to himself, “I will take up this trade. It may appeal to me. At
least I shall be selling forgetfulness and not be wasting my life with
this tramping on the road and thinking.”
The saloon in which he worked was a profitable one and although in an
obscure place had made its proprietor what is called “well fixed.” It
had a side door opening into an alley and one went up this alley to the
main street of the town. The front door looking upon the railroad tracks
was but little used, perhaps at the noon hour two or three young men
from the freight depot down the tracks would come in by it and stand
about drinking beer, but the trade that came down the alley and in at
the side door was prodigious. All day long men hurried in at this door,
took drinks and hurried out again, looking up the alley and running
quickly when they found the way clear. These men all drank whiskey, and
when Sam had worked for a few days in the place he once made the mistake
of reaching for the bottle when he heard the door open.
“Let them ask for it,” said the proprietor gruffly. “Do you want to
insult a man?”
On Saturday the place was filled all day with beer-drinking farmers, and
at odd hours on other days men came in, whimpering and begging drinks.
When alone in the place, Sam looked at the trembling fingers of these
men and put the bottle before them, saying, “Drink all you want of the
stuff.”
When the proprietor was in, the men who begged drinks stood a moment
by the stove and then went out thrusting their hands into their coat
pockets and looking at the floor.
“Bar flies,” the proprietor explained laconically.
The whiskey was horrible. The proprietor mixed it himself and put it
into stone jars that stood under the bar, pouring it out of these into
bottles as they became empty. He kept on display in glass cases bottles
of well known brands of whiskey, but when a man came in and asked for
one of these brands Sam handed him a bottle bearing that label from
beneath the bar, a bottle previously filled by Al from the jugs of
his own mixture. As Al sold no mixed drinks Sam was compelled to know
nothing the bartender’s art and stood all day handing out Al’s poisonous
stuff and the foaming glasses of beer the workingmen drank in the
evening.
Of the men coming in at the side door, a shoe merchant, a grocer, the
proprietor of a restaurant, and a telegraph operator interested Sam
most. Several times each day these men would appear, glance back over
their shoulders at the door, and then turning to the bar would look at
Sam apologetically.
“Give me a little out of the bottle, I have a bad cold,” they would say,
as though repeating a formula.
At the end of the week Sam was on the road again. The rather bizarre
notion that by staying there he would be selling forgetfulness of life’s
unhappiness had been dispelled during his first day’s duty, and his
curiosity concerning the customers was his undoing. As the men came in
at the side door and stood before him Sam leaned over the bar and asked
them why they drank. Some of the men laughed, some swore at him, and the
telegraph operator reported the matter to Al, calling Sam’s question an
impertinence.
“You fool, don’t you know better than to be throwing stones at the bar?”
Al roared, and with an oath discharged him.
CHAPTER IV
One fine warm morning in the fall Sam was sitting in a little park in
the centre of a Pennsylvania manufacturing town watching men and
women going through the quiet streets to the factories and striving to
overcome a feeling of depression aroused by an experience of the evening
before. He had come into town over a poorly made clay road running
through barren hills, and, depressed and weary, had stood on the shores
of a river, swollen by the early fall rains, that flowed along the edges
of the town.
Before him in the distance he had looked into the windows of a huge
factory, the black smoke from which added to the gloom of the scene that
lay before him. Through the windows of the factory, dimly seen, workers
ran here and there, appearing and disappearing, the glare of the furnace
fire lighting now one, now another of them, sharply. At his feet the
tumbling waters that rolled and pitched over a little dam fascinated
him. Looking closely at the racing waters his head, light from physical
weariness, reeled, and in fear of falling he had been compelled to grip
firmly the small tree against which he leaned. In the back yard of a
house across the stream from Sam and facing the factory four guinea hens
sat on a board fence, their weird, plaintive cries making a peculiarly
fitting accompaniment to the scene that lay before him, and in the yard
itself two bedraggled fowls fought each other. Again and again they
sprang into the fray, striking out with bills and spurs. Becoming
exhausted, they fell to picking and scratching among the rubbish in the
yard, and when they had a little recovered renewed the struggle. For an
hour Sam had looked at the scene, letting his eyes wander from the river
to the grey sky and to the factory belching forth its black smoke. He
had thought that the two feebly struggling fowls, immersed in their
pointless struggle in the midst of such mighty force, epitomised much of
man’s struggle in the world, and, turning, had gone along the sidewalks
and to the village hotel, feeling old and tired. Now on the bench in
the little park, with the early morning sun shining down through the
glistening rain drops clinging to the red leaves of the trees, he began
to lose the sense of depression that had clung to him through the night.
A young man who walked in the park saw him idly watching the hurrying
workers, and stopped to sit beside him.
“On the road, brother?” he asked.
Sam shook his head, and the other began talking.
“Fools and slaves,” he said earnestly, pointing to the men and women
passing on the sidewalk. “See them going like beasts to their bondage?
What do they get for it? What kind of lives do they lead? The lives of
dogs.”
He looked at Sam for approval of the sentiment he had voiced.
“We are all fools and slaves,” said Sam, stoutly.
Jumping to his feet the young man began waving his arms about.
“There, you talk sense,” he cried. “Welcome to our town, stranger. We
have no thinkers here. The workers are like dogs. There is no solidarity
among them. Come and have breakfast with me.”
In the restaurant the young man began talking of himself. He was a
graduate of the University of Pennsylvania. His father had died while he
was yet in school and had left him a modest fortune, upon the income of
which he lived with his mother. He did no work and was enormously proud
of the fact.
“I refuse to work! I scorn it!” he declared, shaking a breakfast roll in
the air.
Since leaving school he had devoted himself to the cause of the
socialist party in his native town, and boasted of the leadership he
had already achieved. His mother, he declared, was disturbed and worried
because of his connection with the movement.
“She wants me to be respectable,” he said sadly, and added, “What’s the
use trying to explain to a woman? I can’t get her to see the difference
between a socialist and a direct-action anarchist and I’ve given up
trying. She expects me to end by blowing somebody up with dynamite or by
getting into jail for throwing bricks at the borough police.”
He talked of a strike going on among some girl employés of a Jewish
shirtwaist factory in the town, and Sam, immediately interested, began
asking questions, and after breakfast went with his new acquaintance to
the scene of the strike.
The shirtwaist factory was located in a loft above a grocery store, and
on the sidewalk in front of the store three girl pickets were walking up
and down. A flashily dressed Hebrew, with a cigar in his mouth and his
hands in his trousers pockets, stood in the stairway leading to the loft
and looked closely at the young socialist and Sam. From his lips came
a stream of vile words which he pretended to be addressing to the
empty air. When Sam walked towards him he turned and ran up the stairs,
shouting oaths over his shoulder.
Sam joined the three girls, and began talking to them, walking up and
down with them before the grocery store.
“What are you doing to win?” he asked when they had told him of their
grievances.
“We do what we can!” said a Jewish girl with broad hips, great motherly
breasts, and fine, soft, brown eyes, who appeared to be a leader and
spokesman among the strikers. “We walk up and down here and try to get
a word with the strikebreakers the boss has brought in from other towns,
when they go in and come out.”
Frank, the University man, spoke up. “We are putting up stickers
everywhere,” he said. “I myself have put up hundreds of them.”
He took from his coat pocket a printed slip, gummed on one side, and
told Sam that he had been putting them on walls and telegraph poles
about town. The thing was vilely written. “Down with the dirty scabs”
was the heading in bold, black letters across the top.
Sam was shocked at the vileness of the caption and at the crude
brutality of the text printed on the slip.
“Do you call women workers names like that?” he asked.
“They have taken our work from us,” the Jewish girl answered simply and
began again, telling the story of her sister strikers and of what the
low wage had meant to them and to their families. “To me it does not so
much matter; I have a brother who works in a clothing store and he can
support me, but many of the women in our union have only their wage here
with which to feed their families.”
Sam’s mind began working on the problem.
“Here,” he declared, “is something definite to do, a battle in which I
will pit myself against this employer for the sake of these women.”
He put away from him his experience in the Illinois town, telling
himself that the young woman walking beside him would have a sense of
honour unknown to the red-haired young workman who had sold him out to
Bill and Ed.
“I failed with my money,” he thought, “now I will try to help these
girls with my energy.”
Turning to the Jewish girl he made a quick decision.
“I will help you get your places back,” he said.
Leaving the girls he went across the street to a barber shop where he
could watch the entrance to the factory. He wanted to think out a method
of procedure and wanted also to look at the girl strikebreakers as
they came to work. After a time several girls came along the street and
turned in at the stairway. The flashily dressed Hebrew with the cigar
still in his mouth was again by the stairway entrance. The three pickets
running forward accosted the file of girls going up the stairs, one
of whom, a young American girl with yellow hair, turned and shouted
something over her shoulder. The man called Frank shouted back and the
Hebrew took the cigar out of his mouth and laughed heartily. Sam filled
and lighted his pipe, a dozen plans for helping the striking girls
running through his mind.
During the morning he went into the grocery store on the corner, a
saloon in the neighbourhood, and returned to the barber shop talking to
men of the strike. He ate his lunch alone, still thinking of the three
girls patiently walking up and down before the stairway. Their ceaseless
walking seemed to him a useless waste of energy.
“They should be doing something more definite,” he thought.
After lunch he joined the soft-eyed Jewish girl and together they walked
along the street talking of the strike.
“You cannot win this strike by just calling nasty names,” he said. “I
do not like that ‘dirty scab’ sticker Frank had in his pocket. It cannot
help you and only antagonises the girls who have taken your places. Here
in this part of town the people want to see you win. I have talked to
the men who come into the saloon and the barber shop across the street
and you already have their sympathy. You want to get the sympathy of the
girls who have taken your places. Calling them dirty scabs only makes
martyrs of them. Did the yellow-haired girl call you a name this
morning?”
The Jewish girl looked at Sam and laughed bitterly.
“Rather; she called me a loud-mouthed street walker.”
They continued their walk along the street, across the railroad track
and a bridge, and into a quiet residence street. Carriages stood at
the curb before the houses, and pointing to these and to the well-kept
houses Sam said, “Men have bought these things for their women.”
A shadow fell across the girl’s face.
“I suppose all of us want what these women have,” she answered. “We do
not really want to fight and to stand on our own feet, not when we know
the world. What a woman really wants is a man,” she added shortly.
Sam began talking and told her of a plan that had come into his mind.
He had remembered how Jack Prince and Morrison used to talk about the
appeal of the direct personal letter and how effectively it was used by
mail order houses.
“We will have a mail order strike here,” he said and went on to lay
before her the details of his plan. He proposed that she, Frank, and
some others of the striking girls, should go about town getting the
names and the mail addresses of the girl strikebreakers.
“Get also the names of the keepers of the boarding houses at which
these girls live and the names of the men and women who live in the
same houses,” he suggested. “Then you get the striking girls and women
together and have them tell me their stories. We will write letters day
after day to the girl strikebreakers, to the women who keep the boarding
houses, and to the people who live in the houses and sit at table with
them. We won’t call names. We will tell the story of what being beaten
in this fight means to the women in your union, tell it simply and
truthfully as you told it to me this morning.”
“It will cost such a lot,” said the Jewish girl, shaking her head.
Sam took a roll of bills from his pocket and showed it to her.
“I will pay,” he said.
“Why?” she asked, looking at him sharply.
“Because I am a man wanting work just as you want work,” he replied, and
then went on hurriedly, “It is a long story. I am a rich man wandering
about the world seeking Truth. I will not want that known. Take me for
granted. You won’t be sorry.”
Within an hour he had engaged a large room, paying a month’s rent in
advance, and into the room chairs and table and typewriters had
been brought. He put an advertisement in the evening paper for girl
stenographers, and a printer, hurried by a promise of extra pay, ran out
for him several thousand letter heads across the top of which in bold,
black type ran the words, “The Girl Strikers.”
That night Sam held, in the room he had engaged, a meeting of the girl
strikers, explaining to them his plan and offering to pay all expenses
of the fight he proposed to make for them. They clapped their hands and
shouted approvingly, and Sam began laying out his campaign.
One of the girls he told off to stand in front of the factory morning
and evening.
“I will have other help for you there,” he said. “Before you go home
to-night there will be a printer here with a bundle of pamphlets I am
having printed for you.”
Advised by the soft-eyed Jewish girl, he told off others to get
additional names for the mailing list he wanted, getting many important
ones from girls in the room. Six of the girls he asked to come in the
morning to help him with addressing and mailing letters. The Jewish girl
he told to take charge of the girls at work in the room--on the morrow
to become also an office--and to superintend getting the names.
Frank rose at the back of the room.
“Who are you anyway?” he asked.
“A man with money and the ability to win this strike,” Sam told him.
“What are you doing it for?” demanded Frank.
The Jewish girl sprang to her feet.
“Because he believes in these women and wants to help,” she explained.
“Rot,” said Frank, going out at the door.
It was snowing when the meeting ended, and Sam and the Jewish girl
finished their talk in the hallway leading to her room.
“I don’t know what Harrigan, the union leader from Pittsburgh, will
say to this,” she told him. “He appointed Frank to lead and direct the
strike here. He doesn’t like interference and he may not like your plan.
But we working women need men, men like you who can plan and do things.
There are too many men living on us. We need men who will work for all
of us as the men work for the women in the carriages and automobiles.”
She laughed and put out a hand to him. “See what you have got yourself
into? I want you to be a husband to our entire union.”
The next morning four girl stenographers went to work in Sam’s strike
headquarters, and he wrote his first strike letter, a letter telling
the story of a striking girl named Hadaway, whose young brother was sick
with tuberculosis. Sam did not put any flourishes in the letter; he
felt that he did not need to. He thought that with twenty or thirty such
letters, each telling briefly and truthfully the story of one of the
striking girls, he should be able to show one American town how its
other half lived. He gave the letter to the four girl stenographers with
the mailing list he already had and started them writing it to each of
the names.
At eight o’clock a man came in to install a telephone and girl strikers
began bringing in new names for the mailing list. At nine o’clock three
more stenographers appeared and were put to work, and girls who had been
in began sending more names over the ‘phone. The Jewish girl walked up
and down, giving orders, making suggestions. From time to time she ran
to Sam’s desk and suggested other sources of names for the mailing list.
Sam thought that if the other working girls were timid and embarrassed
before him this one was not. She was like a general on the field of
battle. Her soft brown eyes glowed, her mind worked rapidly, and her
voice had a ring in it. At her suggestion Sam gave the girls at the
typewriters lists bearing the names of town officials, bankers and
prominent business men, and the wives of all these, also presidents of
various women’s clubs, society women, and charitable organizations. She
called reporters from the town’s two daily papers and had them interview
Sam, and at her suggestion he gave them copies of the Hadaway girl
letter to print.
“Print it,” he said, “and if you cannot use it as news, make it an
advertisement and bring the bill to me.”
At eleven o’clock Frank came into the room bringing a tall Irishman,
with sunken cheeks, black, unclean teeth, and an overcoat too small for
him. Leaving him standing by the door, Frank walked across the room to
Sam.