“Come to lunch with us,” he said. He jerked his thumb over his shoulder

toward the tall Irishman. “I picked him up,” he said. “Best brain that’s

been in town for years. He’s a wonder. Used to be a Catholic priest.

He doesn’t believe in God or love or anything. Come on out and hear him

talk. He’s great.”

Sam shook his head.

“I am too busy. There is work to be done here. We are going to win this

strike.”

Frank looked at him doubtfully and then about the room at the busy

girls.

“I don’t know what Harrigan will think of all this,” he said. “He

doesn’t like interferences. I never do anything without writing him.

I wrote and told him what you were doing here. I had to, you know. I’m

responsible to headquarters.”

In the afternoon the Hebrew owner of the shirtwaist factory came in to

strike headquarters and, walking through the room took off his hat and

sat down by Sam’s desk.

“What do you want here?” he asked. “The newspaper boys told me of what

you had planned to do. What’s your game?”

“I want to whip you,” Sam answered quietly, “to whip you good. You might

as well get into line. You are going to lose this strike.”

“I’m only one,” said the Hebrew. “There is an association of us

manufacturers of shirtwaists. We are all in this. We all have a strike

on our hands. What will you gain if you do beat me here? I’m only a

little fellow after all.”

Sam laughed and picking up his pen began writing.

“You are unlucky,” he said. “I just happened to take hold here. When I

have you beaten I will go on and beat the others. There is more money

back of me than back of you all, and I am going to beat every one of

you.”

The next morning a crowd stood before the stairway leading to the

factory when the strikebreaking girls came to work. The letters and

the newspaper interview had been effective and more than half the

strikebreakers did not appear. The others hurried along the street and

turned in at the stairway without looking at the crowd. The girl,

told off by Sam, stood on the sidewalk passing out pamphlets to the

strikebreakers. The pamphlets were headed, “The Story of Ten Girls,” and

told briefly and pointedly the stories of ten striking girls and what

the loss of the strike meant to them and to their families.

After a while there drove up two carriages and a large automobile, and

out of the automobile climbed a well-dressed woman who took a bundle of

the pamphlets from the girl picket and began passing them about among

the people. Two policemen who stood in front of the crowd took off their

helmets and accompanied her. The crowd cheered. Frank came hurrying

across the street to where Sam stood in front of the barber shop and

slapped him on the back.

“You’re a wonder,” he said.

Sam hurried back to the room and prepared the second letter for the

mailing list. Two more stenographers had come to work. He had to send

out for more machines. A reporter for the town’s evening paper ran up

the stairway.

“Who are you?” he asked. “The town wants to know.”

From his pocket he took a telegram from a Pittsburgh daily.

“What about mail-order strike plan? Give name and story new strike

leader there.”

At ten o’clock Frank returned.

“There’s a wire from Harrigan,” he said. “He’s coming here. He wants a

mass meeting of the girls for to-night. I’ve got to get them together.

We’ll meet here in this room.”

In the room the work went on. The list of names for the mailing had

doubled. The picket at the shirtwaist factory reported that three more

of the strikebreakers had left the plant. The Jewish girl was excited.

She went hurrying about the room, her eyes glowing.

“It’s great,” she said. “The plan is working. The whole town is aroused

and for us. We’ll win in another twenty-four hours.”

And then at seven o’clock that night Harrigan came into the room where

Sam sat with the assembled girls, bolting the door behind him. He was a

short, strongly built man with blue eyes and red hair. He walked about

the room in silence, followed by Frank. Suddenly he stopped and, picking

up one of the typewriting machines rented by Sam for the letter writing,

raised it above his head and sent it smashing to the floor.

“A hell of a strike leader,” he roared. “Look at this. Scab machines!

“Scab stenographers!” he said through his teeth. “Scab printing! Scab

everything!”

Picking up a bundle of the letterheads, he tore them across, and walking

to the front of the room, shook his fist before Sam’s face.

“Scab leader!” he shouted, turning and facing the girls.

The soft-eyed Jewish girl sprang to her feet.

“He’s winning for us,” she said.

Harrigan walked toward her threateningly.

“Better lose than win a scab victory,” he bellowed.

“Who are you anyway? What grafter sent you here?” he demanded, turning

to Sam.

He launched into a speech. “I have been watching this fellow, I know

him. He has a scheme to break down the union and is being paid by the

capitalists.”

Sam waited to hear no more. Getting up he pulled on his canvas jacket

and started for the door. He saw that already he had involved himself

in a dozen violations of the unionist code and the idea of trying to

convince Harrigan of his disinterestedness did not occur to him.

“Do not mind me,” he said, “I am going.”

He walked between the rows of frightened, white-faced girls and unbolted

the door, the Jewish girl following. At the head of the stairway leading

to the street he stopped and pointed back into the room.

“Go back,” he said, handing her a roll of bills. “Carry on the work

if you can. Get other machines and new printing. I will help you in

secret.”

Turning he ran down the stairs, hurried through the curious crowd

standing at the foot, and walked rapidly along in front of the lighted

stores. A cold rain, half snow, was falling. Beside him walked a young

man with a brown pointed beard, one of the newspaper reporters who had

interviewed him the day before.

“Did Harrigan trim you?” asked the young man, and then added, laughing,

“He told us he intended to throw you down stairs.”

Sam walked on in silence, filled with wrath. He turned into a side

street and stopped when his companion put a hand upon his arm.

“This is our dump,” said the young man, pointing to a long low frame

building facing the side street. “Come in and let us have your story. It

should be a good one.”

Inside the newspaper office another young man sat with his head lying

on a flat-top desk. He was clad in a strikingly flashy plaid coat, had a

little wizened, good-natured face and seemed to have been drinking. The

young man with the beard explained Sam’s identity, taking the sleeping

man by the shoulder and shaking him vigorously.

“Wake up, Skipper! There’s a good story here!” he shouted. “The union

has thrown out the mail-order strike leader!”

The Skipper got to his feet and began shaking his head.

“Of course, of course, Old Top, they would throw you out. You’ve got

some brains. No man with brains can lead a strike. It’s against the laws

of Nature. Something was bound to hit you. Did Roughneck come out from

Pittsburgh?” he asked, turning to the young man of the brown beard.

Then reaching above his head and taking a cap that matched his plaid

coat from a nail on the wall, he winked at Sam. “Come on, Old Top. I’ve

got to get a drink.”

The two men went through a side door and down a dark alley, going in

at the back door of a saloon. Mud lay deep in the alley and The Skipper

sloshed through it, splattering Sam’s clothes and face. In the saloon at

a table facing Sam, with a bottle of French wine between them, he began

explaining.

“I’ve a note coming due at the bank in the morning and no money to pay

it,” he said. “When I have a note coming due I always have no money and

I always get drunk. Then next morning I pay the note. I don’t know how

I do it, but I always come out all right. It’s a system--Now about this

strike.” He plunged into a discussion of the strike while men came in

and out, laughing and drinking. At ten o’clock the proprietor locked

the front door, drew the curtain, and coming to the back of the room sat

down at the table with Sam and The Skipper, bringing another bottle of

the French wine from which the two men continued drinking.

“That man from Pittsburgh busted up your place, eh?” he said, turning

to Sam. “A man came in here to-night and told me. He sent for the

typewriter people and made them take away the machines.”

When they were ready to leave, Sam took money from his pocket and

offered to pay for the bottle of French wine ordered by The Skipper, who

arose and stood unsteadily on his feet.

“Do you mean to insult me?” he demanded indignantly, throwing a

twenty-dollar bill on the table. The proprietor gave him back only

fourteen dollars.

“I might as well wipe off the slate while you’re flush,” he observed,

winking at Sam.

The Skipper sat down again, taking a pencil and pad of paper from his

pocket, and throwing them on the table.

“I want an editorial on the strike for the Old Rag,” he said to Sam. “Do

one for me. Do something strong. Get a punch into it. I want to talk to

my friend here.”

Putting the pad of paper on the table Sam began writing his newspaper

editorial. His head seemed wonderfully clear, his command of words

unusually good. He called the attention of the public to the situation,

the struggles of the striking girls and the intelligent fight they had

been making to win a just cause, following this with paragraphs pointing

out how the effectiveness of the work done had been annulled by the

position taken by the labour and socialist leaders.

“These fellows at bottom care nothing for results,” he wrote. “They are

not thinking of the unemployed women with families to support, they are

thinking only of themselves and their puny leadership which they fear

is threatened. Now we shall have the usual exhibition of all the old

things, struggle, and hatred and defeat.”

When he had finished The Skipper and Sam went back through the alley

to the newspaper office. The Skipper sloshed again through the mud

and carried in his hand a bottle of red gin. At his desk he took the

editorial from Sam’s hands and read it.

“Perfect! Perfect to the thousandth part of an inch, Old Top,” he said,

pounding Sam on the shoulder. “Just what the Old Rag wanted to say about

the strike.” Then climbing upon the desk and putting the plaid coat

under his head he went peacefully to sleep, and Sam, sitting beside the

desk in a shaky office chair, slept also. At daybreak a black man with a

broom in his hand woke them, and going into a long low room filled with

presses The Skipper put his head under a water tap and came back waving

a soiled towel and with water dripping from his hair.

“Now for the day and the labours thereof,” he said, grinning at Sam and

taking a long drink out of the gin bottle.

After breakfast he and Sam took up their stand in front of the barber

shop opposite the stairway leading to the shirtwaist factory. Sam’s girl

with the pamphlets was gone as was also the soft-eyed Jewish girl, and

in their places Frank and the Pittsburgh leader named Harrigan walked up

and down. Again carriages and automobiles stood by the curb, and again

a well-dressed woman got out of a machine and went toward three striking

girls approaching along the sidewalk. The woman was met by Harrigan,

shaking his fist and shouting, and getting back into the machine she

drove off. From the stairway the flashily-dressed Hebrew looked at the

crowd and laughed.

“Where is the new strike leader--the mail-order strike leader?” he

called to Frank.

With the words, a working man with a dinner pail on his arm ran out of

the crowd and knocked the Jew back into the stairway.

“Punch him! Punch the dirty scab leader!” yelled Frank, dancing up and

down on the sidewalk.

Two policemen running forward began leading the workingman up the

street, his dinner pail still clutched in one hand.

“I know something,” The Skipper shouted, pounding Sam on the shoulder.

“I know who will sign that note with me. The woman Harrigan drove back

into her machine is the richest woman in town. I will show her your

editorial. She will think I wrote it and it will get her. You’ll see.”

He ran off up the street, shouting back over his shoulder, “Come over to

the dump, I want to see you again.”

Sam returned to the newspaper office and sat down waiting for The

Skipper who, after a time, came in, took off his coat and began writing

furiously. From time to time he took long drinks out of the bottle of

red gin, and after silently offering it to Sam, continued reeling off

sheet after sheet of loosely-written matter.

“I got her to sign the note,” he called over his shoulder to Sam. “She

was furious at Harrigan and when I told her we were going to attack him

and defend you she fell for it quick. I won out by following my system.

I always get drunk and it always wins.”

At ten o’clock the newspaper office was in a ferment. The little man

with the brown pointed beard, and another, kept running to The Skipper

asking advice, laying typewritten sheets before him, talking as he

wrote.

“Give me a lead. I want one more front page lead,” The Skipper kept

bawling at them, working like mad.

At ten thirty the door opened and Harrigan, accompanied by Frank, came

in. Seeing Sam they stopped, looking at him uncertainly, and at the man

at work at the desk.

“Well, speak up. This is no ladies’ reception room. What do you fellows

want?” snapped The Skipper, glaring at them.

Frank, coming forward, laid a typewritten sheet on the desk, which the

newspaper man read hurriedly.

“Will you use it?” asked Frank.

The Skipper laughed.

“Wouldn’t change a word of it,” he shouted. “Sure I’ll use it. It’s what

I wanted to make my point. You fellows watch me.”

Frank and Harrigan went out and The Skipper, rushing to the door, began

yelling into the room beyond.

“Hey, you Shorty and Tom, I’ve got that last lead.”

Coming back to his desk he began writing again, grinning as he worked.

To Sam he handed the typewritten sheet prepared by Frank.

“Dastardly attempt to win the cause of the working girls by dirty scab

leaders and butter-fingered capitalist class,” it began, and after

this followed a wild jumble of words, words without meaning, sentences

without point in which Sam was called a mealy-mouthed mail-order musser

and The Skipper was mentioned incidentally as a pusillanimous ink

slinger.

“I’ll run the stuff and comment on it,” declared The Skipper, handing

Sam what he had written. It was an editorial inviting the public to

read the article prepared for publication by the strike leaders and

sympathising with the striking girls that their cause had to be lost

because of the incompetence and lack of intelligence of their leaders.

“Hurrah for Roughhouse, the brave man who leads working girls to defeat

in order that he may retain leadership and drive intelligent effort out

of the cause of labour,” wrote The Skipper.

Sam looked at the sheets and out of the window where a snow storm

raged. It seemed to him that a crime was being done and he was sick and

disgusted at his own inability to stop it. The Skipper lighted a short

black pipe and took his cap from a nail on the wall.

“I’m the smoothest little newspaper thing in town and some financier as

well,” he declared. “Let’s go have a drink.”

After the drink Sam walked through the town toward the country. At the

edge of town where the houses became scattered and the road started to

drop away into a deep valley some one helloed behind him. Turning, he

saw the soft-eyed Jewish girl running along a path beside the road.

“Where are you going?” he asked, stopping to lean against a board fence,

the snow falling upon his face.

“I’m going with you,” said the girl. “You’re the best and the strongest

man I’ve ever seen and I’m not going to let you get away. If you’ve got

a wife it don’t matter. She isn’t what she should be or you wouldn’t be

walking about the country alone. Harrigan and Frank say you’re crazy,

but I know better. I am going with you and I’m going to help you find

what you want.”

Sam wondered. She took a roll of bills from a pocket in her dress and

gave it to him.

“I spent three hundred and fourteen dollars,” she said.

They stood looking at each other. She put out a hand and laid it on his

arm. Her eyes, soft and now glowing with eager light looked into his.

Her round breasts rose and fell.

“Anywhere you say. I’ll be your servant if you ask it of me.”

A wave of hot desire ran through Sam followed by a quick reaction. He

thought of his months of weary seeking and his universal failure.

“You are going back to town if I have to drive you there with stones,”

he told her, and turning ran down the valley leaving her standing by the

board fence, her head buried in her arms.

CHAPTER V

One crisp winter evening Sam found himself on a busy street corner in

Rochester, N.Y., watching from a doorway the crowds of people hurrying

or loitering past him. He stood in a doorway near a corner that seemed

to be a public meeting place and from all sides came men and women

who met at the corner, stood for a moment in talk, and then went away

together. Sam found himself beginning to wonder about the meetings.

In the year since he had walked out of the Chicago office his mind had

grown more and more reflective. Little things--a smile on the lips of

an ill-clad old man mumbling and hurrying past him on the street, or the

flutter of a child’s hand from the doorway of a farmhouse--had furnished

him food for hours of thought. Now he watched with interest the little

incidents; the nods, the hand clasps, the hurried stealthy glances

around of the men and women who met for a moment at the corner. On the

sidewalk near his doorway several middle-aged men, evidently from a

large hotel around the corner, were eyeing, with unpleasant, hungry,

furtive eyes the women in the crowd.

A large blond woman stepped into the doorway beside Sam. “Waiting for

some one?” she asked, smiling and looking steadily at him, with

the harried, uncertain, hungry light he had seen in the eyes of the

middle-aged men upon the sidewalk.

“What are you doing here with your husband at work?” he ventured.

She looked startled and then laughed.

“Why don’t you hit me with your fist if you want to jolt me like that?”

she demanded, adding, “I don’t know who you are, but whoever you are I

want to tell you that I’ve quit my husband.”

“Why?” asked Sam.

She laughed again and stepping over looked at him closely.

“I guess you’re bluffing,” she said. “I don’t believe you know Alf at

all. And I’m glad you don’t. I’ve quit Alf, but he would raise Cain just

the same, if he saw me out here hustling.”

Sam stepped out of the doorway and walked down a side street past a

lighted theatre. Along the street women raised their eyes to him and

beyond the theatre, a young girl, brushing against him, muttered,

“Hello, Sport!”

Sam wanted to get away from the unhealthy, hungry look he had seen in

the eyes of the men and women. His mind began working on this side of

the lives of great numbers of people in the cities--of the men and

women on the street corner, of the woman who from the security of a safe

marriage had once thrown a challenge into his eyes as they sat together

in the theatre, and of the thousand little incidents in the lives of

all modern city men and women. He wondered how much that eager, aching

hunger stood in the way of men’s getting hold of life and living it

earnestly and purposefully, as he wanted to live it, and as he felt all

men and women wanted at bottom to live it. When he was a boy in

Caxton he was more than once startled by the flashes of brutality and

coarseness in the speech and actions of kindly, well-meaning men; now

as he walked in the streets of the city he thought that he had got past

being startled. “It is a quality of our lives,” he decided. “American

men and women have not learned to be clean and noble and natural, like

their forests and their wide, clean plains.”

He thought of what he had heard of London, and of Paris, and of other

cities of the old world; and following an impulse acquired through his

lonely wanderings, began talking to himself.

“We are no finer nor cleaner than these,” he said, “and we sprang from

the big clean new land through which I have been walking all these

months. Will mankind always go on with that old aching, queerly

expressed hunger in its blood, and with that look in its eyes? Will

it never shrive itself and understand itself, and turn fiercely and

energetically toward the building of a bigger and cleaner race of men?”

“It won’t unless you help,” came the answer from some hidden part of

him.

Sam fell to thinking of the men who write, and of those who teach, and

he wondered why they did not, all of them, talk more thoughtfully of

vice, and why they so often spent their talents and their energies in

futile attacks upon some phase of life, and ended their efforts toward

human betterment by joining or promoting a temperance league, or

stopping the playing of baseball on Sunday.

As a matter of fact were not many writers and reformers unconsciously

in league with the procurer, in that they treated vice and profligacy as

something, at bottom, charming? He himself had seen none of this vague

charm.

“For me,” he reflected, “there have been no François Villons or Sapphos

in the tenderloins of American cities. There have been instead only

heart-breaking disease and ill health and poverty, and hard brutal faces

and torn, greasy finery.”

He thought of men like Zola who saw this side of life clearly and how

he, as a young fellow in the city, had read the man at Janet Eberly’s

suggestion and had been helped by him--helped and frightened and made

to see. And then there rose before him the leering face of a keeper of

a second-hand book store in Cleveland who some weeks before had pushed

across the counter to him a paper-covered copy of “Nana’s Brother,”

saying with a smirk, “That’s some sporty stuff.” And he wondered what he

should have thought had he bought the book to feed the imagination the

bookseller’s comment was intended to arouse.

In the small towns through which Sam walked and in the small town in

which he grew to manhood vice was openly crude and masculine. It went to

sleep sprawling across a dirty beer-soaked table in Art Sherman’s saloon

in Piety Hollow, and the newsboy passed it without comment, regretting

that it slept and that it had no money with which to buy papers.

“Dissipation and vice get into the life of youth,” he thought, coming to

a street corner where young men played pool and smoked cigarettes in a

dingy poolroom, and turned back toward the heart of the city. “It gets

into all modern life. The farmer boy coming up to the city to work hears

lewd stories in the smoking car of the train, and the travelling men

from the cities tell tales of the city streets to the group about the

stove in village stores.”

Sam did not quarrel with the fact that youth touched vice. Such things

were a part of the world that men and women had made for their sons and

daughters to live in, and that night as he wandered in the streets of

Rochester he thought that he would like all youth to know, if they could

but know, truth. His heart was bitter at the thought of men throwing the

glamour of romance over the sordid, ugly things he had been seeing in

that city and in every city he had known.

Past him in a street lined with small frame houses stumbled a man far

gone in drink, by whose side walked a boy, and Sam’s mind leaped back to

those first years he had spent in the city and of the staggering old man

he had left behind him in Caxton.

“You would think no man better armed against vice and dissipation than

that painter’s son of Caxton,” he reminded himself, “and yet he embraced

vice. He found, as all young men find, that there is much misleading

talk and writing on the subject. The business men he knew did not part

with able assistance because it did not sign the pledge. Ability was

too rare a thing and too independent to sign pledges, and the

lips-that-touch-liquor-shall-never-touch-mine sentiment among women was

reserved for the lips that did not invite.”

He began reviewing incidents of carouses he had been on with business

men of his acquaintance, of a policeman knocked into a street and of

himself, quiet and ably climbing upon tables to make speeches and

to shout the innermost secrets of his heart to drunken hangers-on in

Chicago barrooms. Normally he had not been a good mixer. He had been one

to keep himself to himself. But on these carouses he let himself go,

and got a reputation for daring audacity by slapping men on the back and

singing songs with them. A glowing cordiality had pervaded him and for

a time he had really believed there was such a thing as high flying vice

that glistens in the sun.

Now stumbling past lighted saloons, wandering unknown in a city’s

streets, he knew better. All vice was unclean, unhealthy.

He remembered a hotel in which he had once slept, a hotel that admitted

questionable couples. Its halls had become dingy; its windows remained

unopened; dirt gathered in the corners; the attendants shuffled as they

walked, and leered into the faces of creeping couples; the curtains at

the windows were torn and discoloured; strange snarling oaths, screams,

and cries jarred the tense nerves; peace and cleanliness had fled the

place; men hurried through the halls with hats drawn down over their

faces; sunlight and fresh air and cheerful, whistling bellboys were

locked out.

He thought of the weary, restless walks taken by the young men from

farms and country towns in the streets of the cities; young men

believers in the golden vice. Hands beckoned to them from doorways, and

women of the town laughed at their awkwardness. In Chicago he had walked

in that way. He also had been seeking, seeking the romantic, impossible

mistress that lurked at the bottom of men’s tales of the submerged

world. He wanted his golden girl. He was like the naïve German lad in

the South Water Street warehouses who had once said to him--he was a

frugal soul--“I would like to find a nice-looking girl who is quiet and

modest and who will be my mistress and not charge anything.”

Sam had not found his golden girl, and now he knew she did not exist. He

had not seen the places called by the preachers the palaces of sin, and

now he knew there were no such places. He wondered why youth could not

be made to understand that sin is foul and that immorality reeks

of vulgarity. Why could not they be told plainly that there are no

housecleaning days in the tenderloin?

During his married life men had come to the house who discussed this

matter. One of them, he remembered, had maintained stoutly that the

scarlet sisterhood was a necessity of modern life and that ordinary

decent social life could not go on without it. Often during the past

year Sam had thought of the man’s talk and his brain had reeled before

the thought. In towns and on country roads he had seen troops of little

girls come laughing and shouting out of school houses, and had wondered

which of them would be chosen for that service to mankind; and now, in

his hour of depression, he wished that the man who had talked at his

dinner table might be made to walk with him and to share with him his

thoughts.

Turning again into a lighted busy thoroughfare of the city, Sam

continued his study of the faces in the crowds. To do this quieted and

soothed his mind. He began to feel a weariness in his legs and thought

with gratitude that he should have a night of good sleep. The sea of

faces rolling up to him under the lights filled him with peace. “There

is so much of life,” he thought, “it must come to some end.”

Looking intently at the faces, the dull faces and the bright faces, the

faces drawn out of shape and with eyes nearly meeting above the nose,

the faces with long, heavy sensual jaws, and the empty, soft faces on

which the scalding finger of thought had left no mark, his fingers

ached to get a pencil in his hand, or to spread the faces upon canvas

in enduring pigments, to hold them up before the world and to be able

to say, “Here are the faces you, by your lives, have made for yourselves

and for your children.”

In the lobby of a tall office building, where he stopped at a little

cigar counter to get fresh tobacco for his pipe, he looked so fixedly

at a woman clad in long soft furs, that in alarm she hurried out to her

machine to wait for her escort, who had evidently gone up the elevator.

Once more in the street, Sam shuddered at the thought of the hands that

had laboured that the soft cheeks and the untroubled eyes of this one

woman might be. Into his mind came the face and figure of a little

Canadian nurse who had once cared for him through an illness--her quick,

deft fingers and her muscular little arms. “Another such as she,” he

muttered, “has been at work upon the face and body of this gentlewoman;

a hunter has gone into the white silence of the north to bring out the

warm furs that adorn her; for her there has been a tragedy--a shot, and

red blood upon the snow, and a struggling beast waving its little claws

in the air; for her a woman has worked through the morning, bathing her

white limbs, her cheeks, her hair.”

For this gentlewoman also there had been a man apportioned, a man like

himself, who had cheated and lied and gone through the years in pursuit

of the dollars to pay all of the others, a man of power, a man who could

achieve, could accomplish. Again he felt within him a yearning for the

power of the artist, the power not only to see the meaning of the faces

in the street, but to reproduce what he saw, to get with subtle fingers

the story of the achievement of mankind into a face hanging upon a wall.

In other days, in Caxton, listening to Telfer’s talk, and in Chicago and

New York with Sue, Sam had tried to get an inkling of the passion of

the artist; now walking and looking at the faces rolling past him on the

long street he thought that he did understand.

Once when he was new in the city he had, for some months, carried on an

affair with a woman, the daughter of a cattle farmer from Iowa. Now her

face filled his vision. How rugged it was, how filled with the message

of the ground underfoot; the thick lips, the dull eyes, the strong,

bullet-like head, how like the cattle her father had bought and sold.

He remembered the little room in Chicago where he had his first love

passage with this woman. How frank and wholesome it had seemed. How

eagerly both man and woman had rushed at evening to the meeting place.

How her strong hands had clasped him. The face of the woman in the motor

by the office building danced before his eyes, the face so peaceful, so

free from the marks of human passion, and he wondered what daughter of

a cattle raiser had taken the passion out of the man who paid for the

beauty of that face.

On a side street, near the lighted front of a cheap theatre, a woman,

standing alone and half concealed in the doorway of a church, called

softly, and turning he went to her.

“I am not a customer,” he said, looking at her thin face and bony

hands, “but if you care to come with me I will stand a good dinner. I am

getting hungry and do not like eating alone. I want some one to talk to

me so that I won’t get to thinking.”

“You’re a queer bird,” said the woman, taking his arm. “What have you

done that you don’t want to think?”

Sam said nothing.

“There’s a place over there,” she said, pointing to the lighted front of

a cheap restaurant with soiled curtains at the windows.

Sam kept on walking.

“If you do not mind,” he said, “I will pick the place. I want to buy

a good dinner. I want a place with clean linen on the table and a good

cook in the kitchen.”

They stopped at a corner to talk of the dinner, and at her suggestion he

waited at a near-by drug store while she went to her room. As he waited

he went to the telephone and ordered the dinner and a taxicab. When

she returned she had on a clean shirtwaist and had combed her hair. Sam

thought he caught the odour of benzine, and guessed she had been at work

on the spots on her worn jacket. She seemed surprised to find him still

waiting.

“I thought maybe it was a stall,” she said.

They drove in silence to a place Sam had in mind, a road-house with

clean washed floors, painted walls, and open fires in the private

dining-rooms. Sam had been there several times during the month, and the

food had been well cooked.

They ate in silence. Sam had no curiosity to hear her talk of herself,

and she seemed to have no knack of casual conversation. He was not

studying her, but had brought her as he had said, because of his

loneliness, and because her thin, tired face and frail body, looking out

from the darkness by the church door, had made an appeal.

She had, he thought, a look of hard chastity, like one whipped but not

defeated. Her cheeks were thin and covered with freckles, like a boy’s.

Her teeth were broken and in bad repair, though clean, and her hands had

the worn, hardly-used look of his own mother’s hands. Now that she

sat before him in the restaurant, in some vague way she resembled his

mother.

After dinner he sat smoking his cigar and looking at the fire. The woman

of the streets leaned across the table and touched him on the arm.

“Are you going to take me anywhere after this--after we leave here?” she

said.

“I am going to take you to the door of your room, that’s all.”

“I’m glad,” she said; “it’s a long time since I’ve had an evening like

this. It makes me feel clean.”

For a time they sat in silence and then Sam began talking of his home

town in Iowa, letting himself go and expressing the thoughts that came

into his mind. He told her of his mother and of Mary Underwood and she

in turn told of her town and of her life. She had some difficulty about

hearing which made conversation trying. Words and sentences had to be

repeated to her and after a time Sam smoked and looked at the fire,

letting her talk. Her father had been a captain of a small steamboat

plying up and down Long Island Sound and her mother a careful, shrewd

woman and a good housekeeper. They had lived in a Rhode Island village

and had a garden back of their house. The captain had not married until

he was forty-five and had died when the girl was eighteen, the mother

dying a year later.

The girl had not been much known in the Rhode Island village, being shy

and reticent. She had kept the house clean and helped the captain in

the garden. When her parents were dead she had found herself alone with

thirty-seven hundred dollars in the bank and the little home, and had

married a young man who was a clerk in a railroad office, and sold the

house to move to Kansas City. The big flat country frightened her. Her

life there had been unsuccessful. She had been lonely for the hills

and the water of her New England village, and she was, by nature,

undemonstrative and unemotional, so that she did not get much hold of

her husband. He had undoubtedly married her for the little hoard and, by

various devices, began getting it from her. A son had been born, for a

time her health broke badly, and she discovered through an accident that

her husband was spending her money in dissipation among the women of the

town.

“There wasn’t any use wasting words when I found he didn’t care for me

or for the baby and wouldn’t support us, so I left him,” she said in a

level, businesslike way.

When she came to count up, after she had got clear of her husband and

had taken a course in stenography, there was one thousand dollars of her

savings left and she felt pretty safe. She took a position and went to

work, feeling well satisfied and happy. And then came the trouble with

her hearing. She began to lose places and finally had to be content with

a small salary, earned by copying form letters for a mail order medicine

man. The boy she put out with a capable German woman, the wife of a

gardener. She paid four dollars a week for him and there was clothing

to be bought for herself and the boy. Her wage from the medicine man was

seven dollars a week.

“And so,” she said, “I began going on the street. I knew no one and

there was nothing else to do. I couldn’t do that in the town where the

boy lived, so I came away. I’ve gone from city to city, working mostly

for patent medicine men and filling out my income by what I earned in

the streets. I’m not naturally a woman who cares about men and not many

of them care about me. I don’t like to have them touch me with their

hands. I can’t drink as most of the girls do; it sickens me. I want to

be left alone. Perhaps I shouldn’t have married. Not that I minded my

husband. We got along very well until I had to stop giving him money.

When I found where it was going it opened my eyes. I felt that I had to

have at least a thousand dollars for the boy in case anything happened

to me. When I found there wasn’t anything to do but just go on the

streets, I went. I tried doing other work, but hadn’t the strength, and

when it came to the test I cared more about the boy than I did about

myself--any woman would. I thought he was of more importance than what I

wanted.

“It hasn’t been easy for me. Sometimes when I have got a man to go with

me I walk along the street praying that I won’t shudder and draw away

when he touches me with his hands. I know that if I do he will go away

and I won’t get any money.

“And then they talk and lie about themselves. I’ve had them try to work

off bad money and worthless jewelry on me. Sometimes they try to make

love to me and then steal back the money they have given me. That’s the

hard part, the lying and the pretence. All day I write the same lies

over and over for the patent-medicine men and then at night I listen to

these others lying to me.”

She stopped talking and leaning over put her cheek down on her hand and

sat looking into the fire.

“My mother,” she began again, “didn’t always wear a clean dress. She

couldn’t. She was always down on her knees scrubbing around the floor

or out in the garden pulling weeds. But she hated dirt. If her dress was

dirty her underwear was clean and so was her body. She taught me to be

that way and I wanted to be. It came naturally. But I’m losing it all.

All evening I have been sitting here with you thinking that my underwear

isn’t clean. Most of the time I don’t care. Being clean doesn’t go with

what I am doing. I have to keep trying to be flashy outside so that men

will stop when they see me on the street. Sometimes when I have done

well I don’t go on the streets for three or four weeks. Then I clean

up my room and bathe myself. My landlady lets me do my washing in the

basement at night. I don’t seem to care about cleanliness the weeks I am

on the streets.”

The little German orchestra began playing a lullaby, and a fat German

waiter came in at the open door and put more wood on the fire. He

stopped by the table and talked about the mud in the road outside. From

another room came the silvery clink of glasses and the sound of laughing

voices. The girl and Sam drifted back into talk of their home towns. Sam

felt that he liked her very much and thought that if she had belonged to

him he should have found a basis on which to live with her contentedly.

She had a quality of honesty that he was always seeking in people.

As they drove back to the city she put a hand on his arm.

“I wouldn’t mind about you,” she said, looking at him frankly.

Sam laughed and patted her thin hand. “It’s been a good evening,” he

said, “we’ll go through with it as it stands.”

“Thanks for that,” she said, “and there is something else I want to tell

you. Perhaps you will think it bad of me. Sometimes when I don’t want to

go on the streets I get down on my knees and pray for strength to go on

gamely. Does it seem bad? We are a praying people, we New Englanders.”

As he stood in the street Sam could hear her laboured asthmatic

breathing as she climbed the stairs to her room. Half way up she stopped

and waved her hand at him. The thing was awkwardly done and boyish.

Sam had a feeling that he should like to get a gun and begin shooting

citizens in the streets. He stood in the lighted city looking down the

long deserted street and thought of Mike McCarthy in the jail at Caxton.

Like Mike, he lifted up his voice in the night.

“Are you there, O God? Have you left your children here on the earth

hurting each other? Do you put the seed of a million children in a man,

and the planting of a forest in one tree, and permit men to wreck and

hurt and destroy?”

CHAPTER VI

One morning, at the end of his second year of wandering, Sam got out

of his bed in a cold little hotel in a mining village in West Virginia,

looked at the miners, their lamps in their caps, going through the dimly

lighted streets, ate a portion of leathery breakfast cakes, paid his

bill at the hotel, and took a train for New York. He had definitely

abandoned the idea of getting at what he wanted through wandering about

the country and talking to chance acquaintances by the wayside and in

villages, and had decided to return to a way of life more befitting his

income.

He felt that he was not by nature a vagabond, and that the call of the

wind and the sun and the brown road was not insistent in his blood.

The spirit of Pan did not command him, and although there were certain

spring mornings of his wandering days that were like mountain tops in

his experience of life, mornings when some strong, sweet feeling ran

through the trees, and the grass, and the body of the wanderer, and when

the call of life seemed to come shouting and inviting down the wind,

filling him with delight of the blood in his body and the thoughts in

his brain, yet at bottom and in spite of these days of pure joy he was,

after all, a man of the towns and the crowds. Caxton and South Water

Street and LaSalle Street had all left their marks on him, and so,

throwing his canvas jacket into a corner of the room in the West

Virginia hotel, he returned to the haunts of his kind.

In New York he went to an uptown club where he owned a membership and

into the grill where he found at breakfast an actor acquaintance named

Jackson.

Sam dropped into a chair and looked about him. He remembered a visit he

had made there some years before with Webster and Crofts and felt again

the quiet elegance of the surroundings.

“Hello, Moneymaker,” said Jackson, heartily. “Heard you had gone to a

nunnery.”

Sam laughed and began ordering a breakfast that made Jackson’s eyes open

with astonishment.

“You, Mr. Elegance, would not understand a man’s spending month after

month in the open air seeking a good body and an end in life and then

suddenly changing his mind and coming back to a place like this,” he

observed.

Jackson laughed and lighted a cigarette.

“How little you know me,” he said. “I would live my life in the open but

that I am a mighty good actor and have just finished another long New

York run. What are you going to do now that you are thin and brown? Will

you go back to Morrison and Prince and money making?”

Sam shook his head and looked at the quiet elegance of the man before

him. How satisfied and happy he looked.

“I am going to try living among the rich and the leisurely,” he said.

“They are a rotten crew,” Jackson assured him, “and I am taking a night

train for Detroit. Come with me. We will talk things over.”

On the train that night they got into talk with a broad-shouldered old

man who told them of a hunting trip on which he was bound.

“I am going to sail from Seattle,” he said, “and go everywhere and hunt

everything. I am going to shoot the head off of every big animal kind

of thing left in the world and then come back to New York and stay there

until I die.”

“I will go with you,” said Sam, and in the morning left Jackson at

Detroit and continued westward with his new acquaintance.

For months Sam travelled and shot with the old man, a vigorous,

big-hearted old fellow who, having become wealthy through an early

investment in stock of the Standard Oil Company, devoted his life to

his lusty, primitive passion for shooting and killing. They went on lion

hunts, elephant hunts and tiger hunts, and when on the west coast of

Africa Sam took a boat for London, his companion walked up and down the

beach smoking black cheroots and declaring the fun was only half over

and that Sam was a fool to go.

After the year of the hunt royal Sam spent another year living the life

of a gentleman of wealth and leisure in London, New York, and Paris. He

went on automobile trips, fished and loafed along the shores of northern

lakes, canoed through Canada with a writer of nature books, and sat

about clubs and fashionable hotels listening to the talk of the men and

women of that world.

Late one afternoon in the spring of the year he went to the village on

the Hudson River where Sue had taken a house, and almost immediately saw

her. For an hour he followed, watching her quick, active little figure

as she walked through the village streets, and wondering what life had

come to mean to her, but when, turning suddenly, she would have come

face to face with him, he hurried down a side street and took a train

to the city feeling that he could not face her empty-handed and ashamed

after the years.

In the end he started drinking again, not moderately now, but steadily

and almost continuously. One night in Detroit, with three young men from

his hotel, he got drunk and was, for the first time since his parting

with Sue, in the company of women. Four of them, met in some restaurant,

got into an automobile with Sam and the three young men and rode

about town laughing, waving bottles of wine in the air, and calling to

passers-by in the street. They wound up in a diningroom in a place

at the edge of town, where the party spent hours around a long table,

drinking, and singing songs.

One of the girls sat on Sam’s lap and put an arm about his neck.

“Give me some money, rich man,” she said.

Sam looked at her closely.

“Who are you?” he asked.

She began explaining that she was a clerk in a downtown store and that

she had a lover who drove a laundry wagon.

“I go on these bats to get money to buy good clothes,” she said frankly,

“but if Tim saw me here he would kill me.”

Putting a bill into her hand Sam went downstairs and getting into a

taxicab drove back to his hotel.

After that night he went frequently on carouses of this kind. He was in

a kind of prolonged stupor of inaction, talked of trips abroad which

he did not take, bought a huge farm in Virginia which he never visited,

planned a return to business which he did not execute, and month after

month continued to waste his days. He would get out of bed at noon

and begin drinking steadily. As the afternoon passed he grew merry

and talkative, calling men by their first names, slapping chance

acquaintances on the back, playing pool or billiards with skilful young

men intent upon gain. In the early summer he got in with a party of

young men from New York and with them spent months in sheer idle waste

of time. Together they drove high-powered automobiles on long trips,

drank, quarrelled, and went on board a yacht to carouse, alone or with

women. At times Sam would leave his companions and spend days riding

through the country on fast trains, sitting for hours in silence looking

out of the window at the passing country and wondering at his endurance

of the life he led. For some months he carried with him a young man whom

he called a secretary and paid a large salary for his ability to tell

stories and sing clever songs, only to discharge him suddenly for

telling a foul tale that reminded Sam of another tale told by the

stoop-shouldered old man in the office of Ed’s hotel in the Illinois

town.

From being silent and taciturn, as during the months of his wanderings,

Sam became morose and combative. Staying on and on in the empty, aimless

way of life he had adopted he yet felt that there was for him a right

way of living and wondered at his continued inability to find it. He

lost his native energy, grew fat and coarse of body, was pleased for

hours by little things, read no books, lay for hours in bed drunk and

talking nonsense to himself, ran about the streets swearing vilely, grew

habitually coarse in thought and speech, sought constantly a lower and

more vulgar set of companions, was brutal and ugly with attendants about

hotels and clubs where he lived, hated life, but ran like a coward to

sanitariums and health resorts at the wagging of a doctor’s head.

BOOK IV

CHAPTER I

One afternoon in early September Sam got on a westward-bound train

intending to visit his sister on the farm near Caxton. For years he had

heard nothing from Kate, but she had, he knew, two daughters, and he

thought he would do something for them.

“I will put them on the Virginia farm and make a will leaving them

my money,” he thought. “Perhaps I shall be able to make them happy by

setting them up in life and giving them beautiful clothes to wear.”

At St. Louis he got off the train, thinking vaguely that he would see

an attorney and make arrangements about the will, and for several days

stayed about the Planters Hotel with a set of drinking companions he had

picked up. One afternoon he began going from place to place drinking and

gathering companions. An ugly light was in his eyes and he looked at men

and women passing in the streets, feeling that he was in the midst of

enemies, and that for him the peace, contentment, and good cheer that

shone out of the eyes of others was beyond getting.

In the late afternoon, followed by a troop of roistering companions, he

came out upon a street flanked with small, brick warehouses facing the

river, where steamboats lay tied to floating docks.

“I want a boat to take me and my crowd for a cruise up and down the

river,” he announced, approaching the captain of one of the boats. “Take

us up and down the river until we are tired of it. I will pay what it

costs.”

It was one of the days when drink would not take hold of him, and he

went among his companions, buying drinks and thinking himself a fool to

continue furnishing entertainment for the vile crew that sat about him

on the deck of the boat. He began shouting and ordering them about.

“Sing louder,” he commanded, tramping up and down and scowling at his

companions.

A young man of the party who had a reputation as a dancer refused to

perform when commanded. Springing forward Sam dragged him out on the

deck before the shouting crowd.

“Now dance!” he growled, “or I will throw you into the river.”

The young man danced furiously, and Sam marched up and down and looked

at him and at the leering faces of the men and women lounging along

the deck or shouting at the dancer. The liquor in him beginning to take

effect, a queerly distorted version of his old passion for reproduction

came to him and he raised his hand for silence.

“I want to see a woman who is a mother,” he shouted. “I want to see a

woman who has borne children.”

A small woman with black hair and burning black eyes sprang from the

group gathered about the dancer.

“I have borne children--three of them,” she said, laughing up into his

face. “I can bear more of them.”

Sam looked at her stupidly and taking her by the arm led her to a chair

on the deck. The crowd laughed.

“Belle is after his roll,” whispered a short, fat man to his companion,

a tall woman with blue eyes.

As the steamer, with its load of men and women drinking and singing

songs, went up the river past bluffs covered with trees, the woman

beside Sam pointed to a row of tiny houses at the top of the bluffs.

“My children are there. They are getting supper now,” she said.

She began singing, laughing and waving a bottle to the others sitting

along the deck. A youth with heavy features stood upon a chair and sang

a song of the street, and, jumping to her feet, Sam’s companion kept

time with the bottle in her hand. Sam walked over to where the captain

stood looking up the river.

“Turn back,” he said, “I am tired of this crew.”

On the way back down the river the black-eyed woman again sat beside

Sam.

“We will go to my house,” she said quietly, “just you and me. I will

show you the kids.”

Darkness was gathering over the river as the boat turned, and in the

distance the lights of the city began blinking into view. The crowd had

grown quiet, sleeping in chairs along the deck or gathering in small

groups and talking in low tones. The black-haired woman began to tell

Sam her story.

She was, she said, the wife of a plumber who had left her.

“I drove him crazy,” she said, laughing quietly. “He wanted me to stay

at home with him and the kids night after night. He used to follow me

down town at night begging me to come home. When I wouldn’t come he

would go away with tears in his eyes. It made me furious. He wasn’t a

man. He would do anything I asked him to do. And then he ran away and

left the kids on my hands.”

In the city Sam, with the black-haired woman beside him, rode about in

an open carriage, forgetting the children and going from place to place,

eating and drinking. For an hour they sat in a box at the theatre, but

grew tired of the performance and climbed again into the carriage.

“We will go to my house. I want to have you alone,” said the woman.

They drove through street after street of workingmen’s houses, where

children ran laughing and playing under the lights, and two boys, their

bare legs flashing in the lights from the lamps overhead, ran after

them, holding to the back of the carriage.

The driver whipped the horses and looked back laughing. The woman got up

and kneeling on the seat of the carriage laughed down into the faces of

the running boys.

“Run, you little devils,” she cried.

They held on, running furiously. Their legs twinkled and flashed under

the lights.

“Give me a silver dollar,” she said, turning to Sam, and when he had

given it to her, threw it ringing upon the pavement under a street lamp.

The two boys darted for it, shouting and waving their hands to her.

Swarms of huge flies and beetles circled under the street lamps,

striking Sam and the woman in the face. One of them, a great black

crawling thing, alighted on her breast, and taking it in her hand she

crept forward and dropped it down the neck of the driver.

In spite of his hard drinking during the afternoon and evening, Sam’s

head was clear and a calm hatred of life burned in him. His mind ran

back over the years he had passed since breaking his word to Sue, and a

scorn of all effort burned in him.

“It is what a man gets who goes seeking Truth,” he thought. “He comes to

a fine end in life.”

On all sides of him life ran playing on the pavement and leaping in the

air. It circled and buzzed and sang above his head in the summer night

there in the heart of the city. Even in the sullen man sitting in the

carriage beside the black-haired woman it began to sing. The blood

climbed through his body; an old half-dead longing, half hunger, half

hope awoke in him, pulsating and insistent. He looked at the laughing,

intoxicated woman beside him and a feeling of masculine approval shot

through him. He began thinking of what she had said before the laughing

crowd on the steamer.

“I have borne three children and can bear more.”

His blood, stirred by the sight of the woman, awoke his sleeping brain,

and he began again to quarrel with life and what life had offered him.

He thought that always he would stubbornly refuse to accept the call of

life unless he could have it on his own terms, unless he could command

and direct it as he had commanded and directed the gun company.

“Else why am I here?” he muttered, looking away from the vacant,

laughing face of the woman and at the broad, muscular back of the driver

on the seat in front. “Why had I a brain and a dream and a hope? Why

went I about seeking Truth?”

His mind ran on in the vein started by the sight of the circling beetles

and the running boys. The woman put her head upon his shoulder and her

black hair blew against his face. She struck wildly at the circling

beetles, laughing like a child when she had caught one of them in her

hand.

“Men like me are for some end. They are not to be played with as I have

been,” he muttered, clinging to the hand of the woman, who, also, he

thought, was being tossed about by life.

Before a saloon, on a street where cars ran, the carriage stopped.

Through the open front door Sam could see working-men standing before

a bar drinking foaming glasses of beer, the hanging lamps above their

heads throwing their black shadows upon the floor. A strong, stale smell

came out at the door. The woman leaned over the side of the carriage and

shouted. “O Will, come out here.”

A man clad in a long white apron and with his shirt sleeves rolled to

his elbows came from behind the bar and talked to her, and when they had

started on she told Sam of her plan to sell her home and buy the place.

“Will you run it?” he asked.

“Sure,” she said. “The kids can take care of themselves.”

At the end of a little street of a half dozen neat cottages, they got

out of the carriage and walked with uncertain steps along a sidewalk

skirting a high bluff and overlooking the river. Below the houses a

tangled mass of bushes and small trees lay black in the moonlight, and

in the distance the grey body of the river showed faint and far away.

The undergrowth was so thick that, looking down, one saw only the

tops of the growth, with here and there a grey outcrop of rocks that

glistened in the moonlight.

Up a flight of stone steps they climbed to the porch of one of the

houses facing the river. The woman had stopped laughing and hung heavily

on Sam’s arm, her feet groping for the steps. They passed through a door

and into a long, low-ceilinged room. An open stairway at the side of the

room went up to the floor above, and through a curtained doorway at the

end one looked into a small dining-room. A rag carpet lay on the floor

and about a table, under a hanging lamp at the centre, sat three

children. Sam looked at them closely. His head reeled and he clutched at

the knob of the door. A boy of perhaps fourteen, with freckles on his

face and on the backs of his hands and with reddish-brown hair and brown

eyes, was reading aloud. Beside him a younger boy with black hair and

black eyes, and with his knees doubled up on the chair in front of him

so that his chin rested on them, sat listening. A tiny girl, pale and

with yellow hair and dark circles under her eyes, slept in another

chair, her head hanging uncomfortably to one side. She was, one would

have said, seven, the black-haired boy ten.

The freckle-faced boy stopped reading and looked at the man and woman;

the sleeping child stirred uneasily in her chair, and the black-haired

boy straightened out his legs and looked over his shoulder.

“Hello, Mother,” he said heartily.

The woman walked unsteadily to the curtained doorway leading into the

dining-room and pulled aside the curtains.

“Come here, Joe,” she said.

The freckle-faced boy arose and went toward her. She stood aside,

supporting herself with one hand grasping the curtain. As he passed

she struck him with her open hand on the back of the head, sending him

reeling into the dining-room.

“Now you, Tom,” she called to the black-haired boy. “I told you kids to

wash the dishes after supper and to put Mary to bed. Here it is past ten

and nothing done and you two reading books again.”

The black-haired boy got up and started obediently toward her, but Sam

walked rapidly past him and clutched the woman by the arm so that she

winced and twisted in his grasp.

“You come with me,” he said.

He walked the woman across the room and up the stairs. She leaned

heavily on his arm, laughing, and looking up into his face.

At the top of the stairway he stopped.

“We go in here,” she said, pointing to a door.

He took her into the room. “You get to sleep,” he said, and going out

closed the door, leaving her sitting heavily on the edge of the bed.

Downstairs he found the two boys among the dishes in a tiny kitchen off

the dining-room. The little girl still slept uneasily in the chair by

the table, the hot lamp-light streaming down on her thin cheeks.

Sam stood in the kitchen door looking at the two boys, who looked back

at him self-consciously.

“Which of you two puts Mary to bed?” he asked, and then, without waiting

for an answer, turned to the taller of the two boys. “Let Tom do it,” he

said. “I will help you here.”

Joe and Sam stood in the kitchen at work with the dishes; the boy, going

busily about, showed the man where to put the clean dishes, and got him

dry wiping towels. Sam’s coat was off and his sleeves rolled up.

The work went on in half awkward silence and a storm went on within

Sam’s breast. When the boy Joe looked shyly up at him it was as though

the lash of a whip had cut down across flesh, suddenly grown tender. Old

memories began to stir within him and he remembered his own childhood,

his mother at work among other people’s soiled clothes, his father Windy

coming home drunk, and the chill in his mother’s heart and in his own.

There was something men and women owed to childhood, not because it

was childhood but because it was new life springing up. Aside from any

question of fatherhood or motherhood there was a debt to be paid.

In the little house on the bluff there was silence. Outside the house

there was darkness and darkness lay over Sam’s spirit. The boy Joe

went quickly about, putting the dishes Sam had wiped on the shelves.

Somewhere on the river, far below the house, a steamboat whistled. The

backs of the hands of the boy were covered with freckles. How quick and

competent the hands were. Here was new life, as yet clean, unsoiled,

unshaken by life. Sam was shamed by the trembling of his own hands. He

had always wanted quickness and firmness within his own body, the health

of the body that is a temple for the health of the spirit. He was an

American and down deep within himself was the moral fervor that is

American and that had become so strangely perverted in himself and

others. As so often happened with him, when he was deeply stirred, an

army of vagrant thoughts ran through his head. The thoughts had taken

the place of the perpetual scheming and planning of his days as a man of

affairs, but as yet all his thinking had brought him to nothing and had

only left him more shaken and uncertain then ever.

The dishes were now all wiped and he went out of the kitchen glad to

escape the shy silent presence of the boy. “Has life quite gone from me?

Am I but a dead thing walking about?” he asked himself. The presence of

the children had made him feel that he was himself but a child, a grown

tired and shaken child. There was maturity and manhood somewhere abroad.

Why could he not come to it? Why could it not come into him?

The boy Tom returned from having put his sister into bed and the two

boys said good night to the strange man in their mother’s house. Joe,

the bolder of the two, stepped forward and offered his hand. Sam shook

it solemnly and then the younger boy came forward.

“I’ll be around here to-morrow I think,” Sam said huskily.

The boys were gone, into the silence of the house, and Sam walked up and

down in the little room. He was restless as though about to start on a

new journey and half unconsciously began running his hands over his body

wishing it strong and hard as when he tramped the road. As on the day

when he had walked out of the Chicago Club bound on his hunt for

Truth, he let his mind go so that it played freely over his past life,

reviewing and analysing.

For hours he sat on the porch or walked up and down in the room where

the lamp still burned brightly. Again the smoke from his pipe tasted

good on his tongue and all the night air had a sweetness that brought

back to him the walk beside the bridle path in Jackson Park when Sue had

given him herself, and with herself a new impulse in life.

It was two o’clock when he lay down upon a couch in the living-room and

blew out the light. He did not undress, but threw his shoes on the floor

and lay looking at a wide path of moonlight that came through the open

door. In the darkness it seemed that his mind worked more rapidly and

that the events and motives of his restless years went streaming past

like living things upon the floor.

Suddenly he sat up and listened. The voice of one of the boys, heavy

with sleep, ran through the upper part of the house.

“Mother! O Mother!” called the sleepy voice, and Sam thought he could

hear the little body moving restlessly in bed.

Silence followed. He sat upon the edge of the couch, waiting. It seemed

to him that he was coming to something; that his brain that had for

hours been working more and more rapidly was about to produce the thing

for which he waited. He felt as he had felt that night as he waited in

the corridor of the hospital.

In the morning the three children came down the stairs and finished

dressing in the long room, the little girl coming last, carrying her

shoes and stockings and rubbing her eyes with the back of her hand. A

cool morning wind blew up from the river and through the open screened

doors as he and Joe cooked breakfast, and later as the four of them

sat at the table Sam tried to talk but did not make much progress. His

tongue was heavy and the children seemed looking at him with strange

questioning eyes. “Why are you here?” their eyes asked.

For a week Sam stayed in the city, coming daily to the house. With the

children he talked a little, and in the evening, when the mother had

gone away, the little girl came to him. He carried her to a chair on the

porch outside and while the boys sat reading under the lamp inside she

went to sleep in his arms. Her body was warm and the breath came softly

and sweetly from between her lips. Sam looked down the bluffside and saw

the country and the river far below, sweet in the moonlight. Tears came

into his eyes. Was a new sweet purpose growing within him or were the

tears but evidence of self pity? He wondered.

One night the black-haired woman again came home far gone in drink, and

again Sam led her up the stairs to see her fall muttering and babbling

upon the bed. Her companion, a little flashily dressed man with a beard,

had run off at the sight of Sam standing in the living-room under the

lamp. The two boys, to whom he had been reading, said nothing, looking

self-consciously at the book upon the table and occasionally out of the

corner of their eyes at their new friend. In a few minutes they too

went up the stairs, and as on that first night, they put out their hands

awkwardly.

Through the night Sam again sat in the darkness outside or lay awake on

the couch. “I will make a new try, adopt a new purpose in life now,” he

said to himself.

When the children had gone to school the next morning, Sam took a car

and went into the city, going first to a bank to have a large draft

cashed. Then he spent many busy hours going from store to store and

buying clothes, caps, soft underwear, suit cases, dresses, night

clothes, and books. Last of all he bought a large dressed doll. All

these things he had sent to his room at the hotel, leaving a man there

to pack the trunks and suit cases, and get them to the station. A large,

motherly-looking woman, an employé of the hotel, who passed through the

hall, offered to help with the packing.

After another visit or two Sam got back upon the car and went again to

the house. In his pockets he had several thousands of dollars in large

bills. He had remembered the power of cash in deals he had made in the

past.

“I will see what it will do here,” he thought.

In the house Sam found the black-haired woman lying on a couch in the

living-room. As he came in at the door she arose unsteadily and looked

at him.

“There’s a bottle in the cupboard in the kitchen,” she said. “Get me a

drink. Why do you hang about here?”

Sam brought the bottle and poured her a drink, pretending to drink with

her by putting the bottle to his lips and throwing back his head.

“What was your husband like?” he asked.

“Who? Jack?” she said. “Oh, he was all right. He was stuck on me. He

stood for anything until I brought men home here. Then he got crazy and

went away.” She looked at Sam and laughed.

“I didn’t care much for him,” she added. “He couldn’t make money enough

for a live woman.”

Sam began talking of the saloon she intended buying.

“The children will be a bother, eh?” he said.

“I have an offer for the house,” she said. “I wish I didn’t have the

kids. They are a nuisance.”

“I have been figuring that out,” Sam told her. “I know a woman in the

East who would take them and raise them. She is wild about kids. I

should like to do something to help you. I might take them to her.”

“In the name of Heaven, man, lead them away,” she laughed, and took

another drink from the bottle.

Sam drew from his pocket a paper he had secured from a downtown

attorney.

“Get a neighbour in here to witness this,” he said. “The woman will want

things regular. It releases you from all responsibility for the kids and

puts it on her.”

She looked at him suspiciously. “What’s the graft? Who gets stuck for

the fares down east?”

Sam laughed and going to the back door shouted to a man who sat under a

tree back of the next house smoking a pipe.

“Sign here,” he said, putting the paper before her. “Here is your

neighbour to sign as witness. You do not get stuck for a cent.”

The woman, half drunk, signed the paper, after a long doubtful look at

Sam, and when she had signed and had taken another drink from the bottle

lay down again on the couch.

“If any one wakes me up for the next six hours they will get killed,”

she declared. It was evident she knew little of what she had done, but

at the moment Sam did not care. He was again a bargainer, ready to take

an advantage. Vaguely he felt that he might be bargaining for an end in

life, for purpose to come into his own life.

Sam went quietly down the stone steps and along the little street at

the brow of the hill to the car tracks, and at noon was waiting in an

automobile outside the door of the schoolhouse when the children came

out.

He drove across the city to the Union Station, the three children

accepting him and all he did without question. At the station they found

the man from the hotel with the trunks and with three bright new suit

cases. Sam went to the express office and putting several bills into an

envelope sealed and sent it to the woman while the three children walked

up and down in the train shed carrying the cases, aglow with the pride

of them.

At two o’clock Sam, with the little girl in his arms and with one of

the boys seated on either side of him, sat in a stateroom of a New York

flyer--bound for Sue.

CHAPTER II

Sam McPherson is a living American. He is a rich man, but his money,

that he spent so many years and so much of his energy acquiring, does

not mean much to him. What is true of him is true of more wealthy

Americans than is commonly believed. Something has happened to him

that has happened to the others also, to how many of the others? Men

of courage, with strong bodies and quick brains, men who have come of

a strong race, have taken up what they had thought to be the banner of

life and carried it forward. Growing weary they have stopped in a road

that climbs a long hill and have leaned the banner against a tree. Tight

brains have loosened a little. Strong convictions have become weak. Old

gods are dying.

“It is only when you are torn from your mooring and

drift like a rudderless ship I am able to come

near to you.”

The banner has been carried forward by a strong daring man filled with

determination.

What is inscribed on it?

It would perhaps be dangerous to inquire too closely. We Americans have

believed that life must have point and purpose. We have called ourselves

Christians, but the sweet Christian philosophy of failure has been

unknown among us. To say of one of us that he has failed is to take life

and courage away. For so long we have had to push blindly forward. Roads

had to be cut through our forests, great towns must be built. What

in Europe has been slowly building itself out of the fibre of the

generations we must build now, in a lifetime.

In our father’s day, at night in the forests of Michigan, Ohio,

Kentucky, and on the wide prairies, wolves howled. There was fear in

our fathers and mothers, pushing their way forward, making the new land.

When the land was conquered fear remained, the fear of failure. Deep in

our American souls the wolves still howl.

* * * * *

There were moments after Sam came back to Sue, bringing the three

children, when he thought he had snatched success out of the very jaws

of failure.

But the thing from which he had all his life been fleeing was still

there. It hid itself in the branches of the trees that lined the New

England roads where he went to walk with the two boys. At night it

looked down at him from the stars.

Perhaps life wanted acceptance from him, but he could not accept.

Perhaps his story and his life ended with the home-coming, perhaps it

began then.

The home-coming was not in itself a completely happy event. There was

a house with a fire at night and the voices of the children. In Sam’s

breast there was a feeling of something alive, growing.

Sue was generous, but she was not now the Sue of the bridle path in

Jackson Park in Chicago or the Sue who had tried to remake the world by

raising fallen women. On his arrival at her house, on a summer night,

coming in suddenly and strangely with the three strange children--a

little inclined toward tears and homesickness--she was flustered and

nervous.

Darkness was coming on when he walked up the gravel path from the gate

to the house door with the child Mary in his arms and the two boys, Joe

and Tom, walking soberly and solemnly beside him. Sue had just come

out at the front door and stood regarding them, startled and a little

frightened. Her hair was becoming grey, but as she stood there Sam

thought her figure almost boyish in its slenderness.

With quick generosity she threw aside the inclination in herself to ask

many questions but there was the suggestion of a taunt in the question

she did ask.

“Have you decided to come back to me and is this your home-coming?” she

asked, stepping down into the path and looking not at Sam but at the

children.

Sam did not answer at once, and little Mary began to cry. That was a

help.

“They will all be wanting something to eat and a place to sleep,” he

said, as though coming back to a wife, long neglected, and bringing with

him three strange children were an everyday affair.

Although she was puzzled and afraid, Sue smiled and led the way into the

house. Lamps were lighted and the five human beings, so abruptly brought

together, stood looking at each other. The two boys clung to each other

and little Mary put her arms about Sam’s neck and hid her face on his

shoulder. He unloosed her clutching hands and put her boldly into Sue’s

arms. “She will be your mother now,” he said defiantly, not looking at

Sue.

* * * * *

The evening was got through, blunderingly by himself, Sam thought, and

very nobly by Sue.

There was the mother hunger still alive in her. He had shrewdly counted

on that. It blinded her eyes to other things and then a notion had come

into her head and there seemed the possibility of doing a peculiarly

romantic act. Before that notion was destroyed, later in the evening,

both Sam and the children had been installed in the house.

A tall strong Negress came into the room, and Sue gave her instructions

regarding food for the children. “They will want bread and milk, and

beds must be found for them,” she said, and then, although her mind was

still filled with the romantic notion that they were Sam’s children

by some other woman, she took her plunge. “This is Mr. McPherson, my

husband, and these are our three children,” she announced to the puzzled

and smiling servant.

They went into a low-ceilinged room whose windows looked into a garden.

In the garden an old Negro with a sprinkling can was watering flowers. A

little light yet remained. Both Sam and Sue were glad there was no more.

“Don’t bring lamps, a candle will do,” Sue said, and she went to stand

near the door beside her husband. The three children were on the point

of breaking forth into sobs, but the Negro woman with a quick intuitive

sense of the situation began to chatter, striving to make the children

feel at home. She awoke wonder and hope in the breasts of the boys.

“There is a barn with horses and cows. To-morrow old Ben will show you

everything,” she said, smiling at them.

* * * * *

A thick grove of elm and maple trees stood between Sue’s house and a

road that went down a hill into a New England village, and while Sue and

the Negro woman put the children to bed, Sam went there to wait. In

the feeble light the trunks of trees could be dimly seen, but the thick

branches overhead made a wall between him and the sky. He went back into

the darkness of the grove and then returned toward the open space before

the house.

He was nervous and distraught and two Sam McPhersons seemed struggling

for possession of his person.

There was the man he had been taught by the life about him to bring

always to the surface, the shrewd, capable man who got his own way,

trampled people underfoot, went plunging forward, always he hoped

forward, the man of achievement.

And then there was another personality, a quite different being

altogether, buried away within him, long neglected, often forgotten, a

timid, shy, destructive Sam who had never really breathed or lived or

walked before men.

What of him? The life Sam had led had not taken the shy destructive

thing within into account. Still it was powerful. Had it not torn him

out of his place in life, made of him a homeless wanderer? How many

times it had tried to speak its own word, take entire possession of him.

It was trying again now, and again and from old habit Sam fought against

it, thrusting it back into the dark inner caves of himself, back into

darkness.

He kept whispering to himself. Perhaps now the test of his life had

come. There was a way to approach life and love. There was Sue. A basis

for love and understanding might be found with her. Later the impulse

could be carried on and into the lives of the children he had found and

brought to her.

A vision of himself as a truly humble man, kneeling before life,

kneeling before the intricate wonder of life, came to him, but he was

again afraid. When he saw Sue’s figure, dressed in white, a dim, pale,

flashing thing, coming down steps toward him, he wanted to run away, to

hide himself in the darkness.

And he wanted also to run toward her, to kneel at her feet, not because

she was Sue but because she was human and like himself filled with human

perplexities.

He did neither of the two things. The boy of Caxton was still alive

within him. With a boyish lift of the head he went boldly to her.

“Nothing but boldness will answer now,” he kept saying to himself.

* * * * *

They walked in the gravel path before the house and he tried lamely to

tell his story, the story of his wanderings, of his seeking. When he

came to the tale of the finding of the children she stopped in the path

and stood listening, pale and tense in the half light.

Then she threw back her head and laughed, nervously, half hysterically.

“I have taken them and you, of course,” she said, after he had stepped

to her and had put his arm about her waist. “My life alone hasn’t turned

out to be a very inspiring affair. I had made up my mind to take them

and you, in the house there. The two years you have been gone have

seemed like an age. What a foolish mistake my mind has made. I thought

they must be your own children by some other woman, some woman you had

found to take my place. It was an odd notion. Why, the older of the two

must be nearly fourteen.”

They went toward the house, the Negro woman having, at Sue’s command,

found food for Sam and respread the table, but at the door he stopped

and excusing himself stepped again into the darkness under the trees.

In the house lamps had been lighted and he could see Sue’s figure

going through a room at the front of the house toward the dining-room.

Presently she returned and pulled the shades at the front windows. A

place was being prepared for him inside there, a shut-in place in which

he was to live what was left of his life.

With the pulling of the shades darkness dropped down over the figure

of the man standing just within the grove of trees and darkness dropped

down over the inner man also. The struggle within him became more

intense.

Could he surrender to others, live for others? There was the house

darkly seen before him. It was a symbol. Within the house was the woman,

Sue, ready and willing to begin the task of rebuilding their lives

together. Upstairs in the house now were the three children, three

children who must begin life as he had once done, who must listen to

his voice, the voice of Sue and all the other voices they would hear

speaking words in the world. They would grow up and thrust out into a

world of people as he had done.

To what end?

There was an end. Sam believed that stoutly. “To shift the load to the

shoulders of children is cowardice,” he whispered to himself.

An almost overpowering desire to turn and run away from the house, from

Sue who had so generously received him and from the three new lives into

which he had thrust himself and in which in the future he would have to

be concerned, took hold of him. His body shook with the strength of it,

but he stood still under the trees. “I cannot run away from life. I must

face it. I must begin to try to understand these other lives, to love,”

he told himself. The buried inner thing in him thrust itself up.

How still the night had become. In the tree beneath which he stood a

bird moved on some slender branch and there was a faint rustling of

leaves. The darkness before and behind was a wall through which he

must in some way manage to thrust himself into the light. With his hand

before him, as though trying to push aside some dark blinding mass, he

moved out of the grove and thus moving stumbled up the steps and into

the house.

THE END

End of Project Gutenberg’s Windy McPherson’s Son, by Sherwood Anderson