I suppose I was predestined (and likewise foreordained) to reach the
city sooner or later. My fate in that respect was settled for me when
I placed my trust in the vagrant road. I thought for a time that I was
more than a match for the Road, but I soon learned that the Road
was more than a match for me. Sly? There's no name for it. Alluring,
lovable, mysterious--as the heart of a woman. Many a time I followed
the Road where it led through innocent meadows or climbed leisurely hill
slopes only to find that it had crept around slyly and led me before I
knew it into the back door of some busy town.
Mostly in this country the towns squat low in the valleys, they lie in
wait by the rivers, and often I scarcely know of their presence until
I am so close upon them that I can smell the breath of their heated
nostrils and hear their low growlings and grumblings.
My fear of these lesser towns has never been profound. I have even been
bold enough, when I came across one of them, to hasten straight through
as though assured that Cerberus was securely chained; but I found,
after a time, what I might indeed have guessed, that the Road, also led
irresistibly to the lair of the Old Monster himself, the He-one of the
species, where he lies upon the plain, lolling under his soiled gray
blanket of smoke.
It is wonderful to be safe at home again, to watch the tender, reddish
brown shoots of the Virginia creeper reaching in at my study window, to
see the green of my own quiet fields, to hear the peaceful clucking of
the hens in the sunny dooryard--and Harriet humming at her work in the
kitchen.
When I left the Ransomes that fine spring morning, I had not the
slightest presentiment of what the world held in store for me. After
being a prisoner of the weather for so long, I took to the Road with
fresh joy. All the fields were of a misty greenness and there were pools
still shining in the road, but the air was deliciously clear, clean,
and soft. I came through the hill country for three or four miles, even
running down some of the steeper places for the very joy the motion gave
me, the feel of the air on my face.
Thus I came finally to the Great Road, and stood for a moment looking
first this way, then that.
“Where now?” I asked aloud.
With an amusing sense of the possibilities that lay open before me, I
closed my eyes, turned slowly around several times and then stopped.
When I opened my eyes I was facing nearly southward: and that way I set
out, not knowing in the least what Fortune had presided at that turning.
If I had gone the other way--
I walked vigorously for two or three hours, meeting or passing many
people upon the busy road. Automobiles there were in plenty, and loaded
wagons, and jolly families off for town, and a herdsman driving sheep,
and small boys on their way to school with their dinner pails, and a
gypsy wagon with lean, led horses following behind, and even a Jewish
peddler with a crinkly black beard, whom I was on the very point of
stopping.
“I should like sometime to know a Jew,” I said to myself.
As I travelled, feeling like one who possesses hidden riches, I came
quite without warning upon the beginning of my great adventure. I had
been looking for a certain thing all the morning, first on one side
of the road, then the other, and finally I was rewarded. There it was,
nailed high upon tree, the curious, familiar sign:
[ REST ]
I stopped instantly. It seemed like an old friend.
“Well,” said I. “I'm not at all tired, but I want to be agreeable.”
With that I sat down on a convenient stone, took off my hat, wiped my
forehead, and looked about me with satisfaction, for it was a pleasant
country.
I had not been sitting there above two minutes when my eyes fell upon
one of the oddest specimens of humanity (I thought then) that ever I
saw. He had been standing near the roadside, just under the tree upon
which I had seen the sign, “Rest.” My heart dotted and carried one.
“The sign man himself!” I exclaimed.
I arose instantly and walked down the road toward him.
“A man has only to stop anywhere here,” I said exultantly, “and things
happen.”
The stranger's appearance was indeed extraordinary. He seemed at first
glimpse to be about twice as large around the hips as he was at
the shoulders, but this I soon discovered to be due to no natural
avoir-dupois but to the prodigious number of soiled newspapers and
magazines with which the low-hanging pockets of his overcoat were
stuffed. For he was still wearing an old shabby overcoat though the
weather was warm and bright--and on his head was an odd and outlandish
hat. It was of fur, flat at the top, flat as a pie tin, with the
moth-eaten earlaps turned up at the sides and looking exactly like small
furry ears. These, with the round steel spectacles which he wore--the
only distinctive feature of his countenance--gave him an indescribably
droll appearance.
“A fox!” I thought.
Then I looked at him more closely.
“No,” said I, “an owl, an owl!”
The stranger stepped out into the road and evidently awaited my
approach. My first vivid impression of his face--I remember it afterward
shining with a strange inward illumination--was not favourable. It was a
deep-lined, scarred, worn-looking face, insignificant if not indeed ugly
in its features, and yet, even at the first glance, revealing something
inexplainable--incalculable--
“Good day, friend,” I said heartily.
Without replying to my greeting, he asked:
“Is this the road to Kilburn?”--with a faint flavour of foreignness in
his words.
“I think it is,” I replied, and I noticed as he lifted his hand to thank
me that one finger was missing and that the hand itself was cruelly
twisted and scarred.
The stranger instantly set off up the Road without giving me much more
attention than he would have given any other signpost. I stood a moment
looking after him--the wings of his overcoat beating about his legs and
the small furry ears on his cap wagging gently.
“There,” said I aloud, “is a man who is actually going somewhere.”
So many men in this world are going nowhere in particular that when one
comes along--even though he be amusing and insignificant--who is really
(and passionately) going somewhere, what a stir he communicates to a
dull world! We catch sparks of electricity from the very friction of his
passage.
It was so with this odd stranger. Though at one moment I could not help
smiling at him, at the next I was following him.
“It may be,” said I to myself, “that this is really the sign man!”
I felt like Captain Kidd under full sail to capture a treasure ship; and
as I approached I was much agitated as to the best method of grappling
and boarding. I finally decided, being a lover of bold methods, to let
go my largest gun first--for moral effect.
“So,” said I, as I ran alongside, “you are the man who puts up the
signs.”
He stopped and looked at me.
“What signs?”
“Why the sign 'Rest' along this road.”
He paused for some seconds with a perplexed expression on his face.
“Then you are not the sign man?” I said.
“No,” he replied, “I ain't any sign man.”
I was not a little disappointed, but having made my attack, I determined
to see if there was any treasure aboard--which, I suppose, should be the
procedure of any well-regulated pirate.
“I'm going this way myself,” I said, “and if you have no objections--”
He stood looking at me curiously, indeed suspiciously, through his round
spectacles.
“Have you got the passport?” he asked finally.
“The passport!” I exclaimed, mystified in my turn.
“Yes,” said he, “the passport. Let me see your hand.”
When I held out my hand he looked at it closely for a moment, and then
took it with a quick warm pressure in one of his, and gave it a little
shake, in a way not quite American.
“You are one of us,” said he, “you work.”
I thought at first that it was a bit of pleasantry, and I was about
to return it in kind when I saw plainly in his face a look of solemn
intent.
“So,” he said, “we shall travel like comrades.”
He thrust his scarred hand through my arm, and we walked up the road
side by side, his bulging pockets beating first against his legs and
then against mine, quite impartially.
“I think,” said the stranger, “that we shall be arrested at Kilburn.”
“We shall!” I exclaimed with something, I admit, of a shock.
“Yes,” he said, “but it is all in the day's work.”
“How is that?”
He stopped in the road and faced me. Throwing back his overcoat he
pointed to a small red button on his coat lapel.
“They don't want me in Kilburn,” said he, “the mill men are strikin'
there, and the bosses have got armed men on every corner. Oh, the
capitalists are watchin' for me, all right.”
I cannot convey the strange excitement I felt. It seemed as though these
words suddenly opened a whole new world around me--a world I had heard
about for years, but never entered. And the tone in which he had used
the word “capitalist!” I had almost to glance around to make sure that
there were no ravening capitalists hiding behind the trees.
“So you are a Socialist,” I said.
“Yes,” he answered. “I'm one of those dangerous persons.”
First and last I have read much of Socialism, and thought about it, too,
from the quiet angle of my farm among the hills, but this was the first
time I had ever had a live Socialist on my arm. I could not have been
more surprised if the stranger had said, “Yes, I am Theodore Roosevelt.”
One of the discoveries we keep making all our life long (provided we
remain humble) is the humorous discovery of the ordinariness of the
extraordinary. Here was this disrupter of society, this man of the
red flag--here he was with his mild spectacled eyes and his furry ears
wagging as he walked. It was unbelievable!--and the sun shining on him
quite as impartially as it shone on me.
Coming at last to a pleasant bit of woodland, where a stream ran under
the roadway, I said:
“Stranger, let's sit down and have a bite of luncheon.”
He began to expostulate, said he was expected in Kilburn.
“Oh, I've plenty for two,” I said, “and I can say, at least, that I am a
firm believer in cooperation.”
Without more urging he followed me into the woods, where we sat down
comfortably under a tree.
Now, when I take a fine thick sandwich out of my bag, I always feel like
making it a polite bow, and before I bite into a big brown doughnut, I
am tempted to say, “By your leave, madam,” and as for MINCE PIE-----Beau
Brummel himself could not outdo me in respectful consideration. But
Bill Hahn neither saw, nor smelled, nor, I think, tasted Mrs. Ransome's
cookery. As soon as we sat down he began talking. From time to time
he would reach out for another sandwich or doughnut or pickle (without
knowing in the least which he was getting), and when that was gone some
reflex impulse caused him to reach out for some more. When the last
crumb of our lunch had disappeared Bill Hahn still reached out. His hand
groped absently about, and coming in contact with no more doughnuts or
pickles he withdrew it--and did not know, I think, that the meal was
finished. (Confidentially, I have speculated on what might have happened
if the supply had been unlimited!)
But that was Bill Hahn. Once started on his talk, he never thought of
food or clothing or shelter; but his eyes glowed, his face lighted up
with a strange effulgence, and he quite lost himself upon the tide of
his own oratory. I saw him afterward by a flare-light at the centre of a
great crowd of men and women--but that is getting ahead of my story.
His talk bristled with such words as “capitalism,” “proletariat,”
“class-consciousness”--and he spoke with fluency of “economic
determinism” and “syndicalism.” It was quite wonderful! And from time to
time, he would bring in a smashing quotation from Aristotle, Napoleon,
Karl Marx, or Eugene V. Debs, giving them all equal value, and he cited
statistics!--oh, marvellous statistics, that never were on sea or land.
Once he was so swept away by his own eloquence that he sprang to his
feet and, raising one hand high above his head (quite unconscious that
he was holding up a dill pickle), he worked through one of his most
thrilling periods.
Yes, I laughed, and yet there was so brave a simplicity about this odd,
absurd little man that what I laughed at was only his outward appearance
(and that he himself had no care for), and all the time I felt a growing
respect and admiration for him. He was not only sincere, but he was
genuinely simple--a much higher virtue, as Fenelon says. For while
sincere people do not aim at appearing anything but what they are,
they are always in fear of passing for something they are not. They are
forever thinking about themselves, weighing all their words and thoughts
and dwelling upon what they have done, in the fear of having done
too much or too little, whereas simplicity, as Fenelon says, is an
uprightness of soul which has ceased wholly to dwell upon itself or its
actions. Thus there are plenty of sincere folk in the world but few who
are simple.
Well, the longer he talked, the less interested I was in what he said
and the more fascinated I became in what he was. I felt a wistful
interest in him: and I wanted to know what way he took to purge himself
of himself. I think if I had been in that group nineteen hundred years
ago, which surrounded the beggar who was born blind, but whose anointed
eyes now looked out upon glories of the world, I should have been among
the questioners:
“What did he to thee? How opened he thine eyes?”
I tried ineffectually several times to break the swift current of his
oratory and finally succeeded (when he paused a moment to finish off a
bit of pie crust).
“You must have seen some hard experiences in your life,” I said.
“That I have,” responded Bill Hahn, “the capitalistic system--”
“Did you ever work in the mills yourself?” I interrupted hastily.
“Boy and man,” said Bill Hahn, “I worked in that hell for thirty-two
years--The class-conscious proletariat have only to exert themselves--”
“And your wife, did she work too--and your sons and daughters?”
A spasm of pain crossed his face.
“My daughter?” he said. “They killed her in the mills.”
It was appalling--the dead level of the tone in which he uttered those
words--the monotone of an emotion long ago burned out, and yet leaving
frightful scars.
“My friend!” I exclaimed, and I could not help laying my hand on his
arm.
I had the feeling I often have with troubled children--an indescribable
pity that they have had to pass through the valley of the shadow, and I
not there to take them by the hand.
“And was this--your daughter--what brought you to your present belief?”
“No,” said he, “oh, no. I was a Socialist, as you might say, from youth
up. That is, I called myself a Socialist, but, comrade, I've learned
this here truth: that it ain't of so much importance that you possess a
belief, as that the belief possess you. Do you understand?”
“I think,” said I, “that I understand.”
Well, he told me his story, mostly in a curious, dull, detached way--as
though he were speaking of some third person in whom he felt only a
brotherly interest, but from time to time some incident or observation
would flame up out of the narrative, like the opening of the door of a
molten pit--so that the glare hurt one!--and then the story would die
back again into quiet narrative.
Like most working people he had never lived in the twentieth century at
all. He was still in the feudal age, and his whole life had been a blind
and ceaseless struggle for the bare necessaries of life, broken from
time to time by fierce irregular wars called strikes. He had never known
anything of a real self-governing commonwealth, and such progress as
he and his kind had made was never the result of their citizenship,
of their powers as voters, but grew out of the explosive and ragged
upheavals, of their own half-organized societies and unions.
It was against the “black people” he said, that he was first on strike
back in the early nineties. He told me all about it, how he had been
working in the mills pretty comfortably--he was young and strong then;
with a fine growing family and a small home of his own.
“It was as pretty a place as you would want to see,” he said; “we grew
cabbages and onions and turnips--everything grew fine!--in the garden
behind the house.”
And then the “black people” began to come in, little by little at first,
and then by the carload. By the “black people” he meant the people
from Southern Europe, he called them “hordes”--“hordes and hordes
of 'em”--Italians mostly, and they began getting into the mills and
underbidding for the jobs, so that wages slowly went down and at the
same time the machines were speeded up. It seems that many of these
“black people” were single men or vigorous young married people with
only themselves to support, while the old American workers were men with
families and little homes to pay for, and plenty of old grandfathers and
mothers, to say nothing of babies, depending upon them.
“There wasn't a living for a decent family left,” he said.
So they struck--and he told me in his dull monotone of the long
bitterness of that strike, the empty cupboards, the approach of winter
with no coal for the stoves and no warm clothing for the children. He
told me that many of the old workers began to leave the town (some bound
for the larger cities, some for the Far West).
“But,” said he with a sudden outburst of emotion, “I couldn't leave. I
had the woman and the children!”
And presently the strike collapsed, and the workers rushed helter
skelter back to the mills to get their old jobs. “Begging like whipped
dogs,” he said bitterly.
Many of them found their places taken by the eager “black people,” and
many had to go to work at lower wages in poorer places--punished for the
fight they had made.
But he got along somehow, he said--“the woman was a good manager”--until
one day he had the misfortune to get his hand caught in the machinery.
It was a place which should have been protected with guards, but was
not. He was laid up for several weeks, and the company, claiming that
the accident was due to his own stupidity and carelessness, refused
even to pay his wages while he was idle. Well, the family had to live
somehow, and the woman and the daughter--“she was a little thing,” he
said, “and frail”--the woman and the daughter went into the mill. But
even with this new source of income they began to fall behind. Money
which should have gone toward making the last payments on their home
(already long delayed by the strike) had now to go to the doctor and the
grocer.
“We had to live,” said Bill Hahn.
Again and again he used this same phrase, “We had to live!” as a sort of
bedrock explanation for all the woes of life.
After a time, with one finger gone and a frightfully scarred hand--he
held it up for me to see--he went back into the mill.
“But it kept getting worse and worse,” said he, “and finally I couldn't
stand it any longer.”
He and a group of friends got together secretly and tried to organize a
union, tried to get the workmen together to improve their own condition;
but in some way (“they had spies everywhere,” he said) the manager
learned of the attempt and one morning when he reported at the mill he
was handed a slip asking him to call for his wages, that his help was no
longer required.
“I'd been with that one company for twenty years and four months,” he
said bitterly, “I'd helped in my small way to build it up, make it a big
concern payin' 28 per cent. dividends every year; I'd given part of my
right hand in doin' it--and they threw me out like an old shoe.”
He said he would have pulled up and gone away, but he still had the
little home and the garden, and his wife and daughter were still at
work, so he hung on grimly, trying to get some other job. “But what good
is a man for any other sort of work,” he said, “when he has been trained
to the mills for thirty-two years!”
It was not very long after that when the “great strike” began--indeed,
it grew out of the organization which he had tried to launched--and
Bill Hahn threw himself into it with all his strength. He was one of
the leaders. I shall not attempt to repeat here his description of the
bitter struggle, the coming of the soldiery, the street riots, the long
lists of arrests (“some,” said he, “got into jail on purpose, so
that they could at least have enough to eat!”), the late meetings of
strikers, the wild turmoil and excitement.
Of all this he told me, and then he stopped suddenly, and after a long
pause he said in a low voice:
“Comrade, did ye ever see your wife and your sickly daughter and your
kids sufferin' for bread to eat?”
He paused again with a hard, dry sob in his voice.
“Did ye ever see that?”
“No,” said I, very humbly, “I have never seen anything like that.”
He turned on me suddenly, and I shall never forget the look on his face,
nor the blaze in his eyes:
“Then what can you know about working-men?”
What could I answer?
A moment passed and then he said, as if a little remorseful at having
turned thus on me:
“Comrade, I tell you, the iron entered my soul--them days.”
It seems that the leaders of the strike were mostly old employees like
Bill Hahn, and the company had conceived the idea that if these men
could be eliminated the organization would collapse, and the strikers be
forced back to work. One day Bill Hahn found that proceedings had been
started to turn him out of his home, upon which he had not been able to
keep up his payments, and at the same time the merchant, of whom he had
been a respected customer for years, refused to give him any further
credit.
“But we lived somehow,” he said, “we lived and we fought.”
It was then that he began to see clearly what it all meant. He said he
made a great discovery: that the “black people” against whom they had
struck in 1894 were not to blame!
“I tell you,” said he, “we found when we got started that them black
people--we used to call 'em dagoes--were just workin' people like
us--and in hell with us. They were good soldiers, them Eyetalians and
Poles and Syrians, they fought with us to the end.”
I shall not soon forget the intensely dramatic but perfectly simple way
in which he told me how he came, as he said, “to see the true light.”
Holding up his maimed right hand (that trembled a little), he pointed
one finger upward.
“I seen the big hand in the sky,” he said, “I seen it as clear as
daylight.”
He said he saw at last what Socialism meant. One day he went home from a
strikers' meeting--one of the last, for the men were worn out with
their long struggle. It was a bitter cold day, and he was completely
discouraged. When he reached his own street he saw a pile of household
goods on the sidewalk in front of his home. He saw his wife there
wringing her hands and crying. He said he could not take a step further,
but sat down on a neighbour's porch and looked and looked. “It was
curious,” he said, “but the only thing I could see or think about was
our old family clock which they had stuck on top of the pile, half
tipped over. It looked odd and I wanted to set it up straight. It was
the clock we bought when we were married, and we'd had it about twenty
years on the mantel in the livin'-room. It was a good clock,” he said.
He paused and then smiled a little.
“I never have figured it out why I should have been able to think of
nothing but that clock,” he said, “but so it was.”
When he got home, he found his frail daughter just coming out of the
empty house, “coughing as though she was dyin'.” Something, he said,
seemed to stop inside him. Those were his words: “Something seemed to
stop inside 'o me.”
He turned away without saying a word, walked back to strike
headquarters, borrowed a revolver from a friend, and started out along
the main road which led into the better part of the town.
“Did you ever hear o' Robert Winter?” he asked.
“No,” said I.
“Well, Robert Winter was the biggest gun of 'em all. He owned the mills
there and the largest store and the newspaper--he pretty nearly owned
the town.”
He told me much more about Robert Winter which betrayed still a curious
sort of feudal admiration for him, and for his great place and power;
but I need not dwell on it here. He told me how he climbed through a
hemlock hedge (for the stone gateway was guarded) and walked through the
snow toward the great house.
“An' all the time I seemed to be seein' my daughter Margy right there
before my eyes coughing as though she was dyin'.”
It was just nightfall and all the windows were alight. He crept up to a
clump of bushes under a window and waited there a moment while he drew
out and cocked his revolver. Then he slowly reached upward until his
head cleared the sill and he could look into the room. “A big, warm
room,” he described it.
“Comrade,” said he, “I had murder in my heart that night.”
So he stood there looking in with the revolver ready cocked in his hand.
“And what do you think I seen there?” he asked.
“I cannot guess,” I said.
“Well,” said Bill Hahn, “I seen the great Robert Winter that we had been
fighting for five long months--and he was down on his hands and knees on
the carpet--he had his little daughter on his back--and he was creepin'
about with her--an' she was laughin'.”
Bill Hahn paused.
“I had a bead on him,” he said, “but I couldn't do it--I just couldn't
do it.”
He came away all weak and trembling and cold, and, “Comrade,” he said,
“I was cryin' like a baby, and didn't know why.”
The next day the strike collapsed and there was the familiar stampede
for work--but Bill Hahn did not go back. He knew it would be useless. A
week later his frail daughter died and was buried in the paupers field.
“She was as truly killed,” he said, “as though some one had fired a
bullet at her through a window.”
“And what did you do after that?” I asked, when he had paused for a long
time with his chin on his breast.
“Well,” said he, “I did a lot of thinking them days, and I says to
myself: 'This thing is wrong, and I will go out and stop it--I will go
out and stop it.'”
As he uttered these words, I looked at him curiously--his absurd flat
fur hat with the moth-eaten ears, the old bulging overcoat, the
round spectacles, the scarred, insignificant face--he seemed somehow
transformed, a person elevated above himself, the tool of some vast
incalculable force.
I shall never forget the phrase he used to describe his own feelings
when he had reached this astonishing decision to go out and stop the
wrongs of the World. He said he “began to feel all clean inside.”
“I see it didn't matter what become o' me, and I began to feel all clean
inside.”
It seemed, he explained, as though something big and strong had got hold
of him, and he began to be happy.
“Since then,” he said in a low voice, “I've been happier than I ever
was before in all my life. I ain't got any family, nor any home--rightly
speakin'--nor any money, but, comrade, you see here in front of you, a
happy man.”
When he had finished his story we sat quiet for some time.
“Well,” said he, finally, “I must be goin'. The committee will wonder
what's become o' me.”
I followed him out to the road. There I put my hand on his shoulder, and
said:
“Bill Hahn, you are a better man than I am.”
He smiled, a beautiful smile, and we walked off together down the road.
I wish I had gone on with him at that time into the city, but somehow I
could not do it. I stopped near the top of the hill where one can see in
the distance that smoky huddle of buildings which is known as Kilburn,
and though he urged me, I turned aside and sat down in the edge of a
meadow. There were many things I wanted to think about, to get clear in
my mind.
As I sat looking out toward that great city, I saw three men walking
in the white road. As I watched them, I could see them coming quickly,
eagerly. Presently they threw up their hands and evidently began to
shout, though I could not hear what they said. At that moment I saw my
friend Bill Hahn running in the road, his coat skirts flapping heavily
about his legs. When they met they almost fell into another's arms.
I suppose it was so that the early Christians, those who hid in the
Roman catacombs, were wont to greet one another.
So I sat thinking.
“A man,” I said to myself, “who can regard himself as a function, not an
end of creation, has arrived.”
After a time I got up and walked down the hill--some strange force
carrying me onward--and came thus to the city of Kilburn.