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THE DRIVER
by
GARET GARRETT
Author of “The Blue Wound,” etc.
[Illustration: Logo]
New York
E. P. Dutton & Company
681 Fifth Avenue
Copyright, 1922
By E. P. Dutton & Company
All Rights Reserved
First printing, September, 1922
Second printing, October, 1922
Printed in the United
States of America
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. PHANTASMA 1
II. THE FUNK IDOL 32
III. GALT 63
IV. AN ECONOMIC NIGHTMARE 86
V. VERA 99
VI. A GIANT IN BABY SWEAT 115
VII. DARING THE DARK 131
VIII. LOW WATER 136
IX. FORTH HE GOES 139
X. HEYDAY 162
XI. HEARTH NOTES 180
XII. A BROKEN SYMBOL 198
XIII. SUCCESS 213
XIV. THE COMBAT 226
XV. THE HEIGHTS 257
XVI. GATE OF ENIGMA 285
XVII. NATALIE 293
THE DRIVER
CHAPTER I
PHANTASMA
i
It is Easter Sunday in the village of Massillon, Stark County, Ohio,
fifty miles south by east from Cleveland. Fourth year of the soft Money
Plague; 1894.
Time, about 10 o’clock.
The sky is low and brooding, with an untimely thought of snow. Church
bells are ringing. They sound remote and disapproving. Almost nobody is
mindful of their call. The soul may miss its feast; the eye of wonder
shall not be cheated. The Comic God has published a decree. Here once
more the sad biped, solemn, ludicrous and romantic, shall mount the
gilded ass. It is a spectacle that will not wait. For weeks in all the
newspapers of the country the fact has been advertised in a spirit of
waggery. At this hour and from this place the Army of the Commonweal
of Christ will set forth on foot in quest of the Economic Millennium.
The village is agog with people congregating to witness the fantasied
event. In the main street natives and strangers mingle their feet
gregariously. There are spasmodic sounds of laughter, retort, argument
and ribaldry; and continually the shrill cries of youth in a frenzy of
expectation. Buggies, two-wheelers, open carts and spring wagons line
both sides of the street. The horses are blanketed. A damp, chill wind
is blowing. Vendors from Chicago, lewd-looking men, working a hundred
feet apart, are yelling: “Git a Christ army button here fer a nickel!”
There is a composite smell of ham sandwiches, peanuts, oranges and
cigars.
A shout rises at the far end of the street. The crowd that has been
so thick there, filling the whole space, bursts open. A band begins
playing “Onward Christian Soldiers,” and the spectacle is present.
First comes a negro bearing the American flag.
Next, on a white horse, is a thick, close-bearded, self-regarding man
with powerful, darting eyes and an air of fantastic vanity. He wears a
buckskin coat with fringed sleeves; the breast is covered with gaudy
medals. On his head is a large white sombrero. Around his neck swings a
string of amber beads. He is cheered and rallied as he passes and bows
continually.
Behind him walks a trumpeter, saluted as Windy Oliver. After the
trumpeter walks the Astrologer, bearing the wand of his mysterious
office. Then a band of seven pieces, very willing and enterprising.
And now, by the timbre and volume of the cheering, you recognize the
Commander. He rides. Sitting so still and distant beside a negro
driver in a buggy drawn by two mares he is disappointing to the eye.
There is nothing obviously heroic about him. He wears spectacles.
Above a thin, down-growing mustache the face is that of a man of ideas
and action; the lower features, especially the mouth, denote a shy,
secretive, sentimental, credulous man of mystical preoccupations. None
of these qualities is more than commonplace. The type is well known
to inland communities--the man who believes in perpetual motion, in
the perfectibility of human nature, in miraculous interventions of
deity, and makes a small living shrewdly. He might be the inventor of
a washing machine. He is in fact the owner of a sandstone quarry and a
breeder of horses.
But mark you, the ego may achieve grandeur in any habitat. It is
not in the least particular. This inconsiderable man, ludicrously
setting forth on Easter Sunday in command of a modern crusade, has one
startling obsession. He believes that with the bandit-looking person on
the white horse he _shares the reincarnation of Christ_.
In a buggy following, with what thoughts we shall never know, rides the
wife of this half of Christ reincarnated.
Next comes another negro bearing the banner of the Commonweal of
Christ. In the center of it is a painted Christ head. The lettering,
divided above and below the head, reads:
PEACE ON EARTH: GOOD WILL TO MEN
B U T
DEATH TO INTEREST BEARING BONDS
Then comes the Army of the Commonwealers. They are counted derisively.
The Commander said there would be an hundred thousand, or at least ten
thousand, or, at the start, not fewer than one thousand. Well, the
number is one hundred scant. They are a weird lot--a grim, one-eyed
miner from Ottumwa; a jockey from Lexington, a fanatical preacher of
the raw gospel from Detroit, a heavy steel mill worker from Youngstown,
a sinewy young farmer from near Sandusky, a Swede laborer from
everywhere, one doctor, one lawyer, clerks, actors, paper hangers,
blind ends, what-nots and tramps. There is not a fat man among them,
nor one above forty. They march in order, looking straight ahead. A
man in a blue overcoat and white trousers, riding a horse with a red
saddle, moves up and down the line eyeing it importantly.
At the end of this strange procession are two wagons. One is called the
commissariat wagon; it is loaded with a circus tent, some bales of hay
for the horses and a few bags of provisions--hardly enough for one day.
The other is a covered wagon painted blue. The sides are decorated
with geometrical figures of incomprehensible meaning. This vehicle of
mystery belongs to the precious being on the white horse ahead. He
created it; inside are sliding panoramas which he has painted.
As these wagons pass, people on foot and in buggies and wagons to
the number of more than a thousand fall into line and follow. Their
curiosity is not yet sated. They cannot abandon the spectacle.
Among these followers are forty-three correspondents, representing
newspapers from New York to San Francisco; four Western Union telegraph
operators, and two linemen. The route to Jerusalem is uncertain.
Something may happen on the open road, miles from a telegraph office.
Hence the linemen, anywhere to climb a pole and tap the wires, and
special operators to dispatch the news emergently! The reporters are to
whoop the story up and be in on the crucifixion.
Could anything less seeming of reality be invented by the imagination?
It has the pattern of a dream. Yet it is history.
This is how two fatuous spirits, charlatans maybe, visionaries
certainly,--Carl Browne on the white horse and Jacob S. Coxey in the
buggy,--led the Army of the Commonweal of Christ (Coxey’s Army for
short), out of Massillon, past the blacksmith shop, past the sandstone
quarry, past the little house where the woman was who waved her apron
with one hand and wiped her eyes with the other, out upon the easting
highway, toward Washington, with the Easter chimes behind them.
And for what purpose? Merely this: to demand from Congress a law by
which unlimited prosperity and human happiness might be established on
earth.
ii
I, who am telling it, was one of the forty-three correspondents.
The road was ankle deep with that unguent kind of mud which lies on
top of frost. Snow began to fall. Curiosity waned in the rear. The
followers began to slough off, shouting words of encouragement as they
turned back. Browne on his white horse, Coxey in his buggy and the
man in the red saddle were immersed in vanity. But the marchers were
extremely miserable. None of them was properly shod or dressed for
it. They were untrained, unused to distance walking, and after a few
miles a number of them began to limp on wet, blistered feet. The band
played a great deal and the men sang, sometimes all together, sometimes
in separate groups. The going was such that no sort of marching order
could be maintained.
At one o’clock there was a stop for coffee and dry bread, served out of
the commissariat wagon.
It was understood that the Army would live on the country as it went
along, trusting to charity and providence; but the shrewdness of
the Commander had foreseen that the art of begging would have to be
learned, and that in any case it could not begin successfully on the
first few miles out.
The Commonwealers watched us curiously as we tapped the telegraph wires
by the roadside to send off flash bulletins of progress. Both Browne
and Coxey exhorted their followers to courage, challenged the weaklings
to drop out, and the march was resumed with only two desertions. These
were made good by accessions further on.
At four o’clock a halt was called near a village, the inhabitants of
which made friendly gestures and brought forth bacons and hams which
were gratefully added to the boiled potatoes and bread served out of
the wagon. The tent was raised. Browne, astride his bespattered white
horse, made a speech.
He was the more aggressive half of the reincarnation. Indeed, it came
presently to be the opinion of the correspondents that he was the
activating principle of the whole infatuation, and held the other in a
spell. He was full of sound and rhetoric and moved himself to ecstacy
with sonorous sayings. His talk was a wild compound of Scripture,
Theosophy and Populism.
The Kingdom of Heaven on earth was at hand, he said. The conditions
foretold in Revelations were fulfilled. The seven heads of the beast
were the seven conspiracies against the money of the people. The
ten horns of the beast were the ten monopolies nourished in Wall
Street--the Sugar Trust, the Oil Trust, and so on.
“We are fast undermining the structure of monopoly in the hearts of the
people,” he declaimed, reaching his peroration. “Like Cyrus of old we
are fast tunnelling under the boodlers’ Euphrates and will soon be able
to march under the walls of the second Babylon, and its mysteries, too.
The infernal, blood-sucking bank system will be overthrown, for the
handwriting is on the wall.”
The listeners, though they growled at the mention of Wall Street and
cheered the fall of Babylon, received his interpretation of their
rôle and errand with an uneasy, bothered air. Voices asked for Coxey.
He spoke to them in a gentle manner, praised them for their courage
and fortitude, emphasized the hardships yet to be endured, proposed a
hymn to be sung, and then dismissed them to rest with some practical
suggestions touching their physical comfort. Rest and comfort, under
the circumstances, were terms full of irony, but nobody seemed to think
of that. They cheered him heartily.
iii
In the village railroad station was a telegraph office, where our
special operators cut in their instruments and received our copy. Among
us we filed more than 40,000 words of narrative, incident, pathos and
ridicule.
News is stranger than fiction not in what it tells but in how it
happens. In a room twenty feet square, lighted by one kerosene lamp, we
wrote our copy on our knees, against the wall, on each other’s backs,
standing up and lying down, matching notes and exchanging information
as we went along.
“What’s the name of this town?”
“Louisville.”
“Kentucky?”
“Kentucky, no. Hear him!--Ohio.”
“Didn’t know there was a Louisville, Ohio.”
“Write it anyway. It isn’t the first time you’ve written what you don’t
know.”
Then silence, save for the clicking of the telegraph instruments and
the cracking of copy paper.
“Who was the man in the red saddle?”
No answer.
Again: “Who was the guy in the red saddle?”
No answer.
Another voice, in the same difficulty, roaring: “Who in hell was the
man in the red saddle?”
Now everybody for a minute stops writing. Nobody knows.
Voice: “Call him Smith: the man of mystery: the great unknown.”
We did. The man in the red saddle was Smith the Great Unknown to the
end of his silly part.
There was a small hotel in the place, with only two bedrooms available,
and these had been selfishly seized by three magazine writers who had
no telegraph stuff to file. They had retired. The rest of us took
possession of a fairly large lounging room and settled ourselves for
the night on cots, pallets and chairs.
The lean-minded man from Cleveland, reclining on the hotel desk with
his feet on the cigar case, started an untimely discussion.
“We’ve sent off a lot of guff about this thing,” he said, “and not a
word of what it means. Not a man here has tried to tell what it means.”
“Leave that to the editorial writers and go to sleep,” said St. Louis
from under his hat. He had made his bed in the swivel chair.
“It means something ... it means something,” said Cleveland.
“Well, what?” asked a petulant voice.
“It’s a joke,” said St. Louis, not moving. “People have to laugh,” he
added. “Go to sleep or be still.”
Another voice: “What does it mean, you Cleveland? I saw you reading
Plutarch. What does it mean?”
“These people are asking questions to which there is no answer,” said
the Cleveland man, lifting on his elbow. “Why is anybody hungry in a
land of surplus food? Why are able bodied men out of work while we have
such roads as the one we traveled to-day? I don’t know. I’m asking.”
A man whom we had hardly noticed before, anæmic, shrill and hairy, sat
up on his mattress and thrust a naked bent arm out of his blanket.
“I’ll tell you what it means,” he shouted. “Wall Street has sucked the
country dry. People may perish, but Wall Street will have its profit
and interest. Labor may starve, but the banking power will keep money
sound. Money in itself is nothing,--merely a convenience, a token by
means of which useful things are exchanged. Is that so? Not at all.
Money no longer exists for the use of people. We exist for the sake of
money. There is plenty everywhere, but people cannot buy because they
are unemployed and have no money. Coxey says, ‘Create the money. Make
it abundant. Then people may work and be prosperous.’ Well, why not?
Wall Street says if you make money abundant you will ruin the country.
Hell! The country is already ruined. We laugh. Yet what we have seen
to-day is the beginning of revolution. As people have freed themselves
from other tyrannies, so they will free themselves from this money
tyranny.”
He stopped, out of breath and choking, and a singular hubbub arose.
Everyone awake had been listening attentively, and now, just as they
lay, not an arm or a leg stirring, all those huddled, inert forms
became vocal, shouting:
“Populist! Right-o! Put him out! Douse him!”
Accents of weariness, irritation and raillery were inseparably mingled.
Yet the overtone was not unfriendly. We could be light and cruel with
the Army of the Commonweal of Christ, because its whole figure was
ludicrous, but there was no love among us for Wall Street or the money
power. Those names stood for ideas of things which were commonly feared
and hated and blamed for all the economic distress of the time.
Above, the plutocratic magazine writers were pounding on the floor. The
hairy agitator, breathing heavily, melted back into his mattress, heavy
in his conscience, no doubt, for having written a very sarcastic piece
about that Easter Day event. We saw it afterward in his Chicago paper.
The fat reporter from Cincinnati began to snore.
For a long time I lay awake, thinking.
What were we doing here? Reporting the news. News of what? One
hundred inconsequent men dreaming in the mud,--was that news? No, not
intrinsically. As a manifestation of the frustrate human spirit it
might serve as material for the reflective fictionist, or text for some
Olympian humorist, but why was it news to be written hot and dispatched
by telegraph?
In their acts of faith, folly, wisdom and curiosity men are moved by
ideas. Perhaps, therefore, the discrepancy between the unimportance
of this incongruous Easter Day spectacle itself and the interest we
bestowed upon it was explained by what it signified--that is, by the
motivating idea. This thought I examined carefully.
Two years before this, Jacob S. Coxey, horse breeder, quarry owner,
crank, whom no one had heard of until then, proposed to cure the
economic disease then afflicting the country by the simple expedient of
hiring all the unemployed on public works. Congress should raise half
a billion dollars from non-interest bearing bonds and spend the money
on national roads. This plan received some publicity as a freak idea;
nobody had been really serious about it. What then happens?
One Carl Browne, theosophist, demagogue and noise-breaker, seeks out
this money crank at Massillon and together they incubate the thought of
calling upon the people to take the plan in the form of a petition and
walk with it to Congress. The thing is Russian,--“a petition in boots,”
a prayer to the government carried great distances by peasants on foot.
The newspapers print it as a piece of light news. Then everybody begins
to talk about it, and the response is amazing. People laugh openly and
are secretly serious.
A day is set for the march to begin, a form of organization is
announced and Coxey Army contingents begin to appear spontaneously all
over the country. This also is news, to be treated in the same light
spirit, and no doubt it is much exaggerated for sportive reasons. As
the day approaches little groups of men, calling themselves units of
the Christ Army of the Commonweal, set out from Missouri, Illinois,
Pennsylvania, Kansas, Michigan, from anywhere east of the Missouri
River, footing it to Massillon to merge their numbers. Then it rains.
For three weeks there is nothing but rain, and the flesh fails. That is
why there is but a scant one hundred to make the start. Coxey believes
the bemired and tardy units will survive and catch up. He still hopes
to have tens of thousands with him when he reaches Washington.
But all of this vibration is unmistakably emotional. That is a fact
to be accounted for. When did it become possible to emotionalize the
human animal with a financial idea?--specifically, a plan to convert
non-interest bearing bonds into an unlimited amount of legal tender
money? Never. The money theory is merely the ostensible aspect, the
outwardness of the matter. Something else is signified. What is it?
I come back to what the Cleveland man said. Why are people hungry in a
land of surplus food? Why is labor idle? Labor applied to materials is
the source of all wealth. There is no lack of materials. The desire for
wealth is without limit. Why are men unemployed instead of acting on
their unfinished environment to improve it?
And now, though I had thought my way around a circle, I began to
glimpse some understanding of what was taking place in a manner
nominally so preposterous. People had tormented themselves with
these questions until they were weary, callous and bitterly ironic.
The country was in the toils of an invisible monster that devoured
its heart and wasted its substance. The name of this monster was
Hard Times. The problem of unemployment was chronic, desperate and
apparently hopeless. The cause of it was unknown. People were sick of
thinking and talking about something for which there was no help. They
had either to despair or laugh. Then came Coxey, fanatic, mountebank
or rare comedian,--so solemn in his egregious pretensions that no one
knew which,--and they laughed. It might become serious. Mass psychology
was in a highly inflammable condition. There was always that thought
in reserve to tinge the laughter with foreboding. But if there came
a conflagration, then perhaps the questions would be unexpectedly
answered; nobody cared much what else happened.
Cincinnati turned over with a frightful snort and was suddenly quiet. I
prayed that he might be dead and went to sleep.
The next morning the New York Herald man took me aside.
“I’ve been recalled from this assignment to go to Europe,” he said.
“I’m waiting for a man to relieve me. He will pick us up some time
to-day.”
I said I was sorry; and I was, for we were made to each other’s liking.
“I don’t care for the man who is relieving me,” he continued. “Besides,
he isn’t competent to do what I’m about to ask you to undertake in my
place.”
“Anything I can,” I said.
“You are from the west,” he continued, “and therefore you’re not likely
to know how jumpy the Wall Street people are about what’s going on.
They are afraid of this Coxey movement,--of what it may lead to. They
want to know a lot about it,--more than they can get from the newspaper
stories. I’ve been sending a confidential letter on it daily to
Valentine ... you know, ... John J., president of the Great Midwestern
Railroad. He wants the tale unvarnished, and what you think of it,
and what others think of it. He particularly wants to know in the
fullest way how the Coxeyites are received along the way, for therein
is disclosed the state of public feeling. Well, I wish you to take
this commission off my hands. It pays fifty a week for the life of the
circus. I’ll see him in New York, tell him who you are and why I left
it for you to do. Then when the thing is over you can run up to New
York from Washington and get your money.”
I hesitated.
“It’s Wall Street money,” I said.
“It’s railroad money,” he replied. “That may be all the same thing.
But there’s no difficulty, really. It’s quite all right for anyone to
do this. What’s wanted is the truth. Put in your own opinions of Wall
Street if you like. Indeed, do that. Wall Street people are not as you
think they are. Valentine is a particularly good sort and honest in his
point of view. I vouch for the whole thing.”
So I took it; and thereafter posted to John J. Valentine, 130 Broadway,
room 607, _personal_, a daily confidential report on the march of the
Commonwealers.
I would not say that the fact of having a retainer in railroad money
changed my point of view. It did somewhat affect my sense of values and
my curiosity was extended.
For the purpose of the Valentine reports I made an intensive personal
study of the Commonwealers. I asked them why they were doing it. Some
took it as a sporting adventure, with no thought of the consequences,
and enjoyed the mob spirit. Some were tramps who for the first time in
their lives found begging respectable. But a great majority of them
were earnest, wistful men, fairly aching with convictions, without
being able to say what it was they had a conviction of, or what was
wrong with the world. Their notions were incoherent. Nobody seemed
very sanguine about the Coxey plan; nobody understood it, in fact; yet
something would have to be done; people couldn’t live without work.
Unemployment was the basic grievance. I took a group of twenty, all
skilled workmen, sixteen of them married, and found that for each of
them the average number of wage earning days in a year had been twelve.
They blamed the money power in Wall Street. When they were asked how
the money power could profit by their unemployment, what motive it
could have in creating hard times, they took refuge in meaningless
phrases. Most of them believed in peaceable measures. Only three or
four harbored destructive thoughts.
The manner of the Army’s reception by farmers, villagers and
townspeople was variable and hard at first to understand. Generally
there was plenty of plain food. Sometimes it was provided in a
generous, sympathetic spirit; then again it would be forthcoming as
a bid for immunity, the givers at heart being fearful and hostile.
The Army was much maligned by rumor as a body of tramps obtaining
sustenance by blackmail. It wasn’t true. There was no theft, very
little disorder, no taking without leave, even when the stomach gnawed.
One learned to anticipate the character of reception by the look of
the place. In poor, dilapidated communities there was always a hearty
welcome with what food the people could spare, cheerfully bestowed;
the better and more prosperous the community the worse for the
Commonwealers.
I spoke of this to some of the more thoughtful men. They had noted the
fact and made nothing of it. Then I spoke of it to one of the tramps,
who knew the technique of begging; he said:
“Sure. Anybody’d know that. D’jew ever get anything at a big house? The
poor give. We ought to stick to the poor towns.”
In those industrial communities where class distinctions had
arisen,--that is to say, where poverty and affluence were separately
self-conscious, the police invariably were disagreeable and the poor
were enthusiastic over the Commonwealers. At Allegheny, where the steel
mill workers had long suffered from unemployment, the Army received a
large white silk banner, lettered:
“Laws for Americans. More money. Less misery.”
Here there were several collisions between, on one side, the
Commonwealers and their welcomers, and, on the other, the police. At
some towns the Army was not permitted to stop at all. At others it was
officially received with music, speeches and rejoicings.
As these incidents became repetitious they ceased to be news, yet they
were more important, merely by reason of recurring, than the bizarre
happenings within the Army which as newspaper correspondents we were
obliged competitively to emphasize, as, for example, the quarrel
between Browne and the bandmaster, the mutiny led by Smith the Great
Unknown, the development of the reincarnation myth and the increasing
distaste for it among the disciples.
The size of the Army fluctuated with the state of the weather. Crossing
the Blue Mountains by the icy Cumberland road in a snow storm was an
act of fortitude almost heroic. Confidence in the leaders declined.
Browne came to be treated with mild contempt. The line,--“Christ
and Coxey,”--which had been painted on the commissariat wagon was
almost too much. There was grumbling in the ranks. Everybody was
discouraged when the expectation of great numbers had finally to be
abandoned. Never did the roll exceed five hundred men, not even after
the memorable junction in Maryland with Christopher Columbus Jones,
forty-eight men and a bull dog, from Philadelphia.
Yet there was a cohesive principle somewhere. Nearly all of those who
started from Massillon stuck to the very end. What held them together?
Possibly, a vague, herd sense of moving against something and a dogged
reaction to ridicule. This feeling of againstness is sometimes stronger
to unite men, especially unhappy men, than a feeling of forness. The
thing they were against was formless in their minds. It could not be
visualized or perceived by the imagination, like the figure of the
horrible Turk in possession of the Holy Sepulchre. Therefore it was a
foredoomed crusade.
The climax was pitiably futile.
Two self-mongering reincarnations of Christ, both fresh and clean,
having nighted in decent hotels, led four hundred draggle-tail men into
Washington and up Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol grounds, enormous
humiliated crowds looking on. Browne dismounted and leaped over the
low stone wall. Coxey tried to make a speech. Both were good-naturedly
arrested for trespassing on the public grass and violating a police
ordinance. The leaderless men wandered back to a camp site that had
been mercifully loaned. For a time they dully subsisted upon charity,
ceased altogether to be news, and gradually vanished away.
iv
Though the Army of the Commonweal of Christ was dead, and Coxey himself
was now a pusillanimous figure, Coxeyism survived in a formidable
manner. The term was current in newspaper language; and the country
seemed to be full of those forms of social insubordination which it
was meant to signify. In the west rudely organized bands, some of them
armed, and strong enough to overwhelm the police of the cities through
which they passed, were running amuck. They bore no petition in boots;
they were impatient and headlong. One of their pastimes was train
stealing. They would seize a railroad train, overpower the crew and
oblige themselves to outlaw transportation; and the railroad people,
fearful of accidents, would clear the way to let them through. It was
very exciting for men who had nothing else to do, and rather terrifying
to the forces of law and order.
Public opinion was distracted and outraged.
Some said, “Put down Coxeyism. Put it down with a strong hand. To treat
it tenderly is to encourage lawlessness.”
Others said, “You may be able to put down Coxeyism by force, but you
will sometime have to answer the questions it has raised. Better now
than later.”
There was a great swell of radical thought in the country. The Populist
party, representing a blind sense of revolt, had elected four men to
the Senate and eleven to the House of Representatives. Many newspapers
and magazines were aligned with the agitators, all asking the same
questions:
Why hunger in a land of plenty?
Why unemployment?
Why was the economic machine making this frightful noise?
The Federal and state governments were afraid to act effectively
against Coxeyism because too many people sympathized with it, secretly
or openly. It was partly a state of nerves. Writers in the popular
periodicals and in some of the solemn reviews laid it on red. In
Coxey’s march they saw an historic parallel. In almost the same
way five hundred volunteers, knowing how to die, had marched from
Marseilles to Paris with questions that could not be answered, and gave
the French Revolution a hymn that shook the world. Human distress was
first page news. The New York World gave away a million loaves of bread
and whooped up its circulation. The New York Herald solicited donations
of clothing which it distributed in large quantities to the ragged.
On the train from Washington to New York I found men continually
wrangling in fierce heat about money, tariff and Coxeyism. I was
surprised to hear Wall Street attacked by well dressed, apparently
prosperous men, in the very phrases with which the Coxeyites had
filled my ears. Nobody by any chance ever stood in defense of Wall
Street, but there were those who denounced the Coxeyites and Populists
intemperately. Everybody denounced something; nobody was _for_
anything. National morale was in a very low state.
In the smoking compartment two men, behaving as old acquaintances,
quarreled interminably and with so much dialectical skill that an
audience gathered to listen in respectful silence. One was a neat,
clerical-looking person whose anxieties were unrelieved by any glimpse
of humor or fancy. The other was carelessly dressed, spilt cigar ashes
over his clothes unawares, and had a way of putting out his tongue and
laughing at himself dryly if the argument went momentarily against him
or when he had adroitly delivered himself from a tight place. He was
the elder of the two. He was saying:
“Because men are out of work they do not lose their rights as citizens
to petition Congress in _any_ peaceable manner. Your low tariff is the
cause of unemployment. There is the evidence,--those cold smoke stacks.”
He pointed to them. We were passing through Wilmington.
“The importation of cheap foreign goods has shut our factories up. You
retort by calling the unemployed tramps.”
“It was the high Republican tariff that made the people soft and
helpless,” said the other. “For years you taught them that good times
resulted not from industry and self-reliance but from laws,--that
prosperity was created by law. Now you reap the fruit. You put money
into the pockets of the manufacturers by high tariffs. The people know
this. Now they say, ‘Fill our pockets, too.’ It’s quite consistent. But
it’s Socialism. That’s what all this Coxeyism is,--a filthy eruption of
Socialism, and the Republican party is responsible.”
“You forget to tell what has become of the jobs,” the other said. “All
they want is work to do. Where is the work?”
“These Coxeyites,” the other retorted, “are a lot of strolling beggars.
They refuse work. They enjoy marching through the country in mobs,
living without work, doing in groups what as individuals they would
not dare to do for fear of police and dogs. And the Republican party
encourages them in this criminality because it needs a high tariff
argument.”
At this point an impulse injected me into the discussion.
“You are wrong about the Coxeyites,” I said. “At least as to those from
Massillon. I marched with them all the way. A few were tramps. There
were no criminals. A great majority of them were men willing to work
and honestly unemployed.”
Both of them stared at me, and I went on for a long time, not knowing
how to stop and wishing I hadn’t begun. The younger man heard me
through with a bored air and turned away. But the other asked me some
questions and thanked me for my information.
The episode closed suddenly. We were running into the Jersey City
railroad terminal, on the west bank of the Hudson River, and all
fellow-traveler contacts began to break up without ceremony in the
commotion of arrival. I saw no more of the disputants and forgot them
entirely in the thrill of approaching New York for the first time.
It was early evening. Slowly I made headway up the platform against
the tide of New Jersey commuters returning from work. With a scuffling
roar of feet, and no vocal sound whatever, they came racing through the
terminal in one buffalo mass, then divided into hasty streams, flowed
along the platforms and boarded the westbound trains, strangely at ease
with extraordinary burdens, such as reels of hose, boxes of tomato
plants, rakes, scythes, hand cultivators, bags of bulbs, carpentering
tools and bits of lumber.
Beating my way up the current, wondering how so many people came, by
what means they could be delivered in such numbers continuously, I came
presently into view of the cataract. Great double-decked ferryboats,
packed to the rails with self-loading and unloading cargoes, were
arriving two or three at a time and berthing in slips which lay side by
side in a long row, like horse stalls.
We, the eastbound passengers from the Washington train, gathered at one
of the empty slips. Through the gates I saw a patch of water. Suddenly
a stealthy mass up-heaved, hesitated, then made up its mind and came
head on with terrific momentum. At the breathless moment the engines
were reversed, there was a gnashing of waters, and the boat came
fast with a soft bump. The gates burst open and the people decanted
themselves with a headlong rush. We stood tight against the wall to let
them pass. As the tail of the spill filed by we were sent aboard, the
gates banged to behind us, and the boat was off toward the other shore
for another load. This was before the unromantic convenience of Hudson
River tunnels.
I stood on the bow to have my first look at New York.
One’s inner sense does not perceive the thing in the moment of
experience, but films it, to be afterward developed in fluid
recollection. I see it now in memory as I only felt it then.
A wide mile of opal water, pulsatile, thrilling to itself in a
languorous ancient way. And so indifferent! Indifference was
its immemorial character. I watched the things that walked upon
it--four-eyed, double-ended ferryboats with no fore or aft, like
those monsters of the myth that never turned around; tugs like mighty
Percherons, dragging sledges in a string; a loitering hyena, marked
dynamite, much to be avoided; behemoths of the deep, helpless in this
thoroughfare, led by hawsers from the nose; sore-footed scows with one
pole rigs, and dressy, high-heeled pleasure craft. The river was as
unregardful of all these tooting, hooting, hissing improvisations as
of the natural fish, the creaking gulls, or those swift and ceaseless
patterns woven of the light which seem to play upon its surface and are
not really there.
Beyond was that to which all this hubbub appertained. The city!...
Sudden epic!... Man’s forethought of escape ... his refuge ... his
self-overwhelming integration. Anything may happen in a city. Career
is there, success is there, failure, anguish, horror, women, hell, and
heaven. One has the sense of moral fibres loosening. Lust of conquest
stirs. The spirit of adventure flames. A city is a tilting field.
Unknown, self-named, anyone may enter, cast his challenge where he
will, and take the consequences. The penalties are worse than fatal.
The rewards are what you will.
“New York!” I said.
It stood against the eastern sky, a pure illusion, a rhythmic mass
without weight or substance, in the haze of a May-day evening. The
shadows of twilight were rising like a mist. Everything of average
height already was submerged. Some of the very tall buildings still had
the light above, and their upper windows were a-gleam with reflections
of the sunset.
Seething city!... So full of life transacting potently, and yet so
still! A thin gray shell, a fragile show, a profile raised in time and
space, a challenge to the elements. They take their time about it....
Lovely city!... Ugly city!... Never was there one so big and young and
hopeful all at once.
“New York!” I said again, out loud.
A man who must have been standing close beside me for some time spoke
suddenly, without salutation or word of prelude.
“You were with Coxey’s Army?”
“Yes,” I said, turning to look at him. I recognized him as a man who
sat in one corner of the smoking compartment, listening in an attentive
though supercilious manner, and never spoke.
“Wasn’t there plenty to eat?” he asked, in a truculent tone.
“People were very generous along the way.”
“Wasn’t there plenty to eat?” he asked, repeating the question
aggressively.
“There was generally enough and sometimes plenty,” I replied. Then I
added rather sharply: “I have no case to prove for the Coxeyites, if
that’s what you think.”
“I know you haven’t,” he said. “I have no case to make against them
either. They are out of work. That’s bad. But people who will ask need
not be hungry. You can cut that out. The unemployed eat. You’ve seen
it. Do the ravens feed them?”
“What are you driving at?” I asked.
“They all eat,” he repeated. “Ain’t that extraordinary?”
“It doesn’t seem so to me,” I said. “They have to eat.”
“Oh, do they?” he said. “You can eat merely because you have to, can
you? Suppose there wasn’t anything to eat?”
He was turning away, with his feathers up, as if he had carried the
argument. But I detained him.
“All right,” I said. “There is not enough work but plenty to eat. We’ll
suppose it. What does that prove?”
Eyeing me intently, with some new interest, he hesitated, not as to
what he would say but as to whether he should bother to say it.
“It proves,” he said, “that the country is rich. Nobody knows it.
Nobody will believe it. The country is so rich that people may actually
live without work.”
“That’s an interesting point of view,” I said. “Who are you?”
“Nobody,” he replied, with an oblique sneer. “A member of the Stock
Exchange.”
“Oh!” I said, before I could catch it. And not to leave the
conversation in that lurch I asked: “Do you know who those two men were
who wrangled in the smoking compartment?”
“Editors,” he replied, cynically. “The younger one was Godkin of
the Post. I’ve forgotten the other one’s name. Silly magpies!
Pol-i-t-i-c-s, _hell_!”
At that instant the ferryboat bumped into her slip. The petulant man
screwed his head half round, jerked a come-along nod to a girl who had
been standing just behind us, and stalked off in a mild brain fit.
I had not noticed the girl before. She passed me to overtake her
father,--I supposed it was her father,--and in passing she gave me a
look which made me both hot and cold at once. It left me astonished,
humiliated and angry. It was a full, open, estimating look, too
impervious to be returned as it deserved and much too impersonal to
be rude. It was worse than rude. I was an object and not a person. It
occurred to me that either or both of us might have been stark nude and
it would not have made the slightest difference.
For a moment I thought I must have been mistaken,--that she was not a
girl but a man-hardened woman. I followed them for some distance. And
she was unmistakably a girl, probably under twenty, audaciously lithe
and flexible. She walked without touching her father,--if he were that.
He was a small man, wearing a soft hat a little down on one side, and
moved with a bantam, egregious stride. One hand he carried deep in his
trousers pocket, which gave him a slight list to the right, for his
arms were short. The skirts of his overcoat fluttered in the wind and
his left arm swung in an arc.
Presently I lost them, and that was all of it; but this experience,
apparently so trivial, cost me all other sensations of first contact
with New York. I wandered about for several hours, complaining that all
cities are alike. I had dinner, and the food was like food anywhere
else. Then I found a hotel and went to bed. My last thought was: Why
did she look at me at all?
Her eyes were dark carnelian.