A COMMUNIST AND HIS SISTER.
Meantime a discussion upon society in general and other things in
particular, something like that of Haviland and Townley, was going
on in the back shop of the little brick store upon Sixth Avenue. A
certain James Starbuck had lodgings there with his sister; that is,
he was usually there when he was in New York. But this his occupation
seldom permitted; for he was employed as a sort of small paymaster
or inspector of the great Allegheny Central Company, a corporation
which owned coal-mines, oil-wells, pipe-lines, factories, bonds,
stocks, and other contracts so complex that the mind of even its
owner grew confused at thinking of it. Starbuck was a slender, pale,
narrow-chested American mechanic, whose bright eyes contrasted
strikingly with his feeble frame and stooping shoulders, and whose
sharp look betokened an unhealthy intelligence. His work was one which
did not, however, require manual exertion, and he did it faithfully.
His sister Jenny was very different in appearance; handsome, fond of
pleasure, high spirited, they had only their cleverness in common.--But
with Jenny’s case we have nothing to do.
Of course, the reader, on the alert for coincidences and dovetailings
of plot (as one always is in a novel, however veracious) has noticed
that the name of Starbuck is not strange to this story; and has smiled
to himself, superior, as his sagacity foresaw a link of connection in
this fact. But was James Starbuck a cousin of clever, fashionable,
refined Flossie? Starbuck did not know it. What, in active, progressive
America, in the migrating America of the last fifty years, need a man
know of his antecedents? They go for little in his life. Starbuck
remembered his father well enough; and how he had struggled from pillar
to post, from one frowzy city street to another, with the jaded, tawdry
woman who was his wife; until one day, from a new and prosperous little
city in the oil regions of Pennsylvania, he had gone, never to be seen
or heard of after, by wife or child. And there they had lived, as
they had been left there; and his mother took to dress-making and a
boarding-house for miners, and his pretty sister had been sent to the
public schools, and he had found work with the Company. His sister went
through the High School, and then came home discontented; she could not
bear their mode of life, nor like her mother’s boarders--great hulking
fellows who came home at night grimy from the wells and mines, and
were, at best, but laboring-men, though they had money enough. Then
her mother had died; and her brother had proved unequal to the actual
labor of the business; but his quickness, his Yankee intelligence, had
not gone unobserved, and he had been given this sort of clerkship or
travelling agency, which made it possible for him to live at either end
of the line. But he could not support her yet, though she persuaded him
to move to New York; and she quickly found a place with Rose Marie, who
was a little, beady-eyed old Frenchwoman, and slept in the remotest
attic-chamber, so that she grew to be rather a myth, and Jenny’s
friends used to disbelieve in her existence, and called Jenny Rose
Marie, in joke.
But we, who know everything, will not attempt to escape the reader’s
perspicacity. Yes (though it has nothing to do with the story), James
Starbuck was in fact the grandson of that old whaling-captain Obed,
Flossie’s father’s elder brother--he would have been her second cousin,
then--quite too far for city kin to be counted, even had Mrs. Gower
known anything about it. His father, by some curious chance, atavism,
or some other influence, had taken after the uncle, and ceased to
follow the sea; but, not like his uncle, he had not prospered, and
had lived upon the world when he could; when he could not, he brought
his wife back to her home in the small country town in Connecticut.
The father was one of those curious fellows who turn their hand to
anything, and of whom the best you can say is that they are hardly
respectable, and the worst that they don’t quite deserve to be hanged.
Their lives are one long misdemeanor, but (unless we count fraudulent
bankruptcy, and except an occasional bigamy) they rarely commit a
crime. This Horace Starbuck had his ups and his downs, his ins and his
outs; but the friends and the places of his prosperity knew him not in
his adversity, and _vice versa_. There was no more continuity to his
career than there is to a string of cheap assorted beads; and I doubt
if even the devil took any serious interest in him. He was clever,
too, in a way, with that common-school education no person born in New
England can be without; he had made an invention, and owned a patent
or two in the course of his life, and formed several corporations, in
Connecticut and elsewhere, for their exploitation. It chanced that
in one of these (it was upon a patent for machine-made shirts) some
stockholder had actually paid up his stock; this lucky chance was
the means of bringing seven thousand dollars into Horace Starbuck’s
pocket, the largest sum he ever possessed at any one time of his life.
He promptly got himself married to a girl in his own town, which was
probably, on the whole, the most defensible action of his career. They
went on a wedding-trip to New York, where Starbuck went into six new
corporations; and in a few months they were as poor as ever, and these
twin children were born to them. Mrs. Starbuck’s health gave out after
this; and she never had any more children. Her husband’s business
made it necessary for him to travel a great deal; and she sometimes
went with him, sometimes not. Hardly a commercial hotel in the United
States but Starbuck had stopped there; he made his nest in hotels, as
a spider does in dark places by the sea. His travels led him all over
the northern part of America and to Australia; his assets consisted
of a diamond-pin, a gold watch and chain, and four collars and a
shirt, besides the clothes he wore; and he subsisted mysteriously.
At one time he had considerable reputation in Ohio and Indiana as Dr.
Westminster, the cancer doctor; he wore his hair long, and had his
portrait so taken printed in the newspapers; his treatment consisted in
an application of leaves of bracken or fern, steeped in hot water, and
business prospered, until he foolishly used cabbage-leaves instead, and
a patient died of the blister. He made some money by curing stammering,
at one hundred dollars the cure; if the patients did not pay him, he
threatened suit, and they were glad to get rid of him at any price.
At times he gave temperance lectures (drinking never was one of his
vices); and if worst came to worst he could play three-card-monte,
though he hated to resort to this, as being fairly beyond the liberal
moral line he drew for himself. He never had any permanent occupation;
when luck ran strong against him, he would return to the little
Connecticut town, where his wife had a bit of real estate and a home
with her brother, old Sam Wolcott, and there vegetate. He honestly and
in good faith considered himself a gentleman; he always wore a black
coat, and once came near getting a Labor nomination for Congress. But
the workmen, when it came to the point, would none of him; though he
did occupy a seat for a year as a Prohibitionist in the Connecticut
Legislature. He was given to long disappearances; and at the time of
his Australian tour it really seemed to his wife as if he were never
coming back. However, he walked in home, one day, with the gold watch
and chain, and quite a little sum of money; and did not finally
disappear until that time in the Pennsylvania mining-town, whither he
had gone to buy oil-land, having at last persuaded his wife to sell her
little bit of real estate in Connecticut, against her brother Sam’s
advice. All this James Starbuck did not know, of course; but in a
general way he did not accord much respect to his father’s memory. He
considered pride of ancestry a most disagreeable form of aristocracy;
and whereas his father would speak of himself as a gentleman, James
Starbuck boasted openly that he was nothing but a plain laboring-man.
James was perfectly honest in financial affairs, and he tried to look
after his twin-sister. Much of his childhood had been spent with
his uncle Sam; and his earliest recollections were of that little
district-school the reader may remember. For uncle Sam belonged to the
salt of the earth, good old Puritan stock, and lived to be the last of
it, the day he hanged himself, and the Wolcott family tomb was sealed.
They had had a scene to-night, apropos of her visit to the
garden-concert. She had gone with an ornate and expensive person, a
sporting gentleman, whose ostentatious affluence had won her fancy; and
whom James detested. She called him one of her “gentleman-friends;”
and they had angry words about him, for I suspect, after all, James
was a better judge of a gentleman than his father had been. But she
had his own cleverness and strength of will; and it was difficult for
James, who despised all authority himself, to exercise it upon another.
Both brother and sister were, and had always been, absolutely and
utterly devoid of any semblance or savor of religion; how absolutely,
only those who have lived in certain classes of society in modern
American manufacturing towns can know; and there was a large range of
motive upon which it was perfectly hopeless for the brother to call.
He knew it, and he was too bluntly honest not to recognize it; so he
ended merely by hoping that his sister would not make a d----d fool of
herself; which as they both had common-sense and practical minds, was
perhaps the best argument he could use. But Jenny, perfectly conscious
of her ability to take care of herself, was quite well aware of all
that could be said on both sides; and replied that if Jim chose to
smoke pipes in his shirt-sleeves with common laborers, there was no
reason why his sister should not accept a gentleman’s invitation to
go to a concert. An English navvy might have stopped her going with a
knock-down argument; but no pure-blooded American ever strikes a woman,
and James could only swallow his wrath, admitting that his sister was a
free human being in a free country, and if she preferred pleasure and
he power, why it was the way of humanity. He was conscious that his
own aims were selfish enough, and though he dimly felt that jewellery
and fashionable hats and shawls were vanities, it was hard to put that
idea into their language. For he believed in labor and commodities; and
these, at least, were commodities. What fault he found was in their
distribution alone; and his sister was but taking her way to get them
unto herself. But to see her aping aristocracy added a drop to the
hate he bore that _bête noire_ of his class; though surely Dave St.
Clair was no aristocrat, as he had to admit. Dave St. Clair was the
gentleman who had taken his sister to the garden.
What was it, then, that made him hate the world? It was money,
accumulation, capital, as he had learned to call the word. And he went
back to the little coterie in the back room, and fervidly resumed his
speech where his sister’s departure had interrupted it.
“I tell you,” said he, “we must change it all. A man is only worth
what he makes. They tell us society would be a chaos without private
property; I tell them it is private property that makes a chaos of
society. They talk about the law! the law! I tell them the world would
be better without law. It is a bogey, invented to scare off us ignorant
fellows from the plunder the rich have appropriated, just such a bogey
as religion was, only religion has been exploded. It is the law’s turn
to go next. All property is robbery; and it is only because land-owners
are the worst thieves of all, that we feel differently about other
things. The earth belongs to the human race; and no man can rightly own
its surface, whether he got his title from a feudal baron or a Spanish
general, any more than he can own the air of heaven. But property in
other things is just as bad; and Jay Gould is a worse man than the Duke
of Westminster, though he has ten million acres and Gould only a few
hundred. How much of his wealth represents the honest labor of himself
or his forefathers?”
There was a murmur of applause at this. There were some half dozen men
in the room, all sober and apparently intelligent, and all natural-born
Americans.
“But somebody must own things,” one of them remarked. “Somebody must
own the mills, and the railroads, and the machinery. Why up to our
works we’ve got a single engine that cost nigh unto eighty thousand
dollars.”
“We can all own them,” Starbuck went on earnestly, “just as we all made
them. Who do you suppose made that eighty-thousand dollar machine--the
banks with their money and so-called capital, or the men as put it
together? A man is worth just what he makes, I tell you. Can Jay Gould
make an engine? But because we’ve all got to have a little land, and
a little plant and money, are those as have got it to take away from
us ninety-nine per cent. of all we make? Yes--if we’re fools enough
to stand it. A man can have what he can keep and use, what he can eat
and what he can wear. If he chooses to store up his day’s labor, to
set aside the bread and meat he earns, he can do so, and keep it till
it spoils. But this dog-in-the-manger business ain’t to be carried no
further; and if a feller squats down on land, and don’t use it, an’
another feller without no land comes along and wants it, that first
feller has got to get up and git--that’s all. A man’s a man for what he
is, for what he can do--not for what he owns.”
“But who’s going to support the Government?”
“Government,” said Starbuck, with a snort of disgust, to the speaker,
who was something of a ward politician. “Government! We don’t want
no government, Bill. What’s the use of a government, except to
scrouge out taxes, and make wars, and support standing armies and
lazy politicians?--To protect life, liberty, and property, they say;
property may go to h--l for all I care; and I guess life and liberty
can take care of themselves; they aren’t much helped by government,
anyhow. And don’t you suppose we fellers can look after them? And our
own schools, and our roads and things, too, each town and city for
itself?”
The man addressed as Bill paid little attention to these last remarks,
but was talking politics with his neighbor. “Vote for F---- this year,”
he was saying; and Starbuck caught the end of his sentence as he
finished his own remarks.
“Vote!” he interrupted, with infinite contempt. “Vote, vote again! I
tell you, you’re only doing yourselves harm. It ain’t no sort of use.
The ballot-box is just the last toy the bosses have got up, to keep you
fellows quiet. Why, all this machinery keeps up the Government, and the
laws, and the property, and the very things we’ve got to fight against.
There’s that patriotic bosh, and the talk about national honor, and the
German wars and all--all for the benefit of the State, and the bosses,
and the existing condition of things. What call has a Frenchy to go and
cut a Dutchman’s throat--or I an Irishman’s? He’s my mate, just as the
next fellow is. I say, what we’ve got to do is, to fight; but not fight
each other. We’ve got to fight the aristocrats, or the bosses, or the
capitalists at home. I tell you these bond-holder fellows are all over
the world; they’re just as much in Egypt or in Mexico or in Turkey as
they are here or in England. We’ve got to make a clean sweep, that’s
what we’ve got to do.”
“By God, when a man talks, I like to hear him talk like a man,” said
another, approvingly; and there was a murmur of applause.
“But what’s the use of destroying things?” said a third, of a sparing
turn of mind.
“Destroying things! that’s the d----dest bugbear of all,” cried
Starbuck. “Do you know, if everything in the world was destroyed
to-morrow, we fellows could put it all back in two years? Aye, and
less, if we worked with a will. I tell you, we’ve got to make a clean
sweep, first of all; and when we build ’em up again, we’ll build for
ourselves this time--and don’t you forget it,” he added, by way of
climax.
“Well, you talk pretty fine for a young fellow,” answered one of the
older men; and the party got up and exchanging a rough good-night,
separated. Starbuck sat a long time with his chin on his hand, pulling
at the embers of his pipe. Late at night the door opened and his sister
returned; he heard a short colloquy at the door, and then she entered
alone, with a flush upon her handsome face. She had the rude, frank
bearing and the pitiless smile which belong to the type who take life’s
pleasures without much regard to its pains or the pains of others; and
the strong, full curve of the merry lip grows harder with age, with
less of merriment and more of malice. But, withal, such a woman as no
man could ever rule; and James felt it vaguely, as he sat and looked at
her.
“A pretty time for you to be in o’ nights,” said he; and the girl
laughed loudly; and putting off her hat and shawl upon a chair, went
to a little mirror and stood before it, touching her hair with her
fingers. Now, a laugh and then silence was perhaps of all things the
most exasperating to James Starbuck.
“Who was that brought you home?” said he, rudely.
“I don’t know what call you’ve got to ask me that,” said she. “I go
with what gentlemen I choose; I don’t interfere with you sticking
to your workmen, do I? Phew! how it smells of pipes;” and Jenny
ostentatiously rattled open the light windows.
“Well, its just here; I can’t have you going round this sort of way,
that’s all,” and James banged his white fist upon the table. The girl
only laughed, more contemptuously and less merrily than before, and the
brother grew furious.
“I can’t have it--d’ye hear?”
“Mind your own business,” said the sister, “and don’t talk nonsense.
I suppose you’d have me sit here in the back room and be a poor
sempstress all my life. You like your lectures and your laborers’
clubs, and your political power that you’re all the time talking
about--and I like to have a good time, and go out in society. We’re
quits. What have you got to say against it?”
“It--it ain’t right,” said James, weakly.
“Oh, ain’t it? Well--I like it, then. I suppose you never do but what’s
right, of course. You’re all the time complaining we don’t get enough
of the good things of this world--I guess you’d get ’em yourself, if
you could, anyhow. And I can.” And Jennie pulled off a very pretty
little glove and showed a single diamond ring, which flashed bravely in
the lamp-light. “You go ahead your way, an’ I’ll go mine; an’ I guess
we’ll both get what we can.”
James was honest enough in his philosophy, and really without direct
personal ends; and the last words goaded him to madness.
“Yes, an’ I guess you went your own way up to Allegheny City a little
too much,” said he. “Where’s Charley Thurston now?” (This Charley
Thurston was an old friend of Starbuck’s, to whom his sister had been
once reported engaged.)
“I left Charley Thurston of my own free will, because I wanted to live
in New York,” screamed the girl, really angry at last. “Look here,
Jim Starbuck--I’ve had about enough of you anyhow. You can’t give me
the position in life I require; and I’ve had more’n enough of your
talk. This house is mine; and I paid for it, and for every dress I’ve
got to my back--yes--and for this ring, too,” she added, noticing her
brother’s glance. “You just go, do you hear? Clear out----” And the
girl tore her brother’s coat from the nail and threw it into his lap.
“You don’t mean that,” said James.
“Yes, I do--I’m sick of you and all your low acquaintances. I suppose
you want me to pay for your lodging, do you?”
James got up, wearily. They had had many such a dispute before; but,
with his feeble health and physical condition he had never managed to
keep his temper so long as now.
“You’ll be sorry for this, Jennie,” was all he said. “You know where to
find me.” And he went out, and the front door closed behind him.
Left alone, the beauty rubbed her forehead impatiently, and pouted for
a few minutes. Then she took out a small case of crimson velvet from
her pocket and opened it; it was a framed and highly colored photograph
of herself, on porcelain, and set in gilt, with small jewels inlaid
in the frame. As she looked upon it, her mouth unbent at the corners,
her lips came back to their usual roguish, fascinating curves. She
laid aside her dress, and robed in a splendid pink-and-lilac négligé,
unbound her hair and sat for a long time before the glass, looking from
it to the miniature and back again to the original. Then she took out a
letter and read its contents, still smiling.
And then, for the first time that evening, you might have seen a
resemblance--to what? Why, for all the world--as she sat with her
yellow hair falling on her full neck, with the contented, infantine
smile, and the fashionably cut _robe-de-chambre_--for all the world,
like Mrs. Flossie Gower.