BLOWS
It was about half past twelve when Tom left Mr. Baxter's office. As he
came purposeless into the street it occurred to him that he was but a
few blocks from the office of Mr. Driscoll, and in the same instant his
chance meeting with Ruth three weeks before as she came out to lunch
flashed across his memory. He turned his steps in the direction of Mr.
Driscoll's office, and on gaining the block it was in walked slowly back
and forth on the opposite side of the street, eagerly watching the
revolving door of the great building. At length she appeared. Tom
started quickly toward her. Another quarter revolution of the door and a
man was discharged at her side. The man was Mr. Berman; and they walked
off together, he turning upon her glances whose meaning Tom's quickened
instinct divined at once.
The sight of these two together, Mr. Berman's eyes upon her with an
unmistakable look, struck him through with jagged pain. He was as a man
whose sealed vision an oculist's knife has just released. Amid startled
anguish his eyes suddenly opened to things he, in his blindness, had
never guessed. He saw what she had come to mean to him. This was so
great that, at first, it well-nigh obscured all else. She filled
him,--her sympathy, her intelligence, her high womanliness. And she,
she that filled him, was ... only a great pain.
And then (he had mechanically followed them, and now stood watching the
door within which they had disappeared--the door through which he had
gone with her three weeks before) he saw, his pain writhing within him
the while, the double hopelessness of his love: she was educated,
cultured--she could care nothing for a mere workman; and even if she
could care, he was bound.
And then (he was now moving slowly through the Broadway crowd, scarcely
conscious of it) he saw how poor he was in his loveless married life.
Since his first liking for Maggie had run its so brief course, he had
lapsed by such slow degrees to his present relations with her that he
had been hardly more conscious of his life's lacking than if he had been
living with an unsympathetic sister. But now that a real love had
discovered itself to him, with the suddenness of lightning that rips
open the night, he saw, almost gaspingly, how glorious life with love
could be; and, by contrast, he saw how sordid and commonplace his own
life was; and he saw this life without love stretching away its flat
monotony, year after year.
And there were things he did not see, for he had not been made aware by
the unwritten laws prevailing in a more self-conscious social stratum.
And one of these things was, he did not see that perhaps in his social
ignorance he had done Ruth some great injury.
That night Maggie kept his dinner warm on the back of the kitchen
range, to no purpose; and that night Petersen waited vainly on the
tenement steps. It was after twelve when Tom came into the flat, his
face drawn, his heart chilled. He had seen his course vaguely almost
from the first moment of his vision's release; he had seen it clearer
and more clear as hour after hour of walking had passed; and he felt
himself strong enough to hold to that course.
The next morning at breakfast he was gentler with Maggie than he had
been in many a day; so that once, when she had gone into the kitchen to
refill her coffee cup, she looked in at him for a moment in a kind of
resentful surprise. Not being accustomed to peering inward upon the
workings of his soul, Tom himself understood this slight change in his
attitude no better than did his wife. He did not realize that the coming
of the knowledge of love, and the coming of sorrow, were together
beginning to soften and refine his nature.
The work Tom had marked out for himself permitted him little time to
brood over his new unhappiness. After breakfast he set out once more
upon his twofold purpose: to find a job, if one could be found; to talk
strike to as many members of the union as he could see. In seeking work
he was limited to such occupations as had not yet been unionized. He
walked along the docks, thinking to find something to do as a
longshoreman, but the work was heavy and irregular, the hours long, the
pay small; and he left the river front without asking for employment. He
looked at the men in the tunnel of the underground railway; but he could
not bring himself to ask employment among the low-waged Italians he saw
there. He did go into three big stores and make blind requests for
anything, but at none was there work for him.
As he went about Tom visited the jobs near which he passed, on which
members of his union were at work. One of these was a small residence
hotel just west of Fifth Avenue, whose walls were up, but which was as
yet unfinished on the inside. He climbed to the top in search of members
employed on the iron stairways and the elevator shafts, but did not find
a man. He reached the bottom of the stairway just in time to see three
men enter the doorway. One of the three he recognized as Jake Henderson,
and he knew the entertainment committee had him cornered. He grimly
changed his revolver from his vest pocket to his left coat pocket, and
filling his right coat pocket from a heap of sand beside him, quietly
awaited their coming.
The three paused a moment inside the door, evidently to accustom their
eyes to the half darkness, for all the windows were boarded up. At
length they sighted him, standing before the servants' staircase in the
further corner. They came cautiously across the great room, as yet
unpartitioned, Jake slightly in the lead. At ten paces away they came to
a halt.
"I guess we got youse good an' proper at last," said Jake gloatingly.
"It won't do youse no good to yell. We'll give youse all the more if
youse do. An' we can give it to youse, anyhow, before the men can get
down."
Tom did not answer. He had no mind to cry for help. He stood alertly
watching them, his hands in his coat pockets.
Jake laid off his hat and coat--there was leisure, and it enlarged his
pleasure to take his time--and moved forward in advance of his two
companions.
"Good-by," he said leering. He was on the point of lunging at his
victim, when Tom's right hand came out and a fistful of sand went
stinging full into his face. He gave a cry, but before he could so much
as make a move to brush away the sand Tom's fist caught him on the ear.
He dropped limply.
The two men sprang forward, to be met in the face by Tom's revolver.
"If you fellows want button-holes put into you, just move another step!"
he said.
They took another step, several of them--but backward steps. Tom kept
them covered for a minute, then moved toward the light, walking
backward, his eyes never leaving them. On gaining the door he slipped
the revolver into his vest pocket and stepped quickly into the blinding
street.
When Tom, entering the union hall that evening, passed Jake at his place
at the door, the latter scowled fiercely, but the presence of several of
Tom's friends, who had been acquainted with the afternoon's encounter,
pacified his fists.
"Why, what's the matter with your eyes, Jake?" asked Pig Iron Pete
sympathetically.
Jake consigned Pete to the usual place, and whispered in Tom's ear:
"Youse just wait! I'll git youse yet!"
That night Tom sat his first time in the president's chair. His
situation was painfully grotesque,--instead of being the result of the
chances of election, it might well have been an ironic jest of Foley:
there was Connelly, two tables away, at his right; Brown, the
vice-president, at the table next him; Snyder, the corresponding
secretary, at his left; Jake Henderson, sergeant-at-arms, at the
door;--every man of them an intimate friend of Foley. And it was not
long before Tom felt the farce-tragedy of his position. Shortly after he
rapped the meeting to order a man in the rear of the hall became
persistently obstreperous. After two censured outbreaks he rose
unsteadily amid the discussion upon a motion. "I objec'," he said.
"What's your objection?" Tom asked, repressing his wrath.
The man swore. "Ain't it 'nough I objec'!"
"If the member is out of order again he'll have to leave the hall." Tom
guessed this to be a scheme of Foley to annoy him.
"Put me out, you----" And the man offered some remarks upon Tom's
character.
Tom pounded the table with his gavel. "Sergeant-at-arms, put that man
out!"
Jake, who stood at the door whispering to a man, did not even turn
about.
"Sergeant-at-arms!"
Jake went on with his conversation.
"Sergeant-at-arms!" thundered Tom, springing to his feet.
Jake looked slowly around.
"Put that man out!" Tom ordered.
"Can't youse see I'm busy?" said Jake; and turned his broad back.
Several of Tom's friends sprang up, but all in the room waited to see
what he would do. For a moment he stood motionless, a statue of
controlled fury, and for that moment there was stillness in the hall.
Then he tossed the gavel upon the table and strode down the center
aisle. He seized the offending member, who was in an end seat, one hand
on his collar and one on his wrist. The man struck out, but a fierce
turn of his wrist brought from him a submissive cry of pain. Tom pushed
him, swearing, toward the door. No one offered interference, and his
ejection was easy, for he was small and half drunken.
Tom strode back to his table, brought the gavel down with a blow that
broke its handle and looked about with blazing eyes. Again the union
waited his action in suspense. His chest heaved; he swallowed mightily.
Then he asked steadily: "Are you ready for the question?"
This is but one sample of the many annoyances Tom suffered during the
meeting, and of the annoyances he was to suffer for many meetings to
come. A man less obstinately strong would have yielded his resignation
within an hour--to force which was half the purpose of the harassment;
and a man more violent would have broken into a fury of words, which,
answering the other half of the purpose, would have been to Foley's crew
what the tirade of a beggar is to teasing schoolboys.
When "new business" was reached Tom yielded the chair to Brown, the
vice-president, and rose to make the protest on which he had determined.
He had no great hope of winning the union to the action he desired; but
it had become a part of his nature never to give up and to try every
chance.
The union knew what was coming. There were cheers and hisses, but Tom
stood waiting minute after minute till both had died away. "Mr.
Chairman, I move we set aside last week's election of walking delegate,"
he began, and went on to make his charges against Foley. Cries of "Good
boy, Tom!" "Right there!" came from his friends, and various and
variously decorated synonyms for liar came from Foley's crowd; but Tom,
raising his voice to a shout, spoke without pause through the cries of
friends and foes.
When he ended half the crowd was on foot demanding the right to the
floor. Brown dutifully recognized Foley.
Foley did not speak from where he stood in the front row, but sauntered
angularly, hands in trousers pockets, to the platform and mounted it.
With a couple of kicks he sent a chair from its place against the wall
to the platform's edge, leisurely swung his right foot upon the chair's
seat, rested his right elbow upon his knee, and with cigar in the left
corner of his mouth, and his side to his audience, he began to speak.
"When I was a kid about as big as a rivet I used to play marbles for
keeps," he drawled, looking at the side wall. "When I won, I didn't make
no kick. When I lost, a deaf man could 'a' heard me a mile. I said the
other kid didn't play fair, an' I went cryin' around to make him give
'em up."
He paused to puff at his cigar. "Our honorable president, it seems he's
still a kid. Me an' him played a little game o' marbles last week. He
lost. An' now he's been givin' youse the earache. It's the same old
holler. He says I didn't play fair. He says I tried to stuff the box at
the start. But that was just a game on his part, as I said then, to
throw suspicion on me; an' anyhow, no ballots got in. He says I stuffed
it by a trick at the last. What's his proof? He says so.
Convincin'--hey? Gents, if youse want to stop his bawlin', give him back
his marbles. Turn me down, an' youse'll have about what's comin' to
youse--a cry baby sport."
He kicked his chair back against the wall and sat down; and amidst all
the talk that followed he did not once rise or turn his face direct to
the crowd. But when, finally, Brown said, "Everybody in favor of the
motion stand up," Foley rose to his full height with his back against
the wall, and his withheld gaze now struck upon the crowd with startling
effect. It was a phenomenon of his close-set eyes that each man in a
crowd thought them fixed upon himself. Upon every face that gaze seemed
bent--lean, sarcastic, menacing.
"Everybody that likes a cry baby sport, stand up!" he shouted.
Men sprang up all over the hall, and stood so till the count was made.
"Those opposed," Brown called out.
A number equally great rose noisily. A glance showed Tom the motion was
lost, since a two-thirds' vote was necessary to rescind an action. But
as his hope had been small, his disappointment was now not great.
Foley's supporters broke into cheers when they saw their leader was
safe, but Foley himself walked with up-tilted cigar back to his first
seat in an indifferent silence.