The strike made a good deal of talk in the office of 'Every Other Week'
that is, it made Fulkerson talk a good deal. He congratulated himself
that he was not personally incommoded by it, like some of the fellows who
lived uptown, and had not everything under one roof, as it were. He
enjoyed the excitement of it, and he kept the office boy running out to
buy the extras which the newsmen came crying through the street almost
every hour with a lamentable, unintelligible noise. He read not only the
latest intelligence of the strike, but the editorial comments on it,
which praised the firm attitude of both parties, and the admirable
measures taken by the police to preserve order. Fulkerson enjoyed the
interviews with the police captains and the leaders of the strike; he
equally enjoyed the attempts of the reporters to interview the road
managers, which were so graphically detailed, and with such a fine
feeling for the right use of scare-heads as to have almost the value of
direct expression from them, though it seemed that they had resolutely
refused to speak. He said, at second-hand from the papers, that if the
men behaved themselves and respected the rights of property, they would
have public sympathy with them every time; but just as soon as they began
to interfere with the roads' right to manage their own affairs in their
own way, they must be put down with an iron hand; the phrase "iron hand"
did Fulkerson almost as much good as if it had never been used before.
News began to come of fighting between the police and the strikers when
the roads tried to move their cars with men imported from Philadelphia,
and then Fulkerson rejoiced at the splendid courage of the police. At the
same time, he believed what the strikers said, and that the trouble was
not made by them, but by gangs of roughs acting without their approval.
In this juncture he was relieved by the arrival of the State Board of
Arbitration, which took up its quarters, with a great many scare-heads,
at one of the principal hotels, and invited the roads and the strikers to
lay the matter in dispute before them; he said that now we should see the
working of the greatest piece of social machinery in modern times. But it
appeared to work only in the alacrity of the strikers to submit their
grievance. The roads were as one road in declaring that there was nothing
to arbitrate, and that they were merely asserting their right to manage
their own affairs in their own way. One of the presidents was reported to
have told a member of the Board, who personally summoned him, to get out
and to go about his business. Then, to Fulkerson's extreme
disappointment, the august tribunal, acting on behalf of the sovereign
people in the interest of peace, declared itself powerless, and got out,
and would, no doubt, have gone about its business if it had had any.
Fulkerson did not know what to say, perhaps because the extras did not;
but March laughed at this result.
"It's a good deal like the military manoeuvre of the King of France and
his forty thousand men. I suppose somebody told him at the top of the
hill that there was nothing to arbitrate, and to get out and go about his
business, and that was the reason he marched down after he had marched up
with all that ceremony. What amuses me is to find that in an affair of
this kind the roads have rights and the strikers have rights, but the
public has no rights at all. The roads and the strikers are allowed to
fight out a private war in our midst as thoroughly and precisely a
private war as any we despise the Middle Ages for having tolerated--as
any street war in Florence or Verona--and to fight it out at our pains
and expense, and we stand by like sheep and wait till they get tired.
It's a funny attitude for a city of fifteen hundred thousand
inhabitants."
"What would you do?" asked Fulkerson, a good deal daunted by this view of
the case.
"Do? Nothing. Hasn't the State Board of Arbitration declared itself
powerless? We have no hold upon the strikers; and we're so used to being
snubbed and disobliged by common carriers that we have forgotten our hold
on the roads and always allow them to manage their own affairs in their
own way, quite as if we had nothing to do with them and they owed us no
services in return for their privileges."
"That's a good deal so," said Fulkerson, disordering his hair. "Well,
it's nuts for the colonel nowadays. He says if he was boss of this town
he would seize the roads on behalf of the people, and man 'em with
policemen, and run 'em till the managers had come to terms with the
strikers; and he'd do that every time there was a strike."
"Doesn't that rather savor of the paternalism he condemned in Lindau?"
asked March.
"I don't know. It savors of horse sense."
"You are pretty far gone, Fulkerson. I thought you were the most engaged
man I ever saw; but I guess you're more father-in-lawed. And before
you're married, too."
"Well, the colonel's a glorious old fellow, March. I wish he had the
power to do that thing, just for the fun of looking on while he waltzed
in. He's on the keen jump from morning till night, and he's up late and
early to see the row. I'm afraid he'll get shot at some of the fights; he
sees them all; I can't get any show at them: haven't seen a brickbat
shied or a club swung yet. Have you?"
"No, I find I can philosophize the situation about as well from the
papers, and that's what I really want to do, I suppose. Besides, I'm
solemnly pledged by Mrs. March not to go near any sort of crowd, under
penalty of having her bring the children and go with me. Her theory is
that we must all die together; the children haven't been at school since
the strike began. There's no precaution that Mrs. March hasn't used. She
watches me whenever I go out, and sees that I start straight for this
office."
Fulkerson laughed and said: "Well, it's probably the only thing that's
saved your life. Have you seen anything of Beaton lately?"
"No. You don't mean to say he's killed!"
"Not if he knows it. But I don't know--What do you say, March? What's the
reason you couldn't get us up a paper on the strike?"
"I knew it would fetch round to 'Every Other Week,' somehow."
"No, but seriously. There'll be plenty of newspaper accounts. But you
could treat it in the historical spirit--like something that happened
several centuries ago; De Foe's Plague of London style. Heigh? What made
me think of it was Beaton. If I could get hold of him, you two could go
round together and take down its aesthetic aspects. It's a big thing,
March, this strike is. I tell you it's imposing to have a private war, as
you say, fought out this way, in the heart of New York, and New York not
minding it a bit. See? Might take that view of it. With your
descriptions and Beaton's sketches--well, it would just be the greatest
card! Come! What do you say?"
"Will you undertake to make it right with Mrs. March if I'm killed and
she and the children are not killed with me?"
"Well, it would be difficult. I wonder how it would do to get Kendricks
to do the literary part?"
"I've no doubt he'd jump at the chance. I've yet to see the form of
literature that Kendricks wouldn't lay down his life for."
"Say!" March perceived that Fulkerson was about to vent another
inspiration, and smiled patiently. "Look here! What's the reason we
couldn't get one of the strikers to write it up for us?"
"Might have a symposium of strikers and presidents," March suggested.
"No; I'm in earnest. They say some of those fellows--especially the
foreigners--are educated men. I know one fellow--a Bohemian--that used to
edit a Bohemian newspaper here. He could write it out in his kind of
Dutch, and we could get Lindau to translate it."
"I guess not," said March, dryly.
"Why not? He'd do it for the cause, wouldn't he? Suppose you put it up on
him the next time you see him."
"I don't see Lindau any more," said March. He added, "I guess he's
renounced me along with Mr. Dryfoos's money."
"Pshaw! You don't mean he hasn't been round since?"
"He came for a while, but he's left off coming now. I don't feel
particularly gay about it," March said, with some resentment of
Fulkerson's grin. "He's left me in debt to him for lessons to the
children."
Fulkerson laughed out. "Well, he is the greatest old fool! Who'd 'a'
thought he'd 'a' been in earnest with those 'brincibles' of his? But I
suppose there have to be just such cranks; it takes all kinds to make a
world."
"There has to be one such crank, it seems," March partially assented.
"One's enough for me."
"I reckon this thing is nuts for Lindau, too," said Fulkerson. "Why, it
must act like a schooner of beer on him all the while, to see 'gabidal'
embarrassed like it is by this strike. It must make old Lindau feel like
he was back behind those barricades at Berlin. Well, he's a splendid old
fellow; pity he drinks, as I remarked once before."
When March left the office he did not go home so directly as he came,
perhaps because Mrs. March's eye was not on him. He was very curious
about some aspects of the strike, whose importance, as a great social
convulsion, he felt people did not recognize; and, with his temperance in
everything, he found its negative expressions as significant as its more
violent phases. He had promised his wife solemnly that he would keep away
from these, and he had a natural inclination to keep his promise; he had
no wish to be that peaceful spectator who always gets shot when there is
any firing on a mob. He interested himself in the apparent indifference
of the mighty city, which kept on about its business as tranquilly as if
the private war being fought out in its midst were a vague rumor of
Indian troubles on the frontier; and he realized how there might once
have been a street feud of forty years in Florence without interfering
materially with the industry and prosperity of the city. On Broadway
there was a silence where a jangle and clatter of horse-car bells and
hoofs had been, but it was not very noticeable; and on the avenues,
roofed by the elevated roads, this silence of the surface tracks was not
noticeable at all in the roar of the trains overhead. Some of the
cross-town cars were beginning to run again, with a policeman on the rear
of each; on the Third Avenge line, operated by non-union men, who had not
struck, there were two policemen beside the driver of every car, and two
beside the conductor, to protect them from the strikers. But there were
no strikers in sight, and on Second Avenue they stood quietly about in
groups on the corners. While March watched them at a safe distance, a car
laden with policemen came down the track, but none of the strikers
offered to molest it. In their simple Sunday best, March thought them
very quiet, decent-looking people, and he could well believe that they
had nothing to do with the riotous outbreaks in other parts of the city.
He could hardly believe that there were any such outbreaks; he began more
and more to think them mere newspaper exaggerations in the absence of any
disturbance, or the disposition to it, that he could see. He walked on to
the East River.
Avenues A, B, and C presented the same quiet aspect as Second Avenue;
groups of men stood on the corners, and now and then a police-laden car
was brought unmolested down the tracks before them; they looked at it and
talked together, and some laughed, but there was no trouble.
March got a cross-town car, and came back to the West Side. A policeman,
looking very sleepy and tired, lounged on the platform.
"I suppose you'll be glad when this cruel war is over," March suggested,
as he got in.
The officer gave him a surly glance and made him no answer.
His behavior, from a man born to the joking give and take of our life,
impressed March. It gave him a fine sense of the ferocity which he had
read of the French troops putting on toward the populace just before the
coup d'etat; he began to feel like the populace; but he struggled with
himself and regained his character of philosophical observer. In this
character he remained in the car and let it carry him by the corner where
he ought to have got out and gone home, and let it keep on with him to
one of the farthermost tracks westward, where so much of the fighting was
reported to have taken place. But everything on the way was as quiet as
on the East Side.
Suddenly the car stopped with so quick a turn of the brake that he was
half thrown from his seat, and the policeman jumped down from the
platform and ran forward.