"I wonder what Joe would say to that."
"I know what he'll say—he'll agree with me. Why don't you ask him and see for yourself? I'm beginning to like Joe Kramer," she added with a quiet smile, "because now that I understand him I know that his life and yours are so far apart you've hardly a point in common."
And in the talks I had with Joe this soon proved to be the case. Eleanore brought us together now and listened with deep satisfaction as we clashed and jarred each other apart.
His old indifferent manner was gone, he was softened, grateful for what we had done—but he held to that view of his like a rock, and the view entirely shut me out. Joe saw society wholly as "War Sure" between two classes, and I was hopelessly on the wrong side. My work, my home and my whole life were bound in with the upper class.And there could be no middle ground. My boasted tolerance, breadth of mind, my readiness to see both sides, my passion for showing up all men as human—this to Joe was utter piffle. He had no use for such writing, or in fact for art of any kind. "Propaganda" was all that he wanted, and that could be as cheap as Nick Carter, as sentimental as Uncle Tom's Cabin, if only it had the kind of "punch" that would reach to the mass of ignorant workers and stir their minds and their passions into swift and bitter revolt. Revolution! That was the thing. The world had come to a time, he said, when talking and writing weren't going to count. We were entering into an age of force—of "direct action"—strikes and the like—by prodigious masses of men. All I could do was worthless.
These talks made me so indignant and sore, so sure that Joe and all his work were utterly wild and that only in Dillon and his kind lay any hope of solving the dreary problems of the slums—that within a few days more I was delving into my opera man with a most determined approval. He at least was a builder, he didn't want to tear everything down! In his every scheme for a huge success I took now an aggravated delight. All my recent tolerance gone, I threw into my work an intensity that I had not felt in months.
And Eleanore smiled contentedly, as though she knew what she was about. When at last the time came for Joe to leave, she was twice as friendly to him as I.
But on coming home one evening two or three weeks later, I found Eleanore reading aloud to our son with a most preoccupied look on her face.
"Joe Kramer is coming to dinner," she said. "He called up this morning and said he'd like to see us again. Sue is coming, too, as it happens. She dropped in this afternoon."
Sue arrived a few minutes later, and at once I thought to myself I had never seen her look so well. For once she had taken time to dress. She had done her dark hair in a different way. Her color, which had been poor of late, to-night was most becomingly high, and those fascinating eyes of hers were bright with a new animation.
"She has found a fine new hobby," I thought.
Her whole attitude to us was one of eager friendliness. She made much of what we had done for Joe.
"You've no idea," she told me, "how he feels about you both." She was speaking of this when Joe came in.
He, too, appeared to me different. Into his blunt manner had crept a certain awkwardness, his gruff voice had an anxious note at times and his eyes a hungry gleam. Poor old Joe, I thought. It must be hard, despite all his talk, to see what he had missed in life, to feel what a sacrifice he had made. He had thrown everything aside, love, marriage, home, all personal ties—to tackle this bleak business of slums. The more pity he had such a twisted view. And as presently, in reply to Sue's questions, he talked about the approaching strike, my irritation at his talk grew even sharper than before.
"Your stokers and dock laborers," I interrupted hotly,"are about as fit to build up a mew world as they are to build a Brooklyn Bridge! When I compare them to Eleanore's father and his way of going to work"—I broke off in exasperation. "Can't you see you're all just floundering in a perfect swamp of ignorance?"
"No," said Joe. "I don't see that——"
"I'm mighty glad you don't," said Sue. Eleanore turned on her abruptly.
"Why areyouglad, Sue?" she asked.
"Because," Sue answered warmly, "he's where every one of us ought to be! He's doing the work we all ought to be doing!"
"Then why don't you do it?" said Joe. His voice was low but sharp as in pain. The next instant he turned from Sue to me. "I mean all of you," he added. I looked at him in astonishment. What had worked this change in Joe? In our last talk he had shut me out so completely. He seemed to feel this at once himself, for he hastened to explain his remark. He had turned his back on Sue and was talking hard at me:
"Of course I don't mean you can do it, Bill, unless you change your whole view of life. But why shouldn't you change? You're young enough. That look at a stokehole got hold of you hard. And if you're able to feel like that why not do some thinking, too?"
"I'm thinking," I said grimly. "I told you before that I wanted to help. But you said——"
"I say it still," J. K. cut in. "If you want to help the people you've got to drop your efficiency gods. You've got to believe in the people first—that all they need is waking up to handle this whole job themselves. You've got to see that they're waking up fast—all over the world—that they're getting tired of gods above 'em slowly planning out their lives—that they don't want to wait till they're dead to be happy—that they feel poverty every day like a million tons of brick on their chests—it's got so they can't even breathe without thinking! And you've got to seethat what they're thinking is, 'Do it yourself and do it quick!' The only thing that's keeping them back is that in these times of peace men get out of the habit of violence!
"But the minute you get this clear in your mind, then I say you can help 'em. Because what's needed is so big. It's not only more pay and shorter hours and homes where they needn't die off like flies—they need more than that—they need a change as much as you—in their whole way of looking at things. They've got to learn that they are a crowd—and can't get anywhere at all until all pull together. Ignorant? Of course they are! But that's where you and me come in—we can help 'em get together faster than they would if left to themselves! You can help that way a lot—by writing to the tenements!That'swhat I meant!"
Joe stopped short. And after his passionate outburst, Eleanore spoke up quietly.
"This sounds funny from you," she said. "A few weeks ago you were just as sure that Billy could do nothing. What has made you change so?"
Joe reddened and looked down at his hands.
"I suppose," he said gruffly after a moment, "it's because I'm still weak from typhoid—weak enough to want to see some one but stokers get into the job that's become my life. You see," he muttered, "I was raised among people like you. It's a kind of a craving, I suppose—like cigarettes." Again he stopped short and there was a pause.
"Rather natural," Sue murmured. Again he turned sharply from her to me.
"I say you can help by your writing," he said. "You call my friends an ignorant mob. But thousands of 'em have read your stuff!"
I looked up at Joe with a start.
"Oh they don't like it," he went on. "It only makes 'em sore and mad. But if you ever see things right, andget into their side of this fight with that queer fountain-axe of yours, you'll be surprised at the tenement friends who'll pop up all around you. The first thing you know they'll be calling you 'Bill.' That's the kind they are—they don't want to shut anyone out—all they want to know is whether he means business. If he doesn't he's no use, because they know that sooner or later they'll do it anyhow themselves. It's going to be the biggest fight that's happened since the world began! No cause has ever been so fine, so worth a man's giving his life to aid! And all you've got to decide is this—whether you're to get in now, and help make it a little easier, help make it come without violence—or wait till it all comes to a crash and then be yanked in like a sack of meal!"
Before I could speak, Sue drew a deep breath.
"I don't see how there's any choice about that," she said.
Eleanore turned to her again:
"Do you mean for Billy?"
"I mean for us all," Sue answered. "Even for a person like me!" Sue was beautiful just then—her cheeks aglow, her features tense, a radiant eagerness in her eyes. "I've felt it, oh so long," she said. "It's gone all through my suffrage work—through every speech that I have made—that the suffragists need the working girls and ought to help them win their strikes!"
"And what doyouthink, Joe?" Eleanore persisted. "Were you speaking of Billy alone just now or did you have Sue, too, in mind?"
Joe looked back at her steadily.
"I don't want to shut out the women," he said. "I've seen too many girls jump in and make a big success of it. Not only working girls, but plenty of college girls like you." He turned from Eleanore to Sue—and with a gruff intensity, "You may think you can't do it, Sue," he said. "But I know you can. I've seen it done, I tell you, all the way from here to the Coast—girls like you as speakers, asregular organizers—forgetting themselves and sinking themselves—ready for any job that comes."
"That's the way I should want to do it," said Sue, her voice a little breathless.
"But how about wives?" asked Eleanore. "For some of these girls marry, I suppose," she added thoughtfully. "At least I hope they do. I hope Sue will."
"I never said anything against that," Joe answered shortly.
"But if they marry and have children," Eleanore continued, "aren't they apt to get sick of it then, even bitter about it, this movement you speak of that takes you in and sinks you down, swallows up every dollar you have and all your thoughts and feelings?"
"It needn't do as much as that," Joe muttered as though to himself.
"Still—I'd like to see it work out," Eleanore persisted. "Do you happen to know the wives of any labor leaders?"
"I do," Joe answered quickly. "The wife of the biggest man we've got. Jim Marsh arrived in town last night. His wife is with him. She always is."
"Now are you satisfied, dear?" Sue asked. But Eleanore smiled and shook her head.
"Is Mrs. Marsh a radical, too—I mean an agitator?" she asked. Joe's face had clouded a little.
"Not exactly," he replied. Eleanore's eyes were attentive now:
"Do you know her well, Joe?"
"I've met her——"
"I'd like to meet her, too," she said. "And find out how she likes her life."
"I think I know what you'd find," said Sue, in her old cocksure, superior manner. "I guess she likes it well enough——"
"Still, dear," Eleanore murmured, "instead of taking things for granted it would be interesting, I think, in all this talk to have one look at a little real life."
"Aren't you just a little afraid of real life, Eleanore?" Sue demanded, in a quick challenging tone.
"Am I?" asked Eleanore placidly.
Long after Joe had left us, Sue kept up that challenging tone. But she did not speak to Eleanore now, her talk like Joe's was aimed at me.
"Why not think it over, Billy?" she urged. "You're not happy now, I never saw you so worried and blue."
"I'm not in the least!" I said stoutly. But Sue did not seem to hear me. She went on in an eager, absorbed sort of way:
"Why not try it a little? You needn't go as far as Joe Kramer. He may even learn to go slower himself—now that he has had typhoid——"
"Do you think so?" Eleanore put in.
"Why not?" cried Sue impatiently. "If he keeps on at this pace it will kill him! Has he no right to some joy in life? Why should you two have it all? Just think of it, Billy, you have a name, success and a lot of power! Why not use it here? Suppose it is harder! Oh, I get so out of patience with myself and all of us! Our easy, lazy, soft little lives! Why can't wegiveourselves a little?" And she went back over all Joe had said. "It's all so real. So tremendously real," she ended.
"I wonder what's going to happen," said Eleanore when we were alone.
"God knows," I answered gloomily. That hammering from Joe and Sue had stirred me up all over again. I had doggedly resisted, I had told Sue almost angrily that I meant to keep right on as before. But now she was gone, I was not so sure. "I still feel certain Joe's all wrong," I said aloud. "But he and his kind are so dead in earnest—so ready for any sacrifice to push their utterly wild ideas—that they may get a lot of power. God help the country if they do."
"I wasn't speaking of the country, my love," my wife informed me cheerfully. "I was speaking of Sue and Joe Kramer."
"Joe," I replied, "will slam right ahead. You can be sure of that, I've got him down cold."
"Have you?" she asked. "And how about Sue?"
"Oh Sue," I replied indifferently, "has been enthused so many times."
"Billy."
I turned and saw my wife regarding her husband thoughtfully.
"I wonder," she said, "how long it will be before you can write a love story."
"What?"
"Sue and Joe Kramer, you idiot."
I stared at her dumfounded.
"Did you think all that talk was aimed at you?" my pitiless spouse continued. "Did you think all that change in Joe's point of view was on your account?"
I watched her vigilantly for a while.
"If there's anything in what you say," I remarked carefully at last, "I'll bet at least that Joe doesn't know it. He doesn't even suspect it."
"There are so many things," said Eleanore, "that men don't even suspect in themselves. I'm sorry," she added regretfully. "But that summer vacation we'd planned is off."
"What?"
"Oh, yes, we'll stay right here in town. I see anything but a pleasant summer."
"Suppose," I said excitedly, "you tell me exactly what youdosee!"
"I see something," Eleanore answered, "which unless we can stop it may be a very tragic affair. Tragic for Sue because I feel sure that she'd never stand Joe's impossible life. And even worse for your father. He's not only old and excitable, and very weak and feeble, too, but he's soconservative besides that if Sue married Joe Kramer he'd consider her utterly damned."
"But I tell you you're wrong, all wrong!" I broke in. "Joe isn't that kind of an idiot!"
"Joe," said my wife decidedly, "is like every man I've ever met. I found that out when he was sick. He has the old natural longing for a wife and a home of his own. His glimpse of it here may have started it rising. I'm no more sure than you are that he admits it to himself. But it's there all the same in the back of his mind, and in that same mysterious region he's trying to reconcile marrying Sue to the work which he believes in—even with this strike coming on. It's perfectly pathetic.
"Isn't it funny," she added, "how sometimes everything comes all at once? Do you know what this may mean to us? I don't, I haven't the least idea. I only know that you yourself are horribly unsettled—and that now through this affair of Sue's we'll have to see a good deal of Joe—and not only Joe but his friends on the docks—and not even the quiet ones. No, we're to see all the wild ones. We're to be drawn right into this strike—into what Joe calls revolution."
"You may be right," I said doggedly. "But I don't believe it."
A few days later Joe called me up and asked me to come down to his office. His reason for wanting to see me, he said, he'd rather not give me over the 'phone.
"You're right," I told Eleanore dismally. "He's going to talk to me about Sue."
I dreaded this talk, and I went to see Joe in no easy frame of mind. But it was not about Sue. I saw that in my first glimpse of his face. He sat half around in his office chair listening intensely to a man by his side.
"I want you to meet Jim Marsh," he said.
I felt a little electric shock. So here was the great mob agitator, the notorious leader of strikes. Eleanore's words came into my mind: "We're to meet all the wild ones. We're to be drawn right into this strike—into what Joe calls revolution." Well, here was the arch-revolutionist, the prime mover of them all. Of middle size, about forty years old, angular and wiry, there was a lithe easy force in his limbs, but he barely moved as he spoke to me now. He just turned his narrow bony face and gave me a glance with his keen gray eyes.
"I've known your work for quite a while," he said in a low drawling voice, "Joe says you're thinking of writing me up."
So this was why Joe had sent for me. I had quite forgotten this idea, but I took to it eagerly now. My work was going badly. Here was something I could do, the life story of a man whose picture would soon be on the front page of every paper in New York. It would interest mymagazine, it would give me a chance to get myself clear on this whole ugly business of labor, poverty and strikes. I had evaded it long enough, I would turn and face it squarely now.
"Why yes, I'd like to try," I said.
"He wants to do your picture with the America you know," said Joe. "He says he's ready to be shown."
Marsh glanced out at the harbor.
"If he'll trail around with us for a while we may show him some of it here," he drawled. And then quietly ignoring my presence he continued his talk with Joe, as though taking it for granted that I was an interested friend. I listened there all afternoon.
The thing that struck me most at first was the cool effrontery of the man in undertaking such a struggle. The old type of labor leader had at least stuck to one industry, and had known by close experience what he had to face. But here was a mere outsider, a visitor strolling into a place and saying, "I guess I'll stop all this." Vaguely I knew what he had to contend with. Sitting here in this cheap bare room, the thought of other rooms rose in my mind, spacious, handsomely furnished rooms where at one time or another I had interviewed heads of foreign ship companies, railroad presidents, bankers and lawyers, newspaper editors, men representing enormous wealth. All these rooms had been parts of my harbor—a massed array of money and brains. He would have all this against him. And to such a struggle I could see no end for him but jail.
For against all this, on his side, was a chaotic army of ignorant men, stokers, dockers, teamsters, scattered all over this immense region, practically unorganized. What possible chance to bring them together? How could he feel that he had a chance? How much did he already know?
I asked him what he had seen of the harbor. For days, I learned, he had told no one but Joe of his coming, hehad wandered about the port by himself. And as a veteran tramp will in some mysterious fashion get the feel of a new town within a few short hours there, so Marsh had got the feel of this place—of a harbor different from mine, for he felt it from the point of view of its hundred thousand laborers. He felt it with its human fringe, he saw its various tenement borders like so many camps and bivouacs on the eve of a battle.
He told a little incident of how the harbor learned he was here. About nine o'clock one morning, as he was waiting his chance to get into one of the North River docks, a teamster recognized him there from a picture of him he had once seen. The news traveled swiftly along the docks, out onto piers and into ships. And at noon, way over in Hoboken, Marsh had overheard a German docker say to the man eating lunch beside him,
"I hear dot tamn fool anarchist Marsh is raising hell ofer dere in New York."
"But I wasn't raising hell," he drawled. "I was over here studying literature." And he drew out from his pocket a tattered copy of a report, the result of a careful investigation of work on the docks, made recently by a most conservative philanthropic organization.
"'In all the fierce rush of American industry,'" he read, with a quiet smile of derision, "'no work is so long, so irregular or more full of danger. Seven a. m. until midnight is a common work day here, and in the rush season of winter when ships are often delayed by storms and so must make up time in port, the same men often work all day and night and even on into the following day, with only hour and half-hour stops for coffee, food or liquor. This strain makes for accidents. From police reports and other sources we find that six thousand killed and injured every year on the docks is a conservative estimate.'"
Marsh glanced dryly up at me:
"Here's the America I know."
I said nothing. I was appalled. Six thousand killed and injured! I could feel his sharp gray eyes boring down into my soul:
"You wrote up this harbor once."
"Yes," I said.
"Did you write this?"
"No. I would have said it was a lie."
"Do you say so now? These people are a careful crowd." I took the pamphlet from his hands.
"Queer," I muttered vaguely. "I never saw this report before."
"Not so queer," he answered. "I'm told that it wasn'tmeantto be seen—by you and the general public. That's the way this society works. They spend half a dead old lady's cash investigating poverty and the other half in keeping the public from learning what they've discovered. But we're going to furnish publicity to this secluded work of art.
"On Saturday afternoon," he continued, "I went along the North River docks. I found long lines of dockers there—they were waiting for their pay. At every pay window one of 'em stood with an empty cigar box in his hands—and into that box every man as he passed dropped a part of his pay—for the man who had been hurt that week—for him or for his widow.
"And over across the way," he went on, "I saw something on the waterfront that fitted right into the scenery. It was a poster on a high fence, and it had a black border around it. On one side of it was a picture of a tall gent in a swell frock suit. He was looking squarely at the docks and pointing to the sign beside him, which said, 'CertainlyI'm talking to you! Money saved is money earned. Read what I will furnish you for seventy-five dollars—cash. Black cloth or any color you like—plush or imitation oak—casket with a good white or cream lining—pillow—burial suit or brown habit—draping and embalming room—chairs—hearse—three coaches—complete care and attendance—also handsome candelabra and candles if requested.'"
As Marsh read this grisly list from his notebook, it suddenly came into my mind that in my explorations years ago I had seen this poster at many points, all along the waterfront. It had made no impression on me then, for it had not fitted into my harbor. But Marsh had caught its meaning at once and had promptly jotted it down for use. For it fitted his harbor exactly.
Vaguely, in this and a dozen ways, I could feel him taking my harbor to pieces, transforming each piece into something grim and so building a harbor all his own. Disturbedly and angrily I struggled to find the flaws in his building, eagerly I caught at distortions here and there, twisted facts and wrong conclusions. But in all the terrible stuff which he had so hastily gathered here, there was so much that I could not deny. And he gave no chance for argument. Quickly jumping from point to point he pictured a harbor of slaves overburdened, driven into fierce revolt. It was hard to keep my footing.
For his talk was not only of this harbor. It ranged out over an ocean world which was all in a state of ferment and change. Men of every race and creed, from English, Germans, Russians to Coolies, Japs and Lascars, had crowded into the stokeholes, mixing bowls for all the world. And the mixing process had begun. At Copenhagen, two years before, in a great marine convention that followed the socialist congress there, Marsh had seen the delegates from seventeen different countries representing millions of seamen. And this crude world parliament, this international brotherhood, had placed itself on record as against wars of every kind, except the one deepening bitter war of labor against capital. To further this they had proposed to paralyze by strikes the whole international transport world. The first had followed promptly, breaking out in England. The second was to take place here.
"You don't see how it can happen," said Marsh, with one of those keen sudden looks that showed he was aware of my presence. "You admit this place is a watery hell, but you don't believe we can change it. You don't see how ignorant mobs of men can rise up and take the whole game in their hands. Do I get you right?"
"You do," I said.
"Look over there."
I followed his glance to the doorway. It was filled with a group of big ragged men. Some of the faces were black with soot, some were smiling stolidly, some scowling in the effort to hear. All eyes were intent on the face of the man who had never been known to lose a strike.
"That's the beginning," Marsh told me. "You keep your eyes on their faces—from now on right into the strike—and you may see something grow there that'll give you a new religion."
As the day wore into evening the crowd from outside pressed into the room until they were packed all around us.
"Let's get out of this," said Joe at last. We went to a neighboring lunchroom and ate a hasty supper. But as here, too, the crowd pressed in to get a look at Marsh, Joe asked us to come up to his room.
"Theyknowyour room," Marsh answered. His tone was grim, as though he had been accustomed for years to this ceaselessly curious pressing mass, pressing, pressing around him tight. "Suppose we go up to mine," he said. "I want you fellows to meet my wife. She has never met any writers before," he added to me, "and she's interested in that kind of thing. She was a music teacher once."
I was about to decline and start for home, but suddenly I recalled Eleanore's saying that she would like to meet Mrs. Marsh. So I accepted his invitation. And what I saw a few minutes later brought me down abruptly from these world-wide schemes for labor.
We entered a small, cheap hotel, climbed a flight of stairs and came into the narrow bedroom which was forthe moment this notorious wanderer's home. A little girl about six years old lay asleep on a cot in one corner, and under the one electric light a woman sat reading a magazine. She had a strong rather clever face which would have been appealing if it were not for the bitter impatient glance she gave us as we entered.
"Talk low, boys, our little girl's asleep," Marsh said. "Say, Sally," he continued, with his faint, derisive smile, "here's a writer come to see you."
"Pleased to meet you, I'm sure," she said, then relapsed into a stiff silence. I tried to break through her awkwardness but entirely without avail. I grew more and more sure of my first impression, that this woman hated her husband's friends, his strikes, his "proletariate." She was smart, pushing, ambitious, I thought, just the kind that would have got on in any middle western town. Eleanore must meet her.
Then presently I noticed that only Marsh was talking. I glanced at Joe and was startled by the intensity in his eyes.
For Joe was watching his leader's wife. And watching, he appeared to me to be seeing her in a dreary succession of rooms like these, in cities, towns and mining camps, wherever her husband was leading a strike—and then trying to see his own home in such rooms, and Sue in his home, a wife like this. The picture struck me suddenly cold. Sue pulled into this for life! Again I remembered Eleanore's words—"Drawn into revolution."
"Say, Joe," drawled Marsh, with a sharp look at him. "Got any of that typhoid left?"
Joe laughed quickly, confusedly.
Soon after that I left them.
The next day I went to the editor for whom I was doing most of my work. When I told him I wanted to try Jim Marsh, the editor looked at me curiously.
"Why?" he asked.
I spoke of the impending strike.
"Have you met Marsh?" he inquired.
"Yes."
"Do you like him?"
"No."
"But he struck you as big."
"Yes—he did."
"Are you getting interested in strikes?"
"I want to see a big one close."
"Why?"
"Why not?" I retorted. "They're getting to be significant, aren't they? I want to see what they're like inside." The editor smiled:
"You'll find them rather hot inside. Don't get overheated."
"Oh you needn't think I'll lose my head."
"I hope not," he said quietly. "Go ahead with your story about Marsh. I'll be interested to see what you do."
I went out of the office in no easy frame of mind. The editor's inquisitive tone had started me thinking of how J. K. had been shut out by the papers because he wrote "the truth about things."
"Oh that's all rot," I told myself. "Joe's case and mine are not the same. The magazines aren't like the papers and I'm not like Joe. His idea of the truth and mine will never be anywhere near alike."
But what would Eleanore think of it? I went home and told her of my plan. To my surprise she made no objection.
"It's the best thing you can do," she said. "We're in this now—on account of Sue—we can't keep out. And so long as we are, you might as well write about it, too. You think so much better when you're at work—more clearly—don't you—and that's what I want." She was looking at me steadily out of those gray-blue eyes of hers. "I want you to think yourself all out—as clearly as you possibly can—and then write just what you think," she said. "I want you to feel that I'm never afraid of anything you may ever write—so long as you're really sure it's true."
I held her a moment in my arms and felt her tremble slightly. And then she said with her old quiet smile:
"Sue has asked us over to Brooklyn to-night—Joe Kramer is to be there, too."
"That affair is moving rather fast."
"Oh yes, quite fast," she said cheerfully.
"How will Dad look at it?" I asked.
"As you did," said Eleanore dryly. "He'll look at it and see nothing at all."
"I've half a mind to tell him!"
"Don't," she said. "If you did he would only get excited, become the old-fashioned father and order Sue to leave Joe alone—which would be all that is needed now to make Sue marry Joe in a week."
"Sue is about as selfish," I said hotly, "about as wrapped up in her own little self——"
"As any girl is who thinks she's in love but isn't sure," said Eleanore. "Sue isn't sure—poor thing—she's frightfully unsettled."
"But why drag Joe way over there?"
"Because she wants to look at him there. It's her home, you know, her whole past life, all that she has been used to. It's the place where she has breakfast. She wants to see how Joe fits in."
"But they'd never livethereif they married!"
"Nevertheless," said Eleanore, "that's one of the ways a girl makes up her mind." She looked pityingly into my eyes. "Women are beyond you—aren't they, dear?" she murmured.
"J. K. isn't," I rejoined. "And I can't see him inanyhome!"
"Can't you! Then watch him a little closer the next time he comes to ours."
I went out for a walk along the docks and tried to picture the coming strike. When I came home I found Joe there, he had come to go with us to Brooklyn. He was sitting on the floor with our boy gravely intent on a toy circus. Neither one was saying a word, but as Joe carefully poised an elephant on the top of a tall red ladder, I recalled my wife's injunction. By Jove, he did fit into a home, here certainly was a different Joe. He did not see me at the door. Later I called to him from our bedroom:
"Say, Joe. Don't you want to come in and wash?"
He came in, and presently watching him I noticed his glances about our room. It was most decidedly Eleanore's room, from the flowered curtains to the warm soft rug on the floor. It was gay, it was quiet and restful, it was intimately personal. Here was her desk with a small heap of letters and photographs of our son and of me, and here close by was her dressing-table strewn with all its dainty equipment. A few invitations were stuck in the mirror. Eleanore's hat and crumpled white gloves lay on our bed. I had thrown my coat beside them. There were such things in this small room as Joe had never dreamed of.
"Oh Joe," said Eleanore from the hall. "Don't you want to come into the nursery? Somebody wants a pillow fight."
"Sure," said Joe, with a queer little start.
"By the way," I heard her add outside. "Billy told me he saw Mrs. Marsh, and I should so like to meet her, too.Couldn't you have us all down to your room some evening?"
"If you like," he answered gruffly.
"I'm honestly curious," Eleanore said, "to see what kind of a person she is. And I'm sure that Sue is, too. May we bring her with us?"
"Of course you may—whenever you like."
"Would Friday evening be too soon?"
"I'll see if I can fix it."
When Eleanore came in to me, her lips were set tight as though something had hurt her.
"That was pretty tough," I muttered.
"Yes, wasn't it," she said quickly. "I don't care, I'm not going to have him marrying Sue. I'm too fond of both of them. Besides, your father has to be thought of. It would simply kill him!"
"Yes," I thought to myself that night. "No doubt about that, it would kill him."
How much older he looked, in the strong light of the huge old-fashioned gas lamp that hung over the dining-room table. He was making a visible effort to be young and genial. He had not seen Joe in several years, and he evidently knew nothing whatever of what Joe was up to, except that he had been ill at our home. Joe spoke of what we had done for him, and Sue eagerly took up the cue, keeping the talk upon us and "the Indian," to my father's deep satisfaction. From this she turned to our childhood and the life in this old house. Dad pictured it all in such glowing colors I recognized almost nothing as real. But watching Sue's face as she listened, she seemed to me trying to feel again as she had felt here long ago when she had been his only chum. Every few moments she would break off to throw a quick, restless glance at Joe.
When the time came for us to go, my father assured us warmly that he had not felt so young in years. He saidwe had so stirred him up that he must take a book and read or he wouldn't sleep a wink all night. Joe did not come away with us. As we stood all together at the door, I saw Eleanore glance into Dad's study where his heavy leather chair was waiting, and then into the room across the hall where Sue had drawn up two chairs to the fire. And I thought of the next hour or two. My father already had under his arm a book on American shipping, which told about the old despotic sea world of his day, in which there had been no strikers but only mutineers.
"There's very little time to lose," said Eleanore on the way home.
"Look here," I suggested. "Why don't you talk this out with Sue, and tell her just what you think of it all?"
"Because," said Eleanore, "what I think and what you think has nothing whatever to do with the case. Sue would say it was none of our business. And she'd be quite right. It isn't."
"Aren't we making it our business?" My wife at times gets me so confused.
"I'm nottellingthem anything," she rejoined. "I'm only trying toshowthem something and let the poor idiots see for themselves. If they won't see, it's hopeless."
On Friday evening Sue sent word that she would be late and that she would meet us at Joe's room. So we went down without her.
His room had changed since I'd seen it last, I took in at once his pathetic attempts to fix it up for our coming. Gone were the dirty curtains, the dirty collars and shirts, and the bed was concealed by an old green screen borrowed from his landlady, the German saloon-keeper's wife below. The same woman had scrubbed the floor and put down a faded rag carpet in front of the old fireplace, in which now a coal fire was burning. Poor Joe had turned up all the lights to make things bright and cheerful, but it only showed things up as they were. The room was glaringly forlorn.
And now that Eleanore had come, her presence made him feel at once what a wretchedly dreary place it was. Eleanore knew what she wanted to do and she had dressed herself for the part. And as Joe took in the effect of her smart little suit, and waited for Sue and Mrs. Marsh, he became so anxious and gloomy that he could only speak with an effort. He kept glancing uneasily at the door.
"I don't like the idea," said Eleanore, "of Sue's coming down here alone at night through this part of town." Joe looked around at her quickly. "But I suppose," she added thoughtfully, "that she'd have to get used to queer parts of towns if she ever took up the life you spoke of."
"I don't think that would bother her," Joe answered gruffly.
Presently there was a step on the stairs. He jumped up and went to the door, and a moment later Sue entered the room.
Immediately its whole atmosphere changed. Sue was plainly excited. She, too, had dressed herself with care—or rather with a careful neglect. She wore the oldest suit she had and a simple blouse with a gay red tie. With one sharp glance at Eleanore, she took in the strained situation and set about to ease it.
"What a nice old fireplace," she exclaimed. "Let's turn down the lights and draw 'round the fire. You need more chairs, Joe; go down and get some."
And soon with the lights turned low and the coals stirred into a ruddy glow, we were sitting in quite a dramatic place, the scene was set for "revolution." The curtainless windows were no longer bleak, for through them from the now darkened room we looked out on the lights of the harbor. Sue thought the view thrilling, and equally thrilling she found the last issue of Joe's weekly paper,War Sure, which lay on the table. It was called "Our Special Sabotage Number," and in it various stokers and dockers, in response to an appeal from Joe, had crudely written their ideas upon just how the engines of a ship or the hoisting winches on a dock could be most effectively put out of order in time of strike. "So that the scabs," wrote one contributor, "can see how they like it."
"Why not have blue-penciled some of this?" I asked, with a faint premonition of trouble ahead.
"Because Joe believes in free speech, I suppose," Sue answered for him quickly.
"I'm not much of a lawyer, Joe," I said. "But this stuff looks to me a good deal like incitement to violence."
"Possibly," J. K replied.
"You don't look horribly frightened," laughed Sue. And she wanted to hear all the latest strike news. The time was rapidly drawing near. It was now close to the end of March and the strike was expected in April.
When Marsh arrived about nine o'clock, there was an awkward moment. For behind him came his wife and their small daughter, both of whom were stiffly dressed,and with one glance at Eleanore they felt immediately out of place. Mrs. Marsh was even more hostile and curt than when I had seen her last. She was angry at having been dragged into this and took little pains to hide it.
"My husband would have me come," she said. "And I couldn't leave my little girl, so I had to bring her along." And she stopped abruptly with a look that asked us plainly, "Now that I'm here, what do you want?"
"How old is your little girl?" Eleanore inquired.
"Six last month."
"Are you going to put her in school in New York?"
And in spite of short suspicious replies she soon had Mrs. Marsh and her child talking of kindergartens and parks and other parts of the town they must see. Sue was now eagerly talking to Marsh, Joe was beside her helping her out, and both seemed wholly to have forgotten the disturbing woman behind them. But by the quick looks that Eleanore gave them now and then, I could see she was only holding back until she should have Mrs. Marsh in a mood where she could be brought into the talk and made to tell about her life.
"Don't you ever want to settle down?" she asked when there had come a pause. Marsh turned abruptly to Eleanore.
"Of course she does," he answered. "Did you ever know a woman who didn't, the minute that she got a kid? But my wife can't, if she sticks to me. She has had to make up her mind to live in any old place that comes along, from a dollar room in a cheap hotel to a shanty in a mining camp." And his look at Eleanore seemed to add, "That's the kind she is, you little doll."
Eleanore quickly made herself look as much like a doll as possible. She placidly folded her dainty gloved hands.
"I should think," she murmured in ladylike tones, "Mrs. Marsh would find that rather difficult."
"She does," said Marsh aggressively. "But my wife has nerve enough to stand up to the rough side of life—as the wives of most workingmen have to—in this rich and glorious land."
"Won't you tell us about it?" asked Eleanore sweetly. "I should be so interested to hear. It's so different, you see, from all I've been accustomed to."
"Yes," Marsh answered grimly, "I've no doubt it is. Go ahead, Sally, and tell them about it."
And Sally did. Gladly taking her husband's aggressive tone, she started out almost with a sneer. Her remarks at first were disjointed and brief, but I told her I was writing the story of her husband's life, that I wanted her side of it from the start. I promised to show her what I wrote and let her cut anything she had told me if she did not want it in print. And so in scattered incidents, with bits thrown in now and then by Marsh, the lives of these two began to come out. And we understood her bitterness.
"Mr. Marsh was born," she said, "in one of the poorest little towns in Southern Iowa. It was nothing but a hole of a place about six miles from the county seat where my father was a lawyer. But even in that little hole his family was the poorest there. I've been all over the States since then, and I've seen poor people, the Lord knows—but I want to say I've never seen people anywhere that were any worse off than my husband was when he was a boy. And yet he got out of it all by himself. He didn't need any strikes to help him."
"But of course," Sue put in smoothly, "your husband was an exceptional man." Mrs. Marsh threw her a bitter glance.
"He might have been," she answered.
"What was he like as a boy?" I asked.
"A fighter," she said. For a moment her sharp voice grew proud. "His father took diabetes and died, and they went into debt to bury him. Jim helped his mother run the farm and missed half his schooling. But his teacher loaned him text-books—and at home they had no candles,so he used to work with his back to the fire—half the night. My father used to call him a regular little Honest Abe. That's a surprise to you, isn't it," she added with a hard little laugh.
"But then the town had a sudden boom. A new branch of the railroad came through that way and houses and stores went up over night. Jim was only sixteen then, but he grabbed the chance to get into the building. In less than a year he had earned enough money so he could quit and go to school. He came over to high school in our town, walking his six miles twice a day. And that's where I met him.
"My father took a shine to him right off and promised to make him a lawyer. He loaned him law books the first year, and the second Jim worked in his office." She looked for a moment at the wall. "I expect it's not a love story you're after—so I'll leave that part of it out. Papa was mad when I broke the news—and I can't say I blame him. He was the richest man in town, the railroad lawyer of the place—and he had meant that I should go to a polishing school in St. Louis.
"Well, I did go to St. Louis, but I was eloping at the time and I became Jim's wife. We had a hard fight for a year or two, but we made up our minds we'd make it go. Jim got a job on a skyscraper which was going up at that time. I got him his breakfast at six every morning and he got home about seven at night, and right after supper he went at his Blackstone and dug into it all evening. As a rule he got to bed at one, and five hours' sleep was all he had—with a few hours extra Sundays.
"I knew a girl from home in St. Louis whose husband was making money fast. But Jim was too proud to make use of my friends or go to her home when we were invited. We missed three card parties on that account. But she helped me get some pupils and I gave piano lessons. When my baby was born I had to quit—but I thought we were out of the woods by then, for Jim was made foreman ofhis gang and was raised to a hundred dollars a month. We moved from our boarding house into a flat. I hired a young Swedish girl and began to feel that I knew where I was.
"But then the building workers struck. Jim had always been popular with his men, and now he wanted his boss to give them half of what they asked for. But his boss didn't see it that way at all, and he and Jim had trouble. The next week Jim decided he wouldn't manage what he called 'scabs.' So he left his employment, went in with the men and made the strike a great success. That left him leader of their union. The salary they paid him was eighty dollars instead of a hundred—so I let our Swedish girl go.
"He said his new position would give him more time to study law. But it didn't turn out quite that way. He got so wrapped up in his union affairs that he had no time for his law books. One day I put them up on a shelf and found he didn't notice it."
Eleanore suddenly tightened at this, a quick sympathy came into her eyes. Sue gave a restless little sigh.
"He'd be out at meetings most every night," Mrs. Marsh continued. "At the end of the year he was one of three leaders in a strike of all the building trades in town. All work of that kind in the city was stopped and things got very ugly. One night a man came to our flat and informed me that my husband was in jail. I went to the jail the next morning and saw him. We had quite a talk. And that afternoon I gave up our flat."
"Why?" asked Eleanore softly.
"I presumed the landlord wished it," said Mrs. Marsh without looking around. "I took a room in a cheap hotel. Mr. Marsh came out of jail with ideas that were all new to me. He had left his old trade union and gone in with a new crowd of men who stood for out-and-out revolution—which I couldn't understand. But we made the best of it. We went to the theater that night and then he took themidnight train on one of his first labor trips. At first these trips were only for a week or so, but as time went on they grew longer. As a rule I never wrote him because I never knew his address. On one trip he was away five weeks—and before he got back there was time enough for my second baby, a little boy, to be born and die of pneumonia."
Eleanore flinched as though that had hurt. I saw her turn and look at Sue, who seemed even more restless than before.
"You decided to travel with him then—didn't you?" Eleanore murmured.
"Yes," said the other gruffly. "We used to try to figure out what city he would likely be in, or at least not far away from—and then my little girl and I would find a place to board there. It has been like that for the past four years. In that time we've lived in fourteen places all the way between here and the Coast."
"Have you lived all the time at hotels?" Eleanore inquired.
"We have," said the woman curtly, "but hardly the kind you're accustomed to. As a rule, as soon as we reach a town my husband's name appears in the papers, and on that account the more refined houses wouldn't care to keep us long."
Eleanore leaned forward, her eyes troubled and intent. She seemed to have forgotten Sue.
"How do you know they wouldn't?" she asked.
"I found out by trying—twice."
I heard a sudden angry creak in the battered old chair in which Sue was sitting.
"So my little girl Lucy and I," the embittered voice went on, "go to hotels that don't ask many questions. We pass the time going to parks or museums—or now and then to a concert—where I try to give her a taste for good music."
"Do you find time to keep up your music?" I asked.
"There's time enough," came the quick reply. "You see as a rule I'm just waiting around. One night in Pittsburgh it was my birthday, and as the Grand Opera was there for a week and I had never been to one, I got Mr. Marsh to take me. We made it a regular celebration, with dinner in a first-class restaurant just for once. But my husband is generally watched, and the papers all took it up the next day. 'Marsh and wife dine and see opera after his speech to starving strikers,' or similar words to that effect."
"Do you see anything of the strikers?" I asked.
"Not much," she replied. "We used to be invited to go to parties at their homes. But most of them, even the leaders, were Irish, Germans, Italians or Jews whose wives could barely speak English. I found them not very pleasant affairs. Some of the wives drank a good deal of beer and most of them had very little to say. Strike dances were no better. The wives as a rule sat with their children around the walls—while a lot of young factory girls, Jewesses for the most part, danced turkey trots around the hall."
"There were speeches, I suppose?" Sue put in impatiently.
"Yes—Mr. Marsh and others made speeches between dances. They weren't the kind of affairs I'd been used to in our home town," said Mrs. Marsh. "I've lost track of the folks at home. I never write and they don't write me. Only once when my mother knew where I was she sent me a box at Christmas. Lucy and I got quite excited over that box, it was all the presents we'd had from outside in quite a line of Christmases. So we thought we'd celebrate."
"How did you celebrate Christmas?" Eleanore asked softly.
"We went out and bought a tree and candles, some gold balls and popcorn and all the other fixings. And we popped the corn over the gas that night. The next day webought things for each other's stockings. Lucy was then only four years old, but I'd leave her at a counter and tell the clerk to let her have all she wanted to buy for me up to a dollar. That was how we worked it. The next night we had the tree in our room. I got Mr. Marsh to help me trim it. At last we lit the candles and let Lucy in from the hotel hall, where she'd nearly caught her death of cold. Then we opened the box from home. There was a doll for Lucy and a framed photograph of my mother for me—and for Mr. Marsh a Bible. He got laughing over that and so did I. And that ended Christmas.
"We had another Christmas last year," she said in a slow, intense sort of way as though seeing the place as she spoke, "in a mining town in Montana, where Jim had been in jail five days and the whole place was under martial law. A major of the militia came to me on Christmas Eve. He claimed that Jim had been seen by detectives traveling with another woman and that I was not his wife. They locked me up for two hours that night as an immoral woman."
Sue was sitting rigid now, her lips pressed tight. And Joe with a strained unnatural face was staring into the fire.
"But of course," Mrs. Marsh concluded, "most of the time it isn't like that. As a rule when we come to a city nothing especial happens at all. We just take a room like the one we have now and wait till the strike is over. I've got so I have a queer view of towns. I'm always there at the time of a strike, when crowds of Italians and Poles and Jews fill the streets on parade or jam into halls and talk about running the world by themselves. And I guess they're going to do it some day—but I presume not by to-morrow."
For some time while she was speaking her eyes had been fixed steadily upon Joe's only picture. It stood on the mantel, a big charcoal sketch of a crowd of immigrants just leaving Ellis Island. They were of all races. Uncouth, heavy, stolid, with that hungry hope in all their eyes for more of the good things of the earth, they seemed like some barbaric horde about to pour in over the land. With her eyes upon their faces in deep, quiet hatred this woman from the Middle West had told the story of her life.
"Well, Sally," said her husband, who had grown restive toward the end, "I guess that'll do. Let's go on home."
"I'm sure I'm ready," she quickly replied. Now that she had come out of herself she seemed angry at having told so much.
When they had left there was a silence, which Sue broke with a breath of impatience.
"What a frightful thing it must be for a man in this work," she exclaimed, "to have a wife like that! A woman so hard and narrow, so wrapped up in her own little life, with not a spark of sympathy for any of his big ideals!"
"I suppose it's the life that has done it," said Eleanore quietly, looking at Sue.
"I'd like to see some women," Sue retorted angrily, "who have been in that life for years and years, andhavesympathy, haveeverything, don't care for anything else in the world!" She turned suddenly to Joe. "You said there were hundreds, didn't you?"
Joe looked back at her a moment. There was a startled, groping, searching expression in his eyes.
"Yes," he said. "There are hundreds."
"Are many of them married?" Eleanore inquired.
"Some of them are," he answered.
"When a woman who, as Sue has just said, throws herself into this heart and soul, marries a man who is in it, too, how much of their time can they spend together?"
"That depends on the kind of work," he said. Eleanore held his eyes with hers.
"In some cases, I suppose," she went on, "like yours, for example, where the man's work keeps him moving—if the woman's work wouldn't let her go with him they would have to be half their time apart."
"Yes."
"As Mrs. Marsh and her husband were at the time when her second baby was born."
"Yes," said Joe, still watching her.
"Aren't there a good many, too, who don't exactly marry—but marry just a little—one woman here, another there, and so on?"
"Yes," said Joe, "there are some who do that."
"I should think," said Eleanore thoughtfully, "that in a movement of this kind a man ought not to marry at all—or else marry a little a good many times—so as always to be free for the Cause."
"Unless," said Joe, quite steadily, "he finds a woman like some I've known, whose feeling for a man, one man, seems to be planted in her for life—who can easily stand not being with him because she herself is deep in her own job, and her job is about the same as his—and because the two of them have decided to see the whole job through to the end."
His eyes went up to the charcoal sketch.
"It's a job worth seeing through," he said.
Sue was leaning forward now.
"Where did you get that picture, Joe?" she asked.
"It was an illustration," he said, "for a thing I once had in a magazine." And then as though almost forgetting us all, his eyes still upon those immigrant faces, he said with a slow, rough intensity:
"I know every figure in it. I know just where they're strong and where each one of 'em is weak. I've never made gods out of 'em. But I know they do all the real work in the world. They're the ones who get all the rotten deals, the ones who get shot down in wars and worked like dogs in time of peace. They're the ones who are ready to go out on strike and risk their lives to change all this. They're the people worth spending your life with. Butit's a job for your whole life—and before a man or a woman jumps in they want to be sure they're ready."
He did not look at Sue as he spoke. He seemed barely able to hold himself in. His relief was plain when we took her away.
Sue took a car to Brooklyn and we started homeward. Eleanore wanted to walk for a while. She walked quickly, her face set.
"What do you think of it?" I asked.
"I wasn't thinking of Sue," she said. "I was thinking of Mrs. Marsh. I've never tormented a woman like that and I never will again in my life—not for Sue or anyone else—she can marry anybody she likes!"
"Well, she won't marry Joe," I said. "Did you see his face—poor devil? You've certainly settled that affair."
"Have I?" she asked sharply. And then her curious feminine mind took a long leap. "And what areyougoing to be," she asked, "in a year from now?" I smiled at her.
"Not a second Marsh," I said. "But even if I were the man in the moon, you'd make a success of being my wife."
"I think I would," said Eleanore. "It must be so quiet up there in the moon."