"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 of his 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 the midnight 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 we bought 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, and have sympathy, have everything, 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. But it'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 are you going 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."



CHAPTER XI

"Come over here at once." My father's voice over the telephone, one morning a few days later, sounded thick and unnatural.

"What about?" I asked.

"Your sister."

When I reached the house in Brooklyn he came himself to let me in and took me into the library. I was shocked by his face, it was terribly worn, quite plainly he had been up all night. As he began speaking his voice shook and he leaned forward, every inch of him tense.

Sue had told him the night before that she was going to marry Joe Kramer. In reply to his anxious questions she had given him some of the facts about what Joe was doing. And Dad had stormed at her half the night.

"She wants to marry him, Billy," he cried. "She's got her mind set on a man like that! What has he got to support her with? Not a cent, not even a decent job! He's not writing now. Do you know what he's doing? Stirring up strikes—of the ugliest kind—of the most ignorant class of men—foreigners! I know such strikes—I've fought 'em myself and I know how they're handled! That young man will land in jail! And it's where he belongs! Do you know what he's up to right here on the docks?"

"Yes, I know——"

"Why didn't you tell me? Why did you let him come to the house?"

"I was doing my best to stop it, Dad."

"You were, eh—well, you'll stop it now! Understand me, Billy, he's your friend—you brought him here—way back at the start. You've got to put a stop to this——"

"But how?" I asked, trying to steady my voice. "What do you think that I can do?"

"You can talk to her, can't you? God Almighty! Make her see this will ruin her life!"

"I can't do that."

"Can't you?" He rose and bent over me gripping my arms, and I felt his violent trembling. "If you don't, it's the end of me," he said.

"Steady, Dad—now steady—this is coming out all right, you know——" I got him back into his chair. "I'm going to do all I possibly can. I'm going to see Joe Kramer now—he's the only one who can influence her. I'm going to get him to come to Sue and help me make her feel what's ahead—the hardest, ugliest parts of his life. Now promise you'll keep out of it, promise you'll leave her alone while I'm gone."

He agreed to this at last and I left him. But as I went into the hall Sue came to me from the other room. Her face was white and strained.

"Well, Billy?" she said. My throat tightened. She looked so pitifully worn.

"I'm sorry, Sue——"

"Is that all you have to say to me?" she cut in with a quick catch of her breath.

"No, no." I took her in my arms. "Dear old Sue—don't you know how I feel? I want to see you happy. I'm trying to see what on earth we can do."

"Why can't you all leave me alone?" she demanded, in low broken tones. "That's all I want—I'm old enough! I love him! Isn't that enough? To be treated like this—like a bad little child! If you'd been here and heard him—Dad, I mean—I tell you he's half out of his mind! I'm afraid to be left alone with him!"

"Sue?" It was our father's voice. He had come out close behind us.

"Leave me alone!" Sue started back, but he caught her arm:

"You'll stay right here with me till he comes."

"Till who comes?"

"Kramer."

"Who said he was coming?"

"Your brother."

"Billy!"

"Now, Sis, I'm going to talk to Joe and try to persuade him to see you and me together, that's all—quietly—over in our apartment."

"No," said our father. "He'll see her right here!"

"Now, Dad——"

"Careful, son, don't get in my way. I'm standing about as much as I can. Kramer is to come right here. If there's any seeing Sue to be done it's to be in her home, where she belongs. I won't let her out of it—not for an hour out of my sight!"

"You'll lock me in here?" she panted. He turned on her.

"You can call the police if you want to." He let go his hold and turned to me. "I'm thinking of her mother. If she sees this man at all again I'll see him too."

"Can't you leave us?" I implored her. "Sue—please! Go up to your room!"

When she'd gone I tried to quiet him. And now that Sue was out of the way I partly succeeded. But he stuck to his purpose. Joe must come and see Sue here.

"I want to be on hand when she sees him," he insisted. "I don't want to talk—I've done all that—I won't say a word—but I want to be here. You think you know her better than I do because you're younger—but you don't. We've lived right here together—she's been my chum for twenty-five years, and I know things about her you don't know. She's wilful, she's as wild as a hawk—but she can't hold out, she hasn't it in her."

"She will if you act as you did just now——"

"But I won't," he said sharply. "That was a mistake—and I won't let it happen again. When he comes you do the talking, boy—and if we're beaten I won't try to keep her, she goes and it's ended, I promise you that. But, son, don't make any mistake about this—I have an influence over this girl that you haven't got and nobody has. I want her to feel me beside her."

He went over this again and again, and with this I had to leave him.

* * * * *

I found Joe in his office. He rose abruptly when I came in, and reached for his hat.

"Let's go out for a walk," he said. Down in the street he turned on me: "Sue has just 'phoned me you were there. She thought you were going to help her, Bill, she thought that you'd stand by her. She didn't get any sleep last night—she's been through hell with that father of hers——"

"Oh, I've been all through Sue's sufferings, Joe. Don't give me any more of that."

"You mean you think she's faking?"

"No. But to be good and brutally frank about it, what she suffers just now doesn't count with me. It's what her whole life may be with you."

"That's not exactly your business, is it?"

"It wouldn't be if I didn't know Sue."

"What do you know?"

"I know that in spite of all her talk and the way she acts and honestly feels whenever she's with you," I replied, "Sue wants to hang on to her home and us. She isn't the heroic kind. She can't just follow along with you and leave all this she's used to."

Joe's face clouded a little.

"She'll get over that," he muttered.

"Perhaps she will and perhaps she won't. How do you know? You want to know, don't you? You want her to be happy?"

"No, that's not what I want most. Being happy isn't the only thing——"

"Then tell her so. That's all I ask. I'll tell you what I've come for, Joe. You've always been more honest, more painfully blunt and open than any man I've ever known. Be that way now with Sue. Give her the plainest, hardest picture you can of the life you're getting her into."

"I've tried to do that already."

"You haven't! If you want to know what you've done I can tell you. You've painted up this life of yours—and all these things you believe in—with power enough and smash enough to knock holes through all I believe in myself. And I'm stronger than Sue—you've done more to her. What I ask of you now is to drop all the fire and punch of your dreams, and line out the cold facts of your life on its personal side—what it's going to be. I'll help draw it out by asking you questions."

"What's the use of that? I know it won't change her!"

"Maybe it won't. But if it won't, at least it'll make my father give up. Can't you see? If you and I together—I asking and you answering—paint your life the way it's to be, and she says, 'Good, that's what I want'—he'll feel she's so far away from him then that he'll throw up his hands and let her go. He can rest then, we can help him then—Eleanore and I can—it may save the last years of his life. And Sue will be free to come to you."

"You mean the more ugly we make it the better."

"Just that. Let's end this one way or the other."

"All right. I agree to that."

* * * * *

When Joe and I came into the library my father rose slowly from his chair and the two stood looking at one another. And by some curious mental process two memories flashed into my mind. One was of the towering sails that my father had told me he had seen on his first day on the harbor, when coming here a crude boy from the inland he had thrilled to the vision of owning such ships with crews to whom his word should be law, and of sending them over the ocean world. Such was the age he had lived in. The other was of the stokers down in the bottom of the ship, and Joe's tired frowning face as he said, "Yes, they look like a lot of bums—and they feed all the fires at sea." What was there in common between these two? To each age a harbor of its own.

"Well, young man, what have you to say to me?"

"Nothing."

Sue came into the room. Briefly I explained to her what our father had agreed upon, that she was to do the deciding and that he would abide by her decision. Then I began my questions to Joe. I felt awkward, painfully the intruder into two other people's lives. And I felt as though I were operating upon the silent old man close by. "The uglier the better," I kept repeating to myself.

"Let's take up first the money side, Joe. Have you any regular salary?"

"No."

"Such as it is, where does it come from?"

"Out of the stokers."

"How much do you get?"

"One week twenty dollars and another ten or five," he said. "One week I got three dollars and eighty-seven cents."

"Is that likely to grow steadier?"

"Possibly—more likely worse."

"But can two of you live on pay like that—say an average of ten dollars a week?"

"I know several millions of people that have to. And most of them have children too."

"And you'd expect to live like that?"

"No better," was his answer. My father turned to him slowly as though he had not heard just right.

"But as a matter of fact," I went on, "you wouldn't have to, would you? You'd expect Sue to earn money as well as yourself."

"I hope so—if she wants to—it's my idea of a woman's life."

"And the work you hope she'll enter will be the kind you believe in—organizing labor and taking an active part in strikes?"

"Yes. She's a good speaker——"

"I see. And if you were out of a job at times you'd be willing to let her support you?"

Sue angrily half rose from her chair, but Joe with a grim move of his hand said softly, "Sit down and try to stand this. Let's get it over and done with." Then he turned quietly back to me.

"Why yes—I'd let her support me," he said.

"You mean you don't care one way or the other. You'd both be working for what you believe in, and how you lived wouldn't especially count?"

"That's about it."

"What do you believe in, Joe? Just briefly, what's your main idea in stirring up millions of ignorant men?"

"Mainly to pull down what's on top."

"As for instance?"

"All of it. Business, industry and finance as it's being run at present."

"A clean sweep. And in place of that?"

"Everything run by the workers themselves."

"For example?" I asked. "The ships by the stokers?"

"Yes, the ships by the stokers," he said. And I felt Dad stiffen in his chair. "As they will be when the time comes," Joe added.

"How soon will that be?"

"I'll see it," he said.

"The working people in full control. No restraints whatever from above."

"There won't be anyone left above. No more gods," he answered.

"Not even one?"

"Is there one?" he asked.

"You're an atheist, aren't you," I said.

"Yes, when I happen to think of it."

"And Sue would likely be the same."

"Isn't she now?" he inquired. I dropped the point and hurried on.

"How about Sue's friends, Joe? In a life like that—always in strikes—she'd have to give them up, wouldn't she?"

"Probably. Some of 'em think they're radicals, but I doubt if they'd come far out of the parlor."

"So her new friends would be either strikers or the people who lead in strikes. Her life would be practically sunk in the mass."

"I hope so."

"You may be in jail at times."

"Quite probably."

"Sue too?"

"Possibly."

I caught the look in my father's face and knew that I had but a few moments more.

"Do you want to marry her, Joe?" I asked.

"Yes, I'll go down to City Hall—if a large fat Tammany alderman can make our love any cleaner."

"You mean you don't believe in marriage."

"Not especially," he said.

"And so if either gets sick of the other he just leaves without any fuss."

"Naturally."

There was a pause. And then Joe spoke again.

"You're a better interviewer than I thought you were," he said. "You've made the picture quite complete—as far as you can see it. Of course you've left all the real stuff out——"

"What is the real stuff, as you call it, young man?" My father's voice had a deadly ring. Joe turned and looked at him as before.

"You couldn't understand," he said.

"I think I understand enough." Dad rose abruptly and turned to Sue. "Sue," he said. "Shall I ask your anarchist friend to go?"

I could feel Sue gather herself. She was white.

"I'll have to go with him," she managed to say. A slight spasm shot over our father's face. For a moment there was silence.

"You've heard all he said of this life of his?"

"Yes."

"And what he wants and expects you to do?"

"I heard it."

"And just how he wants you to live—with nothing you've been used to—nothing? No money but what a few drunken stokers throw your way, no decent ideals, no religion, no home?"

Again a pause.

"I want to go with him," she brought out at last.

Dad turned sharply and left the room.

* * * * *

I heard a deep breath behind me. It came from Joe Kramer, whose face was set in a frown of pain.

"He's so damn old," Joe muttered. "You operated on him hard."

Suddenly Sue threw herself on the lounge. She huddled there shaking and motioned us off.

"Leave me alone, can't you, go away!" we heard between her sobs. "It's all right—I'm ready—I'll come to you, Joe—but not now—not just now! Go away, both of you—leave me alone!"

Joe left the house. Soon after that Eleanore arrived and I told her what had happened. She went in to Sue, I left them together and went up to my father's room. He lay on the bed breathing quickly.

"You did splendidly, son," he said. "You slashed into her hard. It hurt me to listen—but it's all right. Let her suffer—she had to. It hit her, I tell you—she'll break down! If we can only keep her here! Get Eleanore!"

He stopped with a jerk, his hand went to his heart, and he panted and scowled with pain.

"I sent for her," I told him. "She's come and she's in Sue's room now. Let's leave them alone. It's going to be all right, Dad."

I sent for a doctor who was an old friend of my father's. He came and spent a long time in the room, and I could hear them talking. At last he came out.

"It won't do," he said. "We can't have any more of this. We must keep your sister out of his sight. She can't stay alone with him in this house, and she can't go now to your anarchist friend. If she does it may be the end of your father. Suppose you persuade her to come to you."

But here Eleanore joined us.

"I have a better plan," she said. "I've been talking to Sue and she has agreed. She's to stay—and we'll move over here and try to keep Sue and her father apart."

"What about Joe?" I asked her.

"Sue has promised me not to see Joe until the strike is over. It will only be a matter of weeks—perhaps even days—it may break out to-morrow. It's not much of a time for Joe to get married—besides, it's the least she can do for her father—to wait that long. And she has agreed. So that much is settled."

She went home to pack up a few things for the night. When she came back it was evening. She spent some time with Sue in her room, while I stayed in with father. I gave him a powder the doctor had left and he was soon sleeping heavily.

At last in my old bedroom Eleanore and I were alone. It was a long time before we could sleep.

"Funny," said Eleanore presently, "how thoroughly selfish people can be. Here's Sue and your father going through a perfectly ghastly crisis. But I haven't been thinking of them—not at all. I've been thinking of us—of you, I mean—of what this strike will do to you. You're getting so terribly tense these days."

I reached over and took her hand:

"You don't want me to run away from it now?"

"No," she said quickly. "I don't want that. I've told you that I'm not afraid——"

"Then we'll have to wait and see, won't we, dear? We can't help ourselves now. I've got to keep on writing, you know—we depend on that for our living. And I can't write what I did before—I don't seem to have it in me. So I'm going into this strike as hard as I can—I'm going to watch it as hard as I can and think it out as clearly. I know I'll never be like Joe—but I do feel now I'm going to change. I've got to—after what I've been shown. The harbor is so different now. Don't you understand?"

I felt her hand slowly tighten on mine.

"Yes, dear," she said, "I understand——"



CHAPTER XII

The events of that day dropped out of my mind in the turbulent weeks that followed. For day by day I felt myself sink deeper and deeper into the crowd, into surging multitudes of men—till something that I found down there lifted me up and swept me on—into a strange new harbor.

Of the strike I can give only one man's view, what I could see with my one pair of eyes in that swiftly spreading confusion that soon embraced the whole port of New York and other ports both here and abroad. War correspondents, I suppose, must feel the same chaos around them, but in my case it rose from within me as well. I was like a war correspondent who is trying to make up his mind about war. What was good in this labor rebellion? What was bad? Where was it taking me?

From the beginning I could feel that it meant for me a breaking of ties with the safe strong world that had been my life. I felt this first before the strike, when I went to my magazine editor. He had taken my story about Jim Marsh, but when I came to him now and told him that I wanted to cover the strike,

"Go ahead if you like," he answered, a weary indulgence in his tone, "I don't want to interfere in your work. But I can't promise you now that we'll buy it. If you feel you must write up this strike you'll have to do it at your own risk."

"Why?" I asked. For years my work had been ordered ahead. I thought of that small apartment of ours, of my father sick at home—and I felt myself suddenly insecure.

"Because," he answered coolly, "I'm not quite sure that what you write will be a fair unbiassed presentation of the facts. I've seen so many good reporters utterly spoiled in strikes like this. They lose their whole sense of proportion and never seem to get it quite back."

This little talk left me deeply disturbed. But I was unwilling to give up my plan, and so, after some anxious thinking, I decided to free-lance it. After all, if this one story didn't sell I could borrow until I wrote something that did. And I set to work with an angry vim. The very thought that my old world was closing up behind me made my mind the more ready now for the new world opening ahead.

From the old house in Brooklyn I once more explored my harbor. All day and the greater part of each night I went back over my old ground. Old memories rose in sharp contrast to new views I was getting. From the top I had come to the bottom. Crowds of sweating laborers rose everywhere between me and my past. And as between me and my past, and between these masses and their rulers, I felt the struggle drawing near, the whole immense region took on for me the aspect of a battlefield, with puffs and clouds and darting lines of smoke and steam from its ships and trains and factories. Through it I moved confusedly, troubled and absorbed.

I saw the work of the harbor go now with an even mightier rush, because of the impending strike. The rumor of its coming had spread far over the country, and shippers were hurrying cargoes in. I saw boxes and barrels by thousands marked "Rush." And they were rushed! On one dock I saw the dockers begin at seven in the morning and when I came back late in the evening the same men were there. At midnight I went home to sleep. When I came back at daybreak the same men were there, and I watched them straining through the last rush until the ship sailed that day at noon. They had worked for twenty-nine hours. In that last hour I drew close—so close that I could feel them heaving, sweating, panting, feel their laboring hearts and lungs. Long ago I had watched them thus, but then I had seen from a different world. I had felt the pulse of a nation beating and I had gloried in its speed. But now I felt the pulse-beats of exhausted straining men, I saw that undertaker's sign staring fixedly from across the way. "Certainly I'm talking to you!" Six thousand killed and injured!

I saw accidents that week. I saw a Polish docker knocked on the head by the end of a heavy chain that broke. I saw a little Italian caught by the foot in a rope net, swung yelling with terror into the air, then dropped—his leg was broken. And toward the end of a long night's work I saw a tired man slip and fall with a huge bag on his shoulders. The bag came down on top of him, and he lay there white and still. Later I learned that his spine had been broken, that he would be paralyzed for life.

But what I saw was only a part. From the policemen's books alone I found a record for that week of six dockers killed and eighty-seven injured. I traced about a score of these cases back into their tenement homes, and there I found haggard, crippled men and silent, anxious women, the mothers of small children. Curious and deeply thrilled, these children looked at the man on the bed, between his groans of pain I heard their eager questions, they kept getting in their mother's way. One thin Italian mother, whose nerves were plainly all on edge, suddenly slapped the child at her skirts, and then when it began to cry she herself burst into tears.

These tragic people gripped me hard. The stokers down in their foul hole in the bottom of the ship had only disturbed and repelled me. But these crippled dockers in their homes, with their women and their children, their shattered lives, their agony, starvation looming up ahead—they brought a tightening at my throat—nor was it all of pity. For these labor victims were not dumb, I heard the word "strike!" spoken bitterly here, and now I felt that they had a right to this bitter passion of revolt.

But still I felt their way was wrong. How could any real good, any sure intelligent remedies for all this fearful misery, come out of the minds of such people as these, who were rushing so blindly into revolt? I went into saloons full of dockers and stokers, and out of the low harsh hubbub there the word "strike!" came repeatedly to my ears, recklessly from drunken tongues. Wherever I went I heard that word. I heard it spoken in many languages, in many tones. Anxious old women said "strike!" with fear. Little street urchins shouted it joyously. Even the greenest foreigner understood its meaning. A little Greek, who had broken his arm and was one of the cases I traced home, understood none of my questions. "You speak no English?" He shook his head. "Strike!" I ventured. Up he leaped. "Yo' bet!" he cried emphatically.

What was it deep within me that leaped up then as though to meet that burning passion in his eyes?

"Keep your head," I warned myself. "To change all this means years of work—thinking of the clearest kind. And what clear thinking can these men do? The ships have got them down so low they've no minds left to get out of their holes!"

And yet—as now on every dock, that "strike feeling" in the air kept growing tenser, tenser—its tensity crept into me. What was it that lay just ahead? I felt like a man starting out on a journey—a journey from which when he comes back he will find nothing quite the same.

I had a talk about the strike one day with Eleanore's father. I can still see the affectionate smile on his face, he looked as though he were seeing me off.

"My dear boy," he said, in his kind quiet voice, "don't forget for even a minute that the men who stand behind my work are going to stamp out this strike. This modern world is too complex to allow brute force and violence to wreck all that civilization has done. I'm sorry you've gone into this—but so long as you have, as Eleanore's father, I want you now to promise you won't write a line until the strike is over and you have had plenty of time to get clear. Don't let yourself get swamped in this—remember that you have a wife and a small son to think of."

My father had put it more sharply. He was out of bed now and he seemed to take strength from the news reports that he eagerly read of the struggle so fast approaching.

"At sea," he said, "when stokers try to quit their jobs and force their way on deck, they're either put in irons or shot down as mutineers. You'll see your friend Kramer dead or in jail. No danger to your sister now. Only see that you keep out of it!"

I did not tell him of my work, for I knew it would only excite him again, and excitement would be dangerous.

"Now you and Eleanore must go home," said Sue that night. "You'll have enough to think of. I'll be all right with father—he knows there's nothing to do but wait, and he's so kind to me now that it hurts. Poor old Dad—how well he means. But he's the old and we're the new—and that's the whole trouble between us." A sudden light came in her eyes. "The new are bound to win!" she said.

But I was not so sure of the new. To me it was still very vague and chaotic. After we had moved back to New York, at the times when I came home to sleep, Eleanore was silent or quietly casual in her remarks, but I felt her always watching me. One night when I came in very late and thought her asleep, being too tired to sleep myself, I went to our bedroom window and stood looking off down, into the distant expanse of the harbor. How quiet and cool it seemed down there. But presently out of the darkness behind, Eleanore's arm came around me.

"I wonder whether the harbor will ever let us alone," she said. "It was so good to us at first—we were getting on so splendidly. But it's taking hold of us now again—as though we had wandered too far away and were living too smoothly and needed a jolt. Never mind, we're not afraid. Only let's be very sure we know what we are doing."

"We'll be very sure," I whispered, and I held her very close.

"Let's try to be sure together," she said. "Don't leave me out—I want to be in. I want to see as much as I can—and help in any way I can. If you make any friends I want to know them. Remember that whatever comes, thy people shall be mine, my dear."

* * * * *

The next day the strike began.

Out of the docks at nine in the morning I saw dockers pour in crowds. They moved on to other docks, merged themselves in other crowds, scattered here and gathered there, until at last a black tide of men, here straggling wide, here densely massed, moved slowly along the waterfront.

In and out of these surging throngs I moved, so close that in the quiver of muscles, the excited movements of big limbs, the rough eagerness of voices that spoke in a babel of many tongues, such a storm of emotions beat in upon me that I felt I had suddenly dived into an ocean of human beings, each one of whom was as human as I. I caught a glimpse of Joe hurrying by. And I thought of Sue, and of Joe's appeal to her and to me to throw in our lives with such strangers as these whose coarse heavy faces were pressing so close. And I thought of Eleanore at home. "Thy people shall be mine, my dear."

Teamsters drove clattering trucks through the crowds. Some of them did not unload, but others dumped piles of freight by the docks. The dam had begun. All day long the freight piled up, and by evening the light of a pale moon shone down upon acres of barrels and boxes. Then the teamsters unharnessed their teams, left the empty trucks with poles in air, and the teamsters and their horses and all the crowds of strikers scattered by degrees up into the tenement regions. Bursts of laughter and singing came now and then out of the saloons.

Silence settled down over the docks. Walking now down the waterfront I met only a figure here and there. A taxi came tearing and screeching by, and later down the long empty space came a single wagon slowly. A smoky lantern swung under its wheels, and its old white horse with his shaggy head down came plodding wearily along. He alone had no strike feeling.

Battered and worn from the day's impressions I wanted to be alone and to think. I made my way in and out among trucks and around a dockshed out to a slip. It was filled with barges, tugs and floats jammed in between the two big vessels that loomed one at either pier. It was a dark jumble of spars and masts, derricks, funnels and cabin roofs, all shadowy and silent. A single light gleamed here and there from the long dark deck of the Morgan coaster close to my right. She was heavily loaded still, for she had come to dock too late. Smoke still drifted from her stout funnel, steam puffed now and then from her side. Behind her, reaching a mile to the North, were ships by the dozen, coasters and great ocean liners, loaded and waiting to discharge or empty and waiting to reload. And to the South were miles of railroad sheds already packed to bursting. I thought of the trains from all over the land still rushing a nation's produce here, and of the starlit ocean roads, of ships coming from all over the world, the men in their fiery caverns below feeding faster the fires to quicken their speed, all bringing cargoes to this port. More barrels, boxes, crates and bags to be piled high up on the waterfront. For the workers had gone away from their work, and the great white ships were still.

"What has all this to do with me?"

There came into my mind the picture of a little man I had seen that day, a suburban commuter by his looks, frowning from a ferryboat upon a cheering crowd of strikers. I laughed to myself as I thought of him. He had seemed so ludicrously small.

"Yes, my friend," I thought, "you and I are a couple of two-spots here, swallowed up in the scenery."

I thought of what Joe had said that day: "When you see the crowd, in a strike like this, loosen up and show all it could be if it had the chance—that sight is so big it blots you out—you sink—you melt into the crowd."

Something like that happened to me. I had seen the multitudes "loosen up," I had felt myself melt into the crowd. But I had not seen what they could be nor did I see what they could do. Far to the south, high over all the squalid tenement dwellings, rose that tower of lights I had known so well, the airy place where Eleanore's father had dreamed and planned his clean vigorous world. It was lighted to-night as usual, as though nothing whatever had happened. I thought of the men I had seen that day. How crassly ignorant they seemed. And yet in a few brief hours they had paralyzed all that the tower had planned, reduced it all to silence, nothing. Could it be that such upheavals as these meant an end to the rule of the world from above, by the keen minds of the men at the top? Was that great idol which had been mine for so many glad years, that last of my gods, Efficiency, beginning to rock a little now upon its deep foundations?

What could these men ever put in its place? I recalled the words of an old dock watchman with whom I had talked the evening before. From the days of the Knights of Labor he had been through many strikes, and all had failed, he told me. His dog sat there beside him, a solemn old red spaniel, looking wistfully into his master's face. And with somewhat the same expression, looking out on the moonlit Hudson, the old striker had said slowly:

"Before these labor leaders will do half of what they say—a pile of water will have to go by."

A sharp slight sound behind me jerked me suddenly out of my thoughts. I jumped as though at a shot. How infernally tight my nerves were getting. The sound had come from a mere piece of paper blown by the wind—a rough salt wind which now blew in from the ocean as though impatient of all this stillness. From below came a lapping and slapping of waves. Above me a derrick mast growled and whined as it rocked. And now as I looked about me all those densely crowded derricks moved to and fro against the sky. I had never felt in this watery world such deep restlessness as now.

"I wonder if you'll ever stop heaving," I thought half angrily. "I wonder what I'll be like when you finally get through with me. When will you ever let me stand pat and get things settled for good and all? When stop this endless starting out?"



CHAPTER XIII

What could such men as these raise up in place of the mighty life they had stilled?

At first only chaos.

As I went along the waterfront I felt a confused disappointment. Deep under all my questioning there had been a vague subconscious hope that I would see a miracle here. I had looked for an army. I saw only mobs of angry men. They were "picketing" the docks, here making furious rushes at men suspected of being "scabs," there clustering quickly around some talker or some man who was reading a paper, again drifting up into the streets of teeming foreign quarters, jamming into barrooms, voicing wildest rumors, talking, shouting, pounding tables with huge fists. And to me there was nothing inspiring but only something terrible here, an appalling force turned loose, sightless and unguided. What a fool I had been to hope. The harbor held no miracles.

The strike leaders seemed to have little control. Headquarters were in the wildest disorder. Into the big bare meeting hall and through the rooms adjoining drifted multitudes of men. There were no inner private rooms and Marsh saw everyone who came. He was constantly shaking hands or drawling casual orders, more like suggestions than commands. I caught sight of Joe Kramer's face at his desk, where he was signing and giving out union cards to a changing throng that kept pressing around him. Joe's face was set and haggard. He had been at that desk all night.

"It's hopeless. They can do nothing," I thought.

But when I came back the next morning I felt a sudden shock of surprise. For in some mysterious fashion a crude order had appeared. The striker throng had poured into the hall, filled all the seats and then wedged in around the walls. They were silent and attentive now. On the stage sat Marsh and his fellow leaders. Before them in the first three rows of seats was the Central Committee, a rough parliament sprung up over night. Each member, I found, had been elected the night before by his "district committee." These district bodies had somehow formed in the last two days and in them leaders had arisen. The leaders were here to plan together, the mass was here to make sure they planned right. And watching the deep rough eagerness on all those silent faces, that vague hope stirred again in my breast.

Presently I caught Joe's eye. At once he left his platform seat and came to me in the rear of the hall.

"Come on, Bill," he said. "We want you up here." And we made our way up to the platform. There Marsh reached over and gripped my hand.

"Hello, Bill, glad you're with us," he said. I tingled slightly at his tone and at a thousand friendly eyes that met mine for an instant. Then it was over. The work went on.

What they did at first seemed haphazard enough. Reports from the districts were being read with frequent interruptions, petty corrections and useless discussions that strayed from the point and made me impatient. And yet wide vistas opened here. Telegrams by the dozen were read from labor unions all over the country, from groups of socialists East and West, there were cables from England, Germany, France, from Russia, Poland, Norway, from Italy, Spain and even Japan. "Greetings to our comrades!" came pouring in from all over the earth. What measureless army of labor was this? All at once the dense mass in the rear would part to let a new body of men march through. These were new strikers to swell the ranks, and at their coming all business would stop, there would be wild cheers and stamping of feet, shrill whistles, pandemonium!

Gradually I began to feel what was happening in this hall. That first "strike feeling"—diffused, shifting and uncertain—was condensing as in a storm cloud here, swelling, thickening, whirling, attracting swiftly to itself all these floating forces. Here was the first awakening of that mass thought and passion, which swelling later into full life was to give me such flashes of insight into the deep buried resources of the common herd of mankind, their resources and their power of vision when they are joined and fused in a mass. Here in a few hours the great spirit of the crowd was born.

For now the crowd began to question, think and plan. Ideas were thrown out pell mell. I found that every plan of action, everything felt and thought and spoken, though it might start from a single man, was at once transformed by the feeling of all, expressed in fragments of speech, in applause, or in loud bursts of laughter, or again by a chilling silence in which an unwelcome thought soon died. The crowd spoke its will through many voices, through men who sprang up and talked hard a few moments, then sat down and were lost to sight—some to rise later again and again and grow in force of thought and expression, others not to be seen again, they had simply been parts of the crowd, and the crowd had made them rise and speak.

On the first day of this labor parliament, up rose a stolid Pole. He was no committeeman but simply a member of the throng.

"Yo' sand a spickair to my dock," he said. "Pier feefty-two—East Reever. I t'ink he make de boys come out." He sat down breathing heavily.

"You don't need any speaker, go yourself," an Irishman called from across the hall.

"I no spick," said the Pole emphatically.

"You're spicking now, ain't you?" There was a burst of laughter, and the big man's face grew red. "You don't need to talk," the voice went on. "Just go into your dock and yell 'Strike!' You've got chest enough, you Pollock."

The big Pole made his way out of the hall. In the rear I saw him light his pipe and puff and scowl in a puzzled way. Then he disappeared. The next day, in the midst of some discussion, he rose from another part of the hall.

"I want to say I strike my dock," he shouted. Nobody seemed to hear him, it had nothing whatever to do with the subject, but he sat down with a glow of pride.

A Norwegian had arisen and was speaking earnestly, but his English was so wonderful that no one could understand.

"Shut up, you big Swede, go and learn English," somebody said.

"He don't have to shut up." The voice of Marsh cut in, and the mass backed up his curt rebuke by a murmur of approval. He had risen and come forward, and now waited till there was absolute silence. "Everyone gets a hearing here," he said. "We've got nine nationalities, but each one checks his race at the door. Every man is to have a fair show. What we need is an interpreter. Where's someone who can help this Swede?"

There was a quick stirring in the mass and then a man was shoved out of it. He went over to the speaker, who at once began talking intensely.

"The first thing he wants to say," said the interpreter at the end of the torrent, "is that he'd rather be dead than a Swede. He says he's a Norwegian. His second point is that all bad feeling between nationalities ought to be stopped if the strike's to be won. He says he's seen fights already between Irish and Eyetalians."

Up leaped an enormous negro docker who sounded as though he preached often on Sundays.

"Yes, brothers," he boomed, "let us stop our fights. Let us desist—let us refrain. We are men from all countries, black and white. The last speaker came from Norway—he came from way up there in the North. My father came from Africa——"

"He must have come last Monday," said a dry, thin voice from the back of the hall, and there was a laugh.

"Brothers," cried the black man, "I come here from the colored race. At my dock I got over sixty negroes to walk out. Is there no place for us in this strike? If my father was a slave, is my color so against me?"

"It ain't your color, it's your scabbing," a sharp voice interrupted. "They broke the last strike with coons like you. They brought you up in boats from the South. And you scabbed—you scabbed yourself! Didn't you? You did! You —— of a nigger!"

A little Italian sprang up in reply. He did not look like a docker. He was gaily dressed in a neat blue suit with a bright red tie:

"Fellow workers—I am Italian man! You call me Guinney, Dago, Wop—you call another man Coon, Nigger—you call another man a Sheeny! Stop calling names—call men fellow workers! We are on strike—let us not fight each other—let us have peace—let us have a good time! I know a man who has a big boat—and he say now we can have it for nothing—to take our wives and children and make excursions every day. On the boat we will have a good time. I am a musician—I play the violin on a boat till I strike—so now I will get you the music. And we shall run that boat ourselves! We have our own dockers to start it from dock—we have our own stokers, our own engineers—we have our own pilots—we have all! And it will be easy to steer that boat—for we have made the harbor empty—we shall have the whole place to ourselves! Some day maybe soon we have all the boats in the world for ourselves—and we shall be free! All battle boats we shall sink in the sea—we stop all wars! So now we begin—we stop all our fighting—we take out this boat—all our comrades on board! No coons, no niggers, no sheenies, no wops! Fellow workers—I tell you the name of our boat! The Internationale!"

The little man's speech was greeted with a sudden roar of applause. For the crowd had seen at once this danger of race hatred and was eager to put it down. The Internationale made her first trip on the following day, and after that her daily cruise became the gala event of the strike. Both decks of the clumsy craft were packed with strikers, their wives and their children, and all up and down the harbor she went. The little Italian and his friends had had printed a red pamphlet, "Revolutionary Songs of the Sea," the solos of which he sang on the boat while the rest came in on the chorus. A new kind of a "chanty man" was he, voicing the wrongs and the fierce revolt and the surging hopes and longings of all the toilers on the sea—while this ship that was run by the workers themselves plowed over a strange new harbor. I watched it one day from the end of a pier. It approached with a swelling volume of song. It drew so near I could see the flushed faces of those who were singing, some with their eyes on their leader's face, others singing out over the water as though they were spreading far and wide the exultant prophecy of that song. It passed, the singing died away—and still I sat there wondering.

"We shall have all the boats in the world for ourselves—and we shall be free! All battle boats we shall sink in the sea! We stop all wars! So now we begin!"

Was it indeed a beginning? Was this the opening measure of music that would be heard round the world? My mind rejected the idea, I thought it merest madness. But still that song rang in my ears. What deep compelling force was here—this curious power of the crowd that had so suddenly gripped hold of this simple Italian musician, this fiddler on excursion boats, and in a few short days and nights had made him pour into music the fire of its world-wide dreams?

I saw it seize on others. One day a young girl rose up in the hall. A stenographer on one of the docks, she was neatly, rather sprucely dressed, but her face was white and scared. She had never made a speech before. She was speaking now as though impelled by something she could not control.

"Comrades—fellow workers." Her voice trembled violently. She paused and set her teeth, went on. "How about the women and babies?" she asked. "I know of one who was born last night. And that's only one of a lot. We have thousands of kids and old people—sick people too, and cripples and drunks—all that these lovely jobs of ours have left on our backs. They've got to be carried. Who's to take care of 'em, feed 'em, doctor 'em? If we're going to run the earth let's begin at home. What does anyone know about that?"

She sat down with a kind of a gasp of relief. Her seat was close to the platform, and I could see her bright excited eyes as she listened to what she had started here. For the crowd, as though it had only been waiting for this girl to speak its thought, now seized upon her question. Sharp voices were heard all over the hall. Some said they could get doctors, others knew of empty stores that could be had for nothing and used as free food stations. An assistant cook from an ocean liner told where his chief bought wholesale supplies. And the girl who had roused this discussion, her nervousness forgotten now, rose up again and again with so many quick, eager suggestions, that when the first relief station was opened that evening she was one of those placed in charge.

I saw her grow amazingly, for now I came to know her well. Her name was Nora Ganey. At home that night when Eleanore said, "Remember, dear, I want something to do that will let me see the strike for myself"—I thought at once of this work of relief. Eleanore would be good at this, she had trained herself in just such work. And it appealed to her at once. She went down with me the next morning, and she and Nora Ganey, though their lives had been so different, yet proved at once to be kindred souls. Eleanore gave half her time to the work, and these two became fast friends.

Before the strike Nora had sat all day in an office pounding a typewriter, several nights a week she had gone to dances in public halls, and that had made her entire life. In the strike she was at her food station all day, and each evening till late she visited homes, looking into appeals for aid and if need be issuing tickets for food. She heard the bitterest stories from wives of harbor victims, and she began telling these stories in speeches. Soon she was sent out over the city to speak at meetings and ask for aid. With Eleanore I went one night to hear this young stenographer speak to twenty thousand in Madison Square Garden. And the strike leader who made that speech was not the girl of two weeks before. Her life had been as utterly changed as though she had jumped to another world.

Through Marsh and Joe, in those tense days, I was fast making striker friends. With some I had long intimate talks, I ate many kitchen suppers and spent many evenings in tenement homes. But though by degrees I felt myself drawn to these men who called me "Bill," when alone with each one I felt little or none of that passion born of the crowd as a whole. With a sharp drop, a sudden reaction, I would feel this new world gone. Its strength and its wide vision would seem like mere illusions now. What could we little pigmies do with the world? Its guidance was for Dillon and all the big men I had known. Often in those days of groping, knotty problems all unsolved, with a sickening hunger I would think of those men at the top, of their keen minds so thoroughly trained, their vast experience in affairs. I would feel myself in a hopeless mob, a dense, heavy jungle of ignorant minds. And groping for a foothold here I would find only chaos.

But back we would go into the crowd, and there in a twinkling we would be changed. Once more we were members of the whole and took on its huge personality. And again the vision came to me, the dream of a weary world set free, a world where poverty and pain and all the bitterness they bring might in the end be swept away by this awakening giant here—which day by day assumed for me a personality of its own. Slowly I began to feel what It wanted, what It hated, how It planned and how It acted. And this to me was a miracle, the one great miracle of the strike. For years I had labored to train myself to concentrate on one man at a time, to shut out all else for weeks on end, to feel this man so vividly that his self came into mine. Now with the same intensity I found myself striving day and night to feel not one but thousands of men, a blurred bewildering multitude. And slowly in my striving I felt them fuse together into one great being, look at me with two great eyes, speak to me with one deep voice, pour into me with one tremendous burning passion for the freedom of mankind.

Was this another god of mine?



CHAPTER XIV

The great voice of the crowd—incessant, demanding of me and of all within hearing to throw in our lives, to join in this march to a new free world regardless of all risk to ourselves—grew clear to me now.

I felt myself drawn in with the rest. I was helping in the publicity work, each day I met with the leaders to draw up statements for the press. And these messages to the outside world that I wrote to the slow and labored dictation of some burly docker comrade, or again by myself at dawn to express the will of a meeting that had lasted half the night—slowly became for me my own. Almost unawares I had taken the habit of asking:

"How much can we do? How sane and vigilant can we be to keep clear of violence, bloodshed, mobs and a return to chaos? How long can we hold together fast? How far can we march toward this promised land?"

In order to see ourselves as a whole and feel our swiftly swelling strength, having now burst the confines of our hall, we began to hold meetings out on "the Farm." There are many "farms" on the waterfront, for a "farm" is simply the open shore space in front of a dock. But this, which was one of the widest of all, now came to be spoken of as "the Farm," and took on an atmosphere all its own. For there were scenes here which will long endure in the memories of thousands of people. For them it will be a great bright spot in the times gone by—in one of those times behind the times, as this strange world keeps rushing on.

From the top of a pile of sand, where I stood with the speakers at the end of a soft April day, I saw the whole Farm massed solid with people. This mass rose in hummocks and hills of humanity over the piles of brick and sand and of crates and barrels dumped by the trucks, and out over the water they covered the barges and the tugs, and there were even hundreds upon the roofs of docksheds. The yelp of a dog was heard now and then and the faint cries of children. But the mass as a whole stood motionless, without a sound. They had stood thus since two o'clock, and now the sun was setting. To the west the harbor was empty, no smoke from ships obscured the sun, and it shone with radiant clearness upon eleven races of men, upon Italians, Germans, French, on English, Poles and Russians, on Negroes and Norwegians, Lascars, Malays, Coolies, on figures burly, figures puny, faces white and faces swarthy, yellow, brown and black. The sun shone upon all alike—except where that Morgan liner, still lying unloaded at her dock, threw a long dark creeping shadow out across the throng.

Thirty thousand people were here. Thirty thousand intensely alive. As I eagerly watched their faces it was not their poverty now but their boundless fresh vitality that took hold of me so hard. I had read many radical books of late, in my groping for a foothold, and I had found most of them dry affairs. But now the crowd through its leaders had laid hold upon the thoughts in these books, had made them its own and so given them life. In the process the thoughts had been twisted and bent, some parts ignored and others brought out of all their nice proportions. Exaggeration, sentiment, all kinds of crudity were here. But it was crudity alive, a creed was here in action. Out of all the turmoil, the take and give, the jar and clash back there in the meeting hall, had come certain thoughts and passions, hopes and plans, that the multitude had not ignored or hooted but had caught up and cheered into life. And these ideas that they had cheered were now being pounded back into their minds. Monotonous repetition, you say? Yes, monotonous repetition—slow sledgehammer blows upon something red hot—pounding, pounding, pounding—that when it cooled its shape might be changed.

Nora Ganey was speaking.

"Look at those ocean liners!" she cried. Her voice was sharp and strident. "They're paralyzed now, and because they are they're costing the big companies millions of dollars every day. That's what their time is worth to their owners. But what are those ships worth to you? Ten dollars a week and a broken arm—or a leg or a skull, you can take your choice. Six thousand of you men were crippled or crushed to death last year—and that, let me remind you, was only in the port of New York. Why was it? Why did it have to be? And why will it always have to be until you make these ships your own? Because, fellow workers, the time of the ships is worth so much to their owners that the work has got to be rushed day and night—and in that rush somebody's bound to get hurt—if he isn't killed he's lucky! And as for the rest, when at last you're through and dead tired—they point to the saloons and say, 'Now have a few drinks! We won't need you again till next Tuesday'! Do you know what all this means in your homes? It means drunks, cripples, sick and poor! It means such sights as I'll never forget. I've seen 'em all—just lately!

"I never thought of such things before. I liked my office job on the dock and all the jobs around me—and when sailing time drew near I liked the last excitement. I liked the rich furs and dresses and the cute little earrings and slippers and dogs that were attached to the women who came. I liked to see them pile out of their motors and laugh and make eyes at the men they belonged to. I liked to peep into the cabins they had—get on to all the luxuries there.

"But out of all this magnificence, friends, and this work that keeps it going—I saw one day a man come on a stretcher. He was dead. And that started me thinking. That's why I came out when the strike was called. And in the strike I've gone into your homes. I've seen what those soft expensive female dolls and all the work that makes them costs. And I've got a thrill of another kind! It's a thrill that'll last for the rest of my life! And in yours, too, fellow workers! For I believe that you'll go right on—that you'll strike and strike and strike again—till you make these tenements own these ships—and a life won't be thrown away for a dollar!"

She stopped sharply and stepped back, and there burst out a frenzy of applause, which died down to be caught up and prolonged and deepened into a steady roar, as Marsh came slowly forward. He stood there bareheaded, impassive and quiet, listening to the great voice of the mass. At last he turned to the chairman. The latter picked up a whistle, and at that piercing call to order slowly the cheering began to subside. Faces pressed eagerly closer. Marsh looked all around him.

"Fellow workers," he began, "it's hard for a man to be understood when he's talking to men from all over the world." He pointed down to a cluster of Lascars with white turbans on their heads. "You don't understand me. But some of your comrades will give you my speech, for we are all strike brothers here. On the ship there is no flag—on the ship there is no nation—on the ship there is only work—on the ship there are only the workers!

"For a ship may be equipped with the most powerful engines to drive her—she may have the best brains to direct her course—but the ship can't sail until you go aboard! You're the men who make the ships of use, you're the men who give value to the stock of all the big ship companies! You are the ship industry—and to you the ship industry should belong!

"I want you now to think of a tombstone. Out in the Atlantic, two miles down they tell me, a big ship is stuck with her bow in the ooze of the ocean floor and her stern six hundred feet up in the water. In the cold green light down there she looks like a tombstone—and she is packed with dead people inside. She is there because where she should have had lifeboats she had French cafes instead, and sun parlors for the ladies. Some of these ladies went down with the ship, and we heard a lot about their screams. But we haven't heard much of the cries for help of the thousands of men who go down every year in rotten old ships upon the seas! Nor have we heard of the millions more who are killed on land—on the railroads, in the mines and mills and stinking slums of cities!

"But now we've decided that cries like these are to be heard all over the world. For we've only got one life apiece—we're not quite sure of another. And because we do all the work that is done we want all the life there is to be had! All the life there is to be had—that's what we are striking for! That is our share of the life in this world! And until we get our share this labor war will have no end! Other wars may come and go—but under them all on land and sea this war of ours will go steadily on—will swallow up all other wars—will swallow up in all your minds all hatred of your brother men! For you they will be workers all! With them you will rise—and the world will be free!"

* * * * *

When the long stormy din of cheers had little by little died away Joe Kramer began the last speech of the day. He had eaten and slept little, he had lived on coffee and cigarettes, and there was a strained look in his deep eyes as he rose up lean and gaunt by my side.

"I'm here to-day to speak to the men who work in stokeholes naked," he said. "I'm here to talk of the lives you lead—the lives that millions before you have led—for a few brief years—and then they have died. For lives in stokeholes are not long. And before I begin I propose that we stand for a moment with uncovered heads." He looked out over the multitude as though seeing far beyond them, and his voice was as harsh as the look in his eyes. "As a tribute to all the dead stokers," he said.

And in a breathless silence the multitude did what he had asked. Joe broke this silence sharply.

"Now for life and the living," he said. "Why was it that those men all died? What has the change from sails to steam done to the lives of the men at sea?

"The old sailor at least had air to breathe. But what you breathe is red hot gas—I know because I've been there. There is a gong upon the wall, and when it clangs you heave in coal, and if when it clangs faster you don't keep quite up to its pace, a white light flashes out of the wall, and that light is the Chief Engineer's way of saying, 'God damn you, keep up those fires down there! Time is money! Who are you?'

"The old-time sailor lived on deck. He had the winds, the sun and the stars. But you live down between steel walls—with only the glare of electric lights in which you sleep and eat and sweat. You work at all kinds of irregular hours, for you there is no day or night. You don't know whether the millionaire and his last and loveliest wife are drinking champagne before going to bed, in their cabin de luxe above you, or taking their coffee the next day at noon. You don't know about anything way up there—unless you go up as I've seen you do, half out of your senses from the heat, and make a sudden jump for the rail. The cry is heard—'Man overboard!'—then shrieks and a chorus of 'Oh-my-God's!' And then somebody says, 'It's only a stoker.'"

He stopped short, and at the sudden roar of the crowd I saw him frown and quiver. He drew a deep, slow breath and went on:

"They threw off all the good in the ship with sails—but they carefully kept all that was bad. The old mutiny laws—they kept all that. Undermanning of crews—they kept all that. The waterfront sharks—they kept all that. But there was one thing they couldn't keep—the old sailor's habit of standing all this! He had run away to sea as a boy, he'd been kicked all his life by the bucko mate into a state where he couldn't kick back. But with you men it is not so. Among all the thousands standing here most were on shore a few years ago, and you took your land views with you on board. You organized seamen's unions. The one in this country was meek and mild. It did not strike, it went on its knees to Congress instead, and here's part of the written petition it made. 'We raise our manacled hands in humble supplication—and we pray that the nations of the earth issue a decree for our emancipation—restore us our rights as brother men.' But Congress had no ear for you then. Sailors are men who have no votes. And so you failed in your pleading.

"But in the labor movement there seems to be no such word as fail! You have not given up your union—instead you have formed one of a kind more dangerous to your masters! You have not made smaller your requests—no, you are now demanding more! And instead of asking for merciful laws you are saying, 'We are done with your laws, will have none of your laws, will break your laws when they come in our way!'

"And what do your masters answer? Here are thousands of deserters—every man here has broken the law by leaving his ship! But have they tried to arrest you? No! They're afraid to arrest twenty thousand men, they're afraid of this strike, they're afraid of you! They're so almighty scared downtown that though we've been only a week on strike they've already sent their commands to their Congress to give us what merciful laws we like. They're scared because we've thrown over their laws—because they know that we now see our power—to stop all their ships and the trade of their land and send their stock market into a panic!

"And now do you know what I want you to do? I want you to look at their ships, at their docks, at their harbor, men—and laugh—laugh! Don't you see there's no need of violence? Laugh! In old times the people built barricades. You don't need barricades nor any guns—all you've got to do is to stand here and laugh! Look at all you have done to your bosses—and laugh! To this town, to this nation—and laugh, laugh! Look—and think—of what you can do—all you—and you—and you—and you—by just folding your arms! Think of all you will do! And laugh—laugh! Laugh! Laugh!"

He broke off with both arms raised, and there followed one moment without a sound. Then suddenly, quick and hard and clear, from a corner of this human ocean, I heard a single peal of laughter. In an instant scores joined in. Rising in outbursts here and there, deepening, rushing out over the Farm, it gathered and rolled in wave on wave, rising, always rising. And it swelled into such a laugh that I saw the police feel for their clubs. Reporters scrambled for high places, turned their kodaks on it all. Women snatched up their babies in terror and ran. Marsh stepped forward, caught Joe by the arm and jerked him back to where I was standing. I gripped Joe's hand, it was icy cold.

Marsh shouted to the chairman, and the piercing whistle for order was heard. But it took a long time for that laugh to die. Long after the meeting had broken up I saw groups gather together, and presently they would begin to laugh, and their laughter would take on again that same convulsive tensity. I heard small clusters laughing, and dense throngs in hot saloons where the low rooms would echo and double the roar.

Late at night out on the waterfront, under the bow of that Morgan ship, I found two strikers smoking their pipes, and I sat down and lighted mine. One was a Lascar, the other a Pole. In the strike these wanderers over the earth had met on the waterfront under a wagon where each had come to sleep the night. Since then they had become good friends. Each spoke a little English, each one had caught bits here and there from the speeches made that afternoon—and they had been trying to pool what they'd heard, trying to find why it was they had laughed. As now I tried to give them the gist of what Joe Kramer had said, from time to time they would glance up at the big ship they had paralyzed and chuckle softly to themselves.

Then I went on to Marsh's speech. And out there in the darkness I could feel their rough faces, one white and one brown, grow deeply, eagerly intent, as these strike brothers listened to the voice that had spoken the dream of the crowd:

"Other wars may come and go—but under them all on land and sea this war of ours will go steadily on—will swallow up all other wars—will swallow up in all your minds all hatred of your brother men. For you they will be workers all. With them you will rise—and the world will be free."



CHAPTER XV

To all this, from the buildings far downtown that loomed like tall grim shadows, the big companies said nothing.

But that same night, while I sat talking to those two men, we heard a sharp excited cry. We saw a man behind us running along the line of saloons. From these and from the tenements came pouring angry throngs of men. And out of the hubbub I caught the words,

"They're bringing in the scabs! By boat!"

Past a watchman that I knew I ran into a dockshed and out to the open end of the dock. And there I saw a weird ominous scene. Up the empty harbor, under a dark and cloudy sky, came four barges, black with negro laborers, and ahead and around and behind them came police boats throwing their searchlights upon an angry swarm of union picket dories, from which as they drew nearer I heard furious voices shouting, "Scab!" One of the barges docked where I stood and the negroes quickly slunk inside. I drew back from them as they passed, for to me too they were "scabs" that night. Afraid to face the men outside, whose jobs they had taken, these strike-breakers were to live on the dock, under cover of police. Soon half of them lay snoring on long crowded rows of cots. Food and hot coffee were served to the rest. Then I heard the harsh rattle of winches, I saw these negroes trundling freight, the cargo went swooping up into the ship—and with a deep dismay, a sharp foreboding of trouble ahead, I felt the work of the harbor begun.

I heard a quick voice at my elbow:

"Say. What the hell are you doing here!" I turned to the Pinkerton man by my side:

"I'm reporting this strike."

"No you're not, you're in here to report what you see to the strikers. Now don't let's have any words, my friend, we've seen you in their meeting-hall and we've all got your number. Go on out where you belong!"

So I went out where I belonged.

I went out to the crowd—but I found it changed, split up into furious swarms of men, I found the beginning of chaos here. And the world that I had left behind, the old world of order and rule from above, which I had all but forgotten of late, now sharply made its presence felt. For the god I had once known so well was neither dead nor sleeping. Behind closed doors, the doors that had flown open once to show me every courtesy, it had been silently laying plans and sending forth orders or "requests" to all those in its service.

The next day the newspapers changed their tone. Until now they had given us half the front page. Every statement I had written had been printed word for word. The reporters had been free to dig columns of "human interest stuff" out of the rich mine of color here, and they had gone at it hungrily, many with real sympathy. You would have thought the entire press was on the side of the strikers, at times it had almost seemed to me as though the entire country had risen in revolt. But now all this was suddenly stopped, and in its place the front pages were filled with news of a very different kind. "Big Companies Move at Last," were the headlines, "Work of Breaking Strike Begun." The first ship would sail that evening, three more would be ready to start the next day, and within a week the big companies hoped to resume the regular service. They regretted the loss to shippers of all the perishable produce which to the value of millions of dollars had been rotting away at the docks. They deplored the inconvenience and ruin which had been brought on the innocent public by these bodies of rough, irresponsible men who had openly defied the law. With such men there could be no arbitration, and in fact there was no need. The port would be open inside of a week.

So the big companies spoke at last. And as I read the papers, at home that day at breakfast, I remembered what Eleanore's father had said: "Don't let yourself forget for one minute that the men behind me are going to stamp out this strike." Not without a fight, I thought. But I was anxious and depressed. Dillon had not come of late, he had felt that we wanted to be alone. As now I glanced at Eleanore, whose eyes were intent on the news of the day, I saw with a rush of pity and love how alone she suddenly felt in all this. A moment later she looked up.

"Pretty bad, isn't it, dear?" she said.

"It doesn't look very fine just now."

"Are you going down to the docks?"

"Yes, they'll want me," I replied, "to write some answer to this stuff."

"Can you wait a few moments?" Eleanore rose. "I'll get on my hat. I promised Nora Ganey I'd run her relief station for her to-day." I took her a moment in my arms:

"You're no quitter, are you?" I said.

"We're in this now," she answered, just a little breathlessly. "And so of course we'll see it through."

So we went down together.

The waterfront looked different now. In front of the docks where work had begun a large space had been roped off. Inside the rope was an unbroken cordon of police. And without, but pressing close, the multitude of people for whom in a day so much had been changed, moved restlessly, no longer sure of its power, no longer sure of anything but a fast rising hatred of the men who had taken their jobs. As at times the police lines tightened and the negroes came out for more freight, thousands of ominous eyes looked on. Standing here at one such time, I saw a negro striker pass. His head was down and he walked quickly—for race feeling had begun.

The first ship sailed that evening. Tens of thousands watched her sail. And a bitter voice beside me said,

"Laughing ain't going to be enough."

Among men on strike there are two kinds of attitudes toward those who take their places. The first is the scorn of the man who is winning. "You are a dirty scab," it says. "You're a Judas to the working class and a thief who is trying to steal my job. But you won't get it, we're bound to win, and you're barely worth kicking out of the way." The second is quite a different feeling. In this is the fear of the man who is losing—and fear, as an English writer has said, is the great mother of violence. "You may keep my job! And if you do I'll be left with nothing to live on!" It is this second attitude which is dreaded by strike leaders, for it leads to a loss of all control, to machine guns and defeat.