 CHAPTER II What queer friends she had, what a muddled life compared to ours. What a vague, confused development, jumping from one idea to another, never seeing any job through, forever starting all over again with the same feverish absorption in the next radical fad. Highbrow Dramatics, The Settlement Movement, The Post-Impressionists, Socialism, Votes for Women, One Thing After the Other, Pal Mel. She would work herself all up, live hard, talk, organize, think and feel till her nerves went all the pieces, and then she would come to us for a rest and laugh at us for our restfulness and at herself for the state she was in. That was one thing at least she had learned, to laugh at herself. She could be deliciously humorous. An Eleanor meeting her on that ground would quiet her and steady her down. We had grown very fond of Sue. We knew her life was not easy at home. Alone over there with poor old dad and feeling herself anchored down, she would still at intervals rebel, against his sticking to his dull job, against her own dependence, against the small monthly allowance which without my father's knowledge they still had from me. Let me earn my own living, she would exclaim. Why shouldn't I? I'm twenty-six and I'm working hard enough as it is, the Lord knows, I'm organizing every day and making speeches half my nights. Other girls take pay for that. Now, father, please be sensible, I'm going to take a good salary job. But then dad, whose mind was so old and rigid, so much less tolerant than mine, would grow excited or, still worse, ashamed that he couldn't make money enough to give her all she wanted, and that desperate, hungry love with which he clung to her these latter days would in the end make her give in. For under all her radical talk, Sue had the kindest heart in the world. Eleanor did her best to help. She was always having dad over to dinner, and we had a room which she called his, where he would come and stay the weekend. At six o'clock each Saturday night he would arrive with his satchel. Daughter-in-law? He would announce. My other daughter's again the law. She's off Revoluten. Can you take a decent old gentleman in out of the last century? Don't change any plans on my account. If you're going out to dinner just tell the cook to give me a snack and a cup of tea, and then I'll light up a good cigar and read the works of my great son. Go right ahead, as if I wasn't here. If we had he would have been furious. Eleanor always made it his night, and no quiet evening either. When we didn't take him out to a play she invited people to dinner. Young people, for he liked them best. And late on Sunday morning the Indian would wake him up, would watch him shave and dress and breakfast, and then they would be off to the park. We had named our small son after dad, and they were the most splendid chums. They had any number of secrets. Eleanor too had made Sue use our apartment. Sue called it her Manhattan Club and brought her friends here now and then to stir you people up, she said. But this did not disturb me. I felt too secure in life. And with a safe, amused, and slightly curious attitude I found Sue quite a tonic. I like to hear her knock my big men in her cocksure superior way. It was mighty good fun, and every now and then by mistake she would hit on something that was true. I found something too in her ideas. This suffrage business, for example, she had stuck to this hobby quite a while, and through it she had reached a conviction that women would never get the vote until the great mass of working girls were drawn into the movement. So she had gone in for working girls' clubs, and from clubs into trade unions, and from trade unions into strikes. There had been a strike of laundry girls which for a week was the talk of the town. Sue and some of her suffrage friends had organized meetings every night, and in a borrowed automobile she had rushed from meeting to meeting with two laundry women, meager for lawn-looking creatures, who stood up much embarrassed and awkwardly told about their lives. One of them a young widow had gone home from work one night at eleven and found that her small baby had died of convulsions during her absence. It was grim, terrible stuff of its kind, and Sue was so intensely wrought up you'd have thought there was nothing else in the world. But the strike stopped, as suddenly as it began, and the two women whose names she had brought into headlines were refused jobs wherever they went. Sue tried to help them for a while until this suffrage parade came along, when she went into this equally hard and quite forgot their existence. And then Eleanor took them up. Quietly and as a matter of course she took their troubles on her hands, sent one to a hospital, and got the other work, looked into their wretched home affairs, and had them come often to see her. And this kind of thing was happening often, Sue taking up and dropping what Eleanor then took up and put through. I compared them with a glow of pride. Eleanor's way was so sane and sure. She looked upon society much as she did upon our son, who had frequent little ailments, but through them all what a glorious growth to watch it was a perpetual joy. I remember once when in his young stomach there were some fearful goings on, Eleanor's remarking. Now if Sue had a child with a stomach in trouble, I suppose her way would be to quickly remove the entire stomach and put some new radical thing in its place. And then she went to the medicine chest and a vastly comforted Indian was soon cheerfully sitting up in bed. Eleanor could help others, I felt, because she had first helped herself, had tackled the moat in her own eye from the time when she had gone down to the harbor to get her roots, as she called it. She was a wonderful manager. Her budget was carefully worked out, and she had herself so well in hand she could put herself behind herself and smile clearly out on life. When Eleanor takes up a charity case, said her father, she turns it into a person at once and later into an intimate friend. He himself took a quiet interest in all her charity cases. They would often talk them over at night and in his easy, careless way he would turn over all his spare money to help in the work. Eleanor would protest at times and tell him how utterly foolish he was in not putting money aside for himself. But soon, deep in another case of poignant human misery, she would throw all caution to the winds and use her father's money, every dollar he could spare. That was another vice she had. Now she hated all the red tape in that huge network of institutions by which New York City provides relief. She never dropped a case of hers into that cumbersome relief machine and then let it slip out of her sight. She did the hard thing. She followed it up. She had learned, as I had in my work, to get on the inside of this sensitive city, to go to the gods behind it all and so have her cases shoved. One day, when one of them, a woman, was in a hospital so desperately ill that her very life depended on being moved to a private room. It can't be done, said the superintendent. Eleanor took the subway downtown to the Wall Street office of the man who was the hospital's principal backer. She found his outer office crowded with men who were waiting to see him on business. He can't see you, she was told. And she scribbled this on her card. I want none of your money, a little of your influence, and one minute of your time on behalf of a woman who is dying. About twenty minutes later that woman was in a private room. It is hard to stop talking about my wife. But to return to my sister. Into my reverie that night Sue burst with a dozen radical friends. Others kept arriving and our small rooms were soon a riot of color and chatter. Banners were stacked against the wall. Bright yellow ribbons were everywhere. Faces were flushed and happily tired. Eleanor sat at her coffee-earn. Cups and saucers and plates went around. And people still too excited to rest stood about eating hungrily. The talking was fast and furious now. I listened, watched their faces. These radicals, it seemed to me, had talked straight on both day and night ever since the evenings years ago when one of their earliest coteries had gathered in our Brooklyn home and talking they had multiplied and ramified all over the town. There was nothing under heaven their fingers did not itch to change. Here close by my side were three of them, two would-be Ibsen actresses and one budding playwright who had had two Broadway failures and one Berkeley Lyceum success. But were they talking of plays? Not at all. They talked of the Russian Revolution. It had died down in the last few years and they wanted to help stir it up again by throwing some more American money into the smoldering embers. To do this they planned to whip into new life the friends of Russian freedom. That was it, I told myself. These people were all friends of revolutions. Vaguely as I watch them now I felt I was seeing the parlor's side, the light and fluffy outer fringe of something rather dangerous. I thought again of that parade and my impression of mass force. No danger in that. It was dressy and safe, but some of these youngsters did not stop there. They went in for stirring up people in rags, mass force of a very different kind. There was a sculptor's socialist who openly bragged that he'd had a hand in filling Union Square one day with a seething mass of unemployed, and then when some poor crazed fanatic through a bomb, our socialist friend, as he himself smilingly put it, never once stopped running until he reached his studio. It was this kind of thing that got on my nerves. Before I pity the unwieldy poor, the numberless muddled-headed crowds down there in the tenements, and it seemed to me perfectly criminal that a lot of these young highbrows should be allowed to stir them up. Their own thinking was so muddled, their views of life so out of gear. I, a radical, no chance. While they chattered on excitedly, I thought of my trip uptown on the El that afternoon. A trip that I had made hundreds of times. Coming as I usually was from some big man or other, whose busy office and whose mind was a clean, brilliant illustration of what efficiency can be, I would sit in the car and idly watch the upper story windows we passed, with yellow gas jets flaring in the cave-like rooms behind them. There I had glimpses of men and girls at long crowded tables making coats, pants, vests, paper flowers, chewing gum, five cent cigars. I saw countless tenement kitchens, dirty cooking, unmade beds. These glimpses followed one on the other in such a dizzying torrent they merged into one moving picture for me. And that picture was of crowds, crowds, crowds, of people living frosally. This was poverty. And it was like some prodigious swamp. What could you do about it? You could pull out individuals here and there, as Eleanor did. I considered that a mighty fine job for a woman or a clergyman. But to go at it and drain the swamp was a very different matter. You couldn't do it by easy preaching of patent curals, nor by stirring up class hatred through rabid attacks upon big men. No, this was a job for the big men themselves, men who would go at this human swamp as Eleanor's father had gone at the harbor. Quietly and slowly, with an engineer's precision, he had been at it six solid years, but he still remarked humbly, We've only begun. Then from thinking of big men I thought of the one I had seen that day, and of my story about him. It was just in a stage I liked, where I could feel it all coming together. Incidents, bits of character, and neat little turns of speech rose temptingly before my mind. Presently through the clamour around me I heard the Indian crying. All this chatter had waked him up. I saw Eleanor go into him, and soon I heard the crying stop, and I knew she was telling him a story, a nice sleepy one to quiet him down. An infernal racket these people were making about the world. I went on thinking about my work. End of Chapter 2, Recording by Tom Weiss. You too, said Sue, when at last her friends had gone away, have built up a wall of contentment around you a person couldn't break through with an axe. Have a little I suggested. Stay all night, said Eleanor. No thanks, said Sue. I promised Dad that I'd be home. And then instead of going home she sprawled lazily on the sofa with her head upon one elbow, and settled in for some talk. But her talk was different tonight. She usually talked about herself, but tonight she talked of us instead, of our contemptible content. In presently through her talk I felt that she had some surprise to spring. In a few moments Eleanor felt it too. I could tell by that vigilant way she kept glancing up from her knitting. I think, I was remarking, we're a pretty liberal-minded pair. That's it, said Sue, you're liberals. What utter disdain she threw into the word. And what's more, you're citizens. In all these movements she went on, you always find two classes, citizens and criminals. You two are both born citizens. What's the difference, I inquired. Citizens, said Sue impressively, are ready to vote for what they believe in. Criminals are ready to get arrested and go to jail. Eleanor looked up at her. Who gave you that, she asked. Sue looked a little taken back, but only for a moment. One of the criminals, she said. Her voice was carefully casual now, but her eyes were a little excited. He's a man who made up his mind that he wanted to get away down to the bottom, and see how it feels to be down there. So he took the very worst job he could find. For two years he was a stoker, on ships of all kinds, all over the world. And now that he knows just how it feels, he has an office down on the docks where he's getting the stokers and dockers together, getting them ready for a strike on your beloved harbor. Joe Cramer, said Eleanor quietly. Sue gave a sudden nervous start. Eleanor, she severely rejoined, sometimes you're simply uncanny, the way you quietly jump at a thing. Eleanor had gone on with her knitting. I rose and lit a cigarette. I could feel Sue's eyes upon me. So this was her infernal surprise, J.K. banging into my life again. How long has Joe been here, I asked. About five months, Sue answered. He might have looked me up, I said. He doesn't want to look anyone up. I've only seen him once myself. He has simply buried himself down there. Why don't you go and see him, Billy? She added, with a quick glance at Eleanor. He won't amuse you the way we do. He's one of the real criminals now. Still, Eleanor did not look up. What's his address, I asked roughly. Sue gave it to me and good-humoredly yawned and said she must be getting home. Good night, dear, said Eleanor. She had risen and come to the door. What a love of a hat you're wearing. It's a new one, isn't it? I caught sight of it in the parade. With the smile which my tall sister threw back at us from the doorway had nothing whatever to do with hats. It's said as plainly as in words, Now, you cozy liberals, go over and touch that spot if you dare. When she had gone I took up a book and tried to read, but I soon gloomily relapsed. Would J.K. never leave me alone? What was he doing with my harbor? Why should I look him up, confound him? He hadn't bothered his head about me, but I knew that I would look him up and would find him more disturbing than ever. How he did keep moving on, no, not on, but down, down, until now he had bumped the bottom. Are you going to see him? Glancing sharply up I saw Eleanor carefully watching my face. Oh, I suppose so, I replied. She bent again to her knitting. He must be a strange kind of person, she said. I slept little that night, and my work the next morning went badly. So after wasting an hour or two I decided to stop. I would go and see Joe and be done with it. What was he doing with my harbor? The address Sue had given me was down on the North River, my old hunting ground. The weather had turned cold overnight, and when I came to the waterfront I felt the big raw breath of the sea. I had hardly been near the harbor in years. It had become for me a deep invisible cornerstone upon which my vigorous world was built. I had climbed up into the airy heights I had been writing of millionaires. And coming so abruptly now from my story of life in rich hotels the place I had once glorified looked bleak and naked, elemental, down to the roots of things again. I came to a bare wooden building, climbed some stairs, and entered a large low-ceilinged room which was evidently a meeting hall. Chairs were stacked along the walls, and there was a low platform at one end. As I lingered there a moment, by habit my eyes took in the details. The local color was lurid enough. On the walls were foreign pictures, one of the anarchists being executed in Spain, and another of an Italian mob shaking their fists and yelling like demons at a bloated hideous priest. There were posters in which flaming torches, blood-red flags, and barricades and cannon-belching clouds of smoke stood out in heavy blacks and reds. And all this foreign violence was made grimly real in its purpose here by the way these pictures centered around the largest poster, which was of an ocean liner with all its different kinds of workers gathered together in one mass and staring fixedly up at the ship. Through a door in a bored partition I went into a narrow room from which two dirty windows looked out upon the docks below. This room was cramped and crowded. Newspapers and pamphlets laid heat on the floor, and in the corners were four desks, at one of which three men whom I learned later to be an Italian, an Englishman, and a Spaniard were talking together intensely. They took no notice of my entrance for many other visitors, burly, sooty creatures were constantly straggling in and out. I saw Joe at a desk in one corner, looking doubly tall and lean and stoop, and with a tired frown on his face he sat there with his sleeves rolled up, slowly pounding out a letter on the typewriter before him. On top of his desk were huge ledgers, and over them upon hooks of the wall hung bunches of letters from other ports. It all gave me a heavy impression of dull daily drudgery. And in this Joe was so absorbed that he took no notice of my presence, although I now stood close behind him. When at last he did look up, and I got a full view of his face with its large familiar features, tight-set jaw, and deep-set eyes, I was startled at its gauntness. Hello, Joe. Hello. A dullish red came into his face, and then a slight frown. He half rose from his seat. Hello, Bill, he repeated. What's brought you here? He appeared a little dazed at first, then anything but glad to see me. The thought of our old college days flashed for a moment into my mind. How far away they seemed just now. Through our first few awkward remarks he lapsed back into such a tired, worn indifference that I was soon on the point of leaving. But that bony gauntness in his face and all it showed me he had been through gave him some right to his rudeness, I thought. So I changed my mind and stuck to my purpose of having it all out with Joe and learning what he was about. Persisting in my friendliness my questions slowly drew him out. Since I had seen him five years ago he had continued his writing, but as he had grown steadily more set on writing only what he called the truth about things, the newspapers had closed their doors. While I had gone up, he had gone down. Until finally throwing up and discussed this whole cool game of putting words on paper, he had made up his mind to throw in his life with the lives of the men at the bottom. So for over two years he had shoveled coal in the stoke-holes of ships by day and by night. He had mixed with stokers of every race, from English, French and Germans to Russians and Italians, Spaniards, Hindus, Coolies, Greeks. He had worked and eaten and slept in their holes. He had ranged the slums of all the seas, and of all this he spoke in short commonplace phrases, still in that indifferent tone as though personal stories were abhor. But look here, Joe, I asked at the end, what's the good of living like this? What the devil can you do? I still remember the look he gave me, the weary remoteness of it. But all he said was, Organize strikes, here, everywhere, of stokers, no, of all industries, for higher pay, eh, and shorter hours. Another brief look, no, for revolution, he said. Briefly in reply to my questions he explained how he and his friends had already induced some twelve thousand stokers and dockers to leave their old trade unions and enrolled themselves as members of this new international body, which was to embrace not only one trade, but all the labor connected with ships, ships of all nations. He was here doing the advance work. As soon as the ground was made ready, he said, some of the bigger leaders would come, then there would be mass meetings here and presently a gentle strike. And as the years went on, there would be similar strikes in all trades and in all countries until at some time, not many years off, there would be such labor rebellions as would paralyze the industrial world. And out of this catastrophe the workers would emerge into power to build up a strange new world of their own. This was what Joe saw ahead. He seemed to be seeing it while he spoke with a hard clear intensity that struck me rather cold. Here was no mere parlor talk. Here was a man who lived what he said. You comfortable people, he said, are so damn comfortable you're blind. You see nothing ahead but peace on earth and a nice smooth evolution with a lot of steady little reforms. You've got so you honestly can't believe there's any violence left in the world. You're as blind as most folks were five years before the Civil War. But what's the use talking he ended? You can't understand all this. Again, my irritation rose. No, I can't say I do, I replied. To stir up millions of men of that kind and then let them loose upon the world strikes me as absolutely mad. I knew it would. Look here, Joe. How are you so sure about all this? Hasn't it ever struck you that you're getting damnably narrow? He smiled. I don't care much if I'm narrow, he said. You think it's good for you being like this? I don't care if it's good for me. Don't you want to see anything else? Not in your successful world. Well, JK, I'm sorry, I retorted hotly. Because I'd like to see your world, I honestly would. I'm not like you. I'm always ready to be shown. All right, come and see it. Why don't you write up Jim Marsh? He smiled as he named the notorious leader of the whole organization. He'll be here soon, and in his line he has been a mighty successful man. All up and down the USA, Jim's name has been in headlines and Jim himself has been in jail, a successful revolutionist. So why not add him to your list? Write up the America he knows. There was a challenge in Joe's voice. All right, perhaps I will, I said. At least I had him talking now. Come out to lunch and tell me some more. I don't want any lunch. Something in the way he said that made me look at him quickly. He appeared to me now not only thin but tense and rather feverish. His nerves were plainly all on edge. He had smoked one cigarette after another. I've got a lot of work today, he added restlessly. Not only these damn letters to write, I've got to make up our paper besides. It goes to the printer tomorrow. Here, take a copy with you. And he handed me the last week's issue. It was a crude and flimsy affair with its name in scare-head letters. War sure. I glanced it over in silence a moment. What a drop for Joe, from what he had thin to this wretched, violent little sheet, this muckraker of the ocean world. Not like the harbor you paint it, he said, No, I answered shortly. Do you want another look at your harbor? I eyed him for a moment. All right, I'll look. Fine business. He had risen now, and a gleam of the old likable Joe came for a moment into his eyes. Meet me tomorrow at seven a.m. And let's look at some of its failures, he said. CHAPTER V Did you see him, Eleanor asked that night. Yes, I saw him. I could feel her waiting, but I could not bring myself to talk. Eleanor wouldn't like J.K. She wouldn't like what I had told him I'd do. I was sorry now that I had. It was simply looking for trouble. I damned that challenge in Joe's voice. Why did he always get hold of me so? How did he look? Is he much changed, Eleanor asked me quietly. Yes, he looks half sick and old. He's been through a great deal, I answered. Did he talk about that? Yes, I hesitated. And of what he wants to show me, I said. Eleanor looked quickly up. Are you going to see him soon again? Yes, tomorrow morning, to have a look at his stoker friends. I want to have just one good look at the life that has made him what he is. That's all. That's all it amounts to. There was another silence. Then she came over behind my chair, and I felt the cool quiet of her hand as she slowly stroked my forehead. You look tired, dear, she said. Just before daylight the next morning I rose and dressed, swallowed some coffee, and set out. I took a surface car downtown. I had not been out at this hour in years. And as in my present mood, troubled and expectant, I watched the streets in the raw half-light. They looked as utterly changed to me as though they were streets of a different world. The department store windows looked unreal. Their soft, rich lights had been put out, and in this cold, hard light of dawn all their blandishing ladies of wax appeared like so many buxom ghosts. Men were washing the windows. Women and girls were hurrying by, and as some of them stopped for a moment to peer in at these phantoms of fashion, their own faces looked equally waxing to me. A long, luxurious motor passed with a man and a woman in evening clothes half asleep in each other's arms. An old man with a huge pack of rags turned slowly and stared after them. The day's work was beginning. Peddlers trundled push carts along. Newspaper vendors opened their stands. Milk wagons and trucks from the markets came by, some on the gallop. Our car had filled with people now. Men and boys clung to the steps behind, and women and girls were packed inside, most of them hanging to the straps. Now badly and foolishly dressed were these girls. There must be thousands of them out. Two kept twittering innately. All the rest were silent. By the time that I reached the docksheds the day was breaking over their roofs. It was freezing cold, and the chill was worse in the dock that I entered. I buttoned my ulster tighter. The big place was dark and empty. The dockers I'd learned from the watchman had quit work at three o'clock, for a few tons of fruit was all the freight that remained to be loaded. The ship was set to sail at nine o'clock. The stokers had not yet gone aboard. I found about a hundred of them huddled along the steel wall of the shed. Some of them had old leather grips or canvas bags, but many had no luggage at all. A few wore seedy overcoats, but the greater part had none. They stood with their hands in their ragged pockets, shivering and stamping. Most of them were undersized, some tough, some rather sickly. A dull-eyed wretched sodden lot. I got the liquor on their breasts. A fat old Irish stoker came drifting half-drunk up the pier with a serene and waggy smile. Hello, said Joe at my elbow. He looked more fagged than the day before. I noticed that his lips were blue and that his teeth were chattering. Joe, I said abruptly, you're not fit to be here. Let's get out of this, you belong in bed. He glanced at me impatiently. I'm fit enough, he muttered. We'll stay right here and see this show, unless you feel you want to quit. Did I say I did? I'm ready enough. All right, then wait a minute, they're about ready to go on board. But as we stood and watched them, I still felt the chattering teeth by my side, and a wave of pity and anger and of disgust swept over me. Joe wouldn't last long at this kind of thing. What do you think of my friends, he asked? I think you're throwing your life away. Do you? How do you make it out? Because they're an utterly hopeless crowd. Look at them poor devils. They look like a lot of bowery bums. Yes, they look like a lot of bums, and they feed all the fires at sea. Are they all like this? I demanded. No better dressed, he answered. A million lousy brothers of Christ. And you think you can build a new world with them? No. I think they can do it themselves. Do you know what I think they'll do themselves? If they ever do win in any strike and get a raise in wages, they'll simply blow it in on drink. Joe looked for a moment. They'll do so much more than drink, he said. Come on, he added. They're going aboard. They were forming in a long line now before the third-class gang plank. As they went up with their packs on their shoulders, a man at the top gave each a shove and shouted out a number, which another official checked off in a book. The latter I learned was the chief engineer. He was a lean, powerful, ruddy-faced man with a plentiful store of profanity which he poured out in a torrent. Come on, for Christ's sake, do you want to freeze salad, you human bunch of stiffs? We came up the plank at the end of the line, and I showed him a letter which I had procured admitting us to the engine rooms. He turned us over promptly to one of his junior engineers, and we were soon climbing down oily ladders through the intricate parts of the engines, all polished, glistening, carefully cleaned, and then climbing down more ladders until we were, as I was told, within ten feet of the keel of the ship we came into the Stoker's quarters. And here, nothing at all was carefully cleaned. The place was foul. Its painted steel walls and floor and ceiling were heavily encrusted with dirt. The low chamber was crowded with rows of bunks, steel skeleton bunks, three chairs high, the top tier just under the ceiling. In each was a thin, dirty mattress and blanket. In some of these men were already asleep, breathing hard, snoring and wheezing. Others were crowded around their bags intent on something I could not see. Many were smoking, the air was blue. Some were almost naked and the smells of their bodies filled the place. It was already stifling. Had enough, asked our young guide, with a grin. No, I said, with an answering, superior smile. We'll stay a while and get it all. And after a little more talk he left us. How do you like our home? asked Joe. I'm here now, I said grimly. Go ahead and show me and try to believe that I want to be shown. All right, here comes our breakfast. Two stokers were bringing in a huge boiler. They set it down on the dirty floor. It was full of a greasy, watery soup with a thick yellow scum on the top, through which chunks of pork and potato bobbed up here and there. This is scouse, Joe told me. Men eagerly dipped tin cups in this and gulped it down. The chunks of meat they ate with their hands. They ate sitting on bunks or standing between them. Some were wedged in close around the bunk in which lay a sleeper who looked utterly dead to the world. His face was white. He reminds me, said Joe, of a fellow whose bunk was once next to mine. He was shipped at Gwena's heirs, where the crimps still handled the business. A crimp had carried this chap on board, dumped him, got his ten dollars, and left. The man was supposed to wake up at sea and shovel coal. But this one didn't. The second day out, someone leaned over and touched him and yelled. The crimp had sold us a dead one. As Joe said this, he stared down at the sleeper, a curious intensity in his eyes. Joe, how did you ever stand this life? My own voice almost startled me. It sounded so suddenly tense and strained. Joe turned and looked at me, searchingly, with a trace of that old affection of his. I didn't, kid, he said gruffly. The two years almost got me. And that's what happens to most of them here. Half of them, he added, are down and outters when they start. They're what the factories and mills and all the rest of this lovely modern industrial world throw out as no more wanted. So they drift down here and take a job that nobody else will take. It's so rotten. And here they have one week of hell and another week's good drunk in port. And when the bar rooms and the women and all the waterfront sharks have stripped them of their last red scent, then the crimps collect an advance allotment from their future wages to ship them off to sea again. It's not true in this port, I retorted, eagerly catching him up on the one point that I knew was wrong. They don't allow crimps in New York anymore. No, Joe answered grimly. The port of New York has got reformed. It's become all for efficiency now. The big companies put up money for a kind of Siemens YMCA, where they try to keep men sober ashore and so get them back quick into holes like these, in the name of Christ. But there's one thing they forget, he added bitterly. The age of steam has sent the old style sailors ashore and shipped these fellows in their places. And that makes all the difference. These chaps didn't go up on ships and get used to being kicked and cowed and shot for mutiny if they struck. No, they're all grown up on land in factories where they've been in strikes and they bring their factory views along into these floating factories. And they don't like these stinking holes. They don't like their jobs with no day and no night, only steel walls and electric light. You hear a shout at midnight and you jump down into the stoke hole and work like hell till 4 a.m. when you crawl up all soaked in sweat and fall asleep till the next shout. And you do this not as the sailor did for a captain he knew and called the old man, but for a corporation so big it has rules and regulations for you like what they have in the Navy. You're nothing but a number. Look here. He took me to a bulletin board that had just been put up on the wall. Around it men were eagerly crowding, here's where you find by your number what shift you're to work in, he said, and what other number you have to replace if he goes down. Hard failure is damn common here, and if your man gives out, it means you double up for the rest of the voyage. So you get his number and hunt for him and size him up. You hope he'll last, I'll show you why. He crawled down a short ladder and threw low passageways dripping wet, and so came into the stoke hole. This was a long narrow chamber with a row of glowing furnace doors. Wet coal and coal dust lay on the floor. At either end a small steel door opened into bunkers that ran along the sides of the ship, deep down near the bottom, containing thousands of tons of soft coal, which the men called trimmers kept shoveling out to the stokers. As the voyage went on, Joe told me, these trimmers had to go farther and farther back into the long black bunkers full of stifling coal dust, in which, if the ship were rolling, the masses of coal kept crashing down. Hundreds of men had been killed that way. In the stoke hole the fires were not yet up, but by the time the ship was at sea the furnace-mouse would be white hot, and the men at work half naked. They not only shoveled coal into flames, they had to spread it out as well, and at intervals rake out the clinkers in fiery masses on the floor. On these a stream of water played, filling the chamber with clouds of steam. In older ships like this one, a lead stoker stood at the head of the line and set the pace for the others to follow. He was paid more to keep up the pace, but on the fast newliners this pacer was replaced by a gong. And at each stroke of the gong, you shovel, said Joe. You do this till you forget your name. Every time the boat pitches, the floor heaves you forward, the fire spurts at you out of the doors, and the gong keeps on like a sledgehammer coming down on top of your mind. And all you think of is your bunk and the time when you're to tumble in. From the stoker's quarters presently there came a burst of singing. Now let's go back, he ended, and see how they're getting ready for this. As we crawled back the noise increased and it swelled to a roar as we entered. The place was pandemonium now. Those groups I had noticed around the bags had been getting out the liquor, and now at eight o'clock in the morning half the crew was already well-sourced. Some moved restlessly about. One huge bull of a creature with large, lipid, shining eyes stopped suddenly with a puzzled stare. Then leaned back on a bunk and laughed up roriously. From there he lurched over the shoulder of a thin, wiry sober man who, sitting on the edge of a bunk, was slowly spelling out the words of a newspaper aeroplane story. The big man laughed again and spit, and the thin man jumped half up and snarled. After rose the singing, half the crew was crowded close around a little red-faced cockney. He was the modern chantyman. With sweat pouring down his cheeks and the muscles of his neck drawn tight, he was jerking out verse after verse about women. He sang to an old chanty-tune, one that I remembered well. But he was not singing out under the stars. He was screaming at steel walls down here in the bottom of the ship, and although he kept speeding up his song, the crowd were too drunk to wait for the chorus. Their voices kept tumbling in over his, and soon it was only a frenzy of sound, a roar with yells rising out of it. The singers kept pounding each other's backs or wading bottles over their heads. Two bottles smashed together and brought a still higher burst of glee. I'm tired, Joe shouted. Let's get out. I caught a glimpse of his strained, frowning face. Then it came over me in a flash, the years he had spent in holes like this, in this hideous, rotten world of his, while I had lived joyously in mine. And as though he had read the thought in my disturbed and troubled eyes, let's go up where you belong, he said. I followed him up and away from his friends. As we climbed ladder after ladder, fainter and fainter on our ears rose that yelling from below. They became out on deck and slammed an iron door behind us. An eye was where I belonged. I was in dazzling sunshine and keen frosty autumn air. I was among gay throngs of people. Dainty women brushed me by. I felt the softness of their furs. I breathed the fragrant scent of them and of the flowers that they wore. I saw their fresh immaculate clothes. I heard the joyous tumult of their talking and their laughing to the regular crash of the band, all the life of the ship I had known so well, and I walked through it all as though in a dream. On the dock I watched it spellbound, until with hankerchiefs waving and voices calling down goodbyes, that throng of happy travelers moved slowly out into midstream. And I knew that deep below all this, down in the bottom of the ship, the stokers were still singing. That same day I had an appointment to lunch with the owner of rich hotels whose story I was writing and the interview dragged. For the America he knew was like what I'd seen on the upper decks of the ship that had sailed a few hours before. And I could not get back my old zest for it all. I kept thinking of what I had seen underneath. The faces of individual stokers, some fiery red, some sodden gray, kept bobbing up in my memory. Angrily trying to keep them down, I went on with my questions. But I caught the hotel millionaire throwing curious looks at me now and then. I went home worried and depressed and shut myself up in my work room. This business had to be thawed out. It wasn't only stokers, it was something deep worldwide. I had come up against the slums. What had I to do with it all? I was in my room all afternoon. I heard the Indian at my door but I sat still in silent and presently he went away. Late in the twilight Eleanor came. How beautiful she was tonight. She was wearing a soft gown of silk, blue was something white at her throat and a brooch that I had given her. As she bent over my shoulder I felt her clean, fresh loveliness. Don't you want to tell me, love, just what it was he showed you? I'd rather not, my dear one. It was something so terribly ugly, I said. I don't like being so far away from you, dear. Please tell me, suppose you begin at the start. It took a long time, for she would let me keep nothing back. I wouldn't have thought it could hit me so hard, I said at the end. I'm not surprised, said Eleanor. I can't be simply angry at Joe, I went on. He's so intensely and gauntly sincere. It isn't just talk with him, you see, as it is with Sue's parlor radical friends. Think of the life he's been leading. Think of it compared to mine. Joe and I were mighty close once. I broke off and got up restlessly. I hate to think of it, my said. It's funny, said Eleanor quietly. I knew this was coming sooner or later. Ever since we've been married I've known that Joe Cramer still means more to you than any man you've ever met. He doesn't, I said sharply. Where on earth did you get that idea? From you, my love, she answered. You can't dream how often you've spoken about him. I didn't know I had. It is most disquieting at times the things Eleanor tells me about myself. I know you don't, she continued. You do it so unconsciously. That's why I'm so sure he has a real place in the deep unconscious part of you. He worries you. He gets you to think you've no right to be happy. There was a bitterness in her voice that I had never heard before. I believe in helping people, of course, whenever I get the chance, she said. But I don't believe in this. I hate it. It's simply an insane attempt to pull every good thing down. It's too awful even to think of it. You're not going to, I told her. I'm sorry for Joe, and I wish I could help him out of his hole. But I can't. It's too infernally deep. He won't listen to any talk from me, and as long as he won't, I'll leave him alone. It's hideous enough, God knows. But if I ever tackle poverty and labor and that sort of thing, it'll be along quite different lines. The doorbell rang. Oh, Billy, she said. I forgot to tell you, father's coming to dinner tonight. I looked at her a moment. Did you ask him here on my account? Eleanor smiled frankly. Yes, I thought I might need him, she said. I did not talk to her father of Joe. His plans for a strike were his secret, not mine. But with Eleanor pushing me on, I described the hell I had seen in the stoke-hole. You're right it's hell, her father agreed. But in time we'll do away with it. I knew it, Eleanor put in. How, I asked. By using oil instead of coal, or if we can't get oil cheap enough by automatic stokers, machines to do the work of men. I thought hard and fast for a moment, and suddenly I realized that I had never given any real thought to matters of this kind before. Then what will become of the stokers, I asked him. One thing at a time, I caught Dylan keenly watching me over his cigar. Give up your faith in efficiency, Bill, if they'll only give us enough time we'll be able to do so much for men. There was something so big and sincere in his voice and in his clear and kindly eyes. I'm sure you will, I answered. If you don't, there's nobody else who can. In a week or two, by grinding steadily on at my work, and by a few more quiet talks with Eleanor and her father, I could feel myself safely back on my ground. But one morning, Sue broke in on me. I've just heard from a friend of Joe Cramer's, she said, that he is dangerously ill, and there's no one to look after him. Hadn't you better go yourself? Of course, I answered gruffly. I'll go down at once. It seemed as though the fates and Sue were in league to keep Joe in my life. I went to Joe's office and found the address of the room where he slept. It was over a German saloon close by. It was a large, low-ceiling room, bare and cheaply furnished, with dirty curtains at the windows, dirty collars and shirts on the floor. It was cold. In the high, old-fashioned fireplace the coal-fire had gone out. Joe was lying dressed on the bed. He jumped up as I entered and came to me with his face flushed and his eyes dilated. He gripped my hand. Well, hello, kid, he cried, glad to see you. And then with a quick drop of his voice, hold on, we mustn't talk so loud. We've got to be quiet here, you know. He turned away from me restlessly. I've been hunting for hours for that damn book. Their cataloging system here is rotten, kid, it's rotten. As he spoke he was slowly feeling his way along the dirty white wall of his room. They've cheated us, Bill. I'm on to them now. This is what college is really for these days, to hide the books we ought to read. It came over me suddenly that Joe was back in college on one of those library evenings of ours. I felt a tightening at my throat. Say, Joe, I drew him toward the bed. The chapel bell has just struck ten. Time for beer and pretzels. Fine business. Gee, but I've got a thirst. But where's the door? God damn it all, I can't find anything tonight. He laughed unsteadily. Right over here I answered, steady old man. And so I got him to bed. He fell down on it, breathing hard, and I brought him a drink of water. He began to shiver violently. I covered him up with thirty blankets, went down to the bar room and telephoned to Eleanor. Too deeply disturbed to think very clearly, acting on an impulse, I told her of Joe's condition and asked if I might bring him home. And I, of course, came the answer a little sharp. Wait a moment, let me think. There was a pause and then she added quietly. Go back to his room and keep him in bed. I'll see that an ambulance comes right down. Within an hour after that, Joe was installed in our guest room with a trained nurse to attend to him. The doctor pronounced it typhoid, and he was with us for nine weeks. The effect upon our lives was sharp, and our small crowded apartment, all entertaining, was suddenly stopped. And with the sole exception of Sue, no one came to see us. Even our little Indian learned to be quiet as a mouse. Our whole home became intense. Through the thin wall of my work room I could hear Joe in his delirium. Now he was busily writing letters, now in a harsh, excited voice he was talking to a crowd of men. Again he was furiously shoveling coal. All this was incoherent. Only mutterings most of the time. But when the voice rose suddenly it was so full of a stern pain, so quivering with revolt against life, and it poured out such a torrent of commonplace minute details that showed this was Joe's daily life and the deepest part of his being. That as I listened at my desk the ghost I thought I had buried deep, that vague, salty feeling over my own happiness came stealing up in me again. And it was so poignant now that struggle angrily as I would to plunge again into my work I found it impossible to describe the life in those rich gay hotels with the zest and the dash I needed to make my story a success. But it had to be a success, for we needed money badly. The expenses of Joe's sickness were already rolling in. So I did finish it at last and took it to my successful man who read it with evident disappointment. It was not the glory story that I had led him to expect. My magazine editor said he would use it, but he too appeared surprised. You weren't up to your usual form, was his comment. What's the matter? A sick friend. I started another story at once, one I had already planned about a man who was to build a string of gorgeous opera houses in the leading American cities. This story too went slowly. Joe Cramer's voice kept breaking in. From time to time as I struggled on I could feel Eleanor watching me. Don't try to hurry it, she said. We can always borrow from father, you know, and besides I'm going to cut our expenses. She was as good as her word. She dismissed the nurse and through the last weeks of delirium and the first of returning consciousness she placed herself in Joe's borderland as the one whose presence he vaguely felt pulling him back into comfort and strength. Now don't talk, I heard her say to him one evening. I don't want to hear you. All I want is to get you well. That's the only thing you and I have to talk of. Instead having so thrown him off his guard as his mind grew clearer she began cautiously drawing him out despite his awakening hostility to this woman who had made me a success. From my room I heard snatches of their talk. She surprised J.K. by the intimate bits of knowledge about him that she had collected both from me and from his own sick ramblings. She had just enough of his point of view to rouse him from his indifference, to annoy him by her mistakes and her refusals to understand. I remember one afternoon when I went in to sit with him, his staring grimly up at my face and saying, Bill, that wife of yours is such a born success she scares me. Everything she touches, everything she brings me to drink, everything she does to this bed is one thundering success. And she won't listen to anything but success. Your case is absolutely hopeless. They became grim enemies, and both of them enjoyed it. She let our small son come and sit by the bed. The Indian promptly worshipped Joe as the longest man he had ever seen, and they became boon companions. It's pathetic, Eleanor told me, the little things that appealed to him here. Your boy he has forgotten what a decent home is like. As he grew stronger, she read the paper to him each morning, and they quarreled with keen relish over the news events of the day. And as at the start, so now, she kept giving him little shocks of surprise by her intimate glimpses into his views. On one of these occasions after she had come out from his room and was sitting by me reading, You're a wonder, Eleanor, I said. I don't see how you've done it. Done what, my love? asked Eleanor, Wormed all his views out of poor old Joe. I haven't done anything of the sort. I've learned over half of it from Sue. She comes here often nowadays, and we have long talks about him. Sue seems to know him rather well. This did not interest me much, so I switched our talk to something that did. What bothers me, I said with a scowl, is this infernal work of mine. What are you smiling at, I ask? Nothing, she murmured, beginning to read. But if I were you, I'd stick at my work. You're good at that. Not now I'm not, I retorted. This story about the opera man isn't coming on at all. The more I work, the worse it gets. It will get better soon, she said. I'm not so sure. Do you know what I think is the matter with me? I was in today, looking at Joe asleep, and watching the lines in that face of his, it came over me all of a sudden what a wretched coward I've been. Eleanor looked up suddenly. I know there's something in all his talk. I've known it every time we've met. His view so distorted that it makes me mad, but there's something in it you can't get away from. Poverty, that's what it is, and I've always steered away clear of it as though I were afraid to look. I've taken your father's point of view and left the slums for him and his friends to tackle when they get the time. I was only too glad to be left out, but that hour with J.K. and his stokers gave me a joke. I can feel it still. I can't seem to shake it off, and I'm beginning to wonder now why I shouldn't get up the nerve to see for myself, to have a good, big look at it all and write about it for a while. Don't, said Eleanor, leave it alone. Your voice was so sharp it startled me. Why, I rejoined. You've tackled poverty often enough. I guess I can stand it, if you can. You're different, she answered. You leave poverty alone and force yourself to go on with your work. You've made a very wonderful start. You'll be ready to take up fiction soon. When you have, and when you have gone so far that you feel sure of your name and yourself, then you can look at whatever you like. 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. Eleanor brought us together now and listened with deep satisfaction as we clashed and jarred each other apart. His old and different manner was gone. He was soft and 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 boast and tolerance bred the 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 revel. Revolution, that was a 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 in the light, 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 Dylan 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 Eleanor smiled contendantly, 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. CHAPTER VII But on coming home one evening, two or three weeks later, I found Eleanor reading aloud to our son with the most preoccupied look on her face. Joe Cramer 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. Her once she had taken the time to dress. She had done her dark hair in a different way. Her color, which had been poor of late, tonight 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. Sue, 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 interrupt it hotly, are about as fit to build up a new world as they are to build a Brooklyn bridge when I compare them to Eleanor's father in his way of going to work. I broke off an 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. Eleanor turned on her abruptly. Why are you glad, 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 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 the stoke hole 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's 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 them 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 chest. It's got so they can't even breathe without thinking. And you've got to see that 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, that I say you can help them. Because what's needed is so big. It's not only more pay in 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 them get together faster than they would if left to themselves. You can help that way a lot by writing to the tenements. That's what I meant. Joe stopped short, and after his passionate outburst, Eleanor 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 someone 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 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 them have read your stuff. I looked up at Joe at the start. Oh, they don't like it, he went on. It only makes them soar and mad. But if you ever see things right and get into their side of this fight with that queer fountain acts of yours, you'll be surprised at the tenement friends who will 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 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. 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 chance about that, she said. Eleanor 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 with their strikes. And what do you think, Joe, Eleanor 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 shout 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 Eleanor 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, as regular 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 wise, asked Eleanor, 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, Eleanor 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, Eleanor 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 Eleanor 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. Eleanor's eyes were attended 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 cock-sure, superior manner. I guess she likes it well enough. Still dear, Eleanor 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, Eleanor, Sue demanded, in a quick challenging tone? Am I? asked Eleanor placently. Long after Joe had left us, Sue kept up that challenging tone. But she did not speak to Eleanor 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'd 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? Eleanor 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 his life? Why should you to 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 we give ourselves 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 Eleanor, 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 informally cheerfully. I was speaking of Sue and Joe Cramer. 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 indefinitely, has been enthused so many times. Billy, I turned and saw my wife regarding her husband thoughtfully. And I wondered, she said, how long it will be before you can write a love story. What? Sue and Joe Cramer, you idiot. I stared at her dumbfounded. 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 at Eleanor 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 you do see. I see something, Eleanor 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 so conservative besides that if Sue married Joe Cramer, 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 lung 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 were 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. CHAPTER VIII 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 Eleanor 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. Eleanor's words came into my mind. We are to meet all the wild ones were 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 my magazine. 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 placing 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. He had wondered 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 there. 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 Tam Fuhl Anarchist Marsh is raising hell over there 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, for a 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 and 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't meant to 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 them 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 fit it 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, Certainly I'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 linem, pillow, burial suit or brown habit, drapen 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 fit it into my harbor, but Marsh had caught its meaning at once and had promptly jotted it down for use, for it fit it 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. Disturbately 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 overburden, 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 Laskars had crowded into the stoke coals, 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 lunch room 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. They know your 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 fellas 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 her home, but suddenly I recalled Eleanor 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 worldwide schemes per labor. We entered a small cheap hotel, climbed a flight of stairs, and came into the narrow bedroom which was, for the 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 weeding 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 horizon 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 proletariat. She was smart, pushing, ambitious, I thought, just the kind that would have got on in any middle-western town. Eleanor 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 her life. Again I remembered Eleanor'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. End of Chapter 8. Recording by Tom Weiss Chapter 9. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Tom Weiss. The Harbor by Ernest Poole. Chapter 9 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 Eleanor 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 tonight. Joe Cramer is to be there too. That affair is moving rather fast. Oh yes, quite fast, she said cheerfully. How will dad look at it? As you did, said Eleanor 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 Eleanor. Sue isn't sure, poor thing, she's frightfully unsettled. But why drag Joe way over there? Because she wants to look it in 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 live there if they married. Nevertheless, said Eleanor, 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 in any home. 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 Joe 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 Eleanor'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. Eleanor'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 Eleanor 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 ad 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, Eleanor 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 Eleanor came into 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 said we 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 Eleanor 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 Eleanor on the way home. Look here I suggest it. Why don't you talk this out with Sue and tell her just what you think of it all. Because, said Eleanor, 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 not telling them anything, she rejoined. I am only trying to show them something and let the poor idiots see for themselves. If they won't see, it's hopeless.