The Nine-Tenths Part 10

"I had no right to involve you until I was sure...."

"And now you're sure...."

"No," he cried.

She raised her voice a little again:

"And I wrote asking if I couldn't help you. Women are fools...."

He sat searching about for something to say. His heart was like cold lead in his breast; his head ached. He felt her side of the case very vividly, and how could she ever understand?

Then, as she sat there her head seemed to explode, and she spoke hurriedly, incoherently:

"It's time to get to school. I want to go alone. Good-by."

She rose and went off rapidly.

"Myra!" he cried, leaping up, but she only accelerated her pace....

Instead of going to school she went straight home, flung herself full-length on the bed, buried her face in the pillow, and shook for a long time with terrible tearless sobs. Her life was ruined within her.

VI

MARTY BRIGGS

Joe went home in a distraught condition. He was angry, amazed, and pa.s.sion-shaken. He had had a look into that strange mixture which is woman--and he was repelled, and yet attracted as he had never been before. He felt that all was over between them, that somehow she had convicted him of being brutal, selfish, and unmanly, and in the light of her condemnation he saw in his delay to meet her only cowardice and harsh indifference. And yet all along he had acted on the conclusion that he had no right to ask a woman to go into the danger of his work with him.

Pacing up and down his narrow room, he began las.h.i.+ng himself again, excusing, forgiving Myra everything. He had never really understood her nature; he should have gone to her in the beginning and trusted to her love and her insight; he should have let her share the aftermath of the fire; that fierce experience would have taught her that he was forever mortgaged to a life of n.o.ble reparation, and even the terror of it all would have been better than shutting her out, to brood morbidly alone.

Yet, what could he do? He must be strong, be wise, keep his head. He had pledged himself, sworn himself into the service of the working cla.s.s movement. There was no escape. He tried to bury himself in his books, regain for a moment his splendid dream of the future state, feel again those strange throes of world-building, of social service.

And out of it all grew a letter, a letter to Myra. He wrote it in a strange haste, the sentences coming too rapidly for his pen. It ran:

DEAR MYRA,--I must _make_ you understand! I hurt you when I wanted to help you; I wronged you when I wanted only to do right by you. Why didn't you listen to me this morning?

It was at the fire there, at that moment you tugged at my sleeve and I spoke to you, that I saw clearly that my life was no longer my own, that I could not even give it to you, whom I loved, whom I love now with every bit of my existence. I told you I belonged to those dead girls. Have you forgotten? _Sixty of them_--and three of my men. It was as if I had killed them myself. I am a guilty man, and I must expiate this guilt. There is no use fooling myself with pleasant phrases, no use thinking others to blame. It was I who was responsible.

And through the death of those girls I learned of the misery of the world, of the millions in want, the women wrenched from their homes to toil in the mills, the little children--fresh, sweet bodies, bubbling hearts, and tender, whimsical minds--slaving in factories, tiny boys and girls laboring like men and women in cotton and knitting mills, in gla.s.s factory and coal-mine, and on the streets of cities, upon whose frail little spirits is thrust the responsibility, the wage burden, the money, and family trouble, the care and drudgery and mortal burden we grown people ourselves not seldom find too hard. I have learned of a world gone wrong; I have learned of a new slavery on earth; and I as a member of the master cla.s.s share the general guilt for the suffering of the poor...I must help to free them from the very conditions that killed the sixty girls...

And when I think of those girls and their families (some of them were the sole support of their mothers and sisters and brothers) the least I can do is to render up my life for the, lives that were lost--the least I can do is to fill myself with the spirit of the dead and go forth, not to avenge them, but to help build a world where the living will not be sacrificed as they were.

This country is facing a great crisis; civilization is facing a great crisis. Shall we go forward or be drawn backward? There is a call to arms and every man must offer his life in the great fight--that fight for democracy, that fight for lifting up the millions to new levels of life, that fight for a better earth and a superber race of human beings; and in that fight I am with the pioneers, heart and soul; I am ringing with the joy and struggle of it; I am for it, with all my strength and all my power. It demands everything; its old cry, "Arise, arise, and follow me;" means giving up possessions, giving away all, making every sacrifice. Before this issue our little lives shrink into nothingness, and we must sink our happiness into the future of the world.

How can I ask you to go into the peril, the dirt, and disease of this struggle? And how can I refrain from going in myself? Let me see you once more. Do not deny me that. And understand that through life my love will follow you ... a love greatened, I trust, by what little I do in the great cause....

Ever yours, JOE

He waited for an answer and none came, and he felt during those days that the life was being dragged out of him. Feverishly then he buried himself in his tasks and his books, he went on cramming himself with theories until he reached the bursting-point and wanted to go out on fire with mission, almost a fanatic, an Isaiah to shake the city with invective and prophesy change. What could he do to spread the tidings, the news? The time had come to find an outlet for the overbearing flood within him. And then one evening in the Park like a flash came the plan.

He must go among the poor, he must get to know them--not in this neighborhood, "a prophet is not without honor, etc."--but in some new place where he was unknown. He thought of Greenwich Village. Did not Fannie Lemick tell him that Sally Heffer lived in Greenwich Village?

Well, he would look into the matter. He was a printer; why not then print a little weekly newspaper directly for the toilers, for his neighbors? He could tell all that way, pour out his enlightenment, stir them, stand by them, take part in their activities, their troubles and their strikes and lead them forth to a new life. He was sure they were ripe for the facts, powder awaiting the spark; he would go down among them and make his paper the center of their disorganized life.

The more he thought of the plan the more it thrilled him. What was greater than the power of the press? What more direct? He was done with palliatives, finding men jobs, giving Christmas turkeys, paying for coal. What the people needed was education so that they could get justice--all else would follow.

But even at that perfervid period of his life Joe was saved from being a John Brown by his sense of humor. This was the imp in him that always poked a little doubt into his heart and laughed at his ignorance and innocence. By next morning Joe was smiling at himself. Nevertheless, he was driven ahead.

He called for Marty Briggs and they went to lunch together. Third Avenue lay naked to the rain, which swept forward in silvery gusts, dripping, dripping from the elevated structure, and the pattering liquid sound had a fresh mellow music. Here and there a man or woman, mush-roomed by an umbrella, dashed quickly for a car, and the trolleys, gray and crowded, seemed to duck hurriedly under the downpour. The faces of Joe and Marty were fresh-washed and spattering drops; they laughed together as they walked.

"I've some business to talk over with you," explained Joe, and they finally went into a little restaurant on Third Avenue. The stuffy little place, warm and damp with the excluded rain, and odorous with sizzling lard and steaming coffee and boiling cabbage, was crowded with people, but Joe and Marty took a little table to themselves in the darkest corner. They sat against the dirty rear wall, whose white paint was finger-marked, fly-specked, and food-spotted, and in which a shelf-aperture furnished the connection with the kitchen. To this hole in the wall hurried the three waitresses, shrieking their orders above the din of many voices and the clatter and clash of plates and utensils.

"One ham--and!"

A monstrous greasy cook peered forth, shoving out a plate of fried eggs and echoing huskily:

"Ham--and!"

"Corn-beef-an'-cabbage!" "One harf-an'-harf!" "Make a sunstroke on the has.h.!.+" and other pleasing chants of the noon.

"What'll yer have?"

A thin and nervous young woman swooped between them and mopped off the sloppy, crumby table with her ap.r.o.n.

"What's good?" asked Joe.

The waitress regarded Joe with half-shut eyes.

"_You_ want veal cutlets."

And she wafted the information to the cook.

"Well, Joe," said the practical Briggs, unable to hold in his excitement any longer, "let's get down to business."

Joe leaned forward.

"I'm thinking of starting up the printery, Marty."

Marty flushed, choked, and could hardly speak.

"I _knew_ you would, Joe."

"Yes," Joe went on, "but I'm not going to go on with it."

Marty spoke sharply:

"Why not?"