The Nine-Tenths Part 49

There was one event that took place two weeks after Myra's coming, which she did not soon forget. It was the great ma.s.s-meeting to celebrate the return of Rhona and some others who had also been sent to the workhouse.

Myra and Joe sat together. After the music, the speeches, Rhona stepped forward, slim, pale, and very little before that gigantic auditorium.

She spoke simply.

"I was picketing on Great Jones Street. A man came up and struck me. I had him arrested. But in court he said I struck him, and the judge sent me to Blackwells Island. I had to scrub floors. But it was only for five days. I think we ought all to be glad to go to the workhouse, because that will help women to be free and help the strikers. I'm glad I went.

It wasn't anything much."

They cheered her, for they saw before them a young heroine, victorious, beloved, ideal. But when Myra called at Hester Street, a week later, Rhona's mother had something else to say.

"Rhona? Well, you had ought to seen her when we first landed! Ah! she was a beauty, my Rhona--such cheeks, such hair, such eyes--laughing all the time. But now--ach!" She sighed dreadfully. "So it goes. Only, I wished she wasn't always so afraid--afraid to go out ... afraid ... so nervous ... so ... different."

Myra never forgot this. It sent her back to her work with wiser and deeper purpose. And so she fought side by side with Joe through the blacks weeks of that January. It seemed strange that Joe didn't go under. He loomed about the place, a big, stoop-shouldered, gaunt man, with tragic gray face and melancholy eyes and deepening wrinkles. All the tragedy and pathos and struggle of the strike were marked upon his features. His face summed up the sorrows of the thirty thousand. Myra sometimes expected him to collapse utterly. But he bore on, from day to day, doing his work, meeting his committees, and getting out the paper.

Here, too, Myra found she could help him. She insisted on writing the strike articles, and as Jacob Izon was also writing, there was only the editorial for Joe to do. The paper did not miss an issue, and as it now had innumerable canva.s.sers among the strikers, its circulation gained rapidly--rising finally to 20,000.

Even at this time Joe seemed to take no special notice of Myra. But one slushy, misty night, when the gas-lamps had rainbow haloes, and gray figures sluff-sluffed through the muddy snow, she accompanied Joe on one of his fund-raising tours. They entered the side door of a dingy saloon, pa.s.sed through a yellow hall, and emerged finally on the platform of a large and noisy rear room where several hundred members of the Teamsters' Union were holding a meeting. Gas flared above the rough and elemental faces, and Myra felt acutely self-conscious under that concentrated broadside of eyes. She sat very still, flus.h.i.+ng, and feebly smiling, while the outdoor city men blew the air white and black with smoke and raised the temperature to the sweating-point.

Joe was introduced; the men clapped; and then he tried hard to arouse their altruism--to get them to donate to the strike out of their union funds. However, his speech came limp and a little stale. The applause was good-natured but feeble. Joe sat down, sighing, and smiling grimly.

An amazing yet natural thing happened. The Chairman arose, leaned over his table, and said:

"You have heard from Mr. Joe Blaine; now you will hear from the other member of the committee."

Not for some seconds--not until the stamping of feet rose to a fury of sound--did Myra realize that _she_ was the other member. She had a sense of being drained of life, of losing her breath. Instinctively she glanced at Joe, and saw that he was looking at her a little dubiously, a little amusedly. What could she do? She had never addressed a meeting in her life; she had never stood on her feet before a group of men; she had nothing learned, nothing to say. But how could she excuse herself, how withdraw, especially in the face of Joe's challenging gaze?

The stamping increased; the men clapped; and there were shouts:

"Come ahead! Come on! That's right, Miss." It was a cruel test, a wicked predicament. All the old timidity and sensitiveness of her nature held her back, made her tremble, and bathed her face in perspiration. But a new Myra kept saying:

"Joe didn't rouse them. Some one must." She set her feet on the floor, and the deafening thunder of applause seemed to raise her. She took a step forward. And then with a queer motion she raised her hand. There was an appalling silence, a silence more dreadful than the noise, and Myra felt her tongue dry to its root.

"I--" she began, "I want to say--tell you--" She paused, startled by the queer sound of her own voice. She could not believe it was herself speaking; it seemed some one else. And then, sharply, a wonderful thing took place. A surge of strength filled her. She took a good look around.

Her brain cleared; her heart slowed. It was the old trick of facing the worst, and finding the strength was there to meet it and turn it to the best. All at once Myra exulted. She would take these hundreds of human beings and _swing them_. She could do it.

Her voice was rich, vibrating, melodious.

"I want to tell you a little about this strike--what it means. I want to tell you what the girls and women of this city are capable of--what heroism, what toil, what sacrifice and n.o.bility. It is not the easiest thing to live a normal woman's life. You know that. You know how your mothers or wives or sisters have been slaving and stinting--what pain is theirs, what burdens, what troubles. But think of the life of a girl of whom I shall tell you--a young girl by the name of Rhona Hemlitz."

She went on. She told the story of Rhona's life, and then quietly she turned to her theme.

"You understand now, don't you? Are you going to help these girls _win_ their fight?"

The walls trembled with what followed--stamping, shouting, clapping.

Myra sat down, her cheeks red, her eyes brilliant. And then suddenly a big hand closed over hers and a deep voice whispered:

"Myra, you set yourself free then. You are a new woman!"

That was all. She had shocked Joe with the fact of the new Myra, and now the new Myra had come to stay. They raised twenty-five dollars that night. From that time on Myra was a free and strong personality, surprising even Joe's mother, who began to realize that this was not the woman to take Joe from his work, but one who would fight shoulder to shoulder with him until the very end.

In the beginning of February the strike began to fade out. Employers right and left were making compromises with the girls, and here and there girls were deserting the union and going back. The office at West Tenth Street became less crowded, fewer girls came, fewer committees met. There was one night when the work was all done at eleven o'clock, and this marked the reappearance of normal conditions.

It was a day or two later that a vital experience came to Joe. Snow was falling outside, and it was near twilight, and in the quiet Joe was busy at his desk. Then a man came in, well, but carelessly dressed, his face pinched and haggard, his eyes bloodshot, his hair in stray tufts over his wrinkled forehead.

"I want to see you a minute, Mr. Blaine."

The voice was shaking with pa.s.sion.

"Sit down," said Joe, and the man took the seat beside him.

"I'm Mr. Lissner--Albert Lissner--I was the owner of the Lissner s.h.i.+rtwaist Company."

Joe looked at him.

"Lissner? Oh yes, over on Eighth Street."

The man went on:

"Mr. Blaine, I had eighty girls working for me.... I always did all I could for them ... but there was fierce compet.i.tion, and I was just skimping along, and I had to pay small wages;... but I was good to those girls.... They didn't want to strike ... the others made them...."

Joe was stirred.

"Yes, I know ... many of the shops were good...."

"Well," said Lissner, with a shaking, bitter smile, "you and your strike have ruined me.... I'm a ruined man.... My family and I have lost everything.... And, it's killed my wife."

His face became terrible--very white, and the eyes staring--he went on in a hollow, low voice:

"I--I've lost _all_."

There was a silence; then Lissner spoke queerly:

"I happen to know about you, Mr. Blaine.... You were the head of that printing-place that burnt down...."

Joe felt a shock go through him, as if he had seen a ghost....

"Well, maybe you did all you could for your men;... maybe you were a good employer.... Yet see what came of it...." Suddenly Lissner's voice rose pa.s.sionately: "And yet you had the nerve to come around and get after us fellows, who were just as good as you. There are bad employers, and bad employees, too--bad people of every kind--but maybe most people are good. You couldn't help what happened to you; neither can we help it if the struggle is too fierce--we're victims, too. It's conditions, it's life. We can't change the world in a day. And yet you--after your fire--come here and ruin us."

Joe was shaken to his depths. Lissner had made an overstatement, and yet he had thrown a new light on the strike, and he had reminded Joe of his long-forgotten guilt. And suddenly Joe knew. All are guilty; all share in the corruption of the world--the laborer anxious for ma.s.s-tyranny and distrustful of genius, the aristocrat afraid of soiling his hands, the capitalist intent on power and wealth, the artist neglectful of all but a narrow artifice, each one limited by excess or want, by intellect or pa.s.sion, by vanity or l.u.s.t, and all struggling with one another to wrest some special gift for himself. In the intricacy of civilization there are no real divisions, but every man is merely a brain cell, a nerve, in the great organism, and what one man gains, some other must lose. It was a world he got a glimpse of quite different from that sharp twofold world of the workers and the money-power, a world of infinite gradations, a world merely the child of the past, where high and low were pushed by the resistless pressure of environment, and lives were shaped by birth, chance, training, position, and a myriad, myriad indefinable forces.

All of this confused him at first, and it had been so long since he had dealt with theories that it was some time before the chaos cleared, some time before the welter of new thought took shape in his mind. But it made him humble, receptive, teachable, it made him more kindly and more gentle. He began a mental stock-taking; he began to examine into the lives about him.

Myra was there--the new Myra, a Myra with daily less to do in that office, and with more and more time to think. From her heart was lifted the hard hand of circ.u.mstance, releasing a tenderness and yearning which flooded her brain. It was a tragic time for her. She knew now that her services were nearly at an end, and that she must go her own way. She would not be near Joe any longer--she would not have the heart's ease of his presence--she could no longer brood over him and protect him.

It seemed to her that she could not bear the future. Her love for Joe rose and overwhelmed her. She became self-conscious before him, paled when he spoke to her, and when he was away her longing for him was insupportable. She wanted him now--all her life cried out for him--all the woman in her went out to mate with this man. The same pa.s.sion that had drawn her from the country to his side now swayed and mastered her.

"Joe! Joe!" her soul cried, "take me now! This is too much for me to bear!"

And more and more the thought of his health oppressed her. If she only had the power to take him to her breast, draw him close in her arms, mother him, heal him, smooth the wrinkles, kiss the droop of the big lips, and pour her warm and infinite love into his heart. That surely must save him--love surely would save this man.