The Nine-Tenths Part 6

John nodded amiably, and muttered:

"h.e.l.lo yourself!"

He was a strong, athletic, stocky fellow, with sunken little blue eyes, heavy jaws, and almost bald head. Before he had time to rise the two young girls leaped up with shrieks of joy and rushed to Joe. Joe at once tucked one under each arm and hugged them forward to a big chair, into which they all sank together.

"Well! Well!" cried Joe.

"Who do you love most?" asked the seven-year-old.

"The one who loves me most!" said Joe.

"I do!" they both shrieked.

"Now leave Mr. Joe be," warned the father. "Such tomboys they're getting to be, there's no holdin' 'em in!"

At once in the half-curtained doorway to the next room appeared a stocky little woman, whose pale face was made emphatic by large steel-rimmed gla.s.ses that shrank each eye-pupil to the size of a tack-head. Her worried forehead smoothed; she smiled.

"I knew it was Mr. Joe," she said, "by the way those gals yelled."

Joe spoke eagerly:

"I just had to run in, Mrs. Rann, to ask how the baby was."

"He's a sight better. Mrs. Smith, who lives third floor front, had one just like him sick a year ago come Thanksgiving, and he died like that.

But the doctor you sent over is that kind and cute he's got the little fellow a-fightin' for his life. He's a _big_ sight better. Want to see him?"

Joe gave a kiss each way, set down two reluctant women-to-be, and followed Mrs. Rann to the inner room. In a little crib a youngster, just recovered from colic, was kicking up his heels. Joe leaned over and tickled the sole of one foot.

"Well, Johnny boy!"

"Unc! Unc!" cried the infant.

The mother purred with delight.

"He's trying to say Uncle Joe. Did you ever hear the likes?"

Joe beamed with pride.

"Well, your uncle hasn't forgotten you, old man!"

And he produced from his pocket a little rubber doll that whistled whenever its belly was squeezed.

John Rann appeared behind them.

"Say, Mr. Joe, _you_ haven't had your supper yet."

"Not hungry!" muttered Joe.

"G'wan! Molly, put him up a couple of fried eggs, browned on both, and a cup of coffee. I won't take no, either."

Joe laughed.

"Well, perhaps I'd better. I'm ashamed to ask for anything home this hour--in fact, I'm scared to."

So he got his fried eggs and coffee, and the family hung around him, and Joe, circled with such warm friendliness, was glad to be alive. He was especially pleased with Mrs. Rann's regard. But Joe was always a favorite with mothers. Possibly because he was so fond of their babies.

Possibly because mothers love a good son, wherever they find one.

Possibly because his heart was large enough to contain as something precious their obscure lives. Just before he left John asked him:

"Will the printery soon be running, Mr. Joe?"

"Tell you later," murmured Joe, and went out. But he was sorely troubled.

However, to Joe there had been revealed--almost in a day and after thirty-eight years of insulated life--two of the supreme human facts.

There was humanity, on the one side, building the future, the new state, organizing its scattered millions into a rich, healthy, joyous life and calling to every man to enlist in the ranks of the creators; and then there was woman, the undying splendor of the world, the beauty that drenches life with meaning and magic, that stirs the elemental in a man, that wakens the race instinct, that demands the creation of new generations to inhabit that new state of the future. Intertwined, these wondrous things drew the heart now this way, now that, and to Joe they arose separately in intermittent pulsations that threatened to absorb his existence.

He did not dare go to Myra until he was sure of himself. It seemed that he would have to choose between woman and work. It seemed as if his work would lead into peril, dirt, disaster, and that he could not ask a delicate, high-strung woman to go with him. The woman could not follow her warrior to the battle, for marriage meant children to Joe, and the little ones must stay back at home with the mother.

In that moment of clear terror he had said to Myra:

"I may never see you again.... I belong to those dead girls."

And this phrase came and went like a refrain. He must choose between her and those "dead girls." There stood Myra with gray luminous eyes and soft echoing voice magically hinting of a life of ever-renewed romance.

She had a breast for his aching head, she had in her hands a thousand darling household things, she had in her the possibilities of his own children ... who should bring a wind of laughter into his days and a strange domestic tenderness. The depths of the man were stirred by these appeals--that was the happy human way to take, the common road fringed with wild flowers and brier-lost berries, and glorious with the stride of health and the fresh open air.

And Myra herself, that charming presence to infold his life--He would go walking through the golden October park, by little leaf-strewn paths under the wild and sun-soaked foliage, with many vistas every way of luring mystery, and over all the earth the rich opulent mother-bliss of harvest, and his heart would ache, ache within him, ache for his own harvests, ache like the sun for the earth, the man for the woman.

A mad frenzy would seize him and he would plunge into his books and read and think and lash himself to a fury of speculation till the early hours of the morning. Exhaustion alone brought him peace.

But something had to be done. He sat down and wrote to her with a trembling hand:

DEAR MYRA,--Though I am impatient to see you, I must yet wait a little while. Bear with me. You will understand later.

Yours, JOE.

And then she replied:

DEAR JOE,--Can't I help you?

MYRA.

He had to fight a whole afternoon before he replied:

Not yet--later.

JOE.

And back he went into the whirlwind of the world-vision, a stupendous force upsetting, up-rooting, overturning, demolis.h.i.+ng, almost erasing and contradicting everything that Joe had taken for granted, and in the wake of the destruction, rising and ever rising, a new creation, the vision of a new world.

He had taken so much for granted. He had taken for granted that he lived in a democracy--that the Civil War had once for all made America a free nation--a nation of opportunity, riches, and happiness for all. Not so.

Literally millions were living in abject poverty, slaves to their pay-envelopes; to lose a job meant to lose everything, there being more laborers than jobs, or if not, at least recurrent "panics" and "hard times" when the mills and the mines shut down. And these wage slaves had practically no voice in one of the chief things of their life--their work. So millions were penned in places of danger and disease and dirt, lived and toiled in squalor, and were cut off from growth, from health, from leisure and culture and recreation; and worse, millions of women had to add the burden of earning a living to the already overwhelming burden of child-bearing and home-making; and, still worse, millions of children had been drafted into the service of industrialism.