The Nine-Tenths Part 7

He proved the case for himself. He began making tours of the city, discovering New York, laying bare the confusion and ugliness and grime and crime and poverty of a great industrial center. He poked into the Ghetto, into Chinatown, Greenwich Village, and Little Italy; he peered into jails, asylums, and workhouses; he sneaked through factories and hung about saloons. Everywhere a terrific struggle, many sinking down into the city's underworld of crime, men becoming vagrants or thieves, women walking the streets as prost.i.tutes.

And over this broad foundation of the "people" rose the structure of business and politics, equally corrupted--or so it seemed to Joe, as it does to every one who is fresh to the facts. Men at the top gathering into their hands the necessities of life: oil, meat, coal, water-power, wool; seizing on the railroads, those only modern means of social exchange; s.n.a.t.c.hing strings of banks wherein the people's money was being saved; and using their mighty money-power to corrupt legislation, to thwart the will of the voters, to secure new powers, to crush opposition. So had arisen a "Money Power" that was annuling democracy.

And Joe's books argued that all this change had been wrought by the invention of machinery, that only through steam, steel, and electricity could world-wide organization take place, that only through these arose the industrial city, the modern mill. The very things that should have set man free, the enormous powers he s.n.a.t.c.hed from nature and harnessed to do his work, powers with the strength of a nation of men--these very things had been seized by a few for their own profit, and had enslaved the majority. Over and over again could the race be fed, clothed, housed, and enriched by these powers, and that with lessened hours of toil and more variety of work.

But Joe's books argued further and most dogmatically that this organization by the selfish few was a necessary step in progress, that when their work was finished the toilers, the millions, would arise and seize the organization and use it thereafter for the good of all.

Indeed, this was what Sally's labor movement meant: the enlightenment of the toilers as to the meaning of industrialism, and their training for the supreme revolution.

And out of all this arose the world-vision. At such moments Joe walked in a rarer air, he stepped on a fairer earth than ordinarily obtains. It was the beauty and loveliness of simple human camaraderie, of warm human touch. And at such times Joe had no doubt of his life-work. It lay in exquisite places, in chambers of jolly grandeur, in the invisible halls and palaces of the human spirit. He was one with the toilers of earth, one with the crowded underworld. It was that these lives might grow richer in knowledge, richer in art, richer in health, richer in festival, richer in opportunity, that Joe had dedicated his life. And so arose that wonderful and inexpressible vision--a picture as it were of the far future--a glimpse of an earth singing with uplifted crowds of humanity, on one half of the globe going out to meet the sunrise, on the other, the stars. He heard the music of that Hymn of Human Victory, which from millions of throats lifts on that day when all the race is woven into a harmony of labor and joy and home and great unselfish deeds. That day, possibly, might never arrive, forever fading farther and farther into the sunlit distances--but it is the day which leads the race forward. To Joe, however, came that vision, and when it came it seemed as if the last drop of his blood would be little to offer, even in anguish, to help, even by ever so little, the coming and the consummation of that Victory.

He would awake in the night, and cry out in a fever:

"By G.o.d, I'm going to help change things."

The vision shook him--tugged at his heart, downward, like the clutch of a convulsive child; seized him now and again like a madness. Even unto such things had the "dead girls" brought him.

So, crammed with theories--theories as yet untested by experience--Joe became an iconoclast l.u.s.ting for change. He was bursting with good news, he wanted to cry the intimations from the housetops, he wanted to proselytize, convert. He was filled with Sh.e.l.ley's pa.s.sion for reforming the world, and like young Sh.e.l.ley, he felt that all he had to do was to show the people the truth and the truth would make them free.

All this was in his great moments,... there were reactions when his human humorous self--backed by ten years of the printery--told him that the world is a complex mix-up, and that there are many visions; moments that made him wonder what he was about, and why so untrained a man expected to achieve such marvels.

But these reactions were swallowed up by the recurrent pulsations, the spasms of his vision. He felt from day to day a growth of purpose, an acc.u.mulation of energy that would resistlessly spill into action, that would bear him along, whether or no. But what should he do, and how? He was unfitted, and did not think he cared, for settlement work. He knew nothing and cared less for charity work. Politics were an undiscovered world to him. What he wanted pa.s.sionately was to go and live among the toilers, get to know them, and be the means of arousing and training them.

But then there was the problem of his mother--a woman of sixty-three.

Could he leave her alone? It was preposterous to think of taking her with him. Myra could a thousand times better go. He must talk with his mother, he must thresh the matter out with her, he must not delay longer to clear the issue. And yet he hesitated. Would she be able to understand? How could he communicate what was bursting in his breast?

She belonged to a past generation; how could she hear the far-off drums of the advance?

Up and down the Park he went early one evening in a chaos of excitement, and he had a sudden conviction that he could not put off the moment any longer. He must go to his mother at once, he must tell all. As he walked down the lamp-lit street, under all the starriness of a tranquil autumn night, he became alternately pale and flushed, his heart thumped hard against his ribs, he felt like a little boy going to his mother to confess a wrong.

He looked up; the shades of the second floor were illumined: she was up there. Doing what? Sharply then he realized what a partial life she led, the decayed middle-cla.s.s a.s.sociates of the boarding-house, tired, brainless, and full of small talk, the lonesome evenings, the long days.

He became more agitated, and climbed the stoop, unlocked his way into the house, went up the dim, soft, red-cus.h.i.+oned stairs, past the milky gas-globe in the narrow hall, and knocked at her door.

"Come in!" she cried.

He swung the door wide and entered. She was, as usual, sitting in the little rocker under the light and beside the bureau, between the bed and the window. The neat, fragrant room seemed to be sleeping, but the clear-eyed, upright woman was very much awake. She glanced up from her sewing and realized intuitively that at last the crisis had come. His big, homely face was a bald advertis.e.m.e.nt of his boyish excitement.

She nodded, and murmured, "Well!"

He drew up a chair awkwardly, and sat opposite her, tilting back to accommodate his sprawling length. Then he was at a loss.

"Well," he muttered, trying to be careless, "how are you?"

"All right," she said drily.

She could not help him, though her heart was beginning to pain in her side.

"I've been walking about the Park," he began again, with an indifference that was full of leaks, "and thinking...." He leaned forward and spoke suddenly: "Say, mother, don't you get tired of living in this place?"

She felt strangely excited, but answered guardedly.

"It isn't so bad, Joe.... There are a few decent people ... there's Miss Gardiner, the librarian ... and I have books and sewing."

"Oh, I know," he went on, clumsily, "but you're alone a lot."

"Yes, I am," she said, and all at once she felt that she could speak no further with him. She began sewing diligently.

"Say, mother!"

No answer.

"Mother!"

"Yes," dimly.

His voice sounded unnatural.

"Since the ... fire ... I've been doing some thinking, some reading...."

"Yes."

"I've been going about ... studying the city...."

"Yes."

"Now I want you to understand, mother.... I want to tell you of ...

It's--well, I want to do something with my money, my life...." And his voice broke, in spite of himself.

His mother felt as if she were smothering. But she waited, and he went on:

"For those dead girls, mother...." and sharply came a dry sob. "And for all the toilers. Oh, but can you understand?"

There was a silence. Then she looked at him from her youthful, brilliant eyes, and saw only an overgrown, rather ignorant boy. This gave her strength, and, though it was painful, she began speaking:

"_Understand_? Do you mean the books you are reading?"

"Yes," he murmured.

"Well," she smiled weakly, "I've been reading them, too."

"_You_!" He was shocked. He looked at her as if she had revealed a new woman to him.

"Yes," she said, quickly. "I found them in your room."

He was amazedly silent. He felt then that he had never really known his mother.

"Joe," she said, tremulously, "I want to tell you a little about the war.... There are things I haven't told you."

And while he sat, stupefied and dumfounded, she told him--not all, but many things. She was back in the Boston of the sixties, when she was a young girl, when that town was the literary center of America, when high literature was in the air, when the poets had great fame and every one, even the business man, was a poet. She had seen or met some of the great men. Once Whittier was pointed out to her, at a time when his lines on slavery were burning in her brain. She had seen the clear-eyed Lowell walking under the elms of Cambridge, and she justly felt that she was one of those

"Who dare to be In the right with two or three."