Windy McPherson's Son Part 32

Before him in the distance he had looked into the windows of a huge factory, the black smoke from which added to the gloom of the scene that lay before him. Through the windows of the factory, dimly seen, workers ran here and there, appearing and disappearing, the glare of the furnace fire lighting now one, now another of them, sharply. At his feet the tumbling waters that rolled and pitched over a little dam fascinated him. Looking closely at the racing waters his head, light from physical weariness, reeled, and in fear of falling he had been compelled to grip firmly the small tree against which he leaned. In the back yard of a house across the stream from Sam and facing the factory four guinea hens sat on a board fence, their weird, plaintive cries making a peculiarly fitting accompaniment to the scene that lay before him, and in the yard itself two bedraggled fowls fought each other. Again and again they sprang into the fray, striking out with bills and spurs. Becoming exhausted, they fell to picking and scratching among the rubbish in the yard, and when they had a little recovered renewed the struggle. For an hour Sam had looked at the scene, letting his eyes wander from the river to the grey sky and to the factory belching forth its black smoke. He had thought that the two feebly struggling fowls, immersed in their pointless struggle in the midst of such mighty force, epitomised much of man's struggle in the world, and, turning, had gone along the sidewalks and to the village hotel, feeling old and tired. Now on the bench in the little park, with the early morning sun s.h.i.+ning down through the glistening rain drops clinging to the red leaves of the trees, he began to lose the sense of depression that had clung to him through the night.

A young man who walked in the park saw him idly watching the hurrying workers, and stopped to sit beside him.

"On the road, brother?" he asked.

Sam shook his head, and the other began talking.

"Fools and slaves," he said earnestly, pointing to the men and women pa.s.sing on the sidewalk. "See them going like beasts to their bondage?

What do they get for it? What kind of lives do they lead? The lives of dogs."

He looked at Sam for approval of the sentiment he had voiced.

"We are all fools and slaves," said Sam, stoutly.

Jumping to his feet the young man began waving his arms about.

"There, you talk sense," he cried. "Welcome to our town, stranger. We have no thinkers here. The workers are like dogs. There is no solidarity among them. Come and have breakfast with me."

In the restaurant the young man began talking of himself. He was a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania. His father had died while he was yet in school and had left him a modest fortune, upon the income of which he lived with his mother. He did no work and was enormously proud of the fact.

"I refuse to work! I scorn it!" he declared, shaking a breakfast roll in the air.

Since leaving school he had devoted himself to the cause of the socialist party in his native town, and boasted of the leaders.h.i.+p he had already achieved. His mother, he declared, was disturbed and worried because of his connection with the movement.

"She wants me to be respectable," he said sadly, and added, "What's the use trying to explain to a woman? I can't get her to see the difference between a socialist and a direct-action anarchist and I've given up trying. She expects me to end by blowing somebody up with dynamite or by getting into jail for throwing bricks at the borough police."

He talked of a strike going on among some girl employes of a Jewish s.h.i.+rtwaist factory in the town, and Sam, immediately interested, began asking questions, and after breakfast went with his new acquaintance to the scene of the strike.

The s.h.i.+rtwaist factory was located in a loft above a grocery store, and on the sidewalk in front of the store three girl pickets were walking up and down. A flas.h.i.+ly dressed Hebrew, with a cigar in his mouth and his hands in his trousers pockets, stood in the stairway leading to the loft and looked closely at the young socialist and Sam. From his lips came a stream of vile words which he pretended to be addressing to the empty air. When Sam walked towards him he turned and ran up the stairs, shouting oaths over his shoulder.

Sam joined the three girls, and began talking to them, walking up and down with them before the grocery store.

"What are you doing to win?" he asked when they had told him of their grievances.

"We do what we can!" said a Jewish girl with broad hips, great motherly b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and fine, soft, brown eyes, who appeared to be a leader and spokesman among the strikers. "We walk up and down here and try to get a word with the strikebreakers the boss has brought in from other towns, when they go in and come out."

Frank, the University man, spoke up. "We are putting up stickers everywhere," he said. "I myself have put up hundreds of them."

He took from his coat pocket a printed slip, gummed on one side, and told Sam that he had been putting them on walls and telegraph poles about town. The thing was vilely written. "Down with the dirty scabs"

was the heading in bold, black letters across the top.

Sam was shocked at the vileness of the caption and at the crude brutality of the text printed on the slip.

"Do you call women workers names like that?" he asked.

"They have taken our work from us," the Jewish girl answered simply and began again, telling the story of her sister strikers and of what the low wage had meant to them and to their families. "To me it does not so much matter; I have a brother who works in a clothing store and he can support me, but many of the women in our union have only their wage here with which to feed their families."

Sam's mind began working on the problem.

"Here," he declared, "is something definite to do, a battle in which I will pit myself against this employer for the sake of these women."

He put away from him his experience in the Illinois town, telling himself that the young woman walking beside him would have a sense of honour unknown to the red-haired young workman who had sold him out to Bill and Ed.

"I failed with my money," he thought, "now I will try to help these girls with my energy."

Turning to the Jewish girl he made a quick decision.

"I will help you get your places back," he said.

Leaving the girls he went across the street to a barber shop where he could watch the entrance to the factory. He wanted to think out a method of procedure and wanted also to look at the girl strikebreakers as they came to work. After a time several girls came along the street and turned in at the stairway. The flas.h.i.+ly dressed Hebrew with the cigar still in his mouth was again by the stairway entrance. The three pickets running forward accosted the file of girls going up the stairs, one of whom, a young American girl with yellow hair, turned and shouted something over her shoulder. The man called Frank shouted back and the Hebrew took the cigar out of his mouth and laughed heartily. Sam filled and lighted his pipe, a dozen plans for helping the striking girls running through his mind.

During the morning he went into the grocery store on the corner, a saloon in the neighbourhood, and returned to the barber shop talking to men of the strike. He ate his lunch alone, still thinking of the three girls patiently walking up and down before the stairway. Their ceaseless walking seemed to him a useless waste of energy.

"They should be doing something more definite," he thought.

After lunch he joined the soft-eyed Jewish girl and together they walked along the street talking of the strike.

"You cannot win this strike by just calling nasty names," he said. "I do not like that 'dirty scab' sticker Frank had in his pocket. It cannot help you and only antagonises the girls who have taken your places. Here in this part of town the people want to see you win. I have talked to the men who come into the saloon and the barber shop across the street and you already have their sympathy. You want to get the sympathy of the girls who have taken your places. Calling them dirty scabs only makes martyrs of them. Did the yellow-haired girl call you a name this morning?"

The Jewish girl looked at Sam and laughed bitterly.

"Rather; she called me a loud-mouthed street walker."

They continued their walk along the street, across the railroad track and a bridge, and into a quiet residence street. Carriages stood at the curb before the houses, and pointing to these and to the well-kept houses Sam said, "Men have bought these things for their women."

A shadow fell across the girl's face.

"I suppose all of us want what these women have," she answered. "We do not really want to fight and to stand on our own feet, not when we know the world. What a woman really wants is a man," she added shortly.

Sam began talking and told her of a plan that had come into his mind.

He had remembered how Jack Prince and Morrison used to talk about the appeal of the direct personal letter and how effectively it was used by mail order houses.

"We will have a mail order strike here," he said and went on to lay before her the details of his plan. He proposed that she, Frank, and some others of the striking girls, should go about town getting the names and the mail addresses of the girl strikebreakers.

"Get also the names of the keepers of the boarding houses at which these girls live and the names of the men and women who live in the same houses," he suggested. "Then you get the striking girls and women together and have them tell me their stories. We will write letters day after day to the girl strikebreakers, to the women who keep the boarding houses, and to the people who live in the houses and sit at table with them. We won't call names. We will tell the story of what being beaten in this fight means to the women in your union, tell it simply and truthfully as you told it to me this morning."

"It will cost such a lot," said the Jewish girl, shaking her head.

Sam took a roll of bills from his pocket and showed it to her.

"I will pay," he said.

"Why?" she asked, looking at him sharply.

"Because I am a man wanting work just as you want work," he replied, and then went on hurriedly, "It is a long story. I am a rich man wandering about the world seeking Truth. I will not want that known. Take me for granted. You won't be sorry."

Within an hour he had engaged a large room, paying a month's rent in advance, and into the room chairs and table and typewriters had been brought. He put an advertis.e.m.e.nt in the evening paper for girl stenographers, and a printer, hurried by a promise of extra pay, ran out for him several thousand letter heads across the top of which in bold, black type ran the words, "The Girl Strikers."

That night Sam held, in the room he had engaged, a meeting of the girl strikers, explaining to them his plan and offering to pay all expenses of the fight he proposed to make for them. They clapped their hands and shouted approvingly, and Sam began laying out his campaign.