Suddenly Ed turned and, pushing Sam before him, threw him through the
office door and into the street. In falling his head struck against a
hitching post and he lay stunned. When he partially recovered from the
fall Sam got up and walked along the street. His face was swollen and
bruised and his nose bled. The street was deserted and the assault upon
him had been unnoticed.
He went to a hotel on Main Street--a more pretentious place than Ed's,
near the bridge leading to the station--and as he passed in he saw,
through an open door, Jake, the red-haired man, leaning against the bar
and talking to Bill, the man with the florid face. Sam, paying for a room,
went upstairs and to bed.
In the bed, with cold bandages on his bruised face, he tried to get the
situation in hand. Hatred for Ed ran through his veins. His hands
clenched, his brain whirled, and the brutal, passionate faces of the woman
and the boy danced before his eyes.
"I'll fix them, the brutal bullies," he muttered aloud.
And then the thought of his quest came back to his mind and quieted him.
Through the window came the roar of the waterfall, broken by noises of the
street. As he fell asleep they mingled with his dreams, sounding soft and
quiet like the low talk of a family about the fire of an evening.
He was awakened by a noise of pounding on his door. At his call the door
opened and the face of the old carpenter appeared. Sam laughed and sat up
in bed. Already the cold bandages had soothed the throbbing of his bruised
face.
"Go away," begged the old man, rubbing his hands together nervously. "Get
out of town."
He put his hand to his mouth and talked in a hoarse whisper, looking back
over his shoulder through the open door. Sam, getting out of bed, began
filling his pipe.
"You can't beat Ed, you fellows," added the old man, backing out at the
door. "He's a slick one, Ed is. You better get out of town."
Sam called a boy and gave him a note to Ed asking for his clothes and for
the bag in his room, and to the boy he gave a large bill, asking him to
pay anything due. When the boy came back bringing the clothes and the bag
he returned the bill unbroken.
"They're scared about something up there," he said, looking at Sam's
bruised face.
Sam dressed carefully and went down into the street. He remembered that he
had never seen a printed copy of the political pamphlet written in the
ravine and realised that Jake had used it to make money for himself.
"Now I shall try something else," he thought.
It was early evening and crowds of men coming down the railroad track from
the plough works turned to right and left as they reached Main Street. Sam
walked among them, climbing a little hilly side street to a number he had
got from a clerk at the drug store before which the socialist had talked.
He stopped at a little frame house and a moment after knocking was in the
presence of the man who had talked night after night from the box in the
street. Sam had decided to see what could be done through him. The
socialist was a short, fat man, with curly grey hair, shiny round cheeks,
and black broken teeth. He sat on the edge of his bed and looked as if he
had slept in his clothes. A corncob pipe lay smoking among the covers of
the bed, and during most of the talk he sat with one shoe held in his hand
as though about to put it on. About the room in orderly piles lay stack
after stack of paper-covered books. Sam sat down in a chair by the window
and told his mission.
"It is a big thing, this power steal that is going on here," he explained.
"I know the man back of it and he would not bother with a small affair. I
know they are going to make the city build the millrace and then steal it.
It will be a big thing for your party about here if you take hold and stop
them. Let me tell you how it can be done."
He explained his plan, and told of Crofts and of his wealth and dogged,
bullying determination. The socialist seemed beside himself. He pulled on
the shoe and began running hurriedly about the room.
"The time for the election," Sam went on, "is almost here. I have looked
into this thing. We must beat this bond issue and then put through a
square one. There is a train out of Chicago at seven o'clock, a fast
train. You get fifty speakers out here. I will pay for a special train if
necessary and I will hire a band and help stir things up. I can give you
facts enough to shake this town to the bottom. You come with me and 'phone
to Chicago. I will pay everything. I am McPherson, Sam McPherson of
Chicago."
The socialist ran to a closet and began pulling on his coat. The name
affected him so that his hand trembled and he could scarcely get his arm
into the coat sleeve. He began to apologise for the appearance of the room
and kept looking at Sam with the air of one not able to believe what he
had heard. As the two men walked out of the house he ran ahead holding
doors open for Sam's passage.
"And you will help us, Mr. McPherson?" he exclaimed. "You, a man of
millions, will help us in this fight?"
Sam had a feeling that the man was going to kiss his hand or do something
equally ridiculous. He had the air of a club door man gone off his head.
At the hotel Sam stood in the lobby while the fat man waited in a
telephone booth.
"I will have to 'phone Chicago, I will simply have to 'phone Chicago. We
socialists don't do anything like this offhand, Mr. McPherson," he had
explained as they walked along the street.
When the socialist came out of the booth he stood before Sam shaking his
head. His whole attitude had changed, and he looked like a man caught
doing a foolish or absurd thing.
"Nothing doing, nothing doing, Mr. McPherson," he said, starting for the
hotel door.
At the door he stopped and shook his finger at Sam.
"It won't work," he said, emphatically. "Chicago is too wise."
Sam turned and went back to his room. His name had killed his only chance
to beat Crofts, Jake, Bill and Ed. In his room he sat looking out of the
window into the street.
"Where shall I take hold now?" he asked himself.
Turning out the lights he sat listening to the roar of the waterfall and
thinking of the events of the last week.
"I have had a time," he thought. "I have tried something and even though
it did not work it has been the best fun I have had for years."
The hours slipped away and night came on. He could hear men shouting and
laughing in the street, and going downstairs he stood in a hallway at the
edge of the crowd that gathered about the socialist. The orator shouted
and waved his hand. He seemed as proud as a young recruit who has just
passed through his first baptism of fire.
"He tried to make a fool of me--McPherson of Chicago--the millionaire--one
of the capitalist kings--he tried to bribe me and my party."
In the crowd the old carpenter was dancing in the road and rubbing his
hands together. With the feeling of a man who had finished a piece of work
or turned the last leaf of a book, Sam went back to his hotel.
"In the morning I shall be on my way," he thought.
A knock came at the door and the red-haired man came in. He closed the
door softly and winked at Sam.
"Ed made a mistake," he said, and laughed. "The old man told him you were
a socialist and he thought you were trying to spoil the graft. He is
scared about that beating you got and mighty sorry. He's all right--Ed is
--and he and Bill and I have got the votes. What made you stay under cover
so long? Why didn't you tell us you were McPherson?"
Sam saw the hopelessness of any attempt to explain. Jake had evidently
sold out the men. Sam wondered how.
"How do you know you can deliver the votes?'" he asked, trying to lead
Jake on.
Jake rolled the quid in his mouth and winked again.
"It was easy enough to fix the men when Ed, Bill and I got together," he
said. "You know about the other. There's a clause in the act authorising
the bond issue, a sleeper, Bill calls it. You know more about that than I
do. Anyway the power will be turned over to the man we say."
"But how do I know you can deliver the votes?"
Jake threw out his hand impatiently.
"What do they know?" he asked sharply. "What they want is more wages.
There's a million in the power deal and they can't any more realise a
million than they can tell what they want to do in Heaven. I promised Ed's
fellows the city scale. Ed can't kick. He'll make a hundred thousand as it
stands. Then I promised the plough works gang a ten per cent raise. We'll
get it for them if we can, but if we can't, they won't know it till the
deal is put through."
Sam walked over and held open the door.
"Good night," he said.
Jake looked annoyed.
"Ain't you even going to make a bid against Crofts?" he asked. "We ain't
tied to him if you do better by us. I'm in this thing because you put me
in. That piece you wrote up the river scared 'em stiff. I want to do the
right thing by you. Don't be sore about Ed. He wouldn't a done it if he'd
known."
Sam shook his head and stood with his hand still on the door.
"Good night," he said again. "I am not in it. I have dropped it. No use
trying to explain."
CHAPTER II
For weeks and months Sam led a wandering vagabond life, and surely a
stranger or more restless vagabond never went upon the road. In his pocket
he had at almost any time from one to five thousand dollars, his bag went
on from place to place ahead of him, and now and then he caught up with
it, unpacked it, and wore a suit of his former Chicago clothes upon the
streets of some town. For the most part, however, he wore the rough
clothes bought from Ed, and, when these were gone, others like them, with
a warm canvas outer jacket, and for rough weather a pair of heavy boots
lacing half way up the legs. Among the people, he passed for a rather
well-set-up workman with money in his pocket going his own way.
During all those months of wandering, and even when he had returned to
something nearer his former way of life, his mind was unsettled and his
outlook on life disturbed. Sometimes it seemed to him that he, among all
men, was a unique, an innovation. Day after day his mind ground away upon
his problem and he was determined to seek and to keep on seeking until he
found for himself a way of peace. In the towns and in the country through
which he passed he saw the clerks in the stores, the merchants with
worried faces hurrying into banks, the farmers, brutalised by toil,
dragging their weary bodies homeward at the coming of night, and told
himself that all life was abortive, that on all sides of him it wore
itself out in little futile efforts or ran away in side currents, that
nowhere did it move steadily, continuously forward giving point to the
tremendous sacrifice involved in just living and working in the world. He
thought of Christ going about seeing the world and talking to men, and
thought that he too would go and talk to them, not as a teacher, but as
one seeking eagerly to be taught. At times he was filled with longing and
inexpressible hopes and, like the boy of Caxton, would get out of bed, not
now to stand in Miller's pasture watching the rain on the surface of the
water, but to walk endless miles through the darkness getting the blessed
relief of fatigue into his body and often paying for and occupying two
beds in one night.
Sam wanted to go back to Sue; he wanted peace and something like
happiness, but most of all he wanted work, real work, work that would
demand of him day after day the best and finest in him so that he would be
held to the need of renewing constantly the better impulses of his mind.
He was at the top of his life, and the few weeks of hard physical exertion
as a driver of nails and a bearer of timbers had begun to restore his body
to shapeliness and strength, so that he was filled anew with all of his
native restlessness and energy; but he was determined that he would not
again pour himself out in work that would react upon him as had his money
making, his dream of beautiful children, and this last half-formed dream
of a kind of financial fatherhood to the Illinois town.
The incident with Ed and the red-haired man had been his first serious
effort at anything like social service achieved through controlling or
attempting to influence the public mind, for his was the type of mind that
runs to the concrete, the actual. As he sat in the ravine talking to Jake,
and, later, coming home in the boat under the multitude of stars, he had
looked up from among the drunken workmen and his mind had seen a city
built for a people, a city independent, beautiful, strong, and free, but a
glimpse of a red head through a barroom door and a socialist trembling
before a name had dispelled the vision. After his return from hearing the
socialist, who in his turn was hedged about by complicated influences, and
in those November days when he walked south through Illinois, seeing the
late glory of the trees and breathing the fine air, he laughed at himself
for having had the vision. It was not that the red-haired man had sold him
out, it was not the beating given him by Ed's sullen-faced son or the
blows across the face at the hands of his vigorous wife--it was just that
at bottom he did not believe the people wanted reform; they wanted a ten
per cent raise in wages. The public mind was a thing too big, too
complicated and inert for a vision or an ideal to get at and move deeply.
And then, walking on the road and struggling to find truth even within
himself, Sam had to come to something else. At bottom he was no leader, no
reformer. He had not wanted the free city for a free people, but as a work
to be done by his own hand. He was McPherson, the money maker, the man who
loved himself. The fact, not the sight of Jake hobnobbing with Bill or the
timidity of the socialist, had blocked his way to work as a political
reformer and builder.
Tramping south between the rows of shocked corn he laughed at himself.
"The experience with Ed and Jake has done something for me," he thought.
"They bullied me. I have been a kind of bully myself and what has happened
has been good medicine for me."
Sam walked the roads of Illinois, Ohio, New York, and other states,
through hill country and flat country, in the snow drifts of winter and
through the storms of spring, talking to people, asking their way of life
and the end toward which they worked. At night he dreamed of Sue, of his
boyhood struggles in Caxton, of Janet Eberly sitting in her chair and
talking of writers of books, or, visualising the stock exchange or some
garish drinking place, he saw again the faces of Crofts, Webster,
Morrison, and Prince intent and eager as he laid before them some scheme
of money making. Sometimes at night he awoke, seized with horror, seeing
Colonel Tom with the revolver pressed against his head; and sitting in his
bed, and all through the next day he talked aloud to himself.
"The damned old coward," he shouted into the darkness of his room or into
the wide peaceful prospect of the countryside.
The idea of Colonel Tom as a suicide seemed unreal, grotesque, horrible.
It was as though some round-cheeked, curly-headed boy had done the thing
to himself. The man had been so boyishly, so blusteringly incompetent, so
completely and absolutely without bigness and purpose.
"And yet," thought Sam, "he has found strength to whip me, the man of
ability. He has taken revenge, absolute and unanswerable, for the slight I
put upon the little play world in which he had been king."
In fancy Sam could see the great paunch and the little white pointed beard
sticking up from the floor in the room where the colonel lay dead, and
into his mind came a saying, a sentence, the distorted remembrance of a
thought he had got from a book of Janet's or from some talk he had heard,
perhaps at his own dinner table.
"It is horrible to see a fat man with purple veins in his face lying
dead."
At such times he hurried along the road like one pursued. People driving
past in buggies and seeing him and hearing the stream of talk that issued
from his lips, turned and watched him out of sight. And Sam, hurrying and
seeking relief from the thoughts in his mind, called to the old
commonsense instincts within himself as a captain marshals his forces to
withstand an attack.
"I will find work. I will find work. I will seek Truth," he said.
Sam avoided the larger towns or went hurriedly through them, sleeping
night after night at village hotels or at some hospitable farmhouse, and
daily he increased the length of his walks, getting real satisfaction from
the aching of his legs and from the bruising of his unaccustomed feet on
the hard road. Like St. Jerome, he had a wish to beat upon his body and
subdue the flesh. In turn he was blown upon by the wind, chilled by the
winter frost, wet by the rains, and warmed by the sun. In the spring he
swam in rivers, lay on sheltered hillsides watching the cattle grazing in
the fields and the white clouds floating across the sky, and constantly
his legs became harder and his body more flat and sinewy. Once he slept
for a night in a straw stack at the edge of a woods and in the morning was
awakened by a farmer's dog licking his face.
Several times he came up to vagabonds, umbrella menders and other
roadsters, and walked with them, but he found in their society no
incentive to join in their flights across country on freight trains or on
the fronts of passenger trains. Those whom he met and with whom he talked
and walked did not interest him greatly. They had no end in life, sought
no ideal of usefulness. Walking and talking with them, the romance went
out of their wandering life. They were utterly dull and stupid, they were,
almost without exception, strikingly unclean, they wanted passionately to
get drunk, and they seemed to be forever avoiding life with its problems
and responsibilities. They always talked of the big cities, of "Chi" and
"Cinci" and "Frisco," and were bent upon getting to one of these places.
They condemned the rich and begged and stole from the poor, talked
swaggeringly of their personal courage and ran whimpering and begging
before country constables. One of them, a tall, leering youth in a grey
cap, who came up to Sam one evening at the edge of a village in Indiana,
tried to rob him. Full of his new strength and with the thought of Ed's
wife and the sullen-faced son in his mind, Sam sprang upon him and had
revenge for the beating received in the office of Ed's hotel by beating
this fellow in his turn. When the tall youth had partially recovered from
the beating and had staggered to his feet, he ran off into the darkness,
stopping when well out of reach to hurl a stone that splashed in the mud
of the road at Sam's feet.
Everywhere Sam sought people who would talk to him of themselves. He had a
kind of faith that a message would come to him out of the mouth of some
simple, homely dweller of the villages or the farms. A woman, with whom he
talked in the railroad station at Fort Wayne, Indiana, interested him so
that he went into a train with her and travelled all night in the day
coach, listening to her talk of her three sons, one of whom had weak lungs
and had, with two younger brothers, taken up government land in the west.
The woman had been with them for some months, helping them to get a start.
"I was raised on a farm and knew things they could not know," she told
Sam, raising her voice above the rumble of the train and the snoring of
fellow passengers.
She had worked with her sons in the field, ploughing and planting, had
driven a team across country, carrying boards for the building of a house,
and had grown brown and strong at the work.
"And Walter is getting well. His arms are as brown as my own and he has
gained eleven pounds," she said, rolling up her sleeves and showing her
heavy, muscular forearms.
She planned to take her husband, a machinist working in a bicycle factory
in Buffalo, and her two grown daughters, clerks in a drygoods store, with
her and return to the new country, and having a sense of her hearer's
interest in her story, she talked of the bigness of the west and the
loneliness of the vast, silent plains, saying that they sometimes made her
heart ache. Sam thought she had in some way achieved success, although he
did not see how her experience could serve as a guide to him.
"You have got somewhere. You have got hold of a truth," he said, taking
her hand when he got off the train at Cleveland, at dawn.
At another time, in the late spring, when he was tramping through southern
Ohio, a man drove up beside him, and pulling in his horse, asked, "Where
are you going?" adding genially, "I may be able to give you a lift."
Sam looked at him and smiled. Something in the man's manner or in his
dress suggesting the man of God, he assumed a bantering air.
"I am on my way to the New Jerusalem," he said seriously. "I am one who
seeks God."
The young minister picked up his reins with a look of alarm, but when he
saw a smile playing about the corners of Sam's mouth, he turned the wheels
of his buggy.
"Get in and come along with me and we will talk of the New Jerusalem," he
said.
On the impulse Sam got into the buggy, and driving along the dusty road,
told the essential parts of his story and of his quest for an end toward
which he might work.
"It would be simple enough if I were without money and driven by hard
necessity, but I am not. I want work, not because it is work and will
bring me bread and butter, but because I need to be doing something that
will satisfy me when I am done. I do not want so much to serve men as to
serve myself. I want to get at happiness and usefulness as for years I got
at money making. There is a right way of life for such a man as me, and I
want to find that way."
The young minister, who was a graduate of a Lutheran seminary at
Springfield, Ohio, and had come out of college with a very serious outlook
on life, took Sam to his house and together they sat talking half the
night. He had a wife, a country girl with a babe lying at her breast, who
got supper for them, and who, after supper, sat in the shadows in a corner
of the living-room listening to their talk.
The two men sat together. Sam smoked his pipe and the minister poked at a
coal fire that burned in a stove. They talked of God and of what the
thought of God meant to men; but the young minister did not try to give
Sam an answer to his problem; on the contrary, Sam found him strikingly
dissatisfied and unhappy in his way of life.
"There is no spirit of God here," he said, poking viciously at the coals
in the stove. "The people here do not want me to talk to them of God. They
have no curiosity about what He wants of them nor of why He has put them
here. They want me to tell them of a city in the sky, a kind of glorified
Dayton, Ohio, to which they can go when they have finished this life of
work and of putting money in the savings bank."
For several days Sam stayed with the clergyman, driving about the country
with him and talking of God. In the evening they sat in the house,
continuing their talks, and on Sunday Sam went to hear the man preach in
his church.
The sermon was a disappointment to Sam. Although his host had talked
vigorously and well in private, his public address was stilted and
unnatural.
"The man," thought Sam, "has no feeling for public address and is not
treating his people well in not giving them, without reservation, the
ideas he has expounded to me in his house." He decided there was something
to be said for the people who sat patiently listening week after week and
who gave the man the means of a living for so lame an effort.
One evening when Sam had been with them for a week the young wife came to
him as he stood on the little porch before the house.
"I wish you would go away," she said, standing with her babe in her arms
and looking at the porch floor. "You stir him up and make him
dissatisfied."
Sam stepped off the porch and hurried off up the road into the darkness.
There had been tears in the wife's eyes.
In June he went with a threshing crew, working among labourers and eating
with them in the fields or about the crowded tables of farmhouses where
they stopped to thresh. Each day Sam and the men with him worked in a new
place and had as helpers the farmer for whom they threshed and several of
his neighbours. The farmers worked at a killing pace and the men of the
threshing crew were expected to keep abreast of each new lot of them day
after day. At night the threshermen, too weary for talk, crept into the
loft of a barn, slept until daylight and then began another day of
heartbreaking toil. On Sunday morning they went for a swim in some creek
and in the afternoon sat in a barn or under the trees of an orchard
sleeping or indulging in detached, fragmentary bits of talk, talk that
never rose above a low, wearisome level. For hours they would try to
settle a dispute as to whether a horse they had seen at some farm during
the week had three, or four, white feet, and one man in the crew never
talked at all, sitting on his heels through the long Sunday afternoons and
whittling at a stick with his pocket knife.
The threshing outfit with which Sam worked was owned by a man named Joe,
who was in debt for it to the maker and who, after working with the men
all day, drove about the country half the night making deals with farmers
for other days of threshing. Sam thought that he looked constantly on the
point of collapse through overwork and worry, and one of the men, who had
been with Joe through several seasons, told Sam that at the end of the
season their employer did not have enough money left from his season of
work to pay the interest on the debt for his machines and that he
continually took jobs for less than the cost of doing them.
"One has to keep going," said Joe, when one day Sam began talking to him
on the matter.
When told to keep Sam's wage until the end of the season he looked
relieved and at the end of the season came to Sam, looking more worried
and said that he had no money.
"I will give you a note bearing good interest if you can let me have a
little time," he said.
Sam took the note and looked at the pale, drawn face peering out of him
from the shadows at the back of the barn.
"Why do you not drop the whole thing and begin working for some one else?"
he asked.
Joe looked indignant.
"A man wants independence," he said.
When Sam got again upon the road he stopped at a little bridge over a
stream, and tearing up Joe's note watched the torn pieces of it float away
upon the brown water.
CHAPTER III
Through the summer and early fall Sam continued his wanderings. The days
on which something happened or on which something outside himself
interested or attracted him were special days, giving him food for hours
of thought, but for the most part he walked on and on for weeks, sunk in a
kind of healing lethargy of physical fatigue. Always he tried to get at
people who came into his way and to discover something of their way of
life and the end toward which they worked, and many an open-mouthed,
staring man and woman he left behind him on the road and on the sidewalks
of the villages. He had one principle of action; whenever an idea came
into his mind he did not hesitate, but began trying at once the
practicability of living by following the idea, and although the practice
brought him to no end and only seemed to multiply the difficulties of the
problem he was striving to work out, it brought him many strange
experiences.
At one time he was for several days a bartender in a saloon in a town in
eastern Ohio. The saloon was in a small wooden building facing a railroad
track and Sam had gone in there with a labourer met on the sidewalk. It
was a stormy night in September at the end of his first year of wandering
and while he stood by a roaring coal stove, after buying drinks for the
labourer and cigars for himself, several men came in and stood by the bar
drinking together. As they drank they became more and more friendly,
slapping each other on the back, singing songs and boasting. One of them
got out upon the floor and danced a jig. The proprietor, a round-faced man
with one dead eye, who had himself been drinking freely, put a bottle upon
the bar and coming up to Sam, began complaining that he had no bartender
and had to work long hours.
"Drink what you want, boys, and then I'll tell you what you owe," he said
to the men standing along the bar.
Watching the men who drank and played like school boys about the room, and
looking at the bottle sitting on the bar, the contents of which had for
the moment taken the sombre dulness out of the lives of the workmen, Sam
said to himself, "I will take up this trade. It may appeal to me. At least
I shall be selling forgetfulness and not be wasting my life with this
tramping on the road and thinking."
The saloon in which he worked was a profitable one and although in an
obscure place had made its proprietor what is called "well fixed." It had
a side door opening into an alley and one went up this alley to the main
street of the town. The front door looking upon the railroad tracks was
but little used, perhaps at the noon hour two or three young men from the
freight depot down the tracks would come in by it and stand about drinking
beer, but the trade that came down the alley and in at the side door was
prodigious. All day long men hurried in at this door, took drinks and
hurried out again, looking up the alley and running quickly when they
found the way clear. These men all drank whiskey, and when Sam had worked
for a few days in the place he once made the mistake of reaching for the
bottle when he heard the door open.
"Let them ask for it," said the proprietor gruffly. "Do you want to insult
a man?"
On Saturday the place was filled all day with beer-drinking farmers, and
at odd hours on other days men came in, whimpering and begging drinks.
When alone in the place, Sam looked at the trembling fingers of these men
and put the bottle before them, saying, "Drink all you want of the stuff."
When the proprietor was in, the men who begged drinks stood a moment by
the stove and then went out thrusting their hands into their coat pockets
and looking at the floor.
"Bar flies," the proprietor explained laconically.
The whiskey was horrible. The proprietor mixed it himself and put it into
stone jars that stood under the bar, pouring it out of these into bottles
as they became empty. He kept on display in glass cases bottles of well
known brands of whiskey, but when a man came in and asked for one of these
brands Sam handed him a bottle bearing that label from beneath the bar, a
bottle previously filled by Al from the jugs of his own mixture. As Al
sold no mixed drinks Sam was compelled to know nothing the bartender's art
and stood all day handing out Al's poisonous stuff and the foaming glasses
of beer the workingmen drank in the evening.
Of the men coming in at the side door, a shoe merchant, a grocer, the
proprietor of a restaurant, and a telegraph operator interested Sam most.
Several times each day these men would appear, glance back over their
shoulders at the door, and then turning to the bar would look at Sam
apologetically.
"Give me a little out of the bottle, I have a bad cold," they would say,
as though repeating a formula.
At the end of the week Sam was on the road again. The rather bizarre
notion that by staying there he would be selling forgetfulness of life's
unhappiness had been dispelled during his first day's duty, and his
curiosity concerning the customers was his undoing. As the men came in at
the side door and stood before him Sam leaned over the bar and asked them
why they drank. Some of the men laughed, some swore at him, and the
telegraph operator reported the matter to Al, calling Sam's question an
impertinence.
"You fool, don't you know better than to be throwing stones at the bar?"
Al roared, and with an oath discharged him.
CHAPTER IV
One fine warm morning in the fall Sam was sitting in a little park in the
centre of a Pennsylvania manufacturing town watching men and women going
through the quiet streets to the factories and striving to overcome a
feeling of depression aroused by an experience of the evening before. He
had come into town over a poorly made clay road running through barren
hills, and, depressed and weary, had stood on the shores of a river,
swollen by the early fall rains, that flowed along the edges of the town.
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 shining 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
passing 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 leadership 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
shirtwaist 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 shirtwaist 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 flashily 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
breasts, 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 flashily 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 advertisement 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.
One of the girls he told off to stand in front of the factory morning and
evening.
"I will have other help for you there," he said. "Before you go home to-
night there will be a printer here with a bundle of pamphlets I am having
printed for you."
Advised by the soft-eyed Jewish girl, he told off others to get additional
names for the mailing list he wanted, getting many important ones from
girls in the room. Six of the girls he asked to come in the morning to
help him with addressing and mailing letters. The Jewish girl he told to
take charge of the girls at work in the room--on the morrow to become also
an office--and to superintend getting the names.
Frank rose at the back of the room.
"Who are you anyway?" he asked.
"A man with money and the ability to win this strike," Sam told him.
"What are you doing it for?" demanded Frank.
The Jewish girl sprang to her feet.
"Because he believes in these women and wants to help," she explained.
"Rot," said Frank, going out at the door.
It was snowing when the meeting ended, and Sam and the Jewish girl
finished their talk in the hallway leading to her room.
"I don't know what Harrigan, the union leader from Pittsburgh, will say to
this," she told him. "He appointed Frank to lead and direct the strike
here. He doesn't like interference and he may not like your plan. But we
working women need men, men like you who can plan and do things. There are
too many men living on us. We need men who will work for all of us as the
men work for the women in the carriages and automobiles." She laughed and
put out a hand to him. "See what you have got yourself into? I want you to
be a husband to our entire union."
The next morning four girl stenographers went to work in Sam's strike
headquarters, and he wrote his first strike letter, a letter telling the
story of a striking girl named Hadaway, whose young brother was sick with
tuberculosis. Sam did not put any flourishes in the letter; he felt that
he did not need to. He thought that with twenty or thirty such letters,
each telling briefly and truthfully the story of one of the striking
girls, he should be able to show one American town how its other half
lived. He gave the letter to the four girl stenographers with the mailing
list he already had and started them writing it to each of the names.
At eight o'clock a man came in to install a telephone and girl strikers
began bringing in new names for the mailing list. At nine o'clock three
office door and into the street. In falling his head struck against a
hitching post and he lay stunned. When he partially recovered from the
fall Sam got up and walked along the street. His face was swollen and
bruised and his nose bled. The street was deserted and the assault upon
him had been unnoticed.
He went to a hotel on Main Street--a more pretentious place than Ed's,
near the bridge leading to the station--and as he passed in he saw,
through an open door, Jake, the red-haired man, leaning against the bar
and talking to Bill, the man with the florid face. Sam, paying for a room,
went upstairs and to bed.
In the bed, with cold bandages on his bruised face, he tried to get the
situation in hand. Hatred for Ed ran through his veins. His hands
clenched, his brain whirled, and the brutal, passionate faces of the woman
and the boy danced before his eyes.
"I'll fix them, the brutal bullies," he muttered aloud.
And then the thought of his quest came back to his mind and quieted him.
Through the window came the roar of the waterfall, broken by noises of the
street. As he fell asleep they mingled with his dreams, sounding soft and
quiet like the low talk of a family about the fire of an evening.
He was awakened by a noise of pounding on his door. At his call the door
opened and the face of the old carpenter appeared. Sam laughed and sat up
in bed. Already the cold bandages had soothed the throbbing of his bruised
face.
"Go away," begged the old man, rubbing his hands together nervously. "Get
out of town."
He put his hand to his mouth and talked in a hoarse whisper, looking back
over his shoulder through the open door. Sam, getting out of bed, began
filling his pipe.
"You can't beat Ed, you fellows," added the old man, backing out at the
door. "He's a slick one, Ed is. You better get out of town."
Sam called a boy and gave him a note to Ed asking for his clothes and for
the bag in his room, and to the boy he gave a large bill, asking him to
pay anything due. When the boy came back bringing the clothes and the bag
he returned the bill unbroken.
"They're scared about something up there," he said, looking at Sam's
bruised face.
Sam dressed carefully and went down into the street. He remembered that he
had never seen a printed copy of the political pamphlet written in the
ravine and realised that Jake had used it to make money for himself.
"Now I shall try something else," he thought.
It was early evening and crowds of men coming down the railroad track from
the plough works turned to right and left as they reached Main Street. Sam
walked among them, climbing a little hilly side street to a number he had
got from a clerk at the drug store before which the socialist had talked.
He stopped at a little frame house and a moment after knocking was in the
presence of the man who had talked night after night from the box in the
street. Sam had decided to see what could be done through him. The
socialist was a short, fat man, with curly grey hair, shiny round cheeks,
and black broken teeth. He sat on the edge of his bed and looked as if he
had slept in his clothes. A corncob pipe lay smoking among the covers of
the bed, and during most of the talk he sat with one shoe held in his hand
as though about to put it on. About the room in orderly piles lay stack
after stack of paper-covered books. Sam sat down in a chair by the window
and told his mission.
"It is a big thing, this power steal that is going on here," he explained.
"I know the man back of it and he would not bother with a small affair. I
know they are going to make the city build the millrace and then steal it.
It will be a big thing for your party about here if you take hold and stop
them. Let me tell you how it can be done."
He explained his plan, and told of Crofts and of his wealth and dogged,
bullying determination. The socialist seemed beside himself. He pulled on
the shoe and began running hurriedly about the room.
"The time for the election," Sam went on, "is almost here. I have looked
into this thing. We must beat this bond issue and then put through a
square one. There is a train out of Chicago at seven o'clock, a fast
train. You get fifty speakers out here. I will pay for a special train if
necessary and I will hire a band and help stir things up. I can give you
facts enough to shake this town to the bottom. You come with me and 'phone
to Chicago. I will pay everything. I am McPherson, Sam McPherson of
Chicago."
The socialist ran to a closet and began pulling on his coat. The name
affected him so that his hand trembled and he could scarcely get his arm
into the coat sleeve. He began to apologise for the appearance of the room
and kept looking at Sam with the air of one not able to believe what he
had heard. As the two men walked out of the house he ran ahead holding
doors open for Sam's passage.
"And you will help us, Mr. McPherson?" he exclaimed. "You, a man of
millions, will help us in this fight?"
Sam had a feeling that the man was going to kiss his hand or do something
equally ridiculous. He had the air of a club door man gone off his head.
At the hotel Sam stood in the lobby while the fat man waited in a
telephone booth.
"I will have to 'phone Chicago, I will simply have to 'phone Chicago. We
socialists don't do anything like this offhand, Mr. McPherson," he had
explained as they walked along the street.
When the socialist came out of the booth he stood before Sam shaking his
head. His whole attitude had changed, and he looked like a man caught
doing a foolish or absurd thing.
"Nothing doing, nothing doing, Mr. McPherson," he said, starting for the
hotel door.
At the door he stopped and shook his finger at Sam.
"It won't work," he said, emphatically. "Chicago is too wise."
Sam turned and went back to his room. His name had killed his only chance
to beat Crofts, Jake, Bill and Ed. In his room he sat looking out of the
window into the street.
"Where shall I take hold now?" he asked himself.
Turning out the lights he sat listening to the roar of the waterfall and
thinking of the events of the last week.
"I have had a time," he thought. "I have tried something and even though
it did not work it has been the best fun I have had for years."
The hours slipped away and night came on. He could hear men shouting and
laughing in the street, and going downstairs he stood in a hallway at the
edge of the crowd that gathered about the socialist. The orator shouted
and waved his hand. He seemed as proud as a young recruit who has just
passed through his first baptism of fire.
"He tried to make a fool of me--McPherson of Chicago--the millionaire--one
of the capitalist kings--he tried to bribe me and my party."
In the crowd the old carpenter was dancing in the road and rubbing his
hands together. With the feeling of a man who had finished a piece of work
or turned the last leaf of a book, Sam went back to his hotel.
"In the morning I shall be on my way," he thought.
A knock came at the door and the red-haired man came in. He closed the
door softly and winked at Sam.
"Ed made a mistake," he said, and laughed. "The old man told him you were
a socialist and he thought you were trying to spoil the graft. He is
scared about that beating you got and mighty sorry. He's all right--Ed is
--and he and Bill and I have got the votes. What made you stay under cover
so long? Why didn't you tell us you were McPherson?"
Sam saw the hopelessness of any attempt to explain. Jake had evidently
sold out the men. Sam wondered how.
"How do you know you can deliver the votes?'" he asked, trying to lead
Jake on.
Jake rolled the quid in his mouth and winked again.
"It was easy enough to fix the men when Ed, Bill and I got together," he
said. "You know about the other. There's a clause in the act authorising
the bond issue, a sleeper, Bill calls it. You know more about that than I
do. Anyway the power will be turned over to the man we say."
"But how do I know you can deliver the votes?"
Jake threw out his hand impatiently.
"What do they know?" he asked sharply. "What they want is more wages.
There's a million in the power deal and they can't any more realise a
million than they can tell what they want to do in Heaven. I promised Ed's
fellows the city scale. Ed can't kick. He'll make a hundred thousand as it
stands. Then I promised the plough works gang a ten per cent raise. We'll
get it for them if we can, but if we can't, they won't know it till the
deal is put through."
Sam walked over and held open the door.
"Good night," he said.
Jake looked annoyed.
"Ain't you even going to make a bid against Crofts?" he asked. "We ain't
tied to him if you do better by us. I'm in this thing because you put me
in. That piece you wrote up the river scared 'em stiff. I want to do the
right thing by you. Don't be sore about Ed. He wouldn't a done it if he'd
known."
Sam shook his head and stood with his hand still on the door.
"Good night," he said again. "I am not in it. I have dropped it. No use
trying to explain."
CHAPTER II
For weeks and months Sam led a wandering vagabond life, and surely a
stranger or more restless vagabond never went upon the road. In his pocket
he had at almost any time from one to five thousand dollars, his bag went
on from place to place ahead of him, and now and then he caught up with
it, unpacked it, and wore a suit of his former Chicago clothes upon the
streets of some town. For the most part, however, he wore the rough
clothes bought from Ed, and, when these were gone, others like them, with
a warm canvas outer jacket, and for rough weather a pair of heavy boots
lacing half way up the legs. Among the people, he passed for a rather
well-set-up workman with money in his pocket going his own way.
During all those months of wandering, and even when he had returned to
something nearer his former way of life, his mind was unsettled and his
outlook on life disturbed. Sometimes it seemed to him that he, among all
men, was a unique, an innovation. Day after day his mind ground away upon
his problem and he was determined to seek and to keep on seeking until he
found for himself a way of peace. In the towns and in the country through
which he passed he saw the clerks in the stores, the merchants with
worried faces hurrying into banks, the farmers, brutalised by toil,
dragging their weary bodies homeward at the coming of night, and told
himself that all life was abortive, that on all sides of him it wore
itself out in little futile efforts or ran away in side currents, that
nowhere did it move steadily, continuously forward giving point to the
tremendous sacrifice involved in just living and working in the world. He
thought of Christ going about seeing the world and talking to men, and
thought that he too would go and talk to them, not as a teacher, but as
one seeking eagerly to be taught. At times he was filled with longing and
inexpressible hopes and, like the boy of Caxton, would get out of bed, not
now to stand in Miller's pasture watching the rain on the surface of the
water, but to walk endless miles through the darkness getting the blessed
relief of fatigue into his body and often paying for and occupying two
beds in one night.
Sam wanted to go back to Sue; he wanted peace and something like
happiness, but most of all he wanted work, real work, work that would
demand of him day after day the best and finest in him so that he would be
held to the need of renewing constantly the better impulses of his mind.
He was at the top of his life, and the few weeks of hard physical exertion
as a driver of nails and a bearer of timbers had begun to restore his body
to shapeliness and strength, so that he was filled anew with all of his
native restlessness and energy; but he was determined that he would not
again pour himself out in work that would react upon him as had his money
making, his dream of beautiful children, and this last half-formed dream
of a kind of financial fatherhood to the Illinois town.
The incident with Ed and the red-haired man had been his first serious
effort at anything like social service achieved through controlling or
attempting to influence the public mind, for his was the type of mind that
runs to the concrete, the actual. As he sat in the ravine talking to Jake,
and, later, coming home in the boat under the multitude of stars, he had
looked up from among the drunken workmen and his mind had seen a city
built for a people, a city independent, beautiful, strong, and free, but a
glimpse of a red head through a barroom door and a socialist trembling
before a name had dispelled the vision. After his return from hearing the
socialist, who in his turn was hedged about by complicated influences, and
in those November days when he walked south through Illinois, seeing the
late glory of the trees and breathing the fine air, he laughed at himself
for having had the vision. It was not that the red-haired man had sold him
out, it was not the beating given him by Ed's sullen-faced son or the
blows across the face at the hands of his vigorous wife--it was just that
at bottom he did not believe the people wanted reform; they wanted a ten
per cent raise in wages. The public mind was a thing too big, too
complicated and inert for a vision or an ideal to get at and move deeply.
And then, walking on the road and struggling to find truth even within
himself, Sam had to come to something else. At bottom he was no leader, no
reformer. He had not wanted the free city for a free people, but as a work
to be done by his own hand. He was McPherson, the money maker, the man who
loved himself. The fact, not the sight of Jake hobnobbing with Bill or the
timidity of the socialist, had blocked his way to work as a political
reformer and builder.
Tramping south between the rows of shocked corn he laughed at himself.
"The experience with Ed and Jake has done something for me," he thought.
"They bullied me. I have been a kind of bully myself and what has happened
has been good medicine for me."
Sam walked the roads of Illinois, Ohio, New York, and other states,
through hill country and flat country, in the snow drifts of winter and
through the storms of spring, talking to people, asking their way of life
and the end toward which they worked. At night he dreamed of Sue, of his
boyhood struggles in Caxton, of Janet Eberly sitting in her chair and
talking of writers of books, or, visualising the stock exchange or some
garish drinking place, he saw again the faces of Crofts, Webster,
Morrison, and Prince intent and eager as he laid before them some scheme
of money making. Sometimes at night he awoke, seized with horror, seeing
Colonel Tom with the revolver pressed against his head; and sitting in his
bed, and all through the next day he talked aloud to himself.
"The damned old coward," he shouted into the darkness of his room or into
the wide peaceful prospect of the countryside.
The idea of Colonel Tom as a suicide seemed unreal, grotesque, horrible.
It was as though some round-cheeked, curly-headed boy had done the thing
to himself. The man had been so boyishly, so blusteringly incompetent, so
completely and absolutely without bigness and purpose.
"And yet," thought Sam, "he has found strength to whip me, the man of
ability. He has taken revenge, absolute and unanswerable, for the slight I
put upon the little play world in which he had been king."
In fancy Sam could see the great paunch and the little white pointed beard
sticking up from the floor in the room where the colonel lay dead, and
into his mind came a saying, a sentence, the distorted remembrance of a
thought he had got from a book of Janet's or from some talk he had heard,
perhaps at his own dinner table.
"It is horrible to see a fat man with purple veins in his face lying
dead."
At such times he hurried along the road like one pursued. People driving
past in buggies and seeing him and hearing the stream of talk that issued
from his lips, turned and watched him out of sight. And Sam, hurrying and
seeking relief from the thoughts in his mind, called to the old
commonsense instincts within himself as a captain marshals his forces to
withstand an attack.
"I will find work. I will find work. I will seek Truth," he said.
Sam avoided the larger towns or went hurriedly through them, sleeping
night after night at village hotels or at some hospitable farmhouse, and
daily he increased the length of his walks, getting real satisfaction from
the aching of his legs and from the bruising of his unaccustomed feet on
the hard road. Like St. Jerome, he had a wish to beat upon his body and
subdue the flesh. In turn he was blown upon by the wind, chilled by the
winter frost, wet by the rains, and warmed by the sun. In the spring he
swam in rivers, lay on sheltered hillsides watching the cattle grazing in
the fields and the white clouds floating across the sky, and constantly
his legs became harder and his body more flat and sinewy. Once he slept
for a night in a straw stack at the edge of a woods and in the morning was
awakened by a farmer's dog licking his face.
Several times he came up to vagabonds, umbrella menders and other
roadsters, and walked with them, but he found in their society no
incentive to join in their flights across country on freight trains or on
the fronts of passenger trains. Those whom he met and with whom he talked
and walked did not interest him greatly. They had no end in life, sought
no ideal of usefulness. Walking and talking with them, the romance went
out of their wandering life. They were utterly dull and stupid, they were,
almost without exception, strikingly unclean, they wanted passionately to
get drunk, and they seemed to be forever avoiding life with its problems
and responsibilities. They always talked of the big cities, of "Chi" and
"Cinci" and "Frisco," and were bent upon getting to one of these places.
They condemned the rich and begged and stole from the poor, talked
swaggeringly of their personal courage and ran whimpering and begging
before country constables. One of them, a tall, leering youth in a grey
cap, who came up to Sam one evening at the edge of a village in Indiana,
tried to rob him. Full of his new strength and with the thought of Ed's
wife and the sullen-faced son in his mind, Sam sprang upon him and had
revenge for the beating received in the office of Ed's hotel by beating
this fellow in his turn. When the tall youth had partially recovered from
the beating and had staggered to his feet, he ran off into the darkness,
stopping when well out of reach to hurl a stone that splashed in the mud
of the road at Sam's feet.
Everywhere Sam sought people who would talk to him of themselves. He had a
kind of faith that a message would come to him out of the mouth of some
simple, homely dweller of the villages or the farms. A woman, with whom he
talked in the railroad station at Fort Wayne, Indiana, interested him so
that he went into a train with her and travelled all night in the day
coach, listening to her talk of her three sons, one of whom had weak lungs
and had, with two younger brothers, taken up government land in the west.
The woman had been with them for some months, helping them to get a start.
"I was raised on a farm and knew things they could not know," she told
Sam, raising her voice above the rumble of the train and the snoring of
fellow passengers.
She had worked with her sons in the field, ploughing and planting, had
driven a team across country, carrying boards for the building of a house,
and had grown brown and strong at the work.
"And Walter is getting well. His arms are as brown as my own and he has
gained eleven pounds," she said, rolling up her sleeves and showing her
heavy, muscular forearms.
She planned to take her husband, a machinist working in a bicycle factory
in Buffalo, and her two grown daughters, clerks in a drygoods store, with
her and return to the new country, and having a sense of her hearer's
interest in her story, she talked of the bigness of the west and the
loneliness of the vast, silent plains, saying that they sometimes made her
heart ache. Sam thought she had in some way achieved success, although he
did not see how her experience could serve as a guide to him.
"You have got somewhere. You have got hold of a truth," he said, taking
her hand when he got off the train at Cleveland, at dawn.
At another time, in the late spring, when he was tramping through southern
Ohio, a man drove up beside him, and pulling in his horse, asked, "Where
are you going?" adding genially, "I may be able to give you a lift."
Sam looked at him and smiled. Something in the man's manner or in his
dress suggesting the man of God, he assumed a bantering air.
"I am on my way to the New Jerusalem," he said seriously. "I am one who
seeks God."
The young minister picked up his reins with a look of alarm, but when he
saw a smile playing about the corners of Sam's mouth, he turned the wheels
of his buggy.
"Get in and come along with me and we will talk of the New Jerusalem," he
said.
On the impulse Sam got into the buggy, and driving along the dusty road,
told the essential parts of his story and of his quest for an end toward
which he might work.
"It would be simple enough if I were without money and driven by hard
necessity, but I am not. I want work, not because it is work and will
bring me bread and butter, but because I need to be doing something that
will satisfy me when I am done. I do not want so much to serve men as to
serve myself. I want to get at happiness and usefulness as for years I got
at money making. There is a right way of life for such a man as me, and I
want to find that way."
The young minister, who was a graduate of a Lutheran seminary at
Springfield, Ohio, and had come out of college with a very serious outlook
on life, took Sam to his house and together they sat talking half the
night. He had a wife, a country girl with a babe lying at her breast, who
got supper for them, and who, after supper, sat in the shadows in a corner
of the living-room listening to their talk.
The two men sat together. Sam smoked his pipe and the minister poked at a
coal fire that burned in a stove. They talked of God and of what the
thought of God meant to men; but the young minister did not try to give
Sam an answer to his problem; on the contrary, Sam found him strikingly
dissatisfied and unhappy in his way of life.
"There is no spirit of God here," he said, poking viciously at the coals
in the stove. "The people here do not want me to talk to them of God. They
have no curiosity about what He wants of them nor of why He has put them
here. They want me to tell them of a city in the sky, a kind of glorified
Dayton, Ohio, to which they can go when they have finished this life of
work and of putting money in the savings bank."
For several days Sam stayed with the clergyman, driving about the country
with him and talking of God. In the evening they sat in the house,
continuing their talks, and on Sunday Sam went to hear the man preach in
his church.
The sermon was a disappointment to Sam. Although his host had talked
vigorously and well in private, his public address was stilted and
unnatural.
"The man," thought Sam, "has no feeling for public address and is not
treating his people well in not giving them, without reservation, the
ideas he has expounded to me in his house." He decided there was something
to be said for the people who sat patiently listening week after week and
who gave the man the means of a living for so lame an effort.
One evening when Sam had been with them for a week the young wife came to
him as he stood on the little porch before the house.
"I wish you would go away," she said, standing with her babe in her arms
and looking at the porch floor. "You stir him up and make him
dissatisfied."
Sam stepped off the porch and hurried off up the road into the darkness.
There had been tears in the wife's eyes.
In June he went with a threshing crew, working among labourers and eating
with them in the fields or about the crowded tables of farmhouses where
they stopped to thresh. Each day Sam and the men with him worked in a new
place and had as helpers the farmer for whom they threshed and several of
his neighbours. The farmers worked at a killing pace and the men of the
threshing crew were expected to keep abreast of each new lot of them day
after day. At night the threshermen, too weary for talk, crept into the
loft of a barn, slept until daylight and then began another day of
heartbreaking toil. On Sunday morning they went for a swim in some creek
and in the afternoon sat in a barn or under the trees of an orchard
sleeping or indulging in detached, fragmentary bits of talk, talk that
never rose above a low, wearisome level. For hours they would try to
settle a dispute as to whether a horse they had seen at some farm during
the week had three, or four, white feet, and one man in the crew never
talked at all, sitting on his heels through the long Sunday afternoons and
whittling at a stick with his pocket knife.
The threshing outfit with which Sam worked was owned by a man named Joe,
who was in debt for it to the maker and who, after working with the men
all day, drove about the country half the night making deals with farmers
for other days of threshing. Sam thought that he looked constantly on the
point of collapse through overwork and worry, and one of the men, who had
been with Joe through several seasons, told Sam that at the end of the
season their employer did not have enough money left from his season of
work to pay the interest on the debt for his machines and that he
continually took jobs for less than the cost of doing them.
"One has to keep going," said Joe, when one day Sam began talking to him
on the matter.
When told to keep Sam's wage until the end of the season he looked
relieved and at the end of the season came to Sam, looking more worried
and said that he had no money.
"I will give you a note bearing good interest if you can let me have a
little time," he said.
Sam took the note and looked at the pale, drawn face peering out of him
from the shadows at the back of the barn.
"Why do you not drop the whole thing and begin working for some one else?"
he asked.
Joe looked indignant.
"A man wants independence," he said.
When Sam got again upon the road he stopped at a little bridge over a
stream, and tearing up Joe's note watched the torn pieces of it float away
upon the brown water.
CHAPTER III
Through the summer and early fall Sam continued his wanderings. The days
on which something happened or on which something outside himself
interested or attracted him were special days, giving him food for hours
of thought, but for the most part he walked on and on for weeks, sunk in a
kind of healing lethargy of physical fatigue. Always he tried to get at
people who came into his way and to discover something of their way of
life and the end toward which they worked, and many an open-mouthed,
staring man and woman he left behind him on the road and on the sidewalks
of the villages. He had one principle of action; whenever an idea came
into his mind he did not hesitate, but began trying at once the
practicability of living by following the idea, and although the practice
brought him to no end and only seemed to multiply the difficulties of the
problem he was striving to work out, it brought him many strange
experiences.
At one time he was for several days a bartender in a saloon in a town in
eastern Ohio. The saloon was in a small wooden building facing a railroad
track and Sam had gone in there with a labourer met on the sidewalk. It
was a stormy night in September at the end of his first year of wandering
and while he stood by a roaring coal stove, after buying drinks for the
labourer and cigars for himself, several men came in and stood by the bar
drinking together. As they drank they became more and more friendly,
slapping each other on the back, singing songs and boasting. One of them
got out upon the floor and danced a jig. The proprietor, a round-faced man
with one dead eye, who had himself been drinking freely, put a bottle upon
the bar and coming up to Sam, began complaining that he had no bartender
and had to work long hours.
"Drink what you want, boys, and then I'll tell you what you owe," he said
to the men standing along the bar.
Watching the men who drank and played like school boys about the room, and
looking at the bottle sitting on the bar, the contents of which had for
the moment taken the sombre dulness out of the lives of the workmen, Sam
said to himself, "I will take up this trade. It may appeal to me. At least
I shall be selling forgetfulness and not be wasting my life with this
tramping on the road and thinking."
The saloon in which he worked was a profitable one and although in an
obscure place had made its proprietor what is called "well fixed." It had
a side door opening into an alley and one went up this alley to the main
street of the town. The front door looking upon the railroad tracks was
but little used, perhaps at the noon hour two or three young men from the
freight depot down the tracks would come in by it and stand about drinking
beer, but the trade that came down the alley and in at the side door was
prodigious. All day long men hurried in at this door, took drinks and
hurried out again, looking up the alley and running quickly when they
found the way clear. These men all drank whiskey, and when Sam had worked
for a few days in the place he once made the mistake of reaching for the
bottle when he heard the door open.
"Let them ask for it," said the proprietor gruffly. "Do you want to insult
a man?"
On Saturday the place was filled all day with beer-drinking farmers, and
at odd hours on other days men came in, whimpering and begging drinks.
When alone in the place, Sam looked at the trembling fingers of these men
and put the bottle before them, saying, "Drink all you want of the stuff."
When the proprietor was in, the men who begged drinks stood a moment by
the stove and then went out thrusting their hands into their coat pockets
and looking at the floor.
"Bar flies," the proprietor explained laconically.
The whiskey was horrible. The proprietor mixed it himself and put it into
stone jars that stood under the bar, pouring it out of these into bottles
as they became empty. He kept on display in glass cases bottles of well
known brands of whiskey, but when a man came in and asked for one of these
brands Sam handed him a bottle bearing that label from beneath the bar, a
bottle previously filled by Al from the jugs of his own mixture. As Al
sold no mixed drinks Sam was compelled to know nothing the bartender's art
and stood all day handing out Al's poisonous stuff and the foaming glasses
of beer the workingmen drank in the evening.
Of the men coming in at the side door, a shoe merchant, a grocer, the
proprietor of a restaurant, and a telegraph operator interested Sam most.
Several times each day these men would appear, glance back over their
shoulders at the door, and then turning to the bar would look at Sam
apologetically.
"Give me a little out of the bottle, I have a bad cold," they would say,
as though repeating a formula.
At the end of the week Sam was on the road again. The rather bizarre
notion that by staying there he would be selling forgetfulness of life's
unhappiness had been dispelled during his first day's duty, and his
curiosity concerning the customers was his undoing. As the men came in at
the side door and stood before him Sam leaned over the bar and asked them
why they drank. Some of the men laughed, some swore at him, and the
telegraph operator reported the matter to Al, calling Sam's question an
impertinence.
"You fool, don't you know better than to be throwing stones at the bar?"
Al roared, and with an oath discharged him.
CHAPTER IV
One fine warm morning in the fall Sam was sitting in a little park in the
centre of a Pennsylvania manufacturing town watching men and women going
through the quiet streets to the factories and striving to overcome a
feeling of depression aroused by an experience of the evening before. He
had come into town over a poorly made clay road running through barren
hills, and, depressed and weary, had stood on the shores of a river,
swollen by the early fall rains, that flowed along the edges of the town.
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 shining 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
passing 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 leadership 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
shirtwaist 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 shirtwaist 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 flashily 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
breasts, 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 flashily 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 advertisement 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.
One of the girls he told off to stand in front of the factory morning and
evening.
"I will have other help for you there," he said. "Before you go home to-
night there will be a printer here with a bundle of pamphlets I am having
printed for you."
Advised by the soft-eyed Jewish girl, he told off others to get additional
names for the mailing list he wanted, getting many important ones from
girls in the room. Six of the girls he asked to come in the morning to
help him with addressing and mailing letters. The Jewish girl he told to
take charge of the girls at work in the room--on the morrow to become also
an office--and to superintend getting the names.
Frank rose at the back of the room.
"Who are you anyway?" he asked.
"A man with money and the ability to win this strike," Sam told him.
"What are you doing it for?" demanded Frank.
The Jewish girl sprang to her feet.
"Because he believes in these women and wants to help," she explained.
"Rot," said Frank, going out at the door.
It was snowing when the meeting ended, and Sam and the Jewish girl
finished their talk in the hallway leading to her room.
"I don't know what Harrigan, the union leader from Pittsburgh, will say to
this," she told him. "He appointed Frank to lead and direct the strike
here. He doesn't like interference and he may not like your plan. But we
working women need men, men like you who can plan and do things. There are
too many men living on us. We need men who will work for all of us as the
men work for the women in the carriages and automobiles." She laughed and
put out a hand to him. "See what you have got yourself into? I want you to
be a husband to our entire union."
The next morning four girl stenographers went to work in Sam's strike
headquarters, and he wrote his first strike letter, a letter telling the
story of a striking girl named Hadaway, whose young brother was sick with
tuberculosis. Sam did not put any flourishes in the letter; he felt that
he did not need to. He thought that with twenty or thirty such letters,
each telling briefly and truthfully the story of one of the striking
girls, he should be able to show one American town how its other half
lived. He gave the letter to the four girl stenographers with the mailing
list he already had and started them writing it to each of the names.
At eight o'clock a man came in to install a telephone and girl strikers
began bringing in new names for the mailing list. At nine o'clock three