more stenographers appeared and were put to work, and girls who had been
in began sending more names over the 'phone. The Jewish girl walked up and
down, giving orders, making suggestions. From time to time she ran to
Sam's desk and suggested other sources of names for the mailing list. Sam
thought that if the other working girls were timid and embarrassed before
him this one was not. She was like a general on the field of battle. Her
soft brown eyes glowed, her mind worked rapidly, and her voice had a ring
in it. At her suggestion Sam gave the girls at the typewriters lists
bearing the names of town officials, bankers and prominent business men,
and the wives of all these, also presidents of various women's clubs,
society women, and charitable organizations. She called reporters from the
town's two daily papers and had them interview Sam, and at her suggestion
he gave them copies of the Hadaway girl letter to print.
"Print it," he said, "and if you cannot use it as news, make it an
advertisement and bring the bill to me."
At eleven o'clock Frank came into the room bringing a tall Irishman, with
sunken cheeks, black, unclean teeth, and an overcoat too small for him.
Leaving him standing by the door, Frank walked across the room to Sam.
"Come to lunch with us," he said. He jerked his thumb over his shoulder
toward the tall Irishman. "I picked him up," he said. "Best brain that's
been in town for years. He's a wonder. Used to be a Catholic priest. He
doesn't believe in God or love or anything. Come on out and hear him talk.
He's great."
Sam shook his head.
"I am too busy. There is work to be done here. We are going to win this
strike."
Frank looked at him doubtfully and then about the room at the busy girls.
"I don't know what Harrigan will think of all this," he said. "He doesn't
like interferences. I never do anything without writing him. I wrote and
told him what you were doing here. I had to, you know. I'm responsible to
headquarters."
In the afternoon the Hebrew owner of the shirtwaist factory came in to
strike headquarters and, walking through the room took off his hat and sat
down by Sam's desk.
"What do you want here?" he asked. "The newspaper boys told me of what you
had planned to do. What's your game?"
"I want to whip you," Sam answered quietly, "to whip you good. You might
as well get into line. You are going to lose this strike."
"I'm only one," said the Hebrew. "There is an association of us
manufacturers of shirtwaists. We are all in this. We all have a strike on
our hands. What will you gain if you do beat me here? I'm only a little
fellow after all."
Sam laughed and picking up his pen began writing.
"You are unlucky," he said. "I just happened to take hold here. When I
have you beaten I will go on and beat the others. There is more money back
of me than back of you all, and I am going to beat every one of you."
The next morning a crowd stood before the stairway leading to the factory
when the strikebreaking girls came to work. The letters and the newspaper
interview had been effective and more than half the strikebreakers did not
appear. The others hurried along the street and turned in at the stairway
without looking at the crowd. The girl, told off by Sam, stood on the
sidewalk passing out pamphlets to the strikebreakers. The pamphlets were
headed, "The Story of Ten Girls," and told briefly and pointedly the
stories of ten striking girls and what the loss of the strike meant to
them and to their families.
After a while there drove up two carriages and a large automobile, and out
of the automobile climbed a well-dressed woman who took a bundle of the
pamphlets from the girl picket and began passing them about among the
people. Two policemen who stood in front of the crowd took off their
helmets and accompanied her. The crowd cheered. Frank came hurrying across
the street to where Sam stood in front of the barber shop and slapped him
on the back.
"You're a wonder," he said.
Sam hurried back to the room and prepared the second letter for the
mailing list. Two more stenographers had come to work. He had to send out
for more machines. A reporter for the town's evening paper ran up the
stairway.
"Who are you?" he asked. "The town wants to know."
From his pocket he took a telegram from a Pittsburgh daily.
"What about mail-order strike plan? Give name and story new strike leader
there."
At ten o'clock Frank returned.
"There's a wire from Harrigan," he said. "He's coming here. He wants a
mass meeting of the girls for to-night. I've got to get them together.
We'll meet here in this room."
In the room the work went on. The list of names for the mailing had
doubled. The picket at the shirtwaist factory reported that three more of
the strikebreakers had left the plant. The Jewish girl was excited. She
went hurrying about the room, her eyes glowing.
"It's great," she said. "The plan is working. The whole town is aroused
and for us. We'll win in another twenty-four hours."
And then at seven o'clock that night Harrigan came into the room where Sam
sat with the assembled girls, bolting the door behind him. He was a short,
strongly built man with blue eyes and red hair. He walked about the room
in silence, followed by Frank. Suddenly he stopped and, picking up one of
the typewriting machines rented by Sam for the letter writing, raised it
above his head and sent it smashing to the floor.
"A hell of a strike leader," he roared. "Look at this. Scab machines!
"Scab stenographers!" he said through his teeth. "Scab printing! Scab
everything!"
Picking up a bundle of the letterheads, he tore them across, and walking
to the front of the room, shook his fist before Sam's face.
"Scab leader!" he shouted, turning and facing the girls.
The soft-eyed Jewish girl sprang to her feet.
"He's winning for us," she said.
Harrigan walked toward her threateningly.
"Better lose than win a scab victory," he bellowed.
"Who are you anyway? What grafter sent you here?" he demanded, turning to
Sam.
He launched into a speech. "I have been watching this fellow, I know him.
He has a scheme to break down the union and is being paid by the
capitalists."
Sam waited to hear no more. Getting up he pulled on his canvas jacket and
started for the door. He saw that already he had involved himself in a
dozen violations of the unionist code and the idea of trying to convince
Harrigan of his disinterestedness did not occur to him.
"Do not mind me," he said, "I am going."
He walked between the rows of frightened, white-faced girls and unbolted
the door, the Jewish girl following. At the head of the stairway leading
to the street he stopped and pointed back into the room.
"Go back," he said, handing her a roll of bills. "Carry on the work if you
can. Get other machines and new printing. I will help you in secret."
Turning he ran down the stairs, hurried through the curious crowd standing
at the foot, and walked rapidly along in front of the lighted stores. A
cold rain, half snow, was falling. Beside him walked a young man with a
brown pointed beard, one of the newspaper reporters who had interviewed
him the day before.
"Did Harrigan trim you?" asked the young man, and then added, laughing,
"He told us he intended to throw you down stairs."
Sam walked on in silence, filled with wrath. He turned into a side street
and stopped when his companion put a hand upon his arm.
"This is our dump," said the young man, pointing to a long low frame
building facing the side street. "Come in and let us have your story. It
should be a good one."
Inside the newspaper office another young man sat with his head lying on a
flat-top desk. He was clad in a strikingly flashy plaid coat, had a little
wizened, good-natured face and seemed to have been drinking. The young man
with the beard explained Sam's identity, taking the sleeping man by the
shoulder and shaking him vigorously.
"Wake up, Skipper! There's a good story here!" he shouted. "The union has
thrown out the mail-order strike leader!"
The Skipper got to his feet and began shaking his head.
"Of course, of course, Old Top, they would throw you out. You've got some
brains. No man with brains can lead a strike. It's against the laws of
Nature. Something was bound to hit you. Did Roughneck come out from
Pittsburgh?" he asked, turning to the young man of the brown beard.
Then reaching above his head and taking a cap that matched his plaid coat
from a nail on the wall, he winked at Sam. "Come on, Old Top. I've got to
get a drink."
The two men went through a side door and down a dark alley, going in at
the back door of a saloon. Mud lay deep in the alley and The Skipper
sloshed through it, splattering Sam's clothes and face. In the saloon at a
table facing Sam, with a bottle of French wine between them, he began
explaining.
"I've a note coming due at the bank in the morning and no money to pay
it," he said. "When I have a note coming due I always have no money and I
always get drunk. Then next morning I pay the note. I don't know how I do
it, but I always come out all right. It's a system--Now about this
strike." He plunged into a discussion of the strike while men came in and
out, laughing and drinking. At ten o'clock the proprietor locked the front
door, drew the curtain, and coming to the back of the room sat down at the
table with Sam and The Skipper, bringing another bottle of the French wine
from which the two men continued drinking.
"That man from Pittsburgh busted up your place, eh?" he said, turning to
Sam. "A man came in here to-night and told me. He sent for the typewriter
people and made them take away the machines."
When they were ready to leave, Sam took money from his pocket and offered
to pay for the bottle of French wine ordered by The Skipper, who arose and
stood unsteadily on his feet.
"Do you mean to insult me?" he demanded indignantly, throwing a twenty-
dollar bill on the table. The proprietor gave him back only fourteen
dollars.
"I might as well wipe off the slate while you're flush," he observed,
winking at Sam.
The Skipper sat down again, taking a pencil and pad of paper from his
pocket, and throwing them on the table.
"I want an editorial on the strike for the Old Rag," he said to Sam. "Do
one for me. Do something strong. Get a punch into it. I want to talk to my
friend here."
Putting the pad of paper on the table Sam began writing his newspaper
editorial. His head seemed wonderfully clear, his command of words
unusually good. He called the attention of the public to the situation,
the struggles of the striking girls and the intelligent fight they had
been making to win a just cause, following this with paragraphs pointing
out how the effectiveness of the work done had been annulled by the
position taken by the labour and socialist leaders.
"These fellows at bottom care nothing for results," he wrote. "They are
not thinking of the unemployed women with families to support, they are
thinking only of themselves and their puny leadership which they fear is
threatened. Now we shall have the usual exhibition of all the old things,
struggle, and hatred and defeat."
When he had finished The Skipper and Sam went back through the alley to
the newspaper office. The Skipper sloshed again through the mud and
carried in his hand a bottle of red gin. At his desk he took the editorial
from Sam's hands and read it.
"Perfect! Perfect to the thousandth part of an inch, Old Top," he said,
pounding Sam on the shoulder. "Just what the Old Rag wanted to say about
the strike." Then climbing upon the desk and putting the plaid coat under
his head he went peacefully to sleep, and Sam, sitting beside the desk in
a shaky office chair, slept also. At daybreak a black man with a broom in
his hand woke them, and going into a long low room filled with presses The
Skipper put his head under a water tap and came back waving a soiled towel
and with water dripping from his hair.
"Now for the day and the labours thereof," he said, grinning at Sam and
taking a long drink out of the gin bottle.
After breakfast he and Sam took up their stand in front of the barber shop
opposite the stairway leading to the shirtwaist factory. Sam's girl with
the pamphlets was gone as was also the soft-eyed Jewish girl, and in their
places Frank and the Pittsburgh leader named Harrigan walked up and down.
Again carriages and automobiles stood by the curb, and again a well-
dressed woman got out of a machine and went toward three striking girls
approaching along the sidewalk. The woman was met by Harrigan, shaking his
fist and shouting, and getting back into the machine she drove off. From
the stairway the flashily-dressed Hebrew looked at the crowd and laughed.
"Where is the new strike leader--the mail-order strike leader?" he called
to Frank.
With the words, a working man with a dinner pail on his arm ran out of the
crowd and knocked the Jew back into the stairway.
"Punch him! Punch the dirty scab leader!" yelled Frank, dancing up and
down on the sidewalk.
Two policemen running forward began leading the workingman up the street,
his dinner pail still clutched in one hand.
"I know something," The Skipper shouted, pounding Sam on the shoulder. "I
know who will sign that note with me. The woman Harrigan drove back into
her machine is the richest woman in town. I will show her your editorial.
She will think I wrote it and it will get her. You'll see." He ran off up
the street, shouting back over his shoulder, "Come over to the dump, I
want to see you again."
Sam returned to the newspaper office and sat down waiting for The Skipper
who, after a time, came in, took off his coat and began writing furiously.
From time to time he took long drinks out of the bottle of red gin, and
after silently offering it to Sam, continued reeling off sheet after sheet
of loosely-written matter.
"I got her to sign the note," he called over his shoulder to Sam. "She was
furious at Harrigan and when I told her we were going to attack him and
defend you she fell for it quick. I won out by following my system. I
always get drunk and it always wins."
At ten o'clock the newspaper office was in a ferment. The little man with
the brown pointed beard, and another, kept running to The Skipper asking
advice, laying typewritten sheets before him, talking as he wrote.
"Give me a lead. I want one more front page lead," The Skipper kept
bawling at them, working like mad.
At ten thirty the door opened and Harrigan, accompanied by Frank, came in.
Seeing Sam they stopped, looking at him uncertainly, and at the man at
work at the desk.
"Well, speak up. This is no ladies' reception room. What do you fellows
want?" snapped The Skipper, glaring at them.
Frank, coming forward, laid a typewritten sheet on the desk, which the
newspaper man read hurriedly.
"Will you use it?" asked Frank.
The Skipper laughed.
"Wouldn't change a word of it," he shouted. "Sure I'll use it. It's what I
wanted to make my point. You fellows watch me."
Frank and Harrigan went out and The Skipper, rushing to the door, began
yelling into the room beyond.
"Hey, you Shorty and Tom, I've got that last lead."
Coming back to his desk he began writing again, grinning as he worked. To
Sam he handed the typewritten sheet prepared by Frank.
"Dastardly attempt to win the cause of the working girls by dirty scab
leaders and butter-fingered capitalist class," it began, and after this
followed a wild jumble of words, words without meaning, sentences without
point in which Sam was called a mealy-mouthed mail-order musser and The
Skipper was mentioned incidentally as a pusillanimous ink slinger.
"I'll run the stuff and comment on it," declared The Skipper, handing Sam
what he had written. It was an editorial inviting the public to read the
article prepared for publication by the strike leaders and sympathising
with the striking girls that their cause had to be lost because of the
incompetence and lack of intelligence of their leaders.
"Hurrah for Roughhouse, the brave man who leads working girls to defeat in
order that he may retain leadership and drive intelligent effort out of
the cause of labour," wrote The Skipper.
Sam looked at the sheets and out of the window where a snow storm raged.
It seemed to him that a crime was being done and he was sick and disgusted
at his own inability to stop it. The Skipper lighted a short black pipe
and took his cap from a nail on the wall.
"I'm the smoothest little newspaper thing in town and some financier as
well," he declared. "Let's go have a drink."
After the drink Sam walked through the town toward the country. At the
edge of town where the houses became scattered and the road started to
drop away into a deep valley some one helloed behind him. Turning, he saw
the soft-eyed Jewish girl running along a path beside the road.
"Where are you going?" he asked, stopping to lean against a board fence,
the snow falling upon his face.
"I'm going with you," said the girl. "You're the best and the strongest
man I've ever seen and I'm not going to let you get away. If you've got a
wife it don't matter. She isn't what she should be or you wouldn't be
walking about the country alone. Harrigan and Frank say you're crazy, but
I know better. I am going with you and I'm going to help you find what you
want."
Sam wondered. She took a roll of bills from a pocket in her dress and gave
it to him.
"I spent three hundred and fourteen dollars," she said.
They stood looking at each other. She put out a hand and laid it on his
arm. Her eyes, soft and now glowing with eager light looked into his. Her
round breasts rose and fell.
"Anywhere you say. I'll be your servant if you ask it of me."
A wave of hot desire ran through Sam followed by a quick reaction. He
thought of his months of weary seeking and his universal failure.
"You are going back to town if I have to drive you there with stones," he
told her, and turning ran down the valley leaving her standing by the
board fence, her head buried in her arms.
CHAPTER V
One crisp winter evening Sam found himself on a busy street corner in
Rochester, N.Y., watching from a doorway the crowds of people hurrying or
loitering past him. He stood in a doorway near a corner that seemed to be
a public meeting place and from all sides came men and women who met at
the corner, stood for a moment in talk, and then went away together. Sam
found himself beginning to wonder about the meetings. In the year since he
had walked out of the Chicago office his mind had grown more and more
reflective. Little things--a smile on the lips of an ill-clad old man
mumbling and hurrying past him on the street, or the flutter of a child's
hand from the doorway of a farmhouse--had furnished him food for hours of
thought. Now he watched with interest the little incidents; the nods, the
hand clasps, the hurried stealthy glances around of the men and women who
met for a moment at the corner. On the sidewalk near his doorway several
middle-aged men, evidently from a large hotel around the corner, were
eyeing, with unpleasant, hungry, furtive eyes the women in the crowd.
A large blond woman stepped into the doorway beside Sam. "Waiting for some
one?" she asked, smiling and looking steadily at him, with the harried,
uncertain, hungry light he had seen in the eyes of the middle-aged men
upon the sidewalk.
"What are you doing here with your husband at work?" he ventured.
She looked startled and then laughed.
"Why don't you hit me with your fist if you want to jolt me like that?"
she demanded, adding, "I don't know who you are, but whoever you are I
want to tell you that I've quit my husband."
"Why?" asked Sam.
She laughed again and stepping over looked at him closely.
"I guess you're bluffing," she said. "I don't believe you know Alf at all.
And I'm glad you don't. I've quit Alf, but he would raise Cain just the
same, if he saw me out here hustling."
Sam stepped out of the doorway and walked down a side street past a
lighted theatre. Along the street women raised their eyes to him and
beyond the theatre, a young girl, brushing against him, muttered, "Hello,
Sport!"
Sam wanted to get away from the unhealthy, hungry look he had seen in the
eyes of the men and women. His mind began working on this side of the
lives of great numbers of people in the cities--of the men and women on
the street corner, of the woman who from the security of a safe marriage
had once thrown a challenge into his eyes as they sat together in the
theatre, and of the thousand little incidents in the lives of all modern
city men and women. He wondered how much that eager, aching hunger stood
in the way of men's getting hold of life and living it earnestly and
purposefully, as he wanted to live it, and as he felt all men and women
wanted at bottom to live it. When he was a boy in Caxton he was more than
once startled by the flashes of brutality and coarseness in the speech and
actions of kindly, well-meaning men; now as he walked in the streets of
the city he thought that he had got past being startled. "It is a quality
of our lives," he decided. "American men and women have not learned to be
clean and noble and natural, like their forests and their wide, clean
plains."
He thought of what he had heard of London, and of Paris, and of other
cities of the old world; and following an impulse acquired through his
lonely wanderings, began talking to himself.
"We are no finer nor cleaner than these," he said, "and we sprang from the
big clean new land through which I have been walking all these months.
Will mankind always go on with that old aching, queerly expressed hunger
in its blood, and with that look in its eyes? Will it never shrive itself
and understand itself, and turn fiercely and energetically toward the
building of a bigger and cleaner race of men?"
"It won't unless you help," came the answer from some hidden part of him.
Sam fell to thinking of the men who write, and of those who teach, and he
wondered why they did not, all of them, talk more thoughtfully of vice,
and why they so often spent their talents and their energies in futile
attacks upon some phase of life, and ended their efforts toward human
betterment by joining or promoting a temperance league, or stopping the
playing of baseball on Sunday.
As a matter of fact were not many writers and reformers unconsciously in
league with the procurer, in that they treated vice and profligacy as
something, at bottom, charming? He himself had seen none of this vague
charm.
"For me," he reflected, "there have been no Francois Villons or Sapphos in
the tenderloins of American cities. There have been instead only heart-
breaking disease and ill health and poverty, and hard brutal faces and
torn, greasy finery."
He thought of men like Zola who saw this side of life clearly and how he,
as a young fellow in the city, had read the man at Janet Eberly's
suggestion and had been helped by him--helped and frightened and made to
see. And then there rose before him the leering face of a keeper of a
second-hand book store in Cleveland who some weeks before had pushed
across the counter to him a paper-covered copy of "Nana's Brother," saying
with a smirk, "That's some sporty stuff." And he wondered what he should
have thought had he bought the book to feed the imagination the
bookseller's comment was intended to arouse.
In the small towns through which Sam walked and in the small town in which
he grew to manhood vice was openly crude and masculine. It went to sleep
sprawling across a dirty beer-soaked table in Art Sherman's saloon in
Piety Hollow, and the newsboy passed it without comment, regretting that
it slept and that it had no money with which to buy papers.
"Dissipation and vice get into the life of youth," he thought, coming to a
street corner where young men played pool and smoked cigarettes in a dingy
poolroom, and turned back toward the heart of the city. "It gets into all
modern life. The farmer boy coming up to the city to work hears lewd
stories in the smoking car of the train, and the travelling men from the
cities tell tales of the city streets to the group about the stove in
village stores."
Sam did not quarrel with the fact that youth touched vice. Such things
were a part of the world that men and women had made for their sons and
daughters to live in, and that night as he wandered in the streets of
Rochester he thought that he would like all youth to know, if they could
but know, truth. His heart was bitter at the thought of men throwing the
glamour of romance over the sordid, ugly things he had been seeing in that
city and in every city he had known.
Past him in a street lined with small frame houses stumbled a man far gone
in drink, by whose side walked a boy, and Sam's mind leaped back to those
first years he had spent in the city and of the staggering old man he had
left behind him in Caxton.
"You would think no man better armed against vice and dissipation than
that painter's son of Caxton," he reminded himself, "and yet he embraced
vice. He found, as all young men find, that there is much misleading talk
and writing on the subject. The business men he knew did not part with
able assistance because it did not sign the pledge. Ability was too rare a
thing and too independent to sign pledges, and the lips-that-touch-liquor-
shall-never-touch-mine sentiment among women was reserved for the lips
that did not invite."
He began reviewing incidents of carouses he had been on with business men
of his acquaintance, of a policeman knocked into a street and of himself,
quiet and ably climbing upon tables to make speeches and to shout the
innermost secrets of his heart to drunken hangers-on in Chicago barrooms.
Normally he had not been a good mixer. He had been one to keep himself to
himself. But on these carouses he let himself go, and got a reputation for
daring audacity by slapping men on the back and singing songs with them. A
glowing cordiality had pervaded him and for a time he had really believed
there was such a thing as high flying vice that glistens in the sun.
Now stumbling past lighted saloons, wandering unknown in a city's streets,
he knew better. All vice was unclean, unhealthy.
He remembered a hotel in which he had once slept, a hotel that admitted
questionable couples. Its halls had become dingy; its windows remained
unopened; dirt gathered in the corners; the attendants shuffled as they
walked, and leered into the faces of creeping couples; the curtains at the
windows were torn and discoloured; strange snarling oaths, screams, and
cries jarred the tense nerves; peace and cleanliness had fled the place;
men hurried through the halls with hats drawn down over their faces;
sunlight and fresh air and cheerful, whistling bellboys were locked out.
He thought of the weary, restless walks taken by the young men from farms
and country towns in the streets of the cities; young men believers in the
golden vice. Hands beckoned to them from doorways, and women of the town
laughed at their awkwardness. In Chicago he had walked in that way. He
also had been seeking, seeking the romantic, impossible mistress that
lurked at the bottom of men's tales of the submerged world. He wanted his
golden girl. He was like the naive German lad in the South Water Street
warehouses who had once said to him--he was a frugal soul--"I would like
to find a nice-looking girl who is quiet and modest and who will be my
mistress and not charge anything."
Sam had not found his golden girl, and now he knew she did not exist. He
had not seen the places called by the preachers the palaces of sin, and
now he knew there were no such places. He wondered why youth could not be
made to understand that sin is foul and that immorality reeks of
vulgarity. Why could not they be told plainly that there are no
housecleaning days in the tenderloin?
During his married life men had come to the house who discussed this
matter. One of them, he remembered, had maintained stoutly that the
scarlet sisterhood was a necessity of modern life and that ordinary decent
social life could not go on without it. Often during the past year Sam had
thought of the man's talk and his brain had reeled before the thought. In
towns and on country roads he had seen troops of little girls come
laughing and shouting out of school houses, and had wondered which of them
would be chosen for that service to mankind; and now, in his hour of
depression, he wished that the man who had talked at his dinner table
might be made to walk with him and to share with him his thoughts.
Turning again into a lighted busy thoroughfare of the city, Sam continued
his study of the faces in the crowds. To do this quieted and soothed his
mind. He began to feel a weariness in his legs and thought with gratitude
that he should have a night of good sleep. The sea of faces rolling up to
him under the lights filled him with peace. "There is so much of life," he
thought, "it must come to some end."
Looking intently at the faces, the dull faces and the bright faces, the
faces drawn out of shape and with eyes nearly meeting above the nose, the
faces with long, heavy sensual jaws, and the empty, soft faces on which
the scalding finger of thought had left no mark, his fingers ached to get
a pencil in his hand, or to spread the faces upon canvas in enduring
pigments, to hold them up before the world and to be able to say, "Here
are the faces you, by your lives, have made for yourselves and for your
children."
In the lobby of a tall office building, where he stopped at a little cigar
counter to get fresh tobacco for his pipe, he looked so fixedly at a woman
clad in long soft furs, that in alarm she hurried out to her machine to
wait for her escort, who had evidently gone up the elevator.
Once more in the street, Sam shuddered at the thought of the hands that
had laboured that the soft cheeks and the untroubled eyes of this one
woman might be. Into his mind came the face and figure of a little
Canadian nurse who had once cared for him through an illness--her quick,
deft fingers and her muscular little arms. "Another such as she," he
muttered, "has been at work upon the face and body of this gentlewoman; a
hunter has gone into the white silence of the north to bring out the warm
furs that adorn her; for her there has been a tragedy--a shot, and red
blood upon the snow, and a struggling beast waving its little claws in the
air; for her a woman has worked through the morning, bathing her white
limbs, her cheeks, her hair."
For this gentlewoman also there had been a man apportioned, a man like
himself, who had cheated and lied and gone through the years in pursuit of
the dollars to pay all of the others, a man of power, a man who could
achieve, could accomplish. Again he felt within him a yearning for the
power of the artist, the power not only to see the meaning of the faces in
the street, but to reproduce what he saw, to get with subtle fingers the
story of the achievement of mankind into a face hanging upon a wall.
In other days, in Caxton, listening to Telfer's talk, and in Chicago and
New York with Sue, Sam had tried to get an inkling of the passion of the
artist; now walking and looking at the faces rolling past him on the long
street he thought that he did understand.
Once when he was new in the city he had, for some months, carried on an
affair with a woman, the daughter of a cattle farmer from Iowa. Now her
face filled his vision. How rugged it was, how filled with the message of
the ground underfoot; the thick lips, the dull eyes, the strong, bullet-
like head, how like the cattle her father had bought and sold. He
remembered the little room in Chicago where he had his first love passage
with this woman. How frank and wholesome it had seemed. How eagerly both
man and woman had rushed at evening to the meeting place. How her strong
hands had clasped him. The face of the woman in the motor by the office
building danced before his eyes, the face so peaceful, so free from the
marks of human passion, and he wondered what daughter of a cattle raiser
had taken the passion out of the man who paid for the beauty of that face.
On a side street, near the lighted front of a cheap theatre, a woman,
standing alone and half concealed in the doorway of a church, called
softly, and turning he went to her.
"I am not a customer," he said, looking at her thin face and bony hands,
"but if you care to come with me I will stand a good dinner. I am getting
hungry and do not like eating alone. I want some one to talk to me so that
I won't get to thinking."
"You're a queer bird," said the woman, taking his arm. "What have you done
that you don't want to think?"
Sam said nothing.
"There's a place over there," she said, pointing to the lighted front of a
cheap restaurant with soiled curtains at the windows.
Sam kept on walking.
"If you do not mind," he said, "I will pick the place. I want to buy a
good dinner. I want a place with clean linen on the table and a good cook
in the kitchen."
They stopped at a corner to talk of the dinner, and at her suggestion he
waited at a near-by drug store while she went to her room. As he waited he
went to the telephone and ordered the dinner and a taxicab. When she
returned she had on a clean shirtwaist and had combed her hair. Sam
thought he caught the odour of benzine, and guessed she had been at work
on the spots on her worn jacket. She seemed surprised to find him still
waiting.
"I thought maybe it was a stall," she said.
They drove in silence to a place Sam had in mind, a road-house with clean
washed floors, painted walls, and open fires in the private dining-rooms.
Sam had been there several times during the month, and the food had been
well cooked.
They ate in silence. Sam had no curiosity to hear her talk of herself, and
she seemed to have no knack of casual conversation. He was not studying
her, but had brought her as he had said, because of his loneliness, and
because her thin, tired face and frail body, looking out from the darkness
by the church door, had made an appeal.
She had, he thought, a look of hard chastity, like one whipped but not
defeated. Her cheeks were thin and covered with freckles, like a boy's.
Her teeth were broken and in bad repair, though clean, and her hands had
the worn, hardly-used look of his own mother's hands. Now that she sat
before him in the restaurant, in some vague way she resembled his mother.
After dinner he sat smoking his cigar and looking at the fire. The woman
of the streets leaned across the table and touched him on the arm.
"Are you going to take me anywhere after this--after we leave here?" she
said.
"I am going to take you to the door of your room, that's all."
"I'm glad," she said; "it's a long time since I've had an evening like
this. It makes me feel clean."
For a time they sat in silence and then Sam began talking of his home town
in Iowa, letting himself go and expressing the thoughts that came into his
mind. He told her of his mother and of Mary Underwood and she in turn told
of her town and of her life. She had some difficulty about hearing which
made conversation trying. Words and sentences had to be repeated to her
and after a time Sam smoked and looked at the fire, letting her talk. Her
father had been a captain of a small steamboat plying up and down Long
Island Sound and her mother a careful, shrewd woman and a good
housekeeper. They had lived in a Rhode Island village and had a garden
back of their house. The captain had not married until he was forty-five
and had died when the girl was eighteen, the mother dying a year later.
The girl had not been much known in the Rhode Island village, being shy
and reticent. She had kept the house clean and helped the captain in the
garden. When her parents were dead she had found herself alone with
thirty-seven hundred dollars in the bank and the little home, and had
married a young man who was a clerk in a railroad office, and sold the
house to move to Kansas City. The big flat country frightened her. Her
life there had been unsuccessful. She had been lonely for the hills and
the water of her New England village, and she was, by nature,
undemonstrative and unemotional, so that she did not get much hold of her
husband. He had undoubtedly married her for the little hoard and, by
various devices, began getting it from her. A son had been born, for a
time her health broke badly, and she discovered through an accident that
her husband was spending her money in dissipation among the women of the
town.
"There wasn't any use wasting words when I found he didn't care for me or
for the baby and wouldn't support us, so I left him," she said in a level,
businesslike way.
When she came to count up, after she had got clear of her husband and had
taken a course in stenography, there was one thousand dollars of her
savings left and she felt pretty safe. She took a position and went to
work, feeling well satisfied and happy. And then came the trouble with her
hearing. She began to lose places and finally had to be content with a
small salary, earned by copying form letters for a mail order medicine
man. The boy she put out with a capable German woman, the wife of a
gardener. She paid four dollars a week for him and there was clothing to
be bought for herself and the boy. Her wage from the medicine man was
seven dollars a week.
"And so," she said, "I began going on the street. I knew no one and there
was nothing else to do. I couldn't do that in the town where the boy
lived, so I came away. I've gone from city to city, working mostly for
patent medicine men and filling out my income by what I earned in the
streets. I'm not naturally a woman who cares about men and not many of
them care about me. I don't like to have them touch me with their hands. I
can't drink as most of the girls do; it sickens me. I want to be left
alone. Perhaps I shouldn't have married. Not that I minded my husband. We
got along very well until I had to stop giving him money. When I found
where it was going it opened my eyes. I felt that I had to have at least a
thousand dollars for the boy in case anything happened to me. When I found
there wasn't anything to do but just go on the streets, I went. I tried
doing other work, but hadn't the strength, and when it came to the test I
cared more about the boy than I did about myself--any woman would. I
thought he was of more importance than what I wanted.
"It hasn't been easy for me. Sometimes when I have got a man to go with me
I walk along the street praying that I won't shudder and draw away when he
touches me with his hands. I know that if I do he will go away and I won't
get any money.
"And then they talk and lie about themselves. I've had them try to work
off bad money and worthless jewelry on me. Sometimes they try to make love
to me and then steal back the money they have given me. That's the hard
part, the lying and the pretence. All day I write the same lies over and
over for the patent-medicine men and then at night I listen to these
others lying to me."
She stopped talking and leaning over put her cheek down on her hand and
sat looking into the fire.
"My mother," she began again, "didn't always wear a clean dress. She
couldn't. She was always down on her knees scrubbing around the floor or
out in the garden pulling weeds. But she hated dirt. If her dress was
dirty her underwear was clean and so was her body. She taught me to be
that way and I wanted to be. It came naturally. But I'm losing it all. All
evening I have been sitting here with you thinking that my underwear isn't
clean. Most of the time I don't care. Being clean doesn't go with what I
am doing. I have to keep trying to be flashy outside so that men will stop
when they see me on the street. Sometimes when I have done well I don't go
on the streets for three or four weeks. Then I clean up my room and bathe
myself. My landlady lets me do my washing in the basement at night. I
don't seem to care about cleanliness the weeks I am on the streets."
The little German orchestra began playing a lullaby, and a fat German
waiter came in at the open door and put more wood on the fire. He stopped
by the table and talked about the mud in the road outside. From another
room came the silvery clink of glasses and the sound of laughing voices.
The girl and Sam drifted back into talk of their home towns. Sam felt that
he liked her very much and thought that if she had belonged to him he
should have found a basis on which to live with her contentedly. She had a
quality of honesty that he was always seeking in people.
As they drove back to the city she put a hand on his arm.
"I wouldn't mind about you," she said, looking at him frankly.
Sam laughed and patted her thin hand. "It's been a good evening," he said,
"we'll go through with it as it stands."
"Thanks for that," she said, "and there is something else I want to tell
you. Perhaps you will think it bad of me. Sometimes when I don't want to
go on the streets I get down on my knees and pray for strength to go on
gamely. Does it seem bad? We are a praying people, we New Englanders."
As he stood in the street Sam could hear her laboured asthmatic breathing
as she climbed the stairs to her room. Half way up she stopped and waved
her hand at him. The thing was awkwardly done and boyish. Sam had a
feeling that he should like to get a gun and begin shooting citizens in
the streets. He stood in the lighted city looking down the long deserted
street and thought of Mike McCarthy in the jail at Caxton. Like Mike, he
lifted up his voice in the night.
"Are you there, O God? Have you left your children here on the earth
hurting each other? Do you put the seed of a million children in a man,
and the planting of a forest in one tree, and permit men to wreck and hurt
and destroy?"
CHAPTER VI
One morning, at the end of his second year of wandering, Sam got out of
his bed in a cold little hotel in a mining village in West Virginia,
looked at the miners, their lamps in their caps, going through the dimly
lighted streets, ate a portion of leathery breakfast cakes, paid his bill
at the hotel, and took a train for New York. He had definitely abandoned
the idea of getting at what he wanted through wandering about the country
and talking to chance acquaintances by the wayside and in villages, and
had decided to return to a way of life more befitting his income.
He felt that he was not by nature a vagabond, and that the call of the
wind and the sun and the brown road was not insistent in his blood. The
spirit of Pan did not command him, and although there were certain spring
mornings of his wandering days that were like mountain tops in his
experience of life, mornings when some strong, sweet feeling ran through
the trees, and the grass, and the body of the wanderer, and when the call
of life seemed to come shouting and inviting down the wind, filling him
with delight of the blood in his body and the thoughts in his brain, yet
at bottom and in spite of these days of pure joy he was, after all, a man
of the towns and the crowds. Caxton and South Water Street and LaSalle
Street had all left their marks on him, and so, throwing his canvas jacket
into a corner of the room in the West Virginia hotel, he returned to the
haunts of his kind.
In New York he went to an uptown club where he owned a membership and into
the grill where he found at breakfast an actor acquaintance named Jackson.
Sam dropped into a chair and looked about him. He remembered a visit he
had made there some years before with Webster and Crofts and felt again
the quiet elegance of the surroundings.
"Hello, Moneymaker," said Jackson, heartily. "Heard you had gone to a
nunnery."
Sam laughed and began ordering a breakfast that made Jackson's eyes open
with astonishment.
"You, Mr. Elegance, would not understand a man's spending month after
month in the open air seeking a good body and an end in life and then
suddenly changing his mind and coming back to a place like this," he
observed.
Jackson laughed and lighted a cigarette.
"How little you know me," he said. "I would live my life in the open but
that I am a mighty good actor and have just finished another long New York
run. What are you going to do now that you are thin and brown? Will you go
back to Morrison and Prince and money making?"
Sam shook his head and looked at the quiet elegance of the man before him.
How satisfied and happy he looked.
"I am going to try living among the rich and the leisurely," he said.
"They are a rotten crew," Jackson assured him, "and I am taking a night
train for Detroit. Come with me. We will talk things over."
On the train that night they got into talk with a broad-shouldered old man
who told them of a hunting trip on which he was bound.
"I am going to sail from Seattle," he said, "and go everywhere and hunt
everything. I am going to shoot the head off of every big animal kind of
thing left in the world and then come back to New York and stay there
until I die."
"I will go with you," said Sam, and in the morning left Jackson at Detroit
and continued westward with his new acquaintance.
For months Sam travelled and shot with the old man, a vigorous, big-
hearted old fellow who, having become wealthy through an early investment
in stock of the Standard Oil Company, devoted his life to his lusty,
primitive passion for shooting and killing. They went on lion hunts,
elephant hunts and tiger hunts, and when on the west coast of Africa Sam
took a boat for London, his companion walked up and down the beach smoking
black cheroots and declaring the fun was only half over and that Sam was a
fool to go.
After the year of the hunt royal Sam spent another year living the life of
a gentleman of wealth and leisure in London, New York, and Paris. He went
on automobile trips, fished and loafed along the shores of northern lakes,
canoed through Canada with a writer of nature books, and sat about clubs
and fashionable hotels listening to the talk of the men and women of that
in began sending more names over the 'phone. The Jewish girl walked up and
down, giving orders, making suggestions. From time to time she ran to
Sam's desk and suggested other sources of names for the mailing list. Sam
thought that if the other working girls were timid and embarrassed before
him this one was not. She was like a general on the field of battle. Her
soft brown eyes glowed, her mind worked rapidly, and her voice had a ring
in it. At her suggestion Sam gave the girls at the typewriters lists
bearing the names of town officials, bankers and prominent business men,
and the wives of all these, also presidents of various women's clubs,
society women, and charitable organizations. She called reporters from the
town's two daily papers and had them interview Sam, and at her suggestion
he gave them copies of the Hadaway girl letter to print.
"Print it," he said, "and if you cannot use it as news, make it an
advertisement and bring the bill to me."
At eleven o'clock Frank came into the room bringing a tall Irishman, with
sunken cheeks, black, unclean teeth, and an overcoat too small for him.
Leaving him standing by the door, Frank walked across the room to Sam.
"Come to lunch with us," he said. He jerked his thumb over his shoulder
toward the tall Irishman. "I picked him up," he said. "Best brain that's
been in town for years. He's a wonder. Used to be a Catholic priest. He
doesn't believe in God or love or anything. Come on out and hear him talk.
He's great."
Sam shook his head.
"I am too busy. There is work to be done here. We are going to win this
strike."
Frank looked at him doubtfully and then about the room at the busy girls.
"I don't know what Harrigan will think of all this," he said. "He doesn't
like interferences. I never do anything without writing him. I wrote and
told him what you were doing here. I had to, you know. I'm responsible to
headquarters."
In the afternoon the Hebrew owner of the shirtwaist factory came in to
strike headquarters and, walking through the room took off his hat and sat
down by Sam's desk.
"What do you want here?" he asked. "The newspaper boys told me of what you
had planned to do. What's your game?"
"I want to whip you," Sam answered quietly, "to whip you good. You might
as well get into line. You are going to lose this strike."
"I'm only one," said the Hebrew. "There is an association of us
manufacturers of shirtwaists. We are all in this. We all have a strike on
our hands. What will you gain if you do beat me here? I'm only a little
fellow after all."
Sam laughed and picking up his pen began writing.
"You are unlucky," he said. "I just happened to take hold here. When I
have you beaten I will go on and beat the others. There is more money back
of me than back of you all, and I am going to beat every one of you."
The next morning a crowd stood before the stairway leading to the factory
when the strikebreaking girls came to work. The letters and the newspaper
interview had been effective and more than half the strikebreakers did not
appear. The others hurried along the street and turned in at the stairway
without looking at the crowd. The girl, told off by Sam, stood on the
sidewalk passing out pamphlets to the strikebreakers. The pamphlets were
headed, "The Story of Ten Girls," and told briefly and pointedly the
stories of ten striking girls and what the loss of the strike meant to
them and to their families.
After a while there drove up two carriages and a large automobile, and out
of the automobile climbed a well-dressed woman who took a bundle of the
pamphlets from the girl picket and began passing them about among the
people. Two policemen who stood in front of the crowd took off their
helmets and accompanied her. The crowd cheered. Frank came hurrying across
the street to where Sam stood in front of the barber shop and slapped him
on the back.
"You're a wonder," he said.
Sam hurried back to the room and prepared the second letter for the
mailing list. Two more stenographers had come to work. He had to send out
for more machines. A reporter for the town's evening paper ran up the
stairway.
"Who are you?" he asked. "The town wants to know."
From his pocket he took a telegram from a Pittsburgh daily.
"What about mail-order strike plan? Give name and story new strike leader
there."
At ten o'clock Frank returned.
"There's a wire from Harrigan," he said. "He's coming here. He wants a
mass meeting of the girls for to-night. I've got to get them together.
We'll meet here in this room."
In the room the work went on. The list of names for the mailing had
doubled. The picket at the shirtwaist factory reported that three more of
the strikebreakers had left the plant. The Jewish girl was excited. She
went hurrying about the room, her eyes glowing.
"It's great," she said. "The plan is working. The whole town is aroused
and for us. We'll win in another twenty-four hours."
And then at seven o'clock that night Harrigan came into the room where Sam
sat with the assembled girls, bolting the door behind him. He was a short,
strongly built man with blue eyes and red hair. He walked about the room
in silence, followed by Frank. Suddenly he stopped and, picking up one of
the typewriting machines rented by Sam for the letter writing, raised it
above his head and sent it smashing to the floor.
"A hell of a strike leader," he roared. "Look at this. Scab machines!
"Scab stenographers!" he said through his teeth. "Scab printing! Scab
everything!"
Picking up a bundle of the letterheads, he tore them across, and walking
to the front of the room, shook his fist before Sam's face.
"Scab leader!" he shouted, turning and facing the girls.
The soft-eyed Jewish girl sprang to her feet.
"He's winning for us," she said.
Harrigan walked toward her threateningly.
"Better lose than win a scab victory," he bellowed.
"Who are you anyway? What grafter sent you here?" he demanded, turning to
Sam.
He launched into a speech. "I have been watching this fellow, I know him.
He has a scheme to break down the union and is being paid by the
capitalists."
Sam waited to hear no more. Getting up he pulled on his canvas jacket and
started for the door. He saw that already he had involved himself in a
dozen violations of the unionist code and the idea of trying to convince
Harrigan of his disinterestedness did not occur to him.
"Do not mind me," he said, "I am going."
He walked between the rows of frightened, white-faced girls and unbolted
the door, the Jewish girl following. At the head of the stairway leading
to the street he stopped and pointed back into the room.
"Go back," he said, handing her a roll of bills. "Carry on the work if you
can. Get other machines and new printing. I will help you in secret."
Turning he ran down the stairs, hurried through the curious crowd standing
at the foot, and walked rapidly along in front of the lighted stores. A
cold rain, half snow, was falling. Beside him walked a young man with a
brown pointed beard, one of the newspaper reporters who had interviewed
him the day before.
"Did Harrigan trim you?" asked the young man, and then added, laughing,
"He told us he intended to throw you down stairs."
Sam walked on in silence, filled with wrath. He turned into a side street
and stopped when his companion put a hand upon his arm.
"This is our dump," said the young man, pointing to a long low frame
building facing the side street. "Come in and let us have your story. It
should be a good one."
Inside the newspaper office another young man sat with his head lying on a
flat-top desk. He was clad in a strikingly flashy plaid coat, had a little
wizened, good-natured face and seemed to have been drinking. The young man
with the beard explained Sam's identity, taking the sleeping man by the
shoulder and shaking him vigorously.
"Wake up, Skipper! There's a good story here!" he shouted. "The union has
thrown out the mail-order strike leader!"
The Skipper got to his feet and began shaking his head.
"Of course, of course, Old Top, they would throw you out. You've got some
brains. No man with brains can lead a strike. It's against the laws of
Nature. Something was bound to hit you. Did Roughneck come out from
Pittsburgh?" he asked, turning to the young man of the brown beard.
Then reaching above his head and taking a cap that matched his plaid coat
from a nail on the wall, he winked at Sam. "Come on, Old Top. I've got to
get a drink."
The two men went through a side door and down a dark alley, going in at
the back door of a saloon. Mud lay deep in the alley and The Skipper
sloshed through it, splattering Sam's clothes and face. In the saloon at a
table facing Sam, with a bottle of French wine between them, he began
explaining.
"I've a note coming due at the bank in the morning and no money to pay
it," he said. "When I have a note coming due I always have no money and I
always get drunk. Then next morning I pay the note. I don't know how I do
it, but I always come out all right. It's a system--Now about this
strike." He plunged into a discussion of the strike while men came in and
out, laughing and drinking. At ten o'clock the proprietor locked the front
door, drew the curtain, and coming to the back of the room sat down at the
table with Sam and The Skipper, bringing another bottle of the French wine
from which the two men continued drinking.
"That man from Pittsburgh busted up your place, eh?" he said, turning to
Sam. "A man came in here to-night and told me. He sent for the typewriter
people and made them take away the machines."
When they were ready to leave, Sam took money from his pocket and offered
to pay for the bottle of French wine ordered by The Skipper, who arose and
stood unsteadily on his feet.
"Do you mean to insult me?" he demanded indignantly, throwing a twenty-
dollar bill on the table. The proprietor gave him back only fourteen
dollars.
"I might as well wipe off the slate while you're flush," he observed,
winking at Sam.
The Skipper sat down again, taking a pencil and pad of paper from his
pocket, and throwing them on the table.
"I want an editorial on the strike for the Old Rag," he said to Sam. "Do
one for me. Do something strong. Get a punch into it. I want to talk to my
friend here."
Putting the pad of paper on the table Sam began writing his newspaper
editorial. His head seemed wonderfully clear, his command of words
unusually good. He called the attention of the public to the situation,
the struggles of the striking girls and the intelligent fight they had
been making to win a just cause, following this with paragraphs pointing
out how the effectiveness of the work done had been annulled by the
position taken by the labour and socialist leaders.
"These fellows at bottom care nothing for results," he wrote. "They are
not thinking of the unemployed women with families to support, they are
thinking only of themselves and their puny leadership which they fear is
threatened. Now we shall have the usual exhibition of all the old things,
struggle, and hatred and defeat."
When he had finished The Skipper and Sam went back through the alley to
the newspaper office. The Skipper sloshed again through the mud and
carried in his hand a bottle of red gin. At his desk he took the editorial
from Sam's hands and read it.
"Perfect! Perfect to the thousandth part of an inch, Old Top," he said,
pounding Sam on the shoulder. "Just what the Old Rag wanted to say about
the strike." Then climbing upon the desk and putting the plaid coat under
his head he went peacefully to sleep, and Sam, sitting beside the desk in
a shaky office chair, slept also. At daybreak a black man with a broom in
his hand woke them, and going into a long low room filled with presses The
Skipper put his head under a water tap and came back waving a soiled towel
and with water dripping from his hair.
"Now for the day and the labours thereof," he said, grinning at Sam and
taking a long drink out of the gin bottle.
After breakfast he and Sam took up their stand in front of the barber shop
opposite the stairway leading to the shirtwaist factory. Sam's girl with
the pamphlets was gone as was also the soft-eyed Jewish girl, and in their
places Frank and the Pittsburgh leader named Harrigan walked up and down.
Again carriages and automobiles stood by the curb, and again a well-
dressed woman got out of a machine and went toward three striking girls
approaching along the sidewalk. The woman was met by Harrigan, shaking his
fist and shouting, and getting back into the machine she drove off. From
the stairway the flashily-dressed Hebrew looked at the crowd and laughed.
"Where is the new strike leader--the mail-order strike leader?" he called
to Frank.
With the words, a working man with a dinner pail on his arm ran out of the
crowd and knocked the Jew back into the stairway.
"Punch him! Punch the dirty scab leader!" yelled Frank, dancing up and
down on the sidewalk.
Two policemen running forward began leading the workingman up the street,
his dinner pail still clutched in one hand.
"I know something," The Skipper shouted, pounding Sam on the shoulder. "I
know who will sign that note with me. The woman Harrigan drove back into
her machine is the richest woman in town. I will show her your editorial.
She will think I wrote it and it will get her. You'll see." He ran off up
the street, shouting back over his shoulder, "Come over to the dump, I
want to see you again."
Sam returned to the newspaper office and sat down waiting for The Skipper
who, after a time, came in, took off his coat and began writing furiously.
From time to time he took long drinks out of the bottle of red gin, and
after silently offering it to Sam, continued reeling off sheet after sheet
of loosely-written matter.
"I got her to sign the note," he called over his shoulder to Sam. "She was
furious at Harrigan and when I told her we were going to attack him and
defend you she fell for it quick. I won out by following my system. I
always get drunk and it always wins."
At ten o'clock the newspaper office was in a ferment. The little man with
the brown pointed beard, and another, kept running to The Skipper asking
advice, laying typewritten sheets before him, talking as he wrote.
"Give me a lead. I want one more front page lead," The Skipper kept
bawling at them, working like mad.
At ten thirty the door opened and Harrigan, accompanied by Frank, came in.
Seeing Sam they stopped, looking at him uncertainly, and at the man at
work at the desk.
"Well, speak up. This is no ladies' reception room. What do you fellows
want?" snapped The Skipper, glaring at them.
Frank, coming forward, laid a typewritten sheet on the desk, which the
newspaper man read hurriedly.
"Will you use it?" asked Frank.
The Skipper laughed.
"Wouldn't change a word of it," he shouted. "Sure I'll use it. It's what I
wanted to make my point. You fellows watch me."
Frank and Harrigan went out and The Skipper, rushing to the door, began
yelling into the room beyond.
"Hey, you Shorty and Tom, I've got that last lead."
Coming back to his desk he began writing again, grinning as he worked. To
Sam he handed the typewritten sheet prepared by Frank.
"Dastardly attempt to win the cause of the working girls by dirty scab
leaders and butter-fingered capitalist class," it began, and after this
followed a wild jumble of words, words without meaning, sentences without
point in which Sam was called a mealy-mouthed mail-order musser and The
Skipper was mentioned incidentally as a pusillanimous ink slinger.
"I'll run the stuff and comment on it," declared The Skipper, handing Sam
what he had written. It was an editorial inviting the public to read the
article prepared for publication by the strike leaders and sympathising
with the striking girls that their cause had to be lost because of the
incompetence and lack of intelligence of their leaders.
"Hurrah for Roughhouse, the brave man who leads working girls to defeat in
order that he may retain leadership and drive intelligent effort out of
the cause of labour," wrote The Skipper.
Sam looked at the sheets and out of the window where a snow storm raged.
It seemed to him that a crime was being done and he was sick and disgusted
at his own inability to stop it. The Skipper lighted a short black pipe
and took his cap from a nail on the wall.
"I'm the smoothest little newspaper thing in town and some financier as
well," he declared. "Let's go have a drink."
After the drink Sam walked through the town toward the country. At the
edge of town where the houses became scattered and the road started to
drop away into a deep valley some one helloed behind him. Turning, he saw
the soft-eyed Jewish girl running along a path beside the road.
"Where are you going?" he asked, stopping to lean against a board fence,
the snow falling upon his face.
"I'm going with you," said the girl. "You're the best and the strongest
man I've ever seen and I'm not going to let you get away. If you've got a
wife it don't matter. She isn't what she should be or you wouldn't be
walking about the country alone. Harrigan and Frank say you're crazy, but
I know better. I am going with you and I'm going to help you find what you
want."
Sam wondered. She took a roll of bills from a pocket in her dress and gave
it to him.
"I spent three hundred and fourteen dollars," she said.
They stood looking at each other. She put out a hand and laid it on his
arm. Her eyes, soft and now glowing with eager light looked into his. Her
round breasts rose and fell.
"Anywhere you say. I'll be your servant if you ask it of me."
A wave of hot desire ran through Sam followed by a quick reaction. He
thought of his months of weary seeking and his universal failure.
"You are going back to town if I have to drive you there with stones," he
told her, and turning ran down the valley leaving her standing by the
board fence, her head buried in her arms.
CHAPTER V
One crisp winter evening Sam found himself on a busy street corner in
Rochester, N.Y., watching from a doorway the crowds of people hurrying or
loitering past him. He stood in a doorway near a corner that seemed to be
a public meeting place and from all sides came men and women who met at
the corner, stood for a moment in talk, and then went away together. Sam
found himself beginning to wonder about the meetings. In the year since he
had walked out of the Chicago office his mind had grown more and more
reflective. Little things--a smile on the lips of an ill-clad old man
mumbling and hurrying past him on the street, or the flutter of a child's
hand from the doorway of a farmhouse--had furnished him food for hours of
thought. Now he watched with interest the little incidents; the nods, the
hand clasps, the hurried stealthy glances around of the men and women who
met for a moment at the corner. On the sidewalk near his doorway several
middle-aged men, evidently from a large hotel around the corner, were
eyeing, with unpleasant, hungry, furtive eyes the women in the crowd.
A large blond woman stepped into the doorway beside Sam. "Waiting for some
one?" she asked, smiling and looking steadily at him, with the harried,
uncertain, hungry light he had seen in the eyes of the middle-aged men
upon the sidewalk.
"What are you doing here with your husband at work?" he ventured.
She looked startled and then laughed.
"Why don't you hit me with your fist if you want to jolt me like that?"
she demanded, adding, "I don't know who you are, but whoever you are I
want to tell you that I've quit my husband."
"Why?" asked Sam.
She laughed again and stepping over looked at him closely.
"I guess you're bluffing," she said. "I don't believe you know Alf at all.
And I'm glad you don't. I've quit Alf, but he would raise Cain just the
same, if he saw me out here hustling."
Sam stepped out of the doorway and walked down a side street past a
lighted theatre. Along the street women raised their eyes to him and
beyond the theatre, a young girl, brushing against him, muttered, "Hello,
Sport!"
Sam wanted to get away from the unhealthy, hungry look he had seen in the
eyes of the men and women. His mind began working on this side of the
lives of great numbers of people in the cities--of the men and women on
the street corner, of the woman who from the security of a safe marriage
had once thrown a challenge into his eyes as they sat together in the
theatre, and of the thousand little incidents in the lives of all modern
city men and women. He wondered how much that eager, aching hunger stood
in the way of men's getting hold of life and living it earnestly and
purposefully, as he wanted to live it, and as he felt all men and women
wanted at bottom to live it. When he was a boy in Caxton he was more than
once startled by the flashes of brutality and coarseness in the speech and
actions of kindly, well-meaning men; now as he walked in the streets of
the city he thought that he had got past being startled. "It is a quality
of our lives," he decided. "American men and women have not learned to be
clean and noble and natural, like their forests and their wide, clean
plains."
He thought of what he had heard of London, and of Paris, and of other
cities of the old world; and following an impulse acquired through his
lonely wanderings, began talking to himself.
"We are no finer nor cleaner than these," he said, "and we sprang from the
big clean new land through which I have been walking all these months.
Will mankind always go on with that old aching, queerly expressed hunger
in its blood, and with that look in its eyes? Will it never shrive itself
and understand itself, and turn fiercely and energetically toward the
building of a bigger and cleaner race of men?"
"It won't unless you help," came the answer from some hidden part of him.
Sam fell to thinking of the men who write, and of those who teach, and he
wondered why they did not, all of them, talk more thoughtfully of vice,
and why they so often spent their talents and their energies in futile
attacks upon some phase of life, and ended their efforts toward human
betterment by joining or promoting a temperance league, or stopping the
playing of baseball on Sunday.
As a matter of fact were not many writers and reformers unconsciously in
league with the procurer, in that they treated vice and profligacy as
something, at bottom, charming? He himself had seen none of this vague
charm.
"For me," he reflected, "there have been no Francois Villons or Sapphos in
the tenderloins of American cities. There have been instead only heart-
breaking disease and ill health and poverty, and hard brutal faces and
torn, greasy finery."
He thought of men like Zola who saw this side of life clearly and how he,
as a young fellow in the city, had read the man at Janet Eberly's
suggestion and had been helped by him--helped and frightened and made to
see. And then there rose before him the leering face of a keeper of a
second-hand book store in Cleveland who some weeks before had pushed
across the counter to him a paper-covered copy of "Nana's Brother," saying
with a smirk, "That's some sporty stuff." And he wondered what he should
have thought had he bought the book to feed the imagination the
bookseller's comment was intended to arouse.
In the small towns through which Sam walked and in the small town in which
he grew to manhood vice was openly crude and masculine. It went to sleep
sprawling across a dirty beer-soaked table in Art Sherman's saloon in
Piety Hollow, and the newsboy passed it without comment, regretting that
it slept and that it had no money with which to buy papers.
"Dissipation and vice get into the life of youth," he thought, coming to a
street corner where young men played pool and smoked cigarettes in a dingy
poolroom, and turned back toward the heart of the city. "It gets into all
modern life. The farmer boy coming up to the city to work hears lewd
stories in the smoking car of the train, and the travelling men from the
cities tell tales of the city streets to the group about the stove in
village stores."
Sam did not quarrel with the fact that youth touched vice. Such things
were a part of the world that men and women had made for their sons and
daughters to live in, and that night as he wandered in the streets of
Rochester he thought that he would like all youth to know, if they could
but know, truth. His heart was bitter at the thought of men throwing the
glamour of romance over the sordid, ugly things he had been seeing in that
city and in every city he had known.
Past him in a street lined with small frame houses stumbled a man far gone
in drink, by whose side walked a boy, and Sam's mind leaped back to those
first years he had spent in the city and of the staggering old man he had
left behind him in Caxton.
"You would think no man better armed against vice and dissipation than
that painter's son of Caxton," he reminded himself, "and yet he embraced
vice. He found, as all young men find, that there is much misleading talk
and writing on the subject. The business men he knew did not part with
able assistance because it did not sign the pledge. Ability was too rare a
thing and too independent to sign pledges, and the lips-that-touch-liquor-
shall-never-touch-mine sentiment among women was reserved for the lips
that did not invite."
He began reviewing incidents of carouses he had been on with business men
of his acquaintance, of a policeman knocked into a street and of himself,
quiet and ably climbing upon tables to make speeches and to shout the
innermost secrets of his heart to drunken hangers-on in Chicago barrooms.
Normally he had not been a good mixer. He had been one to keep himself to
himself. But on these carouses he let himself go, and got a reputation for
daring audacity by slapping men on the back and singing songs with them. A
glowing cordiality had pervaded him and for a time he had really believed
there was such a thing as high flying vice that glistens in the sun.
Now stumbling past lighted saloons, wandering unknown in a city's streets,
he knew better. All vice was unclean, unhealthy.
He remembered a hotel in which he had once slept, a hotel that admitted
questionable couples. Its halls had become dingy; its windows remained
unopened; dirt gathered in the corners; the attendants shuffled as they
walked, and leered into the faces of creeping couples; the curtains at the
windows were torn and discoloured; strange snarling oaths, screams, and
cries jarred the tense nerves; peace and cleanliness had fled the place;
men hurried through the halls with hats drawn down over their faces;
sunlight and fresh air and cheerful, whistling bellboys were locked out.
He thought of the weary, restless walks taken by the young men from farms
and country towns in the streets of the cities; young men believers in the
golden vice. Hands beckoned to them from doorways, and women of the town
laughed at their awkwardness. In Chicago he had walked in that way. He
also had been seeking, seeking the romantic, impossible mistress that
lurked at the bottom of men's tales of the submerged world. He wanted his
golden girl. He was like the naive German lad in the South Water Street
warehouses who had once said to him--he was a frugal soul--"I would like
to find a nice-looking girl who is quiet and modest and who will be my
mistress and not charge anything."
Sam had not found his golden girl, and now he knew she did not exist. He
had not seen the places called by the preachers the palaces of sin, and
now he knew there were no such places. He wondered why youth could not be
made to understand that sin is foul and that immorality reeks of
vulgarity. Why could not they be told plainly that there are no
housecleaning days in the tenderloin?
During his married life men had come to the house who discussed this
matter. One of them, he remembered, had maintained stoutly that the
scarlet sisterhood was a necessity of modern life and that ordinary decent
social life could not go on without it. Often during the past year Sam had
thought of the man's talk and his brain had reeled before the thought. In
towns and on country roads he had seen troops of little girls come
laughing and shouting out of school houses, and had wondered which of them
would be chosen for that service to mankind; and now, in his hour of
depression, he wished that the man who had talked at his dinner table
might be made to walk with him and to share with him his thoughts.
Turning again into a lighted busy thoroughfare of the city, Sam continued
his study of the faces in the crowds. To do this quieted and soothed his
mind. He began to feel a weariness in his legs and thought with gratitude
that he should have a night of good sleep. The sea of faces rolling up to
him under the lights filled him with peace. "There is so much of life," he
thought, "it must come to some end."
Looking intently at the faces, the dull faces and the bright faces, the
faces drawn out of shape and with eyes nearly meeting above the nose, the
faces with long, heavy sensual jaws, and the empty, soft faces on which
the scalding finger of thought had left no mark, his fingers ached to get
a pencil in his hand, or to spread the faces upon canvas in enduring
pigments, to hold them up before the world and to be able to say, "Here
are the faces you, by your lives, have made for yourselves and for your
children."
In the lobby of a tall office building, where he stopped at a little cigar
counter to get fresh tobacco for his pipe, he looked so fixedly at a woman
clad in long soft furs, that in alarm she hurried out to her machine to
wait for her escort, who had evidently gone up the elevator.
Once more in the street, Sam shuddered at the thought of the hands that
had laboured that the soft cheeks and the untroubled eyes of this one
woman might be. Into his mind came the face and figure of a little
Canadian nurse who had once cared for him through an illness--her quick,
deft fingers and her muscular little arms. "Another such as she," he
muttered, "has been at work upon the face and body of this gentlewoman; a
hunter has gone into the white silence of the north to bring out the warm
furs that adorn her; for her there has been a tragedy--a shot, and red
blood upon the snow, and a struggling beast waving its little claws in the
air; for her a woman has worked through the morning, bathing her white
limbs, her cheeks, her hair."
For this gentlewoman also there had been a man apportioned, a man like
himself, who had cheated and lied and gone through the years in pursuit of
the dollars to pay all of the others, a man of power, a man who could
achieve, could accomplish. Again he felt within him a yearning for the
power of the artist, the power not only to see the meaning of the faces in
the street, but to reproduce what he saw, to get with subtle fingers the
story of the achievement of mankind into a face hanging upon a wall.
In other days, in Caxton, listening to Telfer's talk, and in Chicago and
New York with Sue, Sam had tried to get an inkling of the passion of the
artist; now walking and looking at the faces rolling past him on the long
street he thought that he did understand.
Once when he was new in the city he had, for some months, carried on an
affair with a woman, the daughter of a cattle farmer from Iowa. Now her
face filled his vision. How rugged it was, how filled with the message of
the ground underfoot; the thick lips, the dull eyes, the strong, bullet-
like head, how like the cattle her father had bought and sold. He
remembered the little room in Chicago where he had his first love passage
with this woman. How frank and wholesome it had seemed. How eagerly both
man and woman had rushed at evening to the meeting place. How her strong
hands had clasped him. The face of the woman in the motor by the office
building danced before his eyes, the face so peaceful, so free from the
marks of human passion, and he wondered what daughter of a cattle raiser
had taken the passion out of the man who paid for the beauty of that face.
On a side street, near the lighted front of a cheap theatre, a woman,
standing alone and half concealed in the doorway of a church, called
softly, and turning he went to her.
"I am not a customer," he said, looking at her thin face and bony hands,
"but if you care to come with me I will stand a good dinner. I am getting
hungry and do not like eating alone. I want some one to talk to me so that
I won't get to thinking."
"You're a queer bird," said the woman, taking his arm. "What have you done
that you don't want to think?"
Sam said nothing.
"There's a place over there," she said, pointing to the lighted front of a
cheap restaurant with soiled curtains at the windows.
Sam kept on walking.
"If you do not mind," he said, "I will pick the place. I want to buy a
good dinner. I want a place with clean linen on the table and a good cook
in the kitchen."
They stopped at a corner to talk of the dinner, and at her suggestion he
waited at a near-by drug store while she went to her room. As he waited he
went to the telephone and ordered the dinner and a taxicab. When she
returned she had on a clean shirtwaist and had combed her hair. Sam
thought he caught the odour of benzine, and guessed she had been at work
on the spots on her worn jacket. She seemed surprised to find him still
waiting.
"I thought maybe it was a stall," she said.
They drove in silence to a place Sam had in mind, a road-house with clean
washed floors, painted walls, and open fires in the private dining-rooms.
Sam had been there several times during the month, and the food had been
well cooked.
They ate in silence. Sam had no curiosity to hear her talk of herself, and
she seemed to have no knack of casual conversation. He was not studying
her, but had brought her as he had said, because of his loneliness, and
because her thin, tired face and frail body, looking out from the darkness
by the church door, had made an appeal.
She had, he thought, a look of hard chastity, like one whipped but not
defeated. Her cheeks were thin and covered with freckles, like a boy's.
Her teeth were broken and in bad repair, though clean, and her hands had
the worn, hardly-used look of his own mother's hands. Now that she sat
before him in the restaurant, in some vague way she resembled his mother.
After dinner he sat smoking his cigar and looking at the fire. The woman
of the streets leaned across the table and touched him on the arm.
"Are you going to take me anywhere after this--after we leave here?" she
said.
"I am going to take you to the door of your room, that's all."
"I'm glad," she said; "it's a long time since I've had an evening like
this. It makes me feel clean."
For a time they sat in silence and then Sam began talking of his home town
in Iowa, letting himself go and expressing the thoughts that came into his
mind. He told her of his mother and of Mary Underwood and she in turn told
of her town and of her life. She had some difficulty about hearing which
made conversation trying. Words and sentences had to be repeated to her
and after a time Sam smoked and looked at the fire, letting her talk. Her
father had been a captain of a small steamboat plying up and down Long
Island Sound and her mother a careful, shrewd woman and a good
housekeeper. They had lived in a Rhode Island village and had a garden
back of their house. The captain had not married until he was forty-five
and had died when the girl was eighteen, the mother dying a year later.
The girl had not been much known in the Rhode Island village, being shy
and reticent. She had kept the house clean and helped the captain in the
garden. When her parents were dead she had found herself alone with
thirty-seven hundred dollars in the bank and the little home, and had
married a young man who was a clerk in a railroad office, and sold the
house to move to Kansas City. The big flat country frightened her. Her
life there had been unsuccessful. She had been lonely for the hills and
the water of her New England village, and she was, by nature,
undemonstrative and unemotional, so that she did not get much hold of her
husband. He had undoubtedly married her for the little hoard and, by
various devices, began getting it from her. A son had been born, for a
time her health broke badly, and she discovered through an accident that
her husband was spending her money in dissipation among the women of the
town.
"There wasn't any use wasting words when I found he didn't care for me or
for the baby and wouldn't support us, so I left him," she said in a level,
businesslike way.
When she came to count up, after she had got clear of her husband and had
taken a course in stenography, there was one thousand dollars of her
savings left and she felt pretty safe. She took a position and went to
work, feeling well satisfied and happy. And then came the trouble with her
hearing. She began to lose places and finally had to be content with a
small salary, earned by copying form letters for a mail order medicine
man. The boy she put out with a capable German woman, the wife of a
gardener. She paid four dollars a week for him and there was clothing to
be bought for herself and the boy. Her wage from the medicine man was
seven dollars a week.
"And so," she said, "I began going on the street. I knew no one and there
was nothing else to do. I couldn't do that in the town where the boy
lived, so I came away. I've gone from city to city, working mostly for
patent medicine men and filling out my income by what I earned in the
streets. I'm not naturally a woman who cares about men and not many of
them care about me. I don't like to have them touch me with their hands. I
can't drink as most of the girls do; it sickens me. I want to be left
alone. Perhaps I shouldn't have married. Not that I minded my husband. We
got along very well until I had to stop giving him money. When I found
where it was going it opened my eyes. I felt that I had to have at least a
thousand dollars for the boy in case anything happened to me. When I found
there wasn't anything to do but just go on the streets, I went. I tried
doing other work, but hadn't the strength, and when it came to the test I
cared more about the boy than I did about myself--any woman would. I
thought he was of more importance than what I wanted.
"It hasn't been easy for me. Sometimes when I have got a man to go with me
I walk along the street praying that I won't shudder and draw away when he
touches me with his hands. I know that if I do he will go away and I won't
get any money.
"And then they talk and lie about themselves. I've had them try to work
off bad money and worthless jewelry on me. Sometimes they try to make love
to me and then steal back the money they have given me. That's the hard
part, the lying and the pretence. All day I write the same lies over and
over for the patent-medicine men and then at night I listen to these
others lying to me."
She stopped talking and leaning over put her cheek down on her hand and
sat looking into the fire.
"My mother," she began again, "didn't always wear a clean dress. She
couldn't. She was always down on her knees scrubbing around the floor or
out in the garden pulling weeds. But she hated dirt. If her dress was
dirty her underwear was clean and so was her body. She taught me to be
that way and I wanted to be. It came naturally. But I'm losing it all. All
evening I have been sitting here with you thinking that my underwear isn't
clean. Most of the time I don't care. Being clean doesn't go with what I
am doing. I have to keep trying to be flashy outside so that men will stop
when they see me on the street. Sometimes when I have done well I don't go
on the streets for three or four weeks. Then I clean up my room and bathe
myself. My landlady lets me do my washing in the basement at night. I
don't seem to care about cleanliness the weeks I am on the streets."
The little German orchestra began playing a lullaby, and a fat German
waiter came in at the open door and put more wood on the fire. He stopped
by the table and talked about the mud in the road outside. From another
room came the silvery clink of glasses and the sound of laughing voices.
The girl and Sam drifted back into talk of their home towns. Sam felt that
he liked her very much and thought that if she had belonged to him he
should have found a basis on which to live with her contentedly. She had a
quality of honesty that he was always seeking in people.
As they drove back to the city she put a hand on his arm.
"I wouldn't mind about you," she said, looking at him frankly.
Sam laughed and patted her thin hand. "It's been a good evening," he said,
"we'll go through with it as it stands."
"Thanks for that," she said, "and there is something else I want to tell
you. Perhaps you will think it bad of me. Sometimes when I don't want to
go on the streets I get down on my knees and pray for strength to go on
gamely. Does it seem bad? We are a praying people, we New Englanders."
As he stood in the street Sam could hear her laboured asthmatic breathing
as she climbed the stairs to her room. Half way up she stopped and waved
her hand at him. The thing was awkwardly done and boyish. Sam had a
feeling that he should like to get a gun and begin shooting citizens in
the streets. He stood in the lighted city looking down the long deserted
street and thought of Mike McCarthy in the jail at Caxton. Like Mike, he
lifted up his voice in the night.
"Are you there, O God? Have you left your children here on the earth
hurting each other? Do you put the seed of a million children in a man,
and the planting of a forest in one tree, and permit men to wreck and hurt
and destroy?"
CHAPTER VI
One morning, at the end of his second year of wandering, Sam got out of
his bed in a cold little hotel in a mining village in West Virginia,
looked at the miners, their lamps in their caps, going through the dimly
lighted streets, ate a portion of leathery breakfast cakes, paid his bill
at the hotel, and took a train for New York. He had definitely abandoned
the idea of getting at what he wanted through wandering about the country
and talking to chance acquaintances by the wayside and in villages, and
had decided to return to a way of life more befitting his income.
He felt that he was not by nature a vagabond, and that the call of the
wind and the sun and the brown road was not insistent in his blood. The
spirit of Pan did not command him, and although there were certain spring
mornings of his wandering days that were like mountain tops in his
experience of life, mornings when some strong, sweet feeling ran through
the trees, and the grass, and the body of the wanderer, and when the call
of life seemed to come shouting and inviting down the wind, filling him
with delight of the blood in his body and the thoughts in his brain, yet
at bottom and in spite of these days of pure joy he was, after all, a man
of the towns and the crowds. Caxton and South Water Street and LaSalle
Street had all left their marks on him, and so, throwing his canvas jacket
into a corner of the room in the West Virginia hotel, he returned to the
haunts of his kind.
In New York he went to an uptown club where he owned a membership and into
the grill where he found at breakfast an actor acquaintance named Jackson.
Sam dropped into a chair and looked about him. He remembered a visit he
had made there some years before with Webster and Crofts and felt again
the quiet elegance of the surroundings.
"Hello, Moneymaker," said Jackson, heartily. "Heard you had gone to a
nunnery."
Sam laughed and began ordering a breakfast that made Jackson's eyes open
with astonishment.
"You, Mr. Elegance, would not understand a man's spending month after
month in the open air seeking a good body and an end in life and then
suddenly changing his mind and coming back to a place like this," he
observed.
Jackson laughed and lighted a cigarette.
"How little you know me," he said. "I would live my life in the open but
that I am a mighty good actor and have just finished another long New York
run. What are you going to do now that you are thin and brown? Will you go
back to Morrison and Prince and money making?"
Sam shook his head and looked at the quiet elegance of the man before him.
How satisfied and happy he looked.
"I am going to try living among the rich and the leisurely," he said.
"They are a rotten crew," Jackson assured him, "and I am taking a night
train for Detroit. Come with me. We will talk things over."
On the train that night they got into talk with a broad-shouldered old man
who told them of a hunting trip on which he was bound.
"I am going to sail from Seattle," he said, "and go everywhere and hunt
everything. I am going to shoot the head off of every big animal kind of
thing left in the world and then come back to New York and stay there
until I die."
"I will go with you," said Sam, and in the morning left Jackson at Detroit
and continued westward with his new acquaintance.
For months Sam travelled and shot with the old man, a vigorous, big-
hearted old fellow who, having become wealthy through an early investment
in stock of the Standard Oil Company, devoted his life to his lusty,
primitive passion for shooting and killing. They went on lion hunts,
elephant hunts and tiger hunts, and when on the west coast of Africa Sam
took a boat for London, his companion walked up and down the beach smoking
black cheroots and declaring the fun was only half over and that Sam was a
fool to go.
After the year of the hunt royal Sam spent another year living the life of
a gentleman of wealth and leisure in London, New York, and Paris. He went
on automobile trips, fished and loafed along the shores of northern lakes,
canoed through Canada with a writer of nature books, and sat about clubs
and fashionable hotels listening to the talk of the men and women of that