The Friendly Road Part 20

"What did he to thee? How opened he thine eyes?"

I tried ineffectually several times to break the swift current of his oratory and finally succeeded (when he paused a moment to finish off a bit of pie crust).

"You must have seen some hard experiences in your life," I said.

"That I have," responded Bill Hahn, "the capitalistic system--"

"Did you ever work in the mills yourself?" I interrupted hastily.

"Boy and man," said Bill Hahn, "I worked in that h.e.l.l for thirty-two years--The cla.s.s-conscious proletariat have only to exert themselves--"

"And your wife, did she work too--and your sons and daughters?"

A spasm of pain crossed his face.

"My daughter?" he said. "They killed her in the mills."

It was appalling--the dead level of the tone in which he uttered those words--the monotone of an emotion long ago burned out, and yet leaving frightful scars.

"My friend!" I exclaimed, and I could not help laying my hand on his arm.

I had the feeling I often have with troubled children--an indescribable pity that they have had to pa.s.s through the valley of the shadow, and I not there to take them by the hand.

"And was this--your daughter--what brought you to your present belief?"

"No," said he, "oh, no. I was a Socialist, as you might say, from youth up. That is, I called myself a Socialist, but, comrade, I've learned this here truth: that it ain't of so much importance that you possess a belief, as that the belief possess you. Do you understand?"

"I think," said I, "that I understand."

Well, he told me his story, mostly in a curious, dull, detached way--as though he were speaking of some third person in whom he felt only a brotherly interest, but from time to time some incident or observation would flame up out of the narrative, like the opening of the door of a molten pit--so that the glare hurt one!--and then the story would die back again into quiet narrative.

Like most working people he had never lived in the twentieth century at all. He was still in the feudal age, and his whole life had been a blind and ceaseless struggle for the bare necessaries of life, broken from time to time by fierce irregular wars called strikes. He had never known anything of a real self-governing commonwealth, and such progress as he and his kind had made was never the result of their citizenship, of their powers as voters, but grew out of the explosive and ragged upheavals, of their own half-organized societies and unions.

It was against the "black people" he said, that he was first on strike back in the early nineties. He told me all about it, how he had been working in the mills pretty comfortably--he was young and strong then; with a fine growing family and a small home of his own.

"It was as pretty a place as you would want to see," he said; "we grew cabbages and onions and turnips--everything grew fine!--in the garden behind the house."

And then the "black people" began to come in, little by little at first, and then by the carload. By the "black people" he meant the people from Southern Europe, he called them "hordes"--"hordes and hordes of 'em"--Italians mostly, and they began getting into the mills and underbidding for the jobs, so that wages slowly went down and at the same time the machines were speeded up. It seems that many of these "black people" were single men or vigorous young married people with only themselves to support, while the old American workers were men with families and little homes to pay for, and plenty of old grandfathers and mothers, to say nothing of babies, depending upon them.

"There wasn't a living for a decent family left," he said.

So they struck--and he told me in his dull monotone of the long bitterness of that strike, the empty cupboards, the approach of winter with no coal for the stoves and no warm clothing for the children. He told me that many of the old workers began to leave the town (some bound for the larger cities, some for the Far West).

"But," said he with a sudden outburst of emotion, "I couldn't leave. I had the woman and the children!"

And presently the strike collapsed, and the workers rushed helter skelter back to the mills to get their old jobs. "Begging like whipped dogs," he said bitterly.

Many of them found their places taken by the eager "black people," and many had to go to work at lower wages in poorer places--punished for the fight they had made.

But he got along somehow, he said--"the woman was a good manager"--until one day he had the misfortune to get his hand caught in the machinery.

It was a place which should have been protected with guards, but was not. He was laid up for several weeks, and the company, claiming that the accident was due to his own stupidity and carelessness, refused even to pay his wages while he was idle. Well, the family had to live somehow, and the woman and the daughter--"she was a little thing," he said, "and frail"--the woman and the daughter went into the mill. But even with this new source of income they began to fall behind. Money which should have gone toward making the last payments on their home (already long delayed by the strike) had now to go to the doctor and the grocer.

"We had to live," said Bill Hahn.

Again and again he used this same phrase, "We had to live!" as a sort of bedrock explanation for all the woes of life.

After a time, with one finger gone and a frightfully scarred hand--he held it up for me to see--he went back into the mill.

"But it kept getting worse and worse," said he, "and finally I couldn't stand it any longer."

He and a group of friends got together secretly and tried to organize a union, tried to get the workmen together to improve their own condition; but in some way ("they had spies everywhere," he said) the manager learned of the attempt and one morning when he reported at the mill he was handed a slip asking him to call for his wages, that his help was no longer required.

"I'd been with that one company for twenty years and four months," he said bitterly, "I'd helped in my small way to build it up, make it a big concern payin' 28 per cent. dividends every year; I'd given part of my right hand in doin' it--and they threw me out like an old shoe."

He said he would have pulled up and gone away, but he still had the little home and the garden, and his wife and daughter were still at work, so he hung on grimly, trying to get some other job. "But what good is a man for any other sort of work," he said, "when he has been trained to the mills for thirty-two years!"

It was not very long after that when the "great strike" began--indeed, it grew out of the organization which he had tried to launched--and Bill Hahn threw himself into it with all his strength. He was one of the leaders. I shall not attempt to repeat here his description of the bitter struggle, the coming of the soldiery, the street riots, the long lists of arrests ("some," said he, "got into jail on purpose, so that they could at least have enough to eat!"), the late meetings of strikers, the wild turmoil and excitement.

Of all this he told me, and then he stopped suddenly, and after a long pause he said in a low voice:

"Comrade, did ye ever see your wife and your sickly daughter and your kids sufferin' for bread to eat?"

He paused again with a hard, dry sob in his voice.

"Did ye ever see that?"

"No," said I, very humbly, "I have never seen anything like that."

He turned on me suddenly, and I shall never forget the look on his face, nor the blaze in his eyes:

"Then what can you know about working-men?"

What could I answer?

A moment pa.s.sed and then he said, as if a little remorseful at having turned thus on me:

"Comrade, I tell you, the iron entered my soul--them days."

It seems that the leaders of the strike were mostly old employees like Bill Hahn, and the company had conceived the idea that if these men could be eliminated the organization would collapse, and the strikers be forced back to work. One day Bill Hahn found that proceedings had been started to turn him out of his home, upon which he had not been able to keep up his payments, and at the same time the merchant, of whom he had been a respected customer for years, refused to give him any further credit.

"But we lived somehow," he said, "we lived and we fought."

It was then that he began to see clearly what it all meant. He said he made a great discovery: that the "black people" against whom they had struck in 1894 were not to blame!

"I tell you," said he, "we found when we got started that them black people--we used to call 'em dagoes--were just workin' people like us--and in h.e.l.l with us. They were good soldiers, them Eyetalians and Poles and Syrians, they fought with us to the end."

I shall not soon forget the intensely dramatic but perfectly simple way in which he told me how he came, as he said, "to see the true light."

Holding up his maimed right hand (that trembled a little), he pointed one finger upward.