The Nine-Tenths Part 16

The invasion was unostentatious. No one could have dreamed that the tall, homely man, dashing in and out in his shirt-sleeves between the rooms and the moving-van drawn up at the curb, had come down with the deliberate purpose of making a neighborhood out of a chaos, of organizing that jumble of scattered polyglot lives.... In the faded sunshine of the unusually warm winter afternoon, with its vistas of gold-dusty air, and its noise of playing children and on-surging trolleys and trucks and all the minute life of the saloons and the stores--women hanging out of windows to get the recreation of watching the confused drama of the streets, neighbors meeting in doorways, young men laughing and chatting in cl.u.s.ters about lamp-posts--Joe toiled valiantly and happily. He would rapidly glance at the thickly peopled street and wonder, with a thrill, how soon he would include these lives in his own, how soon he would grip and rouse and awaken the careless mult.i.tude....

All was strange, all was new. Everything that was deep in his life--all the roots he had put down through boyhood, youth, and manhood into the familiar life of Yorkville--was torn up and transplanted to this fresh and unfriendly soil.... He felt as if he were in an alien land, under new skies, in a new clime, and there was all the romance of the mysterious and all the fear of the untried. Beginnings always have the double quality of magic and timidity--the dreaded, delicious first plunge into cold water, the adventurous striking out into unknown perils.... Did it not at moments seem like madness to dare single-handed into this vast and careless population? Was he not merely a modern Don Quixote tilting at windmills? Well, so be it, he thought; the goal might be unreachable, but the quest was life itself.

He had an inkling of the monstrous size of New York. All his days he had lived within a half-hour's ride of Greenwich Village, and yet it was a new world to him. So the whole city was but a conglomeration of nests of worlds, woven together by a few needs and the day's work, worlds as yet undiscovered in every direction, huge tracts of peoples of all races leading strange and una.s.similated lives. He felt lost in the crowded immensity, a helpless, obscure unit in the whirl of life.

He had fallen in love with Greenwich Village from the first day he had explored it for a promising dwelling-place. Here, he knew, lived Sally Heffer, and here doubtless he would meet her and she would help shape his fight, perhaps be the woman to gird on his armor, put sword in his hand, and send him forth. For he needed her, needed her as a child needs a teacher, as a recruit needs a disciplined veteran. It was she who had first revealed the actual world to him; it was she who had first divined his power and his purpose; it was she who had released him from guilt by showing him a means of expiation.

And yet, withal, he feared to meet her. There had been something terrible about her that afternoon at Carnegie Hall, and something that awed him that evening at the Woman's League. Until she had broken down and wept, she had hardly seemed a woman--rather a voice crying in the wilderness, a female Isaiah, the toilers become articulate. And he could not think of her as a simple, vivacious young woman. How would she greet him? Would her eyes remember his part in the fire?

At least, so he told himself, he would not seek her out (he had her address from Fannie Lemick) until he had something to show for his new life--until, possibly, he had a copy of that magazine which was still a hypothesis and a chimera. Then he would nerve himself and go to her and she should judge him as she pleased.

That first supper with his mother had a sweetness new to their lives. He ran out to the butcher, the grocer, and the delicatessen man, and came home laden with packages. The stove in the rear kitchen was set alight; the wooden table in the center was spread with cloth and cutlery; and they sat down opposite each other, utterly alone ... no boarding--house flutter and gossip and noise, no unpleasant jarring personalities, no wholesale cookery. All was quiet and peace--a brooding, tinkling silence. They both smiled and smiled, their eyes moist, and the food tasted so good. Blessed bread that they broke together, the cup that they shared between them! The moment became sacred, human, stirred by all the old, old miraculousness of home, that deepest need of humanity, that rich relationship that cuts so much deeper than the light touch-and-go of the world.

Joe spoke awkwardly.

"So we're here, mother ... and it's ripping, isn't it?"

She could hardly speak, but her eyes seemed to sparkle with a second youth.

"Yes," she murmured, "it's the first time we've had anything like this since you were a boy."

They both thought of his father, and the vanished days of the shanty on the hillside, and his mother thought:

"People must live out their own lives in their own homes."

There was something that fed the roots of her woman-nature to have this place apart, this quiet shelter where she ruled. It would be a joy to go marketing, it would be a delight to cook, and it was charming to live so intimately with her son. They were a family again.

After supper they washed the dishes together, laughing and chatting.

There were a hundred pleasing details to consider--where to place furniture, what to buy, whether to have a servant or not (Joe insisted on one), and all the incidents of the day to go over.

And then after the dish-washing they stopped work, and sat down in the front office amid the packing-cases and the trunks and the litter and debris. The gas was lighted above them, and the old-fashioned stove which stood in the center and sprouted up a pipe nearly to the ceiling and then at right angles into the wall was made red-hot with wood and coal. Joe smoked and his mother sewed, and a hush seemed to fall on the city, broken only by the echo of pa.s.sing footsteps and the mellowed thunder of the intermittent trolley-cars.

"And they call this a slum," muttered Joe.

In fact, save possibly for less clear air and in the summer a noise of neighbors, they might have been living in New York's finest neighborhood--almost a disappointment to two people prepared to plunge into dirt, danger, and disease.... Later Joe learned that some of the city's magazine writers had settled in the district on purpose, not because they were meeting a crisis, but because they liked it, liked its quaint old flavor, its colorful life, its alien charm, and not least, its cheaper rents.

But this evening all was unknown save the joy and peace of a real home.

They went to bed early, Joe in the room next the office, his mother in the adjoining room next the kitchen, but neither slept for a long time.

They lay awake tingling with a strange happiness, a fine freedom, a freshness of re-created life. Only to the pioneer comes this thrill of a new-made Eden, only to those who tear themselves from the easy ruts and cut hazardous clearings in the unventured wilderness. It is like being made over, like coming with fresh heart and eyes upon the glories of the earth; it is the only youth of the world.

The night grew late and marvelously hushed, a silence almost oppressive, where every noise seemed like an invader, and Joe, lying there keenly awake, seemed to feel the throb of the world, the pauseless pulsations of that life that beats in every brain and every heart of the earth; that life that, more intense than human love and thought, burns in the suns that swing about heaven rolling the globe of earth among them; that life that enfolds with tremendous purpose the little human creature in the vastness, that somehow expresses itself and heightens and changes itself in human lives and all the dreams and doings of men. Joe felt that life, thrilling to it, opening his heart to it, letting it surcharge and overflow his being with strength and joy. And he knew then that he lay as in a warm nest of the toilers and the poor, that crowded all about him in every direction were sleeping men and women and little children, all recently born, all soon to die, he himself shortly to be stricken out of these scenes and these sensations. It was all mystery unplumbable, unbelievable ... that this breath was not to go on forever, that this brain was to be stopped off, this heart cease like a run-down clock, this exultation and sorrow to leave like a mist, scattered in that life that bore it.... That he, Joe Blaine, was to die!

Surely life was marvelous and sacred; it was not to be always a selfish scramble, a money rush, a confusion and jumble, but rather something of harmony and mighty labors and mingled joys. He felt great strength; he felt equal to his purposes; he was sure he could help in the advancing processes.... Even as he was part of the divine mystery, so he could wield that divineness in him to lift life to new levels, while the breath was in his body, while the glow was in his brain.

And he thought of Myra, his mate in the mystery, and in the night he yearned for her, hungered through all his being. She had written him a note; it came to him from the mountains. It ran:

DEAR JOE,--You will be glad to know that I am getting back to myself. The peace and stillness of the white winter over the hills is healing me. It seems good merely to exist, to sleep and eat and exercise and read. I can't think now how I behaved so unaccountably those last few weeks, and I wonder if you will ever understand. I have been reading over and over again your long letter, trying hard to puzzle out its meanings, but I fear I am very ignorant. I know nothing of the crisis you speak of. I know that "ye have the poor always with you," I know that there is much suffering in the world--I have suffered myself--but I cannot see that living among the poor is going to help vitally. Should we not all live on the highest level possible? Level up instead of leveling down. Ignorance, dirt, and sickness do not attract me ... and now here among the hills the terrible city seems like a fading nightmare. It would be better if people lived in the country. I feel that the city is a mistake. But of one thing I am sure. I understand that you cannot help doing what you are doing, and I know that it would have been a wrong if I had interfered with your life.

I would have been a drag on you and defeated your purposes, and in the end we would both have been very unhappy. It seems to me most marriages are. Write me what you are doing, where you are living, and how you are.

Yours,

MYRA.

He had smiled over some of the phrases in this letter, particularly, "I feel that the city is a mistake." Would Myra ever know that her very personality and all of her life were interwoven inextricably with the industrial city--that the clothes she wore, the food she ate, the books she studied, the letter she wrote him, even down to ink, pen, and paper, the education and advantages she enjoyed, were all wrought in the mills, the mines, the offices, and by the interchange and inweaving and mighty labors of industrialism? The city teacher is paid by taxes levied on the commerce and labors of men, and the very farmer cannot heighten his life without exchange with the city.

And so her letter made him smile. Yet at the same time it stirred him mightily. All through it he could read renunciation; she was giving him up; she was loosening her hold over him; she was n.o.bly sacrificing her love to his life-work. And she announced herself as teachable and receptive. She could not yet understand, but understanding might come in time.

So in the night he tried to send his thought over the hills, flash his spirit into hers, in the great hope that she would thrill with a new comprehension, a new awakening.... In a world so mysterious, in an existence so strange, so impossible, so unbelievable, might such a miracle be stranger than the breath he breathed and the pa.s.sions he felt?

And so in that hope, that great wild hope, he fell asleep in the uneventful beginnings of the battle. And all through those unconscious hours forces were shaping about him and within him to bear his life through strange ways and among strange people. His theories, so easy as he drank them out of books, were to be tested in the living world of men and women, in that reality that hits back when we strike it, and that batters us about like driftwood in the whirlpool.

II

THE NINE-TENTHS

Standing on Washington Heights--that hump on northwestern Manhattan Island--gazing, say, from a window of the City College whose gray and quaint cl.u.s.ter fronts the morn as on a cliff above the city--one sees, at seven of a sharp morning, a low-hung sun in the eastern skies, a vast circle and lift of mild blue heavens, and at one's feet, down below, the whole sweep of New York from the wooded ridges of the Bronx to the Fifty-ninth Street bridge and the golden tip of the Metropolitan Tower.

It is a flood of roofs sweeping south to that golden, flashing minaret, a flood bearing innumerable high mill chimneys, church steeples, school spires, and the skeleton frames of gas-works. Far in the east the Harlem River lies like a sheet of dazzling silver, dotted with boats; every skylight, every point of gla.s.s or metal on the roofs, flashes in the sun, and, gazing down from that corner in the sky, one sees the visible morning hymn of the city--a drift from thousands of house chimneys of delicate unraveling skeins of white-blue smoke lifting from those human dwellings like aerial spirits. It is the song of humanity rising, the song of the ritual of breaking bread together, of preparation for the day of toil, the song of the mothers sending the men to work, the song of the mothers kissing and packing to school the rosy, laughing children.

It might be hard to imagine that far to the south in that moving human ocean, a certain Joe Blaine, swallowed in the sea, was yet as real a fact as the city contained--that to himself he was far from being swallowed, that he was, in fact, so real to himself that the rest of the city was rather shadowy and unreal, and that he was immensely concerned in a thousand-flashing torrent of thoughts, in a mix-up of appet.i.te and desires, and in the condition and apparel of his body. That as he sat at his desk, for instance, it was important to him to discover how he could break himself of a new habit of biting the end of his pen-holder.

And yet, under that flood of roofs, Joe was struggling with that crucial problem. He finally settled it by deciding to smoke lots of cigars, and proceeded to light one as a beginning. He smoked one, then a second, then a third--which was certainly bad for his health. He was in the throes of a violent reaction.

Several days of relentless activity had followed the moving in. There was much to do. The four rooms became immaculately clean--sweetened up with soap and water, with neat wallpaper, with paint and furniture.

Even the dark inner bedrooms contrived to look cozy and warm and inviting. Joe's mother was a true New England housekeeper, which meant scrupulous order, cleanliness, and brightness. The one room exempt from her rule was Joe's. After the first clean-up, his mother did not even try to begin on it.

"You're hopeless, Joe," she laughed, "and you'll ruin faster than I can set right."

And so that editorial office soon became a nest of confusion. The walls were lined with bookshelves and a quaint a.s.sortment of books, old and new, populated not only these, but the floor, the two tables, the roll-top desk, and here and there a chair. White paper began to heap up in the corners. Magazines--"my contemporaries," said the proud editor--began their limitless flood. And the matting on the floor was soon worn through by Joe's perpetual pacing.

The whole home, however, began to have atmosphere--personality. There was something open, hospitable, warm about it--something comfortable and livable.

Among the first things Joe did was to procure two a.s.sistants. One was the bookkeeper, Nathan Slate, a lean and dangling individual, who collapsed over his high desk in the corner like a many-bladed penknife.

He was thin and cadaverous, and spoke in a meek and melancholy voice, studied and slow. He dressed in black and tried to suppress his thin height by stooping low and hanging his head. The other addition was Billy, the office-boy, a sharp, bright youth with red hair and brilliant blue eyes.

There was much else to do. For instance, there were the money affairs to get in shape. Joe secured a five-per-cent mortgage with his capital.

Marty Briggs paid down two thousand cash and was to pay two thousand a year and interest. So Joe could figure his income at somewhat over six thousand dollars, and, as he hoped that he and his mother would use not more than fifteen hundred a year, or, at the most, two thousand, he felt he had plenty to throw into his enterprise.

Among the first things that Joe discovered was a gift of his own temperament. He was a born crowd-man, a "mixer." He found he could instantly a.s.sume the level of the man he talked with, and that his tongue knew no hindrance. Thought flowed easily into speech. This gave him a freedom among men, a sense of belonging anywhere, and singled him out from the rest. It gave him, too, the joy of expression--the joy of throwing out his thought and getting its immediate reaction in other lives. Yet he understood perfectly the man who seemed shy and recluse, who was choked-off before strangers, and who yet burned to be a democrat, to give and take, to share alien lives, to be of the moving throng of life. Such a man was the victim either of a wrong education, an education of repression that discouraged any personal display, or he had a twist in his temperament. Joe, who began to be well aware of his gift, used it without stint and found that it had a contagious quality--it loosened other people up; it unfolded their shy and secret petals like sun heat on a bud; it made the desert of personality blossom like the rose. He warmed the life about him because he could express himself.

So it was not hard for Joe to shift to this new neighborhood and become absorbed in its existence. Tradespeople, idlers, roomers and landlady in the house accepted him at once and felt as if they had known him all their lives. By a power almost of intuition he probed their obscure histories and entered into their destinies.

However, in spite of these activities and all the bustle and stir of fresh beginnings, Joe, that sunny morning, was suffering a sharp reaction. In the presence of Nathan Slate and Billy he was pretending to work, but his brain was as dry as a soda-cracker. It was that natural revulsion of the idealist following the first glow. Here he was, up against a reality, and yet with no definite plan, not even a name for his paper, and he had not even begun to penetrate the life about him.

The throbbing moment had arrived when he must set his theories into motion, drive them out into the lives of the people, and get reactions.

But how? In what way? His brain refused to think, and he felt nothing save a misery and poverty of the spirit that were unendurable.