The Nine-Tenths Part 23

"I know it," said Joe, "and I like it!"

They shook hands.

"Come over to-morrow and meet my mother!" He gave her the address.

"Good-by," she said. "And let me tell you, I'm simply primed for woman stuff. It is the women"--she repeated the phrase slowly--"it is the women, as you'll find, who bear the burden of the world! Good-by!"

"Good-by!"

He went down into the open air exulting.

He could not overcome his astonishment. She was so different than he had antic.i.p.ated, so much more human and simple; so much more easy to fit into the every-day shake-up of life, and full of that divine allowance for other people's shortcomings. It was impossible to act the tragedian before her. And, most wondrous of all, she was a "live wire." He had gone to her abasing himself; he came away as her employer, subtly cheered, encouraged, and lifted to new heights of vivid enterprise.

"Sally Heffer!" he kept repeating. "Isn't she a marvel! And, miracle of miracles, she is going to swing the great work with me!"

And so the Stove Circle was founded with Sally Heffer, Michael Dunan, Oscar Heming, Nathan Latsky, Salvatore Giotto, and Jacob Izon. Its members met together a fortnight later on a cold wintry night. The stove was red-hot, the circle drew about it on their kitchen chairs, and Joe spent the first meeting in going over his plans for the paper. There were many invaluable practical comments--especially on how to get news and what news to get--and each member was delegated to see to one department. Latsky and Giotto took immigration, Dunan took politics and the Irish, Heming took the East Side, Izon, foreign news, and Sally Heffer took workwomen. Thereafter each one in his way visited labor unions, clubs, and societies and got each group to pledge itself to send in news. They helped, too, to get subscriptions--both among their friends and in the unions. In this way Joe founded his paper. He never repeated the personal struggle of that first week, for he now had an enthusiastic following to spread the work for him--men and a woman, every one of whom had access to large bodies of people and was an authority in his own world.

But that wonderful week was never forgotten by Joe. Each day he had risen early and gone forth and worked till late at night, making a canva.s.s in good earnest. House after house he penetrated, knocking at doors, inquiring for a mythical Mrs. (or Mr.) Parsons (this to hush the almost universal fear that he had come to collect the rent or the instalment on the furniture or clothes of the family). In this way he started conversation. He found first that the immediate neighborhood knew him already. And he found many other things. He found rooms tidy, exquisite in their cleanliness and good taste of arrangement; and then other rooms slovenly and filthy. He found young wives just risen from bed, chewing gum and reading the department-store advertis.e.m.e.nts in the paper, their hair in curl-papers. He found fat women hanging out of windows, their dishes unwashed, their beds unmade, their floors unswept.

He found men sick in bed, and managed to sit down at their side and give them an interesting twenty minutes. He found other men, out of work, smoking and reading. He found one Italian family making "willow plumes"

in two narrow rooms--one a bedroom, the other a kitchen--every one at work, twisting the strands of feathers to make a swaying plume--every one, including the grandmother and little dirty tots of four and six--and every one of them cross-eyed as a result of the terrific work.

He found one dark cellar full of girls twisting flowers; and one attic where, in foul, steaming air, a Jewish family were "finishing"

garments--the whole place stacked with huge bundles which had been given out to them by the manufacturer. He found one home where an Italian "count" was the husband of an Irish girl, and the girl told him how she had been led into the marriage by the man's promise of t.i.tle and castle in Venice, only to bring her from Chicago to New York and confess that he was a poor laborer.

"But I made the best of it," she cried. "I put down my foot, hustled him out to work, and we've done well ever since. I've been knocking the dago out of him as hard as I can hit!"

"You're ambitious," said Joe.

"My! I'd give my hands for education!"

Joe prescribed _The Nine-Tenths_.

Everywhere he invited people to call--"drop over"--and see his plant and meet his mother. Even the strange specimen of white woman who had married a negro and was proud of it.

"Daniel's black outside, but there's many stuck-up women I know whose white man is black _inside_."

Absorbingly interesting was the quest--opening up one vista of life after another. Joe gained a moving-picture knowledge of life--saw flashed before him dramatic scene after scene, destiny after destiny--squalor, ignorance, crime, neatness, ambition, thrift, respectability. He never forgot the shabby dark back room where under gas-light a frail, fine woman was sewing ceaselessly, one child sick in a tumble-down bed, and two others playing on the floor.

"I'm all alone in the world," she said. "And all I make is two hundred and fifty dollars a year--less than five dollars a week--to keep four people."

Joe put her on the free list.

He learned many facts, vital elements in his history.

For instance, that on less than eight hundred dollars a year no family of five (the average family) could live decently, and that nearly half the people he met had less, and the rest not much more. That, as a rule, there were three rooms for five people; and many of the families gathered their fuel on the street; that many had no gas--used oil and wood; that many families spent about twenty-five cents a day for food; that few clothes were bought, and these mainly from the instalment man and second hand at that; that many were recipients of help; and that recreation and education were everywhere reduced to the lowest terms.

That is, boys and girls were hustled to work at twelve by giving their age as fourteen, and recreation meant an outing a year to Coney Island, and beer, and, once in a while, the nickel theater; that there were practically no savings. And there was one conclusion he could not evade--namely, that while overcrowding, improvidence, extravagance, and vice explained the misery of some families, yet there were limits. For instance:

On Manhattan Island no adequate housing can be obtained at less than twelve or fourteen dollars a month.

That there is no health in a diet of bread and tea.

That--curious facts!--coal burns up, coats and shoes wear out in spite of mending.

That the average housewife cannot take time to go bargain-hunting or experimenting with new food combinations, or in making or mending garments, and neither has she the ability nor training to do so.

That, in fact, the poor, largely speaking, were between the upper and nether millstones of low wages and high prices.

Of course there was the vice, but while drink causes poverty, poverty causes drink. Joe found intemperance among women; he found little children running to the saloon for cans of beer; he found plenty of men drunkards. But what things to offset these! The woman who bought three bushels of coal a week for seventy-five cents, watched her fires, picked out the half-burned pieces, reused them, and wasted no heat; the children foraging the streets for kindling-wood; the family in bed to keep warm; the wife whose husband had p.a.w.ned her wedding-ring for drink, and who had bought a ten-cent bra.s.s one, "to keep the respect of her children"; the man working for ten dollars a week, who once had owned his own saloon, but, so he said, "it was impossible to make money out of a saloon unless I put in gambling-machines or women, and I wouldn't stand for it"; the woman whose husband was a drunkard, and who, therefore, went to the Battery 5 A.M. to 10, then 5 P.M. to 7, every day to do scrubbing for twenty dollars a month; the wonderful Jewish family whose income was seven hundred and ninety-seven dollars and who yet contrived to save one hundred and twenty-three dollars a year to later send their two boys to Columbia University.

And everywhere he found the miracle of miracles: the spirit of charity and mutual helpfulness--the poor aiding the poorer; the exquisite devotion of mothers to children; the courage that braved a terrible life.

For a week the canva.s.s went on. Joe worked feverishly, and came home late at night too tired almost to undress himself. Again and again he exclaimed to his mother:

"I never dreamed of such things! I never dreamed of such poverty! I never dreamed of such human nature!"

Greenwich Village, hitherto a shabby red clutter of streets, uninviting, forbidding, dull, squalid, became for Joe the very swarm and drama and warm-blooded life of humanity. He began to sense the fact that he was in the center of a human whirlpool, in the center of beauty and ugliness, love and bitterness, misery and joy. The whole neighborhood began to palpitate for him; the stone walls seemed b.l.o.o.d.y with struggling souls; the pavements stamped with the steps of a battle.

"What can I do," he kept thinking, "with these people?"

And to his amazement he began to see that just as up-town offered the rivals of luxury, pleasure, and ease, so down-town offered the rivals of intemperance, grinding poverty, ignorance. His theories were beginning to meet the shock of facts.

"How move them? How touch them off?" he asked himself.

But the absorbing interest--the faces--the shadowy scenes--the gas-lit interiors--everywhere human beings, everywhere life, packed, crowded, evolving.

At the end of the week he stopped, though the fever was still on him. He had gained two hundred and fifty subscribers; he had distributed twelve hundred copies of the paper. He now felt that he could delay no longer in bringing out the next number. So he sat down, and, with Sally Heffer's words ringing in his mind, he wrote his famous editorial, "It is the Women":

It is the women who bear the burden of this world--the poor women.

Perhaps they have beauty when they marry. Then they plunge into drudgery. All day and night they are in dark and damp rooms, scrubbing, washing, cooking, cleaning, sewing. They wear the cheapest clothes--thin calico wrappers. They take their husbands' thin pay-envelopes, and manage the finances. They stint and save--they buy one carrot at a time, one egg. When rent-week comes--and it comes twice a month--they cut the food by half to pay for housing. They are underfed, they are denied everything but toil--save _love_. Child after child they bear. The toil increases, the stint is sharper, the worry infinite. Now they must clothe their children, feed them, dress them, wash them, amuse them.

They must endure the heart-sickness of seeing a child underfed. They must fight the demons of disease. Possibly they must stop a moment in the speed of their labor and face death. Only for a moment! Need calls them: mouths ask for food, floors for the broom, and the pay-envelope for keen reckonings. Possibly then the husband will begin to drink--possibly he will come home and beat his wife, drag her about the floor, blacken her eyes, break a rib. The next day the task is taken up again--the man is fed, the children clothed, the food marketed, the floor scrubbed, the dress sewn. And then as the family grows there come hard times. The man is out of work--he wants to work but cannot. Rent and the butcher and grocer must be paid, but there are no wages brought home. The woman takes in washing. She goes through the streets to the more prosperous and drags home a basket of soiled clothes. The burden of life grows heavier--the husband becomes accustomed to the changed relationships. Very often he ceases to be a wage-earner and loafs about saloons. From then on the woman wrestles with worlds of trouble--unimaginable difficulties. Truly, running a state may be easier than running a family. And yet the woman toils on; she does not complain; she sets three meals each day before husband and children; she sees that they have clothes; she gives the man his drink money; she endures his cruelty; she plans ambitiously for her children. Or possibly the man begins to work again, and then one day is killed in an accident.

There is danger of the family breaking up. But the woman rises to the crisis and works miracles. She keeps her head; she takes charge; she toils late into the night; she goes without food, without sleep. Somehow she manages. There was a seamstress in Greenwich Village who pulled her family of three and herself along on two hundred and fifty dollars a year--less than five dollars a week! If luck is with the woman the children grow up, go to work, and for a time ease the burden. But then, what is left? The woman is prematurely old--her hair is gray, her face drawn and wrinkled, or flabby and soiled, her back bent, her hands raw and red and big. Beauty has gone, and with the years of drudgery, much of the over-glory, much of the finer elements of love and joy, have vanished. Her mind is absorbed by little things--details of the day. She has ceased to attend church, she has not stepped beyond the street corner for years, she has not read or played or rested. Much is dead in her. Love only is left. Love of a man, love of children. She is a fierce mother and wife, as of old. And she knows the depth of sorrow and the truth of pain.

He repeated his programme. Perhaps--he afterward thought so himself--this editorial was a bit too pessimistic. But he had to write it--had to ease his soul. He set it off, however, by a lovely little paragraph which he printed boxed. Here it is:

Possibly much of the laughter heard on this planet comes from the mothers and fathers who are thinking or talking of the children.

In this way, then, Joe entered into the life of the people.

IV

OTHERS: AND THEODORE MARRIN

Joe became a familiar figure in Greenwich Village. As time went on, and issue after issue of _The Nine-Tenths_ appeared, he became known to the whole district. Whenever he went out people nodded right and left, pa.s.sed the time of day with him, or stopped him for a hand-shake and a question. He would, when matters were not pressing, pause at a stoop to speak with mothers, and people in trouble soon began to acquire a habit of dropping in at his office to talk things over with the "Old Man."

If it was a matter of employment, he turned the case over to some member of the Stove Circle; if it was a question of honest want, he drew on the "sinking-fund" and took a note payable in sixty days--a most elastic note, always secretly renewable; if it was an idle beggar, a vagrant, he made short work of his visitor. Such a visitor was Lady Hickory. Billy was at his little table next the door; over in the corner the still-despondent Slate was still collapsing; at the east window sat Editor Sally Heffer, digging into a ma.s.s of notes; and near the west, at the roll-top desk, a visitor's chair set out invitingly beside him, Joe was writing--weird exercise of muttering softly, so as not to disturb the rest, and then scratching down a sentence.