The Nine-Tenths Part 47

There was one kiss, one hug, and the brave girl was led away. The door slammed her in.

Joe and Myra looked at each other, awed, thrilled. Tears trickled down Myra's face.

"Oh," she cried low, "isn't it lovely? Isn't it wonderful?"

He spoke softly.

"The day of miracles isn't over. Women keep on amazing me. Come!"

Quietly they walked out into the warm, sunshiny day. Streaks of snow were vanishing in visible steam. The sky was a soft blue, bulbous with little puffs of cloud. Myra felt an ineffable peace. Rhona's heroism had filled her with a new sense of human power. She longed to speak with Joe--she longed, as they stood on the ferry, and glided softly through the wash and sway of the East River, to share her sweet emotions with him. But he had pulled out a note-book and was busily making jottings.

He seemed, if anything, more worn than ever, more tired. He was living on his nerves. The gray face was enough to bring tears to a woman's eyes, and the lank, ill-clothed form seemed in danger of thinning away to nothingness. So Myra said nothing, but kept looking at him, trying to save him by her strength of love, trying to send out those warm currents and wrap him up and infuse him with life and light and joy.

All the way out he had been silent, preoccupied. In fact, all these three days he had been preoccupied--toiling terribly early and late, busy, the center of a swarm of human activities, his voice everywhere, his pen in his hand. Meals he ate at his desk while he wrote, and sleep was gained in little s.n.a.t.c.hes. Myra had been there to watch him, there to help him. Since that night in the court, she had come early and stayed until ten in the evening, doing what work she could. And there was much to be done--she found a profitable task in instructing new recruits in the rules of picketing--and also in investigating cases of need. These took her to strange places. She had vistas of life she had not dreamed to be true--misery she had thought confined to novels, to books like _Les Miserables_. It was all wonderful and strange and new.

She was beginning to really know the life of the Greater Number--the life of the Nine-Tenths--and as she got used to the dust, the smells, and the squalor, she found daily all the richness of human nature. It was dramatic, absorbing, real. Where was it leading her? She hardly knew yet. The strangeness had not worn off.

She had been watching Joe, and she felt that he was hardly aware of her presence. He took her and her work as a matter of course. And this did not embitter her, for she felt that the time had pa.s.sed for privileges, that this was a season in Joe's life when he belonged to a ma.s.s of the people, to a great cause, and that she had no right to any part of his life. He was so deep in it, so overwrought, that it was best to let him alone, to keep him free from the responsibility of personal relationships, not to burden him with added emotionalism. And so she accepted the rule of Joe's mother--to do Joe's bidding without question, to let him have his way, waiting patiently for the time when he would need and cry out for the personal. When that time came the two women were ready to help to heal, to nurse--to bind the wounds and soothe the troubled heart, and rebuild the broken spirit. It might be, of course, that in the end he would shut Myra out; that was a contingency she had to face; but she thought that, whatever came, she was getting herself equal to it.

They left the ferry and walked over to Second Avenue and took an elevated train. Then Joe spoke--leaning near, his voice gentle:

"Myra."

"Yes, Joe."

"I've been wondering."

"What?"

"About this strike business. Wondering if it isn't mostly waste."

She found herself saying eagerly:

"But what else can the people do?"

He shook his head.

"In this country if men only voted right ... only had the right sort of government.... What are they gaining this way? It's too costly."

"But how are they going to vote right?"

"Education!" he exclaimed. "Training! We must train the children in democracy. We must get at the children."

Myra was amazed.

"Then you think your work is ... of the wrong sort?"

"No! no!" he said. "Everything helps--we must try every way--I may not be fit for any other way than this. But I'm beginning to think it isn't of the best sort. Maybe it's the only thing to do to-day, however."

She began to throb with a great hope.

"Don't you think," she cried, "you ought to go off and take a rest and think it over? You know you might go into politics, to Congress, or something--then you could really do something."

He looked at her with surprise.

"How you're thinking these days!" he mused. But then he went on very wearily. "Rest? Myra," his voice sank, "if I ever come out of this alive, I'll rest--rest deep, rest deep. But there's no end--no end to it...."

He reverted to the problem of the strike.

"Don't you think there's right on the other side, too? Don't you think many of the employers are doing all they can under present conditions?

We're asking too much. We want men to change their methods before we change conditions. Who can do it? I tell you, I may be wronging as fine a lot of men as there are."

"Then why did you go into it?" she asked, quickly.

"I didn't. It came to me. It bore me under. But I haven't made a mistake this time. By chance I'm on the _righter_ side, the better side. When it comes to the women in industry, there's no question. It is killing the future to work them this way--it is intolerable, inhuman, insane. We must stop it--and as we _don't_ vote right, we _must_ strike. A strike is justified these days--will be, until there's some other way of getting justice. Anyway, this time," he said, fiercely, "I'm right. But I'm wondering about the future. I'm wondering...."

He said nothing further, digging again at his notes. But Myra now nourished a hope, a secret throbbing hope ... the first ray of a new and more confident morning.

XII

CONFIDENT MORNING

Myra moved down to West Tenth Street. She found a neat, little hall bedroom in one of the three-story brick houses--a little white room, white-curtained, white-walled, with white counterpane on the iron bed.

She was well content with these narrow quarters, content because it was near Joe, content because it saved money (her savings were dwindling rapidly these days), and finally content because she had shifted the center of her interests to a different set of facts. She was both too busy and too aroused to be sensitive about running water and the minor comforts. Her whole being was engrossed in large activities, and she found with astonishment how many things she could do without. What previously had seemed so important, poetry, music, dress, quiet, ease, now became little things lost in a host of new big events. And, curiously enough, she found a new happiness in this freedom from superfluities--a sense of range and independence new to her. For at this time such things actually were superfluous, though the time was to come again when music and poetry had a new and heightened meaning.

But during these days of the strike she was a quite free woman, s.n.a.t.c.hing her sleep and her food carelessly, and putting in her time in spending heart and soul on the problem in hand. She dressed simply, in shirtwaist and skirt, and she moved among the people as if she were one of them, and with no sense of contrast. In fact, Myra was changing, changing rapidly. Her work called for a new set of powers, and without hesitation these new powers rose within her, emerged and became a part of her character. She became executive, quick, stepped into any situation that confronted her, knew when to be mild, when to be sharp, sensed where sympathy was needed, and also where sympathy merely softened and ruined. Her face, too, followed this inner change. Soft lines merged into something more vivid. She was usually pale, and her sweet, small mouth had a weary droop, but her eyes were keen and living, and lit with vital force.

She began to see that a life of ease and a life of extreme toil were both equally bad--that each choked off possibilities. She knew then that women of her type walked about with hidden powers unused, their lives narrowed and blighted, negative people who only needed some great test, some supreme task, to bring out those hidden forces, which, gushing through the soul, overflowing, would make of them characters of abounding vitality. She felt the glory of men and women who go about the world bubbling over with freshness and zest and life, warming the lives they move among, spreading by quick contagion their faith and virility.

She longed to be such a person--to train herself in that greatest of all the arts--the touching of other lives, drawing a music from long-disused heart-strings, rekindling, reanimating, the torpid spirit. It was her search for more _life_--richer, thicker, happier, more intense.

Her model was Joe's mother. It seemed to her that Joe's mother had met life and conquered it, and so would never grow old. She never found the older woman soured or bitter or enfeebled. Even about death there was no flinching.

"Don't you think I know," said Joe's mother, "that there is something precious in me that isn't going to go with the body? Just look at this body! That's just what's happening already! I'm too young to die. And besides I know one or two people whom I lost years ago--too precious to be lost--I've faith in them."

This, then, is the greatest victory of life: to treat death as a mere incident in the adventure; an emigration to a new country; a brief and tragic "auf wiedersehen." It has its pang of parting, and its pain of new birth--all birth is a struggle full of pain--but it is the only door to the future. Well for Joe's mother that her hand was ready to grasp the dark k.n.o.b and turn it when the time came.

Once as she and Joe's mother were s.n.a.t.c.hing a lunch together in the kitchen, the elder woman spoke softly:

"Myra, you're a great girl!" (She persisted in calling Myra a girl, though Myra kept telling her she was nearly thirty-three and old enough to be dignified.) "What will I ever do without you when the strike is over?"

Myra smiled.

"Is it as bad as that?"

"Yes, and getting worse, Myra!"