Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Bill Walker and PG Distributed Proofreaders THE NINE-TENTHS BY JAMES OPPENHEIM 1911 TO THE MEMORY OF MY FATHER CONTENTS PART I--THE DREAM I. THE PRINTERY II. THE EAST EIGHTY-FIRST STREET FIRE III. THE GOOD PEOPLE IV. GOLDEN OCTOBER V. MYRA AND JOE VI. MARTY BRIGGS VII. LAST OF JOE BLAINE AND HIS MEN VIII. THE WIND IN THE OAKS PART II--THE TEST I. BEGINNINGS II. THE NINE-TENTHS III. OTHERS: AND SALLY HEFFER IV. OTHERS: AND THEODORE MARRIN V. FORTY-FIVE TREACHEROUS MEN VI. A FIGHT IN GOOD EARNEST VII. OF THE THIRTY THOUSAND VIII. THE ARREST IX. RHONA X. THE TRIAL XI. THE WORKHOUSE XII. CONFIDENT MORNING XIII. THE CITY PART I--THE DREAM I THE PRINTERY That windy autumn noon the young girls of the hat factory darted out of the loft building and came running back with cans of coffee, and bags of candy, and packages of sandwiches and cakes. They frisked hilariously before the wind, with flying hair and sparkling eyes, and crowded into the narrow entrance with the grimy pressmen of the eighth floor. Over and over again the one frail elevator was jammed with the laughing crowd and shot up to the hat factory on the ninth floor and back. The men smoked cigarettes as the girls chattered and flirted with them, and the talk was fast and free. At the eighth floor the pressmen got off, still smoking, for "Mr. Joe" was still out. Even after the presses started up they went on surreptitiously, though near one group of them in a dark corner of the printery lay a careless heap of cotton waste, thoroughly soaked with machine-oil. This heap had been passed by the factory inspector unnoticed, the pressmen took it for granted, and Joe, in his slipshod manner, gave it no thought. Later that very afternoon as the opening of the hall door rang a bell sharply and Joe came in, the men swiftly and guiltily flung their lighted cigarettes to the floor and stepped them out or crumpled them with stinging fingers in their pockets. But Joe did not even notice the clinging cigarette smell that infected the strange printery atmosphere, that mingled with its delightful odor of the freshly printed page, damp, bitter-sweet, new. Once Marty Briggs, the fat foreman, had spoken to Joe of the breaking of the "No Smoking" rule, but Joe had said, with his luminous, soft smile: "Marty, the boys are only human--they see me smoking in the private office!" Up and down the long, narrow, eighth-floor loft the great intricate presses stood in shadowy bulk, and the intense gray air was spotted here and there with a dangling naked electric bulb, under whose radiance the greasy, grimy men came and went, pulling out heaps of paper, sliding in sheets, tinkering at the machinery. Overhead whirled and traveled a complex system of wheels and belting, whirring, thumping, and turning, and the floor, the walls, the very door trembled with the shaking of the presses and made the body of every man there pleasantly quiver. The stir of the hat factory on the floor above mingled with the stir of the presses, and Joe loved it all, even as he loved the presence of the young girls about him. Some of these girls were Bohemians, others Jewish, a few American. They gave to the gaunt, smoky building a touch as of a wild rose on a gray rock-heap--a touch of color and of melody. Joe, at noon, would purposely linger near the open doorway to get a glimpse of their bright faces and a snatch of their careless laughter. Some of the girls knew him and would nod to him on the street--their hearts went out to the tall, homely, sorrowful fellow. But his printery was his chief passion. It absorbed him by its masterful stress, overwhelming every sense, trembling, thundering, clanking, flashing, catching his eye with turning wheels and chewing press-mouths, and enveloping him in something tremulously homelike and elemental. Even that afternoon as Joe stood at the high wall-desk near the door, under a golden bulb of light, figuring on contracts with Marty Briggs, he felt his singular happiness of belonging. Here he had spent the work hours of the last ten years; he was a living part of this living press-room; this was as native to him as the sea to a fish. And glancing about the crowded gray room, everything seemed so safe, secure, unending, as if it would last forever. Up to that very evening Joe had been merely an average American--clean of mind and body, cheerful, hard-working, democratic, willing to live and let live, and striving with all his heart and soul for success. His father had served in the Civil War and came back to New York with his right sleeve pinned up, an emaciated and sick man. Then Joe's mother had overridden the less imperious will of the soldier and married him, and they had settled down in the city. Henry Blaine learned to write with his left hand and became a clerk. It was the only work he could do. Then, as his health became worse and worse, he was ordered to live in the country (that was in 1868), and as the young couple had scarcely any money they were glad to get a little shanty on the stony hill which is now the corner of Eighty-first Street and Lexington Avenue and is the site of a modern apartment-house. But Joe's mother was glad even of a shanty; she made an adventure of it; she called herself the wife of a pioneer, and said that they were making a clearing in the Western wilderness. Here in 1872 Joe was born, and he was hardly old enough to crawl about when his father became too sick to work, and his mother had to leave "her two men" home together and go out and do such work as she could. This consisted largely in reading to old ladies in the neighborhood, though sometimes she had to do fancy needlework and sometimes take in washing. Of these last achievements she was justly proud, though it made Henry Blaine wince with shame. Joe was only six years old when his father died, and from then on he and his mother fought it out together. The boy entered the public school on Seventy-ninth Street, and grew amazingly, his mind keeping pace. He was a splendid absorber of good books; and his mother taught him her poets and they went through English literature together. Yorkville sprang up, a rubber-stamped neighborhood, of which each street was a brownstone duplicate of the next. The rocky hill became valuable and went for twenty thousand dollars, of which three thousand had to be deducted for the mortgage. Then Joe graduated from high school, and, lusting for life, took a clerk's job with one of the big express companies. He held this for two years, and learned an interesting fact--namely, that a clerk's life began at 5 P.M. and ended at 8.30 A.M. In between the clerk was a dead but skilled machine that did the work of a child. He learned, besides, that advancement was slow and only for a few, and he saw these few, men past middle life, still underlings. A man of forty-five with a salary of three thousand was doing remarkably well, and, as a rule, he was a dried-up, negative, timid creature. Out of all this he went like a stick of dynamite, took the seventeen thousand dollars and went into his father's business of printing. Joe was shrewd, despite his open nature; he never liked to be "done"; and so he made money and made it fast. Besides his printing he did some speculating in real estate, and so at thirty-eight he was a successful business man and could count himself worth nearly a hundred thousand dollars. He made little use of this money; his was a simple, serious, fun-loving nature, and all his early training had made for plain living and economy. And so for years he and his mother had boarded in a brownstone boarding-house in the quiet block west of Lexington Avenue up the street. They spent very little on themselves. In fact, Joe was too busy. He was all absorbed in the printery--he worked early and late--and of recent years in the stress of business his fine relationship with his mother had rather thinned out. They began leading separated lives; they began shutting themselves away from each other. And so here he was, thirty-eight years of his life gone, and what had it all been? Merely the narrow, steady, city man's life--work, rest, a little recreation, sleep. Outside his mother, his employees, his customers, and the newspapers he knew little of the million-crowded life of the city about him. He used but one set of streets daily; he did not penetrate the vast areas of existence that cluttered the acres of stone in every direction. There stood the city, a great fact, and even that afternoon as the wild autumn wind blew from the west and rapid, ragged cloud masses passed huge shadows over the ship-swept Hudson, darkened briefly the hurrying streets, extinguished for a moment the glitter of a skyscraper and went gray-footed over the flats of Long Island, even at that moment terrific forces, fierce aggregations of man-power, gigantic blasts of tamed electricity, gravitation, fire, and steam and steel, made the hidden life of the city cyclonic. And in that mesh of nature and man the human comedy went on--there was love and disaster, frolic and the fall of a child, the boy buying candy in a shop, the woman on the operating-table in the hospital. Who could measure that swirl of life and whither it was leading? But who could live in the heart of it all and be unaware of it? Yet Joe's eyes were unseeing. Children played on the street, people walked and talked, the toilers were busy at their tasks, and that was all he knew or saw. And yet of late he had a new, unexpected vista of life. Like many men, Joe had missed women. There was his mother, but no one else. He was rather shy, and he was too busy. But during the last few months a teacher--Myra Craig--had been coming to the printery to have some work done for the school. She had strangely affected Joe--sprung an electricity on him that troubled him profoundly. He could not forget her, nor wipe her image from his brain, nor rid his ears of the echoes of her voice. He went about feeling that possibly he had underrated poetry and music. Romance, led by Myra's hand, had entered the dusty printery and Joe began to feel like a youngster who had been blind to life. Outside the world was blowing away on the gray wings of the twilight, blowing away with eddies of dust that swept the sparkling street-lamps, and the air was sharp with a tang of homesickness and autumn. The afternoon was quietly waning, up--stairs the hat-makers, and here the printers, were toiling in a crowded, satisfying present, and Joe stood there musing, a tall, gaunt man, the upstart tufts of his tousled hair glistening in the light overhead. His face was the homeliest that ever happened. The mouth was big and big-lipped, the eyes large, dark, melancholy and slightly sunken, and the mask was a network of wrinkles. His hands were large, mobile, and homely. But about him was an air of character and thought, of kindliness and camaraderie, of very human nature. He stood there wishing that Myra would come. The day seemed to demand it; the wild autumn cried out for men to seek the warmth and forgetful glory of love. He could get some nice house and make a home for her; he could take her out of the grind and deadliness of school-work and make her happy; there would be little children in that house. He thought she loved him; yes, he was quite sure. Then what hindrance? There, at quarter to five that strange afternoon, Joe felt that he had reached the heights of success, and he saw no obstacle to long years of solid advance. He had before his eyes the evidence of his wealth--the great, flapping presses, the bending, moving men. If anything was sure and solid in this world, these things were. He felt sure Myra would come. She had not been around for a week, and, anticipating a new meeting with her, he felt very young, like a very young man for the first time aware of the strange loveliness of night, its haunting and hidden beauties, its women calling from afar. It all seemed wild and impossible romance. It smote his heart-strings and set them trembling with music. He wondered why he had been so stupid all these years and evaded life, evaded joys that should have been his twenty years earlier. Now it seemed to him that his youth had passed from him defeated of its splendor. If Myra came to-day he would tell her. The very thought gave his heart a lovely quake of fear, a trembling that communicated itself to his hands and down his legs, a throbbing joy dashed with a strange tremor. And then as he wanted, as he wished for, the door beside him opened and the bell sharply sounded. She stood there, very small, very slight, but quite charming in her neat, lace-touched clothes. A fringe at the wrist, a bunch at the neck, struck her off as some one delicate and sensitive, and the face strengthened this impression. It was long and oval, with a narrow woman-forehead cut off by a curve of dark hair; the mouth was small and sweet; the nose narrow; the eyes large, clear gray, penetrating. Under the gracefully modeled felt hat she stood quite complete, quite a personality. One instantly guessed that she was an aristocrat by birth and breeding. But her age was doubtful, seeming either more or less than the total, which was thirty-two. There she stood, glancing at Joe with a breathless eagerness. He turned pale, and yet at the same time there was a whirl of fire in his heart. She had come to him; he wanted to gather her close and bear her off through the wild autumn weather, off to the wilderness. He reached out a hand and inclosed a very cold and very little one. "Why, you're frozen!" he said, with a queer laugh. "Oh--not much!" she gasped. She held her leather bag under her arm and took off her gloves. Then she loosened her coat, and gave a sigh. He gazed at her warm-tinted cheek, almost losing himself, and then murmured, suddenly: "More school stuff?" She made a grimace and tried to speak lightly, but her voice almost failed her. "Class 6-B, let me tell you, is giving the 'Landing of the Pilgrims,' and every blessed little pilgrim is Bohemian. Here's the programme!" With trembling fingers she opened her bag and handed him some loose sheets. He bent over them at once. "Now make it cheap, Mr. Blaine," she said, severely. "Rock bottom! Or I'll give the job to some one else." Joe laughed strangely. "How many copies?" "One thousand." He spoke as if in fear. "Fifty cents too much?" Myra laughed. "I don't want the school to ruin you!" He said nothing further, and in the awkward silence she began pitifully to button her coat. There was no reason for staying. Then suddenly he spoke, huskily: "Don't go, Miss Craig...." "You want ..." she began. He leaned very close. "I want to take a walk with you. May I?" She became dead white, and the terror of nature's resistless purpose with men and women, that awful gravitation, that passion of creation that links worlds and uses men and women, went through them both. "I may?" he was whispering. Her "Yes" was almost inaudible. So Joe put on his coat, and slapped over his head a queer gray slouch hat, and called over Marty. "I won't be back to-night, Marty!" he said. Then at the door he gave one last glance at his life-work, the orderly presses, the harnessed men, and left it all as if it must surely be there when he returned. He was proud at that moment to be Joe Blaine, with his name in red letters on the glass door, and under his name "Power Printer." His wife would be able to hold her head high. The frail elevator took them clanking, bumping, slipping, down, down past eight floors, to the street level. The elevator boy, puffing at his cigarette, remarked, amiably: "Gee! it's a windy day. It's gittin' on to winter, all right.... Good-night, Mr. Blaine!" "Good-night, Tom," said Joe. II THE EAST EIGHTY-FIRST STREET FIRE They emerged in all the magic wildness of an autumn night and walked east on Eighty-first Street. The loft building was near the corner of Second Avenue. They passed under the elevated structure, cutting through a hurrying throng of people. "Take my arm," cried Joe. She took it, trembling. They made an odd couple passing along between the squalid red-brick tenements, now in shadow, now in the glow of some little shop window, now under a sparkling lamp. At Avenue A they went south to Seventy-ninth Street, and again turned east, passing a row of bright model tenements, emerging at last at the strange riverside. Down to the very edge of the unpaved waste they walked, or rather floated, so strange and uplifted and glorious they felt, blown and carried bodily with the exultant west wind, and they only stopped when they reached the wooden margin, where an old scow, half laden with brick, was moored fast with ropes. This scow heaved up and down with the motion of the rolling waters; the tight ropes grated; the water swashed melodiously. The man and woman seemed alone there, a black little lump in the vast spaces, for behind them the city receded beyond empty little hill-sides and there was nothing some distance north and south. "Look," said Joe, "look at the tide!" It was running north, a wide expanse of rolling waters from their feet to Blackwells Island in the east, all hurling swiftly like a billowing floor of gray. Here and there whitecaps spouted. On Blackwells Island loomed the gray hospitals and workhouses, and at intervals on the shore sparkled a friendly light. "But see the bridge," exclaimed Myra. She pointed far south, where across the last of the day ran a slightly arched string of lights, binding shore with shore. On the New York side, and nearer, rose the high chimneys of mills, and from these a purplish smoke swirled thickly, melting into the gray weather. And it seemed to Joe at that wild moment that nothing was as beautiful as smoking chimneys. They meant so much--labor, human beings, fire, warmth. And over all--river, bridge, chimneys, Blackwells Island, and the throbbing city behind them--rose the immense gray-clouded heavens. A keen smell of the far ocean came to their nostrils and the air was clear and exhilarant. Then, as they watched, suddenly a tug lashed between enormous flat boats on which were red freight-cars, swept north with the tide. A thin glaze of heat breathed up from the tug's pipe; it was moving without its engines, and the sight was unbelievable. The whole huge mass simply shot the river, racing by them. And then the very magic of life was theirs. The world fell from them, the dusty scales of facts, the complex intricacies of existence melted away. They were very close, and the keen, yelling wind was wrapping them closer. Vision filled the gray air, trembled up from the river to the heavens. They rose from all the chaos like two white flames blown by the wind together--they were two gigantic powers of the earth preparing like gods for new creation. In that throbbing moment each became the world to the other, and love, death-strong, shot their hearts. He turned, gazing strangely at her pale, eager, breathless face. "I want ..." he began. "Yes," she breathed. He opened his lips, and the sound that escaped seemed like a sob. "Myra!" And then at the sound of her name she was all woman, all love. She cried out: "Joe!" And they flung their arms round each other. She sobbed there, overcome with the yearning, the glory, the beatitude of that moment. "Oh," he cried, "how I love you!... Myra ..." "Joe, Joe--I couldn't have stood it longer!" All of life, all of the past, all of the million years of earth melted into that moment, that moment when a man and a woman, mingled into one, stood in the heart of the wonder, the love, the purpose of nature--a mad, wild, incoherent half-hour, a secret ecstasy in the passing of the twilight, in the swing of the wind and the breath of the sea. "Come home to my mother," cried Joe. "Come home with me!" They turned ... and Myra was a strange new woman, tender, grave, and wrought of all lovely power, her face, in the last of the light, mellow and softly glowing with a heightened woman-power. "Yes," she said, "I want to see Joe's mother." It was Joe's last step to success. Now he had all--his work, his love. He felt powerfully masculine, triumphant, glorious. Night had fallen, and on the darkness broke and sparkled a thousand lights in tenement windows and up the shadowy streets--everywhere homes, families; men, women, and children busily living together; everywhere love. Joe glanced, his eyes filling. Then he paused. "Look at that," he said in a changed voice. Over against the west, a little to the north, the gray heavens were visible--a lightning seemed to run over them--a ghastly red lightning--sharply silhouetting the chimneyed housetops. "What is it?" said Myra. He gazed at it, transfixed. "That's a fire ... a big fire." Then suddenly his face, in the pale light of a street-lamp, became chalky white and knotted. He could barely speak. "It must be on Eighty-first or Eighty-second Street." She spoke shrilly, clutching his arm. "Not ... the loft?" "Oh, it can't be!" he cried, in an agony. "But come ... hurry ..." They started toward Eighty-first Street up Avenue A. They walked fast; and it seemed suddenly to Joe that he had been dancing on a thin crust, and that the crust had broken and he was falling through. He turned and spoke harshly: "You must run!" Fear made their feet heavy as they sped, and their hearts seemed to be exploding in their breasts. They felt as if that fire were consuming them; as if its tongues of flame licked them up. And so they came to the corner of Eighty-first Street and turned it, and looked, and stopped. Joe spoke hoarsely. "It's burning;... it's the loft.... The printery's on fire...." Beyond the elevated structure at Second Avenue the loft building rose like a grotesque gigantic torch in the night. Swirls of flame rolled from the upper three stories upward in a mane of red, tossing volumes of smoke, and the wild wind, combing the fire from the west, rained down cinders and burned papers on Joe and Myra as they rushed up the street. Every window was blankly visible in the extreme light, streams of water played on the walls, and the night throbbed with the palpitating, pounding fire-engines. And it seemed to Joe as if life were torn to bits, as if the world's end had come. It was unbelievable, impossible--his eyes belied his brain. That all those years of labor and dream and effort were going up in flame and smoke seemed preposterous. And only a few moments before he and Myra had stood on the heights of the world; had their mad moment; and even then his life was being burned away from him. He felt the hoarse sobs lifting up through his throat. They reached Second Avenue, and were stopped by the vast swaying crowd of people, a density that could not be cloven. They went around about it frantically; they bore along the edge of the crowd, beside the houses; they wedged past one stoop; they were about to get past the next, when, in the light of the lamp, Joe saw a strange sight. Crouched on that stoop, with clothes torn, with hair loosed down her back, her face white, her lips gasping, sat one of the hat factory girls. It was Fannie Lemick. Joe knew her. And no one seemed to notice her. The crowd was absorbed in other things. And even at that moment Joe heard the dire clanging of ambulances, and an awful horror dizzied his brain. No, no, not that! He clutched the stoop-post, leaned, cried weirdly: "Fannie! Fannie!" She gazed up at him. Then she recognized him and gave a terrible sob. "Mr. Joe! Oh, how did you get out?" "I wasn't there," he breathed. "Fannie! what's happened?... None of the girls ..." "You didn't know?" she gasped. He felt the life leaving his body; it seemed impossible. "No ..." he heard himself saying. "Tell me...." She looked at him with dreadful eyes and spoke in a low, deadly, monotonous voice: "The fire-escape was no good; it broke under some of the girls;... they fell;... we jammed the hall;... some of the girls jumped down the elevator shaft;... they couldn't get out ... and Miss Marks, the forelady, was trying to keep us in order.... She stayed there ... and I ran down the stairs, and dropped in the smoke, and crawled ... but when I got to the street ... I looked back ... Mr. Joe ... the girls were jumping from the windows...." Joe seized the stoop-post. His body seemed torn in two; he began to reel. "From the ninth floor," he muttered, "and couldn't get out.... And I wasn't there! Oh, God, why wasn't I killed there!" III THE GOOD PEOPLE Joe broke through the fire line. He stepped like a calcium-lit figure over the wet, gleaming pavement, over the snaky hose, and among the rubber-sheathed, glistening firemen, gave one look at the ghastly heap on the sidewalk, and then became, like the host of raving relatives and friends and lovers, a man insane. It was as if the common surfaces of life--the busy days, the labor, the tools, the houses--had been drawn aside like a curtain and revealed the terrific powers that engulf humanity. In his ears sounded the hoarse cries of the firemen, the shout of the sprayed water, the crash of axes, the shatter of glass. It was too magnificent a spectacle, nature, like a Nero, using humanity to make a sublime torch in the night. And through his head pulsed and pulsed the defiant throb of the engines. Cinders fell, sticks, papers, and Joe saw fitfully the wide ring of hypnotized faces. It was as if the world had fallen into a pit, and human beings looked on each other aghast. "Get back there!" cried a burly policeman. Joe resisted his shouldering. "I'm Mr. Blaine;... it's my loft burning. I'm looking for my men...." "Go to the morgue then," snapped the policeman. "A fire line's a fire line." Joe was pushed back, and as the crowd closed about him, a soft pressure of clothing, men and women, he became aware of the fact that he had lost his head. He pulled himself together; he told himself that he, a human being, was greater than anything that could happen; that he must set his jaw and fight and brave his way through the facts. He must get to work. Myra clutched his sleeve. He turned to her a face of death, but she brought her wide eyes close to him. "Joe! Joe!" "Myra," he said, in a whisper, suddenly in that moment getting a sharp revelation of his changed life. "I may never see you again. I belong to those dead girls." He paused. "Go home ... do that for me, anyway." He had passed beyond her; there was no opposing him. "I'll go," she murmured. Then, dizzily, she reeled back, and was lost in the crowd. And then he set to work. He was strangely calm now, numb, unfeeling. There was nothing more to experience, and the overwrought brain refused any new emotions. So stupendous was the catastrophe that it left him finally calm, ready, and eagerly awake. He stepped gently through the crowd, searching, and found John Rann, the pressman. John wept like a little boy when they met. "Marty got out ... yes ... most of us did ... but Eddie Baker, Morty, and Sam Bender.... It was the cotton waste, Mr. Joe, and the cigarettes...." Joe put his arm about the rough man. "Never mind, Johnny ... Go home to the kiddies...." There was so little he could do. He went to a few homes he knew, he went to the hospital to ask after the injured, he went to the morgue. At midnight the fire, like an evil thing, drew him back, and he encountered only a steamy blackness lit by the search-light of the engine. There was still the insistent throbbing. And then he thought of his mother and her fears, and sped swiftly up the street, over deserted Lexington Avenue, and up the lamp-lit block. Already newsboys were hoarsely shouting in the night, as they waved their papers--a cry of the underworld palpitating through the hushed city: "Wuxtra! Wuxtra! Great--fire--horror! Sixty--killed! Wuxtra!" The house was still open, lighted, awake. People came into the hall as he entered, but he shunned them and started up the stairs. One called after him. "Your mother's out, Mr. Joe." He turned. "Out? How long?" "Since the fire started ... She's been back and forth several times ..." He went on up, entered the neat, still front room, lit the gas beside the bureau mirror, and began to pace up and down. His mother was searching for him; he might have known it; he should have remembered it. And then he heard the uncanny shouting of the newsboys--as if those dead girls had risen from their ashes and were running like flaming furies through the city streets, flinging handfuls of their fire into a million homes, shaking New York into a realization of its careless, guilty heart, crying for vengeance, stirring horror and anger and pity. Who was the guilty one, if not he, the boss? And then the inquisition began, the repeated sting of lashing thoughts and cruel questions. He asked himself what right he had to be an employer, to take the responsibility of thirty lives in his hands. He was careless, easy-going, he was in business for profits. Had such a man any right to be placed over others, to be given the power over other lives? The guilt was his; the blame fell on him. He should have kept clean house; he should have stamped out the smoking; he should not have smoked himself. There fell upon his shoulders a burden not to be borne, the burden of his blame, and he felt as if nothing now in the world could assuage that sense of guilt. Life, he found, was a fury, a cyclone, not the simple, easy affair he had thought it. It was his living for himself, his living alone, his ignorance of the fact that his life was tangled in with the lives of all human beings, so that he was socially responsible, responsible for the misery and poverty and pain all about him. That _he_ should be the one! Had he not lived just the average life--blameless, cheerful, hard-working, fun-loving--the life of the average American? Just by every-day standards his was the useful and good life. But no, that was not enough. In his rush for success he had made property his treasure instead of human beings. That was the crime. And so these dead lay all about him as if he had murdered them with his hands. It was his being an average man that had killed sixty-three girls and men. And what had he been after? Money? He did not use his money, did not need so much. Just a little shared with his employees would have saved them. No, the average man must cease to exist, and the social man take his place, the brother careful of his fellow-men, not careless of all but his own gain. A boy passed, hoarsely shouting that terrible extra. Would nothing in the world silence that sound? The cold sweat came out on his face. He was the guilty one. That was the one fact that he knew. And then he paused; the door opened creakingly and his mother entered. She was a magnificent young-old woman, her body sixty-three years old, her mind singularly fresh and young. She was tall, straight, spirited, and under the neat glossy-white hair was a noble face, somewhat long, somewhat slim, a little pallid, but with firm chin and large forehead and living large black eyes set among sharp lines of lids. The whole woman was focussed in the eyes, sparkled there, lived there, deep, limpid, quick, piercing. Her pallor changed to pure whiteness. "Joe ..." her voice broke. "I've been looking for you...." He paused, walled away from her by years of isolation. She advanced slowly; her face became terrible in its hungry love, its mother passion. She met his eyes, and then he fled to her, and his body shook with rough, tearless sobs. Her relief came in great tears. "And all those girls," she was murmuring, "and those men. How did it happen?" He drew back; his eyes became strange. "Mother," he said, harshly, "I'm the guilty one. There was a heap of cotton waste in the corner, shouldn't have been there. And I let the men smoke cigarettes." She was horrified. "But _why_ did you do that?" she whispered, moving a little away from him. "My thoughtlessness ... my _business_." The word was charged with bitterness. "Business! business! I'm a business man! I wasn't in business"--he gave a weird laugh--"for the health of my employees! I was making money!" She looked at him as if he had ceased being her son and had turned into a monster. Then she swayed, grasped the bedpost and sank on the bed. Her voice was low and harsh. "_Your_ fault ... and all those young girls...." His mother had judged him; he looked at her with haggard eyes, and spoke in a hollow voice. "Nothing will ever wipe this guilt from my mind.... I'm branded for life ... this thing will go on and on and on every day that I live...." She glanced at him then, and saw only her son, the child she had carried in her arms, the boy who had romped with her, and she only knew now that he was suffering, that no one on earth could be in greater pain. "Oh, my poor Joe!" she murmured. "Yes," he went on, beside himself, "I'm blasted with guilt...." She cried out: "If you go on like this, we'll both go out of our minds, Joe! Fight! It's done ... it's over.... From now on, make amends.... Joe!"--She rose magnificently then--"Your father lost his arm in the war.... Now give your life to setting things right!" And she drew him close again. Her words, her love, her belief in him roused him at last. "You know the fault isn't all yours," she said. "The factory inspector's to blame, too--and the men--and the people up-stairs--and the law because it didn't demand better protection and fire-drills--all are to blame. You take too much on yourself...." And gradually, striving with him through the early morning hours, she calmed him, she soothed him, and got him to bed. He was at last too weary to think or feel and he slept deep into the day. And thinking a little of herself, she realized that the tragedy had brought them closer together than they had been for years. * * * * * Out of those ashes on East Eighty-first Street rose a certain splendor over the city. All of New York drew together with indignation and wondrous pity. It did not bring the dead girls to life again--it was too late for that--but it brought many other dead people to life. Fifty thousand dollars flowed to the newspapers for relief; an inquest probed causes and guilt and prevention; mass--meetings were held; the rich and the powerful forgot position and remembered their common humanity; and the philanthropic societies set to work with money, with doctors and nurses and visitors. The head of one huge association said to the relief committee in a low, trembling voice: "Of course, our whole staff is at your service." Just for a time, a little time, the five-million-manned city flavored its confused, selfish struggle with simple brotherhood. How had it happened? Whose was the fault? How came it that sixty girls were imprisoned in the skies, as it were, and could only fling themselves down to the stone pavement in an insanity of terror? What war was more horrible than this Peace of Industry? Such things must be prevented in future, said New York, rising like a wrathful god--and for a while the busy wheels of progress turned. Joe had to attend the inquest as a witness. He gave his testimony in a simple, sincere, and candid way that gained him sympathy. His men testified in his behalf, trying to wholly exonerate him and inculpate themselves, and the lawyers cleverly scattered blame from one power to another--the city, the State, the fire department, the building department, etc. It became clear that Joe could not be officially punished; it was evident that he had done as much as the run of employers to protect life, and that his intentions had been blameless. However, that did not ease Joe's real punishment. He was a changed man that week, calm, ready with his smile, but haggard and bowed, nervous and overwrought, bearing a burden too heavy for his heart. He made over the twenty thousand dollars of insurance money to the Relief and Prevention Work; he visited the injured and the bereaved; he forgot Myra and tried to forget himself; he attended committee meetings. Myra wrote him a little note: DEAR JOE,--Don't forget that whatever happens I believe in you utterly and I love you and shall always love you, and that you have me when all else is lost. Your MYRA. To which he merely replied: DEAR MYRA,--I shall remember what you say, and I shall see you when I can. Yours, JOE. It was on Sunday afternoon that Joe met Fannie Lemick on the street. Her eyes filled with tears and he noticed she was trembling. "Mr. Joe!" she cried. "Yes, Fannie...." "Are you going, too?" "Going where?" "Don't you know? _The mass-meeting at Carnegie Hall_!" He looked at her, smiling. "I'll go with you, if I may!" So they went down together. A jam of poor people was crowding the doors, and a string of automobiles drew up and passed at the curb. Joe and Fannie got in the throng. There was no room left in the orchestra and they were swept with the flood up and up, flight after flight, to the high gallery. Here they found seats and looked down, down as if on the side of the planet, on the far-away stage filled with the speakers and the committees, and on that sea of humanity that swept back and up through the boxes to themselves. All in the subdued light, the golden light that crowd sat, silent, remorseful, stirred by a sense of having risen to a great occasion; thousands of human beings, the middle class, the rich, the poor; Americans, Germans, Italians, Jews. But all about him Joe felt a silent hatred, a still cry for vengeance, a class bitterness. Many of these were relatives of the dead. It was a demonstration of the human power that refuses to submit to environment and circumstance and fate; that rises and rebukes facts, reshapes destiny. And then the speaking began: the bishop, the rabbi, the financier, the philanthropist, the social worker. They spoke eloquently, they showed pity, they were constructive, they were prepared to act; they represented the "better classes" and promised the "poor," the toilers, that they would see that relief and protection were given; but somehow their eloquence did not carry; somehow that mass of commonest men and women refused to be stirred and thrilled. There was even a little hissing when it was announced that a committee of big men would see to the matter. Joe had a dull sense of some monstrous social cleavage; the world divided into the rulers and the ruled, the drivers and the driven. He felt uncomfortable, and so did the throng. There was a feeling as if the crowd ought to have a throat to give vent to some strange, fierce fact that festered in its heart. And then toward the end the chairman announced that one of the hat-trimmers, one of the girls who worked--in another hat factory, would address the meeting--Miss Sally Heffer. A girl arose, a young woman with thin, sparse, gold-glinting hair, with face pallid and rounded, with broad forehead and gray eyes of remarkable clarity. She was slim, dressed in a little brown coat and a short brown skirt. She came forward, trembling, as if overcome by the audience. She paused, raised her head and tried to speak. There was not a sound, and suddenly the audience became strangely still, leaning forward, waiting. Then again she tried to speak; it was hardly above a whisper; and yet so clear was the hush that Joe heard every word. And he knew, and all knew, that this young woman was overcome, not by the audience, but by the passion of the tragedy, the passion of an oppressed class. She was the voice of the toilers at last dimly audible; she was the voice of a million years of sore labor and bitter poverty and thwarted life. And the audience was thrilled, and the powerful were shaken with remorse. Trembling, terrible came the words out of that little body on the far stage: "I would be a traitor to these poor burned bodies if I came here to talk good-fellowship. We have tried you good people of the public and we have found you wanting. The old Inquisition had its rack and its thumbscrews and its instruments of torture with iron teeth. We know what these things are to-day: the iron teeth are our necessities, the thumbscrews the high-powered and swift machinery close to which we must work, and the rack is here in the fire-trap structures that will destroy us the minute they catch on fire. "This is not the first time girls have been burned alive in this city. Every week I learn of the untimely death of one of my sister workers. Every year thousands of us are maimed. _The life of men and women is so cheap and property is so sacred!_ There are so many of us for one job, it matters little if sixty of us are burned to death. "We have tried you citizens; we are trying you now, and you have a couple of dollars for the sorrowing mothers and brothers and sisters by way of a charity gift. But every time the workers come out in the only way they know to protest against conditions which are unbearable, the strong hand of the law is allowed to press heavily down on us. "Public officials have only words of warning to us--warning that we must be intensely orderly and intensely peaceable, and they have the workhouse just back of all their warnings. "I can't talk fellowship to you who are gathered here. Too much blood has been spilled. I know from my experience it is up to the working people to save themselves. The only way they can save themselves is by a strong working-class movement." Joe heard nothing further. There were several other speakers, but no words penetrated to his brain. He felt as if he must stifle. He felt the globe of earth cracking, breaking in two under his feet, and for the first time in his life he was acutely aware of the division of humanity. All through his career he had taken his middle-class position for granted; he tacitly agreed that there were employees and employers; but in his own case his camaraderie had hidden the cleavage. Now he saw a double world--on the one side the moneyed owners, on the other the crowded, scrambling, disorganized hordes of the toilers--each one of them helpless, a victim, worked for all that was in him, and then flung aside in the scrap heap. And behold, this horde was becoming self-conscious, was beginning to organize, was finding a voice. And he, who was one of the "good people," was rejected by this voice. He had been "tried" and found wanting. He was on the other side of the fence. And it was the fault of his class that fire horrors and all the chaos and cruelty of industry arose. So that now the working people had found that they must "save themselves." In an agony of guilt again he felt what he had said to Myra: "From now on I belong to those dead girls"--yes, and to their fellow-workers. Suddenly it seemed to him that he must see Sally Heffer--that to her he must carry the burden of his guilt--to her he must personally make answer to the terrible accusations she had voiced. It was all at once, as if only in this way could he go on living, that otherwise he would end in the insanity of the mad-house or the insanity of suicide. He was walking down the stairs with Fannie, and he was trembling. "Do you know this Sally Heffer?" "Know her? We all do!" she cried, with all a young girl's enthusiasm. "I want to see her, Fannie. Where does she live?" "Oh, somewhere in Greenwich Village. But she'll be up at the Woman's League after the meeting." He went up to the Woman's League and found the office crowded with women and men. He asked for Miss Heffer. "I'll take your name," said the young woman, and then came back with the answer that "he'd have to wait." So he took a seat and waited. He felt feverish and sick, as if he could no longer carry this burden with him. It seemed impossible to sit still. And yet he waited over an hour, waited until it was eight at night, all the gas-jets lit. The young woman came up to him. "You want to see Miss Heffer? Come this way." He was led up a flight of stairs to a little narrow hall-room. Sally Heffer was there at a roll-top desk, still in her little brown coat--quiet, pale, her clear eyes remarkably penetrating. She turned. "Yes?" He shook pitifully,... then he sat down, holding his hat in his hands. "I'm Joe Blaine...." "Joe Blaine ... of what?" "Of the printery ... that burned...." She looked at him sharply. "So, you're the employer." "Yes, I am." "Well," she said, brusquely, "what do you want?" "I heard you speak this afternoon." His face flickered with a smile. "And so you ...?" He could say nothing; and she looked closer. She saw his gray face, his unsteady eyes, the tragedy of the broken man. Then she spoke with a lovely gentleness. "You want to do something?" "Yes," he murmured, "I want to give--all." She lowered her voice, and it thrilled him. "It won't help to give your money--you must give yourself. We don't want charity." He said nothing for a moment; and then strength rose in him. "I'll tell you why I came.... I felt I had to.... I felt that you were accusing me. I know I am guilty. I have come here to be"--he smiled strangely--"sentenced." She drew closer. "You came here for _that_?" "Yes." She rose and took a step either way. She gazed on him, and suddenly she broke down and cried, her hands to her face. "O God," she sobbed, "when will all this be over? When will we get rid of this tragedy? I can't stand it longer." He rose, too, confused. "Listen," he whispered. "I swear to you, I swear, that from this day on my life belongs to those"--his voice broke--"dead girls ... to the toilers...." She impulsively reached out a hand, and he seized it. Then, when she became more quiet, she murmured: "I can see you mean it. Oh, this is wonderful! It is a miracle springing out of the fire!" There was a strange throbbing silence that brought them close together. And Sally, glancing at him again, whispered: "I can see
{'title': 'The Nine-Tenths by James Oppenheim', 'source': 'Project Gutenberg', 'lang': 'en'}