The Harbor Part 58

"And what I want to ask you now is that you take no halfway course.

Either send me out of this dock a free man or up the river to the chair.

For this is no year for compromise. Am I a murderer? Yes or no. Decide with your eyes wide open. If you set me free I shall still rebel. I shall join my comrades over the sea who already are going about in the camps and saying to the rank and file--'You can stop this slaughter! You can save this world gone mad! You can end this murder--both in time of war and peace!'"

And the jury set Joe free.

Early in the following week I went down to his room by the docks for a last evening with him there. Joe was sailing that same night. Under a name not his own he had taken pa.s.sage in the steerage of the big fast liner which was to sail at one o'clock. Into his room all evening poured his revolutionist friends, and the chance of revolution abroad was talked of in cool practical terms. Nothing could be done, they said, in the first few months to stop this war. Years ago the man in France, who had led the anti-war movement, had predicted that if war broke out every government rus.h.i.+ng in would force on its people the belief that this was no war of aggression but one of defense of the fatherland from a fierce onrus.h.i.+ng foe. And so in truth it had come about, and against that appeal to fight for their homes no voice of reason could stem the tide.

The socialists had been swept on with the rest. By tens and hundreds of thousands they had already gone to the front. But it was upon this very fact that Joe and his friends now rested their hopes. For just so soon as in the camps the first burst of enthusiasm had begun to die away, as the millions in the armies began to grow sick of the sight of blood, the groans and the shrieks of the wounded and dying, the stench of the dead--and themselves weary of fighting, worn by privation and disease, began to think of their distant homes, their wives and children starving there--then these socialists in their midst, one at every bivouack fire, would begin to ask them:

"Why is it that we are at war? What good is all this blood to us? Is it to make our toil any lighter, life any brighter in our homes--or were we sent out by our rulers to die only in order that they in their scramble might take more of the earth for themselves? And if this is true why not rise like men and end this fearful carnage?"

Already these thousands were in the camps. Into Joe's room that evening came men to give him the names and regiments of those comrades he could trust. Joe with a few hundred others was to make his dangerous way into the camps and the barracks, wherever that was possible, of French and Russians and Germans alike, to carry news from one to the other, to make ready and to plan.

Now and then, in the talk that night, I felt the thrilling presence of that rising G.o.d, that giant spirit of the crowd, not dead but only sleeping now to gain new strength for what it must do. And again in gleams and flashes I saw the vision of the end--the world for all the workers. For in this crowded tenement room, forgotten now by governments, this rough earnest group of men seemed so sure of this world of theirs, so sure that it was now soon to be born.

One by one they went away, and Joe and I were left alone. Slowly he refilled his pipe. I thought of the talks we had had in ten years.

"Well Bill," he inquired at last, "what are you going to do with yourself?"

"Write what I see in the crowd," I said, "from my new point of view--this year's point of view," I added. I went on to tell him what the English writer had said. And I told of my book on the harbor.

"Well," said Joe when I was through, "I guess it's about the best you can do. You've got a wife to think of."

"You don't know her," I rejoined, and I told him how she had changed our home in order not to stop my work.

"But don't you see what she's up to?" said Joe.

"What the devil do you mean?" I asked indignantly. Joe blew a pitying puff of smoke.

"You poor blind dub of a husband," he said with his old affectionate smile, "she's making you love her all the more. You're anch.o.r.ed worse than ever. _You_ can't go over to Europe and take a chance at being shot. Don't you see the hole you're in? You've got to care what happens to you."

"I'm not so sure of that, Joe," I said. "Things in this world are changing so fast that it's hard for any man in it to tell where he'll be in a year from now--or even a few short months from now. It's the year that no man can see beyond."

"You mean you're coming over?" he asked.

"I'm not sure. Just now I'm going to finish this book. I'm going to see Eleanore through till the baby is born. But after that--if over in Europe the people rise against this war--I don't just see how I can keep out."

Joe looked at me queerly. And with a curious gruffness,

"I hope you will keep out," he said. "There aren't many women like your wife."

He pulled an old grip from under his bed and began throwing in a few books and clothes. From a drawer he swept a few colored s.h.i.+rts, some underclothes and a small revolver.

"J. K.," I said, "I've been thinking about us. And I think our youth is gone."

"What's youth?" asked Joe indifferently.

"Youth," I replied, "is the time when you can think anything, feel anything and go anywhere."

"I'm still going anywhere," he remarked.

"But you can't think anything," I rejoined. "You say I'm tied to a wife and home. All right, I'm glad I am. But you're tied, too. You're tied to a creed, Mister Syndicalist--a creed so stiff that you can't think of anything else."

"All right, I'm glad I am," he echoed. "I'm sorry youth lasted as long as it did."

He closed his grip and strapped it. Then he took up his hat and coat and threw a last look about the room where he had lived for a year or more.

"Breaking up home ties," he said with a grin. "Don't come to the boat,"

he added downstairs. "She don't sail for an hour or two and I'll be asleep in my bunk long before."

"All right. Good-by, J. K.--remember we may meet over there----"

Again that gruffness came into his voice:

"If you do, you'll be taking a mighty big chance," he said. "Good-by, Bill--it's just possible we may never meet again. Glad to have made your acquaintance, Kid. Here's wis.h.i.+ng you luck."

He turned and went off down the Farm with that long swinging walk of his, his big heavy shoulders bent rather more than before. And as I stood looking after him I thought of the lonely winding road that he was to travel day and night, into slums of cities and in and out among the camps.

I walked slowly back through the tenements toward the new home among them that Eleanore had made.

In the summer's night the city streets were still alive with people. I pa.s.sed brightly lighted thoroughfares where I saw them in crowds, and I knew that this tide of people flowed endlessly through the hundreds of miles of streets that made up the port of New York. Hurrying, idling, talking and laughing, quarreling, fighting, here stopping to look at displays in shop windows, there pouring into "Movies"--and walking, walking, walking on. Going up into their tenement homes to eat and drink, love, breed and sleep, to wake up and come down to another day.

So the crowd moved on and on, while the great harbor surrounding their lives and shaping their lives, went on with its changes unheeded.

I tried to think of this harbor as being run by this common crowd--of the railroads, mines and factories, of the colleges, hospitals and all inst.i.tutions of research, and the theaters and concert halls, the picture galleries, all the books--all in the power of the crowd.

"It will be a long time," I thought. "Before it comes the crowd must change. But they will change--and fast or slow, I belong with them while they're changing."

Something Joe had once said came into my mind:

"They're the ones who get shot down in wars and worked like dogs in time of peace."

And I thought of the crowds across the sea--of men being rushed over Europe on trains, or marching along starlit roads, or tramping across meadows. And I thought of long lines of fire at dawn spurting from the mouths of guns--from mountainsides, from out of woods, from trenches in fast blackening fields--and of men in endless mult.i.tudes pitching on their faces as the fire mowed them down.

And with those men, it seemed to me, went all the great G.o.ds I had known--G.o.ds of civilization and peace--the kind G.o.d in my mother's church and the smiling G.o.ddess in Paris, the clear-eyed G.o.d of efficiency and the awakening G.o.d of the crowd--all plunging into this furnace of war with the men in whose spirits all G.o.ds dwell--to shrivel and melt in seething flame and emerge at last in strange new forms. What would come out of the furnace?

I thought of Joe and his comrades going about in towns and camps, speaking low and watching, waiting, hoping to bring a new dawn, a new order, out of this chaotic night.

And I heard them say to these governments:

"Your civilization is cras.h.i.+ng down. For a hundred years, in all our strikes and risings, you preached against our violence--you talked of your law and order, your clear deliberate thinking. In you lay the hope of the world, you said. You were Civilization. You were Mind and Science, in you was all Efficiency, in you was Art, Religion, and you kept the Public Peace. But now you have broken all your vows. The world's treasures of Art are as safe with you as they were in the Dark Ages. Your Prince of Peace you have trampled down. And all your Science you have turned to the efficient slaughter of men. In a week of your boasted calmness you have plunged the world into a violence beside which all the bloodshed in our strikes and revolutions seems like a pool beside the sea. And so you have failed, you powers above, blindly and stupidly you have failed. For you have let loose a violence where you are weak and we are strong. We are these armies that you have called out. And before we go back to our homes we shall make sure that these homes of ours shall no more become ashes at your will. For we shall stop this war of yours and in our minds we shall put away all hatred of our brother men. For us they will be workers all. With them we shall rise and rise again--until at last the world is free!"

The voice had ceased--and again I was walking by myself along a crowded tenement street. Immigrants from Europe, brothers, sons and fathers of the men now in the camps, kept pa.s.sing me along the way. As I looked into their faces I saw no hope for Europe there. Such men could take and hold no world. But then I remembered how in the strike, out of just such men as these, I had seen a giant slowly born. Would that crowd spirit rise again? Could it be that the time was near when this last and mightiest of the G.o.ds would rise and take the world in his hands?