First harvests

JAMES STARBUCK’S breach with his sister had been a permanent one. He probably had as little affection in his nature as any man you could well find; but what he had was centred in pretty Jenny, and he was both grieved and annoyed by this. He said to himself that his love was given to his brethren, and his work the cause of labor; and certainly he had no love for his master, the great double monopoly of a corporation that employed him, and his maker he deemed a cleverly contrived bogy of the rich. Perhaps it was more his hate of these than even love of his fellow-laborers that really ruled his actions; he recognized no difference among men but riches, and put on these the burden of all their miseries.

One hot morning in the autumn he returned from his periodic journey over the Allegheny Central Railroad. There had been trouble that week on the line of the road; trouble with a strike among the coal miners, and Starbuck had had much ado to keep their own men in order. It was a Saturday, and his work was over for the week. James was never idle from preference; but he saw no work to which he could turn his hand that day. He visited the bar-room in the lower Bowery which formed his club, and found that even this was silent and deserted. One fellow only he met—a silly, drinking workman named Simpson—and he asked him to go to the races. “Everybody has gone,” said Simpson, “and I’ve got the tip on Ballet-girl.” And James remembered that all the penny papers had been crammed for days with talk and bets and naming favorites for the great sweepstakes. He cared little for such things himself, and had a sort of contemptuous wonder at the interest they aroused among his acquaintance; but after some beer, to which Simpson insisted on treating him, they took their tickets by the railway, and paid their dollars at the gate; dollars which, as Starbuck reflected, were more rare to Simpson than to him.

The day had grown intensely hot; not a breath was stirring on the track, and the air, impregnated with dust, seemed lifeless, overbreathed. But the grand stand was packed with humanity; poor people from his own neighborhood, dingy men, fat mothers of families, gasping for breath, young men with their girls, in soiled white dresses and gay ribbons, many wearing the colors of their favorite jockey. He could see that they were all intensely eager about the race; often they had even little betting-books, or cards upon which they marked the winners. James had never been at a race before, and was amazed at all the crowd, at the money they spent for this, at the amount of betting, at the interest they showed in all the horses. Above them, in the private boxes, was a similar crowd, but more finely dressed; Starbuck recognized some of the people he had seen driving in the Park; for he was fond of frequenting such places and having the rich men’s wives pointed out to him. There even was his employer, Mr. Tamms, and his wife and daughters in crisp bright dresses, with snowy throats that made one cool to look at; and there in the shade was Mrs. Gower, whom he also knew by sight. They, too, seemed to be betting; but with less excitement than the common people (as he called them, to himself) below.

“Come to the paddock,” said his friend; and they walked out there and saw the horses unclothed and the trial paces of the jockeys. “Isn’t she a daisy?” said Simpson, pointing to a slender mare as Ballet-girl; and Starbuck looked at her. Just then her jockey dropped his whip, which Simpson obsequiously picked up and handed to him. If this numberless crowd were the working classes, they were little better than “their betters,” said Starbuck to himself, grimly.

The bell rang for the first race; and Simpson hurried him back to the lawn. A false start, a cloud of dust, and they were off, amid the wild cries of the multitude. He watched the little knot of gay colors bobbing around the track. How little they meant to him, and how much to all the throng around him! Starbuck turned and watched the mass of people with all the cynicism of a Caryl Wemyss. Close by him was a rather pretty, pale-faced girl; she was evidently very poor; a black jersey was all she wore and a lilac-twigged cotton skirt; but she rose to her feet, and shouted and clapped her gloveless hands.

Between the races nothing would do but they must have some more beer; and they went behind the grand stand where the pool-booths were, and men, and women too, were drinking it. At the booths was a great press of disreputable men, crying hoarsely and waving rolls of dingy bank-bills at the gamblers. James saw that his friend had had too much to drink already; and he insisted on putting another “fiver” on his favorite. Above them in the stalls James could see the ladies drinking iced champagne and fanning themselves after the excitement of the race. He walked out upon the lawn again, where the well-dressed gentlemen were also making up their books; and went along to the sacred place reserved for private carriages. Here they had hampers; and young men in fawn-colored coats were leaning over the shoulders of pretty young women, having flirtations with them, which he, perhaps, interpreted too simply. “Really,” said one pretty face’s owner, “this is more like Longchamps than I had supposed possible!”

“We are improving, Mrs. Malgam,” said the man. “New York will no longer be provincial, one of these days. And it is getting like Longchamps in more respects than one,” he added. “Have you seen that pretty woman just ahead of us with the cream-colored ponies?”

“Dear me, how interesting!” cried the lady, levelling her opera-glasses in the direction indicated; and James Starbuck followed her look with his eyes, as he stood beside the carriage. “It seems just like being abroad to see such people! She is handsome—and she’s awfully well dressed,” added the lady, candidly. “I never can get my woman to cut a dress for me like that. Who is she, Mr. Van Kull?”

“You had better ask Mr. Townley,” said the other.

“Ask Lucie Gower, you mean,” said a gentleman who had not yet spoken.

“You know very well that that is not true of poor Lucie,” answered the first; “and my cousin would not thank you.”

“Well, they call her Mrs. Beaumont, that’s all I know,” said the other, sulkily; but James did not hear the end of the altercation, for he pressed forward among the drags and carriages to the person indicated. As he did so, one of her cream-colored ponies reared and turned, and was about to crowd him against a dog-cart that was standing next in the row. Starbuck grasped the bridle and gave its mouth a savage wrench. “So it’s you, is it?” said he, facing his sister. “Mrs. Beaumont!”

Jenny gave a half-suppressed scream, as the pony still reared and plunged; and a gentleman who was beside her grasped the reins. “Who is it?” said he.

“I do not know,” said Jenny, looking full at James. “Some drunken fellow, I suppose.”

Starbuck started, as if he had been struck. Then he turned away, dropping the pony’s bridle. He walked back to the lawn, where he found Simpson, much the worse for liquor. The great race had been run, while Starbuck was not looking; and the favorite had lost. Simpson was quarrelsome and angry; and ended by begging James for the loan of a dollar, which he gave, and hurried back to the city. As he passed up Broadway, he looked curiously at the bulletin-boards before the newspaper-offices. A dense crowd was standing about each one; but Starbuck gathered the purport of the news from such messages as were passed out from the centre of the crowd. The strike had ended in a riot. He stopped at his rooms but for a moment, to get a small hand-bag; then he took a cab to the Jersey City ferry; here he boarded the Pennsylvania train.

Starbuck had a pass, and he rode in the parlor-car; but his sleep was troubled, and his dreams seemed full of strange noise and glare. He woke up once and found a reason for the latter; the train was running by a long row of flaming coke-furnaces, which lit the whole valley with a sullen red. The dawn broke as they rolled through a long tunnel, choking with coal-gas, and came to Pittsburg. The forest of chimneys stood smokeless, now that a subtiler agent than the coal was found, and the ringing of bells was in the Sunday morning air, which now lay clear above the city; and the steep river hills were visible, and the red brick town, heaping up its apex in the bold mediæval castle that is its modern city hall.

James had little cause to dally here; but noticed, in the hour or two he had to wait, an unusual, unquiet expression on the faces of the people, who were swarming from the tenement doors into the street, like ants from some huge ant-hill. By mid-day he found a freight train that would take him to his destination. His journey lay up a river valley, its sloping mountains clothed in reds and yellows of autumn woodland. For many miles everything was silent with a Sunday stillness; then the crests of the hills were lost, and the blue sky shaded into yellowish brown, at the touch of a few tall iron towers. These were pouring forth black cinders, as they had for seven years past; for the iron smelter may never say, “it is good,” and rest, upon the seventh day. James watched the carload of ore climbing up along the outside of the furnace, until the great tower’s top was opened, as the tons of ore fell in; then the prisoned flame burst forth and the lower surface of the sulphurous brown cloud that filled the valley was dyed a vivid crimson with the pouring flame.

This river basin had been lovely once; but now its soil was coal-dust, and the soft swelling of the hillsides, all up and down the stream, was spotted with huge red tanks, of rusting brick-red iron, large as ancient forts, the storage fountains of the pipe-lines. And the whole country bristled with the abandoned scaffoldings of old oil-wells, like a scanty fur.

James talked with the brakeman and found that his accustomed engineer was disabled. Bill, he said, was a non-union man, and had been given many a hint; but he stuck it out and wouldn’t join, and so the Union had deputed Ned O’Neal, the engineer of the local freight that ran just ahead, to choose the steepest down grade and “drop upon” Bill’s time. O’Neal had “dropped” accordingly, lagging behind under pretext that his engine would not fire, and finally getting his long train of fifty coal-cars just at the bottom of a curving trestle. Bill had gone into him and scattered the last dozen coal-cars, doing some injury to his locomotive; but his head was badly cut open, and his brakeman had broken his neck. Starbuck was too well used to the tyranny of laboring-men to pay much attention to this murder; and he asked about the riots. Yes, said the brakeman, he believed they had had quite a time at Steam City for several days past. A few men had been hurt, some of them Hungarians at the mines or suchlike. But they had smashed up a terrible deal of rolling-stock.

It was night when Starbuck reached Steam City. The streets were jammed with people, but the town was very still. Only, just in front of the station, was a piece of vacant land that might have contained two or three acres; this was closely strewn with the wreck of cars, machinery, and engines; nothing but the trucks, wheels, and other iron work remaining, all twisted in a wild confusion of iron arms and limbs.

He found that most of the people were going in but one direction, so he followed them. It was a strange country; the soil was coal-dust, the very streams were still with oil, and through every crevice in the earth poured the gas, flaring with wild fire that flamed there night and day. The night was very dark; and at every street corner waved these torches, never quenched, belching fire from the iron tubes stuck anywhere, carelessly, into the ground. A strange country, fitter place for northern runes than modern men; where Loki still lurks in the mountains and the smitten rock gives forth petroleum; and, where the spear or pickaxe strikes the earth, gush still the mythic rills of fire.

The crowd went on, to a wild and open hillside above the town. Here perhaps a dozen lengths of pipe were flaring with the natural gas, glowing ruddily and fitfully upon the upturned faces of some dozen thousand men; and at the highest point, below a flaming well of the gas that had been but lately and rudely piped (for the volume of the fire still shot up straight some hundred feet or so, pillaring, like a groined roof, its canopy of smoke), was a sort of rostrum. From this a man was speaking; but his words were hard to hear above the roaring of the burning well. Starbuck knew the man; he was a certain Moses Jablonawski, a Polish Jew.

The man was pale and narrow-chested, with a reddish beard; his strongest notes varied from a low hiss to a sort of thin shriek; this last he employed in climaxes, and managed barely to carry his words across the great multitude. But Starbuck knew well what he was saying; he preached simple anarchy, nihilism, resistance to any government or force, destruction of all industrial system, annihilation of all wealth and works. Starbuck had never, even in his secret meetings, gone wholly with the man—(openly, of course, he was a “boss” and on the side of the employers)—for secretly James had rather a greed for the wealth of others than a desire to do without the material things of civilization. But to-night there was something in the cold, logical, merciless reasoning of the Pole that went with his mood. Why dally with the pitch at all? Undoubtedly, if they too got their part of this corruption, they would be just as bad. His sister Jenny spoke to him. Destroy, destroy, was the burden of the orator’s speech; then ask what new thing there shall be, when all is gone. And if it be but suicide, society’s suicide, better that than humanity in misery. The slave must break his chains before he ploughs and sows. But the most part of the speech was a clever rousing of the passions, among his audience, of hate and envy. He brought their own woe home to them; and painted brilliantly the pleasures of the idle remnant. And always came the refrain, Kill, kill, destroy, resist all office and authority—till mankind be as the beasts of the forest once more, lawless, unrestrained; then may they build anew and better, freed from superstition of another world, from tainted lessons of the past of this, from silly lessons of a priest’s self-sacrifice, from fashions of a feudal aristocracy. He showed them that their government was but a tyranny more formidable, more insidious, than the Czar’s; that their rich masters were worse than kings; that commercial bourgeois (he used the word) were more blood-sucking than military dukes; and common schools and priests, policemen, laws, and soldiers, their implements of selfish wrong. All these must go; and labor, the primal curse, go with them too.

He stopped; and the crowd murmured; and another man got up. This speaker was tall and muscular, and his clear voice rang deeply to the farthest corners of the crowd. “Some of you know me,” he said, “some of you have heard me speak before; and some Englishmen among you have heard of me in England. My name is Lionel Derwent.” There was a shout or two at this; but most of the crowd remained expectant.

“You know why I have come; I heard that there was trouble here and I came down to see what little thing I could do to help you. You must know me as the son of a working-man who has leisure, and who tries to see the truth for working-men. You know, too, that I have no interest against you; every penny of property my father left I gave to the working-men’s schools in England; and I support myself by writing for the papers.

“Now I must tell you that the man who spoke to you just now is wrong; and he is not only wrong, but he means to be wrong; in other words, he lies. He would have you behave like a child who has just been given a gold watch, and smash it because he does not know how to use it. You have all got your gold watches. You have got your roads and your mills and your schools and your votes. When he tells you to destroy the government, he tells you to undo what your hands have created. Bad as things may be, they are bad because you voters are not wise enough; but he would destroy all wisdom, do away with schools and votes, and then the first big general would be a czar over you again.

“I say you are not wise enough. If things are wrong, whose fault is it? It is you who make them. Do you trust to the best men? Do you try to see who is wise and what is excellent? or do you give the power to him whom you justly hate—the rich monopolist, the selfish trader, who says he is a coarse, plain man like you, and then buys your sovereignty with the sweat of your own brows and a sop of the very mess of pottage you have sold your birthright for?

“If you care more for a glass of beer than your welfare, whose fault that selfish men have found the beer comes cheaper than your family’s comfort in their dividends?

“Your foreign friend—who is no wise leader for American workmen, and if you choose him, you will choose wrong—your foreign friend has told you to destroy. Suppose you tore up these railroads and wrecked these mills and furnaces and flooded all the mines and burned the oil—you know what farmers’ wages are; would you be better off? And if you all went out and wanted work in the fields, where would the wages go to? You say you would not want wages, but would take the land; very good, there is the land now: will any of you like to change your work and earnings for a freehold farmer’s life? ‘No, we want the mills and railroads, but we do not want the rich,’ you say. And if we wiped away the rich, who would build your railroads? Can you do it alone, and feed and pay yourselves? But if the rich must do it, what shall be their reward? They give you money—what will you pay them in? Money, or money’s worth, and human bodies, are the only values that the world has ever known. Will you pay them in your bodies, in your slavery? If no, why, then, object that they have money?

“Because they have more than we, you say. Well, that may be mended. But if people are to use money to help you build your railroads, they must have the money to start with.

“Because they have more money than we have, you say again. And now be honest. Will you promise me one thing: that you will try not to think the world all wrong until it has no justice? They say there is no justice in the country of our friend here, and that is why he had to fly to us. If you can say there is no justice here; when you can honestly say, ‘I have not got what I deserve’—then we will take it, though we wade through seas of blood, and I go with you. But tell me honestly, now—do you think you want money so much as some of the rich? Do you think it so needful to you? Do you think, each one of you, your know-how is so valuable? Do you think to-day, if you had a million apiece, you would use the money on the whole so well? You all know Coal-Oil Patsy—he got five millions, and he kept a bad circus, and a bad hotel, and a bad base-ball nine, and bad women, and took to drinking himself blind, and bribed himself a seat in Congress, and killed his wife or broke her heart, and at last he lost his money, and now he gets a dollar and a quarter a day, when he is sober enough—and he is worth no more—and what cent of his money ever did you any good? It is now all gone, and he built no single furnace, nor mill, nor railroad, nor worked a mine, nor gave any one of you a day’s work while his money lasted. And one thing more: do you think you are better, or as fit to spend this money that your railroad or your coal mine makes—I do not mean, whether you may be so in a short time—but fairly now, as you stand, to-day, are you kinder, wiser, nobler; have you higher tastes, more learning, better knowledge of all the things that take money to buy? For remember, beer and beef and clothes and tobacco and rum are cheap enough—you know you get all of them you need to-day—it is fine learning, and clean manners, and great pictures, and new sciences, and poets, and high music, that come expensive. Even are you quite as good? Are your boys quite as well-bred and sober and respectful, and your little girls quite as generous and gentle? I do not say that all these things are so forever—that you may not all become so—and believe me, the first young man or woman that comes along and says, ‘Look here, I am fit to be a gentleman,’ and the world does not admit him such; the first old man who has knowledge to make and spend money, and has not got it—and I will let him say, like our friend here, ‘Away with learning and effort and order and wisdom and their universal works, and let us burn and kill! for behold, I have not my deserts.’”

The great mass of men had begun to hear Derwent speak with some attention; but the crowd thinned rapidly. Probably the greater part of it did not understand English at all; and toward the end several Huns and Poles collected little groups about them and began themselves to speak in the corners. But as the Englishman closed, James Starbuck took the place; he was known to be one of the masters in sympathy with them, and the multitude pressed eagerly back.

Starbuck looked slowly around the great multitude; and you might have heard the murmur of a child, so silent was their expectation. Then he began; and his words dropped hissing, one by one, like drops of molten iron falling into water.

“What has this fine gentleman to do down here, with us rough workmen?” he began. “Do you think he would let one of you marry his sister?” Starbuck uttered each word staccato, by itself, thinking of his sister Jenny; and his frame seemed to quiver with malice; and he paused again, as if to recover his control. “I saw him riding many times last winter, in a carriage with footmen, with servants in livery, and a lady wearing diamonds, whose dress would buy a house for you and me. She is a fashionable belle, in the newspapers, and they say she is no better than she should be; but she would not touch our wives and daughters with the glove upon her hand.

“This aristocrat may have lost his money—as many of them do, by gambling, as well as poor old Coal-Oil Patsy—and he may have other ways of getting it, for all I know. Perhaps he was paid for his speech to-night. But are you such flats as to think he really cares for the likes of us?” The crowd already had begun to murmur angrily.

“The rich are better than we, he has the cheek to tell you. Yes, their dresses are better, and their food is finer, and they have learned how to lie and swindle with a soft tongue. They drink champagne instead of beer, and bet bigger money on their horses, and smoke cigars, and take their girls to ride in fine turnouts with a span of horses; but they don’t mean honestly by their girls, and they turn them out upon the streets at last. And they don’t have to work in the dirt, and they can take a hot bath every day, and their wives and daughters can keep their bodies clean and their faces fair, and so they go to the theatre and show themselves in dresses you’d be ashamed to see your wife in.

“But in all the rest, he’s gassin’ you. I think my girls could wear their diamonds as well as them, and flirt and show their dresses; and I could drive my span, and take my fancy drinks, and bribe the judges and the lawyers. Do you suppose if they couldn’t steal from us, they could earn even so much as Coal-Oil Patsy? And as for books and pictures, they leave all that to the long-haired fellers at the colleges; they don’t care a damn for art an’ all that stuff any more’n we do.

“Do you suppose if any boy o’ yourn studied to be a gentleman, and was as good, and as clever, and as gifted with the gab as our fine friend here, and went to him, he’d take him to his clubs and balls and parties? He’d say, ‘Your hands are coarse and rough, and you don’t talk enough like a dude’—and what he’d really mean all the time would be, ‘You ain’t got money enough.’ I tell you all this talk is guff, and it just comes down to the money. All we want is money, and they’ve got it.

“Then he says we aren’t smart enough. Of course we aren’t smart enough. This world has been run for the smart fellers about long enough, and it’s about time it was run for the honest men. It’s the rich fellers on top that are the smart ones, and we are the fools who let ’em make all the money. It’s they who are the judges and make the laws and run the legislatures, and then they have the cheek to come to us and say, ‘Oh, lord, don’t break the law!’ And they bring you men over by the shipload, and give you seventy cents a day, and rent one room of their houses to your families at their own price, and herd your girls and boys together naked in the coal-mines, and then say, ‘See how much cleaner we are! how much more virtuous we are!’ And if you strike, you starve, and they know it; and if in your despair you give a kick or two to their damned machinery, they cry like cowards as they are, ‘Oh, lord, that’s my property—don’t break the law!’ And the law is theirs, too, not ours, nor God Almighty’s whom they talk so much about.

“I tell you, friends, you can never touch these people but through their pockets. The law’s a fraud, and when they don’t find it suit, they laugh at it. And they don’t care a damn for you or your wives or children or your souls or your bodies or the lives of your boys or the virtue of your daughters—but only for what they can make out of you. And they talk about the freedom of the country, and the Declaration of Independence, and ballots and that; and all the time they ape their swell English friends and marry their girls off to rotten foreign princes and would have a king here if they could—except that it’s easier to throw the dust in our eyes under what they call a republic.

“And now I say, don’t you care a damn for their laws, either. And if they hire their Pinkerton spies who are paid to shoot you down, you shoot them too. They won’t care much for that; but then when you burn a big works, and blow up a mine or two, they’ll see their money going and squeal fast enough. That’s all I’ve got to say.”

Derwent had listened to his speech intently, none the less so that threatening glances were cast at him from time to time. As he finished, a score or more of orators leaped to the platform; and many of them began to speak at once. Starbuck, having done his work, disappeared; the crowd was beginning to thin; the speakers spoke in Polish, Bohemian, Hungarian, Sicilian, each in the dialect of his own audience. Many were waving their hands violently and making threatening gestures in the direction of the city, which lurked, black and sullen, below them in the valley, shrouded in the thick smoke itself had made, bright-pointed here and there with many torches; and now and again from the bowels of the thing would burst a blaze of white-hot metal, like the opening of the monster’s fiery eye, ending in a wide red glare and a hissing shower of sparks; and all was dark again.

Hardly any men of the English race were by this time left upon the ground. Derwent noticed it, as he stood watching, in one corner of the throng; and thought how un-American a scene it was. At last the anarchist who had first begun stood up again, as if to close the meeting. This time his voice seemed stronger or more sibilant; his speech was but a string of curses, of tales of crime, full of a savage’s lust of ruin. Let it end! Let them suffer, too; let them die, as we have died. If they mean to starve us now, let these mills and machines, these tools of wrong, these mines, these gaols of wretchedness, let them all burn or blast—what care we—we who are to be burned or hanged ourselves? Let their towns be gutted, and their homes be razed and their factories be burned—aye, let them burn, burn, burn, as this shall burn, from now on, day and night, winter and summer, for all time!

And as the orator closed, with a group of men he threw himself upon the structure of the piping of the flaming well. The wooden tower swayed and rocked and fell; and with a roar like the ocean the gas, freed from its casing, flooded the sky with its flare of fire. A great mass of pebbles and timbers rose with the first outburst, and fell flaming on the shouting crowd below; then, igniting close to the earth, and even below its surface, running rapidly around the rock, leaping and tossing in liquid tongues, the red rills seemed to spring from every crevice in the earth, until the place that had been the rostrum was sunken in a lake of flame.

The Pole had kept his arm extended, as one who invokes a spell, until the shock of the explosion had gone by, and all the flaming timbers fell; then, when the fire was steady, reddening the valley even to the distant mountain-tops, he swept his arm in a gesture not without some dignity toward the silent city. With a hoarse cry the multitude seemed to take his meaning; and the sea of swarthy faces, red-sashed men and olive-cheeked women, with their motley dresses, and their odd diversity of foreign cries, swept downward to the city’s rolling mills.

Of all the crowd who spoke that night not one American except James Starbuck; of all the thoughts in those ten thousand heads, scarce one the fathers of the republic could have owned with honor; of all these men indeed, not one who understood the principles which gave his country birth.—Derwent was reflecting. Where were the true Americans? Where were the descendants of the colonies, and Virginia and Old New England? What had been Starbuck’s training, that he talked like that?

But, you will remember, it was long since Jem Starbuck had left that old New England village, dying out amidst its sturdy hills; and his old uncle Samuel Wolcott had hanged himself, a long year since, to the rafter from the barn in his hillside homestead.