And Joe's books argued that all this change had been wrought by the invention of machinery, that only through steam, steel, and electricity could world-wide organization take place, that only through these arose the industrial city, the modern mill. The very things that should have set man free, the enormous powers he snatched from nature and harnessed to do his work, powers with the strength of a nation of men—these very things had been seized by a few for their own profit, and had enslaved the majority. Over and over again could the race be fed, clothed, housed, and enriched by these powers, and that with lessened hours of toil and more variety of work.
But Joe's books argued further and most dogmatically that this organization by the selfish few was a necessary step in progress, that when their work was finished the toilers, the millions, would arise and seize the organization and use it thereafter for the good of all. Indeed, this was what Sally's labor movement meant: the enlightenment of the toilers as to the meaning of industrialism, and their training for the supreme revolution.
And out of all this arose the world-vision. At such moments Joe walked in a rarer air, he stepped on a fairer earth than ordinarily obtains. It was the beauty and loveliness of simple human camaraderie, of warm human touch. And at such times Joe had no doubt of his life-work. It lay in exquisite places, in chambers of jolly grandeur, in the invisible halls and palaces of the human spirit. He was one with the toilers of earth, one with the crowded underworld. It was that these lives might grow richer in knowledge, richer in art, richer in health, richer in festival, richer in opportunity, that Joe had dedicated his life. And so arose that wonderful and inexpressible vision—a picture as it were of the far future—a glimpse of an earth singing with uplifted crowds of humanity, on one half of the globe going out to meet the sunrise, on the other, the stars. He heard the music of that Hymn of Human Victory, which from millions of throats lifts on that day when all the race is woven into a harmony of labor and joy and home and great unselfish deeds. That day, possibly, might never arrive, forever fading farther and farther into the sunlit distances—but it is the day which leads the race forward. To Joe, however, came that vision, and when it came it seemed as if the last drop of his blood would be little to offer, even in anguish, to help, even by ever so little, the coming and the consummation of that Victory.
He would awake in the night, and cry out in a fever:
"By God, I'm going to help change things."
The vision shook him—tugged at his heart, downward, like the clutch of a convulsive child; seized him now and again like a madness. Even unto such things had the "dead girls" brought him.
So, crammed with theories—theories as yet untested by experience—Joe became an iconoclast lusting for change. He was bursting with good news, he wanted to cry the intimations from the housetops, he wanted to proselytize, convert. He was filled with Shelley's passion for reforming the world, and like young Shelley, he felt that all he had to do was to show the people the truth and the truth would make them free.
All this was in his great moments,… there were reactions when his human humorous self—backed by ten years of the printery—told him that the world is a complex mix-up, and that there are many visions; moments that made him wonder what he was about, and why so untrained a man expected to achieve such marvels.
But these reactions were swallowed up by the recurrent pulsations, the spasms of his vision. He felt from day to day a growth of purpose, an accumulation of energy that would resistlessly spill into action, that would bear him along, whether or no. But what should he do, and how? He was unfitted, and did not think he cared, for settlement work. He knew nothing and cared less for charity work. Politics were an undiscovered world to him. What he wanted passionately was to go and live among the toilers, get to know them, and be the means of arousing and training them.
But then there was the problem of his mother—a woman of sixty-three. Could he leave her alone? It was preposterous to think of taking her with him. Myra could a thousand times better go. He must talk with his mother, he must thresh the matter out with her, he must not delay longer to clear the issue. And yet he hesitated. Would she be able to understand? How could he communicate what was bursting in his breast? She belonged to a past generation; how could she hear the far-off drums of the advance?
Up and down the Park he went early one evening in a chaos of excitement, and he had a sudden conviction that he could not put off the moment any longer. He must go to his mother at once, he must tell all. As he walked down the lamp-lit street, under all the starriness of a tranquil autumn night, he became alternately pale and flushed, his heart thumped hard against his ribs, he felt like a little boy going to his mother to confess a wrong.
He looked up; the shades of the second floor were illumined: she was up there. Doing what? Sharply then he realized what a partial life she led, the decayed middle-class associates of the boarding-house, tired, brainless, and full of small talk, the lonesome evenings, the long days. He became more agitated, and climbed the stoop, unlocked his way into the house, went up the dim, soft, red-cushioned stairs, past the milky gas-globe in the narrow hall, and knocked at her door.
"Come in!" she cried.
He swung the door wide and entered. She was, as usual, sitting in the little rocker under the light and beside the bureau, between the bed and the window. The neat, fragrant room seemed to be sleeping, but the clear-eyed, upright woman was very much awake. She glanced up from her sewing and realized intuitively that at last the crisis had come. His big, homely face was a bald advertisement of his boyish excitement.
She nodded, and murmured, "Well!"
He drew up a chair awkwardly, and sat opposite her, tilting back to accommodate his sprawling length. Then he was at a loss.
"Well," he muttered, trying to be careless, "how are you?"
"All right," she said drily.
She could not help him, though her heart was beginning to pain in her side.
"I've been walking about the Park," he began again, with an indifference that was full of leaks, "and thinking…." He leaned forward and spoke suddenly: "Say, mother, don't you get tired of living in this place?"
She felt strangely excited, but answered guardedly.
"It isn't so bad, Joe…. There are a few decent people … there's Miss
Gardiner, the librarian … and I have books and sewing."
"Oh, I know," he went on, clumsily, "but you're alone a lot."
"Yes, I am," she said, and all at once she felt that she could speak no further with him. She began sewing diligently.
"Say, mother!"
No answer.
"Mother!"
"Yes," dimly.
His voice sounded unnatural.
"Since the … fire … I've been doing some thinking, some reading…."
"Yes."
"I've been going about … studying the city…."
"Yes."
"Now I want you to understand, mother…. I want to tell you of … It's—well, I want to do something with my money, my life…." And his voice broke, in spite of himself.
His mother felt as if she were smothering. But she waited, and he went on:
"For those dead girls, mother…." and sharply came a dry sob. "And for all the toilers. Oh, but can you understand?"
There was a silence. Then she looked at him from her youthful, brilliant eyes, and saw only an overgrown, rather ignorant boy. This gave her strength, and, though it was painful, she began speaking:
"Understand? Do you mean the books you are reading?"
"Yes," he murmured.
"Well," she smiled weakly, "I've been reading them, too."
"You!" He was shocked. He looked at her as if she had revealed a new woman to him.
"Yes," she said, quickly. "I found them in your room."
He was amazedly silent. He felt then that he had never really known his mother.
"Joe," she said, tremulously, "I want to tell you a little about the war…. There are things I haven't told you."
And while he sat, stupefied and dumfounded, she told him—not all, but many things. She was back in the Boston of the sixties, when she was a young girl, when that town was the literary center of America, when high literature was in the air, when the poets had great fame and every one, even the business man, was a poet. She had seen or met some of the great men. Once Whittier was pointed out to her, at a time when his lines on slavery were burning in her brain. She had seen the clear-eyed Lowell walking under the elms of Cambridge, and she justly felt that she was one of those
"Who dare to be
In the right with two or three."
Once, even, a relative of hers, a writer then well known and now forgotten, had taken her out to see "the white Mr. Longfellow." It was one of the dream-days of her life—the large, spacious, square Colonial house where once Washington had lived; the poet's square room with its round table and its high standing desk in which he sometimes wrote; the sloping lawn; the great trees; and, better than anything, the simple, white-haired, white-bearded poet who took her hand so warmly and spoke so winningly and simply. He even gave her a scrap of paper on which were written some of his anti-slavery lines.
Those were great days—days when America, the world's experiment in democracy, was thrown into those fires that consume or purify. The great test was on, whether such a nation could live, and Boston was athrob with love of country and eagerness to sacrifice. The young, beautiful, clear-eyed girl did not hesitate a moment to urge Henry Blaine to give up all and go to the front. It was like tearing her own heart in two, and, possibly at a word, Blaine would have remained in Boston and helped in some other way. But she fought it out with him one night on Boston Commons, and she wished then that she was a man and could go herself. On that clear, mild night, the blue luminous tinge of whose moon she remembered so vividly, they walked up and down, they passionately embraced, they felt the end of life and the mystery of death, and then at last when the young man said: "I'll go! It's little enough to do in this crisis!" she clung to him with pride and sacred joy and knew that life was very great and that it had endless possibilities.
And so Henry Blaine went with his regiment, and the black and terrible years set in—years in which so often she saw what Walt Whitman had seen:
"I saw askant the armies,
I saw as in noiseless dreams hundreds of battle-flags,
Borne through the smoke of the battles and pierced with missiles I saw
them,
And carried hither and yon through the smoke, and torn and bloody,
And at last but a few shreds left on the staffs (and all in silence),
And the staffs all splinter'd and broken.
I saw battle-corpses, myriads of them,
And the white skeletons of young men, I saw them.
I saw the débris and débris of all the slain soldiers of the war,
But I saw they were not as was thought.
They themselves were fully at rest, they suffered not,
The living remain'd and suffer'd, the mother suffer'd,
And the wife and the child and the musing comrade suffer'd,
And the armies that remain'd suffer'd."
Terrible years, years of bulletins, years of want, hard times, years when all the future was at stake, until finally that day in New York when she saw the remnant returning, marching up Broadway between the black crowds and the bunting, the drums beating, the fifes playing,
"Returning, with thinned ranks, young, yet very old, worn, marching, noticing nothing."
Henry Blaine was one of these and he came to her a cripple, an emaciated and sick man. Then had followed, as Joe knew, the marriage, the hard pioneer life in the shanty on the stony hill, the death, and the long widowhood….
Had she not a right to speak to him?
"Understand?" she ended. "I think, Joe, I ought to understand…. I sent your father into the war…."
Depth beneath depth he was discovering her. He was amazed and awed. He asked himself where he had been all these years, and how he had been so blind. He felt very young then. It was she who actually knew what the word social and the word patriotism meant.
He looked down on the floor, and spoke in a whisper:
"And … would you send me off, too? The new war?"
She could scarcely speak.
"Whereto?"
"I … oh, I'll have to go down in a tenement somewhere—the slums…."
"Well, then," she said, quietly, "I'll go with you."
"But you—" he exclaimed, almost adding, "an old woman"—"it's impossible, mother."
She answered him with the same quietness.
"You forget the shanty."
And then it was clear to him. Like an electric bolt it shot him, thrilling, stirring his heart and soul. She would go with him; more than that, she should. It was her right, won by years of actual want and struggle and service. More, it was her escape from a flat, stale, meaningless boarding-house existence. Suddenly he felt that she was really his mother, knit to him by ties unbreakable, a terrible thing in its miraculousness.
But he only said, in a strained voice,
"All right, mother!"
And she laughed, and mused, and murmured:
"How does the world manage to keep so new and young?"
V
MYRA AND JOE
Myra Craig used to dream at night that the fifty-seven members of her class arose from their desks with wild shrieks and danced a war-dance about her. This paralyzed her throat, her hands, and her feet, and she could only stand, flooded with horror, awaiting the arrival of the school principal and disgrace. Out of this teacher's dream she always awoke disgusted with school-work.
Myra came from Fall River—her parents still lived there—came when she was ten years younger, to seek her fortune in the great city. New York had drawn her as it draws all the youth of the land, for youth lusts for life and rushes eagerly to the spot where life is most intense and most exciting. The romance of crowds, of wealth, of art, of concentrated pleasure and concentrated vice, of immense money-power, the very architecture of the world-city, the maelstrom of people, drew the young Fall River woman irresistibly. She did not want the even and smooth future of a little town; she wanted to plunge into the hazardous interweaving of the destinies of millions of people. She wanted to grasp at some of the magic opportunities of the city. She wanted a career.
And so she came. Early that June morning she left her cabin on the Sound steamboat and went out on deck, and then she had unfolded to her the most thrilling scene of the earth. Gazing, almost panting with excitement, it seemed to her that the nature she had known—the hills and fields of New England—shrank to littleness. First there was all about her the sway of the East River, golden—flecked with the morning sun, which glowed through a thin haze. From either shore a city climbed, topped with steeples and mill chimneys—floods of tenements and homes. Then the boat swept under the enormous steel bridges which seemed upheld by some invisible power and throbbed with life above them. And then, finally, came the Vision of the City. The wide expanse of rolling, slapping water was busy with innumerable harbor craft, crowded ferries, puffing tugs, each wafting its plume of smoke and white steam; but from those waters rose tier after tier of square-set skyscrapers climbing in an irregular hill to the thin peak of the highest tower. In the golden haze, shot with sun, the whole block of towers loomed distant, gigantic, shadowy, unreal—a magic city floating on the waters of the morning. Windows flashed, spirals of white smoke spun thin from the far roofs. Myra thought of those skyscrapers as the big brothers of the island gazing out over the Atlantic.
The boat rounded the tip of the island, furrowing the broad surface of the bay, which seemed as the floor of a stage before that lifting huge sky-lost amphitheater. Every advance changed the many-faceted beauty of New York, and Myra, gazing, had one glimpse across little green Battery Park up the deep twilit cañon of Broadway, the city's spine. The young woman was moved to tears. She seemed to slough off at that moment the church of her youth, averring that New York was too big for a creed. It was the great human outworking; the organism of the mighty many. It seemed a miracle that all this splendor and wonder had been wrought by human hands. Surely human nature was great—greater than she had dreamed. If creatures like herself had wrought this, then she was more than she had dared to imagine, "deeper than ever plummet had sounded." She felt new courage, new faith. She wanted to leave the boat and merge with those buildings and those swarming streets. She was proud of the great captains who had engineered this masswork, proud of the powers that ruled this immensity.
But beyond all she felt the city's livingness. The air seemed charged with human activity, with toil-pulsations. She was all crowded about with human beings, and felt the mystery of what might be termed crowd-touch. Here, surely, was life—life thick, happy, busy, daring, ideal. Here was pioneering—a reaching forth to a throbbing future. So, as the boat landed, she mentally identified herself with this city, labeled herself New-Yorker, and became one of its millions.
Her rapture lasted throughout her first stay. She tasted romance glancing in shop windows or moving in a crowd or riding in an elevated train. A letter of introduction to a friend of her mother's secured her a companion, who "showed her the sights" and helped her choose her boarding-house in East Eightieth Street. And then came the examinations for public-school teaching; and after these she went home for the summer, returning to New York in the fall.
Then her new life began, the rapture ceased, and Myra Craig, like so many others, found that her existence in the city was just as narrow as it had been in the town. In some ways, more narrow. She was quite without friends, quite without neighborhood. Her day consisted in teaching from 9 A.M. to 3 P.M., correcting papers and planning lessons and making reports until well into the evening, sometimes until late in the night, and meeting at meals unfriendly people that she disliked. Her class was composed of rather stupid, rather dirty children. They smelled—a thing she never forgave them. And what could one woman do with fifty or sixty children? The class was at least three times too big for real teaching, and so almost inevitably a large part of the work became routine—a grind that spoiled her temper and embittered her heart. Her fellow-teachers were an ignorant lot; the principal himself she thought the biggest lump of stupidity she had ever met—a man demanding letter-perfection and caring not one rap for the growth of children. Her week-ends were her only relief, and she used these partly for resting and partly in going to theater and concert.
Such for ten years—with summers spent at home—was Myra's life. It was bounded by a few familiar streets; it was largely routine; it was hard and bitter; and it had no future. It was anything but what she had dreamed. New York was anything but what she had dreamed. She never saw again that Vision of the City; never felt again that throb of life, that sense of pioneering and of human power. And yet in those years Myra had developed. She was thrown back on books for friendship, and through these and through hard work and through very routine she developed personality—grew sensitive, mentally quick, metropolitan. She had, as it were, her own personal flavor—one felt in her presence a difference, a uniqueness quite precious and exquisite.
And then one day she had gone to the printery and met a man, who was homely, rough, simple, and, in spite of her revulsion from these qualities, was immensely drawn to him. Something deeper than the veneer of her culture overpowered her. She had almost forgotten sex in the aridity of those ten years; she had almost become a dried old maid; but now by the new color in her cheeks, the sparkle in her eyes, the fresh rapidity of her blood, and through the wonder of the world having become more light, as if there were two suns in the sky instead of one—yes, through the fact that she lived now at ten human-power instead of one—her heart told her exultingly, "You are a woman."
Girlhood had come again, but girlhood made all woman by immense tenderness, by the up-rush of a wild love, and by the awakening of all her instincts of home and mating and child-bearing. And then had come that mad, wind-blown twilight at the riverside when the spirit of life had drenched her and she had become grave, tender, and wrought of all lovely power. Joe was just a boy then to her, and her great woman-heart drew him in and sheltered him in the sacred warmth of her being. In that moment she had reached the highest point of her womanhood, a new unfolding, a new release. And then had come horror, and he had been swept away from her—one glimpse of his numb, ghastly face, and he was gone.
It was Fannie Lemick that took her home. She only knew that she was being led away, while crashing through her mind went flames, smoke, the throbbing of the engines, and the words: "I may never see you again … dead girls…." All that night she tossed about in a horror, and in the morning she feverishly read the terrible news until she thought she must swoon away. She became sick; the landlady had to come up and help her; the doctor had to be sent for, and he had told her that this nervous breakdown had been long overdue; she had been working under too great a strain; it only needed some shock to break her.
But while she lay in a sick fever her heart went out to Joe. If she only could be at his side, nerve him to the fight, protect him and soothe him. She knew that his whole old life had been consumed in that fire, and lay in ruins, and she felt subtly that he had been taken from her. By one blow, at the very moment of the miracle of their love, they had been torn from each other. She did not want to live; she hoped that she had some serious disease that would kill her.
But she did live; she became better, and then in a mood of passionate tenderness she wrote her first little love-letter to Joe. She went about, doing her school-work and bearing the weight of intolerable lonely days, and he had written twice, just a word to her, a word of delay. What kept him? What was he doing? She read of his testimony at the inquest and became indignant because he blamed himself. Who was to blame for such an accident? It was not his cigarette that had started the blaze. In her overwrought condition she passed from a terrible love to a sharp hate, and back and forth. Was he a fool or was he more noble than she could fathom? He should have seen her sooner, he should not have left her a prey to her morbid thoughts. Time and again she became convinced that he had ceased to love her, that he was more concerned over his burnt printery. She twisted his letters against him. She would sit in her room trying to work at her school papers, and suddenly she would clench her fists, turn pale, and stare despairingly at the blank wall.
Day after day she waited, starting up every time she heard the postman's whistle and the ringing of the bell. And then at last one night, as she paced up and down the narrow white little room, she heard the landlady climbing the stairs, advancing along the hall, and there was a sharp rap. She felt faint and dizzy, flung open the door, took the letter, and sank down on the bed, hardly daring to open it.
It was brief and cold:
Dear Myra,—I know you are up early, so I am coming around at seven to-morrow morning—I'll be out in the street and wait for you. We can go to the Park. I have some serious problems to lay before you.
Joe.
"Serious problems!" She understood. He was paving the way for renouncing her. Perhaps it was a money matter—he thought he ought not marry on a reduced income. Or perhaps he found he didn't love her. For hours she sat there with the letter crumpled in her hand, frozen, inert, until she was incapable of feeling or thinking. So he was coming at seven. He took it for granted that she would be ready to see him—would be eager to walk in the Park with him. Well, what if she didn't go? A fine letter that, after that half-hour at the riverside. A love-letter! She laughed bitterly. And then her heart seemed to break within her. Life was too hard. Why had she ever left the peace and quiet of Fall River? Why had she come down to the cruel, careless, vicious city to be ground up in a wholesale school system and then to break her heart for an uncouth, half-educated printer? It was all too hard, too cruel. Why had she been born to suffer so? Why must she tingle now with pain, when in a few years she would be unfeeling dust again? Among all the millions of the people of the earth, among all the life of earth and the circling million scattered worlds, she felt utterly isolated, defrauded, betrayed. Life was a terrible gift, and she did not want it. This whirl of emotion rose and rose in her, went insanely through her brain, and, becoming intolerable, suddenly ceased and left her careless, numb, and hard.
She arose mechanically and looked in the glass at herself. Her face was haggard.
"I'm getting homely," she thought, and quietly went to bed.
But in the night she awoke to a swift frenzy of joy. He was coming. After all, he was coming. She would see him. She would be near him again. Yes, how she loved him! loved with all her nature. It was the intensity of her love that made her hate. And she lay throbbing with joy, her whole being quivering with desire for him. He was hers, after all. It was the woman's part to forgive and forget.
But when the morning broke, and she arose in her nightgown and sat on the chair at the window, smoothing out and rereading the letter, her doubts returned. He was coming to renounce her. He would make all sorts of plausible excuses, he would be remorseful and penitent, but it all came to the same end. Why should she go and meet him to be humiliated in this way? She would not go.
Yet she rose and dressed with unusual care and tried to smile back the radiance of her face, and fixed her hair this way and that in a pitiful attempt to take away the sharpness of her expression, and when her little clock showed seven she put on hat and coat with trembling hands and went swiftly down and out at the front door. She was shaking with terrible emotions, fire filled and raged in her breast, and she had to bite her lip to keep it still.
The city flashed before her in all the sparkle of October, the air tingled, and in the early morning light the houses, the street, looked as bright and fresh as young school-children washed, combed, bright-eyed, new with sleep, and up from roofs went magic veilings of flimsy smoke. Down the avenues clanged cars black with mechanics, clerks, and shop-girls on the way to work; people streamed hurrying to their day's toil. The city was awake, shaking in every part of her with glad breakfast and the rush to activity. What colossal forces swinging in, swinging out of the metropolis in long pulsations of freight and ship and electricity! Wall Street would roar, the skyscrapers swarm, the schools drone and murmur and sing, the mills grind and rattle, and the six continents and the seven seas would pulse their blood into the city and be flushed by her radiating tides. Into this hidden activity Myra stepped, deaf and blind to all but the clamor of her heart and a single man walking like a black pawn aureoled in the low early sunlight.
She came down slowly, as he came up. She glanced at his face. She was shocked by its suffering, its gray age. He looked quite shabby in his long frayed coat, his unpolished shoes, his gray slouch hat—shabby and homely, and ill-proportioned, stooping a little, his rough shock of hair framing the furrowed face and sunken melancholy eyes. And it was for this man that she had been breaking her heart! Yet, at the moment there swept over her an awful surge of passion, so strong that she could have seized him in her arms and died in his embrace.
He, in turn, saw how white and set her face was, how condemnatory. He had come to her almost ready to throw his plans overboard and cleave to her—for a day and a night that side of his nature had dominated, expunging all else, driving him to her, demanding that he grasp her magic presence, her womanly splendor. This alone was real, and all the rest fantastic. And he had walked up and down the street with all the October morning singing in his blood; the world was glorious again and he was young; he would take her, he would forget all else, and they would go off somewhere in the wilderness and really live. He had never lived yet. He thirsted for life, he thirsted for all this woman could give him. And now the condemnation in her face choked him off, made her a stranger, separated them, made it hard to speak to her.
He cried in a low voice:
"Myra!"
The word was charged with genuine passion, and she became more pale, and stood unable to find her tongue, her lips quivering painfully.
Then suddenly there was a nervous overflow.
"You wanted to walk in the Park," she blurted in a cold, uneven voice. "We'd better be going then. I won't have much time. I've got to be at school early."
She started off, and he strode beside her. They walked in a strange slow silence, each charged with inexpressible, conflicting emotions, and each waiting for the other. This strain was impossible, and finally Joe began speaking in low tones.
"I know it seems queer that I haven't been to see you … but you'll understand, I couldn't. There was so much to do…."
He stopped, and then again came the cold, uneven voice:
"You could have found a moment."
They went on in silence, and entered the Park, following the walk where it swept its curve alongside the tree-arched roadway, past low green hills to the right and the sinking lawns to the left, crossed the roadway, and climbed the steep path that gave on to the Ramble—that twisty little wilderness in the heart of the city, that remote, wild, magic tangle.
A little pond lay in the very center of it, all deep with the blue sky, and golden October gloried all about it—swaying in wild-tinted treetops, blowing in dry leaves, sparkling on every spot of wet, and all suffused and splashed and strangely fresh with the low, red, radiant sunlight. There was splendor in the place, and the air dripped with glorious life, and through it all went the lovers, silent, estranged, pitiable.
"We can sit here," said Joe.
It was a bench under a tree, facing the pond. They sat down, each gazing on the ground, and the leaves dropped on them, and squirrels ran up to them, tufted their tails and begged for peanuts with lustrous beady eyes, and now and then some early walker or some girl or man on the way to work swung lustily past and disappeared in foliage and far low vistas of tree trunks.
The suspense became intolerable again. Joe turned a little to her.
"Myra!"
She was trembling; a moment more she would be in his arms, sobbing, forgiving him. But she hurried on in an unnatural way.
"You wanted to speak to me—I'm waiting. Why don't you speak?"
It was a blow in the face; his own voice hardened then.
"You're making it very hard for me."
She said nothing, and he had to go on.
"After the fire—" his voice snapped, and it was a space before he went on, "I felt I was guilty…. I went to a mass-meeting and one of the speakers accused the … class I belong to … of failing in their duty…. She said …"
Myra spoke sharply:
"Who said?"
"Miss Heffer."
"Oh!"
Joe felt suddenly silenced. Something unpleasant was creeping in between them. He did not know enough of women, either, to divine how Myra was suffering, to know that she had reached a nervous pitch where she was hardly responsible for what she thought and said. He went on blunderingly:
"I felt that I was accused… I felt that I had to make reparation to the toilers, … had to spend my life making conditions better…. You see this country has reached a crisis …"
It was all gibberish to her.
"Exactly what do you mean?" she asked, sharply.
"I mean"—he fumbled for words—"I must go and live among the poor and arouse them and teach them of the great change that is taking place…."
She laughed strangely.
"Oh—an uplifter, settlement work, charity work—"
He was stupefied.
"Myra, can't you see—"
"Yes, I see," she said, raising her voice a little; "you're going to live in the slums and you want me to release you. I do. Anything else?"
She was making something sordid of his beautiful dream, and she was startlingly direct. He was cut to the heart.
"You're making it impossible," he began.
She laughed a little, stroking down her muff.
"So you're going to live among the poor … and you didn't dare come and tell me…."
"I had no right to involve you until I was sure…."
"And now you're sure…."
"No," he cried.
She raised her voice a little again:
"And I wrote asking if I couldn't help you. Women are fools…."
He sat searching about for something to say. His heart was like cold lead in his breast; his head ached. He felt her side of the case very vividly, and how could she ever understand?
Then, as she sat there her head seemed to explode, and she spoke hurriedly, incoherently:
"It's time to get to school. I want to go alone. Good-by."
She rose and went off rapidly.
"Myra!" he cried, leaping up, but she only accelerated her pace….
Instead of going to school she went straight home, flung herself full-length on the bed, buried her face in the pillow, and shook for a long time with terrible tearless sobs. Her life was ruined within her.
VI
MARTY BRIGGS
Joe went home in a distraught condition. He was angry, amazed, and passion-shaken. He had had a look into that strange mixture which is woman—and he was repelled, and yet attracted as he had never been before. He felt that all was over between them, that somehow she had convicted him of being brutal, selfish, and unmanly, and in the light of her condemnation he saw in his delay to meet her only cowardice and harsh indifference. And yet all along he had acted on the conclusion that he had no right to ask a woman to go into the danger of his work with him.
Pacing up and down his narrow room, he began lashing himself again, excusing, forgiving Myra everything. He had never really understood her nature; he should have gone to her in the beginning and trusted to her love and her insight; he should have let her share the aftermath of the fire; that fierce experience would have taught her that he was forever mortgaged to a life of noble reparation, and even the terror of it all would have been better than shutting her out, to brood morbidly alone.
Yet, what could he do? He must be strong, be wise, keep his head. He had pledged himself, sworn himself into the service of the working class movement. There was no escape. He tried to bury himself in his books, regain for a moment his splendid dream of the future state, feel again those strange throes of world-building, of social service.
And out of it all grew a letter, a letter to Myra. He wrote it in a strange haste, the sentences coming too rapidly for his pen. It ran:
DEAR MYRA,—I must make you understand! I hurt you when I wanted to help you; I wronged you when I wanted only to do right by you. Why didn't you listen to me this morning?
It was at the fire there, at that moment you tugged at my sleeve and I spoke to you, that I saw clearly that my life was no longer my own, that I could not even give it to you, whom I loved, whom I love now with every bit of my existence. I told you I belonged to those dead girls. Have you forgotten? Sixty of them—and three of my men. It was as if I had killed them myself. I am a guilty man, and I must expiate this guilt. There is no use fooling myself with pleasant phrases, no use thinking others to blame. It was I who was responsible.
And through the death of those girls I learned of the misery of the world, of the millions in want, the women wrenched from their homes to toil in the mills, the little children—fresh, sweet bodies, bubbling hearts, and tender, whimsical minds—slaving in factories, tiny boys and girls laboring like men and women in cotton and knitting mills, in glass factory and coal-mine, and on the streets of cities, upon whose frail little spirits is thrust the responsibility, the wage burden, the money, and family trouble, the care and drudgery and mortal burden we grown people ourselves not seldom find too hard. I have learned of a world gone wrong; I have learned of a new slavery on earth; and I as a member of the master class share the general guilt for the suffering of the poor…I must help to free them from the very conditions that killed the sixty girls…
And when I think of those girls and their families (some of them were the sole support of their mothers and sisters and brothers) the least I can do is to render up my life for the, lives that were lost—the least I can do is to fill myself with the spirit of the dead and go forth, not to avenge them, but to help build a world where the living will not be sacrificed as they were.
This country is facing a great crisis; civilization is facing a great crisis. Shall we go forward or be drawn backward? There is a call to arms and every man must offer his life in the great fight—that fight for democracy, that fight for lifting up the millions to new levels of life, that fight for a better earth and a superber race of human beings; and in that fight I am with the pioneers, heart and soul; I am ringing with the joy and struggle of it; I am for it, with all my strength and all my power. It demands everything; its old cry, "Arise, arise, and follow me;" means giving up possessions, giving away all, making every sacrifice. Before this issue our little lives shrink into nothingness, and we must sink our happiness into the future of the world.
How can I ask you to go into the peril, the dirt, and disease of this struggle? And how can I refrain from going in myself? Let me see you once more. Do not deny me that. And understand that through life my love will follow you … a love greatened, I trust, by what little I do in the great cause….
Ever yours, JOE
He waited for an answer and none came, and he felt during those days that the life was being dragged out of him. Feverishly then he buried himself in his tasks and his books, he went on cramming himself with theories until he reached the bursting-point and wanted to go out on fire with mission, almost a fanatic, an Isaiah to shake the city with invective and prophesy change. What could he do to spread the tidings, the news? The time had come to find an outlet for the overbearing flood within him. And then one evening in the Park like a flash came the plan. He must go among the poor, he must get to know them—not in this neighborhood, "a prophet is not without honor, etc."—but in some new place where he was unknown. He thought of Greenwich Village. Did not Fannie Lemick tell him that Sally Heffer lived in Greenwich Village? Well, he would look into the matter. He was a printer; why not then print a little weekly newspaper directly for the toilers, for his neighbors? He could tell all that way, pour out his enlightenment, stir them, stand by them, take part in their activities, their troubles and their strikes and lead them forth to a new life. He was sure they were ripe for the facts, powder awaiting the spark; he would go down among them and make his paper the center of their disorganized life.
The more he thought of the plan the more it thrilled him. What was greater than the power of the press? What more direct? He was done with palliatives, finding men jobs, giving Christmas turkeys, paying for coal. What the people needed was education so that they could get justice—all else would follow.
But even at that perfervid period of his life Joe was saved from being a John Brown by his sense of humor. This was the imp in him that always poked a little doubt into his heart and laughed at his ignorance and innocence. By next morning Joe was smiling at himself. Nevertheless, he was driven ahead.
He called for Marty Briggs and they went to lunch together. Third Avenue lay naked to the rain, which swept forward in silvery gusts, dripping, dripping from the elevated structure, and the pattering liquid sound had a fresh mellow music. Here and there a man or woman, mush-roomed by an umbrella, dashed quickly for a car, and the trolleys, gray and crowded, seemed to duck hurriedly under the downpour. The faces of Joe and Marty were fresh-washed and spattering drops; they laughed together as they walked.
"I've some business to talk over with you," explained Joe, and they finally went into a little restaurant on Third Avenue. The stuffy little place, warm and damp with the excluded rain, and odorous with sizzling lard and steaming coffee and boiling cabbage, was crowded with people, but Joe and Marty took a little table to themselves in the darkest corner. They sat against the dirty rear wall, whose white paint was finger-marked, fly-specked, and food-spotted, and in which a shelf-aperture furnished the connection with the kitchen. To this hole in the wall hurried the three waitresses, shrieking their orders above the din of many voices and the clatter and clash of plates and utensils.
"One ham—and!"
A monstrous greasy cook peered forth, shoving out a plate of fried eggs and echoing huskily:
"Ham—and!"
"Corn-beef-an'-cabbage!" "One harf-an'-harf!" "Make a sunstroke on the hash!" and other pleasing chants of the noon.
"What'll yer have?"
A thin and nervous young woman swooped between them and mopped off the sloppy, crumby table with her apron.
"What's good?" asked Joe.
The waitress regarded Joe with half-shut eyes.
"You want veal cutlets."
And she wafted the information to the cook.
"Well, Joe," said the practical Briggs, unable to hold in his excitement any longer, "let's get down to business."
Joe leaned forward.
"I'm thinking of starting up the printery, Marty."
Marty flushed, choked, and could hardly speak.
"I knew you would, Joe."
"Yes," Joe went on, "but I'm not going to go on with it."
Marty spoke sharply:
"Why not?"
"I'll tell you later, Marty."
"Not—lost your nerve? The fire?"
Joe laughed softly.
"Other reasons—Marty."
"Retire?" Marty's appetite was spoiled. He pushed the veal cutlet from him. He was greatly agitated. "Retire—you? I can see you doing nothing, blamed if I can't. Gettin' sporty, Joe, in your old age, aren't you? You'll be wearing one of these dress-suits next and a flasher in yer chest. Huh!" he snorted, "you'd make a good one on the shelf!"
Joe laughed with joy.
"With my flunkies and my handmaids. No, Marty, I'm going into another business."
"What business?"
"Editing a magazine."
"And what do you know about editing a magazine?"
"What do most of the editors know?" queried Joe. "You don't have to know anything. Everybody's editing magazines nowadays."
"A magazine!" Marty was disgusted. "You're falling pretty low, Joe. Why don't you stick to an honest business? Gosh! you'd make a queer fist editing a magazine!"
Joe was delighted.
"Well, there are reasons, Marty."
"What reasons?"
So Joe in a shaking voice unfolded his philosophy, and as he did so Marty became dazed and aghast, gazing at his boss as if Joe had turned into some unthinkable zoological oddity. Into Marty's prim-set life, with its definite boundaries and unmysterious exactness, was poured a vapor of lunacy. Finally Joe wound up with:
"So you see I've got to do what little I can to help straighten things. You see, Marty? Now, what do you think of it? Give me your honest opinion."
Marty spoke sharply:
"You want to know what I really think?"
"Every word of it!"
"Now see here, Joe," Marty burst out, "you and I grew up in the business together, and we know each other well enough to speak out, even if you are my boss, don't we?"
"We do, Marty!"
Marty leaned over.
"Joe, I think you're a blamed idiot!"
Joe laughed.
"Well, Marty, if it weren't for the blamed idiots—like Columbus and Tom Watts and the prophets and Abe Lincoln—this world would be in a pretty mess."
But Marty refused to be convinced, even averring that the world is in a pretty mess, and that probably the aforementioned "idiots" had caused it to be so. Then finally he spoke caressingly:
"Ah, Joe, tell me it's a joke."
"No," said Joe, earnestly, "it's what I've got to face, Marty, and I need your backing."
Marty mused miserably.
"So the game's up, and you've changed, and we men can go to the dogs.
Why, we can't run that printery without you. We'd go plumb to hell!"
Joe changed his voice—it became more commanding.
"Never mind now, Marty. I want your help to figure things out."
So Marty got out his little pad and the two drew close together.
"I want to figure on a weekly newspaper—I'm figuring big on the future—just want to see what it will come to. Say an edition of twenty thousand copies, an eight-page paper, eight by twelve, no illustrations."
Marty spoke humbly:
"As you say, Joe. Cheap paper?"
"Yes."
"Do your own printing?"
"Yes."
"Well, you'll need a good cylinder press for a starter."
"How much help?"
"Make-up man—pressman—feeder—that's on the press. Will you set up the paper yourself?"
"No, I'll have it set up outside."
"Who'll bind it, fold, and address?"
"The bindery—give that out, too."
"And who'll distribute?"
"Outside, too."
"The news company?"
"No, I won't deal with any news company. I want to go direct to the people. Say I get a hundred newsmen to distribute in their neighborhood?"
"But who'll get the paper to the newsmen?"
"Hire a truck company—so much a week."
"And how much will you charge for the paper?"
"Cent a copy."
"Can't do it," said Marty.
"Why not?"
Marty did some figuring, so they raised the price to two cents. And then they put in twenty minutes and worked out the scheme. It summed up as follows:
Paper sells at 2 cts., 20,000 $400
Expenses 340
——
Profit $ 60
Joe was exultant.
"Sixty profit! Well, I'm hanged."
"Not so fast, Joe," said Marty, drily. "They say no one ever started a magazine without getting stuck, and anyway, you just reckon there'll be expenses that will run you into debt right along. But of course there'll be the ads."
"I don't know about the ads," said Joe. "But the figures please me just the same."
Marty squirmed in his chair.
"Joe," he burst out, "how the devil is the printery going to run without you?"
Their eyes met, and Joe laughed.
"Will it be worth twenty-five thousand dollars when it's rebuilt and business booming again?" he asked, shrewdly.
"More than that!" said Marty Briggs.
"Then," said Joe, "I want you to take it."
"Me?" Marty was stunned.
"You can do it easily. I'll take a mortgage and you pay it off two thousand a year and five per cent. interest. That will still leave you a tidy profit."
"Me?" Then Marty laughed loud. "Listen, my ears! Did you hear that?"
"Think it over!" snapped Joe. "Now come along."
VII
LAST OF JOE BLAINE AND HIS MEN
So the printery was rehabilitated, and one gray morning Joe, with a queer tremor at his heart, went down the street and met many of his men in the doorway. They greeted him with strange, ashamed emotion.
"Morning, Mr. Joe…. It's been a long spell…. Good to see the old place again…. Bad weather we're having…. How've you been?"
The loft seemed strangely the same, strangely different—fresh painted, polished, smelling new and with changed details. For a few moments Joe felt the sharp shock of the fire again, especially when he heard the trembling of the hat factory overhead … and that noon the bright faces and laughter in the hallway! It seemed unreal; like ghosts revisiting; and he learned later that the first morning the hat factory had set to work, some of the girls had become hysterical.
But as he stood in his private office, looking out into the gray loft, and feeling how weird and swift are life's changes, the men turned on the electrics, and the floors and walls began their old trembling and the presses clanked and thundered. He could have wept. To Joe this moment of starting up had always been precious: it had seemed to bring him something he had missed; something that fitted like an old shoe and was friendly and familiar. All at once he felt as if he could not leave this business, could not leave these men.
And yet he had only three days with them to wind up the business and install Marty Briggs. And then there was a last supper of Joe Blaine and his men. Those days followed one another with ever-deepening gloom, in which the trembling printery and all the human beings that were part of it seemed steeped in a growing twilight. Do what Joe would and could in the matter of good-fellowship, loud laughter, and high jocularity, the darkness thickened staggeringly. Hardly had Joe settled the transfer of the printery to Marty, when the rumor of the transaction swept the business. At noon men gathered in groups and whispered together as if some one had died, and one after another approached Joe with a:
"Mr. Joe, is it true what the fellows say?"
"Yes, Tom."
"Going to leave us, Mr. Joe?"
"Going, Tom."
"Got to go?"
"I'm afraid I have to."
"I'll hate to go home and tell my wife, Mr. Joe. She'll cry her head off."
"Oh, come! come!"
"Say—we men, Mr. Joe—"
But Tom would say no more, and go off miserably; only to be replaced by Eddie or Mack or John, and then some such dialogue would be repeated. Under the simple and inadequate words lurked that sharp tragedy of life, the separation of comrades, that one event which above all others darkens the days and gives the sense of old age. And the men seemed all the closer to Joe because of the tragedy of the fire. All these conversations told on Joe. He went defiantly about the shop, but invariably his spoken orders were given in a humble, almost affectionate tone, as (with one arm loosely about the man):
"Say, Sam, don't you think you'd better use a little benzine on that?"
And Sam would answer solemnly:
"I've always done as you've said, Mr. Joe—since the very first."
His men succeeded in this way in making Joe almost as miserable as when he had parted from Myra; and indeed a man's work is blood of his blood, heart of his heart.
Possibly one thing that hurt Joe as much as anything else was a curious change in Marty Briggs. That big fellow, from the moment that Joe had handed over the business, began to unfold hitherto unguessed bits of personality. He ceased to lament Joe's going; he went about the shop with a certain jaunty air of proprietorship; and the men, for some unknown reason, began to call him Mr. Briggs. He even grew a bit cool toward Joe. Joe watched him with a sad sort of mirth, and finally called him into the office one morning. He put his hands on the big man's shoulders and looked in his face.
"Marty," he said, "I hope you're not going to make an ass of yourself."
"What do you mean?" murmured Marty.
Joe brought his face a little nearer.
"I want to know something."
"What?"
Joe spoke slowly:
"Are you Marty Briggs now or are you Martin Briggs?"
Marty tried to laugh; tried to look away.
"What's the difference?" he muttered.
"Difference?" Joe's voice sank. "Marty, I thought you were a bigger man. It's only the little peanut fellows who want to be bossy and holier-than-thou. Don't make any mistake!"
"I guess," muttered Marty, "I can steer things O.K."
"You'd better!" Joe spoke a little sharply. "Our men here are as big as you and I, every one of them. My God! you'll have to pay the price of being a high muck-a-muck, Marty! So, don't forget it!"
Marty tried to laugh again.
"You're getting different lately," he suggested.
"I?" Joe laughed harshly. "What if it's you? But don't let's quarrel.
We've been together too long. Only, let's both remember. That's all,
Marty!"
All of which didn't mend matters. It was that strangest of all the twists of human nature—the man rising from the ranks turning against his fellows.
On Friday night Joe climbed the three flights of the stuffy Eightieth Street tenement and had supper with the Ranns. That family of five circled him with such warmth of love that the occasion burst finally into good cheer. The two girls, seated opposite him, sent him smiling and wordless messages of love. Not a word was said of the fire, but John kept serving him with large portions of the vegetables and the excellent and expensive steak which had been bought in his honor; and John's wife kept spurring him on.
"I'm sure Mr. Joe could stand just a weeny sliver more."
"Mrs. Rann"—Joe put down knife and fork—"do you want me to burst?"
"A big man like you? Give him the sliver, John."
"John, spare me!"
"Mr. Joe"—John waved his hand with an air of finality—"in the shop what you says goes, but in this here home I take my orders from the old lady. See?"
"Nellie—Agnes—" he appealed, despairingly, to his little loves, "you save me! Don't you love me any more?"
This set Nellie and Agnes giggling with delight.
"Give him a pound, a whole pound!" cried Agnes, who was the elder.
A nice sliver was waved dripping on Joe's plate, which Joe proceeded to eat desperately, all in one mouthful. Whereupon the Ranns were convulsed with joy, and John kept "ha-ha-ing" as he thumped the table, and went to such excesses that he seemed to put his life in peril and Mrs. Rann and the girls had to rise and pound him until their hands hurt.
"Serves you right, John," said Joe, grimly. "Try it again, and you'll get a stroke."
"Ain't he the limit?" queried John, gasping.
Then Mrs. Rann went mysteriously to the cupboard, and the girls began to whisper together and giggle. And then Mrs. Rann brought something covered with a napkin, and then the napkin was removed. It was pie.
Joe pretended that he didn't know the secret, and leaned far over and gazed at it.
"It's—well, what is it?"
Mrs. Rann's voice rang with exultation.
"Your favorite, Mr. Joe."
"Not—raisin pie?"
A shout went up from all. Then real moisture came stealthily to Joe's eyes, and he looked about on those friendly faces, and murmured:
"Thoughtful, mightily thoughtful!"
There was a special bottle of wine—rather cheap, it is true, but then it was served with raisin pie and with human love, which made it very palatable. Mrs. Rann fixed John with a sharp glance through her glasses and cleared her throat several times, and finally Agnes gave him a poke in the ribs, whispering:
"Hurry up, dad!"
John blushed and rose to his feet.
"Mr. Joe, I ain't a talker, anyway on my feet. But, Mr. Joe, you've been my boss six years. And, Mr. Joe—" He paused, stuck, and gazed appealingly at Joe.
Joe rose to the occasion.
"So it's, here's to good friends, isn't it, John?"
John beamed.
"That's it—you took the words out of my mouth! Toast!"
So they drank.
Then Joe rose, and spoke musingly, tenderly:
"There's a trifle I want to say to you to-night—to every one of you. I can't do without you. Now it happens that I'm going to put a press in my new business and I'm looking for a first-class crackerjack of a pressman. Do you happen to know any one in this neighborhood who could take the job?"
He sat down. There was profound silence. And then Mrs. Rann took off her spectacles and sobbed. John reached over and took Joe's hand, and his voice was husky with tears.
"Mr. Joe! Mr. Joe! Ah, say, you make me feel foolish!"
Joe stayed with them late that night, and when he left, the kisses of the two girls moist on his cheeks, he had no doubt of his life-work. But next day, Saturday—the last day—was downright black. Things went wrong, and the men steered clear of Joe.
"Don't bother him," they said, meaning to spare him, and thereby increasing his pain. Men spoke in hushed tones, as soldiers might on the eve of a fatal battle, and even Marty Briggs dropped his new mannerisms and was subdued and simple.
Then Joe went off into a state of mind which might be described as the "hazes"—a thing he did now and then. At such times the word went round:
"The old man's got 'em again!"
And he was left well alone, for the good reason that he was unapproachable. He seemed not to listen to spoken words, nor to pay any attention to the world about him. The men, however, appreciated these spells, for, as a rule, something came of them—they bore good practical fruit, the sure test of all sanity.
The day finally wore away, to every one's relief. Joe took a last look around at all the familiar scene, shut his desk, handed over the keys to Marty (who could not speak because he was half-choked), sang out, "See you later, boys!" heard for the last time the sharp ring of the door-bell and the slam of the door, and hurried away. Then at last night came, and with night the last supper (as already announced) of Joe Blaine and His Men.
By Monday there would be painted an addition on that door, namely:
MARTIN BRIGGS SUCCESSOR TO
The supper was held in the large hall, upstairs, of Pfaff's, on East
Eighty-sixth Street. The large table was a dream of green and white, of
silver and glass, and the men hung about awkwardly silent in their
Sunday best. Then Joe cried:
"Start the presses!"
There came a good laugh then to break the icy air, and they sat down and were served by flying waiters, who in this instance had the odd distinction of appearing to be the "upper classes" serving the "lower"—a distinction, up to date, not over-eagerly coveted by society. For the waiters wore the conventional dress of "gentlemen" and the diners were in plain and common clothes.
At first the diners were in a bit of a funk, but Pfaff's excellent meats and cool, sparkling wines soon set free in each a scintillant human spirit, and the banquet took on almost an air of gaiety.
Finally there came the coffee and the ice-cream in forms, and Martin Briggs rose. There was a stamping of feet, a clanking of knives on glasses, a cry of "Hear! Hear!"
Martin Briggs knew it by heart and launched it with the aid of two swallows of water. His voice boomed big.
"Fellow-workers, friends, and the Old Man!"
This produced tumults of applause.
"We are met to-night on a solemn occasion. Ties are to be severed, friends parted. Such is life. Mr. Blaine—" (Cries from the far end of the table, "Say, Joe! say, Joe!") "Mr. Joe has been our friend, through all these long years. He has been our friend, our boss, our co-worker. Never did he spare himself; often he spared us. He had created an important business, a profitable business, a business which has brought a good living to every one of us. It is not for us to talk of the catastrophe—this is not the occasion for that. Enough to say that to-night Mr. Joe leaves that business. Others must carry it on. My sentiment is that these others must continue in the same spirit of Mr. Joe. That's my sentiment." (Roars of applause, stamping of feet, but one voice heard in talk with a neighbor, "Say, I guess his wife wrote that, Bill.") "So I propose a toast. To Mr. Joe, now and forever!"
They rose, they clanked glasses, they drank. Then they sat down and felt that something was wrong. Marty surely had missed fire.
Whereupon John Rann, blushing, rose to his feet, and began to stammer:
"Say, fellers, do you mind if I put in a word?" (Cries: "Not a bit!" "Soak it him, Johnny.") "Well, I want to say," his voice rose, "Joe Blaine is it." (Applause, laughter, stamping.) "He's jest one of us." (Cries: "You bet!" "You've hit it, Johnny!" "Give us more!") "He's a friend." (Cries: "That's the dope!") "He never did a mean thing in his life." (One loud cry: "Couldn't if he wanted to!") "Say," (Cries: "Go ahead!" "Nobody 'll stop yer!" "Give him hell!" Laughter.) "We fellers never appreciated this here Joe Blaine, did we?" (Cries: "Gosh no!") "But we do now!" (Uproarious and prolonged applause.) "Say, fellers, he's been like a regular father to us kids." (A strange silence.) "He's been—Oh, hell!" (Speaker wipes his eyes with a red handkerchief. Strange silence prolonged. Then one voice: "Tell him to his face, John. 'Bout time he knew.") "Joe Blaine" (speaker faces Mr. Blaine, and tries not to choke), "if any one tries to say that you had anything to do with the fire—he's a damned liar!"